December 14, 2017
Introduction:
Dear Citizens, Elected Officials, and Democratic Party Officers:
What follows below, in two parts, is an essay of criticism and hope, about the deepest commitments of the Democratic Party: who they are, who they represent, and what they stand for. Some may chuckle over the very notion of a political party in 2017 having a “soul,” but feel free to substitute the late theologian Paul Tillich’s notion that “soul” here means the party’s “ultimate values.”
Part One supplies the context of our historical moment, and the central role that perceptions about our economic system play in that important framing. It is my belief, following Wolfgang Streeck’s lead, that capitalism is in a lot of trouble, not delivering for the bottom 60-80%, but with no clear successor in sight, Bernie Sanders’ Social Democracy platform being the leading contender in the U.S. Since the “Street” and the two leading economic “indicators” are doing so “well,” I have some explaining to do, don’t I? I hope my effort doesn’t come across in the spirit of Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me.” I do get down, though, into the weeds growing in the hoped for “Intersectionality” of the many movements that make up today’s “Progressive” wing of the party, where the energy is. Each of these movements names a different most pressing “national problem,” with opposition to Trump supplying the current thin coating of glue; it isn’t yet enough to forge a compelling new governing platform.
Part Two zeroes in on the actual interactions between the Party, the Sanders insurgents, the Reform Commission, and the personnel changes under new party Chairmen Tom Perez. Brace yourself for some surprises.
It takes an essay this length, some 6,000 words, because I am fighting the currents of our time. Stop and reflect, if that’s possible these days, on how fast the topic of the week has shifted in the national news cycles since the August events in Charlottesville, Virginia. We’ve gone from refighting the Civil War, and Neo-Nazi torchlight parades, to Korean nuclear confrontations, global warming amplified natural disasters, wet ones, the endless procession of women victims of male outrages and workplace crimes…to the fall elections and the upset in Alabama’s Senate race. Did I forget anything? Oh yes, another round of horrendous wildfires in California, weather intensified. So how is the citizen to focus on the state of the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party amidst this circus-kaleidoscope of civic life? Only if someone pulls the pieces together in one place is my response.
So here it goes.
billofrights
Frostburg, MD
Part One: The Fault Lines
From time to time, I’ve been known to comment on the shape and feel of being a registered Democrat, especially out here in the Red State portion of Blue State Maryland - the Western Mountain region, formally considered to be part of Appalachia, and of the Appalachian Regional Commission, the “ARC” that Trump wants to zero out in the budget. Our two counties voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries, and gave Donald Trump margins approaching 2:1 in the Presidential election even as the full state again went decisively for Mrs. Clinton, as it did in the primary.
It’s my strong impression after three years in the region that the dynamics between me and the Democratic Party mirrors the alienation that independent voters feel, as well as the angry Trump voters, tensions which were visible long ago to sharp regional observers, like the late Joe Bageant in his Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (2008).
Like other Democrats, and just decent human beings, I’m pleased when the revulsion against Trump and candidates like Roy Moore in Alabama result in a rising tide to turn out the Republican Right. However, our national politics, as in much of Europe, has seen emotional waves time and time again over the past three decades, in both directions, so my focus now is on the substance of what the Democratic Party does or doesn’t stand for, which will determine its viability over the long haul.
I put my thoughts into a posting at the Daily Kos back on June 30th of this year, with quite a bit of detail, complaining about the poor communication between the party and its registered voters, and the high prices it charged to attend the Western Maryland Summit, whose tickets were tiered at $80 - and $35 for students. Given the demographics of our local colleges, that’s an insult right out of the gate, and a clear deterrent to participation for the poorer “rank and file.” That late April Western Maryland event (which showcased the gubernatorial candidates) followed the “invitation only” feel of a Center for American Progress Ideas Conference (the CAP is sometimes called the Clinton’s think tank) held in May at an upscale Georgetown hotel, where the tentative topic was an economic Marshall Plan with job guarantees to the non-college educated working class voters, via a WPA type program. That’s the closest the party has come to travelling down the progressive populist road on economics, despite the Senator Chuck Schumer-inspired “Better Deal” from July. Since then it has backed away from such decisiveness, perhaps hoping to claim the credit to ride the supposedly good feelings generated by the positive “official numbers” of our national economic performance: low employment, low inflation and a 3.3 increase in GDP growth in the 3rd quarter according to the commerce department. Here’s what I wrote back in June: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/30/1676756/-Some-Mid-Summer-Thoughts-About-the-Democratic-Party-or-They-Want-Our-Votes-Not-Our-Minds ; and then one month later in response to that strange July press conference held in Berryville, Virginia, the “Better Deal” roll-out: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/30/1685512/--Deaths-of-Despair-in-America-New-Deal-Fair-Deal-to-Schumer-s-Better-Deal-A-Dialogue
And we should keep in mind, looking back over the party since the election of Reagan, that it never got behind an urban Marshall Plan when our de-industrializing cities and their black ghettos were being overwhelmed by a crime and drug deluge. Instead, the groundwork for Mass Incarceration was laid, which some have called “the New Jim Crow.” There were calls for a Marshall Plan, but the Party and the nation settled for benign neglect, hoping that market forces over time would gentrify the old neighborhoods, Harlem being a prime example. So apparently, neither the black underclass nor the white working class are deserving of a domestic Marshall Plan, a proposal which was always less than the more universal “Second Bill of Rights” that FDR outlined in 1944 – and which threatened to be more divisive if pitched to just one constituency.
