As regular readers of TDS know, a baleful reality facing Democrats this year is the abiding reality of “midterm falloff” among key Democratic constituencies, particular young and minority (and particularly Hispanic) voters. At Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball today, Geoffrey Skelley ran some numbers on the phenomenon for under-30 voters, and it makes for sobering reading. Here’s how I explained it at Washington Monthly:

According to Skelley’s numbers, the “midterm falloff” in the percentage of the electorate comprised of under-30 votes from the preceding presidential election was 9.5% in 1978, 8.0% in 1982, 7.8% in 1986, 6.3% in 1990, 7.6% in 1994, 3.7% in 1998, 5.7% in 2002, 4.4% in 2006, and 6.3% in 2010. You can say it’s not as bad lately as it once was, but it’s still mighty consistent. And at the same time, thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom generation, the percentage of the midterm electorate made up of over-60 voters has risen and then stayed high. In every midterm since 1994, over-60 voters have more than doubled under-30 voters as a percentage of the electorate. The gap in presidential years is vastly lower (as recently as 1992, under-30 voters still outnumbered over-60 voters).
As Skelley notes, the reasons for the age gap in midterms are not attributable to easy-to-change shortcomings in candidate or party messages:

[S]harply lower young voter participation in midterm elections is surely a trend that predates national exit polls. Older people are simply more likely to vote in general due to a number of lifestyle factors, such as buying a house, starting a family and becoming settled in a community. Even when the 18-to-29 cohort made up a plurality (30.4%) of the country’s adult population in 1980 (the last time that was true as the Baby Boomers got older), the 1982 midterm election saw an eight-point drop in that group’s portion of the electorate from the 1980 presidential election, falling from 22.9% to 14.9%.

There are, however, low-falloff years, such as 1998 (when Democrats broke the rules by making gains in a second-term midtern) and 2006 (when Democrats ran the table). Those should be the models for Democrats this year, when they depend on young voters more than at any time in memory.

With Senate Democrats in particularly suggesting that mitigating “midterm falloff” is their top priority, they have their work cut out for them.

The on-again, off-again debate among Democrats about the limits of party heterodoxy flared back up this week. I had some irenic thoughts about it at Washington Monthly.

Like a lot of intraparty political disputes, the protest filed by Third Way senior veeps Matt Bennett and Jim Kessler at Politico Magazine against Markos Moulitsas’ alleged effort to “fold up” the “big tent” of a Democratic Party is largely based on what might be charitably called a misunderstanding.
The fiery Big Orange Satan founder did a post the other day observing and celebrating the more progressive cast of Democratic Senators today as opposed to a decade ago. In passing he observed that he thought Mark Pryor would lose this year, and that Mary Landrieu might lose as well. He didn’t celebrate the replacement of either Democrat by a Republican, but generally suggested that for progressives a similar partisan balance in the Senate accompanied by a significantly more leftbent Democratic Caucus was a sign of progress since 2004.
Bennett and Kessler viewed this (from Kos’ perspective) reasonable assessment as a declaration of war on the idea of a “Big Tent” Democratic Party that could win seats in red states.

If we are to make progress in a divided Washington–and if we are to protect the Democratic Senate majority–we simply must embrace a big tent for the Democratic Party. Even in purple states, there are not enough self-identified liberals to elect Democrats without their winning significant pluralities or majorities of moderates. The idea that more liberal candidates could win in places like Arkansas, Indiana or Alaska is pure fantasy. And to write off those states would consign Democrats to long-term congressional minority status.

I didn’t see where Markos said “more liberal candidates” could win in places like Arkansas, Indiana or Alaska, or that such states should be written off. He simply said that for purposes of achieving progressive policy objectives, both partisanship and ideology are factors.
Now playing off the Third Way protest, Hullabaloo‘s David Atkins goes where Markos didn’t quite go, and argues that the kind of “economic populism” Third Way tends to dislike is exactly the kind of political message that can work in red states.

Attacking Wall Street…is excellent politics in conservative districts. Hammering against unrestricted bailouts and cocaine-freebasing, prostitute-expensing billionaire vulture capitalists in Manhattan makes for a compelling argument in rural Missouri. Taking broadsides against outsourcing, Cayman Islands tax havens and corporate welfare queens is a superb strategy in suburban Colorado. It was Democrats who ran on these and similar campaign themes who won against the odds in 2012. Most Americans, including in conservative districts, are strongly in favor of reducing income inequality, raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits.

