What Went Wrong with Liberalism? Part III

I made two posts covering what I agreed with from Eric Alterman's review of Douglas S. Massey's book, What Went Wrong with Liberalism?. Now I'll look at the parts I disagree with and the parts that Massey forgot.

Massey sees the Niet Nam war this way:

The arrogance and self-righteousness of liberal elites manifested themselves in yet another way. The same liberal architects who promoted civil rights and social welfare also prosecuted a costly foreign war on the basis of lies, deception, and subterfuges that callously abused the faith and trust of the working class. As subsequent tapes and archives have clearly shown, liberals in the Johnson administration—including the president himself—manufactured an attack on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin to secure congressional authorization for military intervention in Viet Nam. Then they systematically lied to voters about the costs and consequences of that engagement and its ultimate prospects for success.

The Vietnam War forcefully underscored the fact that liberal elites made the decisions while working class whites paid the price, thus reinforcing a politics of class resentment manipulated so effectively by conservative Republicans. The soldiers who fought and died in Vietnam were disproportionately drawn from the America’s working and lower classes. The sons and daughters of upper middle class professionals—the people who held power, influence, and prestige in the Great Society—by and large did not serve in Vietnam. They avoided military service through a combination of student deferments, personal connections, and a skillful use of medical disabilities. Tellingly, once the system of student deferments was abandoned and the children of the upper middle class faced the real risk of being drafted through random assignment, direct U.S. participation in the war quickly ended.

To blue collar workers in the north and poor whites in the south it looked like liberal lawmakers favored the war as long as someone else’s children were serving and dying as soldiers, but as soon as their precious offspring were put at risk, they quickly ignored the sacrifices of the working classes, forgot about the 60,000 dead, and abandoned hundreds of POWs and MIAs in their haste to leave Vietnam. The ultimate result was the evolution of a working class mythology of sellout by unpatriotic liberal elites (“America haters”), epitomized cinematically by the movies and roles of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Clint Eastwood, whose tag lines were appropriated to great political effect by Ronald Reagan.

To be sure, Viet Nam had a major effect on liberalism and the country but not quite the effect that Massey describes. Early in the war there was some resentment about college deferments making View Nam "rich man's war, poor man's fight". The college deferement was being scaled back years before the war ended - around half way through. Further, the deferment was not a "get out of war free" card. It simply delayed when you could be drafted. It also let college graduates enter the service as officers instead of as enlisted men. That is why John Kerry enlisted in the Navy and George Bush in the TANG - their deferments were up.

By the time Johnson's duplicity came out the country was distracted by other matters. This may matter to hard-core liberals but not to most Americans.

Besides, Nixon and Watergate were much bigger scandals (I wonder why?).

What the war did do was encourage a huge block of anti-war protestors to become anti-American. This combined with the civil rights campaign to convince people that, rather than being "a shining city on the hill," America was an imperial power bent on conquering the rest of the world. To these people, Viet Nam was not about stopping communism, it was about crushing a nationalist movement. This is where the blame-America first crowd came from. Since many of them started as college students getting a deferment from the draft, they flooded acedemia.

The question is, how did they end up dominating the Democratic party to the extent that they do?

There are a few answers to this. The Democrats have always been more open to communists and socialists. During Nixon's term, anti-communists such as JFK had been were effectively purged from the party. Instead the Democrats embraced the peace candidate, George McGovern, probably the most liberal major ticket candidate of my lifetime. This cemented the Democrats as the party of peace-at-all-costs and the party of socialism.

The war and Watergate had a very different effect on the Republicans. Many people came away from the early 1970s thinking that the problem was not the US government, it was government in general. The bigger it is and the further away it is the less it is to be trusted. This led to the rise of Libertarians and Libertarian-leaning Republicans (like me).

For the life of me, I cannot see how people who lived through the 1970s could have come away with the conviction that what was needed was more government.

But, forgotten in all of this is one of the biggest blocks of FDR's coalition - labor. What happened to it?

The AFL-CIO is in a bad way. Their biggest members just split off. The portion of the population belonging to unions is was down.

On of their problems is their past successes. Some of the industries they had the most success in have been devistated. Railroads are the classic example. Due to union demands the railroads could not compete with trucks for frieght. What had been one of America's powerhouse sectors now scrapes along with government assistance.

Unions have been squeezed from the left and the right. Globalization means that formerly union jobs have gone overseas. Environmental regulations have closed industries such as mining in the unionized east and encouraged it in the non-unionized west.

To make matters worse for big labor, a sizable percentage of their membership votes Republican. Between not trusting Democrats to defend the country and Democrats' rejection of traditional culture and anyone rural or poorly educated, this should not be a surprise.