Since the election, I’ve been trying to figure out when Democrats separated from unions. This is the eighth post in a series. Previous posts can be found at the following links.
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The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed by Al From in 1985. It claims to have saved the Democratic Party after the death of American liberalism. To evaluate that claim, we can look at the electoral record since 1985.
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In the previous post, I looked at the electoral record up to 1984. There is no evidence for the death of liberalism. There is evidence that presidential races go not to ideologies but to strong candidates with resonating economic messages. That trend continues, here.
In 1988, George H.W. Bush buried Michael Dukakis. Dukakis was a liberal. He also was an incompetent campaigner. Bush had a good economy on which to run and a Republican machine that didn’t mind planting false stories or stirring up racial animosity.
In 1992, Bill Clinton made George H.W. Bush a one-term president, the victory on which Al From hangs his claim of having saved the party. From had recruited Clinton as a DLC candidate, as a “New Democrat.” But Clinton also was the best politician and the most charismatic candidate that Democrats had run in decades. Joan Walsh argues that the DLC did not make Bill Clinton; Bill Clinton made the DLC. There also was the little matter that Bush’s economy had gone into recession. “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Just two years later, Democrats suffered a bloodbath in both the Senate and the House as Republicans conducted an aggressive, nationally-coordinated campaign in a midterm election. (What a strange and wonderful idea.) Clinton moved farther right. He did to Republicans what he had done to Jesse Jackson in the ’92 primary: co-opted their talking points. Frustrated Republicans called him an ideological thief. The left saw it as “betrayal.”
In 1996, Clinton ran for re-election against Bob Dole, the last of the WWII generation. Clinton had not cut taxes or reduced the deficit, two of his campaign promises. Despite his shift to the right and Republican missteps, he was expected to lose. Clinton went on offense, adopting “the Republican idea of a balanced budget,” then turning the debate “to how to balance it -- focusing on Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment, areas where the voters favor Democrats.” When the economy turned around, he won easily despite having fought a liberal’s fight against Republicans on Medicaid, despite his 1993 tax increase, and despite Dole’s promise of a 15% tax cut.
Clinton’s second term brought highly prosperous times. Strangely, Democrats got little advantage from that in 2000. They failed to retake the House, managed only a 50/50 split in the Senate, and lost the White House to George W. Bush. Bush’s victory did require an unprecedented and still disputed intervention by a Republican-majority Supreme Court, and that even with Ralph Nader’s third-party run undermining Al Gore, another New Democrat. Regardless, despite the Clinton prosperity, the White House and Congress were in Republican hands.
Matt Stoller points out that “the rural parts of the country in the South, which had been a traditional area of Democratic strength up until the 1970s, were strongly opposed to this new Democratic Party.” And, notably, “white working-class people … did not perceive the benefits [of Clinton’s economy].”
After the atrocity of September 11, 2001, the war on terror still was a factor in Bush’s 2004 re-election victory over John Kerry. In addition, Bush was a modern Republican, as the Swift-Boat attack ads proved.
Then, financial crises “unseen since the 1920s began breaking out across the world….” The prosperity gains of the late 1990s “were not structural, but illusory,” Stoller says. Finally came the Great Recession: a global crisis “induced by a financial sector that had steadily gained power for 40 years.”
In 2008, Obama ran on a business-friendly platform and called himself a New Democrat. However, credit for the 2008 Democratic landslide goes to Bush, Cheney, and deregulation. Credit for Obama’s 2012 re-election goes to his gifts as a campaigner and to John Maynard Keynes.
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When we reclaimed the Senate in 1986, it was reported that Democrats were “sounding Republican in their talk of ''balanced budgets, tax reform, economic growth and market incentives.”” However, it was a Republican midterm election, and an unusually large number of Republicans had to defend their seats. The Senate would go Republican again in 1994, split 50/50 in 2000, Republican in 2002, Democratic in 2006, and Republican in 2012.
In 2006, we retook also the House. As with the Senate that year, that was due to Bush’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, Dick Cheney’s debacle in Iraq, congressional political scandals, and the Republican attempt to privatize Social Security (to which the DLC was partially amenable). 2010 was a disaster for Democrats. Republicans stirred up a base that was rabidly anti-debt and anti-health-care. Democrats hid. We lost the House and several state legislatures.
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In 1985, there was little reason to think that liberalism was dead. Today, there is less reason to think that a hard, right turn saved the party. Only a few events suggest either, and, for each of those, there are alternative explanations based on consistent, conventional factors.
Bill Clinton was what he had claimed to be, a neoliberal New Democrat. His guiding policy was “unleashing businesses … through deregulation and globalization.” He continued Reagan’s pro-monopoly policy. He “stripped antitrust out of the Democratic platform” for the first time since 1880. “Globalization, deregulation, and balanced budgets would animate Clinton’s political economy ….” He and the New Democrats “deregulated the world’s biggest banks and promoted neo-liberal economic policies across the board ….”
On social policies, Clinton defended Medicare and Medicaid even as he and New Democrats gutted New Deal programs. In a White House meeting early in his administration, Clinton had said, “We're Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans.” Was he confirming that he was more liberal Republican than Democrat, or was he explaining a tactical move to head off ultra-conservative Republicans?
Clinton is said both to have resurrected “the pre-1960s Democratic themes of support for working people” and to have stressed a coalition that was “less reliant on the white working class” while passing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with marginal protections for American workers.
Bill Clinton was neither our savior nor our nemesis. He was a skilled politician who genuinely connected with voters. However, both Clinton and the DLC bought into libertarian economic theories of the late 70s, and neither wept over labor’s losses. The DLC also, fatefully, turned away from grass-roots, efforts. These were egregious errors.
Next, a summing up.