How Republicans Quit Governing

This post is inspired by a book that just came out.  It is "The Impostors" by Steve Benen.  The subtitle of the book is "How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics".  It is competing for attention with the new Bolton book, the Mary Trump "inside the family" book, and the unauthorized biography of Melania Trump.  Of the three, only the Melania book tells us anything we don't already know.  The other two merely layer additional detail into pictures that are already clear.

Benen's book is more important than the other three combined.  But it will likely get lost in the noise surrounding the other three anyhow.  He investigates an important phenomenon that has not received the attention it deserves.  However, it is both too long and too short.  Benen's thesis is that the modern GOP is all form and no substance.  Or, as he puts it, "[t]he modern Republican Party has become a post-policy party".

What he means by this is that the modern GOP has abandoned any pretense of attempting to govern.  Governance requires developing policies, convincing the public that these policies are good ones to the point where they become popular, implementing these policies, and finally studying the results and making appropriate adjustments.

Instead, the GOP has become a publicity and marketing operation whose sole objective is to get Republicans elected then keep them in office.  They are not supposed to do anything once they get there.  Except perhaps oppose Democratic initiatives, policies, and programs.

A policy free agenda has the advantage of shortcutting any argument that one or more of their policies may be flawed.  The GOP can take potshots at Democratic policies sure in the knowledge that Democrats can't retaliate.  Democrats literally have nothing to aim at.  Republicans should pay a penalty for being "the empty slogan party" but they haven't so far.

I say the book is too long because Benen convincingly makes his case by the end of the first chapter, a chapter named "We're not great at this whole governing thing".  Subsequent chapters just pile it on with additional detail.  There is a distressing amount of detail.

Each chapter name is a direct quotation from an elected official, party member, operative, or supporter.  All of them, it must be said, are Republicans.  This is not sniping from the opposition.  It's inside baseball.  Here is a list of the quotations he uses as chapter titles:

• Manipulate the numbers and game the system.
• Even if it worked, I would oppose it.
• Extending the middle finger to the world.
• A series of hasty unplanned, unexamined decisions.
• The cruelty is the point.
• We stand by the numbers.
• Life and death in the culture wars.
• Governing by near-death experience.
• It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant.
• Bridging the "Wonk gap".

Any one chapter is convincing.  All together, they are overwhelming.  So that's the case for "too long".  What's the case for "too short"?

Benen spends 99% of his time discussing the Obama/Trump era.  He has very little to say about what came before.  And he has almost nothing to say about the "why" of it.  That's what I am going to spent the rest of this post on.

But before I leave Benen's book a word about the timing.  The bulk of the book was obviously completed by late 2019.  He spends almost no time, a page or two, on the, Ukraine quid pro quo, the impeachment, and the trial in the Senate that led to Trump's acquittal.  He spends no time on the COVID-19 crisis.  Although both incidents reinforce his thesis he already has more than enough material without either.  On to what came before.

As I noted in a recent post (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-times-they-are-changin.html), the Republicans had a good run starting in about 1890 and continuing for the next 40 years.  They identified themselves as the "business" party.  And they applied business practices to governance.  And that, they claimed, made them better at governance than the other party.

The idea of fiddle faddling around rather than putting your shoulder to the wheel and doing the hard boring business of governing well was anathema to them.  Teddy Roosevelt was atypical only that he devoted even more energy than his compatriots to the business of governance.  All of them worked hard to leave things in better shape than they found them.  You can perhaps quibble with their policies.  But they all believed in them and worked hard to implement them.

Their run was put to an end by FDR and the Great Depression.  Hoover was a decent, kind, and caring man.  He was also extremely competent and capable.  But in spite of his efforts, and they were substantial, he failed.  His failing was not the result of a lack of effort or intelligence.  It was a failure caused by the Republican orthodoxy of the time.

Perhaps if he had been able to escape that box and be more creative, as FDR was, he might have been successful.  But he wasn't, so he wasn't.  And I want to take particular note of something.  It did not take long for the standard suite of Republican policies of the time to become deeply unpopular with the general public.

 

FDR won four elections in a row, with Truman serving out the remainder of his last term.  Then Truman won an additional term on his own.  So Democrats had a 20 year run.  Then Eisenhauer returned the White House to GOP control.  He was a general with no connection to politics before he ran and won.  He was also a moderate, "return to normalcy", kind of guy.  He did not put much of a policy stamp on the GOP.

Then Nixon, a man long closely associated with the GOP, ran in '60 and lost to Kennedy.  But 8 years later he won.  Nixon was a classic "Policy wonk".  He had definite ideas about what should be done, how it should be done, and why it should be done.  He imposed a clear identity on the party, probably for the first time since the Hoover era.

He acquired the nickname "tricky dick" because many thought him not very honest.  But, at least in public, he rarely flat out lied.  Instead he used the usual tricks to avoid answering questions.  If forced to address the question, he would make a misleading statement.  It appeared to say one thing while actually saying something else.

Ron Zeigler, his press secretary, became famous for the "non-denial denial".  Instead of answering the question he would deflect with, for instance, "how can you even ask such a question?"  He became famous for the creativity of his replies.  Superficially, the reply appeared to be a direct and unambiguous response.  In actuality, it was what we now call a deflection.  He used the response to deflect the question into something that didn't have anything with what was originally asked.

When he did lie, Nixon new he was lying.  He knew why he was lying.  He knew what the truth was.  And the lie furthered some political objective.  He never lied by accident or to no purpose.

Nixon was eventually forced to resign.  He was replaced by Ford.  Ford came into office via an unusual path.  Nixon's Vice President, Agnew, was forced to resign as the result of a scandal.  He was replaced as Vice President by Ford, an amiable lightweight that everybody liked.  Then Nixon was also forced to resign and Ford was promoted to the top job.

