Democrats screaming, crying, and whining the most about DOGE need to be investigated first because when all the crooks are mad, you know something is going right. https://tinyurl.com/tnvy436u
There is truth in this. Although I think there's also a lot of just opposition to change and sense of a loss of power going on as well. People feel their power and control slipping away and fear the stability that was supporting them is now gone. Which it is.
In the past both parties had a lot of people in government that had a lot to gain from the status quo.
But in recent times the Trump GOP has been completely pushed out of the status quo in DC. Trump obviously (who lets remember they tried to jail and kill). But the entire lot behind him. It's one long list of former democrats and republicans that got pushed out by "the blob". Not to mention the average citizens estrangement from DC.
When one side feels they have no stake in the current status quo and feels its openly hostile to them, taking a chain saw too it makes sense.
I wouldn't say they got pushed out, as much as they were never part of it. I think it's been a rebellion against the establishment from the get go. They were never in to get pushed out.
Thank you. The woke press and PBS story of The New Deal is "FDR inspired hope and solved everything." It's too tedious and controversial for them to look at what actually happened. It would offend some of their Boomer contributors.
I do think the mistelling of the New Deal story has done a lot of damage to American politics. Most Americans have a very mythical understanding of what happened, and have drawn from it false conclusions about both parties, American history, and how politics works. The 1960s and Civil Rights era has this problem too. I think the past generation of the Democratic Party was too successful building up a mythology supporting their coalition for political reasons, and then a new generation of Democrats learned it and thought it was actually true.
I could write a whole book on the misunderstanding of Woodrow Wilson! The who guy sold himself, and has been enshrined in history, as a progressive when he was always at heart an old style Southern Jeffersonian Bourbon Democrat triangulating on Teddy Roosevelt's popular ideas!
There is almost nothing about the guy I like. When I read about how he always had to be the smartest guy in his White House and wouldn't listen to anyone and thought his gut instinct on every issue was better than the informed opinions of the people around him and pushed out anyone who dared challenge him, I was done with the guy. Terrible president on every account.
“ Why didn’t Democrats do a version of DOGE when they had the chance?”
My take:
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians (aka D.E.I.). Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
The way I think about it is less a list of issues than a total change in the target of their efforts. Americans think the system isn't working and is broken (and they're right!). Republicans have become the anti-establishment party, and Democrats the party of the establishment. This puts Democrats on the side of not doing or changing anything in a broken system, while they push for other things that are irrelevant or unpopular. If they want to win again, they have to adopt their own serious reform agenda to upend the system in different way to make it work. Since they are now the party of the elites running things, that's not easy because there is going to be a lot of opposition within the party, while there are also a lot of hanger ones using the party as a vehicle for losing and unpopular ideas.
Not doing anything means you can continue to campaign on the fact that it isn’t done (as long as you can blame someone else for that fact). Otherwise campaigns themselves would have to innovate new ideas to engage voters.
I agree that action bias and experimentation is a great way to develop solutions to problems and improve things. But I think it’s best to reduce the amount of one-size-fits-all programs on a national level, and instead let the 50 states experiment. There is less risk (negative results would be confined to the states that implement the changes). And it would help depressure our national politics if majority in states and localities can choose their own adventure, rather than having someone else’s views forced on them from a national level. DOGEs from different political perspectives may be great in states and localities that have more sizable majorities of a like mind. But it is destabilizing and causing a lot of anger in our country when our national elections (which have been very close over the past 25 years) result in so many changes that are unwanted by a high percentage of the country’s population. I think there would be more cohesion, and less hatred and occasional talk of civil war, if we get back to a smaller federal government and more diversity in the states.
I have a different take on the New Deal. To make the sort of changes you desire requires the political power to do so. Consider how Republicans won control of both the Executive and Legislature in 1952 had did little to reverse the Democratic New Deal--the trend towards lower economic inequality from its late 1920's peak continued on during and for decades after his time in office. Similarly, when Democrats did the same forty years later, they likewise did little to reverse the Republican Reagan Revolution--the trend toward higher inequality continued on
I believe the NRA, that you dismiss as a failed program, actually played an important role in the success of the New Deal by helping to create the FDR dispensation.
You ask why didn't Obama do a DOGE? The answer is the only way he could have gotten away with it (without becoming a dictator) was to have gotten Democrats to NOT vote for the TARP, and to make it clear when he became president that the Fed was NOT to engage in any open market operations involving long term debt along the lines of what the Fed chief had spoken about in 2002 (i.e No QE). Doing this would likely result in the collapse of the financial system when it could still be blamed on his predecessor.
