After about 33 months and (as of today) 932 posts at NewDonkey.com, I’m finally ready to do what so many other bloggers have done, and move from a solo gig to something a bit more integrated into a strategic political mission.As of June 18, I’ll be blogging regularly at The Democratic Strategist, an online magazine that’s about a year old. In case you’re not familiar with TDS, its editors are the much-esteemed Bill Galston, Stan Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira, all major Democratic strategists in their own spheres. The e-zine’s main purpose is to provide a focused and non-factional forum for civil and empirically-based discussions of strategic issues for Democrats–everything from demographic and electoral analysis, to message and communications challenges, to party unification measures–with a special interest in long-range concerns that may elude the day-to-day debates over tactics. You should check out TDS’ current and back issues to get a sense of the already broad and impressive range of contributors, which include academics, journalists and practitioners from every corner of the party.My job, as successor to Managing Editor Scott Winship, is to enliven the daily content of TDS and to continue and sharpen its issue forums. As a big believer in its mission of party unity, civility, and fact-based reasoning, I’m excited about joining the TDS team.Given time constraints, this means I’m suspending NewDonkey for the time being. I’m not killing the beast; I’m cryogenically freezing it, sort of like Ted Williams’ head. Starting next week, visitors to this site will be redirected to TDS. Ruy Teixeira’s doing the same thing with his longstanding Donkey Rising blog, so we should benefit from some new energy all around.When I made the decision to suspend this blog, I got sentimental for a minute or two, until I remembered my pledge not to take blogging too seriously. I’ll never forget the first political blog I ever laid eyes on: Kausfiles, by Mickey Kaus, whom I knew back when he was at The New Republic. My first reaction was to think, “Oh my God; this is so embarassing for Mickey. Why does he think anybody will want to read anything he feels like saying on any subject?” Within two years, I was doing it myself, but the idea still sometimes seems preposterous. And I’ll remember that every day at TDS, and try to keep my words useful.Still, I know this blog has become a habit for a fair number of readers, and a source of information and amusement on occasion. I’m often humbled to learn that the quality of its readership is frequently superior to the quality of its content. Some folks have come here looking for a more heterodox if partisan point of view; others appear to consider it a voice from the New Democrat tradition that they find congenial or stimulating. And maybe some readers liked the occasional break from politics when I lurch off into religion or college football.In any event, the TDS leadership has encouraged me to keep The Daily Strategist blog as lively as NewDonkey, so if you follow me over there, you may not notice a great deal of difference, other than the fact that my pithy comments will be surrounded by outstanding contributions from others. (And speaking of comments, those who have long deplored the absence of a comment thread here will be happy to hear that we are in the process of making the comment thread at TDS more functional).So: I’m not saying goodbye, but instead “see you over at TDS,” where I hope all the donkeys can gather.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 21: Don’t Dismiss the Power of Inflation Politics
All the talk of renewed inflation brought back some terrible memories for me, and I wrote about them at New York:
When I was a freshman college debater at Emory University in the fall of 1970, the national debate topic was not Vietnam, but the desirability of wage and price controls. Little did we know that just months ahead a Republican president would impose a wage-price freeze, long the anti-inflationary prescription of the left wing of the Democratic Party. But the surprise known in financial circles as the “Nixon shock,” nearly a half-century ago (on August 15, 1971) showed how pervasive the fear of inflation — running at just over 5 percent in 1970 — had become.
That’s ancient history now, even to those of us who remember the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s, and the particularly horrid scourge of “stagflation” (high inflation and unemployment simultaneously). Inflation seems to have been tamed by wise monetary policies. The periodic warnings from 21st-century conservatives that low interest rates and federal budget deficits would create inflation didn’t much bother me. It was like hearing an old priest chant a forgotten litany in a lost language — just one among many ritualistic arguments for the tight credit and reactionary social policies these people favored instinctively as a sort of class self-defense posture.
The current surge in consumer prices doesn’t necessarily change that picture; the current post-pandemic (we hope) economic environment was sure to produce a spike in wages and prices that cannot be projected into a future where something approaching normalcy will surely return (though the real-estate bubble is indeed troubling). But now I am beginning to hear echoes of the inflation panics of the not-so-distant past, which make me tremble.Like Tim Noah, I suspect there may be a generational lapse in understanding the politics of inflation:
“I don’t care to be condescended to by a bunch of Gen Xers and Millennials about my ’70s-bred fear of inflation. It feels too much like the condescension we Boomers directed toward Depression babies whenever they warned us that we were playing with fire in deregulating the financial markets. Poor dears, we thought, traumatized for life by the 1929 crash and one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
“The Depression babies turned out to be right, of course.”
