WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

From Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, Sept. 25, 2004

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

By Jack A. Smith

What happened to the Democratic Party of old — for several decades the principal American political entity, despite abundant limitations, capable of promoting progressive reforms and major social programs, a party that once described itself as the champion of working people, the poor, the downtrodden, and what used to be called the common man?

Over the years, the Democratic Party has been transformed from a party with a strong liberal sector into the political instrument of centrism — a hybrid ideology combining conservativism with liberalism, to the latter's distinct disadvantage, in order to win conservative voters to the Democratic ballot line.

This explains why Democratic Party leaders, top politicians, principal funders, and of course the powerful Democratic Leadership Council strongly supported a consummate political centrist like Sen. John F. Kerry in the primaries and now in the presidential elections to confront right-wing President George W. Bush.

As the centrist candidate, Kerry projects the conservative rhetoric of "limited government" and "fiscal responsibility" — code words for distancing the Democratic Party from a past commitment to social welfare and progressive programs, particularly those which benefit workers and the poor.

Kerry has pointedly distanced himself from the antiwar movement. The Democratic Party, in opposition to the view of most rank-and-file Democrats, supports Bush's invasion and occupation, in part to attract enough pro-war and undecided votes to win an election. It is paying a heavy moral and political price for such votes, and may not even win. This is not new. In the six decades since the end of World War II, the Democratic Party has hardly distinguished itself as a party of peace.

The Democratic Party became identified with liberalism and social reform early in Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" government (1933-45), and began to seriously drift away from both propensities several years after the end of Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" administration (1963-69). By now the party appears to have turned its back with evident finality on the advocacy of significant progressive social reforms.

Of course there are still liberal politicians of principal within the party, such as Sen. Ted Kennedy (Mass.), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), or Rep. Maurice Hinchey (N.Y.), but they have become a distinct minority, often criticized by party leaders for their disregard of centrist shibboleths.

The two parties obviously are not equal. In domestic programs, the Democrats still offer more support for the working class and middle class than the Republicans, who seems to cater only to the right, the rich, the reactionaries, and the religious. The Democratic Party has a better record on a number of issues, from reproductive rights and civil liberties to taxes and union rights, but in many regards the parties are drawing ever closer together.

For example, have you heard Kerry pledge to take serious steps to alleviate the plight of America's 36 million people who live in extreme poverty, or to narrow the widening income gap between the rich and average workers? Kerry's proposal to elevate the minimum wage from $5.15 and hour to $7 by 2007 is pathetically inadequate (try living on an income of $280 a week before deductions, and with no benefits, for a family of two or three), though of course this is superior to the GOP's defense of the existing minimum.

Kerry's official position on social programs, which he does not usually discuss in campaign appearances before the general public, is to oppose what the centrists term the "redistribution policies" embraced by Democratic liberals before they lost influence in the party. ("Redistribution" means investing some social monies in government programs to benefit the workers and the poor.)

Let's go a bit deeper. All politics, like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts — the ("conservative") right, the ("progressive") left and the (combination of the two) center. These parts themselves are divided into right, left and center. The particularities of politics in the U.S. include the following: only political formations that adhere to capitalism have the opportunity to exercise power; the political system is designed so that ruling power is confined to only two parties, Democratic and Republican; and the duopoly generally unites in foreign affairs, especially in wars, the pursuit of economic goals, military superiority and, following the implosion of the USSR, in what is euphemistically termed, "American pre-eminence," meaning hegemony.

Over the last 30 years, while the Republican Party has strengthened its right wing, the national Democratic Party has sidelined its once fairly vocal left wing, causing a realignment to the right of the parameters of American politics. Today, while power in the Republican Party is situated emphatically on the right of the political spectrum (with deviations to the far-right and center-right), power in the Democratic Party is now concentrated directly in the center (with deviations to the center-right, less so to the center-left, and none at all to the left or far-left).

As opposed to other industrialized capitalist democracies, the left in the United States has been forced to exist outside the political mainstream. This is why, of all comparable societies, America is the most backward in terms of social programs and protections for working people — from health care to day care, from welfare to racial equality, and so on. Small, progressive and left third parties with extensive social programs exist on the peripheries of the political system, but the two-party, winner-take-all nature of U.S. politics, combined with election laws designed to discourage alternative parties, has been constructed to keep them powerless and distant from the mechanisms of needed reform.