I would not have been on board with that program then. Would you?
As for Trump's DOGE, it will be failure UNLESS the critics who claim it is a bid to create a dictatorship are right, and then Trump succeeds in doing this. I don't think either of these things are likely, so DOGE will be a failure. If it is big enough one, he could go into my pantheon of Unlikely Heroes of the Republic along with Herbert Hoover.
As always Frank, I read your posts as soon as they’re up b/c you combine thoughtfulness with such a good heart to arrive at valid observations.
It’s so serendipitous that this was posted, because just this past week I had a conversation with my wife (she’s a Canadian; in fact I relocated to Canada in the ‘80’s when it was the epitome of a mixed economy) about the freight train that is MAGA/DOGE/MAHA plowing through the DC bureaucracy.
As a layman, my knowledge of FDR’s non-WW2 administration is pretty superficial; nevertheless, I was aware enough of the themes you enumerated to describe them to her. And yeah, I used the ‘mud on the wall’ metaphor too.
(Note to fellow subscribers, most of the stuff I learned about FDR I got from podcasts)
One thing that I recall is that I THINK FDR set up the Dept. Of Labor, and installed as it’s first head a woman who had witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in NYC. And she was a force of nature during her tenure.
I’m a boomer (66 years old). I was just a regular guy who cast a ballot for the candidate I thought was the best guy. I didn’t give it another thought; I was a well informed voter b/c I watched 60 Minutes fairly often when I lived Stateside. Ohhh boyyyy…
I became awakened to the chicanery that is pervasive in the United States in 2015. Back then, I supported Sanders (talk about being taken for a ride). From here in Canada, I actually made my first political donation to Tulsi’s campaign in 2020.
I made my 2nd donation when Bobby ran this last cycle.
I now wear a MAGA hat, and after 10/7… well, had Israel nuked Gaza I would have cried as much as I did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in other words, not one bit.
Yeah, one hella metamorphosis, huh?
I think Trump 2.0 is going to be as historic an administration as any others in the past. Four years (12 if we’re lucky and JD takes over) are going to have an impact on the United States and subsequently the world in ways I can’t imagine.
I believe that the world IS at war right now. Thank god for nuclear weapons, because it’s a war of ideas, and not on battlefields. The closing chapters of a book I read decades ago, ‘The Making Of The Atomic Bomb’ pointed out that nuclear weapons, in a counter-intuitive way, cause more peace, and the last 80 years has proven that point.
Nevertheless, this is a war in that there are two opposing sides that are in conflict to the death. In other words, they cannot co-exist; one must be absolutely vanquished for the other to survive.
Now here’s the rub— I can’t explicitly describe the sides. I feel that I CAN recognize each side; it’s like obscene material; I know it when I see it. For example, I KNOW JD Vance is on one side, and Bernie Sanders is on the other…
But then both those guys have a lot in common and actually agree on a lot of stuff!
So I’m confused somewhat.
The only dividing line that I am able to discern is the Globalists movement (WEF, Soros, Gates) and the Nationalist movement (Trump, Farage, Meile), but that’s somewhat incomplete.
Nevertheless, there is a war on.
Maybe it’s because all of us are literally in the midst of the battlefield, we can’t see much because of the current fog of war, I dunno.
So that’s my take, man.
May God bless you, yours and all those you hold dear in your heart. And that blessing goes out to all the readers here. We’re a bright, caring lot, y’know.
You're talking about Frances Perkins, who is one of my favorite American political history figures that nobody ever talks about! I'm sort of shocked that progressives looking for female role models don't talk about her more, as she was the first female Cabinet secretary in history. Also, a total badass.
She started as a progressive republican activist as part of the Progressive Movement in New York City, where after the Shirtwaist fire she decided to push for reforms to stop such a thing from happening again. That got her working a lot with the New York City administration headed by Democrat Al Smith (NOT a progressive at all, but a machine politician of the old style, although sometimes claimed as one). This got her into politics, and then as a lot of progressive republicans moved over to FDR, she got into his orbit and he pushed her into his cabinet despite a lot of opposition in the party, where she became a major force within the New Deal Brain Trust.
I did not know Perkins had been a Progressive Republican activist. I long speculated that Republican progressives, who after the 1924 LaFollette run had no home, went over the New Deal. But I knew of no high profile example. Now I do. :)
It's a little arguable, since she came from a wealthy professional class Republican background before getting involved in politics, but then in New York fell in with Al Smith and the Democrats who ran the city. Most progressives were in those days Republicans in the Teddy Roosevelt ilk.
