How the People's Party Lost Its Way (Excellent overview article)

[Armstead]

Last edited Sat May 14, 2016, 11:01 AM - Edit history (3)

The contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is not just a contest between two candidates.

Each of them stands for very different approaches to government, policy....and larger vision of America and what the role of the Democratic Party should be.


The article below from Salon is an Excellent overview of what has brought us to this point. It's obviously from a point of view -- but it explains excellently how many of see it.It's not very long and I strongly hope that -- regardless of which candidate you support -- people will read it for perspective on the backdrop of the present primary.

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/12/the_democrats_have_no_soul_the_clintons_neoliberalism_and_how_the_peoples_party_lost_its_way/

Excerpt

The Democrats have no soul: The Clintons, neoliberalism, and how the “people’s party” lost its way
Republicans never had one. That makes Democrats' betrayals, deceit and crisis of legitimacy that much more serious
ANIS SHIVANI
Over the last forty years both major political parties have been in a state of terminal decline for a number of reasons, primarily the ideological contradictions each has developed quite in sync with the other, driven by the same economic trends. Both are in a death spiral at the moment, but this being America, where political accountability is not as rapid or conclusive as in Europe, it’s likely that they will continue in more or less their existing forms for the foreseeable future,.....

It may seem, with stronger party identification over the last couple of decades, that the parties are stronger than ever, but this would be misleading on several counts. The fact most frequently cited in support of the parties’ strength is increased polarity in Congress, where in recent decades members of each party have moved farther toward the extremes, which means less bipartisan consensus. The electorate has sharply divided, with left and right divisions more pronounced, amidst the now familiar phenomenon of the red state/blue state split which first became prominently visible in the 2000 election.

But it would be a mistake to confuse ideological polarity with party loyalty. In Congress, members have no choice but to support the party closest to their ideological leanings, and likewise for the populace at large. Third parties have had a difficult time getting off the ground in America...

....The last time the establishment—both Republican and Democratic—publicly bemoaned the loss of legitimacy for government, which included the state of the parties, was in the 1970s. This was a persistent theme throughout that decade, after the landslide McGovern defeat in 1972, and the ouster of President Nixon in 1974. An impression was perpetuated by the elites that the U.S. was on the run against communism on all continents. After the 1973 oil embargo, and the stagflation that lasted throughout the decade, Keynesian policy—the glue that had held the New Deal coalition together for decades— swiftly unraveled. The crisis was deep and sustained, both domestically and globally, and the parties and their allied establishments seemed to have their days numbered.

Bizarre and illogical compromises began occurring at that time to preserve the sanctity of the parties, and of the narrow liberal-conservative identification, awkward arrangements that are bearing full fruit only today.

On the Democratic side, President Carter began nudging the party in the direction of corporate, free trade, tight monetarist policies that were later to find their most optimistic rendition during Bill Clinton’s administration......

But all this provided only a patchwork solution to the Democratic party’s crisis of legitimacy. Was it a pro-corporate (neoliberal) or pro-labor (New Deal) party? The actual tendency was for the party to move firmly in the former direction, while escalating rhetorical claims for the rights of cultural minorities, at the same time as the Republican party moved swiftly toward a neoconservative solution to its own crisis.

Meanwhile, the Democrats never really addressed the popular roots of dissatisfaction: in a global economy with more dispersed power, both economic and political, how was the standard of living of the American middle-class to be maintained?

The huge popularity of Bernie Sanders on the left today speaks to precisely this dilemma, fundamentally unaddressed through four decades of deceit and illusion to maintain elite power, as inequality continuously rose in that period of time, the middle class became ever more diminished, and real political power became confined to a vanishingly small elite group.

The Republican establishment, over the last forty years, pursued a parallel, and often intersecting (especially in times of war and recession), path as the Democrats.....It meant that the Republican elites had to put up with a lot of sound and fury about cultural issues like abortion (to feed the evangelical beast), while having a free hand to accumulate the same kind of power, economic and political, within an increasingly smaller elite’s exclusive grasp as was the case with the Democrats.