Of course the temptation now is for the old line Clinton-corporate dominated party to ride Trump’s unpopularity and the ostensibly good economy delivered by Barack Obama for all its worth, making gestures (we’ll see what in fact is going on shortly, in Part II) to appease the Sanders wing while actually standing pat on the party’s centrist ideology. Some of Senator Schumer’s ideas point, it is true, to a modest left turn, especially on anti-trust, but the strange timing of their release, July 24th, (neither July 4th nor Labor Day) and their evaporation since then leave us wondering if this is not yet just another version of the famous Clinton-Obama “two-step”: gesture left populist and govern corporate centrist.
A good example of my worries came in this commentary in the New York Times the day after Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in the infamous Alabama Senate Race. The article, by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, says the victory was due in part, to affluent Republican suburbanites offended by Trumps’ extremism, especially women, who turned to a moderate Democrat, reminding me of the Chuck Schumer calculation that for every blue-collar voter in Western Pennsylvania who voted against Hillary, there would be two suburbanites who fled to her from Trump. (“4 Takeaways from Doug Jones’s Alabama Victory.”) Schumer’s calculation was off, and the Autopsy report on the party we will cover later hones in on it.
Recently I had an online disagreement about the current economic dynamics with well-known economist Dean Baker at the blog site for the world’s second largest organization of professional economists (The World Economics Association) where I am graciously allowed to participate, although I am not a professional economist, and not regretting that at all. I conceded the two official “bragging” numbers, but also disclosed what they hide, and that I don’t see an era of good economic feelings yet in my day-to-day life: https://rwer.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/janet-yellen-and-barack-obamas-economy-is-looking-good/
I should add that in the touting of low unemployment and inflation (as opposed to the labor participation rate, which is getting better but still lagging), no one mentions the Social Security stall-out, where deductibles for Medicare keep increasing, what recipients must pay out-of- pocket first, but Social Security payments don’t rise, a significant factor suppressing overall demand in rural Red State America, where there are many beneficiaries, the young having fled for the hoped for coastal abundances, where most of the jobs have been generated. (See Harold Meyerson’s fine article about Democratic Party neglect of rural America, part of the American Prospect’s excellent series on the white working class: http://prospect.org/article/place-matters )
My discussion with Baker later made me think of The Great Gatsby, written during the famous era of giddy but misleading economic feelings – euphoric times is not too strong a word - “the Roaring Twenties.” What many have called the Great American Novel has a very bitter-sweet feel to it, and some may recall that Fitzgerald also included, amidst the lavish parties and expensive autos, a brief section about who lived in the “Valley of the Ashes”: his version of today’s rural Red State America: a place populated by little people, average people being ignored, mistresses being badly used – and abused, to put it in a very contemporary context. In fact, F. Scott disclosed worse than that: the little people are being pushed around by the East Coast elite who are busy celebrating the “good numbers” then, as now, on the stock exchanges (tickers then, electronic screens now.) To me, and I’ve had this feeling since August, the stock market performance today seems based on the very inegalitarian benefits the Fed policy has bestowed on not just the 1%, but the top 20%, and there has not been much good news, until very recent months, for the bottom 60%.
Janet Yellen, the outgoing Federal Reserve Chairwoman, has looked to the economic horizons and said she does not see another financial crisis “in our lifetime.” She didn’t make it clear just whose lifetime she was framing from, but this sounds too much like the triumphalism of the profession in the 1990’s, the belief that they had banished the business cycle and could cope with any crisis, thanks to the geniuses of the “Committee to Save the World.” Chairwoman Yellen, I’m waving the yellow caution flag over that statement as you leave.
