Did the Democrat Party do better or worse than if the Communist Party didn't exist?

[off2bed]

Interesting question.

The mid century Democratic Party was of course intensely anti-commie. The big Cold Warriors were liberals, while there was a very strong isolationist wing on the Right.

The CPUSA made many attempts to take over the industrial unions and the story of that infighting is largely unknown.

The New Left of the late 60s was definitely influenced by Maoism and academic Marxism, but despite some posturing by folk singers, they really didn't care too much for the actual dirty shop-floor stuff; which obliges one to rub elbows with the white proles in all their tacky glory. The New Left folks preferred the glory of third world anti-colonialist rebellion and Franz Fanon and whatnot.

I just started this book: Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class which is about a lot of this stuff. Really interesting.

So if you are saying that the baby boomers of the New Left had a whole lot to do with killing off the mainly white, mainly socially conservative, definitely anti-communist New Deal Democrats, I'll agree with you.

You're the only leftie here who is able to think for himself.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Without the Communist movement of the 20th Century, we'd still have a JFK-style Democrat Party . . .

The Communist movement in America reached its all-time peak in the 1930s. Long before JFK even went to war.

 

[off2bed]

The Communist movement in America reached its all-time peak in the 1930s. Long before JFK even went to war.

But communism as a philosophy peaked with Pelosi/Obama

 

[Joeybagadonuts]

I was going to join the Tea Party but then I found out they didn't even support Prop 19....wtf!

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[MeeMie]

Did you see Rubio's speech?

It was magnificent.

That's one young man who will go far in today's politics. He's just what the people have been calling for.




On the other hand ...

Looks like things have begun to turn around for the puppeteer:


You know who was a big loser in this election?

George Soros


While Democrats went out of their way to portray the Koch brothers as evil billionaires puppeteering this election, I’d venture they feel pretty good about the outcome.

However, after last night I’d venture that that George Soros is one unhappy Hungarian.

Where the Kochs stood accused of funding some well-known grassroots political groups, Soros has been heavily invested in some pretty shady attempts at electioneering for Democrats. And fortunately, these efforts aren’t going very well.


The first notable thing is Soros’ funding of the Secretary of State Project — which is basically an attempt to elect Secretaries of State around the country willing to impose Democratic-friendly election laws in an attempt to tilt the playing field in their favor on election day.

Well, yesterday Republicans won 17 of 26 races for Secretary of State taking six of those offices (Arkansas, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa and Kansas) from Democrats. Republicans now control 25 offices to Democrats 22.


And then there was Soros’ backing of a measure in California to put control of redistricting back in the hands of the state legislature, a move that would obviously benefit Democrats.

It failed, while another measure to give California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission increased authority over redrawing congressional districts succeeded:

California voters approved a ballot measure financed largely by Charles Munger Jr., son of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Charles Munger, that strips California lawmakers of responsibility for drawing the boundaries of congressional districts.​

Proposition 20 was winning 65 percent to 35 percent, with 17 percent of precincts counted, according to the Associated Press. The measure puts the task of reshaping the districts represented by California’s 53 members of the House of Representatives into the hands of a Citizens Redistricting Commission.

Proposition 27, a competing measure backed by billionaire George Soros, unions and Democratic Party leaders to disband the commission and return districting powers to lawmakers, was losing, 61 percent to 39 percent.


I’m sure Soros will keep pushing his agenda, but for now, two big ticket items of his have been stymied.


Oh yeah and ... the legalization of marijuana failed, too ... another Soros endeavor.


Maybe, he'll go back to Europe and try to influence the EU government instead, now that his masquerade is disintegrating, thanks to American voters. Hopefully, he needs a pet parrot and will take Arianna Huffington with him.












...

 

[KingOrfeo]

But communism as a philosophy peaked with Pelosi/Obama

They are no more Communists than you are. Ideologically, Obama has turned out to be just another center-right Bill Clinton neoliberal.

 

[MeeMie]

They are no more Communists than you are. Ideologically, Obama has turned out to be just another center-right Bill Clinton neoliberal.

HAHAHAAA!

Yeah, like that's going to happen anytime soon.

He's way too narcissistic to even consider that his policies were the problem. Already, he's in a state of denial ... insisting that it is the bad economy and unemployment figures that caused the stupid voters to react out of fear.

He's not about to learn from his mistakes. Thin skinned, radical liberal ideologue.

But, it's okay, because when Obama was warned of a midterm bloodbath comparable to 1994, Obama personally dismissed any comparison between Democrats now and under Bill Clinton 16 years ago — by saying his personal popularity would bail everybody out.

‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

Yeah, like that mentality is centrist.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

If you could see the Elephant with your eyes instead of your hands your perception might be different.

This elephant?

In the first and signal victory speech of election night, Kentucky Senator-elect Rand Paul took to the podium and declared himself the leading edge of a "Tea Party tidal wave." That wave, Paul made clear, is poised to crash down on the very idea of government itself. In his compact, loaded address, Paul pilloried government on at least ten occasions while zipping through the Tea Party's trigger words: Constitution, individual liberty, freedom, entrepreneurship, capitalism, balanced budgets and an end to the slavery of debt. But there was one word conspicuously missing from his remarks: "Republican."

On a night when Republicans pulled off the largest shift in party power since 1938, converting at least sixty seats in the House, they also seemed, paradoxically, to be an endangered species. In absurd remarks coming from a ten-term incumbent, incoming House speaker John Boehner pointedly declined to acknowledge this elephant in the room, pledging instead to take "a new approach that hasn't been tried before in Washington—by either party." And when the R-word was uttered, it was usually in a bizarre ritual of self-flagellation. As victorious Florida Tea Partyer Marco Rubio bluntly declared, it would be "a grave mistake" to believe that "these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party."

If the GOP didn't win—according to the GOP—then just who the hell did? The expedient answer for a party that still can't shake off the stink of George W. Bush's crony capitalism and profligate wars is the Tea Party. As a branding technique, it allows the right to sell a narrative of rediscovered conservatism, a story of how a movement of libertarian true believers got lost in the corridors of Halliburton and the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq but found their way again thanks to an uprising of "the people" awakened by Obama's government takeover. A lot of inconvenient truths and players get dropped along the way (pro-war security hawks; Astroturf-seeding billionaires; the Christian right, whose definition of individual liberty doesn't extend to women and gays; Bush's Wall Street bailout), but obviously historical and factual integrity isn't really the point. It makes a good slogan, and along the way it ups the rhetorical ante. Reagan's small-government revolution now sounds like a full-fledged no-government revolt; not since the British Redcoats has an army come to Washington with so explicit an intent to burn it to the ground.

Underneath the "Tea Party Triumphs" headlines, however, lies a fractured, incoherent party whose short-term strategy for electoral success is every bit as dicey as the formula for New Coke. Paul's, Rubio's and Pat Toomey's wins were more than offset by defeats for Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, John Raese, Ken Buck and, most likely, Joe Miller. Likewise in the House, Tea Party candidates picked up victories in Arizona, Arkansas and Florida, but in Pennsylvania, a hotbed of local Tea Party activism, they went 0 for 2 in races in play while non–Tea Party Republicans went a perfect 5 for 5. Although you wouldn't know it from the media coverage, ordinary Republicans constitute the majority of the new GOP class. Moreover, a number of successful candidates are only nominally or opportunistically associated with the Tea Party; these TINOs (Tea in Name Only) include Ron Johnson, who knocked off Russ Feingold in Wisconsin but whose success was largely driven by his personal wealth, and Steve Chabot of Ohio, who rebranded himself early on as a Tea Partyer in order to reclaim a seat he first won in 1994.

So far, the Tea Party zealots haven't forced most of these TINOs and non-Tea Republicans to take the purity test, as they did with Mike Castle in Delaware, to disastrous effect. But if firebrands like Paul and Rubio get their way in crafting legislation, all bets are off. Ask newly elected moderate Republican Nan Hayworth of New York's 19th District how she feels about privatizing Social Security or eliminating the Department of Education. Then ask Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe how they feel about their new colleague Toomey, who thinks it's cool to jail doctors for performing abortions. The possibilities for wedge issues that highlight the antigovernment extremism of the Tea Party (as well as its religious right tendencies) are ample, and Democrats should have no qualms about exploiting them—if the Tea Party doesn't go there on its own.

But there's a bigger lesson for Democrats than just divide and conquer. As much as the Tea Party's "throw the bums out" mentality represents a scary, anti-intellectual nihilism—there's an undeniably refreshing zing to its claim that Washington needs new faces. Sure, there's tons of hypocrisy and insincerity when folks like Boehner mouth these anti-establishment lines. But at least he had the smarts to ape the mood and in some cases actually accommodate it. The Republican Party wrestled this past year—often bloodily and clumsily (just ask Lisa M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I)—to co-opt, absorb and redirect the new energy on their side. This intraparty fight resulted in considerable blowback, though on the whole it produced not just net gains in Congress but the perception (and sometimes reality) that the Republicans were the party most willing to create a place at the table for outsiders. Meanwhile, Democrats, who just two years ago put a greenhorn at the top of the ticket, doubled down this time on the familiar—rallying around Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas (who subsequently went down to a 20-point defeat) and funneling late money to Blue Dogs (who dropped from fifty-four to twenty-six members). For the better part of Obama's administration, staffers like Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs were busy tossing off insults and elbows to the few insurgents on the left. And look where that got us.

