JimD is a shill from the Republicans. His only purpose is to tear down thoughts rather than to engage in dialog.

I know from experience, you're wasting your time with him.

re:Most Important Middle American Issures
Midniterise on July 19, 2024 - 9:05pm

Your statement "there are more than 45 million people without healthcare today" is WRONG. No one in America is denied medical care for any reason at any time.

45 million may not have health insurance, but thats for many reasons, mostly voluntary. But after 15 years of research, you already know that. In any case, the medical bills get paid as they default to state governments and pooled resources.

What are you peer reviewed publications on this topic?

15 years that's more than a Masters and a PhD where did you do your graduate work?

What think tank do you work at?

JimD, Just to respond to some of your breakdown of my five issues.

Your response to "real pay" is just absolute ignorance.

This healthcare system is headed for a slow but sure death. I have researched and studied this subject for 15 years. And there are more than 45 million people without healthcare today. Of the 45 million there are several million that can not get health coverage due to pre-existing conditions. Our system is corrupt, filled with waste, and choked by reduntant attempts to avoid law suits.

Third, before Carter there was Nixon and Ford. Then after Carter there was Reagan, Bush and Clinton. And now there is Bush. If Carter messed it up then why couldn't any of those who proceeded him get it straighten out?

Fourth, Nixon, Carter and Reagan did a good job of working with foreign countries and bettering our position in the world. This current administraton has not.

Fifth, You need to study your history the countries you have listed are far short of the real number we have force our will upon. Sometimes you don't have to be at war or offer sanctions to control a country.

re:Most Important Middle American Issures
Midniterise on July 19, 2024 - 8:48pm

What you call thoughts are really misconceptions. If you believe that I tore them down could only mean that you believe that they were weak and crumbled. I can't be responsible for your own assessment of your own ideas.

JimD, that was really a poor job of tearing down my thoughts.

You are not intouch with real issues or americans. Instead of having a productive decussion of ideals you have simply attacked my thoughts. That is exactly what has been going on with both parties for a very long time.

I tell you what, If you don't think that those issues are important then why don't you post your own or elaborate on what you may have written on this subject. If you want to engage in some sort of arguement then at least do us a favor and bring something to the table. I don't visit or express my thoughts on this site to argue but to exchange ideas. If you are going to disagree with my thoughts then offer up something. If you just want to tear down everyones thoughts then find somewhere else to post your meaningless messages. They just don't help in the overall exchange of ideas.

Most Important Middle American Issures
Midniterise on July 19, 2024 - 7:47pm

First: "If pay actually decreases in real value over time then everyone suffers"

Pay is NOT decreasing in real value. Real value is determined by productivity. As productivity of a worker increases, their pay increases.. if their relative productivity decreases, pay decreases.

Second: USA has the best, most advanced and evenly distributed health care system in the world. Shifting the cost from individuals or business to the government doesn't cure anything. Bankruptcy is usually done by those that choose not to be insured. Your "least preventative care" issue is totaly bogus.. in fact the opposite is true. Health care costs are rising because we are getting better and much more of it.

Third: Our energy policy was set by Carter, whose chief of staff was the Ham Jordan. Yes, the same as one of the founders. They disabled our emerging commercial nuclear capability and allow the radicals to overthrow the government of Iran.

Forth: Don't know what you were proposing ..except blah.. blah.. blah.

Fifth: Name a country other than Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Liberia, that we force our will upon?

There are several issues that are intertangled.

First, economy..a slow or no growth economy effects everyone. If pay actually decreases in real value over time then everyone suffers.

Second, healtcare..We are one of the few industrized countries in the world without a standard healthcare system for all its citzens. We have stood by for years and watched our system slowly reach into our economy and strangle it. People have declared bankruptcy because of our system of healthcare at an alarming rate but we continue to carry on business as usual. As far as the issue of preventative care we lag behind many countries of the world. Prescription drugs and healthcare costs have out paced the economy by double digit differences. We are headed straight for a catasrophe.

Three, Energy dependancy..We have had warnings since the early 70's that we need to improve fuel efficiency in automobiles. But here we are helplessly controlled by third world governments because we lack leadership and the will to make policies that would have avoided this problem. We are slaves to the oil producing countries and they are funding our demise. Kind of like having a whole country on Crack Cocaine.