In time, particularly with Bill Clinton’s “new democrat” retreat from what remained of the New Deal commitment, the gap between the two establishments narrowed, often to the point of invisibility...... The same unification of the elites occurred in the prelude to the Iraq war, and in the aftermath of the financial collapse.

Barack Obama started off being open to a “grand bargain” to further deplete the remaining social safety net in the name of fiscal responsibility, and one can expect Hillary Clinton (like Jeb Bush, had he been the nominee) to be on the hunt for similar grand bargains. Each crisis makes the uniformity between the parties manifest, which riles up the populist base on either side to even greater degrees of frustration.

Trump’s heresy is to point out, as he did in a recent debate, that the Iraq war was based on lies, and that George W. Bush did not keep us safe..... Likewise, the Democrats cannot keep their old faithful on the reservation, who also keep making their anti-corporate sentiments felt, mostly recently with the Occupy movement and the Sanders upsurge. They are the same ones who trusted that Obama would weaken the corporate stronghold, but were quickly disillusioned when he did no such thing;...

I suspect that if the half of the population that doesn’t vote were to do so, most of them would fall in line with either Trump or Sanders; these are the ones who are so disillusioned, or disempowered, that they do not even bother to participate. Both parties have long since left them. In this sense too, the statistics cited on behalf of strong party identification, or ideological polarization along strict party lines, are illusionary.

.....Had the elites chosen to be more democratic thirty or forty or twenty years ago, both parties would have naturally evolved and reshaped themselves in accord with shifting social and economic realities. Liberalism and conservatism, in their authentic manifestations, would have continued fighting the good fight, rather than the situation that has developed, where economic anxiety is continually suppressed and allowed to manifest only in twisted movements that have little chance of accomplishing any objectives given the present distribution of power.

It is noteworthy that a great many among America’s intellectual elite support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, offering standard neoliberal justifications, whereas those outside elite intellectual circles are more likely to support Sanders; likewise with Trump and his antagonists and supporters. What the establishment will not do is take either of them seriously; meaning that they will not, as they haven’t for forty years, acknowledge the concerns of the constituencies they are supposed to represent, and direct the very real anxieties felt on all parts of the political spectrum toward positive resolutions good for the country and for the rest of the world.

[tonyt53]

1. Even without this article, Salon has been going down the drain for some time.

Bernie Sander - Democratic Socilist/Independent/Democrat/Who Knows

[Armstead]

2. Thank you for a meaningful response

[BillZBubb]

3. The article is correct on all points. You didn't refute a single one.

Hillary - Republican, Democrat, Neo-democrat, Third Way democrat, Neo-Liberal, DINO.

Bernie is a New Deal, liberal Democrat (ie Democratic Socialist).

[Armstead]

5. People complain that all Sanders people do is personal cheap shots...

Well this is a meaty article...and it gets ignored or subject to an empty cheap shot.

[LWolf]

17. I think

that Clinton supporters need a fucking mirror.

And, while political campaigns may be the arena of cheap shots, I've never seen so many deployed against a candidate's supporters, as well as the candidate himself, as in this one.

[Fawke Em]

20. If they had a mirror, their, "meh, so what?" sighs of status quo mendacity would fog it up.

[socialist_n_TN]

4. As a Classic Red, I can state unequivocally that the Democratic Party........

has NEVER been a party for workers or the oppressed, except in a VERY relativistic sense. The Democrats BEGAN as a bourgeois political party, supporters of capitalism against feudalism, AND THEY NEVER CHANGED! During occasional periods of historic and systemic instability, they took on a more "populist" face that claimed to be a party for BOTH economic classes, the owners AND the workers, but during MOST of its history, the Democrats have been TOTALLY on the side of the bosses.

Being on the side of the owners and on the side of the workers at the same time is an impossibility. You can't serve two masters. You will, sooner or later, have to choose sides and the Dems INEVITABLY choose the owners. Class struggle is a zero-sum game. When the owners win, the workers lose and vice versa.

