Peter Beinart: How the Tea Party Won the Deal
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.
...Liberals are furious that President Obama agreed to massive spending cuts, and the promise of more, without any increase in revenue. They should be: Given how much the Bush tax cuts have contributed to the deficit (and how little they’ve spurred economic growth), it’s mind-boggling that they’ve apparently escaped this deficit-reduction deal unscathed.
But there’s a reason for that: Since the economy collapsed in 2008, only one grassroots movement has emerged in response, and it’s been a movement of the right. Compare that with what happened during the Depression. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency and launched the hodgepodge of domestic programs that historians call the first New Deal. By 1935, however, he was looking warily over his left shoulder at Huey Long, whose “Share our Wealth” movement demanded that incomes be capped at $1 million and every family be guaranteed an income no less than one third the national average.
At the same time, the Townsend plan to guarantee generous pensions to every elderly American had organizers in every state in the Union. To be sure, FDR had vehement opponents on his right, but he was at least as concerned about the populist left, which helps explain why he enacted the more ambitious “second New Deal,” which included Social Security, the massive public jobs program called the Works Progress Administration, and the Wagner Act, which for the first time in American history put Washington on the side of labor unions.
Obama, like FDR, had a reasonably successful first two years: a stimulus package that, while too small for the circumstances, was still large by historical standards,, and a health-care bill that while subpar in myriad ways, still far exceeded the efforts of other recent Democratic presidents.
And then, unlike FDR, he ran into a grassroots movement of the right. Historians will long debate why the financial collapse of 2008 produced a right-wing populist movement and not a left-wing one. Perhaps it’s because Obama didn’t take on Wall Street; perhaps it’s because with labor unions so weak there’s just not the organizational muscle to create such a movement; perhaps it’s because trust in government is so low that pro-government populism is almost impossible....