When did the American political left lose its balls?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

As long as I can remember, the Democratic party has dithered to Republicans and social conservatives on issue after issue without even putting up a fight. During Monicagate, one Democrat after another went up and proclaimed how disappointed they were in President Clinton and tried to distance themselves from him as damage control. No one stood up to shame the Republicans for focusing on the President's sex life instead of things that matter (tm). The DNC completely failed to notice how popular Clinton still was outside of the Washington beltway and that no one in the outside world who was even marginally inclined to vote Democrat really gave a shit whether he was getting head under the desk while balancing the budget and creating jobs. Al Gore conceded defeat without a fight despite some pretty blatant evidence that the election was rigged by Diebold and he actually won. After 9/11, the political center and left folded completely and let the right rush us all off to the worst foreign policy mistakes since 1953 and only offered weak, mealy-mouthed objections to Bush's warmongering years after the fact. Today, Obama's popularity is so low that a Democratic candidate froze like deer in the headlights rather than admit voting for him despite clear and overwhelming evidence that conservatives have been disastrously wrong about healthcare from Day 1. Instead of shoving a clear victory in their faces, Democratic candidates have run away from Obamacare and allowed Republicans to convince the voting public that grass isn't green, the sky isn't blue, and the ACA isn't working. The right wing establishment has poisoned the word "liberal", and is now doing the same to "progressive", which the political left fled to instead of mounting a defense, and a woman's right to have an abortion is under greater threat than at any time since most of us were alive.

I'm not old enough to remember when left-of-center politicians loudly and proudly defended their positions and called conservatives on their bullshit, but I know that some of you are, and I would like to know when the left neutered itself, what political debates were like beforehand, and hopefully gain some insight to when we can expect surgical reattachment of liberal testacles.

I don't think that's accurate, leastwise from a historical angle. Like, Democrats gave the same "Holy Jesus this is a waste of time" speech every single day during the impeachment. Gore conceded in Florida after the Supreme Court, in an unprecidented and literally indefensible decision, ordered a stop to the recount, delivering Bush the state. Gore could have done a lot better in that election, but he couldn't have fought on after Rehnquist voted the second time. And there were a lot of passionate Democratic voices against the Iraq War! The Senate Dems obviously dropped the ball there, mainly because of the elections that year.

Yes but doesn't that prove the point I was trying to make? This is a prime example of how conservatives routinely wipe their asses with the law, congressional procedure, and constitution to get what they want. If a liberal justice pulled something like Rehnquist did, they would probably be tried and executed for treason. To be honest subverting our voting process is legitimate traitor status, yet Dems refuse to point out the elephant in the room and pretend everyone's playing by the same rules, going out of their way to "reach across the aisle". How many years did Harry Reid let every single bill get filibustered before finally invoking the so-called "nuclear option" to let the majority force a vote, and how many nanoseconds would the GOP have waited before doing the same if the positions were reversed? It's like a schoolyard where a physically weak and abnormally stupid child is allowed to bully and lord over the others because no one else calls him on his shit or dares break the same rules. Someone needs to kick that kid's ass and make the others realize how stupid he is so they stop viewing him as some kind of alpha ape. If the Dems would sack up and stake out a coherent platform of popular ideas, refuse to apologize for some of them being "liberal" or "socialist", go for the jugular when Repubs do or say something stupid (which is constantly), and actually defend outspoken members of their party instead of offering them as sacrifices the second they come under attack, it wouldn't be long before people would be embarrassed to call themselves conservatives in public the way liberals are reluctant to identify as such now.

Things are looking pretty fucking gloomy for the Dems. I think that this perceived lack of "testicular" fortitude has very little to do with that. The President's real unpopular and we're defending some tough turf. Most of the really vulnerable seats are states that Obama lost by 15% or more in 2012 AND 2008. They'd be tough whatever the circumstances. And the Dems are doing reasonably well in the governors races, despite the general suck. As a Californian, you of ALL people should know this. Governor Moonbeam and the Democratic brand are so successful that he's going to win re-election despite launching his campaign literally two days ago. And we're likely to win 2/3rds in at least one part of the state ledge. And we're likely to keep the more competitive house seats.