Fourth, Education.. We need changes in our educational system to better prepare our young people for the problems they will face in the future. There have been so many advances in communications, technology, and science that we can not longer have a farmer/industrial work type of education system. New innovative ways have to be found to better educate and prepare our society.

Fifth, Foreign Policy..We must examine how we relate to other countries and how we can better work with those countries that are friendly to us. We will only continue to be a leader among nations as long as they feel we are not forcing our will on them. Our example is more than enough to motivate them.

These are the five issues I see that are of most importance to Americans and their way of life. A weekness in any two will cause us to continue towards a reduced standard of living. We may see our way of life erode before our eyes if we don't address these issues.

.
All prior pages of text on the wiki below are gone.

We're starting from scratch to protect a growing (larger and richer) middle class with words that can fit in a nutshell.
.

John Gelles

Unity-now wiki
My Website
mailto:john.gelles@gmail.com

Human rights and how to pay for them are key to a livable world.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can't find.

I didn't get that it was actual YOU, The Seneca, until just now. Please accept my apology and I hope you will understand that to err is human.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts. Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom.

You say: "Regarding economic fairness, justice, polarization and the abandonment of the middle class--Please read the Federalist Papers and get back to me. Our Founding Fathers have already been there and done that. This is exactly what Madison was talking about."

Now tell me what you mean by that - do not quote me the title of something written in the early 1800s as though that alone tells the tale -- tell me HOW it solves the problem.

If the Federalist Papers were the end of the debate - then account for the last more than 120 odd years of political contention over the very same issues, please.

How complacent can you be? Or shall we simply quote book titles now instead of using reason?

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

Polarized America
Seneca on June 19, 2024 - 11:54am

There is a lot of bashing of corporations that i believe is misplaced. In my mind,no unlimited amount of lobbying, generous campaign contributions, bribes or threats could have any effect whatsoever UNLESS the candidates that we place into office lacked integrity and were in a word utterly CORRUPT. So, it is us the voters that elects these corrupt personalities.

Now I get a little crazy. Instead of frowning on mud slinging and negative campaigning .. I would suggest that we welcome it. I want to know ALL about a candidate, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The candidate him/her self will tell me about the good, but only the opponent can expose the bad and ulgy.. and that is negative campaigning.

Dear Seneca:

Regarding economic fairness, justice, polarization and the abandonment of the middle class--Please read the Federalist Papers and get back to me. Our Founding Fathers have already been there and done that. This is exactly what Madison was talking about.

Raising the question of economic justice, fairness and polarization - the abandonment of the middle class -- are out of place here, are they?

Our society today, from our health care system to you name it, is infected with bureaucratic myopia - we see people with intellectual blinders on such that all they can do is select a scripted response or place a person or an idea into a category - without thought, and understanding.

Even a cursory knowledge of our own history shows us parallel circumstances and problems not too far from our own.

The small business owner is part of the population who is getting squeezed, of course. Why?

Could the absurd proportion of our GNP that is devoted, allegedly, to national defense have something to do with this? Could the way we budget and spend tax money affect the amount of room in which we can maneuver? We are failng to collect adequate public revenues from those at the top end of the scale, while we are burdening unduly those in the middle.

When TR proposed his brand of progressivism, and TR was as all presidents have been essentially conservative on the concept of economic individualism, he wanted to attack the Andrew Carnegies, the Jay Goulds and the Rockefellers -- not the lawyer with 3 employees.

One had to be simply amazed to hear Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich justify his veto of legislation granting ordinary people a deferral of the 72% increase in electricity rates on the grounds that he was fulfilling his promise to "take down" the Maryland State House's Democratic majority -- the "monopoly" power, in Ehrlich's words. My amazement came at the obvious failure to note that the power company, the utility company is in fact the monopoly here - not the legislature.

We exist in times where the effect of immense concentrations of corporate economic power daily dictates the terms of our lives to a greater and greater degree. City after city begins to look the same, with the same chain stores and restaurants -- and we go on as though large corporate business was invisible.

It wasn't invisible at the beginning of the 20th century and its effects and untoward influence over and within government should not be invisible now.

Yet again and again one hears voices raised against reform as though they, personally, had a stake in whether the vast entities about which my "white papers" are concerned fail or succeed.

We are all being victimized by huge concentrations of corporate economic power -- and we cannot stop or reverse such concentrations -- and we probably should not.

