The 2014 midterm election double-shellacking has forced the issue of reform of the Democratic Party to the front burner. The most telling fact of that election cycle is this: wherever progressive issues like minimum wage increase, paid sick days, and marijuana legalization were on the ballot, they won big and Republican candidates in the same states won. That is the puzzlement. The Democratic Party did not run on a progressive platform, by choice. So why is that? Why would the party stick to the failed Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) centrist corporate Democrat weak tea formula, even when they lose election after election? Do they have a death wish? Are they actively colluding in their own extinction? What’s up with that?
Let’s dig in and take a look at why the Democratic Party seems to be incapable of evolving, even when they it is being driven to endangered-species status in large swaths of the U.S. I will preface these remarks by noting that I am speaking here to the national Democratic Party, not the local Northern California Democrats, who are mostly smart, effective progressives like Congressman Jared Huffman. I have taken a bit of flak from local folks on the Left like Will Shonbrun for carrying the torch for the Democratic Party. On the other side of the ledger, folks on the right, like Stan Pappas, question why progressive Democrats are even granted any airtime, given their minority status in Congress.
The American political scene has been driven so steadily to the Right over the last 40 years that the gains of the previous progressive eras have been largely rolled back, and areas where there had been widespread consensus, like the need for infrastructure development and maintaining a robust social services network are now arenas of ideological contestation. The failure of the Democratic Party to effectively check this rightward ideological tilt is the problem. The party strategic planners should be charged with political malpractice for persisting in an exhausted identity politics liberalism whose sell-by day has expired. How many times do they need to step on the rake and get hit in the head before they change their M.O.? We really need to know, because the stakes are too high for continued political incompetence.
My frustration with this political enigma led me to give an intemperate title to my last Sun article “It’s Time to Carjack the Democratic Party”). If a sports franchise loses badly season after season, the ownership finally fires the coach and his staff and brings in a fresh front office. We, the Democratic Party base, are the ownership group and we desperately need a new front office team with fresh ideas and energy. But we are not getting that. My left-wing friends would say: “Well of course not, because you aren’t the real ownership group. The real ownership group is the Democratic Party rainmakers who bundle tens of millions of dollars of corporate money. They will not allow the party to adopt a progressive message. So you’re wasting your time on a hopeless cause.” And on the right-wing side of the aisle, they think that Obama and the Democratic Party are attempting to hoist the red flag of socialism over the White House!
My support for the Democratic Party is not founded on any affection for the institution itself, which has a decidedly mixed historical record. Remember, it was not that long ago that the South was solid Jim Crow Dixiecrat, and moderate Republicans governed states well in the Northeast. Within 40 years, the South has turned solid conservative Republican and moderate Republicans have been hunted to extinction almost everywhere. The definitions of the parties are highly fluid over time and on that basis I have placed my bet on the Democratic Party as the only viable vehicle for actually enacting progressive policies on a national level. I am beginning to question that assumption, given the repeated capitulation of the Democratic Party governing apparatus to the corporatist DLC agenda, even when it means that they will go down to defeat again and again. I would love it if the Green Party were a viable political entity, because I concur with most of their platform. But they are not a viable political entity and show no signs of ever becoming one.
When strong third parties emerge, they displace one of the two major parties. That’s why we don’t have Whigs anymore. The fundamental reality of American politics is that the Electoral College framework, based in the constitution, will always generate a two party system. It’s structural. So then the question is, how to fashion a political party that reflects our basic worldview. Party platforms evolve out of the ideological consensus of the majority of their members. Our work is to organize and mobilize to create a new consensus.
The only path to enduring political power for the Democratic Party is to adopt a progressive economic agenda that clearly throws in its lot with the working class and the middle class by strengthening the social safety net, investing in infra-structure and green energy, reforming the tax code to end the corporate loopholes that favor the wealthy, regulating Wall Street to diminish their power to destabilize the economy, and constraining military spending by setting limits on our global ambitions, thereby freeing up resources for a national jobs program. The next progressive horizon is to provide a guarantee of work for any willing citizen, doing the important tasks of childcare, eldercare, environmental remediation and weather-proofing, urban renewal, and a physical infrastructure upgrade for the 21st century.
The private sector will never provide full employment. It is rigged to outsource and downsize, not to fulfill a social need for full employment.
What we actually get from the Democratic Party is a potpourri of loosely related identity politics issues like marriage equality, affirmative action, women’s rights, and small-ball environmental micro-reforms like plastic bag bans and mileage standards. These are all worthy issues in their own right, but they don’t add up to a coherent response to the core issue: how to tame global corporate capitalism, which left unchecked will devour the resource base of the planet, co-opt all the institutions of government, and collapse the living standards of the middle class and the working class. It’s no wonder the American people are not inspired by the tepid and timid focus-group driven marketing messages of the national Democratic Party, given the stakes.
We need to ask hard questions like why we can’t fund a full-employment economy or why we can’t enact a carbon tax to actually bend the climate change curve. A bold populist progressive agenda, the likes of which we are hearing from political leaders like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, would light up the politically dormant American electorate and provide a sharp contrast to the Republican Party’s oligarchic crony-capitalist message. I’m ready for that. But does the Democratic Party have what it takes?
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