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| The Country Mouse |
It’s been a tough row to hoe for Democrats. They have been trying, roughly for four years, to exorcise the demon President Donald Trump, by any means necessary, according to their chief exorcists, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, New York Senator Chuck Schumer and -- to a lesser degree, because he is a lesser congressman – U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut. Presiding over the exorcism were the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other interested (read-politically partisan) left of center publications.
A multi-yearlong investigation that tried to pin former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election on
backroom collusion between Trump and the Russians failed spectacularly. An
elaborately choreographed attempt to impeach Trump that had begun even before
the demon had been sworn in as president also fizzled, as the Democrats
mentioned above knew it would, the Senate, charged with trying a finding of
impeachment flowing from the House, having remained in Republicans’ clenched
fists.
Along came Coronavirus, courtesy of China, and finally
Trump, according to the above mentioned media outlets, had been toppled.
We’ve had eight years of President Barack Obama and, once
electors have cast their die on December 14, we will, most commentators agree,
have a new president-elect in the person of former Obama Vice President Joe
Biden.
It will be tempting to treat the two presidents, Obama and
Biden, as bookends interrupted by a Trump presidency.
Are they bookends? Or will Biden develop his own domestic
and foreign policy initiatives separate from those of the sainted Obama, whose
foreign policy in the Middle East, North Africa, South America and other hot
spots had not been an unmitigated success?
That, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet might say, is the question.
Hamlet, it will be recalled, is torn between the claims of conscience and right
action. Conscience always will, in the moral imagination …
make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Shakespeare, we know, has never been a primer for
politicians, the more conscientious of whom have occasionally wrestled with
their frayed consciences.
The question – are Obama and Biden bookends? – throws us
back upon the question -- will Biden’s conscience, such as it is, turn him away
from Obama’s vision of the United States in the world and so overthrow
progressive enterprises of “great pitch and moment,” such as peek out at us
from the Democrat
Party Platform, heartily approved by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders
and socialist clingers-on such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who
represents the Bronx in New York City.
Progressives are rather hoping the gravitational pull of
what may now be a moribund moderate Democrat Party will not be so massive as to
dull their own native hue of resolution. And they may be right.
The Democrat Party has been drifting left for decades. The
mass of the party is now progressive rather than liberal. It may be a mistake
to regard Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) as ideological polar opposites. If the
touchstone for Democrat Party liberalism is President John Kennedy and its
moral lodestone the Reverend Martin Luther King, the post-modern, progressive
Democrat Party has supplanted both. The post-modern progressive's attitude
towards the claims of Christian faith are hardly reverent; and the political
orientation of the post-modern progressive is hardly liberal.
Both Pelosi and AOC would shrink from the liberal economic
prescriptions adopted by Kennedy in his 1962 address to the Economic
Club of New York.
Vanishing Democrat “moderates” may want to revisit that
address, excerpts from which are recorded below.
Calling for necessary action from the U.S. Congress, Kennedy
ambition was to reform and repurpose the post-World War tax system:
If we do not take action, those who have the most reason
to be dissatisfied with our present rate of growth will be tempted to seek
shortsighted and narrow solutions -- to resist automation, to reduce the work
week to 35 hours or even lower, to shut out imports, or to raise prices in a
vain effort to obtain full capacity profits on under-capacity operations. But
these are all self-defeating expedients which can only restrict the economy,
not expand it.
… the most direct and significant kind of federal action
aiding economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption
and investment demand -- to cut the fetters which hold back private spending.
In the past, this could be done in part by the increased use of credit and
monetary tools, but our balance of payments situation today places limits on
our use of those tools for expansion. It could also be done by increasing
federal expenditures more rapidly than necessary, but such a course would soon
demoralize both the government and our economy. If government is to retain the
confidence of the people, it must not spend more than can be justified on
grounds of national need or spent with maximum efficiency. And I shall say more
on this in a moment...
The final and best means of strengthening demand among
consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents
to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system -- and this
administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom
cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective
in 1963...
