There Never Were Any "Good Old Days" In The Democratic Party

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   There Never Were Any "Good Old Days" In The Democratic Party
by Howie Hawkins

March 1, 2004

"A liberation movement for the Democratic Party" is one of the goals
Ralph Nader stated for his campaign in the question and answer period
of his February 23 press conference announcing his 2004 independent
presidential candidacy. He went on to a lament that progressives had
let their Democratic Party slip away to corporate interests since
about 1980.

While Nader is certainly correct to say that the Democrats are more
thoroughly corporatized than ever, perpetuating the myth that the
Democrats were ever a progressive party undermines the cause of
independent progressive politics and his own campaign.

Indeed, whatever his intentions, Nader implicitly gave wavering
voters permission to vote for Gore in 2000 with such statements as
the Democrats could take back Green votes by going back to their
progressive roots, and that one positive result of his campaign would
be to create a spillover vote down the ticket to help elect Democrats
to Congress.

In 2000 and now again in 2004, Nader seems to be underselling his own
prospects by giving the Democrats more credit and import than they
deserve. Nader had far more support and sympathy than the final 3%
vote on Election Day in 2000 indicated. A Zogby poll found that 18
percent of the population seriously considered voting for Nader. An
analysis of the National Election Study data by Harvard political
scientist Barry Burden shows that only 9% of the people who thought
Nader was the best candidate actually voted for him. If people had
not voted strategically for the lesser evil, Nader would have had
over 30 million votes instead of 3 million and might have won the
election, especially if he had been allowed in the debates.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a substantial proportion of Nader
supporters thought Bush was the lesser evil. While 54% of the people
who thought Nader was the best candidate voted for Gore in order to
defeat Bush, 37% of the people who preferred Nader voted for Bush in
order to defeat Gore. Nader's populist anti-corporate, clean
politics, environmentalist issues clearly appealed to substantial
sections of the bases of both major parties as well as independents.

Burden also shows that Nader would have won the election using the
Condorcet system of preference voting in which voters rank each
candidate against each other candidate, the system which most voting
system experts consider the fairest and most accurate way to reflect
voters' preferences. In a Condorcet preference vote, Nader would have
won the 2000 election. This is the only presidential election for
which there is data to conduct a Condorcet election retrospectively,
in which the Condorcet winner was not the actual winner. (See
http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/hweisberg/conference/burdosu.pdf)

Nader would do better to simply state that the Democratic Party is
beyond reform, completely captured by corporate interests, and that
progressives need their own party independent of corporate influence.
Ironically, it is the same "liberal intelligentsia" that Nader now
scolds for a failure of nerve that perpetuates the myth that the
Democratic Party is potentially progressive. This myth, to which
Nader also contributes by some of his statements, encourages
activists to try to reform the Democratic Party from within.

But what progressive roots of the Democratic Party are there?

Surely they don't mean the slaveholders and Indian exterminators of
the pre-Civil War Democratic Party. In the 1800s, the only post-Civil
War Democratic administrations, those of Grover Cleveland, were not
much different from the Republicans in their hard money economic
policies that were killing the agrarian economy. While Cleveland did
clean up some of the corruption that had become so endemic after some
25 years of Republican rule, Cleveland was no friend of the working
people as evidenced by his use of federal troops against the march on
Washington by Coxey's Army of the unemployed seeking public works for
jobs and against the Pullman railroad strike.

The idea that the Democrats are a progressive party is a 20th century
idea. And progressives entering the Democratic Party to reform it is
an old and failed approach. Since 1936, when the labor movement and
the Communists, then the largest and most influential current on the
Left, dropped all serious pretenses of independent labor or socialist
politics and joined the Democratic Party coalition, reforming the
Democratic Party has been the dominant strategy on the progressive
side of American politics. The new left social movements emerging in
the 1960s -- the civil rights, peace, women's, community organizing,
and environmental movements -- oriented to the Democratic Party.
There were the McCarthy and McGovern campaigns, a New Democratic
Coalition and a Rainbow Coalition, a Jerry Brown campaign in 1992,
all aimed at reform.

The result of all these decades of reform Democratic politics is a
Democratic Party that has moved steadily to the Right because it
could take its Left for granted. The Bayard Rusin/Michael Harrington
strategy of realignment has come to pass as the Dixiecrats became
Republicans in the South, but the Democratic Party has continued to
move Right and its corporate interests dominate its labor and reform
movement constituencies more than ever. There are no platform fights
anymore. The last fight was over the Jackson demands in 1984. In
order to be accepted within the Democratic Party, reform Democrats
have silenced themselves and lined up behind the long line of
lesser-evils against the even-worse Republicans.