[Armstead]

6. In the Big, Big Picture there is food for thought in that.

But in the Big picture of the point in history we are thrust into, the article is a good analysis IMO

[jfern]

10. Of course the Democratic party has always had a lot of flaws

But the amount of flaws is clearly increasing.

[trudyco]

11. I disagree

I think when the workers win they spend more and the owners win. When the workers win for the food, water, air, environment the owners win, too. The owners have to realize they can't live in a bubble. Especially now. Everything will come back to bite them. Or their progeny.

[socialist_n_TN]

19. The rules of capitalism disagree with your view......

"...when the workers win, they spend more and the owners win." That's a Keynesian AND a Austerian flaw in an analysis of capitalism. They BOTH make the assumption that capitalism will be satisfied with making a little profit on a lot of sales. That's not completely true for the Grand Bourgeoisie, although it might be for the Petit Bourgeoisie. For capitalism to work for the general good, capitalists have to make ENOUGH profit to reinvest, and more particularly, to reinvest in the commodity producing sectors of the economy. These are the sectors that MAKE things that people use and, consequently, are more labor intensive leading eventually to more and better jobs. If they can't make enough to reinvest, then they either buy back stocks, pay out dividends, or hold cash in those infamous offshore accounts. And what little they DO reinvest goes into the Wall Street casino that pays more on the dollars invested than does the manufacturing sector. AND with less production costs. The demand side of the economy has been remarkably consistent, not changing more than a couple of percentage points, even through the worst of the depression. And especially for items needed to live. IOW and in short, demand doesn't push capitalist investment, profit and more specifically RATE of profit, does.

And as to workers helping the capitalists by winning in a battle "...for the food, water, air, environment...", once again you're neglecting the need for profit. When those quality of life items are not insulated from the profit motive, then capitalism won't allow them to go to the ones who need them the most, i.e., The rest of us. The capitalists are exempt from this "need" because t he market decides that those who can pay for those items will be the ones who receive those items. And they, because of accumulated wealth passed on in perpetuity, will always be able to pay for those needed things.

"The owners have to realize they can't live in a bubble". Whether it's now or at any time in the history of capitalism, OF COURSE the owners think they can live in a bubble. They spend their whole lives in a bubble, so why would they think they can't?

Now, of course I'm talking about the system as a whole and NOT individuals, whether they're wealthy or not. SOME owners might see the proverbial "writing on the wall", but the system won't let them do anything of any consequence about it. To actually get anything DONE, the system itself has to go.

[trudyco]

21. my point is that some things you can't pay for

You can't live as a pure capitalist. You can't put a bubble between you and global warming, GMO effects, bad drugs you didn't know damaged your heart because another capitalist suppressed the studies, etc.

Money can't protect billionaires and their progeny. Maybe you are saying capitalists can't see beyond their capitalist noses. Are people really that single minded? I would think even billionaires would want to protect their family.

[socialist_n_TN]

22. Capitalist follow the rules of capitalism........

THAT'S why we need a systemic change. There will NEVER be enough capitalists who see "...beyond their capitalist noses" to change the rules of capitalism RE: profit. There's a reason that Lenin said that, paraphrasing, "The capitalists will sell us the rope that we use to hang them". Because it's true.

[Armstead]

7. kick for substance

[Attorney in Texas]

8. kicked and recommended

[tabasco]

9. Great article.

Thanks for posting.

[riderinthestorm]

12. Wonderful article. Unfortunately the Hillary folks will studiously ignore it.

K and R just the same...

[Armstead]

16. seems that way

[PufPuf23]

13. That is a very good summation of where we are today.

How to we disgorge neo-liberalism from the Democratic party and the USA?

The Democratic party would be more inclusive and easily win elections but the financial and political elite would have less wealth and power.

[Armstead]

15. Unfortunately we can't disgorge it from the USA but it...

should be confined to the GOP.

If they were the party of that, and Democrats were the balancing liberal/progressive/populist alternative to fight that, the battle of parties would be more meaningful and I think the Demc would be a lot stronger electorally.

[Todays_Illusion]

14. Written for readers with no knowledge of U.S. History for the second half of the 20th Century. nt

[Vote2016]

18. kick & rec