Atkins seems to have in mind the 2012 Senate winners Heidi Heitkamp, Martin Henriech, and Jon Tester, who are not from Arkansas, Indiana or Alaska (I’m guessing he’s not a big fan of Indiana’s Sen Joe Donnelly). I don’t know if progressives would generally agree that, say, the support of Heitkamp and Tester for the Keystone XL pipeline is entirely consistent with an “economic populist” position of brave opposition to the corporate Man. And for that matter, Third Way supports both a minimum wage increase and extended unemployment benefits. So some of his argument seems a bit off. But he’s right that Third Way totems like free trade tend to be very unpopular in southern and midwestern red states.
But if “economic populism” is such a big potential winner for red state Democrats, why isn’t it deployed more often, particularly in the South (Lord knows Louisiana has a tradition of this kind of politics)? Is it a corporate conspiracy? Would Mary Landrieu really foreswear any winning message that might save her seat? Would Kay Hagan?
Truth is, progressive disgruntlement with “conservadems” is as often about disagreement over cultural issues as it is about economics, so there’s nothing inherently progressive about elevating one set of issues over another, as Atkins seems to do. And so long as the U.S. Senate is set up as it is, with its anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) tilt and internal rules, it’s inevitable that Democrats will need a broader coalition than Republicans to gain and hold a working majority.
So the Third Way folk are right about the need for a Big Tent, and wrong about accusing Markos of trying to “fold” it. And Atkins is right that a simple “move to the center” strategy for red state Democrats could foreclose successful messages, but perhaps wrong in suggesting “economic populism” is either a cure-all or a general point of fracture in the party (associating Third Way’s investment-banker-heavy board of directors with the views of Democratic “centrists” generally–or in some cases with Third Way’s own positions–isn’t really fair or accurate).
In the end I mainly want to defend Markos’ sorting out of what goes in to an assessment of political “progress:” it involves both policy goals and the political assets necessary to achieve them.

This year, right now, though, I doubt there’s any disunity on the desire that all Democratic Senate campaigns pull through to victory, grudging as the respect may be in some circles for candidates who help form a majority but make governing difficult.

The argument over the current status of the Tea Party–is it dying, winning, or something in between?–rages on, pointing to some elements of confusion over how one measures the success of a political movement. Here’s how I addressed it today at Washington Monthly:

For hardly the first time, but with greater conviction than ever, there’s a big media meme this week that the apparent weakness of right-wing primary challengers to Republican senators means the Tea Party Movement has finally run its course and the Republican Establishment is fully back in the saddle again. Josh Kraushaar makes this judgment by looking at the support garnered by the GOP primary challengers. Molly Ball comes to the same conclusion by focusing on the ability of GOP congressional leaders to head off Tea Party-led kamikaze missions.
But at The Federalist Ben Domenech reminds the obituarists that you judge the power of a political movement not just by horse-race victories or even legislative battles, but by its influence over its targets. And by that measure, the Tea Party Movement has come a very long way since Santelli’s Rant:

The Tea Party’s success is not gauged by primaries alone. It’s gauged by how much the Tea Party’s priorities become the Republican Party’s priorities.
The Tea Party’s impact in primaries is largely about putting fear into establishment candidates, whether they knock them off or not.
It took them two cycles, but the traditional Republican establishment took the right lessons from the Bennett and Lugar losses. Orrin Hatch spent 2011-12 voting lockstep with Mike Lee. Primary threats made Mike Enzi part of the organizing group for the defund push. Pat Roberts is doing his best to don the winger apparel. Lindsey Graham is trying like mad to re-establish his conservative credentials. Thad Cochran is the exception that proves the rule: it’s no accident that a traditional Washington appropriator who hasn’t modified his ways is the most vulnerable GOP Senator this cycle. So if establishment Republicans understand that they are vulnerable in primaries, and have to pretend to be Tea Partiers when they’re in cycle, is that a sign that the Tea Party is dead – or a sign that it’s had a significant political impact?
Within the realm of Senate primaries, there’s not as clear-cut of a field of candidates this time in the challenger side with appropriators on one side and strong limited government types on the other (see Nebraska, where Tea Party folks are split between Sasse and Osborn). And the story hasn’t been finalized in North Carolina or Georgia. But even considering the relatively narrow issue of primaries, it’s clear that establishment guys who run as establishment guys lose: their path to winning is to appeal to the Tea Party, champion opposition to Obamacare, hoist the musket and run as right-wingers. Is the fact Mitch McConnell is winning his primary today because of Rand Paul a sign of Tea Party weakness? I think not.
This also speaks to the generational point, where we see Tea Partiers elected to lower level offices rise to take more prominent positions, backed by a new infrastructure of groups which can offset traditional fundraising routes.