Ford is the only President we have ever had that was never elected to either the position of President or Vice President.  When he lost the subsequent election any chance of him making a mark on the party was lost.

The next GOP President was Reagan.  Reagan had accumulated a kind of a political philosophy.  But it consisted of little more than a bunch of slogans that would fit on a fortune cookie.  However, he was a two term Governor of California before he became President, so he knew how to put together a team.

He was the first of the modern "figurehead" presidents.  He was the opposite of a wonk.  He did not dive deeply into issues.  He only worked a few hours per day choosing instead to delegate almost everything.

He knew that his strength was as a pitch man and that's where he put most of his energies.  He focused on honing simple, compelling messages then pitching them to the public.  He was very successful at this.  He was popular for the entire time he was in office, and for a long time afterwards.

He did keep on top of the work his subordinates were doing.  But, as long as they couched what they were doing in terms of supporting his simplistic notions, he let them get on with it without probing deeply enough to know what they were actually up to.  As a result, the more cynical of his aides could actually do the opposite of what Reagan espoused.

The most egregious example of this was Iran/Contra.  Another of Reagan's beliefs was "you don't provide arms to terrorists".  But in a deal whose details I am not going to drag you through, Oliver North, a Machiavellian national security aide, did exactly that.  When talking to Reagan he couched what he was doing in terms of another of Reagan's beliefs ("supporting freedom fighters" - actually anyone who claimed to be anti-communist).  But that was only part of North's plan.  The rest of his plan involved providing arms to terrorists, in this case, the Iranians.  North simply lied about that part.

And this was part of a larger pattern.  Reagan would often say one thing then do the opposite.  His supporters were completely happy with this.  At the time I sat down with a supporter and asked "what about this?"  He replied "I like what he says", implicitly ignoring what was being done.  So I then asked "what about that?"  This time he responded "I like what he does" implicitly ignoring what was being said.  If you can own both sides of an argument how can you fail to be popular?

Another thing Reagan pioneered was stocking the cabinet with wildly unqualified appointees.  Typically you expect a cabinet head to be competent and to understand and support the role and mission of the department.  For policy reasons it may sometimes be a good idea to put someone in who is competent but opposed to the current role and mission of the department.  They can then apply their expertise to changing the mission or to diminishing the role the department plays.

Reagan went further, much further.  He installed people who were generally incompetent.  And they also lacked any kind of subject area expertise.  They couldn't enhance the department with good management and improved policies and procedures because they were incompetent.  They also couldn't change the direction of or reduce the role or effectiveness of a department, if that was the objective.  Their general incompetence only allowed them to make a mess.  Reagan didn't do this with all of his cabinet secretaries but he did it with several.

Reagan was replaced by Bush "41" when term limits prohibited him from running a third time.  Bush could have been a wonk.  He had a long and impressive resume of government work.  But he had run against Reagan in '80.  He was more qualified than Reagan in every way but he was thoroughly trounced anyhow.

Reagan picked him to be his Vice President on what turned out to be the winning ticket.  After two terms he was the obvious choice to move on up.  And he won the '88 election.  But he had learned his lesson.  Reagan had won by being the anti-wonk.  So Bush set out to eschew any wonkish behavior.  He imported a man named John Sununu to tell him what to say and do.  Then he said and did what he was told to do.

It worked well enough so that he secured his party's nomination to run for reelection in '92.  But Clinton's one-two combination of being a wonk who could also politic with the best of them, and the fact that a lot of GOP true believers saw him as a phony, caused him to lose.

Eight years later the fight was between the super-wonk (Gore) and another figurehead type in Bush "43".  Bush was not as good at being a pitch man as Reagan had been but he was good enough.  Like Reagan, he won.  This time around, he defeated the guy who was much more qualified than he was in the general election rather than in the primaries, but the principle remained the same.  Substance was no match for style.

And, like Reagan, before running he had been the Governor of a big state, in this case, Texas.  So, he had a team, which he put in place.  This was not the only example of him following the Reagan playbook.  He didn't work very hard.  He focused on honing simple but effective messages then pitching them to the public.

He did keep a closer eye on what was going on than Reagan had.  But in his biggest case of rampant deception, the runup to the Iraq War, he and his handlers were on the same page.  He didn't get conned the way Reagan had been because he was in on the con from the beginning.

Bush was a combination of the worst of Nixon and Reagan.  Both ran dishonest administrations.  Bush was personally well liked, just like Reagan.  Bush knew when he was lying, just like Nixon.  But what's most important is that both Reagan and Bush were relatively popular.  Both served two full terms.

But why was all this lying and deception going on?  I trace it all the way back to Hoover.  Hover gained office running on a platform that was generally popular.  He could do what he was inclined to do without engaging in deception.  The policies he had run on and his actual policies were the same.  So, he could count on public support for them.

But all that had changed by the time he ran for reelection four years later.  By then those very same policies were deeply unpopular.  Being an honest man, Hoover did not change up his message.  He still believed the same things and wasn't going to lie just to get reelected.

I don't think the GOP has ever completely recovered.  Eisenhauer was popular but he was something of an interloper.  He was not a true blue Republican to his bones.  Nixon was but he had a personality that the public never really warmed to.  When put up against a more likeable candidate with very similar policies (Kennedy), he lost.  Eight years later he felt he had to resort to deception, to return to being "tricky dick", to win.  He reverted to form and win he did.

