After John Kerry's defeat for President in 2004, Terry McAullife, then head of the DNC, gave a bland, platitudinous interview saying something on the order of Bush will need to work with Congress and we have to work together, etc., etc. I complained to my father that this statement may have been politically expedient for John Kerry to give, it didn't speak to the moment at all – that McAuliffe seemed not to get it. The failed candidate can say such things, but the head of the opposing party cannot – someone has to provide a clear-eyed and frank assessment of what had been lost and what was at risk.
My father replied:
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"Sure they already have an agenda. Republicans have been planning for this since FDR. Remember that when Roosevelt came into office he had to break the stranglehold the rich had on the country to keep people from starving to death. Everything he managed to do with the New Deal will be reversed or relaxed. What we're going to see is the Anti-New Deal. […] There are two basic views of governance. They can overlap in places but their extremes are perfectly opposed. One is the view that governments have a responsibility to soothe the brutality of nature; that the reason we form governments is to provide a safety net and for that we agree to pay taxes. The other view is that governments should be limited in their abilities and the market should be left to function on its own. The second extreme - pure monetary greed - will now be allowed to function freely. Workers' ability to unionize will be limited; punitive damages will be arbitrarily limited (as has already happened in this activist Court, regarding, for example, a person's ability to sue over first-time excessive discrimination [long example excised]); tax-laws for companies, which are already anemic, will be further relaxed; and everything will be commercialized, including and especially Social Security - which will disappear as we know it. You're right McAuliffe doesn't get it; Bush's handlers now have no limits. And they all agree so there's no hope of repeating Clinton's first two years. Bush is better than Coolidge for the Rightist elite - well, that's redundant - for the elite in this country. Coolidge at least had an understanding of economics. Bush knows nothing, so he'll do and say whatever Cheney et al. want. He's too stupid to think things over first."
I added, elsewhere: Call it the Old Deal, watch the country slip back into our ugly, plutocratic past, and remember: What's good for the market, is good for America™.
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This was taken, give or take verbatim, from a conversation with my dad, which is a dumb skill I have: reciting lengthy quotes from memory. (Someone I kinda online-knew seemed to not believe me, that this was spoken and then written from memory, which is the primary reason I remembered this at all, once I'd posted it. Still don't really understand that reaction, but perhaps she was impressed? She was some type/form/fashion of a journalist – I think. Anyway, odd.)
A key factor neither my father nor I knew at the time, but has become startlingly and increasingly evident with Republican administrations since (W's second, the election of which preceded this conversation, and Trump's in the meantime) is their level of incompentence has, to a non-zero-degree, scuppered the full-enactment of these plans. W, almost immediately after Election Day, failed to enact his plans to privatize Social Security, and his second administration never accomplished much else afterward.
And yet we can see the bones of my father's argument, built and standing, evident in today's USA. They have a long way to go, the Republicans – and have since re-focused their agenda on dismantling American democracy itself to move it all along faster – but what he predicted, while not entirely fulfilled, is evident, about 20 years later, a steamy, festering pile of restrictive and retrograde shit the rest of us have to dig our way out of.
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