But you can understand that, under these circumstances,
in general, that any new tax legislation enacted next year should meet the
following three tests:
First, it should reduce the net taxes by a sufficiently
early date and a sufficiently large amount to do the job required. Early action
could give us extra leverage, added results, and important insurance against
recession. Too large a tax cut, of course, could result in inflation and
insufficient future revenues -- but the greater danger is a tax cut too little,
or too late, to be effective.
Second, the new tax bill must increase private
consumption, as well as investment. Consumers are still spending between 92 and
94 percent on their after-tax income, as they have every year since 1950. But
that after-tax income could and should be greater, providing stronger markets
for the products of American industry. When consumers purchase more goods,
plants use more of their capacity, men are hired instead of laid-off,
investment increases, and profits are high.
Corporate tax rates must also be cut to increase
incentives and the availability of investment capital. The government has
already taken major steps this year to reduce business tax liability and to
stimulate the modernization, replacement, and expansion of our productive plant
and equipment. We have done this through the 1962 investment tax credit and
through the liberalization of depreciation allowances -- two essential parts of
our first step in tax revision -- which amounted to a ten percent reduction in corporate
income taxes worth 2.5 billion dollars. Now we need to increase consumer demand
to make these measures fully effective -- demand which will make more use of
existing capacity and thus increase both profits and the incentive to invest.
In fact, profits after taxes would be at least 15 percent higher today if we
were operating at full employment.
For all these reasons, next year's tax bill should reduce
personal as well as corporate income taxes: for those in the lower brackets,
who are certain to spend their additional take-home pay, and for those in the
middle and upper brackets, who can thereby be encouraged to undertake
additional efforts and enabled to invest more capital.
Third, the new tax bill should improve both the equity
and the simplicity of our present tax system. This means the enactment of
long-needed tax reforms, a broadening of the tax base, and the elimination or
modification of many special tax privileges.
Those are the three tests which the right kind of bill
must meet -- and I am confident that the enactment of the right bill next year
will in due course increase our gross national product by several times the
amount of taxes actually cut. Profit margins will be improved, and both the
incentive to invest and the supply of internal funds for investment will be
increased. There will be new interest in taking risks, in increasing
productivity, in creating new jobs and new products for long-term economic
growth.
I repeat: our practical choice is not between a tax-cut
deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic
deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a
restricted economy, or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax
cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve, I
believe -- and I believe this can be done -- a budget surplus. The first type
of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment
in the future.
The Kennedy reforms, passed into law during President Lyndon
Johnson's administration following the Kennedy’s assassination, were hugely
successful; so successful, in fact, that Johnson and the Democrats were able to
finance their Great Society programs with revenue generated by the Kennedy
reforms.
Johnson, considered a masterful deal maker, had a bit of a
problem convincing southern Democrats to vote in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, also initiated by Kennedy.
“These Negroes,” Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes Johnson in her
biography, Lyndon Johnson and the American, “they’re getting
pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got
something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their
uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a
little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a
difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against
us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and
there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll
be Reconstruction all over again.”
Neither Kennedy nor Johnson, it needs be said, was a
post-modern progressive. Both were cautious liberals. The break between the
liberalism of, say, Adam Smith and the socialism of Bernie Sanders should be
obvious to anyone, even a progressive, who has a basic understanding of world
history.
Today, Sunday, December 6th, was the first fall
of new snow on Bolton Lake in Vernon. The snow blanketed everything in purist
white and muffled the usual cacophony of sounds. Snow is a great insulator and
forces our thoughts inward. It also serves as a precursor to the Christmas
season, following by a few days the first day of winter on December 21.
Here on the lake, everything is in readiness for Christmas;
leaves have been blown and wood put aside for the wood stove. Andree, to whom I
read recently Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Put Out More Flags,” has put out modest
Christmas lights in front of our house, and its inside shines with her
decorations. Her Fidelco guide dog, luxuriating on the living room rug, has at
last made himself at home. He, at first anxious, and the house have married
each other and are living in wedded bliss.
We remember with gratitude those who have gone before us –
my parents, Frank and Rose, and Andree's parents, Ernie and Margaret – now that
the snow, muffling everything in holy silence, has opened the eyes of our
imaginations so that we may warmly embrace the past, a wayfarer returning home
after a long absence.
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