The takeaway can be simply stated:  "honesty loses - dishonesty wins".  That was not how Reagan saw himself but that was how his administration actually governed.  Bush "41" was a phony but he felt he had to be to win.  And the evidence says he was correct.

Bush "43" showed himself to be very comfortable with dishonesty.  And he too won.  And let's not forget that he dispatched the wonk Kerry in '04 with little difficulty.  McCain in '08 and Romney in '12 were standard issue reasonably honest politicians.  They lost to the charismatic Obama.  And that, of course, brings us to Trump.

In '16 GOP voters had a smorgasbord to choose from.  They had total flakes in several flavors.  They had a decent, honest, man in Kasich.  They had a Bush in Jeb.  And they had a crook, con man, and TV personality in Trump.  By this time what more than 40 years of history told them was "if you want to back a winner, stay away from honesty and competence".  And they did.  They backed the least honest and least competent candidate against one of the most competent and honest people to ever run for President.  And Trump won.

So that's the "what".  How about the "why"?  There is a trend that paralleled the political one.  And we can go back to Reagan to see when it first came to prominence.  In the interest of brevity I am going to skip over the complex and incestuous history of the relationship between the press and elected officials that preceded Reagan.  Instead I am going to start with the situation as it was when Reagan assumed office.

Reagan was elected in the post-Watergate era.  At that time the press had a skeptical attitude toward elected officials and especially the President.  They did their usual thing during the campaign.  And when the Reagan Administration came into office they initially continued to do it.

And, remember that Reagan frequently said one thing and did another.  And he appointed all those incompetent cabinet secretaries.  All this was reported and all of it was obviously true.  But, instead of getting a lot of "good work" from the public, editors got a lot of "why are you picking on that nice man Mr. Reagan".

The Reagan Administration saw a lot of turnover in the press, both at the working press level and at the executive level.  It was financially advantageous (good for circulation and ratings) to go easy on the Reagan Administration.  The old "give 'em hell" bunch were replaced by people who took a softer approach.

As the '80s morphed into the '90s a complete change in approach took place in all levels of the press.  My recollection is that previously there had been a lot of issues oriented coverage,  "Here's what's in this or that bill" or "here's what the experts say is the likely result of this or that policy" was replaced by horserace coverage, "so and so is up/down in the polls" or "so and so is or is not catching on with this or that sector of the electorate".

That's how the '92 campaign was covered.  Clinton was better at the "charm" side of politics than Bush "41".  Since charm got a lot of coverage, he benefited.  Of course, he was just as adept at the policy wonk stuff.  He was famous for his lists:  "three aspects of this", "for reasons for that", etc.  But, other than noting the "wonk" aspect of his personality, the press didn't dive into the substance.

Clinton won.  In '96 he was up against an extremely accomplished opponent in Dole.  But by '96 Dole had already lost out to far less accomplished opponents in previous primary cycles.  By '96 I think it made him bitter.  That diminished his effectiveness.  And ,in the end, he became yet another reason for GOP voters to shun honest competent people.

I think this abandoning of substance for the ephemeral, who's up and who's down, is bad for democracy.  And I have been especially bitter about how the press in general, and the New York Times in particular, covered the '16 Presidential race.   The NYT sets the agenda for a lot of the rest of the press.  If the NYT thinks something is important, everybody follows.

In '16, the NYT thought the Clinton emails were important.  They weren't.  The NYT was the hometown paper for Trump.  They had been covering him for decades.  By '16 they should have known exactly who he was and made sure the public got thoroughly acquainted with him.  But they didn't.  They did few, if any, deep investigative pieces on him in the way they went after the emails.  So, in a real sense, Trump got to skate.

But look at the record I have laid about above.  The GOP has been moving in Trump's direction since 1980, or even earlier.  Reagan styled himself "the champion of the middle class".  But it was the Reagan Administration that began the hollowing out of support for the middle class.  This was obvious by a couple of years into his term.  Yet blue collar union workers, then a pillar of the middle class, moved from the Democratic party to the GOP because they bought what Reagan was selling them.

Republicans have continued their successful assault on blue collar union jobs in manufacturing ever since.  Yet these blue collar union types have stuck with the GOP through thick and thin.  Even if you grant that the press has been doing a terrible job, and they have been a good deal of the time, these people should have been able to figure out what was going on.  The same logic applies to senior citizens and the GOP's sustained assault on Social Security and Medicare.

The GOP has been lying to their base consistently since Reagan.  Trump has made no real secret that he is, and always has been, a pathological liar.  But GOP voters are all "we're with the liar".  And, if winning is your only measure, it makes sense.  If the GOP puts up a liar, at least for the top slot on the ticket, they win.  If they put up a reasonably honest person, they lose.

I think I understand where the GOP is coming from.  The last time their political philosophy was popular with the majority of voters was in the late 1920s.  Back then people had good reason to believe that supporting businesses and a business way of thinking would trickle down in a way that benefited the general public.

But I think that since then, for the most part, a solid majority no longer believes in trickle down economics.  So, if your basic philosophy is unpopular, what do you do?  An obvious answer is "change your philosophy to one that is more popular".  For whatever reason., the GOP has chosen not to do that.  Instead, they have gone with "lie about it".  It is hard to govern if the only thing you are any good at is lying.

The GOP attitude is somewhat understandable.  But the real question is "why do voters think it is a good idea to support liars?"  I don't know why.  But they do.  Something like 40% of the electorate is happy to support a complete liar like Trump.

That means that if the GOP can pick up another ten or fifteen percent, they can win.  Or, if they can game the system using gerrymandering and voter suppression, two tactics that their base is completely fine with, then maybe they only need an additional six or eight percent to win.

