Do Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias Want A Revolution?

From Miami and the Seeds of Port Huron by Tom Geoghegan in TNR 9/2/72: http://tinyurl.com/bl64f3

The danger of the Democratic platform (and its socalled "populist" rhetoric) is that by its explicit promise of social reintegration, it exploits the political potential of the "new anxieties" of private identity. It wants ordinary people to take more responsibility for complex social crises—without having any more power than they did before. Even if more politics were the cure for the distresses in our lives, the Democrats don't seem to have the stomach to give real power to the people. The logic of participatory democracy, as the Wallace Democrats know, requires, for instance, a reshuffling of the judiciary to give the majority of people control over the root-and-branch issue in American politics — race — which David Broder has called the single issue with enough emotional punch to realign the parties.

But the courts are only one stumbling block to participatory democracy. The huge federal leviathan, which survived unscathed at Miami, is sure to compromise any new populist attack on economic privilege and corporate conspiracy. In our economy, the people's government is not another policeman on the block but the air which all big business must breathe. After a century of progressive effort, Washington is regulating and subsidizing and even drawing up the entire demand curve of many large firms. "Consumers, citizens and taxpayers constitute too diffuse and amorphous a group to compete in this league," Richard Posner wrote last fall in Public Interest. "The larger the role of government in the economy . . . the worse the problem of public powers employed for private ends will become." Though calling for tougher antitrust laws against big-business establishment, the Democratic platform accepts a federal establishment already too mammoth to work properly. Thus, the New Democrats are caught between Hayden's world, where politics is expected to deal with the whole man and his sense of helplessness, and the Great Society, where a faceless bureaucracy indemnifies anyone or any group big enough to make trouble for it. The Democrats can't promise, like Wallace, to throw briefcases into the Potomac, nor will they tear down the ancien re'gime in the name of Port Huron. In place of genuine participation, then, the Democrats are left only with cant about truth-in-government, inspired by the Pentagon papers, and a cult of "sincere-ness" inspired by Ellsberg and McGovern himself. More than the war itself, the Pentagon papers have deflected radical Democrats into conspiracy theories and image politics. A bread-and-butter issue like tax reform now figures in their rhetoric as just a particularly good example of hypocrisy in high places.

Same as it ever was.