My point is that something like the New Deal doesn’t just happen because everyone decided to get out of bed and vote one day. There’s a context to understand and that context is that outside pressure and extraordinary events were necessary for it to happen.
Things didn’t get better because just that many more people decided to vote and things didn’t get worse because people stopped voting. The numbers just don’t bear that out. We’ve been stuck in the band of our modern voter turnout rate since before the New Deal. So if the claim is that Democracy works when everyone votes and the example is the New Deal, then it doesn’t support that claim. So if differences in voter turnout can’t explain that outcome, you have to look at other factors.
As for how radical it was. Sure, capitalists didn’t like it. But fundamentally it left power in the hands of those capitalists. The quote is just providing insight on how the people involved thought/talked about it. The evidence is all the history that followed that. They kept their money, their influence over the political system, and given time, they used that to dismantle even something as reformist as the New Deal.
Well at this point it seems like half this thread is just people not being clear what they mean or misunderstanding someone else.
I was responding to the assertion that there was some time when most people voted and participated in the system and that time was good because of that. You offered the New Deal as an example of this. I was showing how that didn’t really match up to the voter participation rate.
It’s not like I was trying to say ND programs were bad. Just that they weren’t the product of mass voter mobilization and didn’t change anything fundamental about the relationship between workers, capital, and the state.
That’s all. I’m pushing back against the idea that American democracy itself has somehow fallen from grace from some mythical period of mass democratic participation. That’s just never been what the country was. If you want to get to that point, you have to start by acknowledging that the old system wasn’t what you wanted to preserve. Otherwise you just keep ending up in the same place.
My point is that something like the New Deal doesn’t just happen because everyone decided to get out of bed and vote one day. There’s a context to understand and that context is that outside pressure and extraordinary events were necessary for it to happen.
Things didn’t get better because just that many more people decided to vote and things didn’t get worse because people stopped voting. The numbers just don’t bear that out. We’ve been stuck in the band of our modern voter turnout rate since before the New Deal. So if the claim is that Democracy works when everyone votes and the example is the New Deal, then it doesn’t support that claim. So if differences in voter turnout can’t explain that outcome, you have to look at other factors.
As for how radical it was. Sure, capitalists didn’t like it. But fundamentally it left power in the hands of those capitalists. The quote is just providing insight on how the people involved thought/talked about it. The evidence is all the history that followed that. They kept their money, their influence over the political system, and given time, they used that to dismantle even something as reformist as the New Deal.
Well, since I never said that the New Deal just happened out of nowhere, everything you’ve written is moot.
I said the New Deal was a great place to start. Try dealing with that.
Tell me why we shouldn’t have a CCC and a WPA as a start.
Well at this point it seems like half this thread is just people not being clear what they mean or misunderstanding someone else.
I was responding to the assertion that there was some time when most people voted and participated in the system and that time was good because of that. You offered the New Deal as an example of this. I was showing how that didn’t really match up to the voter participation rate.
It’s not like I was trying to say ND programs were bad. Just that they weren’t the product of mass voter mobilization and didn’t change anything fundamental about the relationship between workers, capital, and the state.
That’s all. I’m pushing back against the idea that American democracy itself has somehow fallen from grace from some mythical period of mass democratic participation. That’s just never been what the country was. If you want to get to that point, you have to start by acknowledging that the old system wasn’t what you wanted to preserve. Otherwise you just keep ending up in the same place.