Brown has hit all the right notes with mild social progressivism and practical pro-business attitudes that don't piss off unions. He also had the testicular fortitude to attack the redevelopment agencies that have been bleeding the state for years. Yet if he were in Obama's position, the rest of the party would abandon and distance themselves from him and let him soak up every wild accusation for years with no response. Anyone's approval ratings would be in the toilet with friends like that.

More broadly, I think you're asking why the Republican Party is so very effective, while the Democrats just can't seem to do anything right. It's not that they're wrong, it's just that they suck. And I think it's a fair point, but that the underlying idea there is wrong. It's fair in that the Democrats really aren't an effective force for legislation, at least on the national level. They're relagated to utter powerlessness in like fifteen states, and it looks like they're going to lose seats on the state level. This election kinda sucks if you're a liberal because you're losing and there's really no discernable reason other than the electorate just kinda doesn't care for you.

I think it's wrong because the two parties aren't in any way equal. The Republican Party has this massive Conservtive Movement behind it. That Conservative Movement has a lot of very powerful and influential people all pulling their oars in the same direction. The Conservative Movement isn't doing so hot right now. Broadly speaking, it's losing influence on the presidential elections, it has already lost the gay marriage fight and is rapidly losing other parts of the Culture Wars too. And the people that make up the Conservative Movement are shrinking proportionally to the rest of the voters. But it still has a great deal of strength, especially on the local level. The revolutionary changes the Conservative Movement brought down in Wisconsin and North Carolina and Texas are truly astonishing.

The Democrats don't have anything that can compare with this movement. Probably because they're not promising to kill all regulations that aren't industry-approved and keep the capital gains tax at 2%. The Republicans have an awful lot of money going their way, and now it's so untracible that the RNC can't possibly hope to control much of it, to say nothing of the whole pot. And the Democrats are relatively more ideologically diverse. The Republicans are essentially all conservative at this point; it's only really a question of degree. And they've discovered that lockstep and EXTREMELY BITTER opposition to the Democrats doesn't exactly hurt that much. The Dems who are going to lose in four days are overwhelmingly in states that Romney won (AK, AR, WV, SD, LA, ) and the Dems are just not doing well enough to match the 2012 electorate. The Dems have had a lot of their dead weight pruned away in the last few elections. The semi-craven Blue Dogs are essentially extinct. Most of the "New Democrats" that sprang from Clinton's DLC nonsense have moved to the left and vote reliably Democratic something like 90% of the time anyway. If the Dems ever retake the House and Senate, it won't be through those old cowardly conservative Democrats, but more ideologically cohesive (whatever that may be).

TL;DR: Don't cry. There's always 2016.

I understand pretty well how the right has used social engineering to get what it wants. The part I don't understand is why the center-left refuses to defend itself.

[Covenant]

I think they're mostly incapable of defending themselves because their party platform makes no sense and I am not sure how many of them are die-hards for whatever the message is. My guess is "very few" given the limpness they display. I think if you ask them on specific points that they care about they can be tough, but there's no toughness as a party because the party does not engender tough supporters. It is a mushy party because the message is mushy. They're basically the "I am not a Republican" party, which would be entirely obsolete and dead if not for the fact that the Republicans are just the "anti-everything good" party. They have a strong message, it's just one with no roadmap FORWARDS.

[Guardsman Bass]

I'm hesitant to say that the American Left is "weak", considering that we've gotten a lot even if our safety net is weaker than in Europe. We have food and income assistance to the poor, elderly, and disabled; we have a form of universal health care; and we have a massive homeownership subsidy "program" with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And at the state level it's more varied, with more and better programs in heavily Democratic states than in heavily Republican ones (and more everywhere else that isn't the South).