Then, just a few days ago, I saw an interview from David Sirota’s column at the International Business Times with Democratic reformer Robert Reich. Here at: http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/presidents-obama-clinton-failed-defend-middle-class-robert-reich-2621714
Reich, if anyone, should have some insights, from close range, about whether the “good” economic stewardship attributed to Bill Clinton (and that was implicitly pending from Secretary Clinton, had she won) and Barack Obama has made a decisive difference in changing not just “the indicators,” but the way people feel about the economy. Reich hedged a bit, he being now an “outsider,” conceding “good stewardship” from the two presidential caretakers, (remember Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardner in the movie “Being There?”) but said bluntly that neither had dealt with the deeper structural anomalies of the economy. I concur with Reich’s assessment on this, and so far the public has not transferred admiration for the two good key numbers into support for the current White House resident, to put a lot of understatement on the matter. Trump isn’t getting the good feelings transfers - what Bill Clinton got during his late 1990’s turmoil.
Reich fumbled though, when he tried to clarify the problematic relationship between the new 3.3% GDP quarterly growth and the calamitous state of “nature,” nature groaning, its ecosystems in tatters under the vast Neoliberal extraction and consumption regime. Even in Green Germany a crucial part of nature is facing “Armageddon,” in tandem with Great Britain’s insect life, as Michael McCarthy called our attention to in his emotionally riveting book The Moth Snowstorm.
Here at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germany-insect-armageddon.html?_r=0 , leading to this brief Times editorial on the subject:
Global Warming is winning, and nature, including us, is losing, fragmenting and declining from that dynamic and many other human induced pressures: this is a serious, critical matter, but needs its own posting, and I’ve addressed that issue here http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue76/Smith-et-al76.pdf in a three way dialogue about the book “Green Capitalism: the God that Failed.” Suffice it to say now that what we need is a new political-ecological economy: with larger public investments, on a much grander scale than currently exist, to get us to an non-carbon alternative energy economy; public employment programs explicitly targeted to repair all the environmental damage suffered in the extractive regions of rural Red State America, (and elsewhere) and to pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by changing how much, what and where we plant. Without those changes, better GDP growth will not make a difference in changing our environmental predicament, despite the arguments of economic mainstreamers who say GDP growth must precede, is the precondition for the public’s willingness to make the great changes needed.
The nature of economic growth, the size and content of missing public investments and employment programs to carry them out are a good part of the struggle for the “Soul of the Democratic Party,” about which Reich says this: “‘The Democratic Party – there’s no there, there. It’s just a big fund raising machinery…the real energy…is at the grassroots.’” And by that he meant that the party “machinery” needed to stop looking at the Sanders forces as “opponents” and rather see them as the “’source of energy and momentum and mobilization and the future of the Democratic party.’”
It’s worth our while to explore the ramifications of Reich’s statement a bit further. I’ll do that by comparing the forces within “Our Revolution” - the Sander’s movement headed now by Nina Turner and I like to think, the union National Nurses United - against the panel put together at the Center for American Progress’ Ideas Conference on May 16, described as “the Resistance,” including Indivisible (Leah Greenberg); Astrid Silva (Dreamers), DeRay McKesson (Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero) and Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos (MM). Moulitsas is the “elderly statesman” on the panel, who, whatever he once was as a young “gate crasher,” had become by 2016, if not earlier, a Clintonista who gets the “cautions” talking about the Dems trying to recapture the white working class. Here’s the full discussion, 43 minutes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLjma-vOxQ I’ve listened to it about half-a-dozen times to catch the nuances of what was being said.
This panel has been presented as being representative of the new face of the Democratic Party, and when they get around to discussing economics, very little is said about the Marshall Plan proposed as the idea of the day, for the conference itself. MM says Fox News has the white working class locked up, and that the Democratic left “Old Guard,” in the persons of Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders, was/is too male, too white (and too old?) to be relevant. Besides, he says, in muffled tones, everyone here basically agrees on economics, so let’s go out to register voters, spend at least $100 million to flip Georgia and Texas, door-to-door, voter registration is the key, the message less important, and to make his point about the assumed consensus on economic policy, didn’t you know that Hispanics register as the “most socialist” wing of the party? Really? I hadn’t noticed that, not at all, despite working with quite a few Hispanics at Target not so long ago. And Bernie Sanders, far from fading away into a retirement home, is now the most trusted national political figure, who certainly would not buy many, if any, of MM’s assertions, except perhaps spending the money on voter drives in all 50 states, especially including the South and West.
To me, MM’s complacent certainties on a supposed economic consensus clearly are contradicted by the history of the four terms of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Robert Reich’s interview drives those points home. But perhaps more troubling is DeRay McKesson’s statement that economics must wait: when black bodies are not secure, that takes precedence, and Astrid Silva, from the perspective of those about to be deported back to Mexico and Central America, agrees. And doubtless had feminists had a clear representative on the panel, and if re-run today, in December of 2017, then sexual harassment in the workplace, and male sexism more generally, Patriarchy, would be the number one problem, not the economy.
