Young Bernie Supporter: You speak as though we are supposed to have learned some lesson from the past and that is the reason we are supposed to not vote for Bernie. I am just asking what lessons from history you are referring to.
Laura Elizabeth Teller : The lessons are the nomination of George McGovern and the election of Jimmy Carter. They were both good people, but outsiders (although a child, I was very enthusiastic about both. I thought people would have to be fuddy duddies not to nominate them).
McGovern, like Bernie, was considered to be at the left end of the party, and the same sort of enthusiasm boosted him as has been boosting Bernie. Although a genuine American war hero, a bomber pilot in WWII who survived hundreds of missions over Europe, he was liberal to a degree far outside the liberal mainstream. He had the military credentials to be ardently antiwar without being called a coward. Revolution!
Because there were no superdelegates, and many primaries were winner-take-all, McGovern won a plurality of about 30% of the party vote, and wound up becoming the nominee.
Nixon won in a landslide that is, on its face, the worst loss for an opposing candidate in the history of the presidency – but actually, when you dig into the details, the loss was much worse than that.
Jimmy Carter was also a good man, and an “outsider”. Governor of Georgia and a peanut farmer, he was just the sort of non-politician everyone was looking for. Revolution! I was almost old enough to vote for him, and just LOVED Carter.
While his heart was clearly in the right place, he made several critical mistakes. His economic solutions were monetarist, and he was broadsided by high inflation rates which he inherited. He controlled inflation by hiring Paul Volcker to head the Fed, who raised interest rates through the roof, attempting to burn down the village in order to save it. He accomplished both: inflation fell, but it fell because of his utter destruction of the economy.
Carter had the bad luck also of dealing somewhat ineptly with the taking of American hostages in Iran after the Iranian Revolution.
The result was another drubbing for the Democratic Party, in which the union vote went overwhelmingly, for the first time since before the Great Depression, for the Republicans.
Of course, Reagan repaid the favor by methodically busting the unions, beginning with the Professional Air Traffic Controller’s Association, when he fired them immediately after they went on strike.
Teamster head Layne Kirkland was asked by Dick Cavette (he would be like a PBS version of Anserson Cooper today), immediately after the election, how it was possible that union members voted so overwhelmingly against Carter.
Kirkland replied: “well, we told them to vote with their pocketbooks, and I guess they did.”
They came to regret that decision, of course, as Reagan and the Republicans immediately took a broadaxe to labor law, and made us into the supply side country we are today.
The word “liberal” was at this point a label that could get you arrested, and the word “progressive” hadn’t yet been applied as a palliative.
So having been seduced by this “we want an outsider who isn’t corrupt” thing twice out of the last three elections, and being so completely noncompetitive as a result that it resulted in two of the most corrupt presidents of the century being elected, along with a radical shift of the country to the right ensuing (calling yourself a liberal had become worse than calling yourself a communist). The Democratic Party realized that risk control is often more important than revolution.
Two forays into revolutionary candidacies had resulted in incredible regression, in a move of the Overton Window so far to the right that liberalism simply wasn’t in view.
One of the solutions was to introduce superdelegates as risk control.
At one time, legislators had been central to the selection of party nominees for the White House, but for the past century or so, delegates were simply local party hacks (elites) who got free trips to the convention based on their friendships with local party leaders. This situation hasn’t changed much today.
Superdelegates were to serve several purposes. In a year when a race was close but clear, the committment of the superdelegates to the winner was supposed to make the margin of victory larger, and unify the party around the victor.
Among other purposes, there was a very serious purpose which will come into play this year. Superdelegates were created to stem the sorts of movements which attempted to put out nominees which were not in the long-term interests of the party. We knew we had screwed up, and wanted to make sure it never happened again.
While those of us who supported McGovern and Carter were well-satisfied on nomination night, we all rued Nixon’s second term and our absolutely humiliating election night loss, and the Reagan Revolution, which not only stripped us of 40 years of liberal progress, but even stripped our liberal ideology of its legitimacy.
Superdelegates are supposed to be above that sort of passion, and are there to thwart the mob, if the mob should want to lead the left over the sort of cliff which results in us regressing to the right, as we had done.
You will see that invocation this year. In fact, you have already seen it. Obama was successful, as he became viable as a candidate, in poaching many of Hillary’s superdelegates. That will not happen this time. Bernie is not Obama, he was mainstream and pragmatic enough to be safe. The superdelegates will stay parked right where they are, because they know what a red sky at morning means to a sailor.
This is not about protecting elites, it is, literally, about protecting liberty against Donald Trump. Were Trump not in the race, there might be a thin chance that superdelegates would begin to defect, but with him the probable nominee, and with him looming on the 2020 horizon, that is not going to happen. It is almost mathematically impossible for Bernie to be nominated if the superdelegates stay put – and they will.
Because our cities had been bombed in 1980, and we had been driven from them, and were hearing our own lamentations, we had to decide how to rebuild. It was clear that a third call for revolution would be a mistake.
Reagan was too successful – no matter what he did or failed to do, he spent tons of money and ran up huge deficits building a 600-ship Navy, the “Peacekeeper” missile, and fielding new jets and tanks.
Fiscal stimulus was, of course, what we needed in 1976, and Reagan provided it, in 1980, in spades, blaming us for it for “failing to maintain and modernize the military”.
The absolute humiliation of having this double-talking fiscal conservative running up deficits like a drunken sailor, BLAMING US FOR IT, and achieving the largest boom in postwar history as a result, called for a strategic return to the drawing board.
Liberalism wasn’t a viable approach. Democrats realized that they would have to pull the party back to the left much more craftily, and it did that by creating the New Democrat coalition. Bill Clinton and Al Gore fashioned themselves as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative”, because it was absolutely the only way to win an election.
The only way to play is to get in the game, and the temporary rightward move of the Democratic Party was the only way to avoid its destruction.
While it’s easy to sit here in 2016 and snark about Bill’s 1992 conservatism, he and Al Gore – literally – saved both the Democratic Party and liberalism itself.
Hillary was never down with the New Democrat thing and, though she was outwardly – generally – supportive of Bill, she made it very clear that she was a liberal, and wanted nothing to do with being a New Democrat.
This was a very courageous move, and led to the right (and many Democrats) characterizing her as a loony libby loose cannon whom they would watch very closely, so that she did not corrupt Bill.
What’s important to understand is that Bill enabled the rebuilding of liberalism. But it was twelve years after Reagan was elected that he had the chance to begin doing so, and even in 2008, Obama shied away when asked if he was a liberal.
So basically, it was TWENTY-EIGHT years from the time of the disastrous 1980 Democratic Revolution that liberalism moved back inside the Overton Window.
So yeah – if you think we want another thirty years of that, you have another think coming.
We don’t care about the light of zeal in your eyes. You simply don’t understand the downside risks, and your enthusiasm doesn’t permit sobriety.
We, however, are sober as judges, because we lived through this. For you to tell us that we are “Republican Lite” or anything like that after the decades of shit we waded through just to make liberalism an acceptable word again……there just aren’t enough facepalms in the world.
Bernie is going down. If Super Tuesday doesn’t do it, the superdelegates will, and we will be deaf to your cries of “foul”.
We Hillary supporters are not against you, we WERE you, and we have been paying our penance for 36 years.
Trust us – you will thank us for this one day.
tellertreehouse 