Strategies for the new millennium.

Just was reading this column in New York Magazine by Kurt Andersen which I thought I would share, click through to read it in its entirety. Makes a couple very salient points which hopefully the right people will pick up on:

The Great Society programs of the mid-sixties—Food Stamps, Head Start, Medicaid, Medicare—were the final flowering of a social-welfare era that began with FDR’s New Deal 30 years earlier. The countervailing rightward pendulum swing—deregulation and tax cuts under Reagan, welfare reform under Clinton, still more tax cuts under Bush—has dominated our political economy for nearly the past 30 years.

In other words, the time seems to be ripening for a transformative surge of new passion and policy and political traction around the idea of economic fairness. Blaming illegal Mexican immigrants and dollar-an-hour Chinese workers for our troubles is an easy way to vent, but Lou Dobbs’s other regular targets are pretty much on the mark: corporate greedheads and their craven enablers in the political class.

For more than a generation, the Republicans have pitched themselves as the good-old-days party, appealing to the nostalgic hunger for the wholesome, coherent society and culture of mid-century, before life went crazy around 1968. What the Democrats can do now is the same thing, only different—that is, appeal to the nostalgic hunger for the sense of basic economic security and fairness that prevailed before life went crazy around 1986.