After the past two weeks of inflated press pageantry, I, personally, feel quite fed up with this current election, and thus have decided not to write about voting, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the candidates, or the moral outrage that we are all supposed to perform when we hear the name “Donald Trump”. My view on the election can be neatly summed up with this excellent piece by Fredrik DeBoer, and I resist the emotionally manipulative tactics of liberals to browbeat leftists into submission. Thus, I’d like to dedicate some time talking about a different, though related, issue which may plague the Democratic party in the future. This issue is not a new one–it has, arguably, been part of the party for at least twenty years. Perhaps calling it an issue is a bit parochial on my part, though, for it is only an issue for fellow leftists and those who sympathize with us–a better term might be “trend” or “tendency”. Specifically, I predict that in the coming years, the Democratic Party leadership will drift further to the Right, especially on economic and foreign policy issues, and suppress their left-wing with rhetoric repurposed from the more antagonistic interactions between the Old Left and New Left.
As I’ve said before, there is a good historical basis for this trend, one with which anyone who followed the Democratic primary season this year and the rhetoric that accompanied it should be familiar. Specifically, through the 1980s and 1990s, the dominant elements of the Democratic Party, including the Clintons, abandoned even their moderate, reformist, social-democratic posture (which we may call Fabianism or Keynesianism) and accepted all the key tenets of neoliberalism.
A brief aside: Liberals claim the term “neoliberalism” is a snarl word, but this is to confuse the wideness of its applicability with a looseness of meaning. Indeed, if we understand neoliberalism as a dominant political-economical paradigm within late capitalism (one which is in some sense a revival of and extension of Victorian liberalism, or Gladstonianism as we may call it), and if we understand the rest of society as being broadly based on a political-economical infrastructure, it becomes quite clear why the term is so widely used: this paradigm appears everywhere and influences everything within our society.
If we look back at the history of the party, we can see this trend very clearly. After the 1984 landslide victory of Ronald Reagan, elements of the Democratic Party decided to acquiesce to Reaganomics and its ideological bases (economic value as the measure of all things, “dependency” and not poverty as a problem, adoption of “tough on crime” policies and posturing &c), but with a human face, called the “Third Way”, supposedly beyond left and right (not to be confused, of course, with the similar term Third Position, which refers to Nazis who also claimed to be beyond left and right). This newfound centrism, it was hoped, would win over moderate voters, which, then as now, have been largely hyped as being a huge portion of the American populace which decides elections–the Nixonian ‘silent majority’. In 1985, this coalition became a real group–the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)–of politicians and consultants. Many of these were from the South and West, and were traditionally considered conservative Democrats–if they were in power now, they’d be called Blue Dogs. Members of the DLC in the mid-to-late-80s included the Joe Biden (then Senator from Delaware), Al Gore (then Senator from Tennessee), and Bill Clinton (then Governor of Arkansas). After the 1988 election, when Michael Dukakis lost due to an intense negative campaign by George H.W. Bush (who ironically wanted a “kinder and gentler” nation) focused on crime, the New Democrats emphasized their toughness on crime–Bill Clinton, for instance, being head of the DLC in 1990 and 1991, made a point of opportunistically executing Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally ill inmate who had saved the dessert from his last meal “for later”, during his 1992 campaign for President to show just how committed he was to the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs”. When he was elected, Clinton signed NAFTA (whose premises were that white-collar professionals were worth protecting but blue-collar proletarians were expendable), the 1994 omnibus Crime Bill (where he and his wife relied heavily on racist stereotypes and which has greatly contributed to mass incarceration, but which has been, in retrospect, shown to not have had much to do with dropping crime rates), the 1996 welfare reform act (what he later considered to be his signature piece of domestic policy, leading to the further impoverishment of many people–relying on the racist, misogynistic Reaganite myth of the welfare queen, which was not questioned but furthered, and the Reaganite premise that it was not poverty to be solved but “dependency”), and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall (a definite contributor to the massive fraud perpetrated by the financial industry and the subsequent collapse of the global economy).
All of this may seem to be old news, but I’d like to emphasize one element of this tale. While the New Democrats began as a strategic attempt to wrest conservative districts, senate seats, and states in the South and inland West, their complete acceptance of the premises of Reaganism spread to the North and to the West Coast. From the 1990s onwards, the South and inland West no longer elected New Democrats, but rather conservative Republicans–and the North and West Coast, who earlier were bases of support for progressives, would now find themselves confined to the Overton window defined by the New Democrats. While the New Democrats defended themselves as an attempt to destroy the misgivings the “moderate masses” would have about voting Democrat, quiet the GOP by making deals with them and incrementally push the country leftwards (witness the Democratic party rags glorifying this strategy through the all-too-gleeful quoting of Max Weber’s “slow boring of hard boards”, as if that were to be celebrated in an age of massive and imminent climate change among other disasters), they instead pushed the Democratic Party to the Right. The GOP would soon define even the conservatism of the New Democrats to be “left-wing extremism”; any short-term strategic benefits to be had from triangulation would soon vanish. The Left of the Democratic Party tried to re-assert itself at the turn of the millennium, but Clintonites were able to purge it of any influence it might have had first through the incessant pushing of an incredible misreading of the 2000 Presidential election (I don’t want to elucidate why this common view is a misreading just here–suffice it to say, it was Rehnquist’s decision not to recuse himself in Bush v. Gore, the Butterfly Ballot, and the fact that Gore was, during the election, virtually indistinguishable from Bush–indeed, criticizing Bush for not supporting “nation building”!–not the few votes who went to Nader, as if Gore was entitled to those votes anyway) and the “unification” following 9/11.
This process is repeating itself in 2016. Many commentators have noted that the 2016 DNC reminded them quite eerily of past RNCs–anti-war activists were shouted down with chants of “USA! USA!”, for instance. The only person allowed to criticize the platform was Michael Bloomberg–from the Right, of course–because Clinton is not portraying herself as a genuine alternative to conservative Beltway politics but instead embracing the Beltway establishment and pandering to it. The neo-cons which the Democratic Party denounced in the Bush Administration are now its top foreign policy advisers. As the Intercept notes, Clinton and her Party are using the age-old Far-Right tactic of McCarthy and the John Birch Society, from where all enemies–opponents on the Right, critics on the Left–are either active agents or “useful idiots” of the Kremlin, despite Clinton herself having just as significant ties to Moscow, as if that were in itself a sin.
Now comes the part where I’m supposed to give some prescriptions to solve this problem. But unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of this. No amount of explaining that pandering to Beltway conservatives is not only cynical careerism but also ineffective as an electoral strategy (the rise of Trump on a mixture of economic anxieties and “economic anxieties” itself proves this) will change the basic modus operandi of the Democratic Party: be just mildly less bad than the Republican Party.
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