These are precisely the points I tried to make in responding to the “death of the Tea Party” assessments of the Texas primary earlier this month. The gap between conventional conservative Republicans and the Tea Folk has always been exaggerated; it’s mainly a matter of strategy and tactics rather than ideology or policy. Even on strategy and tactics, the “Establishment” has mainly tamped down Tea Party demands for fiscal confrontations by adopting the Tea Folk obsessions with Obamacare and the pseudo-scandals involving the IRS and Benghazi! (now extended to an indictment of Obama’s “weakness” and anti-American instincts with respect to Ukraine). And if you look at actual primary elections, Senate “Establishment” victories–which many are proclaiming before they actually occur–are being achieved by vast concessions to the conservative activist “base,” which in turn is doing very well down-ballot.

Just because the Tea Party didn’t succeed in creating a 2014 government shutdown or may not knock off Lindsey Graham, it should by no means be adjudged as unsuccessful or even in decline. But beyond the debate over the Tea Party, it’s worth remembering that every viable political movement has multiple objectives can that usually be achieved in multiple ways.

There’s been a lot of questionable spin over the results in Tuesday’s special congressional election in the 13th District of Florida, which Republican David Jolly won over Democrat Alex Sink by just under 3500 votes. GOPers naturally want to make it out as a “referendum on Obamacare,” and some Democrats seem to agree that an “enthusiasm gap” partially attributable to Obamacare was the key.
But that’s not what I concluded at Washington Monthly:

One thing that the FL-13 special election results should encourage everyone to do is to get very serious about the phenomenon I write about metronomically here: the “midterm falloff problem” for Democrats.
We don’t have exit polls for FL-13, so we can’t figure out exactly who turned out and who didn’t. But the total vote falloff from 2012 was 46%. It was even 21% from 2010, which reminds us that special elections are kind of super-midterms when it comes to participation levels. Given the eternal proclivity of younger and minority voters who now heavily lean D to vote more in presidential than in non-presidential contests, it’s pretty hard to believe that wasn’t the most important reason why Alex Sink ran behind Barack Obama’s 2012 percentages in the district….
In the last good midterm election for Democrats, 2006, the Donkey Party broke even among voters over 65, who represented 19% of the electorate. Democrats narrowly lost white voters (47-51), who represented 79% of the electorate. Two years later, Obama’s overall solid win masked the fact that Democrats lost over-65 voters by eight points, while their deficit among white voters increased from 4 to 12 points. These demographic categories quite naturally declined as a percentage of the electorate (seniors from 19% to 16%; whites from 79% to 74%).
So the cataclysm of 2010 was largely a matter of Democrats continuing to lose vote share among seniors (a deficit of 21 points) and white voters generally (a 23 point deficit), who again made up a higher proportion of the electorate (seniors: 21%, whites: 77%). In 2012, the Democratic vote share rebounded somewhat among seniors and white voters (12 points and 20 points, respectively), but the more important factor is that their share of the vote declined significantly (old folks and white folks each down 5 points).
I could go on for quite some time with such numbers, but the point is that the two electorates, midterm and presidential, pretty clearly have two “natural” majorities based on vote share and participation rates. And changing that won’t be easy, for either party.

Senate Democrats are reportedly making a reduction in “midterm falloff” their major collective task going into the general election. That’s a very good thing, and as the narrow margin of GOP victory in FL-13 indicates, not at all a hopeless task.