In this year's election, many Democratic voters are situated to the left of the party's centrist leadership and presidential candidate, most particularly in their opposition to the war, but the specter of "four more years" for Bush and his ultra-conservative/neo-conservative regime is convincing them to once again vote for the "lesser evil" Democratic candidate. This has become a routine for many progressive and left voters. Meanwhile, various progressive and left third parties — which will take decades to grow large enough to actually contest for power — receive little sustenance and languish on the fringes, unable to fulfill their potentials. They are even upbraided for participating in the elections.

The social fervor of the Democratic Party actually has been gradually dissipating since the Depression ended with the start of World War II, continuing during the anti-left purges of the late 1940s and throughout the obsessive anticommunism of the 1950s, stabilizing for a period during the radical 1960s and early 1970s and then speeding up its rightward drift until consolidating into unmitigated centrism with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency (1993-2001). It has remained in the center, tilting toward conservatism, ever since.

Here's an example of what I mean. Take the administration of President Richard M. Nixon (1969-74), the quintessential right-wing Republican politician liberals love to hate to this day, for good reason — "Tricky Dickey," as they called the president who was forced to vacate office in disgrace as a consequence of the Watergate scandal. Liberalism's decline has been so pronounced since then that many of Democrat Bill Clinton's policies 20 years later were to the right of those of the Nixon era. The cynical, duplicitous Nixon was certainly no liberal (he prolonged the Vietnam war in the name of ending it), but it was Clinton, the embodiment of centrism in power, who buried the days of the New Deal/Great Society programs for good, ideologically and programmatically.

In domestic policy, Nixon helped create and signed congressional acts establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Supplemental Security Income program and of other acts, including the Family Assistance Plan, which would have proved the poor with a basic survival income had it not been defeated in Congress. In foreign affairs he inaugurated détente with the Soviet Union, joined with Moscow in approving the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and ended nearly a quarter-century of U.S. enmity toward the People's Republic of China, facilitating Beijing's entry into the UN at the expense of Taiwan. He advocated these policies to advance U.S. interests, but they also benefited world peace.

By contrast, Clinton's most impressive social policy achievement was to "end welfare as we know it" by scuttling one of liberalism's most important entitlement programs — Aid to Families With Dependent Children — and embracing as his own the Republican party-initiated Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which he signed in 1996 to the applause of gleeful conservatives. This legislation sharply reduced the number of families receiving benefits but increased the ranks of the working poor. Kerry now proudly tells audiences that he strongly backed the measure.

Clinton supported few social policy measures intended to improve the lot of working people. In foreign affairs he joined neo-conservatives fanatics in promoting legislation calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, following it up with an unjust, preemptive war against Yugoslavia that circumnavigated the UN, providing the rationale and the non-UN precedent for Bush's invasion of Iraq last year. In an interview on "60 Minutes" June 20, Clinton said he considered his 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia one of his greatest accomplishments. Clinton also revealed that he was "supportive" of Bush's war in Iraq, as are all ideological centrists, though many are critical of Bush's "mishandling" of the war.

In an article last June 27, the New York Times noted that "Richard Nixon, many say, talked like a conservative but governed like a liberal" while Clinton, the newspaper continued, quoting a conservative writer, sees to it that "the left gets words, the right gets deeds." For some reason, many liberals throughout Clinton's eight-year centrist reign thought he was one of them, and probably still do — a tribute to the former president's cognomen, "Slick Willie."

Another specific example of the decline of liberalism is in the area of health care. Democratic President Harry S. Truman (1945-53) ran on a 1948 reelection platform calling for comprehensive national health insurance for all Americans. His legislation was eventually defeated in Congress by a combination of outraged Republicans who called it "socialized medicine" and conservative Democrats. Fast forward 56 years to John Kerry's health care proposal today. It's better than Bush's plan, but that's hardly an accomplishment. Compared to Truman's proposal (or to that of Kucinich in the primaries), Kerry's stingy plan is an insult to the party's former liberalism.

Just what happened to finally lead the Democratic Party to subordinate its liberal wing and quicken the march toward centrism?

