They got too academic. When I started as a journalist in the
1950s only half of all reporters in the US had more than a high school
education. Even on Capitol Hill I concealed the fact that I had gone to
Harvard as it would have been a negative getting along with other
journalists. In the 1970s there only about 20,00 new MBAs each year. Now
there are 200,000.
One of the results has been
a greater emphasis on analysis over action. Follow the debate over
ethnic relations or police behavior, for example, and you'll find a
wealth of description and a dearth of solutions.
There has also been a tendency to use more academic words that don't help one's cause, the classic being infrastructure, which has replaced public works and leaves our bridges unrepaired.
The loss of social as opposed to academic
intelligence. Politicians used to get to the top in part by knowing how
to translate complex issues into something the average voter could
understand. A classic failure was Obamacare, which was far too
complicated to let its underlying virtue thrive. It should have been
far more popular than it was but its designers didn't know how to make
it easy to understand. In the current campaign, one reason Biden is
ahead is because he speaks clear United States.
Labor union decline
- In the 1970s about 30% of the workforce was unionized. Now it's 11%
and only about 7% of the private workforce. Labor unions not only
organize for workers, they educate them and far fewer workers would be
falling for Trunp's lies if labor unions were stronger. One way they
could become stronger would be for liberals to pay them more respect.
Liberals let a social divide grow between themselves and the working class Along
with improvements in education, liberals as a class are making a great
deal more money, helping to increase the gap between them and the
working class. This has produced a sometimes snotty approach to social
matters such as Hillary Clinton lumping weaker white Americans into
"deplorables" and, more recently, indiscriminately using the term "white
privilege" for a group that includes more poor whites than there are
black Americans in total.
Making identity more important that issues. When
liberals were stronger, say in the 1960s, there was a big effort to
organize by issues, deliberately bringing people who didn't often do
things together into coalitions centered around causes. Now we have much
more emphasis on identity and less on issues, and have paid the price
for it. Only about a quarter of voters are liberals; they need to find
allies and common issues is one of the best ways to do it.
Doing real stuff. As I wrote back in 2011:
Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to hold cabinet office in American history, played a key role in getting more accomplished than the last three decades of American liberalism combined - things like the Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, Social Security, federal insurance for bank accounts, welfare, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, bargaining rights for labor, restrictions on overtime, a 40 hour work week and a minimum wage.
Perkins’ colleagues in the New Deal also brought us legal alcohol, regulation of the stock exchanges, the Soil Conservation Service, national parks and monuments, the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification, the FHA, a big increase in hospital beds, and the Small Business Administration.
Add to that the numerous achievements of the Great Society including bilingual education, civil rights legislation, community action agencies, Head Start, job Corps, the national endowments for arts and humanities, Teacher Corps, anti-poverty programs, nutrition assistance, Medicare and Medicaid.
Next to this, post-1980 liberalism seems at best pathetic and at worst a major betrayal of its own past. Even the otherwise crummy Nixon administration did better – bringing us EPA, affirmative action, the Clean Air Act, the first Earth Day, indexing Social Security for inflation, Supplemental Security income, OSHA, and healthcare reform.