The best political example of the shift is Harold Ickes, who was actually involved in Republican politics before moving over to FDR. Another similar story is Louis Brandeis.
Thanks, more examples. That's good. My thinking has been that Republican progressives (LaFollette, Johnson, TRoosevelt) were both socially and economically liberal, while Democratic progressives (Wilson) were more labor friendly and more socially conservative. Also, Democrats had populists too.
I hypothesize that during the New Deal Republican progressives migrated over to the Democrats, helping to make them bluer. But I did not have examples of this happening and am not sure to what extent, if any, it did.
What I was trying to work through is how did the party of the Confederacy become blue? I mean the Republicans from the very beginning (and the Whigs before them) were the party of the rich, the capitalist elite, and they have remained this way to this day.
The Democratic party was the party of the Southern while man, pro-slavery and racist to the core from its very beginning. I have a mechanism turning Dems bluer in the fifties and sixties and one that did the same in 1980's and since. But not one for before the 1950's.
But the fact is the New Dealers did policy in WW II that would (and did) benefit blacks more than whites and it had to have been deliberate. It got so obvious that racist Dems bolted from the party in 1948. Because of this, a solid majority of blacks were already voting Democratic in the 1950's. Why would a racist party do that, unless somehow it had gotten an infusion of non-racist elements before then?
You really need to read my book The Next Realignment. The core of the book is a history of America's political parties, walking through their evolution through the five party systems. You'll find compelling answers to every question you just raised.
The book is scholarly, but an accessible good read. It was pretty well reviewed and received. Based on what you're saying, I think you'll find a lost of answers to things you're musing about.
I see where you are coming from. Most of what I have seen with the Trump initiatives have been of the irreversible sort that have led to commenters seeing what they are doing as an effort to entench unConstitutional power for the administration. Particularly troubling is that unvetted personell have been given access to governmental operations without oversight.
Democrats screaming, crying, and whining the most about DOGE need to be investigated first because when all the crooks are mad, you know something is going right. https://tinyurl.com/tnvy436u
There is truth in this. Although I think there's also a lot of just opposition to change and sense of a loss of power going on as well. People feel their power and control slipping away and fear the stability that was supporting them is now gone. Which it is.
In the past both parties had a lot of people in government that had a lot to gain from the status quo.
But in recent times the Trump GOP has been completely pushed out of the status quo in DC. Trump obviously (who lets remember they tried to jail and kill). But the entire lot behind him. It's one long list of former democrats and republicans that got pushed out by "the blob". Not to mention the average citizens estrangement from DC.
When one side feels they have no stake in the current status quo and feels its openly hostile to them, taking a chain saw too it makes sense.
I wouldn't say they got pushed out, as much as they were never part of it. I think it's been a rebellion against the establishment from the get go. They were never in to get pushed out.
Thank you. The woke press and PBS story of The New Deal is "FDR inspired hope and solved everything." It's too tedious and controversial for them to look at what actually happened. It would offend some of their Boomer contributors.
I do think the mistelling of the New Deal story has done a lot of damage to American politics. Most Americans have a very mythical understanding of what happened, and have drawn from it false conclusions about both parties, American history, and how politics works. The 1960s and Civil Rights era has this problem too. I think the past generation of the Democratic Party was too successful building up a mythology supporting their coalition for political reasons, and then a new generation of Democrats learned it and thought it was actually true.
Well said. I suppose the story of Woodrow Wilson and his "noble quest to end war," stymied by those evil isolationists, is another one.
I could write a whole book on the misunderstanding of Woodrow Wilson! The who guy sold himself, and has been enshrined in history, as a progressive when he was always at heart an old style Southern Jeffersonian Bourbon Democrat triangulating on Teddy Roosevelt's popular ideas!
At least his overt racism has caught up with him, if not his other stupidities.
There is almost nothing about the guy I like. When I read about how he always had to be the smartest guy in his White House and wouldn't listen to anyone and thought his gut instinct on every issue was better than the informed opinions of the people around him and pushed out anyone who dared challenge him, I was done with the guy. Terrible president on every account.
“ Why didn’t Democrats do a version of DOGE when they had the chance?”
