Political Discourse 2020

  At stake in this upcoming presidential race is nothing less than the direction of the United States of America for the present and near-term future (circa 2025-2040). Given the role of the U.S., as the consequential nation throughout the world, the election not only has domestic significance, but high-level global implications. While there may be substantive differences on the nature of such direction among informed people who probe this matter, a baseline criterion for the assumption of public office is studied attentiveness to the core objectives this nation needs to address in the near- and longer-term. The alternative is that our political leaders get sidetracked on extraneous matters or subsumed in culture war outrage rhetoric and ignore the domestic and international matters that should arouse the studied attentiveness of this nation’s most informed political minds and decision makers.   For the Democratic Party such a pathway is based on the importance of the centra...

The working classes allied with the Democratic Party from the New Deal era (1930s) to the beginning of the Johnson administration in the mid-1960s. Through the domestic reforms of FDR, the patriotic fervor of World War II, and the flourishing of the post-war consumer economy, the Democratic Party was supported by a carefully balanced alliance of northern liberals, immigrants, workers, African Americans, and white southern segregationists. The durability of that coalition began to crumble as civil rights enactments aggravated southern stakeholders beginning in the 1940s. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origins, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to a mass exodus of the South from the Democratic Party. President Lydon Johnson, aware of the political costs in passing these bills, concluded that the South would be lost for the Democratic Party for a generation.    The social and cultural ...