But we should bring those concentrations under control - our government should be above these entities in order to oversee them, not merely an appendage of their increasing level of control over us all.

I generally agree here although the white papers posted by Seneca seem a little out of place (create your own topic, buddy).

I do think the #1 issue we face is focusing congress' attention back onto issues with substance. Right now they are totally motivated by pork, payola, and posturing... pretty much to the exclusion of all else.

If we can fix that, it'll be a lot easier to get the rest of this done.

Excellent suggestions. Now do I hear anything from the Business Community? The Education Community? The Military community?

The military may have one of the best post high school education programs going. At least the military infused my dearly beloved but completely unmotivated (courtesy of the local High School) little guy with a passion for aircraft which inspired him to become a Marine Medic. Don't even attempt to connect the dots since this is a 21 year old we are talking about.

What I am aiming for is education = total employment. Work with me!

And exactly what do you suggest is to be done Lynn? The federal education budget is $55 billion - up 40% in the last 3 years. and states and cities have nearly tripled their budget in the last 10 years. We know what the problem is and the costs to cure are near zero.

1. Break the teachers union and up the salaries.
2. Dump the diversity, affirmation action, and excessive sports programs.
3. pull back the special education funding and reassign $'s to substantive subject matter.
4. Instense drilling in math, science, history, economics.
5. Let the teachers know that we will not tolerate any more whining and complaining and the students know that school is not summer camp.

This response fits equally well into the education thread, but it seems somehow more appropriate here.

If what is most important to "middle America" is economic security, energy independence and personal responsibility in a civilized and relatively polite nation it can all be summed up in two words--good education.

In this country political and economic polarization have been tracking each other in an extreme way since 1970. Between 1970 and now we saw the baby boom move into the workplace, immigration skyrocket, technology flourish and traditional jobs requiring minimal intellectual competence disappear. Ergo polarization.

It is not that we were better educated in 1950. There were simply fewer of us, less to know and more resources to share. Now we need as a nation to work smarter and harder if we are to retain our competitive edge. Redistribution of wealth is not the answer. Increase of opportunity is.

Lest you think I am simply spouting the Conservative Party Line, I was a civil rights protester in the 60's, a member of the fledgling NOW in the 70's, a single mom in the 80's, an investor in the 90's, and an entrepreneur in the 00's. I had the advantage of having parents who dragged me, sometimes kicking and screaming, through a good education. What I learned was that I had the ability to learn--and keep learning.

What do you think would happen to income inequality and political polarization if every single child in America were forced to stay in school until they could prove themselves competent at something which would support them and their families? I am not talking about "No Child Left Behind" which can be roughly interpreted as "No Statistic Left Unmanipulated". We must make it impossible for children to "drop out" either physically or mentally.

Our legislators on the average currently have the attention span of a five year old with ADD. Some new issue comes up and they respond, "Oh look--something sparkly!" Why can we not promote a grassroots campaign which will force them to focus on the one sure thing that fixes 90% of the rest of the problems--education?

Have we gotten so used to the idea that the USA is politically polarized--the red and the blue--that we, and certainly Democrats, have lost sight of the issue of increasing income inequality and its causes?

I continue to emphasize that I believe the central political issue of our time is exactly this -- that the gap between rich and not rich is getting unacceptably large.

A recent book called Polarized America, by Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, examines the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality.

* Seneca's diary :: ::
*

The authors use quantitative measures to chart polarization in Congress and public opinion, among census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, and find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s.

If you think about it, we know that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. While using the theme of "big government" and social issues, the fundamental economic issue of income redistribution has fallen victim to the Republicans' organized and successful efforts to change the subject.

The book shows how immigration has helped the move to the right, as non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote. This goes a long way to explain GW Bush's view on immigration and why it varies so strongly from more culturally biased views from his own party -- GW does not strike me as a representative of cultural interests but rather of ecnomic interests. When GW appeared before the New York Yacht Club and characterized those there that night as "my base," he wasn't kidding.

It makes sense for conservatives to favor even more illegal immigration than we have now -- and the lack of enforcement against employers who hire illegals speaks to that. A high proportion of illegal labor produces much less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution in relation to opposition to redistribution from the top.

The book makes the case that inequality leads directly to political polarization, and then polarization creates policies that further increase inequality.

Here is the authors' abstract of the book:

see http://voteview.com/...