The GOP base has been comfortable being lied to for more than two generations.  I would like to blame the press but I find that I no longer can.  They can and should do better.  But the problem lies elsewhere.

COVID-19 is literally a "life or death" proposition.  This business of depending on liars and con men does not work in such an environment.  COVID-19 may shake the faith of this large group of people who support liars and crooks.  Or not.  We'll see.

The times, they are a changin'

Two weeks or so into the reaction to the death of George Floyd it is starting to feel like we are at a major turning point, a cultural Tsunami.  The signs are everywhere.  And lots of people are saying "things will never be the same again".  Are they right?  That's the subject of this post.

The song quoted in the title was written by Bob Dylan in 1964, another time of great cultural upheaval.  It was my time.  I was in High School and College in the '60s and early '70s.  Trust me (and anyone who lived through that time), back then it very much felt like the times really were changing.  That nothing would ever be the same.  Are we in a similar period?  Let me go back considerably further to provide some historical context.

At the time of its founding this country did not have any political parties.  That didn't last long.  After a few early fits and starts the Democratic party was formed.  It's still going strong.  For a while the Whig party, modeled loosely on a British party of the same name, was the other major party.  As the 1800s wore on, a single issue came to dominate public discourse, slavery.  For a while there were large pro-slavery and pro-abolitionist wings in each party.  But the Democratic Party slowly evolved to become a mostly pro-slavery party.

The Whigs had more trouble.  The size of the pro-slavery and pro-abolition wings were more even.  As a result, no resolution was possible.  Eventually the Whig party splintered.  The pro-abolition wing became what is now the Republican party.  Some in the pro-slavery wing migrated to the Democrats.  The rest eventually withered away.

That was the situation going into the Civil War.  Lincoln and the Republicans won the White House.  With the start of the War the the Democratic Party lost most of its southerner members.  By and large, they defected to the Confederacy.  The number of Democrats that remained with the party in the north became too small to make the party competitive, at least while the War was raging.

That allowed the Republican Party to retain effective control of the U. S. government throughout the War.  For this, and many other reasons, the Civil War was a time of great change.  But this was in the context of an ideological struggle that had been going on for many decades.

We don't know what would have happened if Lincoln had not been assassinated at the end of the War.  He advocated for a moderate and reconciliatory attitude toward the south.  With him out of the picture the "Radical Reconstruction" people gained the upper hand.  They set out to punish the south and solidified the already substantial antagonism the south held toward the north.  That antagonism remains to the day, and the Civil Ear ended over 150 years ago.

One side effect was that the south became the "solid south", voting reliably Democratic from the late 1800s until roughly 1980.  If the Democratic Party could be roughly competitive in the rest of the country then the solid south would put them over the top and give them the upper hand at the Federal level.

In spite of this, starting in roughly 1890 the Republicans had a good run.  Their thinking was that "what's good for business is good for the U. S. A.".  People bought it.  One reason was that technological advancement, brought to us by corporations, wrought more change, most of them positive, in the lives of average people for the period running from about 1875 to about 1925 than the world had ever seen before and is likely to ever see again.

Transportation was revolutionized.  Steam trains and ships permitted faster, safer, and more comfortable transportation than ever before.  The telegraph (and later the telephone) and the electric light revolutionized communications.  It also meant the rhythm of the day was no longer tied to that of the sun.

Machinery revolutionized farming and manufacturing.  The sewing machine and the typewriter came into widespread use.  And on and on.  The way that the typical person lived in 1925 was radically different than the way a similarly situated person had lived in 1875.  And the way many people lived in 1875 was not greatly different from how people had lived since time immemorial.

This great advancement in the way ordinary people lived, for the most part brought to them by the corporations of the time, led to great contentment and a general trust in the business friendly Republicans.  And that translated to electoral success.

Then the stock market crashed in 1929.  Almost nobody had money in "the market" so almost nobody was directly affected.  The same companies churned out the same products that consumers loved purchasing.  So, it wasn't the crash that changed everything.  It was the response to the crash.

Republicans applied the economic orthodoxy of the day to counteract its initially modest effects.  They effectively shut down credit and severely restricted what banks could do.  That forced banks into an extremely defensive posture.

There was no FDIC at the time.  When some weak banks got into trouble they were forced to close their doors.  That left depositors of both the individual and business variety out in the cold with whatever money they had in that bank gone.  This was rightly called a panic at the time.  And panics were nothing new.  They had been happening routinely for many decades by the time 1930 rolled around.  So, people and businesses knew exactly how they played out.

Watching an unusually high number of banks go under made everybody skittish.  At the least sign of a bank in difficulty, depositors rushed to pull all their money out.  They started a "run on the bank".  Some banks were actually weak.  But many were sound and would have come through just fine if they had not been subjected to a bank run.  It didn't matter.  For the most part they went under and that made everybody get even more skittish.

And this inability of businesses to do business normally caused businesses to hunker down.  They cut salaries and laid people off.  That left many people (unemployment insurance hadn't been invented yet either) in much reduced financial circumstances, so they drastically cut spending.  That shrunk demand for consumer products and businesses were forced to scale back even more.

This is what is called a viscous circle.  And as the circle wound tighter and tighter the economy got worse and worse.  It took a couple of years but by 1932 people were ready for a change.  They no longer trusted business they way they once had.

The Democrats, headed by FDR, offered a populist approach to governance.  That was enough to give them big wins.  And they started making changes everywhere.  Some worked.  Some didn't.  And some were declared illegal.  But Democrats were manifestly trying to make things better.  That was enough to allow them to retain the trust of the people.

And that cemented the change in public attitude from generally pro-business to much more anti-business.  A long standing understanding changed after several decades of remaining the same.  And, as a result, the business friendly Republicans went out of favor and stayed out of favor for a long time.

