Who's Winning? Part 1 of 2
Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias are taking a step back, wondering what conservatives really have to show for their rise to prominence from Reagan/Bush/Bush White House years to a Republican-controlled congress. Matt rebuts the notion that they have won any substantive victories:

"The largest Johnson-era anti-poverty program, Medicaid, is still with us, as is Medicare for senior citizens, which has only grown more generous (most recently, via a bill passed almost exclusively with Republican votes) since it's creation. Social Security, the centerpiece of the New Deal welfare state, is likewise more generous than it was in 1964. The federal government plays a larger role in funding education than it did in 1964 (and, again, it's role has gotten even larger under the Bush-DeLay regime). Abortion, illegal in 1964, is now legal, anti-sodomy laws were eliminated in the recent past, and today we have gay and lesbian couples getting married in Massacusetts..."

And Kevin concurs with more evidence of our triumph:

"Have they eliminated any departments of the federal government? No. Cut back entitlement programs? No. Increased the size of the military? No. Reduced the size of government? No. Outlawed abortion? Restricted gay rights? Brought back prayer in schools? No, no, and no. In fact, just the opposite for most of these things.

Among major conservative causes, then, the only thing left is tax cuts...

But, letting alone the fact that liberals have, with a few exceptions (family leave, and the ADA come to mind), been reduced to playing defense all that time, the advances of the conservative movement, and the declines of the liberal movement, have been much more pronounced than that.

It is true, some social safety net programs have become essentially untouchable. But 3 accomplishments by the Right should leave us in a less celebratory mood, and are taking a slow, decimating toll:

First is the shift that has occurred in the financial burden of those same programs--from people that can afford to bear it toward people that can't. Relative to inflation, minimum wage has never been lower, the cost of raising a family has never been higher, and the local tax burden has shifted the cost of federal requirements squarely on the backs of working, middle and lower-middle class Americans. As a result, the gap between the wealthiest 25% and the poorest 25% of us has never been wider. Kevin says only their tax-cut rhetoric remains, but those tax philosophies are affecting, and will continue to affect those very programs he's glad to have merely kept. The problem is not that those programs might disappear, it's that the majority of working people will nearly drown trying to keep them afloat with adequate funds.

Second, is that conservatives have convinced the Democrats that giving corporations essentially whatever they ask for is the only way they will be elected. In so doing, they've created a silent, false war between business interests and the interests of the workers and consumers that keep businesses running; silent because there's no longer a major party committed to fighting the many tentacles of the beast we might call the corporate lobby; false because the interests of business and of workers is not an opposition at all. The conservative victory is in defining an interest ("business") in a way that benefits a very few in a huge way, on the lie that it will benefit everyone. There's nothing antithetical to the interests of the economy in continuing to grow and secure a strong working middle-class, but Reublicans and most Democrats have bought into the idea that our economic interest is nearly synonymous with bottom-line corporate interest.

Third, and maybe worst of all, the Conservative movement has done here at home what they are too arrogant to accomplish in foreign policy: they've won the battle for hearts and minds. Liberals can't even use that label on themselves, the federal government is seen as the enemy--an incompetent institution, inferior to "business" in managing money, inferior to religion in providing relief, inferior to local government in looking out for our interests. I understand that America was born on a healthy mistrust of governmental tyranny--this is nothing new--but the recent surge of conservatism has invigorated a hatred of Washington that has sterilized the Democrats (devastated them in the South), and given Republicans the platform for performing all the tax/business misdeeds that have left the working middle class shrinking and the working poor growing.

Amid all this, they have convinced the media and the electorate to focus on hot-button social issues. And it's true we've won most of those battles, barely. Abortion rights, some advances in gay rights, some public health victories, defeating most school voucher attempts, and that pesky flag-burning amendment. But in the meantime, while our arms have been upraised, our government has rewired the economy and rewritten the tax code. The drain on working Americans now funnels almost directly to corporate interests, in a lie that's sold as essential to the health of the American economy.

And did I mention that foreign relations have been a bit....strained under Republican rule?

Kevin and Matt may feel some victory. And I may just be in a glass-half-empty mood, but I feel more like the wool's been pulled over our eyes. High-profile conservative defeats have come at the expense of letting them successfully change the subject. If it weren't for the nut-job religious right wing of the Conservative movement (some see them as the base; I see them as the ball-and-chain) riling Democrats, we'd be totally getting our butts kicked.

In his fabulous, inspiring book "Achieving Our Country," controversial philosopher Richard Rorty warns that if they keep on this track--celebrating social, hot-button victories while selling working Americans down the river with pro-corporation economic policies--Democrats will wake up one day to find that some hate-monger Pat Buchanan type is the people's champion.

More on that in "who's winning, Part 2" sometime later this week...