Political polarization, income inequality, and immigration have all increased dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. The increases have followed an equally dramatic decline in these three social indicators over the first seven decades of the twentieth century. The pattern in the social indicators has been matched by a pattern in public policies with regard to taxation of high incomes and estates and with regard to minimum wage policy. We seek to identify the forces that have led to this observation of a social turn about in American society, with a primary focus on political polarization.

Our primary evidence of political polarization comes from analysis of the voting patterns of members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Based on estimates of legislator ideal points (Poole and Rosenthal 1997 and McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 1997), we find that the average positions of Democratic and Republican legislators have diverged markedly since the mid-1970s. This increased polarization took place following a fifty-year blurring of partisan divisions. This turning point occurs almost exactly the same time that income inequality begins to grow after a long decline and the full effects of immigration policy liberalization are beginning to be felt.

Some direct causes of polarization can be ruled out rather quickly. The consequences of "one person, one vote" decisions and redistricting can be ruled out since the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives, has polarized. The shift to a Republican South can be ruled out since the North has also polarized. Primary elections can be ruled out since polarization actually decreased once primaries became widespread.

It is more difficult to find the causes of polarization than to reject them because social, economic, and political phenomena are mutually causal. For example, immigration might lead to policies that increase economic inequality if immigrants are at the bottom of the income distribution and do not have the right to vote. We document an upward shift in the income distribution of voting citizens. In turn, dispersal in income might lead to polarization. It also might lead to laxity toward immigration if inexpensive immigrant labor in the form of domestic and service workers is a complement to the human capital of the wealthy.

In additional to our focus on the polarization of elected office-holders, we look at patterns of polarization among economic elites. By examining campaign contributions, we find very high levels of polarized giving. While some billionaires clearly spread their contributions to both parties to buy access, increasing numbers concentrate their largess on the ideological extremes. This polarized campaign giving, coupled with the emergence of the soft money loophole has arguably contributed to the ideological extremism of political parties and elected officials.

Finally, we also examine polarization among the electorate. While it is fairly clear that the views of most citizens have not become more extreme, those with strong partisan identifications have (DiMaggio, et al., Fiorina). Consistent with other findings (King, Jacobson), we find that partisans are more likely to apply ideological labels to themselves and a declining number of them call themselves moderate. Strong party identifiers are the most likely to define politics and ideological terms while the differences in the ideological self-placements of Republicans and Democrats have grown dramatically since the 1980s. Given Bartels' findings that partisanship has become a better predict of vote choice, this polarization of partisans has contributed to much more ideological voting behavior.

We also find that the polarization of the electorate has increasingly taken place along economic or class lines. Unlike the patterns of the 1950s and 1960s, upper income citizens are more likely to identify with and vote for Republicans than are lower income voters. However, we find that class polarization is most likely a result of the ideological shift of the Republican Party towards a more economic libertarian position. This shift to the right was aided by a number of social, political, and economic factors. First, as American society has become wealthier on average, a larger segment of society prefers to self-insure rather than depend on government social programs. Such voters have become more attracted to the Republicans and their agenda for an "Ownership Society." Second, due to patterns of immigration and incarceration, members of lower income groups are less likely to be part of the electorate. This has the effect of moving the median income voter closer to the mean income citizen, reducing the demand for redistribution (Romer, Meltzer and Richard). Third, middle-income voters in the so-called "Red states" increasingly sympathize with Republican positions on social, cultural, and religious issues (e.g. Franks). The Republican advantage on these issues has mitigated any loss of votes that might have been associated with their shift on economic issues. Finally, the emergence of a class-based, two-party system in the United States has benefited the Republicans and mirrored the patterns of economic polarization found in other regions.

Finally, we examine the policy consequences of the fall and rise of political polarization. The separation of powers makes it difficult to generate coalitions large enough to produce policy change even when opinion shifts. We exploit this observation to get some leverage in disentangling the effects of political, economic, and social policies. For much of the period when polarization fell, immigration policy was restrictive and unchanged while income and estate taxes, defined in nominal terms, became more onerous. For the period since the onset of renewed polarization, we find strong evidence that "gridlock" has resulted in a less activist federal government. The passage of new laws has been curtailed due to the increasing difficulty of generating the requisite bipartisan coalitions. The effects on social and tax policy have been especially dramatic as real minimum wages have fallen, welfare devolved to the states, and tax rates have diminished. We also show how polarized politics has affected administrative and judicial politics.