Then World War II came along.  FDR was credibly able to argue that he was forced into it so he was not blamed for getting the U. S. dragged into "foreign entanglements".  And he is generally credited with doing a good job of prosecuting the War.  And we ended up on the winning side.

The combination of winning the War and the fact that the U. S. got dragged into it in spite of a concerted effort to satay out caused a change.  The isolationist attitude that had held sway since the country had been founded was replaced by an internationalist attitude.

Truman continued Roosevelt's policies but people were ready for a "return to normalcy".  They found it with Eisenhauer.  On the surface, and under the guidance of Eisenhauer the '50s seemed like a quiet time and people liked that.  In fact, people had always liked peace and quiet. 

FDR could and did argue that he didn't cause the mess that was the Great Depression.  He was just the guy tasked with fixing it.  He could and did also argue that he was just the guy in charge when the bad guys declared War on us.  Truman was not in a position to be able to make similar arguments and his popularity suffered for it.

But it turns out that, contrary to the consensus view of most observers at the time, there was a lot going on under the surface in the '50s.  I don't know the what and the why of it.  But the start of the modern Civil Rights movement happened in the late '40s.

One argument is that a lot of black soldiers came home from the War. They had been asked to possibly give their lives in the defense of freedom.  But they came home to find that they still had no freedom.  It's possible this theory is the correct one.  But I confess I don't really know.

In any case, starting in the late '40s, and accelerating through the '50s, more and more actions were taken in the pursuit of Civil Rights for blacks.  For a long time it was a "backburner" story.

Civil Rights organizers persisted in spite of the fact that most people's attention was elsewhere.  And they initially found the bulk of their support coming from within the black community.  But over time this support broadened into substantial support from the white community.  Why?  One explanation is technological advance.

The TV in primitive form was invented in the late '30s.  More or less practical TV was more widely available by around 1950.  But TV-related technological advances came hot and heavy during this period.

I live in Seattle.  In the early years of TV, network shows were only available live in a few places.  The original west coast outpost was Los Angeles.  There, using a primitive TV set and movie camera lash up called "Kinescope", network shows were transferred to film.  The film was developed, printed, and flown to Seattle.

There, my local station broadcast it by aiming a customized TV camera at a small movie screen.  This complicated process introduced a delay amounting to the better part of a day.  But seeing network shows the day after they originally aired was better than not seeing them at all.  The process also introduced a substantial degradation in the already not very good quality of the picture and sound.  But at the time the results were judged to be good enough.

By the early '60s most cities of significant size, and that included Seattle, were connected to a national "coaxial cable" that distributed the network feed.   This allowed local stations to broadcast "live" without the delay and degradation of the kinescope process.

This also permitted a "national" news show, typically originating from New York City, to be seen all over the country at about the same time.  ("Live" shows were retransmitted over the cable after a three hour delay so that they showed up at the same local time in New York and in west coast cities like Seattle.)

All of a sudden everyone was getting the same news.  And they were getting it at the same time.  (There were three networks at the time but their news broadcasts were very similar in terms of the stories they aired and the perspective they applied to them.)

TV news started out using kinescope-like technology.  Field pieces were filmed with a 16 mm camera.  (Kinescope also used 16 mm equipment.)  The film could be developed and modest editing performed.  The result could then be aired in a segment on the news show.  It was primitive but effective.

It was also eye opening.  Before this people were familiar with short "newsreel" segments shown as part of the "preview" package that ran before a movie was shown in a movie theater.  But few people went to the movies more than once per week.  So, they were subjected to one five minute newsreel per week.  The rest of their news came via print newspapers.  The national news shows quickly expanded to a half hour  And they were broadcast five days per week, every week.

Then as now, the news likes "bang bang" stories, stories full of action, and the more violence, the better.  But, in a nod to the presumed sensibilities of viewers, closeups of blood and dead people were off limits.  But that just meant that cameramen resorted to longshots when filming that sort of thing.

That dodge made everybody happy.  The rules against "excessive violence" were being followed.  But the news could still feature lots of film of things (and people) getting blown up and other forms of general mayhem.  And film of white cops beating up, sic'ing dogs on, and otherwise abusing, peaceful black (and later white) demonstrators, made for great "bang bang" footage.

It's not that the morality of what was going on had changed.  It was that film on the TV news had a more visceral impact on people.  That made it harder for people to pretend that things like this were not happening.  And there were lots of young, hungry, reporters trying to make a name for themselves.  They were willing to do what it took to get the technology to work well enough to get this footage to New York where producers were more than willing to put it on the air.

And, to be very clear, this was a good thing.  These news people were doing exactly what they should have been doing.  It's just that before the technology reached the point that it did in the early '60s it was literally impossible to have these stories land with enough impact to get people to change their minds.

All of us are just too good at ignoring inconvenient truths because they are, well, inconvenient.  There is no doubt that TV coverage gave a big boost to the Civil Rights movement in the '60s.  This boost should have not been necessary but it irrefutably was.

But it's never just one thing.  The Civil Rights movement generated a lot of turmoil.  But then the Vietnam War came along.  The tale is a complex and sordid one.  And, like the after effects of the Civil War, it resonates right down to today.

And again an important factor is the rivalry between the two major political parties.  Democrats had scored major points by winning World War II.  Republicans wanted to take them down a notch.  The business community, long time staunch supporters of Republicans, had and has a fear and dread of Communism, the then political system of Russia.  So, after World War II ended Republican started accusing Democrats of being "soft on Communism" and of "being unwitting dupes" in various Communist sponsored schemes.

