Despite the whirlwind of things to discuss on this site, may I humbly suggest that if we want focus on getting through these perilous times perhaps we start by asking ourselves the question in the title. If we need a safe place to talk about factions in the party, can we start there instead of our recent episodes? I believe this question is that discussion in a nutshell. Why was the Republican party once a 40 year minority party? Yes we need an eye on current events but we need plans to get through them while sorting things out among ourselves. We not only have an election to win. We face ourselves approaching more time in the political desert in the next decade if we can’t win back and HOLD 1000 seats in this nation over the next 2 or 3 cycles. And that’s only a bit better than breaking even. We have done better. We need an approach we might take come struggle or schadenfreude.
I find for me turns it everything around, seeing that fact as a roadmap. How did that happen and how to recreate it? Why isn’t this discussed much here or in our party? Is it just depressing? Maybe, but there are records, stories, there are blueprints of that success. Republicans hardly ever held a joint congress. They had a president in for 8 years but he signed in a 91% tax cut on the wealthiest Americans. By the way, there also were about an additional 15 tax brackets above our current highest. Back then a billionaire would not be taxed at the same rate as someone earning less than half a million a year. And he signed in the Interstate Highway, which I believe to this day remains the largest infrastructure project ever. He couldn’t be elected dogcatcher in the Republican party today.
So, the larger questions are how did we do that? And what are we not doing today which is like that? Are we doing things we rejected back then which made us stronger? Why are we not looking for an analog for that time period today? We've done this before. Oligarchs? Gone. Their similar power over our political system was disposed of under one president. And earlier, so were other captains of industry under his distant cousin as president. Corporations paid their way with as much as 3 times the revenue they now pay. And most banking was boring, safe, and stable. The economy was stable enough to accommodate desegregation, the civil rights act and the voting rights acts which never came about under tumultuous times. There was a focus on women and feminism as they began moving into the workplace. The EPA, OSHA all came about.
You want unity? You want to take on the other party? What are we not doing like that today? Here’s one difference: at one point in three workers was a union member and for a long time about ¼ of our workplace was union. Most people reading this can’t say that every third person they know works for a union. That was the rising tide. The other 2/3 of companies which didn’t want unions paid prevailing wages and benefits equal or better than union to keep people (very easily then) organizing them. That’s fine. That’s competition. On a leveled playing field. For a while, all the unions could go on strike at once until Republicans and some Democrats killed that. Imagine the difficulty Trump and his crony capitalists would be facing if anyone who wanted to walk out on a general strike could do today would find no repercussions in their employment? We left that potential track long ago.
If the rescinding the Taft-Hartley act had continued to be fought the way the GOP fights for Roe v Wade (not ending until they get it) we might be rid of it by now. Corporations would be much more circumspect in their behavior if anyone could strike. And the party backing that kind of labor force (of all kinds, not only organized) would get more consistent support when good paychecks are involved. But somewhere we got off track and pushed down from the mountaintop. To be sure, mistakes were made. We need to learn from them too. The picture I displayed in this diary was of a dream we lost. A place of moral and systematic failure. Within a decade our current era started. But we have evidence of a powerhouse party.
I suggest when you want want to talk about Trump and / or about Hillary and Bernie? And talking about social justice, community, about fixing the party? Also talk about dealing with the Republicans as we did then. What did we do that we are not doing now? Even when often being out raised by Republican campaigns that didn’t stop Dems from winning more elections. Often because of paychecks and benefits, much more than we’ve provided in the last 40 years. I’m sorry, but our party is not at that scale of stature any more.
Please consider that. Why, how, and what needs to be done to use that template again? It worked for 40 years. How do we update it to the digital age? We need to be able to tell stories about how we succeeded then. And do some unexpected things to throw the other side off guard. Along with things we don’t talk much about. Who ever mentions that around half of all US liberals won’t join us, and how that is a problem to be solved? I fear for my party as this discussion is never happening in many places. Most of them belonged to a larger power. We need to get back to basics, quickly, to do that again. How do we win them over? While also attempting to solve problems we keep overlooking. Again, i believe growing paychecks are a clue to that older era. They even provided loyalty before that time when paychecks were much fewer. The policies of the day paid off for most Americans. We could do better with that kind of control over government for years to come.
We have less than two years to win. Not only do we a need to win, we need a different strategy which allows us to hold on to a few years under control, in the next decade we are destined to start spending more time in that political desert than Republicans did. Get most liberals and truly moderate conservatives in the tent and we can win seats sustainably. If they were in our shoes now they would have their think tanks up and running and they did things like nothing we’d ever seen before. But at this time they are also still quite unstable. Smaller wedges may make them tumble.
We’ve done this before. It’s old, it’s new, it’s where we last left our stamp. Democrats built that.