The authors:

Nolan McCarty is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Academic Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Keith T. Poole is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Howard Rosenthal is Professor of Politics at New York University and Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

The framers of the constitution struggled with establishing the balance between the rights of individuals and the power of government to act for the common good when they first met in 1787. They set up a system of checks and balances, emphasized the separation of powers and passed the bill of rights insuring against the exercise of arbitrary and capricious governmental power that could infringe on a great many individual liberties.

But what the framers were most concerned with protecting were the rights of property and those who had it. The opportunity that was missed was to establish a truly democratic state in which economic justice as well as universal human rights was the law of the land.

The men who wrote the Constitution were all men of property and constituted an elite segment of society. The rights of property were paramount in their minds, especially their own. As the eminent, late historian, Richard Hofstadter said, all American political traditions, Jeffersonian, Federalist, Jacksonian or otherwise, "...shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition... [T]hey ... accepted the economic virtues of a capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man."

The framers missed the opportunity to make good on the words in the Declaration of Independence and give to all people, including women and those who were then slaves, the same rights. They distrusted the uneducated masses and believed in providing for the common good thru the use of governmental power only for very limited purposes. They also carefully crafted a system that would continue to put power largely in the hand of the propertied classes.

As Hofstadter noted, it was inevitable that Jefferson's laissez faire economics became the politics of the most conservative thinkers, not his concern with the rights of man. Hofstadter also said that Jacksonian democracy was really just a "phase in the expansion of liberated capitalism." The fear of tyrrany -- then and now -- was to a great degree the fear of interference with one's unfettered property rights.

As for our political rhetoric and partisanship, we are stuck in an old, traditionally American trap -- the sort of trap we all fall into when we respond to hate speech with anger.

In a 1964 article in Harpers' Magazine, Hofstadter wrote of "The Paranoid Style of American Politics." He said "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." His article shows how from even the end of the 18th century in America the elite class of wealthy men who dominated the leadership of the United States to the present day protected their economically privileged status against the have-nots below them by using the fear of such people as Masons, or Catholics as scapegoats to cover up their own economically advantageous position. Even Aaron Burr's conspiracy to carve out an empire for himself in Louisiana was alleged to have been a Masonic plot.

Hofstadter noted that Harriet Beecher Stowe's father was a leader in the early anti-Catholic movement. The hallmark of these paranoid movements was the use of the fear, in Stowe's words, that "a great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by 'the potentates of Europe,' multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to 'lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.'"

Sound familiar? Fear of outside enemies and paranoia about immigration has a long and unfortunate history in this country as a calculated technique of politics.

This technique is designed and used by those who wish to obscure the central, primarily economic issues of our time. They use the hate speech, the paranoid style of politics, as a way of changing the subject from economic justice to some sort of cultural or social issue.

The most common tactics, the structural hallmarks of this technique are the use of simple logical fallacies: presenting false dilemmas, misstating an opposing view so as to easily dismiss the resulting straw man, and the always popular ad hominem attack.

The point is to divert attention, stir emotions and thus change the subject.

As Hofstadter saw American history up to 1865 and beyond, a common ideology of "self-help, free enterprise, competition, and beneficent cupidity" has guided the Republic since its inception. By cupidity, Hosftadter meant that efforts to promote the common good through the actions of government were hit and miss, spotty, and based more on tactical political considerations than otherwise.

The missed opportunities, the things that could have been done better, other than ending slavery and granting women and ordinary people the vote right off, are not very different from the issues facing us today: Improving the country's education system, its transportation and energy infrastructure, curbing the unfettered use of monopoly or plutocratic corporate power, protecting public health, establishing the right of ordinary working people to a living wage, to health care, and granting access to and assistance for many of the necessities of life that the wealthiest Americans simply take for granted.

These options all have been taken off the table by a system that places more value on the ability of a few to manipulate their wealth to skew our political system for their own advantage than it places on the public good.

The balance was struck in the beginning in favor of economic individualism at the expense of the ability of government to provide adequately for the public good.

That much appears not to have changed.

During his tenure in the White House, Theodore Roosevelt had shown how powerful that office could be in marshalling reform sentiment. He believed that the president had to be responsive to the will of the people, but that he also had an obligation to lead and not merely follow the mob.

Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, proved far more conservative than Roosevelt had realized, and by 1910 the ex president was harboring ideas that he might run for office again in 1912. Roosevelt began to articulate his own version of progressive reform, which he called the "New Nationalism," and which would be the basis for his campaign for the presidency.

The New Nationalism was not a shallow piece of rhetoric thrown together for the campaign; it represented a carefully thought through analysis of American society and the role that government ought to play.

The old nationalism, he claimed, had been used by sinister, special interests. He now proposed a New Nationalism of dynamic democracy that would recognize the inevitability of economic concentration; to counter the power of the giant corporations, Roosevelt proposed bringing them under complete federal control, so as to protect the interests of the laboring man and the consumer.

TR said: "The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. "

And that remains our problem to this day.

The noisy, seemingly endless American culture war -- fought over such issues as Hollywood depravity and the alleged disparity between mainstream values and those of cultural elites -- is a giant smoke screen that clouds the real cause of Middle America's distress. And what might that real cause be? I think it's economic. To be specific, it's unconstrained free-market capitalism, which has routed the social and political forces that once kept it in check.

Like Tom Frank, I think it is unregulated capitalism, taken to its laissez-faire extreme, that has outsourced the blue-collar prosperity of cities like Wichita and driven the Kansas farm economy to "a state of near collapse." So why did so many aggrieved Kansans band together not to fight the economic philosophy that put the screws to them, but to elect and reelect proponents of that very laissez-faire philosophy?

To explain this paradox, look to what Frank calls the "Great Backlash," a species of conservatism that emerged in reaction to the social and cultural upheavals of the late '60s. The backlash "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues -- summoning public outrage over everything from busing to unchristian art -- which it then marries to pro-business economic policies."

Frank says it is not a marriage between equals. The business agenda gets enacted, producing "low wages and lax regulation." The rich get obscenely richer as a result. Yet the cultural agenda remains unfulfilled. "Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its
act." Meanwhile, backlash strategists have repackaged the idea of the American "elite," to devastating political effect.

In its new meaning, as Frank says, retailed incessantly on talk shows and in screeds with titles like "Treason" and "Bias," the term doesn't refer to members of the nation's economic upper crust, who reap the benefits of tax cuts and deregulation. No, in backlash-speak, an "elitist" is a member of an exclusively cultural establishment, defined as a collection of liberal snobs in the media, the academy and government who sneer at the values of ordinary Americans. Hapless liberals are forced to fight a rear-guard action against these charges in large part, Frank says, because they've conceded most of the economic ground already.

One day, in the library stacks, Frank stumbled across a book called "The Populist Revolt." Up to that point, he had associated the term "populism" with the kind of revolt Reagan was urging: of ordinary Americans against a too-powerful government. Now he discovered a radically different populism, in which late 19th-century Kansans, among others, saw concentrated economic power as the main force citizens needed to confront.

The contrast was a revelation. One populism acknowledges that we live in a business universe. The other doesn't see that. For the new conservatives, it's all about government, and business is just invisible.

Frank asks: If not capitalism, what?

He answers that we live in a capitalist state now, but we also lived in a capitalist state in the 1960s and the 1950s and the 1940s. And yet it was a very different country. The balance of power between labor and management hadn't collapsed. Wealth distribution hadn't reverted to a 19th-century pattern, with ever-increasing concentration at the top.

That capitalism was a better model, according to Frank, and I agree.

According to Frank, a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon should go to the criminal stupidity of the Democratic Party in abandoning its commitment to labor and economic justice in pursuit of white-collar votes and corporate contributions.

The Dems think that to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies, Democrats must stand firm on issues like abortion rights while making endless concessions on economic issues such as NAFTA, welfare, privatization and deregulation. The result? Democrats become Tweedledum to the Republicans' Tweedledee on the laissez-faire economy, leaving their opponents free to woo blue-collar voters with backlash issues.

Frank is right on.

The Democrats either need to go back to what TR said or I call for a new, third party to represent me in taking the following positions, as said by TR in 1910:

"In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity.

"In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege.

"The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.

"There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

"We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

"One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests. I believe that every national officer, elected or appointed, should be forbidden to perform any service or receive any compensation, directly or indirectly, from interstate corporations; and a similar provision could not fail to be useful within the states.

"The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens."

This defines the fundamental political question of our time. I think we need this aspect of TR's leadership again.