The accusations gained some traction so Democrats started trying to out anti-Communist the Republicans.  The French had some colonies in what was then called Indochina.  After the War they wanted them back.  But a Vietnamese nationalist named Ho Chi Minh (who had sat the War out in Paris) became popular in his native country of Vietnam, then part of Indochina.  The problem was that he was a Communist.

So everybody in U. S. politics competed to out anti-Ho everybody else.  The result was that the U. S. gave the French a ton of money to beat Ho.  They failed spectacularly in a place called Dien Bien Phu in '54.  The result was the partition of Vietnam into a Ho controlled north and a "free" south.  Various second raters were put in control in the south.  They were then propped up by western, mostly U. S., interests.  Being second rate, these people did a poor job and Ho made steady gains.

Then, for complex reasons I am going to skip over, President Johnson decided that it was critical to "win in Vietnam".  His real goal was to prevent Republicans from scoring on him by leveling a "weak on Communism" charge.  I also believe that he truly believed that it was important to keep Vietnam out of Communist control. 

But with second raters as a foundation, and an ill conceived "100% military" strategy, the war went poorly.  The result is that a large number of young American men were drafted and sent off to war.  Vietnam was the first TV war.  The technology at the start was the same, 16 mm film shot there and sent to New York.

And the "lots of bang bang but no closeup blood and death" rule was applied to coverage of the war.  But it was obviously a real, not a movie, war.  And that might not have mattered except that it still kept going badly in spite of the fact that at one time over 500,000 American soldiers were thrown into the fray.

In the minds of many Americans, World War II was what the Russians called "The Great Patriotic War".  Germany and Japan were formidable enemies and they attacked us.  With Vietnam things were quite different.   Vietnam was a third world country.  They had neither the population nor the economic ability to mount a serious challenge.  And the aggressors from the north were supposed to be crippled by the "bankrupt" Communist system they operated under.

Sure, Ho got help from the Russians, the Chinese, and others.  But it wasn't all that much help.  And it quickly became obvious to one and all that the American backed South Vietnamese government was incompetent, venial, and corrupt.  So "what are we fighting for again?" was an oft asked question for which a compelling answer was never forthcoming.

And that resulted in a lot of draftees not wanting to be anywhere near where the shooting was taking place.  And that resulted in a large, well organized, and popular anti-War movement emerging.  And that resulted in the same kind of "bang bang" film that the Civil Rights movement had become famous for showing up on the news . Only this time it wasn't blacks in the south.  It was white protesters all over the country.

And, in the middle of all this TV went "full living color".  Blood shows up much better on screen in color than it had in black and white.  Color 16 mm film had been available for years at this point.  So getting color pictures to New York wasn't the problem.  What was lacking was TV equipment capable of transmitting those color pictures to our living rooms.

But RCA, then a giant electronics company, introduced a line of color cameras, TVs, and all the other technical equipment necessary to connect the two together, in the early '60s.  By the mid-60's they were ready to make a splash on NBC, the network they then owned.  Once NBC went "all color", including on their flagship evening news show, the other networks, at the time just ABC and CBS, were forced to follow.  And follow they did.

The Vietnam War, now coming to us in living color, dragged on to the mid '70s.  The story is sad, complicated, and sordid, but I am going to spare you from going through all of it.  The point is that all the commotion and turmoil attendant to factions for and against U. S. participation in the Vietnam War played out during this period.

And remember, commotion and turmoil attendant to the Civil Rights movement continued in parallel during this same period.  In 1968, for instance, we saw a police created riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  This was all televised live and all related to the Vietnam  protests.  In the same year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in events related to the Civil Rights movement.  Bobby Kennedy, brother of President Kennedy, was also assassinated in '68.  He was associated with both Civil Rights and the Vietnam War protests. 

But wait!  There's more.  Along came the Women's Movement, often shorthanded derisively as "Women's Lib".  Women had been involved in the Civil Rights movement and in the Vietnam Protest movement.  But in both cases, they had mostly been restricted to "behind the scenes" roles.  There, they (and by "they" I'm talking specifically about white women here) had supported others.

In the Civil Rights movement it had been blacks.  In the Vietnam Protest movement it had been boyfriends and husbands.  At some point, however, a number of women said "it's our turn now".  The early Woman's Movement consisted almost entirely of white women.  They had little power but women of color had even less.

People have forgotten just how second (or third) class the status of women was at the time of the start of the Women's Movement.  Women were generally expected to marry and become homemakers.  Women who worked were relegated to "women's jobs", secretary, schoolteacher, nurse.

Financially and legally, most women did not have a separate identity.  Their "charge cards" (this was before the modern Credit Card came into widespread use) may have had their names on them.  But the credit history, etc. was attached, not to them, but to their husband.  Women who divorced found that they had essentially no public identity.  So operating on their own was very difficult.

And it was just assumed that men were entitled to certain paternal rights.  Back then, in many jurisdictions it was legally impossible for a husband to rape his wife.  She had a legal obligation to "put out" as much as he wanted and in any form he wanted. And in many jurisdictions it was entirely legal for a husband to literally beat his wife.  He could do it for any reason or for no reason.

A man was supposed to support his wife but he paid no penalty if he failed to do so.  In fact, husbands almost always had complete control of all moneys no matter what their source.  And divorces were very hard to get.  The "no fault" divorce came later.  As long as a husband was not literally caught in the act, he could cat around as much as he wanted to.  No so for the wife.  She was expected to remain faithful regardless of how he behaved.

In any case, the Woman's Movement got its start during this period.  This added to the chaos and the feeling among many that "things were spiraling out of control" and a concern that "there seemed to be no end to it".