Noah makes it clear he’s not arguing inflation per se is bad for the economy. It is, however, bad for progressive politics, and not just because “stagflation” probably killed the Carter presidency and ushered in the Reagan era far more than the Iranian hostage crisis or other better-remembered Democratic foibles. The deflationary economic strategies of the 1980s weren’t called “austerity,” but rather a corrective for undisciplined policies that fed wage and price spirals which in turned hammered the value of savings, the living standards of those on fixed incomes, and the political case for federal domestic spending.
Most lethally for progressivism, the conservative supply-side tax-cutting when combined with inflationary fears can create enormous pressure for public disinvestment and the shredding of safety nets (which is why reactionaries happily labeled the intended result “starving the beast”). We are still living with some of the long-term consequences of anti-inflationary backlash. As Noah points out, California’s Proposition 13 ballot initiative in 1978 and similar “tax revolts” were a by-product of price spirals that boosted tax assessments on property and income alike.
But sometimes lost in an examination of the right’s exploitation of inflation fears is the abiding fact that the left has no clear prescription for dealing with it, either, other than by denying its existence or significance (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly). Ironically, that was made most evident by the supposedly illiberal Richard Nixon’s surprising use of the great liberal instrument for taming inflation.
The veteran ex-conservative economic and political analyst Bruce Bartlett has penned an exceptional explainer on the background and consequences of the “Nixon shock,” particularly its international dimensions, and the role played by Treasury Secretary John Connally, who like his boss and ally Nixon was more focused on short-term politics than on long-term economic realities. What’s clear is that Nixon was convinced a recession induced by the Eisenhower administration and its Federal Reserve Board appointees designed to kill inflationary pressures also killed his 1960 presidential candidacy. As prices spiked in 1970, he was terrified the same thing could happen in 1972.
Nixon had inherited (and temporarily extended) an income-tax surcharge from LBJ that was designed to pay for the skyrocketing costs of the Vietnam War, but its effects were limited. So with his signature televised bombshell reveal (the one he deployed a month earlier to announce his trip to China), amid great secrecy, Nixon rolled out a combo platter of initiatives to fight inflation and international economic instability. They included a suspension of fixed currency exchange rates and the convertibility of the dollar to gold (to head off a raid on gold supplies triggered by a British demand for a major conversion); an import surcharge (to prevent a worsening of the trade balance); and most significantly for most Americans, a 90-day freeze on wages and prices to be followed by an indefinite period of controls by federal panels.
As political theater, Nixon’s speech announcing a “new economic policy” was, well, Nixonian. He began with dessert: an assortment of tax breaks and job-creation incentives balanced by mostly unspecified spending cuts; only then did he mention the wage-price freeze. After promising to “break the vicious circle of spiraling prices and costs,” Nixon moved on to his international proposals, which he downplayed as “very technical,” while assuring viewers that “if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American-made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.”
Nixon’s wage and price controls were initially very popular (as polls had told the White House they would be) and did indeed hold down inflation through the reelection year of 1972, when Nixon won his famous landslide reelection over poor George McGovern, in part by goosing federal appropriations to create a mini-boom. By then the administration had moved on to a more discretionary system for regulating wage and price increases, which generated rumors of employers currying favor with generous donations to CREEP (the Committee to Reelect the President), the notoriously corrupt operation heavily complicit in the Watergate scandals that brought down the Nixon presidency. Between the suppressed and eventually unleashed inflationary pressures and the oil-price shock Nixon’s international economic policies helped create, the country paid a very high economic price for the brief respite from inflation the wage-price freeze earned him. He sowed the wind with even greater inflation, and his successors Gerald Ford (whose feckless “Whip Inflation Now” campaign was widely mocked) and Jimmy Carter reaped the whirlwind.
Before you dismiss these events from 50 years ago as irrelevant, consider how much Nixon’s short-sighted approach sounds like something President Donald Trump might have done if inflation had became a political problem during his tenure (or in, God help us, a future term). Indeed, any president mulling Nixon’s choice of recession-inducing fiscal or monetary policies might be tempted to resort to the easy-to-understand, if dangerous, strategy of wage and price controls in which the pain is mostly back-loaded, particularly in or near an election year. Old folks remember how it preceded Nixon’s landslide 1972 win, followed by a decade of economic pain and multiple decades of political misery for progressives.