[Edited per Bend's comment to actually make sense.] I think that this discussion by Henry Farrell, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, and others is an important one. Basically, Farrell is taking issue with the sustainability of what he characterizes as the neo-liberal approach to politics and policy. By Farrell's reckoning, neo-liberals favor market oriented and technocratic approaches to social and economic problems at the expense of developing mass constituency politics. Thus, for example, someone like Yglesias is comfortable jumping on the school reform bandwagon even if it alienates and comes at the expense of teachers' unions. Farrell is of the view that such an approach to politics leaves a party without the necessary troops to really push for and sustain political change -- it is a politics for people who don't really like politics at all, the kind of thing that is also very big with centrist pundits who really get off on things like the Simpson-Bowles Commission or the various "Gangs" of Senators trying to reach accommodation on this and that. The neo-liberals are not that far gone, but they do have a difficult time constructing approaches with much in the way of populist appeal and they tend not to care too much about alienating important constituencies and interest groups.
Farrell posits, persuasively I think, that meaningful political change requires "large scale organized political activity" of the kind that brought about the labor movement of the 1930s, an integral part of the New Deal politics of the next thirty or so years, and the civil rights movement, that brought about epochal change in the 1950s and 60s. Farrell asserts that "technocratic solutions and market mechanisms can work to relieve disparities etc," but that "it’s hard for me to see how left-leaning neo-liberalism can generate any self-sustaining politics."
Interestingly, Kevin Drum, himself often regarded as an exemplar of neo-liberal style politics, agrees:
If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade
Drum, however, confesses to not having any particular sense of how to accomplish this task. I hardly think he is alone in this. I think that the more populist end of the left blogosphere -- those who most frequently and bitterly denounce Obama as a corporate sell out -- tend to engage in a kind of wishful nostalgia about the efficacy of left economic populism. But I think Yglesias, the neo-liberal target in this case, raises a valid point:
[T]he self-assurance that there’s some non-neoliberal miracle formula for political sustainability seems refuted by the fact that the pre-neoliberal paradigm in the United States was not, in fact, politically sustainable.
Now I know it is tempting to boo and hiss young Mr. Yglesias for this assertion, but, of course, those of us who have been around for fifty or so years know in our hearts that he is absolutely right. The economic populism of the New Deal was politically exhausted by the mid-1970s, broken by racial backlash, the cultural and generational battles of the 1960s, the stagflation of the 1970s, the tax revolt at the end of that decade, and, it must be said, the success of the New Deal -- which fostered a broad middle class that ceased to remember to whom it owed its affluence. All of this led to a series of presidential electoral debacles for the Democrats between 1972 and 1988, with the Republican winning four of those five elections in electoral routs, and the Democrats narrowly winning one election -- 1976 -- in which the most conservative Democratic candidate since Grover Cleveland, a born again Baptist southern moderate, eked out a victory over a non-elected incumbent who had pardoned the predecessor who had presided over the biggest political scandal in at least fifty years. Walter Mondale, the last candidate to try to run an old school New Deal style campaign, was subjected to one of the great electoral drubbings of all time in 1984.
Since then, the successful Democratic presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have attempted a kind of all things to all people style moderate liberalism, a Wall Street friendly kind of liberalism one might say. Both attempted to govern in a classic neo-liberal mode, using technocratic and market oriented approaches to solve problems in a modestly progressive way. Both relied in part on big money donors to assure that they could be more than competitive with Republicans in reaching a nation of increasingly atomized individuals via television, rather than relying on old-fashioned mediating mechanisms of civil society like unions.
I think the changed economic circumstances of the last decade might well provide a new opening for mass politics and economic populism. But how exactly this is to come about is not a question easily answered.
Your thoughts?