Lance Selfa, author of The
Democrats: A Critical History, explains how the party that claims to
represent workers has been set up to make sure they have no power.
EARLIER THIS month, Hillary
Clinton lost the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary to Vermont Sen.
and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders by a landslide margin.
But when the New Hampshire
delegates to the party's nominating convention this summer were tallied up, Clinton
and Sanders came away with 15 each.
How could Clinton lose by more
than 20 percentage points and still get as many delegates pledged to support
her as Sanders? The answer: Most of the Democratic Party
"superdelegates" in the state, including Gov. Maggie Hassan and U.S.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen--announced that they are supporting Clinton.
So even though Sanders won
almost twice as many delegates as Clinton among those awarded based on the
election results, the support of the superdelegates pulled Clinton into a tie
in the state where she was trounced at the ballot box.
This is further evidence of a
fact of politics, not just in the U.S., but around the world: Just because an
organization has "democratic" in its name doesn't mean it functions
according to even basic concepts of democracy.
The "superdelegates"
are a group of more than 700 Democratic officeholders (including all Democratic
governors and members of Congress), Democratic National Committee members,
union officials, lower-level party apparatchiks and miscellaneous members of
the Democratic infrastructure (fundraisers, consultants, pollsters and the
like) who collectively occupy one in every six or seven delegate seats at the
Democratic National Convention.
At the convention, the
superdelegates cast votes alongside those won by the candidates through
competing in the party's caucuses and primaries.
That makes it possible for one
candidate to arrive at the convention with a majority of pledged delegates,
only to have the nomination handed to another based on the vote of the
superdelegates.
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THE SUPERDELEGATES are a
product of the Democratic Party machine's backlash against an opening up in the
1960s. The Democrats experienced a fiasco at their convention in Chicago in
1968, when the party bosses, led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, chose Vice
President Hubert Humphrey as the presidential candidate, despite Humphrey not
competing in a single party primary.
To appease disgruntled
liberals, the party afterward appointed a commission, led by Sen. George
McGovern and Rep. Donald Fraser, to draw up rules for selecting convention
delegates that enforced affirmative action and required that they be chosen in
primaries or caucuses, rather than by party leaders.
Under those rules, the next
two Democratic conventions chose one candidate (McGovern) who lost in an
historic landslide to Richard Nixon in 1972 and another (Jimmy Carter) who won,
but came to Washington as an "outsider." In 1972, much of the party
establishment refused to support McGovern on the grounds that he was too
liberal. And much of Carter's weak presidency was consumed with squabbles
between the White House and the Democratic insiders in Congress.
Once Carter lost to Ronald
Reagan in 1980, the party bosses struck back with new rules intended to place
themselves more fully at the center of the process of selecting a presidential
nominee. They realized they couldn't go back to the days when all-important
matters were decided the infamous "smoke-filled backrooms"--so they
went only part of the way back, arriving at the superdelegate system.
A Wall Street Journal article
cited Tad Devine, "a Democratic strategist who helped write the
rules," as explaining, "The idea was to encourage the party's
officeholders to attend the convention and provide a firewall in case someone
unelectable--say, a Huey Long populist or Norman Thomas socialist--swept the
primaries."
That citing of Devine is
ironic because Devine today is one of Bernie Sanders' main advisers--and
probably his chief liaison to the Democratic Party itself. We can only
speculate if he would describe Sanders as a "Norman Thomas
socialist." But even if his views on the superdelegate system have
changed, his comment speaks to a question that goes beyond just the party
rules.
Devine is a corporate lawyer
who has worked as an adviser and political operative in numerous Democratic
campaigns since the early 1980s. Even if he's "feeling the Bern" now,
there are thousands more people just like him who staff the Democratic Party
apparatus at all levels. Many move between the corporate, non-profit and
government sectors with ease.
When a Democratic
administration takes over in a city, a state, a house of Congress or the White
House, that layer of people like Devine expect political appointments, jobs,
government contracts and lobbying gigs, not to mention positions as media
commentators. It's likewise with the Republicans when their party takes office.
To the extent that a party
establishment exists in either the Democrats or Republicans, these are its most
committed apparatchiks. But they are, to a certain extent, merely "hired
hands." Beyond them lie other institutions and networks, overwhelmingly
funded with corporate money, that shape the political environment in which they
operate.