As for why they're not stronger

1. The US has always been somewhat more conservative than the western and northern European countries on economic issues. It had and has the weakest labor regulations and the weakest unions even at their peak, and was the first to see massive declines in unionization over time. That was the case even before the Cold War and its purges of far left groups - if you read some of the rhetoric from Republicans and conservatives in the Gilded Age, much of it sounds very similar to rhetoric today.


2. The American far left is weaker, more divided, and - most important of all - not as aggressively participant as the far Right in electoral politics. The extremists in the GOP often don't reflect the broader view of most people who identify as "Republican" or "conservative" in this country, but they are very active in electoral politics and that means they exert pressure at critical chokepoints (particularly state, local, and primary elections, where overall participation is low). The far left in the US can turn out in elections, but they're much less likely to be major participants at intra-party politics in the Democratic Party and put pressure on candidates in primary elections (some noticeable exceptions are Kshama Sawant's $15/hr minimum wage campaign in Seattle and Teachout's campaign against Andrew Cuomo in the New York State Democratic Primary).

It didn't use to be that way, before the Cold War. The Democratic Party had some strong leftist contingents (including outright communists), there was a third party Progressive Movement that was even more left-leaning in some ways than the Democrats, there was an outright Communist Party that tended to be low in elections but active in various progressive and labor movements, etc. All of that helped to really "stiffen the spine" of the Democratic Party on economic issues.

[Ekiqa]

I'd imagine the US left lost its balls when half of the Democrats started voting against FDR in the late 30's.

[Elheru Aran]

That's part of it, but the Democratic Party wasn't terribly 'liberal' until around then, actually. A lot of it had to do with the Civil War; the Democrats were the party of the South. The Republicans were the liberals of their time; Theodore Roosevelt is often viewed as something of a reforming President, and he was a Republican, for example. The South largely resented Republicans as being responsible for such fun things as Reconstruction. It wasn't until FDR (ish) that Democrats started slanting liberal (what with the New Deal and all). Even after that they were still a fairly conservative party and the Republicans could be surprisingly liberal-- see Dwight Eisenhower. The full reversal didn't really take place until more or less the Civil Rights era and LBJ's Great Society movement.

[General Brock]

There never really was much of a true American Left. They're further out on the fringes than the libertarians.

People with prosocial consciousness usually used the Church for an outlet, not secular politics, and churches could lose their tax-exempt status if they got too political. The trade union movement was the closest thing to a mass left-wing movement in the United States, but their leaders chose to assimilate into the Democratic party and the tweedle-dee tweedle-dum political system after WWII rather than continue to evolve into their own political movement.

The ACA was written by insurance companies for insurance companies; a true left healthcare model is somewhat more deliberately about the healthcare than for-profit service. The ACA works because the pre-ACA system was so bad its profitability was probably unsustainable. People could opt out (not always by choice). Now at least, even young people who don't want health insurance and gamble successfully on staying healthy have to chip in to corporate health insurance.

Its interesting to note that, Founding Father Dr. Benjamin Rush wanted a constitutional amendment reaffirming the tenth, that, "The People and any lawful inhabitant, resident, or sojourner of the state of (Your state) shall have freedom of choice and practice of any health or medical care modalities as they deem in their own personal best interest and judgment."

Classical liberalism is small government and strong free markets guided by respect for individual rights. Progressive liberalism is about using government to band-aid social justice, even at the expense of individual rights, rather than correct the abuses of the so-called free market that create inequality in the first place.

Without a concurrent and coherent ideal of individual rights to uphold, progressivism is just fascism under a different name and not worthy of respect.

Modern liberalism, what passes for 'liberalism' today, may as well be a pejorative for all the shift in meaning from a classic sense defining responsible prosocial economic and social behavior, to libertinism.

President-in-waiting Hillary Clinton has plenty of balls; her famous line, "We came, we saw, he died", in reference to the Gaddafi assassination, is plenty big-ballsy.

So, to answer your question, the left neutered itself when it stopped deferring to the Bill of Rights and Freedoms and building upon it in order to justify its ambitions, and let the cause of individual rights became a right-wing conservative fetish.

