(proviso: I have unfortunately not yet read the book, so if my questions are answered there, simply ignore them)

My own understanding of conservatism comes at it from a global perspective. The USA doesn’t appear to have been a particular global leader in world conservatism – indeed, Australia elected one of the first “new conservatives” in 1975, long before American conservatism elected Reagan. Thatcher made her first big splash by accusing the Labour Party of being Communist in 1966. Begin was elected in 1977, and Kohl and Mulroney (though both more moderate than the rest) were elected shortly after Reagan was.

I think there was something going on more structurally than something limited solely to the USA. I’m positing that new conservatism was a very common response in Western democracies to the crises of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Does this make sense, and how could this change Rick’s thesis?

Exactly right and better put than my attempt, especially this simple sentence:

we should make the case for the economic bill of rights as fundamental to securing real individual freedom for all.

Liberty is hard to argue against in the good old USA. And used as a filter through which to structure a Democratic rationale and message on all of the issues that are important to us, it could be a unifying force. Plus I’d like to see the right try to fight over it, especially when the’ve had this kind of response to it as of late:

“Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us.”

- Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican

“’I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead.”

- Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.”

- Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican

As compared to, say…

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

-Founding Father Patrick Henry, an American Patriot

After which the crowd jumped up and shouted “To Arms! To Arms!”.

Your point about liberals needing to recapture the idea of freedom or liberty is right on.

Not to imply that you believe otherwise, but this focus on freedom is totally consistent with an emphasis on economic security, as FDR himself noted in his “Economic Bill of Rights” speech:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

So we should make the case for the economic bill of rights as fundamental to securing real individual freedom for all.

That’s not to say that rationales based on equality, justice, and community-based solutions to economic and social problems are not valid, but we should not allow the issues to be posed as a trade-off of less liberty for more equality and community:

Deliberative Democracy and Poverty in America:

Philosophers . . . have argued that everyone has a moral right to do what is necessary to survive. Thus the most solid, if not the most inpsiring, defense of the welfare state may be among the most simple: welfare is a way of ensuring that no one should ever be in such abject need that he would be driven to violate otherwise enforceable rules of property.

Beyond that rather modest justification, champions of the welfare state might add Joseph Raz’s “autonomy principle,” which requires, as a cost of freedom, making efforts to secure the conditions of autonomy for all people.

Together these principles provide a rationale for welfare that does not require altruism or a commitment to equality as a higher priority than liberty. . . . Viewed in this light, the welfare state can be defended not as a form of soft-hearted humanitarianism, but as nothing more (or less) than a manifestation of a thoroughgoing commitment to autonomy for all citizens.

i.e. the welfare state does not create dependence, it is a fundamental prerequisite for true independence just as much as for equality and social justice.

1) Way back in 19th century industrializing England, Liberalism and Libertarianism started out as the same thing. Liberals ceased to be Libertarian (leaving Libertarianism to be revived in the 20th century) when they perceived that government, despite its monopoly on force, wasn’t the only form of coercion. People could be oppressed economically and by traditional authorities like religion as well, and people could co-opt government from below and use it to regulate these other forms of coercion and create individual freedom. Liberalism is Libertarianism adapted for the real world by the recognition that coercion comes from a whole range of interwoven institutions and not just “Statism.”

Conservatives are defenders of these institutions. They have no fixed position on government. If government is reinforcing these institutions, it can’t be authoritarian enough. If it’s regulating these institutions on behalf of individual freedom, it’s evil, and you start hearing about the virtues of “small government.” (There’s another situation, where a runaway government is regulating for its own sake and oppressing without limit, but history shows that this can evolve as easily out of Conservatism as from Liberalism.) Conservative use of Liberal-Libertarian rhetoric about freedom and democracy is opportunistic sleaze and needs to be busted, but to recapture this language, I suggest, Liberalism needs to accept Libertarianism as an embarrassing yearbook photo of itself. Shrillness in the pursuit of liberty is no vice, triangulation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. (Does Perlstein mention Karl Hess? I must read his book.)

2) Okay, the density of capitalized abstractions in point one is so high that even my own bullshit detector is going off. Back to Goldwater and history. If you take away Watergate and the resulting Carter presidency, the period of Republican rule from Nixon to Clinton is exactly as long as the period of Democratic rule from FDR to Eisenhower. Maybe that’s just how long it takes for a governing ideology to run out of gas, or to advance to the point where it needs to consolidate its gains by bringing in the other side before proceeding further. Or for one governing ideology to push forward and get pushed back by its original enemy.

3) I suspect that Watergate and Iran-Contra-gate and the current mess are not discrete events, but accidental (the accident being getting caught) cross-sections of an ongoing situation (BCCI probably belongs here too, but I never really understood that story). Which, incidentally, brings us to Glenn Greenwald and next week’s discussion.

4) “(A) return to bargaining rights, progressive tax scales, voting transparency.” An inspiring vision. For example, there’s a glimmering possibility that the immigration issue might be resolved if North American labor can get together with the new South American populism.

5) Maybe coffee in the morning isn’t such a great idea either.

While meditating on the parallels between Goldwater and Dean as lightning rods for movements, I thought about the dramatic collapse of cycle time due in no small part to the internet and collaborative communications it facilitates. We’ve shrunk more than 10 years out of the process, reduced the time by more than 2/3rds depending on the measures one uses. We are more on message, tighter than the messages that the Goldwater folks used (see the myriad listed in BTS).

The single biggest concept that fuels the speed and the very change itself is the notion of direct representation in an open community. I don’t rely on anyone else to convey this to the party; I am the party when I participate in this and other conversations, one of those “angry anti-war far-left Dems” to use a label coined by the right. I’m also a co-developer, a hacker helping to write this new public code, just as other “angry left” folks also helped develop an energy policy draft (see Energize America at YearlyKos). We are the bazaar model of democracy to the right’s cathedral, to use Eric Raymond’s terminology (see The Bazaar and The Cathedral by same, text online); we can work fast, all bugs are shallow, we can address our own needs. By comparison the Goldwater movement could really only use him as an icon, and a flawed one at that since the bulk of the movement’s members could only subscribe to the concept of Goldwater and not the actual man; he was not really accessible to them, nor could they fully represent themselves in their top-down and deep cathedral system.

How will becoming an open source democracy change our world? Could the right ever migrate to that model? Would Goldwater have succeeded if he could have used the internet to mediate (or disintermediate) his message?