Capricorn
08-12-2016, 02:54 AM
Hillary's New Deal: How a Clinton Presidency Could Transform America
By Sean Wilentz
The political spectacle of the past year has turned the 2016 election into a chasm with profound historical significance. By nominating Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become the vehicle for an authoritarian, nativist nationalism that until now lurked at the fringes of modern American politics. Hillary Clinton has launched a mainstream progressive campaign, in an updated Democratic tradition that stretches back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is the choice Americans face – between alternatives as starkly opposed to each other as in any election in our history, excepting the one in 1860, which led to the Civil War.
This year's political conventions substantively and symbolically revealed the fate of both parties in this crucial election year. The Democratic delegates in Philadelphia looked as culturally polyglot as the party's rank and file, affirming how much the party has changed over the past half century. The 1964 convention in Atlantic City that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson was roiled by the unsuccessful efforts of black voting-rights campaigners to seat a racially integrated delegation from Mississippi – the last stand inside the party of the old Democratic Solid South. Five decades later, the convention hall was a sea of brown and black and white faces as well as LGBT rainbows. And, of course, the convention was nominating the first female presidential candidate of a major party in American history – a connection that Clinton, who toned down the gender angle in her 2008 bid for the nomination, has now made central to her campaign.
Yet the convention also pulled its multicultural celebrations together into a patriotic whole, overcoming the inchoate diversity that has too often bedeviled the Democrats in recent years. As a direct challenge to the Republican nativists' nationalism, the Democrats proclaimed their own pro-immigrant nationalism, at once of this moment and a reprise of traditional Democratic themes. The sight of Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant father of an American soldier slain in Iraq, pulling from his pocket a copy of the Constitution and then contemptuously but calmly asking whether Trump had ever read it stopped the proceedings cold and dramatized the Democrats' rearticulated national pride. In the face of Trump's isolationism, the Democrats celebrated America's indispensable role in global affairs, not least in the NATO alliance, which elicited American flag waving and chants of "USA! USA!," reviving the kind of liberal internationalism that was central to the party of FDR and Harry Truman but had receded in the aftermath of Vietnam. And throughout the convention, there were other reminders of a fortified living connection with the past.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fea...ca-w433768
By Sean Wilentz
The political spectacle of the past year has turned the 2016 election into a chasm with profound historical significance. By nominating Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become the vehicle for an authoritarian, nativist nationalism that until now lurked at the fringes of modern American politics. Hillary Clinton has launched a mainstream progressive campaign, in an updated Democratic tradition that stretches back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is the choice Americans face – between alternatives as starkly opposed to each other as in any election in our history, excepting the one in 1860, which led to the Civil War.
This year's political conventions substantively and symbolically revealed the fate of both parties in this crucial election year. The Democratic delegates in Philadelphia looked as culturally polyglot as the party's rank and file, affirming how much the party has changed over the past half century. The 1964 convention in Atlantic City that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson was roiled by the unsuccessful efforts of black voting-rights campaigners to seat a racially integrated delegation from Mississippi – the last stand inside the party of the old Democratic Solid South. Five decades later, the convention hall was a sea of brown and black and white faces as well as LGBT rainbows. And, of course, the convention was nominating the first female presidential candidate of a major party in American history – a connection that Clinton, who toned down the gender angle in her 2008 bid for the nomination, has now made central to her campaign.
Yet the convention also pulled its multicultural celebrations together into a patriotic whole, overcoming the inchoate diversity that has too often bedeviled the Democrats in recent years. As a direct challenge to the Republican nativists' nationalism, the Democrats proclaimed their own pro-immigrant nationalism, at once of this moment and a reprise of traditional Democratic themes. The sight of Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant father of an American soldier slain in Iraq, pulling from his pocket a copy of the Constitution and then contemptuously but calmly asking whether Trump had ever read it stopped the proceedings cold and dramatized the Democrats' rearticulated national pride. In the face of Trump's isolationism, the Democrats celebrated America's indispensable role in global affairs, not least in the NATO alliance, which elicited American flag waving and chants of "USA! USA!," reviving the kind of liberal internationalism that was central to the party of FDR and Harry Truman but had receded in the aftermath of Vietnam. And throughout the convention, there were other reminders of a fortified living connection with the past.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fea...ca-w433768
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