Ever since the Democratic
Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal centrism
associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic
Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of
remonstrations in the left-liberal press about the need to run “progressive”
candidates if the party wants to win. The latest instance of this was a post to
the Jacobin FB page that stated: “By running to the right, Democrats
insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring agenda.
Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory.”
The question of why Democrats
are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some countries,
elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an
elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist
parliamentarian but a trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica
in 1948 and in Chile in 1973 respectively.
In the 2010 midterm elections,
there was a massive loss of seats in the House of Representatives for the
Democrats. In this month’s midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that a “Blue
Wave” would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans—put them
in the driver’s seat. It turned out to be more of a “Blue Spray”, not to speak
of the toothless response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately
about how the Democrats can reach across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging
racists of the Republican Party.
Out of curiosity, I went to
Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the “losers” in 2010. Did they have
to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round,
Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida
sent a letter to Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up
BP’s claim that seafood in the Gulf of Mexico was okay to eat. After being
voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century Group, a lobbying firm
founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields. A 1980
article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul Weyrich.
Glenn Nye, who lost his job as
a Virginia congressman, his considerable CV that included working for the
Agency for International Development (AID) and serving in various capacities
during the occupation of Iraq to land a nice gig as Senior Political Advisor
for the Hanover Investment Group.
John Spratt from South
Carolina was described by Dow Jones News as “one of the staunchest fiscal
conservatives among House Democrats.” That was enough for him to land a job
with Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform
that was supposed to come up with a strategy to reduce the deficit. Just the
sort of thing that was calculated to lift the American economy out of the worst
slump since the 1930s. Not.
Pennsylvania’s Chris Carney
was a helluva Democrat. From 2002 to 2004, he was a counterterrorism analyst
for the Bush administration. He not only reported to Douglas Feith in the
Office of Special Plans and at the Defense Intelligence Agency, researching
links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but served as an interrogator in
Guantanamo. These qualifications landed him a job as director of homeland
security and policy strategy for BAE Systems when the House of Representatives
gig ended. A British security and munitions powerhouse, BAE won a contract
worth £4.4bn to supply the Saudis with 72 fighter jets – some of which were
used to bomb Red Cross and Physician Without Borders hospitals in Yemen.
With such crumb-bums losing in
2010, you’d think that the Democrats would be convinced that their best bet for
winning elections would be to disavow candidates that had ties to the national
security apparatus and anything that smacked of the DLC’s assault on the
welfare state. Not exactly. When the candidates are female, that might work in
the party’s favor like sugar-coating a bitter pill.
In Virginia, former CIA
officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria defeated
Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania,
former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie
Sherrill of New Jersey also helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill
calculated that moving to the center would serve her own and the party’s
interests. She told MSNBC: “As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew Republican
missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is
something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with
everyone.”
An article titled “‘Montclair
Mikie’ Sherrill recast as ‘Moderate Mikie’ as Webber attacks in NJ House race”
described her Road to Damascus conversion to DLC principles:
For Sherrill, a newcomer to
politics, the 11th has proved to be a tricky terrain. She is seen as a
progressive, but appears wary of carrying the “Trump resistance” banner into
the fray. At Wednesday’s debate, Sherrill was determined to show she is more
Morris Plains than Montclair.
There were no heated vows to
fight Trump, even though being “appalled” by the president was what motivated
her to run in the first place. The Nov. 6 midterms loom as a referendum on
Trump’s presidency, but you would never have guessed that watching Wednesday’s
contest.
Sherrill repeatedly promised
to be bipartisan — a far cry from the combative, confrontational tone that many
in the party’s grass roots are demanding.
On tax policy she sounded more
centrist Republican than mainstream liberal Democrat, and she refused to
endorse issues like free community college tuition, which has become a popular
talking point for Democrats and was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer.
“Without understanding how
that would be paid for, I haven’t supported it because it sounds like it would
raise taxes on our families,’” she said.
The moderate tone puzzled some
of her ardent “resistance” activists who mobilized around her candidacy.
For Eric Fritsch, 32, a
Teamster for the film and television industry from West Orange, it was jarring
to hear Sherrill oppose Democratic Party wish-list items like free community
college tuition or “Medicare-for-all” coverage out of fear that it may raise
taxes. She used the same excuse to sidestep supporting a “carbon tax” to reduce
global warming.
“By going on the defensive
about taxes … she is accepting a Republican framing that we don’t want to be
responsible with taxes in the first place,’” said Fritsch, who insisted that he
remains a “very enthusiastic” Sherrill supporter.
It should be abundantly clear
by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting a candidate in
2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry
past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi,
Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, et al have no intention of allowing
upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to spoil their plans, even if it means a
second term for Donald Trump.
No matter. Jacobin editor
Bhaskar Sunkara urges his readers and DSA comrades to plunge ahead trying to
consolidate a “socialist” caucus in the Democratic Party. From his perspective,
working in the Democratic Party seems to be the “most promising place for
advancing left politics, at least in the short term.” Keep in mind that
Sherrill raised $1.9 million for her campaign and my old boss from Salomon
Brothers Michael Bloomberg ponied up another $1.8 million just for her TV ads.
Does anybody really think that “socialist” backed candidates will be able to
compete with people like Sherrill in the primaries? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
was able to defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something
of a fluke. Until there is a massive shake-up in American society that finally
reveals the Democratic Party to be the capitalist tool it has been since Andrew
Jackson’s presidency, it is likely that a combination of big money and
political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.
Furthermore, the takeover of
the House might turn out to be a hollow victory in the light of how Trump
rules. His strategy hasn’t been to push through legislation except for the tax
cut. Remember the blather about investing in infrastructure? His minions in
Congress have no intention of proposing a trillion or so dollars in highway or
bridge repair, etc. With Nancy Pelosi fecklessly talking about how the two
parties can collaborate on infrastructure, you can only wonder whether she has
been asleep for the past two years.
Donald Trump has been
transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive
powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their
stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as Malcolm X
once put it. Two days ago, the NY Times wrote about how the “Trump Administration
Spares Corporate Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties”. It did not need legislation
to help big banks rip off the public. All it took was naming former head of
BankOne Joseph Otting comptroller of the currency. Senator Sherrod Brown, one
of the few Democrats with a spine, called Trump out: “The president’s choice
for watchdog of America’s largest banks is someone who signed a consent order —
over shady foreclosure practices — with the very agency he’s been selected to
run.”
For all of the dozens of
articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any deal with the
difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy
that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put
considerable restraints on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to
save capitalism. Perhaps if the USA had a social and economic crisis as deep as
Germany’s and left parties as massive as those in Germany, FDR might have
embarked on a much more ambitious concentration camp program, one that would
have interred trade unionists as well as Japanese-Americans. Maybe even Jews if
they complained too much.
By contrast, Trump is imposing
a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover “Starve the
Beast” Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch
Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and
thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn’t be happier with
the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest
policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on
their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to
defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is
unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New
Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart’s is not her business, after
all.
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