If there is one crucial thought presented most frequently here at TDS, it is the importance of sorting out strategic and tactical issues from matters of values, goals and principles, particularly in intraparty conflicts. Sometimes strategic/tactical differences are blown out of proportion into “civil war” topics, and sometimes looking at different strategic approaches helps discern the underlying common ground between factions.
That is the case with the antichoice movement, as I discussed yesterday at Washington Monthly in a post based on the fine work of MSNBC’s Irin Carmon:

[S]upporters of more a more direct strategy and more confrontational tactics often reveal the extremism of party-wide ideological positions that more cautious people would prefer to disguise. So you can learn a lot from paying attention to the loud-and-proud types even if you don’t think they will prevail within their own party.
I say all this as a prelude to Irin Carmon’s piece at MSNBC about a new and abrasive wing of the antichoice movement that doesn’t believe in hiding its light under a bushel of pieties about late-term abortions or “women’s health:”

For the mainstream movement to ban abortion, graphic photos and aggressive language have generally gone out of style. The winning slogans, the ones Republican politicians prefer, are warmer, fuzzier: Thumbsucking ultrasound photos, or “women’s health” used as a pretext to shut down safe abortion clinics, including three in Texas this month alone. The losing slogans involve Akin-like “legitimate rape” and comparing Planned Parenthood to the Klan.
Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) begs to differ. Founded out of Norman, Oklahoma, and with chapters nationwide, AHA activists wear t-shirts emblazoned with “End Child Sacrifice” and proudly display photos of bloodied, fully developed fetuses. They protest outside churches – yes, churches – accusing them of not doing enough to end abortion, and talk scornfully of “pro-lifers” who make peace with rape exceptions to abortion bans.
AHA activists disdain the phrase “pro-life” altogether. They prefer “abolitionists,” with all slavery comparisons explicitly intended, and they want to push the larger movement to abide by their uncompromising positions. That means moving away from the incremental strategy – 20 week bans, admitting privileges laws for clinics – and sticking to banning all abortion without exceptions, equating hormonal birth control (even the daily pill kind) with abortion, and advocating that women who have abortions be tried as murderers. That sort of unblinking absolutism in the face of the messiness of real life decision-making may be what has drawn nearly 34,000 people to like their Facebook page.

But here’s the thing: their basic positions are generally shared by antichoice activists of all varieties. What the AHA zealots are demanding is that antichoicers exhibit some honesty about them:

They don’t care who they offend. They aren’t interested in a political or legal strategy; they reserve their deepest scorn for the incrementalists who have crafted a step-by-step plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. As far as AHA is concerned, those guys are sellouts. But in the end, there isn’t so much that the mainstream movement and Abolish Human Abortion disagree on besides tactics.

That’s very important to know.

There’s a big and fascinating new study of the Millennial Generation out today from Pew, drawing from its recent polling, that poses some interesting questions for Democrats. Here’s how I characterized the strategic issues at Washington Monthly today:

The biggest dichotomy involves the political allegiances of Millennials: fully half self-identify as independents, but the cohort is significantly more likely than older generations to vote Democratic, identify itself as “liberal” (more Millennials self-identify as “liberal” than “conservative,” the first cohort to do so in a very long time), favor government activism, and agree with Democratic issue positions on both cultural and economic topics (there’s a slight divergence on abortion policy, where Millenials are marginally less likely than GenXers to support generally legalized abortion). Yet less than a third of Millenials agree there is a “great deal of difference” between the party they agree with and the party that tends to characterize Millennial views as secular-socialist.
There’s a particularly interesting finding on health care policy:

Millennials are as skeptical as older generations of the 2010 health care law. In December 2013–the most recent Pew Research Center survey on the Affordable Care Act–there were no significant differences across generations in views of the law. About four-in-ten in each cohort approved of the law.
Yet by 54% to 42%, Millennials think it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. There is less support among older age cohorts for the government insuring health coverage for all.

Aside from the fact that Millennials are for obvious reasons less inclined to worry about health coverage than older cohorts, this finding suggests that Millennials may be disproportionately represented in the ranks of those who object to Obamacare from the left.
In any event, the study can be read in two very different ways by progressive political folk. Nothing about their views indicates much of an openness to Republican political appeals, at least so long as the GOP is in its current hyper-reactionary and old-white-folks-dependent phase. That would argue for a Democratic strategy of largely taking them for granted and focusing appeals on older generations more likely to “swing.” But insofar as low voting levels (particularly in midterms) among Millennials are a serious problem for the Donkey Party, and in view of their relatively strong feeling that the two parties aren’t greatly different, a more left-bent message might boost turnout and bond Millenials more durably to the party that actually seems to share its values. One much-discussed dilemma in Democratic strategy actually may be an illusion: while Millennials have huge doubts about Social Security’s solvency, and as an abstract manner favor greater emphasis on program benefiting young folks as compared to old folks, a pretty large majority (61%) oppose cutting Social Security benefits as a solution to the program’s solvency issues.
All in all, the study is worth a close look, particularly by those who like to make breezy assertions about “the kids” without much empirical grounding.

