Quote of the day--a schooling in Democratic politics edition

Then, in 1972, the Democrats ran a candidate whose speeches were more frantic than any in history. George ­McGovern, following a then fashionable theory that the middle class was prosperous enough to take care of itself and that unions were pretty much irrelevant, spoke to working-class concerns less than any Democrat had before. He lost 49 states.

McGovern didn’t give what Lyndon B. Johnson used to call "Democratic" speeches--LBJ’s shorthand for talking about which party gave the people Social Security, Medicare and the Tennessee Valley Authority and which one was willing to toss them over the side. LBJ gave such speeches all the time in 1964--and he won 60% of the popular vote.

-Rick Perlstein, "How Democrats Win: Defending
the Social Safety Net", Time, August 18^th, 2011

If there were Democrats giving "Democratic" speeches, you know I'd probably be one. I even considered affiliating last year, having been an Independent since I first registered to vote when I was eighteen; then the Democrats found some other way to fuck something up or maybe they disparaged liberals again, and I remembered why I wasn't interested. They won't give "Democratic" speeches and I won't register to be one of them, and at this stage I'm not likely to give them any money, either, although I reserve the right to change my mind if the GOP nominates one of their Dominionists for 2012 (they have one, possibly two, who are doing well at this early stage in the process--how fucked up is that?) and starts to make a good showing in polls, somehow.

But it's worth remembering who, as Perlstein reminds us, gave us Medicare, Social Security, and the TVA, and who still wants to throw people over the side. I wish the Democrats would help us remember, by educating us, but they've caught the terrible virus Reagan inflicted upon the country during a time when confidence in government was low. Perhaps the greatest idiocy of Reaganism as a governing philosophy (as opposed to an election strategy) is that it throws up "government isn't the solution to the problem, it is the problem" heedless of what the actual question might be. If government wasn't a valid answer to at least some problems, there's no reason it would have lasted as an invention--the reason you probably don't take a spear to work isn't that a spear isn't an effective tool, it's that your job probably doesn't involve joining your fellow hunters in the wilderness and bringing down big game, and if that was your job, there have been superseding tools that better fill the spear's role. Anyway, the point here is that there are things that government does better and big government does best, but you wouldn't know that from the gang of idiots who can't conceive of a role for it at all.