The message still holds as we finish our compaigning.
(Part one discusses the historic transformation of the Democratic Party. Part two is an updated discussion of the reasons for the Trump victory in 2016. It reviews some of the political activism of the period between 2016 and 2020)
Harry Targ
Part One
Our first task was to defeat Donald Trump. That task
has been completed. Our second task is to continue to build a more progressive
and humane society while pursuing a peace and solidarity agenda in the
international system. A central element of moving from the first task to the
second is mobilizing to educate and agitate for progressive reforms and to
oppose, when necessary, the new administration if it stands in our way.
Discussions about the pursuit of the second task have
begun. Many of these discussions revolve around assessments of the recent
elections: contexts, organizing experiences, and outcomes. There has been some
discussion of the economic circumstances which have shaped voting behavior--growing
economic inequality, declining real wages, evictions, medical bills, and other
basic economic vulnerabilities There has been discussion of tactics such as organizing
grassroots groups, the internet, canvassing, and calling blitzes. There have
been some useful testimonials of personal contacts about talking to voters with
competing views, breaking through ideology, confronting fundamentally reactionary
attitudes about race, religion, women’s issues, and guns. And there has been
discussion of the critical nature of issues that need to be addressed: health
care, climate change, racism and police violence, jobs, and, of course, how to
respond to the pandemic.
All of these conversations are useful and important as
we finally move beyond the elections. However, one set of issues has not been
addressed. That is why 70 million plus voters who, after the pandemic, economic
crisis, and spreading environmental calamity, still voted for President Trump.
Concern is also raised about the losses Democrats incurred in the House of
Representatives and the probability of the Senate continuing its deadlock. And
despite some progressive candidate victories in state and local elections, red
states and counties largely remained red as well.
Historic Changes in the Democratic Party
What seems missing from these discussions on the
election outcomes is an analysis that links history and political economy to
the changes that have occurred in the Democratic Party from Keynesianism and
the capital/labor compromise of the late 1940s to neoliberalism, reflected in
the sector of the Democratic Party that gained dominance in the 1980s,
sometimes referred to as “The Third Way.”
Looking at the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt’s
presidential victory in 1932 and three subsequent victories presaged both a
transformation of the Democratic Party and public policy from laissez faire to
state-directed policies designed to address social safety needs (creating jobs,
supporting farmers, investing in public works, and funding the arts (theater,
murals, music, historical writing for example). It was assumed that fiscal
stimuli, putting money in workers’ hands would jump start the economy. Fiscal
stimuli were paralleled by increased government regulations of banking,
labor/management relations, and wages and hours. To be clear, the New Deal
programs would not have occurred if millions of working-class men and women had
not hit the streets to demand them. And also, to be clear, as much as the New
Deal programs helped large sectors of the working class, workers of color were
disgracefully excluded from many of them. But nevertheless, the thrust of
public policy, mostly advocated by Democrats was for positive government. The
Democratic Party institutionalized the New Deal, the Fair Deal in the Truman
years, and, in the 1960s, the Great Society.
Most white workers, and increasingly Black workers,
saw the Democratic Party as their home. From the 1930s until the 1980s, voter
studies showed majorities of voters identified with the Democratic Party. And
even mainstream Republicans, such as Dwight Eisenhower, embraced workers’ rights
to form unions and Social Security.
However, the Democratic Party began its long decline
in 1968, with candidate Richard Nixon’s appeal to “the silent majority” and his
embrace of a “southern strategy.” Nixon played on growing frustration with
Vietnam era protestors and the centrality of the civil rights campaigns in
American life. George Wallace became a popular racist third-party candidate for
president.
The last gasp of the New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society
tradition was reflected in the overwhelming defeat of populist presidential
candidate George McGovern in 1972. Two years later, because of his criminality,
President Nixon was forced out of office and his successor Gerald Ford lost the
1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter.
These political eruptions occurred in a
decade, the 1970s, when the United States was experiencing declining relative
power in the world, both politically and economically. In addition, the
contours of American politics were dramatically affected by the oil crises of
the 1970s, the inability or refusal of government at all levels to continue to
afford the supports that workers had come to expect, and the radical
transformation of production, highlighted by millions of jobs lost through
outsourcing and deindustrialization. The dramatic changes in the political
economy of capitalism and the increased appeal of racism were reflected in a
substantial change in the campaigns and policies of the Democratic Party
The Democratic Party and “The Third Way”
Jimmy Carter planted the seeds for the shift in the
Democratic Party from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism and the Party’s “Third
Way.” Michael Jordan Smith succinctly summarizes
a theme of the recent book “Reaganland,”
The book’s author, Rick Perlstein, reports
on “the Democrats’ fatal abandonment
of economic fairness in favor of balanced budgets, deregulation, and fiscal
conservatism. Carter led and presided over this transition, over the objections
of traditional liberals including Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. But Carter
joined with a revitalized business lobby, which gradually succeeded in
persuading Democratic politicians that neoliberalism was the only way forward.
To this day, the Democratic Party hasn’t fully recovered.” (Michael Jordan Smith,
“When Conservatism Triumphed,” The Progressive, August 17, 2020)
President Reagan’s 1980
message, which resonated with a work force that was experiencing seven percent
unemployment and double digit inflation, was “Government is not the solution.
Government is the problem.” Armed with theories from conservative economists,
Reagan expanded dramatically the policies initiated by President Carter. These
included deregulation of the economy, lobbying for the privatization of public
institutions, downsizing programs of welfare and safety nets. To secure support
for programs of austerity, Reagan began the process of destroying the influence
of the labor movement, criminalizing the behavior of people of color, and
shifting the discourse from poverty’s connection to economic failure to blaming
the victims of poverty for their own misfortunes. And, in the main, the
Democratic Party either only weakly opposed the Reagan austerity agenda or
cautiously supported it. What would later be called the “neoliberal agenda”
became the dominant ideological framework of discourse of conventional politics.
In 1985, Washington D. C.
Democrats formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The Council
articulated the view that the Democratic Party was losing its grip on public
support because it was “too liberal.” It developed a “Third Way” agenda that
was less committed to working people, was more hostile to people of color,
shifted policy advocacy from providing social safety nets to expanding law
enforcement, and was less vigorously supportive of government regulation. When
Bill Clinton was elected president, he enshrined the neoliberal agenda in the
program of the Democratic Party. Third Way Democrats no longer even pretended
to represent the interests of working people in policy even though they
continued to express empathy for the vast majority of people.
One stark optic of this
was reflected in a Frontline documentary on globalization which showed
candidate Bill Clinton meeting steelworkers at a plant gate during a 1992
campaign stop. He promised them that he would serve their interests,
particularly by opposing the then controversial North America Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). The next scene in the documentary shows Clinton meeting with
financier Robert Rubin, getting schooled on the “realities” of the modern
economy (PBS, Commanding Heights). Despite labor opposition to NAFTA,
including progressives in the labor movements of Mexican and Canadian workers,
Clinton leaned on Democrats in the House of Representatives to support it.
Clinton’s aggressive support of NAFTA was metaphorically analogous to President
Reagan’s firing of the PATCO workers in 1981 after they endorsed his candidacy
for president.
Part Two: Adapted and edited from an earlier assessment of the constellation of political forces that led to the surprise victory and support for Donald Trump.
