The State of the Union speech the president gave last night was good, but I'm still concerned that President Obama is not fighting the way he should to defeat our democratic system's built-in advantages for conservatives and the status quo.
There is no doubt that the president understands how the system is biased against progressive change; yet he shows little tendency to use the resources of his office to fight back against these biases by really getting into the faces of some conservative Democratic Senators or by constantly reminding the public about how the system is stacked in favor of money and power.
I write a lot about how we have two systems of democracy in the U.S.: progressive democracy and conservative democracy that uses the built-in biases of our Constitutional order originally designed to defend the Slave Power (the South) and slavery and ever since to defeat a more progressive democracy.
Tom Schaller has an excellent piece in the Baltimore Sun explaining this bias. Paul Krugman references Schaller's analysis here. Schaller repeats his analysis in 538, my favorite blog for polling analyses and related topics.
Here's my list of our democracy's advantages for defending the status quo:
--- The electoral college and the Senate as both give small states with very small populations the same number of senators as populous, larger states.
--- The practice of using some form of seniority to choose committee chairs within the Senate (and the House). Because so often Senators who are returned again and again represent more conservative states committee chairs often are much more conservative than the average membership of their caucus. Even when today the caucus votes to confirm chairs the power of seniority makes newer and more progressive members reluctant to rock the boat.
---Another factor is the distinctively modern and intensive use of the filibuster for nearly everything by the Republicans, a practice Senate Democrats have been particularly slow to complain about.
---The historical pattern of sectional politics also is a powerful brake on change. Again, sectional politics originated in the South as it defended slavery and later segregation. With the civil rights legislation of the Great Society what emerged was a kind of racial politics, politics that carried not-so-hidden coded language that tended to rouse racial resentment among white voters. This resentment was and still is found in all parts of the nation but especially in the South and in those regions of the midwest and upper midwest settled by southerners after the Civil War.
---This sectionalism stresses cultural populism (with such movements as anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, and anti-sex education, and so forth along with an historic suspicion of the national government except in the building of military bases. Hence, the rise of market populism appeals to the South, a region where the slave and cotton economy was anything but competitive. The themes of deregulation of markets, opposition to labor movements, and anti-environmental regulation appeal to many Southern voters.
---Conservatives when they win can count on more opportunities for normal majority rule because the Democrats don't have the guts (or the votes) to demand 60 votes to, say, slash taxes for the very rich. Or because Democrats vote for such irresponsible tax cuts to curry favor with influential constituencies.
--- Progressives typically need redistributive and regulative reforms that give more power to government over the economy. Some redistributive reforms like like health care reform have the potential to be electoral game-changers by convincing public opinion more toward more governmental activism. Conservatives call this socialism.
---Conservatives generally need only distributive and deregulation policies that give tax breaks (mainly to the rich) or new and expensive programs like the Medicare drug program that gave huge benefits to insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. Or to put it another way, conservatives are in favor of redistribution when it means transferring wealth from the working and middle classes to the wealthy.
---For many Republicans, some elected, most not, this is a kind of religious battle with their side representing those who have been passed over and who have suffered losses at the hands of big government and cultural change, and who know want to get even and back to where we were (or in my view, where we never were). Theirs is the politics of the keenest resentment and curling lip, and resentment is never be open to compromise. With a politics of resentment Republicans must wait until the country gets tired of the Dems so they can get back to the job restoring the country to its original path, the path that never was. I once heard a woman on television complain, in tears, "I want my country back." That's the politics of resentment.
All of these biases against progressive politics and many others mean, as Tom Schaller argues, that progressives must win in elections and then again and again in Congress, every step of the way, and there are many steps along the way.
A big election win like Obama's was just openers for conservative democracy. There are many, many roadblocks waiting along the ways, poised to defeat major policies like health care reform that may lead us to a more progressive democracy.
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