Now, don't get me wrong  I think far more good than bad came out of each of the three movements I have discussed.  But by the late '40s it had been twenty years since some sense of normalcy had reigned supreme.  People yearned to go back to a "simpler time" that had never actually existed. That made Eisenhauer very popular in his time.  Twenty years after the late '40s, a lot of people yearned to go back to the Eisenhauer era.  For a lot of people it had been a good time.

But it had not been a good time for blacks.  It had not been a good time for those men who got drafted and had to go off to fight the Korean "Police Action" (for reasons too complicated to get into here it was NOT a War).  It had not been a good time for those women who did not want to be confined to the role of mother and homemaker.

The fact that right was on the side of all three movements did not stop many people from coming to resent all three.  And that formed the basis for s cultural shift.  The roots started earlier but it really took hold with Reagan entering the White House in early '81.  But before moving on I want to reinforce a key observation.

The Civil Rights Movement was a movement long in the making and long in the execution.  You can go back hundreds of years but you don't have to.  The Movement of this period definitely started to gather steam in the late '40s.  Then it simmered in the '50s, only occasionally popping to the surface.  In the '60s burst forth onto the scene but this was after a long gestation.  It essentially ran out of gas in the '70s as pushback against all the chaos gained strength.

The Vietnam Protest movement was an exception to the pattern I have established.  It came and went a lot more quickly because it was tied to a specific event.  Few U. S. soldiers were involved in Vietnam before 1965.  Things quickly moved to a peak in the late '60s.  Then Nixon announced the troop draw down and there were again few American soldiers in Vietnam by early in the '70s.  The War ended for once and for all when Saigon fell in '75.

The key driving force behind the movement was young men being drafted and sent to 'Nam.  That was only in effect in a significant way for a few years.  So, it was a movement with a relatively fixed duration.  But still, it was a powerful force for more than five years.  Before leaving the subject entirely, let me note that the Vietnamese date the beginning of the War to the Japanese surrender in '45.  And the War for them was intensely prosecuted right up until the last minute in '75.  It is with good reason that they call it "the 10,000 day war".  Not perhaps six years but thirty years.

The Woman's movement had been simmering along out of sight for many decades before it surfaced right around 1970.  The turning away represented by Reagan's election dealt it a serious blow.  But it has continued to simmer along, mostly out of sight, ever since.  It never completely went away.  It just dropped off the radar.  Until recently, the same thing has happened to the Civil Rights Movement.  But back to the main thread.

The conservative component of society became ascendant roughly with the Reagan election success.  Republicans also benefitted from a shift by the solid south from the Democratic party to the Republican party. Roughly breaking even in the rest of the country now translated to a win for Republicans.  It also helped that Reagan became immensely popular in a manner similar to FDR.  He was term limited in a way FDR wasn't.  But he was succeeded by Bush "41", who continued his policies but lacked his charm and charisma.

Bush "41' became a one term President when Clinton succeeded him.  He had lots of charm and charisma.  But conservatives staged a comeback two years into his term.  Clinton got re-elected but did not have strong enough coat tails to bring along allies in the House and Senate.  His term was marred by scandals, both real and artificial.

Clinton's charisma challenged Vice President lost to Bush "43". That took the steam out of any kind of "return to liberalism" movement.  Instead, conservatives were back in control.  Bush "43" managed to secure re-election.  And conservatives were also generally able to be successful in congress.  This cemented their ability to control the national agenda.

Another charismatic politician made his appearance in '08, Barak Obama.  He enjoyed large majorities in congress for his first two years.  But conservatives roared back and regained control in congress after that.  In spite of the fact that his administration was generally seen as successful, conservatives were able to elect their man Trump in '16.  With short exceptions conservatives have dominated affairs and set the agenda for about 40 years now.  Is that about to change?

Let's see what we can see.  Liberals were able to swing a tremendous number of seats and gain solid control of the House in '18.  However, in '18 conservatives maintained control of the Senate.  House liberals have been able to block a lot of conservative initiatives and articulate a liberal message.  But they, in turn, have been blocked from enacting much of anything.  We live in an era of gridlock.  But then we have been living in an era of gridlock for most of the last 30 years.

Conservatives have at various times been able to enact parts of their agenda.  Liberals at other times have been able to enact parts of their agenda.  But for the most part it has been a standoff.  From a legislative perspective it is a standoff right now.

But then the video of George Floyd surfaced.  People took to the streets.  After a couple of weeks of this, protesters have a number of wins they can point to.  And that just emboldens them to ask for more.  I am not going to go into the twists and turns of recent events even though it is a remarkable story.  For the purposes of this post I want to focus on the wider picture.

Many protesters are now saying "everything has changed".  Has it?  There is currently considerable evidence to support the conclusion that everything has changed.  But a longer term perspective councils for caution.  Historically, pivots have taken years not weeks to take place.  But before going on let me refer to something I highlighted above.

A technological advancement was key to the success of the Civil Rights movement in the '50s and '60s.  16 mm film could be shot in the field, processed, then shown on the evening news.  This exposed the general public to scenes they that had not previously seen.  And those pictures being broadcast on the newly created half hour nightly national news shows had a profound impact.

The current technological innovation is the now ubiquitous smartphone that is capable of taking video and transmitting it to the Internet.  Events like those surrounding Mr. Floyd's death are now being captured on video.  And that video is making its way to large segments of the public.

Mr. Floyd's death was not the first of these.  Smartphones capable of taking and transmitting video have been around for several years now.  But a few years ago they were rare and before that they were nonexistent.  Back then something like this was captured only very occasionally.  But as the years have rolled by more and more events were being captured in this way.

