Democratic Elite Could Care
Less About the Life of the Party
“When you go to other
countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and wider; here in
America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans—we’re fighting inside
the 40-yard line.” —President Barack Obama, Nov. 20, 2013
Well, not anymore, President
Obama.
Much has been written about
the effect of Donald Trump in transforming the Republican Party over the past
three years. The upcoming Democratic primary will illustrate the effect he had
in changing the Democratic Party over the same time period. Trump has turned
Obama’s Democratic Party into one in which the ideological playing field is
much wider than before the 2016 elections.
The 2016 Republican primary
proved how little credibility GOP leaders had with their rank-and-file voters.
The 2020 Democratic primary will do the same for Democrats.
Trump widened the Democrats’
ideological playing field by humiliating its establishment with his victory in
2016, when it sold the candidacy of Hillary Clinton to its base by touting her
supposed electability. More importantly, Trump has transformed the party by
convincing its progressive base that there is no future for centrist politics
in a country whose middle class is shrinking and whose working class is being
pauperized.
What is important to
understand is that the current contradictions between both sets of party
leaderships and their voters is not as much about issues and ideology as it is
about who has won and who has lost the economic and cultural struggles of the past
40 years. This divide is the most revealing fact of American life in our era.
Despite the vehemence of the
fight between the elites of both parties, they have a lot more in common with
each other than they would ever care to admit to their respective political
bases. Life for the political elites on all levels has been very good and is
getting better. Their children go to the same private schools and rarely serve
in the endless wars their parents keep extending, while the political elites
graduate from public office and join law firms and lobbying shops that make
them millions.
At the same time, the
ever-more expensive campaigns in the post-Citizens United world have made the
entire election industry of consultants, pollsters and pundits on both sides very
rich, no matter how reckless, incompetent or mediocre so many of them have been
proved to be.
All of this is during an era
in which, according to the Federal Reserve, the bottom 47% of American
income-earners can’t come up with $400 in case of an emergency.
What the two sets of party
elites also share is contempt for their parties’ base of activists, voters and
non-donor constituencies. Aside from paying them lip service during election
season, Republican elites have no use for their base of religious voters,
anti-immigrant activists and small-business people. There is no better
illustration than the fact that during the two years of united Republican Party
control of the entire federal government, no wall was funded or built at the
border, Planned Parenthood was not defunded and not a single piece of
legislation favored by the party’s base of social conservatives or
anti-immigration activists was passed into law. Instead, party leaders promptly
passed budget-busting tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest 1% of
Americans—hardly the reason most rank-and-file Republican voters supported
Trump in 2016.
Similarly, Democratic Party
leaders have no use for the priorities of their voters and activists, who by
large margins support Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal and an end to our
militarized foreign policy. The Democratic leadership rewards its voters, who
handed it historic victories last November by dispatching Wendell Primus, the
lead health adviser to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to meet
with Blue Cross Blue Shield executives to reassure them that they
should not worry about any legislation that would establish a Medicare-for-all
program. This is done while it publicly
ridiculed and then shelved the Green New Deal proposal and attacked
Trump on such foreign policy issues as his proposed withdrawal
of American forces from Syria.
The realization of how little
the agendas of ordinary people matter to the elites of both parties has made it
a lot more acceptable for their betrayed bases to look for alternatives, which
would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In fact, this realization is the
genesis of the populist moment in current American politics.
The vehemence of opposition to
Trump over the past two years has hidden the internal struggle in the
Democratic Party between what can be described as the new left, symbolically
led by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, with the united front of the Democratic establishment, which
includes most former and current elected officials, think tanks, the donor
classes, the liberal faction of establishment media and the Praetorian Guard of
conventional political thinking: the Democratic consulting class.
What the Democratic
establishment will be looking for in the 2020 elections is the restoration of
Clinton- and Obama-era politics, which, despite the populist rhetoric,
delivered war abroad and subservience to the financial elites at home. But what
new left Democrats are looking for is peace abroad and war with the financial
elites at home. These two sides are not compatible in the long run, and their
collective opposition to Trump will only go so far in reconciling these
contradictions.
What the Democratic Party’s
new left needs to understand is that the establishment will fight far more
viciously to prevent a new left victory than Republican Party elites did to
defeat Trump in the 2016 primary because, putting aside all his
anti-establishment rhetoric, the man’s basic political incoherence and
fraudulent nature meant that he can be manipulated to serve elite interests
while betraying his voters.
In comparison to Trump, the
new left Democrats will be perceived as a far greater threat to party elites
and the donor/owner classes of both parties. If any of the new left candidates
win the Democratic Party nomination, many in Democratic establishment ranks,
especially among its nonelected and institutional sections, will be open to
lining up behind a “centrist” independent candidacy. This will guarantee four
more years of Trump, a price many of them will be willing to pay if the
alternative is a Democratic Party transformed into a genuinely social
democratic alternative to the Republican Party.
What the entire American
political establishment will learn over the next two years is that the
political world that existed before the 2016 elections will not be put back
together again. Trump, for all his endless faults, is merely the symptom, not
the cause, of the crisis facing the United States. The cause of the crisis is
an American elite that has for too long mistaken its cynicism for realism,
hubris for wisdom, and the sending of other people’s children to fight wars
lost long ago for patriotism.
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