My take:
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians (aka D.E.I.). Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
The way I think about it is less a list of issues than a total change in the target of their efforts. Americans think the system isn't working and is broken (and they're right!). Republicans have become the anti-establishment party, and Democrats the party of the establishment. This puts Democrats on the side of not doing or changing anything in a broken system, while they push for other things that are irrelevant or unpopular. If they want to win again, they have to adopt their own serious reform agenda to upend the system in different way to make it work. Since they are now the party of the elites running things, that's not easy because there is going to be a lot of opposition within the party, while there are also a lot of hanger ones using the party as a vehicle for losing and unpopular ideas.
Not doing anything means you can continue to campaign on the fact that it isn’t done (as long as you can blame someone else for that fact). Otherwise campaigns themselves would have to innovate new ideas to engage voters.
I agree that action bias and experimentation is a great way to develop solutions to problems and improve things. But I think it’s best to reduce the amount of one-size-fits-all programs on a national level, and instead let the 50 states experiment. There is less risk (negative results would be confined to the states that implement the changes). And it would help depressure our national politics if majority in states and localities can choose their own adventure, rather than having someone else’s views forced on them from a national level. DOGEs from different political perspectives may be great in states and localities that have more sizable majorities of a like mind. But it is destabilizing and causing a lot of anger in our country when our national elections (which have been very close over the past 25 years) result in so many changes that are unwanted by a high percentage of the country’s population. I think there would be more cohesion, and less hatred and occasional talk of civil war, if we get back to a smaller federal government and more diversity in the states.
I have a different take on the New Deal. To make the sort of changes you desire requires the political power to do so. Consider how Republicans won control of both the Executive and Legislature in 1952 had did little to reverse the Democratic New Deal--the trend towards lower economic inequality from its late 1920's peak continued on during and for decades after his time in office. Similarly, when Democrats did the same forty years later, they likewise did little to reverse the Republican Reagan Revolution--the trend toward higher inequality continued on
.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F806e654b-09a3-4046-9414-3286bc712500_631x263.gif
The reason why, according to Stephen Skowronek's Political Time model, is the dispensation:
https://mikealexanhttps://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-a-political-dispensation
I believe the NRA, that you dismiss as a failed program, actually played an important role in the success of the New Deal by helping to create the FDR dispensation.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-dealers-gained-the-ability
You ask why didn't Obama do a DOGE? The answer is the only way he could have gotten away with it (without becoming a dictator) was to have gotten Democrats to NOT vote for the TARP, and to make it clear when he became president that the Fed was NOT to engage in any open market operations involving long term debt along the lines of what the Fed chief had spoken about in 2002 (i.e No QE). Doing this would likely result in the collapse of the financial system when it could still be blamed on his predecessor.
I would not have been on board with that program then. Would you?
As for Trump's DOGE, it will be failure UNLESS the critics who claim it is a bid to create a dictatorship are right, and then Trump succeeds in doing this. I don't think either of these things are likely, so DOGE will be a failure. If it is big enough one, he could go into my pantheon of Unlikely Heroes of the Republic along with Herbert Hoover.
As always Frank, I read your posts as soon as they’re up b/c you combine thoughtfulness with such a good heart to arrive at valid observations.
It’s so serendipitous that this was posted, because just this past week I had a conversation with my wife (she’s a Canadian; in fact I relocated to Canada in the ‘80’s when it was the epitome of a mixed economy) about the freight train that is MAGA/DOGE/MAHA plowing through the DC bureaucracy.
As a layman, my knowledge of FDR’s non-WW2 administration is pretty superficial; nevertheless, I was aware enough of the themes you enumerated to describe them to her. And yeah, I used the ‘mud on the wall’ metaphor too.
(Note to fellow subscribers, most of the stuff I learned about FDR I got from podcasts)
One thing that I recall is that I THINK FDR set up the Dept. Of Labor, and installed as it’s first head a woman who had witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in NYC. And she was a force of nature during her tenure.
I’m a boomer (66 years old). I was just a regular guy who cast a ballot for the candidate I thought was the best guy. I didn’t give it another thought; I was a well informed voter b/c I watched 60 Minutes fairly often when I lived Stateside. Ohhh boyyyy…
I became awakened to the chicanery that is pervasive in the United States in 2015. Back then, I supported Sanders (talk about being taken for a ride). From here in Canada, I actually made my first political donation to Tulsi’s campaign in 2020.
I made my 2nd donation when Bobby ran this last cycle.
I now wear a MAGA hat, and after 10/7… well, had Israel nuked Gaza I would have cried as much as I did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in other words, not one bit.
Yeah, one hella metamorphosis, huh?
I think Trump 2.0 is going to be as historic an administration as any others in the past. Four years (12 if we’re lucky and JD takes over) are going to have an impact on the United States and subsequently the world in ways I can’t imagine.
