Thursday, July 6, 2017

The Democratic Party’s Deadly Dead-End

Excellent, well articulated, insightful, and illuminating. So vital to continue to shine light on dark places. So vital to embody a profound commitment to truth seeking. Half the solution is awareness and deepening understanding of the problem. May integrity, courage, and caring be contagious. - Molly


By playing for centrist and neoconservative votes, national Democrats have left the party floundering with no coherent political message and creating a daunting challenge for democracy, says Nicolas J S Davies.

By Nicolas J S Davies

The most encouraging trend in the otherwise bleak landscape of Western politics is the success of the “new kind of politics”unveiled by Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and parallel movements, parties and candidates in other countries.

In their recent campaigns, Sanders and Corbyn laid out specific progressive policies to address the real-life problems facing their constituents and their countries and to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to fully fund healthcare, education and other vital public services. This represents a dramatic U-turn from the vague, deceptive talking points of “center-left” Democratic, Labour and Socialist politicians of the past generation, under cover of which they quietly sold out their constituents to corporate, plutocratic and military-industrial interests.

In 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked to name her “greatest political achievement,” she smiled her best cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile and purred, “Tony Blair and New Labour.”

The true measure of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution was not how Reagan and Thatcher changed their own parties’ policies but that they remade their opposition in their own image and thus marginalized progressive politics for a generation in both their countries, clearing the way for the neoliberal transformation of society.

Reagan and Thatcher launched a race to the bottom that politicians in France, Germany, Japan and the rest of the developed world soon joined in with. They slashed taxes on the wealthy and corporations, cut funding for everything but weapons, war and debt, privatized public services, and abandoned the principle that the wealth and power of wealthy countries should benefit all their people.

Western experts also fanned out across Eastern Europe to impose neoliberal “shock therapy” that caused soaring unemployment and shocking declines in living standards and life expectancy.

The DLC: the U.S.’s New Labour

The corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which took over the leadership of the Democratic Party between the 1988 and 1992 elections, was the U.S. equivalent of Blair’s New Labour in the U.K. But unlike New Labour, the DLC downplayed its takeover of the Democratic Party instead of dressing it up in a splashy rebranding campaign.

Lax campaign finance laws already left the U.S. political system wide open to corruption, or “legalized bribery” as former President Jimmy Carter has called it, through lavish fundraising, political advertising and corporate lobbying. The DLC Democrats launched a campaign to match the Republicans in fundraising from the wealthy and corporations, and “Slick Willie” Clinton sold the DLC’s new model of “center-left” corporate politics to the public, veiling the radical nature of his plutocratic agenda behind talking points drafted by corporate-funded think tanks and spin doctors.

It has tragically taken three decades for a majority of Americans to wake up to this plutocratic corporate buyout of their political system, first by Reagan’s Republicans, but then, decisively, by the Democrats who dropped the other shoe and left the public at large effectively unrepresented and marginalized.

Hillary Clinton’s dramatic 2016 defeat by one of the most unpopular figures in U.S. political history should have been a clarion call to the middle management of the Democratic Party — members of Congress, senior Congressional staff, and local and state party leaders — that the DLC model of politics had run its course.

Nobody in the Democratic Party more explicitly symbolized the corrupt DLC political model than the Clintons. Bill Clinton was the DLC’s fourth chairman from 1990 to 1991, and his election as President in 1992 cemented the DLC’s control of the Democratic Party. The first six chairmen of the DLC were all Southern men in the Clinton mold, and the DLC was never chaired by a woman in its 26-year history. (The DLC closed its doors in 2011.)

But Hillary Clinton’s defeat was hardly the first signal that the DLC Democrats had had their day. Corporate Democrats suffered a bloodbath in the 2010 midterm election. Even as the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) enjoyed a net gain of four seats in the House in 2010, 36 percent of non-CPC Democrats were tossed out on their ears, losing 67 of their 185 seats.

The CPC was founded in 1991 by Sen. Bernie Sanders and five progressive Democrats, and it has grown to be the largest Democratic caucus in Congress, with 73 current House members representing the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

If the 2010 election should have woken the Democrats from their complacency, the public disillusionment revealed by record low turnout in the 2014 mid-term should have rung the alarm bells off the wall. As Bernie Sanders repeated in almost every stump speech in 2016, “When voter turnout is high, Democrats and progressives win. When voter turnout is low and people are demoralized, Republicans win.”

And yet the overwhelming majority of Democratic members of Congress, including most members of the Progressive Caucus, still backed Clinton over Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary. Despite repeated and increasingly dire warnings, culminating in political suicide in 2016, the Democratic Party still refuses to repudiate or reform its failed, corrupt DLC model of politics.

Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the Reagan-DLC model is so entrenched and so successfully insulated the political class from accountability to the public that they just can’t believe the game is up.

After the election, Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison ran for the chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), on a platform to reform the party and restore integrity to the DNC, which flagrantly pulled strings for Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary. But right-wing Democrats led by Haim Saban opened their wallets for an ugly campaign to smear Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress as an anti-Semite and dig up the votes to defeat him. When Saban and Company’s new DNC chair Tom Perez joined Bernie Sanders on a so-called “Democratic Unity” tour, he was booed from Maine to Miami.

As Claire Sandberg, Sanders’ former digital organizing director told Vice News, “The (Democratic Party) Establishment is like a doomsday cult; no matter how thoroughly their predictions (are) refuted by reality, they just dig in deeper in their incoherent worldview, with devastating consequences for the rest of us.”


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