Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy
I received a press release about this interesting-sounding book about the problems and prospects for the Democratic party a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to post a notice. From the description:
What has happened to the national
Democratic Party? It’s easy to blame it
all on the machinations of evil Republicans, but honest Democrats know that
their own party needs to take some responsibility for its failures. In the last presidential election, a
distinguished senator who was also a decorated war veteran was unable to defeat
someone widely viewed as a failed president and an ignorant if not stupid man,
someone tainted by his association with “religious extremists,” corporate
criminals, and an unpopular war. Why?
Click on the title above to go to a blog with much more info.
–Maclin Horton
Kauffman has a nice review of it up at The American Conservative.
I just finished reading a book by Allan Carlson, THE AMERICAN WAY (ISI, 2003) about American family policy, and one of the best chapters is about the very pro-family policies of the New Deal, and the corresponding anti-family and pro-business policies of the Republicans and industrialists of that era. It was said and never denied by either group, that the National Association of Manufacturers secretly financed the National Women’s Party (a feminist political effort of the 1920s and 30s). During Herbert Hoover’s administration, a White House conference on the family that he convoked called for wide-spread day care and other assorted evils. The Roosevelt adminstration, on the other hand, was filled with what Carlson calls “maternalists,” people (including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins) who believed in women marrying and staying at home to take care of their children, and therefore, that their husbands needed to earn a living wage. Of course, the NAM and the Republicans didn’t care much for that.
As one who was a registered Democrat until a year and a half ago, I think the reasons for the party’s changes are complex and would take more time than I can spend right now to discuss. But sadly, the party doesn’t represent anything I want to be identified with. It’s pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-war, and pretty much pro-big business and pro-rich- just slightly less so than the Republicans.
Yeah, Carlson had a good piece in the Weekly Standard of all places earlier this year talking about this same stuff.
It is well known that the dixiecrats in 1964 forced the Dems to choose between the civil rights act and what the dixiecrats thought we be a bill killer addendum about sex–opening the door wide for the radical left to stream into the Democratic party. http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc_acc_jp2i_030213.htm.
Reading the outline of the book I just added it to my must-read list.
fertility gap between conservatives and liberals.
On the other hand, a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, freed the slaves. And most wars of the 20th century were brought to us courtesy of the Democrats in power. So, was the Civil War a just war, or not?
S.
As conservative as I now consider myself to be, I’ve never been able to get over the hatred of the Republican Party instilled in me by my Mississippian grandmother. This book looks promising.
Joshua Snyder
Where did the party of William Jennings Bryan and Hubert H. Humphrey go? The answer is the same as today: no where! Bryan and Humphrey didn’t win the Presidency either and both took more than one shot at the opportunity. So the article subtitle is a bit misleading.
However, the Republican shouldn’t take much comfort in the current state of affairs. The Party that preached fiscal strictness since Ronald Reagan in 1980 and has spent tax money more irresponsibily than the sterotypical Democrat they helped to define. The Iraqi War is as good as it gets and Americans have now bought their own exclusive occupied territories. 9-11 has been the reason for the federal government to increase its bureaucratic size, scope, cost and intrusiveness, unlike anything since F.D.R. during the Great Depression, all with the focus to catch a couple dozen half-starved rats in a sewer somewhere in Southwest Asia.
In 2006 most Americans feel frustrated at both major political parties. One Party, the Republicans, say stay the course. While the other, the Democrat, says go back to the future of the 1960s. Neither really has a vision for the future – or a grip on it for that matter – and neither has really learned anything substantively from the past.
If there was ever a time in America for a third party it will be 2008. The current crop of potential candidates are retreads and has beens and we have all heard of their great “leadership” abilities. But this is the mess we are confromted with for along time to come.
Danny L. McDaniel
Lafayette, Indiana
With all due respect, Mr McDaniel, the focus has never been on capturing a bunch of “half starved rats” in SW Asia. It is becoming increasingly clear that 9/11 was a pretext for a longed-for move to establish American hegemony in the Middle East, and that information was manipulated to get the American people to go along with Rumsfeld’s madcap military adventure.
It was all preconceived, and as for Osama bin Laden, well Mr Bush himself doesn’t spend much time thinking about the man who killed nearly 3000 of our people, as he himself has said.
Yes, let us long for a real third party alternative in 2008. In the meantime, with world war threatening, I intend to vote Democratic in the upcoming congressional elections. If the congress is not taken from the Republicans we have little hope of avoiding total war. And no hope of investigating the shenanigans of this criminal administration.
For the inevitable criticism that one can never vote for a proabortion candidate, I reply that there is no evidence that “prolife” Republicans, who have had control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency for 6 years, have any intention of doing anything about the status quo.
Tom Storck refuted this opinion in a piece at Traditional Catholic Reflections, and includes a quote from then-Cardinal Ratzinger that proportionate reasons can be found for voting for a candidate that is not prolife: http://tcrnews.com/Catholicvoters.html