[Simon_Jester]

Its interesting to note that, Founding Father Dr. Benjamin Rush wanted a constitutional amendment reaffirming the tenth, that, "The People and any lawful inhabitant, resident, or sojourner of the state of (Your state) shall have freedom of choice and practice of any health or medical care modalities as they deem in their own personal best interest and judgment."

Assuming this is actually true, I must point out that Dr. Benjamin Rush also thought being black was a form of leprosy, that bleeding patients was awesome, and that heavy metal poisoning was good for you. Citing him as an authority on anything makes me nervous, and if I agree with him it's a reason to recheck my own reasoning.

Classical liberalism is small government and strong free markets guided by respect for individual rights. Progressive liberalism is about using government to band-aid social justice, even at the expense of individual rights, rather than correct the abuses of the so-called free market that create inequality in the first place.

Exactly what would "correcting the abuses of the free market" even mean? That's an extremely vague policy proposal.

Without a concurrent and coherent ideal of individual rights to uphold, progressivism is just fascism under a different name and not worthy of respect...

So, to answer your question, the left neutered itself when it stopped deferring to the Bill of Rights and Freedoms and building upon it in order to justify its ambitions...

Well, frankly, the problem there is that unlike most 20th century declarations of rights, the Bill of Rights doesn't include things like, oh, privacy. Or 'a right to education.' Or 'a right to basic human dignity.' These are things that have to some extent been retconned in by the Supreme Court, but they're simply not listed because it didn't occur to a bunch of 18th century aristocrats that they were needed.

So the Bill of Rights has very little practical utility when it comes to solving our actual problems in the US. Most of them revolve around the fact that people are lacking things like medical care and job prospects and just treatment from employers... and the Bill of Rights doesn't guarantee those things.

[General Brock]

Well, frankly, the problem there is that unlike most 20th century declarations of rights, the Bill of Rights doesn't include things like, oh, privacy. Or 'a right to education.' Or 'a right to basic human dignity.' These are things that have to some extent been retconned in by the Supreme Court, but they're simply not listed because it didn't occur to a bunch of 18th century aristocrats that they were needed.

So the Bill of Rights has very little practical utility when it comes to solving our actual problems in the US. Most of them revolve around the fact that people are lacking things like medical care and job prospects and just treatment from employers... and the Bill of Rights doesn't guarantee those things.

Um, right, so the court builds upon interpretations if the Bill of Rights to improve the human condition, but its otherwise useless. I can see by your attitude you're determined not to be the least bit constructive. The Bill of Rights is still valid, and there is a formula for legally changing the constitution.

The question was, when did the left lose its balls; my answer, when it stopped using the Bill of Rights as the basis for its political program. The framers of the constitution were limited by their knowledge and experience. As are we, apparently, but there is no need to be so hostile and willful about it. In the '60s civil rights legislation was passed to meet modern expectations backed by modern interpretations of constitutional obligations.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

[Simon_Jester]

Um, right, so the court builds upon interpretations if the Bill of Rights to improve the human condition, but its otherwise useless. I can see by your attitude you're determined not to be the least bit constructive. The Bill of Rights is still valid, and there is a formula for legally changing the constitution.

Either you are utterly ignorant of how 20th century constitutional law has evolved, or you are being foolish.

Put this way. There is nothing in the Bill of Rights that can directly be interpreted to, say, give a woman the right to have an abortion. To justify this, the Court had to come out and extend the right to privacy, which is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights or anywhere else in the Constitution.

The problem is that because the right to privacy isn't in the Constitution directly, each justice is more or less free to interpret it their own way, and a court that is essentially anti-privacy can do huge damage to everyone's right to it. Because the right is not enumerated, and in America's modern political climate there is no realistic chance of passing a constitutional amendment to do anything.

Similarly, the Bill of Rights does not enumerate basic economic rights, rights to health care or education, and so on. To some extent one can handwave the equal protection clause to cover these. But this is a lot like using the interstate commerce clause to justify federal regulation of industry.

