Joan Walsh: How the Democrats Shellacked Themselves

"Winner-Take-All Politics" delivers its message in neon-bright numbers, but they are numbers all the same. The charts depicting the increasing gap between the uber-rich and the rest of us will blow your mind -- if you like charts. The narrative is lively, yet wonky. If you want to get its wisdom, you're going to have to sit still for some statistics. Here's what I thought was most important:

* The richest 1 percent of Americans now take in almost a quarter of national income, up from about 8 percent during the Carter administration.
* Their after-tax income rose 256 percent in that same time, while the middle fifth of the country saw its after-tax income grow by about 20 percent.
* In roughly the same period, the percent by which taxes and government benefits reduced inequality dropped by a quarter.
* Had national income grown the way it did in the generation after World War II, that middle fifth would have earned $12,300 more income; the top 1 percent would have earned almost $700,000 less.

While those depressing numbers tell one kind of story, what's most important is the story of the political forces that created those economic outcomes. Hacker and Pierson describe a "30-year war," and it's a class war, but they show the way it featured Democrats fighting on the wrong side, against the FDR-New Deal coalition, way too much of the time. Where Rick Perlstein's fantastic and influential "Nixonland" places the start of that war in the Nixon administration -- and certainly Nixon's politics of resentment, picking off the angry white working class, created the cultural conditions for what was to come -- "Winner-Take-All Politics" argues that the Democrats' troubles, and cave-ins, really began with Jimmy Carter. The Nixon administration was actually the high-water mark for the New Deal and Great Society: Social spending was higher than even under Lyndon Johnson, and of course the Republican president presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the passage of the Clean Water Act; though he bashed welfare, his family assistance proposal was progressive, and his healthcare reform proposals, rejected by Democrats who wanted more, were arguably better than the historic compromise hammered out under Obama.

Enter Jimmy Carter, a Southern upstart who'd been soured on the labor movement during the devastating intra-party squabbles of 1972, a good-government reformer who was decent on civil rights but had no defined class agenda. He took office when Democrats also controlled the House and the Senate -- and he got almost nothing of the Democratic agenda accomplished. Labor law reform, full employment, an Office of Consumer Representation; all either failed or were compromised beyond effectiveness. Partly that was thanks to the rise of a new big business lobby in Washington, and partly it was thanks to Democrats' being ideologically rudderless. Despite Nixon's resounding crash in the wreckage of Watergate, they were running scared on defense and on the economy.

Sound familiar?