If nothing else, bookmark the study for future reference.

One of the more annoying habits of the MSM (and some progressive media) is the tendency to greet virtually every political development within the Republican Party as signaling the demise of the Tea Party and the renewed ascendence of the Great Big Adults of the Republican Establishment. It echoes earlier efforts to prematurely bury the Christian Right, which, of course, overlaps extensively with the Tea Folk.
We heard the trumpets of doom for the Tea Party blow yet again the morning after this week’s Texas Primaries, where a couple of bad right-wing congressional campaigns against fairly right-wing incumbents got a lot of attention. This is from my post-mortem at TPMCafe:

[T]he story we are hearing from most national observers (such as this headline from the New York Times today: “Texas GOP Beats Back Challengers From Right”) was about the dog that did not bark: tea party challengers to Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions failed miserably, a result that will undoubtedly be used to reinforce an ongoing national meme that the Tea Party is dead or dying and the GOP establishment is riding high.
But if you look beyond the congressional races, that’s not necessarily the right conclusion to derive from the Texas GOP primary results.
In the Lieutenant Governor’s race, incumbent David Dewhurst — the same guy Ted Cruz upset in the 2012 U.S. Senate primary — ran a poor second last night, and will face fiery right-wing state senator Dan Patrick in a May runoff Dewhurst seems doomed to lose. In the primary to replace Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, the first place finisher was state senator Ken Paxton, whose main campaign credential was his coziness with Cruz. In the Ag Commissioner’s primary, the top finisher was former state legislator Sid Miller, whose campaign co-chairman and treasurer is (even after the neanderthal rocker’s “Obama is a subhuman mongrel” comment) none other than Ted Nugent. On a night when for the first time in memory, all but one Texas statewide office was open, the tea folk did quite well, and could do just as well in what should be an extremely low turnout runoff in May.
But beyond the tea party-versus-establishment dynamics, this primary reflected the full absorption of “constitutional conservative” rhetoric by candidates previously associated with country-club Republicanism. John Cornyn has spent much of the last year snuggling up to his junior colleague Cruz seeking cover. Greg Abbott (“typically described as a more conservative version of [Rick] Perry,” says one Texas observer) is running a campaign that has been teetering on the edge of a vengeful culture-war assault on Democratic rival Wendy Davis. And most interesting at all, the scion of that great weathervane of Republican ideological change, the Bush family, is tacking hard right as well: George P. Bush, the half-Hispanic son of Jeb, is running for the statewide position of Land Commissioner after an extended effort to court the tea folk and identify himself with Cruz (notably endorsing the “defund Obamacare” stunt that led to last year’s government shutdown).
The situation in Texas reflects a more general dynamic in the GOP, dating back at least to the concessions Mitt Romney made to “constitutional conservative” orthodoxy (from signing onto the radical “Cut, Cap, Balance” budget pledge, to taking a hard line on immigration, to promising a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act) in order to secure the Republican presidential nomination over weak and divided “true conservative” opposition. The more the tea party movement (itself mainly a continuation of the “movement conservative” faction that has been struggling for preeminence since its breakthrough in the Goldwater campaign of 1964) influences mainstream GOP policy positions and rhetoric, the less it may succeed in intraparty contests with an “establishment” that has largely coopted it, and whose differences are mainly over strategy and tactics rather than core ideology.

Since the Texas primary was the first major primary of this cycle, it offers a good opportunity to discard this habit of wishing away the ideological “fever” in the GOP before it does real damage to our understanding of conservative politics.

There has been a fascinating change of circumstances occurring this last week, revolving around cookie-cutter state legislation sponsored by Republicans aimed at implementing the widely-deployed conservative rhetoric about “religious liberty.” Beginning in 2012, Republicans nationally and across the country adopted the mantra of “religious liberty” to take advantage of conservative Catholic and evangelical hostility to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate. It did not produce the hoped-for defection of Catholics to the Romney-Ryan ticket (the Catholic vote, as had been the case recently, closely reflected the overall national vote), but did provide a rubric for talking about Republican opposition to legalized abortion and marriage equality that avoided messy and unpopular specifics and gave a positive cast to essentially reactionary positions.
What’s happening now, though, is that efforts to provide “religious liberty” exemptions to normal law-abiding expectations is moving the debate in the opposite direction, drawing attention to the extremism of conservative culture-issue positions. Here’s how I summed up this development at TPMCafe:

