Political Economy of the Sell-Out -- Louis Proyect

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/political-economy-of-the-sell-out/

To show how far things have come, try to imagine Barack Obama saying anything remotely similar about Iraq that McGovern said about Vietnam in his acceptance speech to the 1972 convention:

I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day.

There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North.

And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong.

And then let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.

After McGovern lost to Nixon, the Democrats never nominated a candidate capable of making such a speech. While McGovern was best known as a Vietnam “dove”, he was also committed to the New Deal type reforms of the Johnson administration whose war he had vehemently opposed.

McGovern proposed 2.5 million public-service jobs in 1972, as well as slashing the Pentagon’s budget by $32 billion. Sigh. Those were the days.

So entrenched were New Deal values that McGovern’s loss to Nixon was not seen as a mandate to carry out Thatcher/Reagan style cuts on the welfare state. If anything, the U.S. has not seen a Democratic presidential candidate in recent years about whom the following could be said:

During Nixon’s six years in office, social spending (adjusted for inflation) doubled. Nixon instituted vast new regulatory bodies: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, and the Consumer Products Safety Commission, among many others. Nixon issued the executive orders creating the affirmative action system in federal hiring, and Nixon appointees on the Supreme Court wrote the opinions forcing affirmative action upon the private sector.

The Financial Post (Toronto, Canada), April 23, 1994

During Nixon’s presidency, powerful economic forces were unleashed that would convince the American ruling class that another approach was necessary. Anything that smacked of the New Deal would have to disappear. Under the rubric of “neoliberalism”, the clock would have to be turned back to pre-New Deal days. However, it was not Reagan who introduced this new policy but the Democrat Jimmy Carter in the same manner that Truman introduced the first McCarthyite legislation, not the Republicans.