Instead of speaking with its own voice and putting its own analysis
and program before the public, the Left has tried to rely on
Democratic politicians to speak for them. As a consequence, the Left
has largely disappeared from American public affairs. Today, the Left
in the corporate media is simply the Democrats; anybody to the left
and independent of the Democrats is regarded by the corporate media
as marginal, if not downright delusional, as their treatment of Nader
illustrates.

In fact, the Democratic Party has been the graveyard of progressive
movements for social change since the populists disappeared into it
with the Peoples Party/Democratic Party fusion campaign of William
Jennings Bryan in 1896. In the current election, a new generation is
learning this same hard lesson. The Dean campaign captured the
strongest current of the reform spirit in the Democratic grassroots
in 2003. But between the Party establishment and the corporate media,
they were cut off at the knees. Here is the testimony of one young
Deaniac who recently contacted the Green Party of New York State:
"I'm a 27 year old attorney living in _____ County New York. I've
been active in the _____ County Democratic Party Committee, and was
recently appointed the Secretary of that organization. Until Governor
Dean's withdrawal from the Democratic Party's Presidential Nomination
Campaign today, I thoroughly believed that the man who represented
the last best hope to reform the Democratic Party and return it to
its far more progressive roots would do precisely that.
Unfortunately, his withdrawal, coupled with the work I have done
inside the Democratic Party has made it clear to me that the Party
cannot be reformed neither from the inside, nor from the outside. I
did not vote for my Party's nominee in either of the last two
Presidential elections, and while I have long been hopeful the party
would once again put forward a leader as inspiring as President
Franklin Roosevelt, I am now certain that the Party must go the way
of the Whigs in the 1860 election and fade away to be replaced by a
new progressive third-party that will ultimately become the second
party. I am certain that to accomplish this, such a third-party must
begin to organize at the local level and effectively work to build
itself from the ground up. After my final protest vote for Governor
Dean in the March 2nd primary, on March 3rd, I intend to change my
party registration to Green...." It is exasperating to see so many
peace and justice activists and "left" intellectuals still arguing in
2004 that the best way to fight war and repression in 2004 is to
support the Democrats who have supported Bush's program of war and
repression. Contrary to what liberal intelligentsia says, Bush is not
a big departure from the past. His policies thoroughly reflect a
bipartisan consensus on the central foreign and domestic policies of
concern to the corporate elite, a consensus that has been actively
forged and adapted to changing circumstances by corporate elites for
more than a century.

It would go completely against the grain of the Democratic Party's
history to oppose Bush's military adventures abroad and repression at
home. Indeed, historically, the Democrats have been the more
"internationalist," which is to say the more aggressively
imperialist, of the two corporate-backed parties.

Bush's policy in Southwest Asia is the Carter Doctrine in action. The
Carter Doctrine essentially declared that the U.S. would use military
force to control access to Persian Gulf oil. It was under Carter, in
July 1979 (six months before the Soviet invasion) that the CIA began
recruiting, training, arming, and assisting attacks by the
fundamentalist Islamist militias in Afghanistan that yielded today's
Taliban and al Qaeda. They were supported against the secular
pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan in hopes of provoking a Soviet
intervention, successfully as it turned out, as Carter's National
Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, boasted to Le Nouvel
Observateur in France (Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76) during the Clinton
administration a few months after it had initiated a new covert war
in Afghanistan.

But the history of Democratic interventionism and repression is much
deeper. Woodrow Wilson sent US troops to suppress popular social and
anti-colonial revolutions in Mexico, Russia, China, The Philippines,
Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and
Cuba, a far more expansive counter-revolutionary record than the
"Rough Riders" of the previous Taft and Teddy Roosevelt
administrations. After enabling US capitalists to enrich themselves
selling arms to the allies in World War I, Wilson (who in 1916 ran as
the peace candidate to keep us out of that war) threw US troops in at
the end in 1917-18 to secure an expansion of US influence in the
post-war redivision of world power and a share of the spoils of
victory. Meanwhile, Wilson brought segregation to Washington, D.C.
and ignored the Bill of Rights as his administration jailed or
deported 7,000 peace and freedom activists, including Socialist
Presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who would receive over 900,000
votes while campaigning from jail in 1920.

