Makes me downright nostalgic, remembering it wasn't so long ago that US politics weren't so poisoned that nothing could get done.
Can it happen again? Verdict is out on that.
My view is that it was the Dixiecrats that made it "work" to the extent that it worked. There was a large block of "safe" Democratic seats in the south that would be safe as long as the officeholders pandered to the bigots. Some of the officeholders were bigots themselves, some of them weren't--they were only "half" bigots (LBJ, for example, or his mentor Richard Russell). They had habitual, cultural bigotry, they understood it in their bones, but they knew it was wrong, it had to be eliminated--eventually--and they knew it would difficult to do it. In the meantime, they were elected again and again, they got into positions of power via their seniority, and they formed the "swing" block, mediating between the liberal wing of the Democratic and the Republicans. It also helped in the post-WWII period that the electorate was formed by the Depression and WWII--they remembered the traumas, but they weren't, like much of the rest of the northern hemisphere, destroyed by them. And the GI Bill gave returning vets something constructive to do--education and training for the new jobs that were absolutely needed to rebuild the country and the world at large. All of these things were important. Trickle down worked well in those days. And government seemed to work because the times "worked." There were things for everyone who wanted to do something to do. |