The Democrats lost two elections to ultra-conservative Republican Ronald Reagan (1981-89), and a few months after the second defeat in the 1984 contest a dispirited sector of the party leadership gravitated toward the newly formed Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which advocated that the way to defeat the conservatives was to adopt many of their policies and to dispense with what was left of liberal ideology. DLC ideology guides the national party today.

Democratic politicians who adhere to the DLC's policies identify as New Democrats, a sector that includes most of the party's most important politicians and leaders. The New Democrats receive some support from another centrist group with conservative leanings, the Blue Dog Democrats, a group of some three dozen members of the House of Representatives, mainly from the south, who push the party to the right. The "Blue Dog's" opposite number is the Democratic Progressive Caucus in congress and with some state chapters, which still puts up a fight but has far less influence than the party centrists. The Congressional Black Caucus, too, often supports liberal measures.

The opportunist DLC was catapulted to ideological leadership over the entire party when one of its own, Bill Clinton (a former DLC chairman when he was governor of Arkansas), returned the Democrats to power for two terms, beginning with the 1992 election, on the basis of a conservative-leaning centrist program. After listening to Clinton's first mid-term State of the Union message in 1994, former President Reagan stated that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — only in this case it's not flattery but grand larceny."

The political left been warning about the DLC's influence for many years, but many Democratic voters seem unaware of the extent to which party leaders have embraced centrist ideology, or what it means. One of the better brief descriptions of this organization appeared in the Black Commentator on April 26: "The Democratic Leadership Council, which now writes John Kerry's scripts, is the corporate-financed faction of the Democratic Party, conceived as a mechanism to diminish Black and labor influence and to slow the defection of southern whites to the GOP. The DLC blunts the party's ability to act as a counterweight to corporate power domestically, and cultivates a mass base for American business objectives abroad. . . . The biggest threat from the DLC at present is that its hold on Kerry may cause a second term to be delivered to George Bush, without the necessity of theft."

Vice President Al Gore, a DLC adherent who lost the 2000 election although he won the popular vote, has been blamed for his own defeat by the Democratic Leadership Council. Gore, it seems, resorted to populist rhetoric late in the campaign, a breach of centrist discipline. The DLC was appalled when Gore had the temerity to declare, "I will represent the people, not the powerful." Left analysts suggest he lost because his centrism provided insufficient contrast to Bush's phony "compassionate conservativism." The party today suggests Ralph Nader caused his defeat, which has not been proven.

With Kerry, who has been ingratiating himself to the DLC leadership for years, the organization believes it has finally discovered a genuine Clinton clone, a candidate who can be trusted not to lapse into populism or to distance himself from "the powerful" corporate interests the centrists seek to serve.

The DLC was hysterically opposed to center-left Howard Dean's popular primary candidacy because of his opposition to the war and his progressive leanings, and fought on behalf of Kerry against this perceived "left" danger. Kerry a one time quasi-liberal himself, indignantly criticized Dean from the right on several occasions during the primaries. He sharply attacked the former Vermont governor for rejecting Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war, for favoring a more balanced position on the Israel-Palestine conflict than Bush's one-sided support for the Sharon government, and for correctly suggesting that the capture of Saddam Hussein would not reduce the Iraqi resistance or make the U.S. safer. (Kerry charged Dec. 15 that Dean's remark proved he didn't "have the judgment or the credibility to be the president.")

After defeating Dean in the primaries, Kerry "shed his populist tone," in the words of the New York Times. In mid-April, the Times reported, Kerry told an audience of wealthy donors that he was "an entrepreneurial Democrat" who had no intention of soaking the rich. "Fear not," he told them. "I am not a redistributionist Democrat." In early May the Democratic nominee told a meeting of the DLC that he was a friend of big business: "I refuse to lead a party that loves jobs but hates the people that create them," meaning the big corporations.