FDR is the Democratic president who many people think of as embodying
the "good old days" of the Democratic Party. But racism, repression,
and imperialism reigned in his administration as well. Accommodating
the southern Dixiecrat wing of the Party, Roosevelt allowed federal
New Deal programs to be segregated in the South, meaning the
exclusion of most African Americans from access to them in the South
and many places in the North and West as well. He appointed the
openly anti-Semitic Breckinridge Long to handle the refugee crisis as
fascism rose in Europe, insuring that Jews could not immigrate to the
U.S. as the holocaust unfolded in Europe. Japanese Americans were
sent to concentration camps. Although the National Labor Relations
Act passed under Roosevelt to normalize trade union organizing,
Roosevelt authorized the use of federal troops to break strikes in
many cases.

The core financial support for the Democrats under Roosevelt came
from the capital-intensive oil and manufacturing industries and
internationally-oriented banks that favored more muscular US
imperialism based on state intervention in the economy at home and to
encourage business-friendly regimes abroad. (See Thomas Ferguson and
Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future
of American Politics, Hill and Wang, 1986.) As World War II broke
out, like Wilson in World War I before him, Roosevelt feigned a
hands-off approach as he prepared to enter the war to enhance US
power in the post-war world. From 1939 to 1945, Roosevelt's State
Department enlisted the Council on Foreign Relations to plan to make
the U.S. the dominant power in the post-war world. Called the Grand
Area Strategy, it planned to make the U.S. the dominant military
power and in control of the Grand Area, which meant the non-German,
until the fortunes of the war turned in 1943, when the Grand Area
became the non-Russian world. (See Laurence H. Shoup and William
Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and
United States Foreign Policy, Monthly Review Press, 1977.)

The only real difference between Roosevelt's Grand Area Strategy and
Bush Jr.'s infamous National Security Strategy of 2002 for world
domination is the geographic scope of the imperial ambition. The
Grand Area Strategy became the post-war containment strategy against
Soviet Union which sought to make US satellites of all countries
outside the Soviet sphere of influence. Bush Sr. expanded this
imperial ambition to include the whole world with his declaration of
a New World Order after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The incoming
Clinton administration declared its complete agreement. As Clinton's
first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, stated it in a 1993
speech entitled "From Containment to Enlargement," the U.S. would
accomplish this goal by "Diplomacy where we can; force where we must."

But going back to the next Democratic administration, that of Harry
Truman, we find the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though the
Japanese were seeking to surrender. Those bombs were aimed at
establishing US power in the post-war world. Back at home, though
Truman nominally opposed the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, once
passed, he made ample use of it to send in federal troops to break
several major strikes. In 1948, the Democrats adopted universal
national health insurance as a platform plank. But when they held the
presidency along with majorities in Congress under Kennedy, Johnson,
Carter, and Clinton, they failed to enact that plank. Clinton had the
plank removed in the 1996 platform.

President Kennedy is somehow portrayed today as a champion of civil
rights. But reality is that Kennedy approached the issue politically,
trying to walk a tightrope between his supporters in both the
segregationist and civil rights camps. It wasn't until June 1963, as
the March on Washington loomed, that Kennedy sent a watered down
version of the Civil Rights Act to Congress. Kennedy also authorized
the FBI's wire tapping of Martin Luther King. He kept his promise to
southern Dixiecrats to not challenge right-to-work laws no matter
what the Democratic platform said. He authorized the Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba, the assassination and coup against Diem in South
Vietnam, where he continued Eisenhower's policy of sending military
advisors, and played chicken with nuclear weapons against Khrushchev
during the Cuban missile crisis.

The Johnson administration is often portrayed as another touchstone
of the progressive tradition in the Democratic Party. It is true that
the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid,
and an underfunded War on Poverty program were initiated under
enormous pressure from the civil rights movement. But Johnson is also
the president who sent liberal icons Hubert Humphrey and Walter
Mondale to inform the Mississippi Freedom Democrats that they should
accept two honorary seats at the 1964 Democratic convention while the
segregationist Mississippi Democrats would be seated. After the
convention, Johnson campaigned as the peace candidate and then
escalated in Vietnam.