I believe that the world IS at war right now. Thank god for nuclear weapons, because it’s a war of ideas, and not on battlefields. The closing chapters of a book I read decades ago, ‘The Making Of The Atomic Bomb’ pointed out that nuclear weapons, in a counter-intuitive way, cause more peace, and the last 80 years has proven that point.
Nevertheless, this is a war in that there are two opposing sides that are in conflict to the death. In other words, they cannot co-exist; one must be absolutely vanquished for the other to survive.
Now here’s the rub— I can’t explicitly describe the sides. I feel that I CAN recognize each side; it’s like obscene material; I know it when I see it. For example, I KNOW JD Vance is on one side, and Bernie Sanders is on the other…
But then both those guys have a lot in common and actually agree on a lot of stuff!
So I’m confused somewhat.
The only dividing line that I am able to discern is the Globalists movement (WEF, Soros, Gates) and the Nationalist movement (Trump, Farage, Meile), but that’s somewhat incomplete.
Nevertheless, there is a war on.
Maybe it’s because all of us are literally in the midst of the battlefield, we can’t see much because of the current fog of war, I dunno.
So that’s my take, man.
May God bless you, yours and all those you hold dear in your heart. And that blessing goes out to all the readers here. We’re a bright, caring lot, y’know.
You're talking about Frances Perkins, who is one of my favorite American political history figures that nobody ever talks about! I'm sort of shocked that progressives looking for female role models don't talk about her more, as she was the first female Cabinet secretary in history. Also, a total badass.
She started as a progressive republican activist as part of the Progressive Movement in New York City, where after the Shirtwaist fire she decided to push for reforms to stop such a thing from happening again. That got her working a lot with the New York City administration headed by Democrat Al Smith (NOT a progressive at all, but a machine politician of the old style, although sometimes claimed as one). This got her into politics, and then as a lot of progressive republicans moved over to FDR, she got into his orbit and he pushed her into his cabinet despite a lot of opposition in the party, where she became a major force within the New Deal Brain Trust.
She was cool.
I did not know Perkins had been a Progressive Republican activist. I long speculated that Republican progressives, who after the 1924 LaFollette run had no home, went over the New Deal. But I knew of no high profile example. Now I do. :)
It's a little arguable, since she came from a wealthy professional class Republican background before getting involved in politics, but then in New York fell in with Al Smith and the Democrats who ran the city. Most progressives were in those days Republicans in the Teddy Roosevelt ilk.
The best political example of the shift is Harold Ickes, who was actually involved in Republican politics before moving over to FDR. Another similar story is Louis Brandeis.
Thanks, more examples. That's good. My thinking has been that Republican progressives (LaFollette, Johnson, TRoosevelt) were both socially and economically liberal, while Democratic progressives (Wilson) were more labor friendly and more socially conservative. Also, Democrats had populists too.
I hypothesize that during the New Deal Republican progressives migrated over to the Democrats, helping to make them bluer. But I did not have examples of this happening and am not sure to what extent, if any, it did.
What I was trying to work through is how did the party of the Confederacy become blue? I mean the Republicans from the very beginning (and the Whigs before them) were the party of the rich, the capitalist elite, and they have remained this way to this day.
The Democratic party was the party of the Southern while man, pro-slavery and racist to the core from its very beginning. I have a mechanism turning Dems bluer in the fifties and sixties and one that did the same in 1980's and since. But not one for before the 1950's.
But the fact is the New Dealers did policy in WW II that would (and did) benefit blacks more than whites and it had to have been deliberate. It got so obvious that racist Dems bolted from the party in 1948. Because of this, a solid majority of blacks were already voting Democratic in the 1950's. Why would a racist party do that, unless somehow it had gotten an infusion of non-racist elements before then?
You really need to read my book The Next Realignment. The core of the book is a history of America's political parties, walking through their evolution through the five party systems. You'll find compelling answers to every question you just raised.
The book is scholarly, but an accessible good read. It was pretty well reviewed and received. Based on what you're saying, I think you'll find a lost of answers to things you're musing about.
https://www.amazon.com/Next-Realignment-Americas-Parties-Crumbling/dp/1633885089
I put it on my birthday list.
Some real words of wisdom here.
I see where you are coming from. Most of what I have seen with the Trump initiatives have been of the irreversible sort that have led to commenters seeing what they are doing as an effort to entench unConstitutional power for the administration. Particularly troubling is that unvetted personell have been given access to governmental operations without oversight.
Who are they working for?