Anyone who is even slightly capable of realism has to recognize that no one ever intended the interstate commerce clause (for instance) to be construed as broadly as it now is. But we have to use it the way it is now used, because it is more or less the only piece of language in that archaic document that can be interpreted to authorize America to have a functional government.

So the heart of the problem with saying "the left should base everything in the Bill of Rights" is that most Americans actually aren't suffering in concrete terms from having their constitutional rights ignored. The closest you come to that is inner city teenagers being fast-tracked into prison by the judiciary.

The problems that affect most Americans come down to a failure to "establish justice, promote domestic tranquility... [and] promote the general welfare." And frankly, creating programs that "band-aid" Americans' real problems is more likely to help that than what you have come out in favor of. Since you're proposing that we... somehow fix capitalism by throwing the Bill of Rights at it, unless I've badly misunderstood.

The question was, when did the left lose its balls; my answer, when it stopped using the Bill of Rights as the basis for its political program. The framers of the constitution were limited by their knowledge and experience. As are we, apparently, but there is no need to be so hostile and willful about it. In the '60s civil rights legislation was passed to meet modern expectations backed by modern interpretations of constitutional obligations.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Well, quite frankly, our major modern problems aren't civil rights issues. They're economic rights issues, political corruption issues, and issues brought about by the government just plain not trying to do anything constructive for the lower class in thirty years.

The civil rights debates aren't quite over but they are mostly won; Americans are almost all fully equal before the law. So treating 2015 problems like a repeat of the 1965 civil rights debates is a losing game.

[TimothyC]

Somewhere around 1971-2 to Nixon. He offered the left a lot of what they wanted, but his health care plan wasn't single payer, and his income plan didn't cover everyone so several of his proposals died. Those people who lament the Blue-Dogs forget that it's the Blue Dogs that are the part of the party that tend to make the margin between a minority and a majority for Democrats, so yes, please keep them out of your party.

I'd like to amend my answer to include that the actual blow was as far back as 1964 with Reynolds v. Sims. This supreme court decision forced a break between the rural progressives and the urban left. This break, driven home by a refusal to support the Nixonian reforms of the Great Society (which were in retrospect needed to preserve it as without reforms it could be pointed to by the right wing of the GOP as an edifice that needed to be removed), led to the destruction of the New Deal Coalition in the late 1970s. Even the modern Obama coalition of 2006-2012 is but a fragmenting shadow of what FDR put together.

To elaborate on why this happened, you have to look at the political landscape prior to 1970, when there were liberal and conservative wings of both parties. Prior to Reynolds v. Sims, the rural areas wielded a check on the actions of state houses of representatives (we will ignore Nebraska with it's unicameral legislature) by having an added strength in the state senates. This strength allowed for the allowed for there to be individuals from both parties representing rural voters and rural issues. When this clout was lost in 1964, it meant that if the rural voters were to retain any influence they had to move to just one party. This wouldn't have been bad except for two reasons.

1. From 1964 to the late 70s it was still possible for the New Deal Coalition to win elections when it turned out for progressive candidates without picking up the rural vote. Once the hollowing out of unions became visible, that was no longer the case. The problem was, by this point the Democrats had turned against rural issues and was actively pursuing policies that rural voters opposed (gun control is the biggest of them). The two remaining voting blocks (unions and minorities) would both oppose the platform reforms needed to recapture the rural votes, and as such the left was put in a position where they couldn't bring rural voters back into the fold. While minorities stuck with Democrats, the union support was something that could no longer be counted on to vote as a block for those with a D after their name - hence why we have "Reagan Democrats."

2. It opened up redistricting as a valid means of state-level manipulation. This allowed the republicans, with their shiny new rural vote, to push the progressive rural voices out of politics and keep them out.

[TimothyC]

Late edit: almost all instances of Reynolds v. Sims above can be ammended to read "Reynolds v. Sims & Wesberry v. Sanders"