The next Democratic administration, under Jimmy Carter, not only
enunciated the Carter Doctrine already mentioned, but began the
restoration of Cold War levels of military spending after a brief
post-Vietnam scaling back under Ford. Behind a rhetorical cover of
human rights, Carter gave strong support to many of the world's most
repressive regimes, including Marco's Philippines, the Shah's Iran,
Mobutu's Zaire, Suharto's Indonesia during its bloody annexation of
East Timor, South Korea as it slaughtered hundreds of protesters,
apartheid South Africa under the guise of "constructive engagement,"
the murderous Central American regimes with their death squads in
Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and Saddam Hussein's rise to
power in Iraq. With Presidential Directive 59 in 1979, Carter made it
US policy to plan for a "limited" nuclear war, including a first
strike policy.

On the domestic front, just a few years after Nixon had declared "we
are all Keynesians now," Carter reflected the turn in the corporate
elite from Keynesian to neoliberal policies for managing capitalism.
This policy turn was easy for the Carter administration to do since
some two dozen of its top officials had been members of the corporate
planning organization, the Trilateral Commission. Neoliberalism
includes cuts in social spending, hikes in regressive taxes, cuts in
progressive taxes, privatization, deregulation, corporate-managed
trade, union busting, and corporate welfare. Taken together, these
policies mean the stick of austerity for workers (on the theory it
makes us work harder and raises productivity) and the carrot of
welfare for the corporate rich (on the theory they will invest and
the benefits of increased jobs and tax revenues will trickle down to
the rest of us). Neoliberal austerity became the post-Keynesian
economic policy of the corporate rulers as they ran into the internal
limits to profits and growth under the Keynesian welfare/warfare
state. Carter initiated these trends in 1978 with the appointment of
Volker to the head the Federal Reserve and the combination of social
program cutbacks and military spending hikes.

Reagan and Bush Sr. (as well as their counterparts in other
countries, conservative and social democratic alike) carried
neoliberalism further. But it was the Clinton administration that
carried them further than Reagan and Bush Sr. could have dreamed.

Among the highlights: NAFTA and GATT/WTO, "welfare reform" and
massive privatization under the rubric of "reinventing government,"
deregulation in energy, finance, and telecommunications, and Star
Wars, growing military budgets, and sending US troops into combat 46
times (more times than Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. combined).

On the social issues, Clinton was terrible despite his "I feel your
pain" pretensions. No effort was made to repeal the Hyde Amendment
barring federal funding for abortions or the ban, initiated under
Carter, on funding abortions in overseas aid programs. Gays were
dismissed with "don't ask, don't tell" in the military and the
Defense of Marriage Act. OSHA and EEOC were gutted of funds and
staffing. Civil rights litigation at Justice was cut down to below
the paltry Bush Sr. level. White racists had already been signaled
Clinton's real intentions during his 1992 presidential campaign with
his well-publicized trip back to Arkansas to see through the
execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a retarded black man, and his scolding
of Jesse Jackson at a Rainbow Coalition meeting for inviting Sister
Souljah. Several repressive federal anti-crime, anti-terrorism, and
drug war bills, most notably the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act, laid the legal groundwork for Bush's USA PATRIOT Act and
brought US incarceration rates to the highest in the world.

Now, which Democratic administration embodies the progressive
Democratic tradition to which we are supposed to return?

The Democrats might beat Bush, but they are not going to beat
Bushism, which is basically the Bipartisan Consensus around
neoconservative militarism and neoliberal economics. What is now
called Bushism is not radical departure, but a continuation of this
bipartisan consensus, with the majority of Democrats in Congress
voting for Bush's key programs: the tax cuts, war budgets, war
powers, and the PATRIOT Act.

Ralph Nader may be criticized for contributing to the myth that the
Democrats might still somehow be transformed into a progressive
party, but he is certainly right to scold the "liberal
intelligentsia" for failing to fight for their beliefs inside or
outside of the Democratic Party. Now they are converging around John
Kerry on the grounds that he is "electable" against Bush Jr. without
even so much as demands being made for the Democratic platform. Kerry
voted for NAFTA, welfare reform, the PATRIOT Act, and the war to
occupy Iraq. How different is that from Bush Jr.?

We cannot rely on the center-right Democrats to fight the hard-right
Republicans. We never could. Now, not in 2008 or 2012, is when we
should be building an independent progressive movement and party that
can fight for democratic social change. In 2004, the Nader candidacy
is the best embodiment of that cause we have.

Howie Hawkins is a Teamster truck unloader and Green Party activist
in Syracuse, New York.

The Greens on Swans: <http://www.swans.com/library/subjects/green.html>

<http://www.swans.com/library/art10/hhawk01.html>   *****
--
Yoshie

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