 

[zipman]

This elephant?

That is a thorough "bitch slap" answer to vetteman.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Wok]

Interesting question.

The mid century Democratic Party was of course intensely anti-commie. The big Cold Warriors were liberals, while there was a very strong isolationist wing on the Right.

The CPUSA made many attempts to take over the industrial unions and the story of that infighting is largely unknown.

The New Left of the late 60s was definitely influenced by Maoism and academic Marxism, but despite some posturing by folk singers, they really didn't care too much for the actual dirty shop-floor stuff; which obliges one to rub elbows with the white proles in all their tacky glory. The New Left folks preferred the glory of third world anti-colonialist rebellion and Franz Fanon and whatnot.

I just started this book: Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class which is about a lot of this stuff. Really interesting.

So if you are saying that the baby boomers of the New Left had a whole lot to do with killing off the mainly white, mainly socially conservative, definitely anti-communist New Deal Democrats, I'll agree with you.

From my understanding, the CPUSA had disagreements with Trotskists and other factions within the party. The 1920's - 1930's did see some support because of the depression and fascism, but then those dreams were squashed again when McCarthyism and De-Stalinization occurred.

And the anti-war movement of the 1960's did give the CPUSA some extra support, but Brezhnev did not help matters because he did not care. I think you know this already. So I will stop now.

 

[zipman]

Your slobbering endorsement of his misunderstanding is grim testimony to the colossal cognitive dissonance you lug around to sling off your shoulders onto the table.

Christ Almighty!

The bolded part doesn't make much sense to me.

Then again, making sense isn't really one of your strengths around here.

 

[Wok]

Oh, and I disagree the Democratic Party is socialist, communist, etc.

 

[rosco rathbone]

From my understanding, the CPUSA had disagreements with Trotskists and other factions within the party. The 1920's - 1930's did see some support because of the depression and fascism, but then those dreams were squashed again when McCarthyism and De-Stalinization occurred.

And the anti-war movement of the 1960's did give the CPUSA some extra support, but Brezhnev did not help matters because he did not care. I think you know this already. So I will stop now.

I know more about the labor movement than the intricacies of the Communist movement. I have a book about the size of a phone book waiting for me to read it but I've got to finish Secrets of the Temple first.

 

[Wok]

I know more about the labor movement than the intricacies of the Communist movement. I have a book about the size of a phone book waiting for me to read it but I've got to finish Secrets of the Temple first.

My focus of study was not in the CPUSA, but ran into a few things here and there studying communism abroad. Some interesting stories about infiltration are in Ion Pacepa's book, Red Horizons.

 

[Sean Renaud]

They did better because the Communist Party exists. Look at the exit polls and despair. Your only hope of long term victory is for the economy to rip roar to success in the first year of this new Congress.

 

[firespin]

uhhh, you do realize that there were significant tax cuts, don't you?

Never mind, your head is filled with rush.

Bush sent out stimulus checks in 2008; the 2009 stimulus spread those $400 single / $800 couple payments for 2009 and 2010 over time by playing with withholding rates.

http://www.depositaccounts.com/blog/2009/02/stimulating-400-perworker-tax-credit-for-2009-and-2010.html

 

[Colonel Hogan]

This elephant?

That's a hell of a pachyderm, no doubt about it. And whether it chooses to methodically break the household furniture as it's handlers intend or just ends up shitting on the rug will not be decided by the handful of new acrobats joining the circus.

It will be decided by whether the audience is lulled back into complacently watching the show or sticks to its demands for something more substantial.

History argues for complacency followed by turning back to the same old juggling and dancing taking place in the other ring.

Government will not be fixed by snake oil salesman. It will be fixed by a public refusing to buy their wares. Repeatedly. For as long as it takes.

So far, you and I haven't been very good about doing that.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I know more about the labor movement than the intricacies of the Communist movement. I have a book about the size of a phone book waiting for me to read it but I've got to finish Secrets of the Temple first.

I recommend It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. It covers the (anti-Soviet) Socialist Party as well as the Communist Party. It only goes up to the 1950s, however. Apparently, to the authors, the political upheavals of the 1960s and '70s do not even merit discussion in a history of socialist movements in the U.S.