This began happening first on the contraception coverage front, where the religious objection to the Obamacare mandate had to be justified (in the Hobby Lobby litigation most notably) by the claim that highly effective contraceptive devices (the IUD) and treatments (Plan B and hormonal “patches”) used by millions of women were in fact “abortifacients.”
This is not a terribly common view outside the Right-to-Life movement and the conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy; it certainly is not in accord with mainstream medical opinion. But the very discussion of angels-dancing-on-a-pin disputes over fertilization versus uterine implantation as the beginning of pregnancy shifted the debate over reproductive policy away from the strongest ground for anti-choicers — rare but controversial late-term abortions and the conditions under which they should be allowed — to the very weakest: “abortions” so early that most Americans don’t consider them abortions at all. So a gambit designed to broaden support for faith-based objections to reproductive rights policies is pulling the discussion in a direction that threatens to isolate anti-choicers and their Republican allies in a small ghetto of extremist opinion.
Similarly, the effort to “protect” religious believers from the consequences of a sudden shift in policies on same-sex marriage began as a reasonable-sounding request for two-way tolerance that might unite the near-majority of Americans who are not presently “comfortable” towards marriage equality with those whose views had recently “evolved.”
But the more the demands for religious “exemptions” from compliance with new marriage laws have become concrete, the less reasonable they have seemed. Nobody’s talking about requiring that religious communities perform same-sex marriages (or for that matter, ordain gay ministers, the most heated issue within many U.S. Christian communities). So the martyr’s cross of the “persecuted” must be found among the small ranks of marriage professionals who refuse to bake wedding cakes with two plastic men on top, or offer to offer planning services to two women.
Perhaps some non-sectarian Americans instinctively identify with “bakers of conscience” or wedding planners who consider themselves in danger of hellfire for booking hotel ballrooms for Sodomites. But like the fight for the freedom to treat IUDs as death machines, the fight to provide the conservative Christian elements of the wedding industry with plenary indulgences from obedience to the law tends to elicit less sympathy than ridicule from the non-aligned.
And that matters a great deal politically. On many fronts in the culture wars, the momentum has usually been possessed by those who can best identify themselves with the ambivalent attitudes of a mushy middle “swing vote”–favorable to contraceptives and early-term abortions but not late-term abortions; increasingly accepting of LGBT folk but indulgent of their parents’ and grandparents’ “ick factor.”
After years of shedding crocodile tears for the victims of late-term abortions, anti-choicers are now finding themselves defending businesses who in open court argue that the dividing line between acceptable contraception and murderous abortion occurs moments after sexual intercourse — when women instantly transition from autonomous individuals to “hosts” for a state-protected zygote. And after years of arguing against marriage equality on behalf of the positive “rights” of men and women in “traditional marriage,” those who actually think gay people in love are abominations unto the Lord are being exposed for who they really are.

So a “religious liberty” statute that breezed through the Kansas House was halted in the Senate by Republicans who feared it went too far. And just tonight, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed even broader legislation that actually passed both houses of her state’s legislature, with both GOP U.S. Senators and even some bill sponsors urging her to do so.
Right now, the once powerful “religious liberty” strategy for dealing with cultural issues is in shambles, with Republicans divided. It goes to show that deception and indirection can only work for so long.

On Friday, February 14, in an inverse Valentine Day gift for labor, after an intensive anti-union campaign not by the employer but by local, state and national Republicans, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, narrowly rejected a unionization bid by the United Auto Workers. Here was my initial reaction at WaMo:

I wish I could say I’ve never seen the likes of the campaign of intimidation that led to the vote against UAW representation at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Friday. But I did, as a child growing up in a Georgia textile company town in the early 1960s, where public schools began the year on Labor Day, the word “union” was not said out loud, and people still graphically remembered National Guardsmen being called out to break a strike at Callaway Mills back in 1935–the same year Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act.
I’m a little rusty on my labor law, but I’m reasonably sure that any employer who issued the sorts of threats made by Republican politicians in Tennessee (including Sen. Bob Corker, Gov. Bill Haslam, and a variety of state legislators, backed by national conservative figures like Grove Norquist) against a unionization effort would have been in blatant violation of the NLRA. But that’s what makes the incident such a travesty: it wasn’t the employer fighting the union (VW by all accounts was neutral-to-positive towards unionization, which would have facilitated establishment of the kind of “work council” the company had set up at other international plants to help maintain good employer-employee relations). As Brent Snavely of the Detroit Free Press reported (probably incredulously):

The crusade by anti-union forces in Tennessee, including the state’s governor and senior senator, is as much a fight with Volkswagen management as with the UAW.
Not only are Republican legislators accusing Volkswagen of backing the UAW, some of their leaders on Monday threatened to withhold tax incentives for future expansion of the three-year-old assembly plant in Chattanooga if workers vote this week to join the UAW.