Police used to be confident that they could stay out of the public eye when it came to routine one-on-one encounters with members of the public.  It may be that those days are now over.  In the wake of the Floyd incident we have now seen a mountain of video of police encounters.  And in case after case in city after city police have been shown to be behaving badly.  Some police departments in some cities behave badly more often.  Some less.  But it is becoming harder to sustain the notion that police anywhere behave badly on only rare occasions.

And it has become blindingly obvious that police behave badly far more often when black and brown people are involved.  There are a number of videos of cops behaving badly to white people.  But the overwhelming number of events involve people of color.  This disparity has been on display for days and days now.  And it has had an impact on white people.  The result is that large numbers of white people have now joined what were originally predominantly black protests.

Before continuing, I am going to make another digression.  A few days ago I watched a movie.  The movie was a typical example of a trope.  In it, a thug-cop good guy vanquishes some bad guys including other thug-cops.  This "sometimes a good guy has to bend (or break) they law in order to render justice" is a common trope in books, movies, and on TV.  We can all reel off dozens of examples.

But there are two big implicit assumptions underlying this trope.  The first is the most obvious.  Justice is impossible if cops follow the law closely.  The other is that there are lots of good thug-cops around working diligently to save us from the bad thug-cops.

This "you've got to break the law to do the job right" idea makes for good drama.  But it provides a license for those, particularly cops, to feel righteous about breaking the law whenever they personally feel that it is justified.  But the only data supporting this idea is to be found in the sales figures, box office receipts, and ratings, of fiction that adheres to this trope.  And let's say it's true that some laws are problematic.  Then how about fixing the laws instead of relying on vigilante justice?

I'm sure every thug-cop thinks he is a good guy doing what good guys in cop fiction do.  But there is another implicit assumption going on.  That assumption is that the good guy thug-cop knows who the good-guy civilians are and who the bad-guy civilians are.  This is demonstrably false.  Lots of  thug-cops assume that, for the most part, white people are good guys and people of color are bad guys.

In reality, race and/or skin color are poor predictors of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.  Here's an example ripped straight from the statute books.  Until recently, laws at all levels said that all pot smokers are bad guys. Federal law still says that.  In fact, Federal law says anybody having anything to do with pot is a "category 1" sleaze ball, the worst of the worst.

Lots of studies have been done and they all say the same thing.  White people and people of color smoke pot at the same rate.  But white bad-guy pot smokers rarely get arrested.  For a bad-guy pot smoker in a minority neighborhood the story is quite different.  They are something like six times as likely to get arrested.

This is a situation that cries out for the kind of vigilante justice that thug-cops specialize in.  Lots of "worst of the worst" total bad-guy pot smokers are skating by without receiving the attention they deserve and demand from the criminal justice system. This wrong cries out to be righted.  Yet where are the good-guy thug-cops working the pot beat on the white side of town?

"Do what it takes" thug-cops are obviously needed there.  If "follow the law as written" combined with regular "by the book" policing could get the job done then it would already have done so.  Something more is obviously called for.  So where's the vigilante crowd?  Isn't this the kind of void they are supposed to fill?  Bad-guy pot smokers are a dime a dozen in many white neighborhoods.  It tells you everything you need to know that there are no thug-cops going hard after white pot smokers.

The point is that cops are bad judges of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.  Cops often do not take people as they find them.  They assume that most white people are good guys that don't call for thug-cop behavior.  Conversely, they assume that it is common to find people of color who are bad guys.  So they go transition to thug-cop behavior at the drop of a hat.  They rarely take the time to find out whether they are right or not.

The fact that you can use any number of books, movies, and TV shows to understand why cops go rogue so often has changed my perception of  this whole category of entertainment.  Back to the subject at hand.

So, paradigm shift, full speed ahead, right?  Maybe.  Part of what's currently going on is that people have been locked up at home for weeks.  Many people currently have no job to go to.  Protesting is a wonderful excuse to get out of the house.

Does this mean that protesters are insincere?  Not at all.  But it must be kept in mind that right now protesting involves little cost or inconvenience.  If you are out of work protesting doesn't lose you any income.  There is no admission fee so the price is right.  You are not missing out on other things you could be doing because most of that is shut down.  And you can feel good about yourself.

That said, participating in a protest can be a life changing event.  You eyes can get opened in a way that likely would not otherwise happen.  That can result in permanent change.  So the possibility definitely exists that this all signals a permanent and substantial change in the direction of the country.

But this has all only been going on for a couple of weeks.  And unique circumstances (the COVID19 lockdown) have enabled large groups of people to show up to protests day after day (or night after night).  What happens when we reach week ten or week thirty or year three?  It's too soon to tell.

The technological change that makes things heretofore hidden now visible is here to stay.  But at some point film from various the Civil Rights events started failing to make the same impact it had previously.  People were "been there - seen that -  not interested any more".  Will the same boredom set in with respect to the video that is currently stirring so much excitement?

And in the Civil Rights era the bad guys eventually got smarter.  They figured out ways to stay out of the viewfinders of news cameras.  And things got better.  A "Civil Rights Act" bill was passed into law.  A "Voting Rights Act" bill was passed into law.  The U. S. military involvement in Vietnam came to an end.  Women won substantial and permanent gains to their positions in society.

But maybe the conservative dominance of our politics will finally wane and we will move into a more liberal period.  And maybe advances similar to what happened with Civil Rights and Women's Rights will happen with respect to how people of color are treated and the way police do their jobs.

And other advances in other areas, the environment, economic equity, universal access to quality medical care, and who knows what else, could become reality.  In short, the liberal agenda could run out of steam by achieving a number of permanent successes.  I'm hoping for it but not counting on it.