Now the Democratic Party I’ve come to know over almost five decades of political life is never going to abandon black causes, immigrant causes, women’s causes, new sexual minority complaints, nor, I’d like to think, environmental ones, except I remember 2000 and Al Gore’s campaign, but the party certainly jettisoned old labor’s (the AFL-CIO’s) number one priority, labor law reform under both Clinton and Obama: the AFL-CIO was baited and switched. It still can’t speak with a strong independent voice, even on Labor Day, a holiday which, with each passing year, seems faded and tattered, barely registering, step-in-step with labor itself since 1980. And yes, the campaign for $15.00 an hour is the bright and glaring exception to the trend, and management is going to respond, and how, with all the automation they can summon, and the age-old struggle will shift to a different arena.
Both Clinton and Obama pushed away from the New Deal (Obama preferred the Republican Teddy Roosevelt, not FDR, hitting that hopeful bi-partisan note hard, only to be stonewalled by the rabid Right), and buried the notion of a big federal government coming down on the little person’s side economically (remember: Obama Care was a Mitt Romney Massachusetts passed, conservative think tank solution…it helped, but it was clumsy).
So the great question is: what is the party going to lead with, deep economic reforms heading to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights from 1944, (what will be called “economic security” in the party Autopsy paper below) which means putting economic justice first - and then adjusting the other themes and pressing issues – or instead the smorgasbord that was Hillary Clinton’s campaign? (I wrote about the tensions within the Progressive movements here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/10/27/1710411/-The-Riptides-and-Cross-Currents-of-Progressive-Identity-Crisis-Politics).
The retort to my worries about the competing themes of the different progressive causes each naming their own “nation’s number one problem” while the dominant corporate status quo smiles knowingly, will surely be “intersectionality,” a concept rooted in academe and which I hadn’t heard until Nancy Fraser’s essay in Dissent magazine took me there, her “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism.” Here at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser
Intersectionality is about the multiple, sometimes overlapping “identities” which modern, or post-modern life, based on our deep divisions of labor and multiple roles in society, has given us – or maybe better, imposed upon us. Thus I can be an old labor-egalitarian and an environmentalist at the same time – must be – I would assert, in a way FDR and the CIO didn’t have to be, couldn’t be, in 1935, although the Civilian Conservation Corps began to point in the direction of a “fusion” but certainly came far short of Aldo Leopold’s ethic, and Bob Marshall’s too) and they criticized its lack of integrated thinking along ecological, holistic lines. (Credit here to Neil M. Maher’s Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement.) Women say they are often torn apart by their roles as bread-winners, mothers, wives, family therapists, and social fabric menders. Black Lives Matter raises the issue of black poverty/class, racial identity and reparations of various types – and black power too, including community control of schools and police – and told Bernie Sanders no “Deal,” new or old, until we feel safer when we leave our houses. Since juries seem not to ever want to convict law enforcement in these awful wrongful death cases, how do we construct alternative institutions that can win broad public legitimacy and produce less one sided outcomes? You get the idea: we hope “intersectionality” can bridge the gaps staring at us every day, but the jurors don’t seem to have any intersections to enable them to sympathize with the underdogs.
It is an open question, still, for me at least. The dilemmas point towards equality, greater equality for all the striving identities within the nation, especially equality before the law, a tall order since it encompasses race, gender, and now sexual identity. Did I leave class out? How could I do that, when, in the 2017 the American workplace is a huge space where inequality and subordination, rigid hierarchies are the rule, and ordinary civil rights are often checked at the door upon entry, like free speech and the right to advocate for a union? Equality: can that grand word ever regain its rightful place in our values? Since independent entrepreneurs account for just 10-15 percent of the workforce, how can the remaining vast majority maintain their dignity when very little in our contemporary culture asks them to join together as workers, as employees with common needs and interests? That once was a rallying passion on the left and an international one too. Simply stating it today shows how fractured we have become under post-modern globalized Neoliberal capitalism.
On that aspect of contemporary life, I invite American readers to pick up Wolfgang Streeck’s book, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, recommended on its back cover by no less than Martin Wolf, one of the grand patriarchs of the more enlightened reaches of late capitalism. And reviewed at the Real World Economics Blog by Jayati Gosh, triggering a cascade of commentary, including three long ones by me, “gracchibros.” Here at https://rwer.wordpress.com/2017/11/17/not-with-a-bang-but-with-a-prolonged-whimper/ I wish somehow that Dean Baker could grapple with Streeck’s very different take on late capitalism, circa 2017-2018.)