So addicted are Tennessee Republicans to the “race to the bottom” approach to economic development that they are willing to risk the good will of an existing employer in their zeal to make sure their own people are kept in as submissive a position as possible. President Obama’s reported comment during a Democratic retreat last week that the pols involved in this union-busting effort are “more concerned about German shareholders than American workers” is one way to put it; I’d say they’ve internalized the ancient despicable tendency of the southern aristocracy to favor the abasement of working people as an end in itself.
This incident is also a pretty good symptom of the radicalization of the Republican Party. It’s one thing to oppose collective bargaining rights for public employees, or to defend “right-to-work” laws that interfere with the contracting rights of employers and employees and create “freeriders” who benefit from union collective bargaining without paying dues. But now the very existence of private-sector unions, a familiar part of the American landscape for most of the last century, is under attack from Republican politicians.

As we prepare to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., on Monday, it’s time for progressives to prepare ourselves for a fresh effort by conservatives to purloin his legacy and rewrite the history of the civil rights movement. Just yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul, a serial offender, tried to compare defenders of the filibuster–the filibuster!–and other restraints on popular democracy to advocates for the civil rights of racial minorities. I addressed this effort at WaMo today:

Last April [Paul] gave a speech at Howard University that pursued the ridiculous theory that the New Deal was essentially a complement to Jim Crow in its “enslavement” of African-Americans to the terrible indignity of material living assistance. And now we have this, via WaPo’s Aaron Blake:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in an interview Thursday, likened President Obama’s governing philosophy to the kind of “majority rule” that led to Jim Crow laws and Japanese internment camps.
Speaking on Fox News, Paul reacted to Obama’s repeated assertions that Republicans should win elections if they want to control the agenda in Washington. Obama has also suggested in recent days that he might pursue more executive actions — changes made without Congress.
“The danger to majority rule — to him sort of thinking, well, the majority voted for me, now I’m the majority, I can do whatever I want, and that there are no rules that restrain me — that’s what gave us Jim Crow,” Paul said. “That’s what gave us the internment of the Japanese — that the majority said you don’t have individual rights, and individual rights don’t come from your creator, and they’re not guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s just whatever the majority wants.”
Paul added: “There’s a real danger to that viewpoint, but it’s consistent with the progressive viewpoint. … Progressives believe in majority rule, not constitutional rule.”

Don’t be confused with the conflation of the Japanese interment outrage–a temporary product of wartime hysteria which no one at the time regarded as “progressive”–with Jim Crow. The original Constitution which Paul and his followers worship certainly didn’t concern itself with the rights of racial minorities. It took the most egregious exercise of “majority rule” in U.S. history–the Civil War–to abolish slavery. Only a majority given extraordinary power by the self-exclusion of southerners was in a position to pass the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the most important efforts taken until 1964 to vindicate the rights of racial minorities. It was a failure of will by the majority that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the establishment of the Jim Crow regime. And it was the power of the minority in the Senate (and by the 1930s or so, the minority in the Democratic Party) to thwart majority rule via the filibuster that kept Jim Crow in place for so very long.
And BTW, it’s conservatives, far more than progressives, who perpetually chafe at judicial enforcement of individual rights, unless it happens to coincide with their own policy goals. But in any event, Paul and others like him really need to stop trying to invoke the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to attack “majority rule” on behalf of a “constitutional conservatism” aimed at creating a oligarchical or even theocratic dictatorship of absolute private property rights and puny government. The “minorities” they want to protect are snowy white and very privileged.

It’s very important, morally and politically, to fight back against the kind of egregious revisionism and phony parallels offered by those who are the ideological (and in some cases, literal) descendants of the people who fought against King and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the least we can do to honor the sacrifices made by so many to create the kind of society the “constitutional conservatives” are determined to bury.