In the book The Party Decides,
Marty Cohen and his colleagues argue that the
two pro-corporate parties need to be understood as not just elected
officials, but also "religious organizations, civil rights groups...organizers,
fundraisers, pollsters and media specialists" and even "citizen
activists who join the political fray as weekend warriors."
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THE POINT here is that
"the party," broadly defined like this, organizes a number of
interests that, while invested in the Democrats winning elections, are also
biased to taking as few risks as possible to achieve that. So when union
leaderships or a Congressional Black Caucus PAC that is stuffed with corporate
lobbyists announce
their endorsement of Hillary Clinton without consulting their memberships
or bases of political support, they are simply showing a bias to preserving the
status quo.
In fact, very few of the
leaders of liberal organizations who back Clinton can say why they prefer her
policies over those of Sanders, who has been a far more consistent progressive
advocate throughout his career.
If they're backing Clinton
because they think she's "electable," we have to ask why. And here's
where corporate money and influence raise their heads.
The first thing to consider
here is who even becomes a "viable" candidate. In national elections,
where the costs run into the billions, corporate money exceeds money from labor
unions or average voters by orders of magnitude. Given that, it's a rare
politician who emerges who would seriously challenge corporate policies or
control of the economy.
The two main political parties
are conduits of corporate and individual wealth. They perform the function of
officially nominating candidates, providing the label under which they run, and
an easy identification for voters to use when they choose between them. But
before they get the party stamp of approval, candidates have already won the
"money primary," signifying that Corporate America has signed off on
them. As Thomas Ferguson argues in his book Golden Rule, "[P]arties are
more accurately analyzed as blocs of major investors who coalesce to advance
candidates representing their interests."
Secondly, what political
policies are considered "viable"? These are also policies that have
been cleared by corporate power--hatched in the nonprofit think tanks they
fund, if not written by corporate lobbyists themselves.
One
particularly crude example of this was former Big Pharma lobbyist Liz Fowler,
who helped to write the Affordable Care Act as a chief adviser to Senate Finance
Committee Chair Max Baucus of Montana, then helped administer it as an official
at Obama's Health and Human Services Department--and then departed government
for a post with Johnson & Johnson.
Given that, consider Bernie
Sanders' support for single-payer health care. There's nothing inherently
impossible or "un-American" about creating one. Quasi-single-payer
systems already exist for the elderly and veterans--they're called Medicare and
the VA.
But good luck finding more
than a handful of experts who would testify in Congress in favor of
single-payer. That's because most health-care experts are products of the
privately controlled health care industry that funds research organizations,
university institutes and lobbying organizations--and one of their main tenets
is that single-payer health care is beyond the pale.
Then there's the mainstream
media, which, we should not forget, are capitalist enterprises dedicated far
more to retailing "conventional wisdom" than covering what is
actually happening in the political world. It's remarkable that Sanders has
gained the support and general visibility he has given that the media--not
known for promoting "socialism"--virtually
ignored him all last year.
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SO THE Democratic Party's
superdelegates are only one tool in the corporate and political establishment's
toolkit for thwarting a popular will that might demand more change than the
establishment is prepared to allow. By shaping the political environment and
leaning on well-developed networks dedicated to maintaining the pro-corporate
status quo, this elite have many ways to keep control--superdelegates are only
one of them.
And if their manipulation of
funding and party rules don't work, corporations and their Democratic Party
lackeys can always withdraw support from a rebel candidate who somehow defies
them and gets nominated. Ultimately, the party apparatus prefers for the rebel
to go down to defeat rather than use the party to advance an anti-corporate
agenda.
The classic example of this
was the Democrats' all-out war against Upton Sinclair, the long-time socialist
writer who won the party's nomination for governor of California in the midst
of the Great Depression in 1934, running on a progressive platform and the
slogan "End Poverty in California."
The Democratic establishment,
from President Franklin Roosevelt on down, funded a red-baiting scare campaign
against Sinclair, created a fake third party to siphon votes from him, and
ultimately guaranteed re-election for the Republican Gov. Frank Merriam.
Despite the enthusiasm of his
supporters, his success at raising money based on small donations--and even
winning more votes than Clinton in the early primary races so far--Bernie
Sanders is still operating at a huge disadvantage to Hillary Clinton. No wonder
so many people think the political system is rigged.
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