Kerry's attacks on Dean and subsequent political utterances recently earned him this praise from DLC president Bruce Reed: "He is a pragmatic centrist in the Clinton mode." The conservative columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks, put it this way May 4: "He's emerging from the shadow of Howard Dean and becoming more like the policy twin of Joe Lieberman: a pro-trade, basically conservative centrist Democrat who is willing to pour more troops into Iraq to win the war. . . . He flees from the word 'liberal.' He is quick to mention his support for the Gramm-Rudman budget balancing bill. His Clintonesque 'Contract With the Middle Class' speech last week was straight out of the gospel of the Democratic Leadership Council. His speech on Iraq on Friday, while a tad vacuous, sounded more like a Bush speech than a Ted Kennedy speech."
Since Kerry upholds all the DLC's political positions and in 2000 signed the organization's "Statement of Principles and Policy Agenda for the 21st Century," let's take a quick look at some of its provisions. "As New Democrats," it begins, "we believe in a Third Way that rejects the old left-right debate." Elsewhere the group explains that it seeks to merge left and right principles into a unified whole, neglecting to note that many progressive values have been virtually obliterated in the process.

"We believe the Democratic Party's mission is to expand opportunity, not government," the statement continues. "We believe in shifting the focus of America's anti-poverty and social insurance programs from transferring wealth to creating wealth. . . . We believe in enhancing the role that civic entrepreneurs, voluntary groups and religious institutions play in tackling America's social ills" This means counting heavily on private enterprise and voluntarism to create jobs, provide for the poor and homeless, and so on, as opposed to initiating government programs that require spending money on those in need who do not, or cannot, "earn" it.

Connected to this concept is the DLC's strong aversion to economic "redistribution." The term redistribution implies the transfer of money from the wealthy to the working class, middle class and the poor in the form of social service programs and opportunities for improving people's lives. Interestingly, there is no restriction on transferring wealth from the working people to the private sector in the form of corporate welfare, tax breaks, free research and development, subsidies, grants and government purchases to encourage them to "expand opportunities" sufficiently to fulfill the tasks that "Old" Democrats used to perform through government programs.

In terms of "strengthening environmental protection," the statement calls for "giving communities the flexibility to tackle new challenges that cannot be solved with top-down mandates." This is ambiguous, but it seems to rely on local rather that federal regulations to avert the impending ecological crisis.

The DLC's (and thus Kerry's) perspective on foreign policy and security issues — titled, amusingly, "progressive internationalism" — is based on such "new realities" as "globalization, democracy, American pre-eminence and the rise of a new array of threats ranging from regional and ethnic conflicts to the spread of missiles and biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons." It stipulates that "a strong, technologically superior defense is the foundation for U.S. global leadership. . . . The United States must speed up the 'revolution in military affairs' that uses our technological advantage to project force in many different contingencies involving uncertain and rapidly changing security threats."

The key words here are "globalization," the policy of advancing corporate exploitation of cheap labor throughout the world, often at the expense of jobs at home; "democracy," which seems to mean the spread of U.S. values by various means, including "regime change"; "American pre-eminence," signifies that in this post-Soviet world there is but one superpower in charge of global affairs, and it had better be respected as such; "superior defense" is clearly the method by which pre-eminence is maintained; and "rapidly changing security threats" provide the rationale for strengthening the national security state that the U.S. has become.

According to a July 26 statement from the DLC leadership, "In the 1990s, Clinton, Kerry, and the New Democrats changed the party in a fundamental way: They redefined the party on critical issues like fiscal discipline, welfare, crime, national service, and the size and role of government. . . . Under Kerry and Edwards, the Democratic party stands for economic growth and opportunity, not redistribution; for expanding the middle class, not the middle-class tax burden; for national strength, not national weakness; for work not welfare."

In this brief excursion, we have tried to outline the several-decade transformation of a center-left capitalist party with a tilt toward liberalism into a centrist party with a tilt toward conservatism. This mutation is still taking place, but a reversal seems unlikely. Since the Democratic Party, of the two that are permitted to rule America, has for over 70 years functioned as the least antagonistic to the needs of the working people, oppressed minorities, the labor movement, and the poor, this continuing metamorphosis is of considerable significance.

We urge our readers, especially the large majority who intend to vote for John F. Kerry, to keep this in mind, after the November elections if not before, particularly since it is improbable that the new centrist Democratic Party will ever be able to adequately serve the interests of its principal constituency. True, in degree though not in kind, the Democratic Party is preferable to the Republican Party, but is that the best the progressives and the left can do? We suggest that it's time to think the unthinkable — the turning away from "lesser evil" politics — keeping in mind that every good idea that ever worked well was once unthinkable.