December 14, 2017
Introduction:
Dear Citizens, Elected Officials, and Democratic Party Officers:
What follows below, in two parts, is an essay of criticism and hope, about the deepest commitments of the Democratic Party: who they are, who they represent, and what they stand for. Some may chuckle over the very notion of a political party in 2017 having a “soul,” but feel free to substitute the late theologian Paul Tillich’s notion that “soul” here means the party’s “ultimate values.”
Part One supplies the context of our historical moment, and the central role that perceptions about our economic system play in that important framing. It is my belief, following Wolfgang Streeck’s lead, that capitalism is in a lot of trouble, not delivering for the bottom 60-80%, but with no clear successor in sight, Bernie Sanders’ Social Democracy platform being the leading contender in the U.S. Since the “Street” and the two leading economic “indicators” are doing so “well,” I have some explaining to do, don’t I? I hope my effort doesn’t come across in the spirit of Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me.” I do get down, though, into the weeds growing in the hoped for “Intersectionality” of the many movements that make up today’s “Progressive” wing of the party, where the energy is. Each of these movements names a different most pressing “national problem,” with opposition to Trump supplying the current thin coating of glue; it isn’t yet enough to forge a compelling new governing platform.
Part Two zeroes in on the actual interactions between the Party, the Sanders insurgents, the Reform Commission, and the personnel changes under new party Chairmen Tom Perez. Brace yourself for some surprises.
It takes an essay this length, some 6,000 words, because I am fighting the currents of our time. Stop and reflect, if that’s possible these days, on how fast the topic of the week has shifted in the national news cycles since the August events in Charlottesville, Virginia. We’ve gone from refighting the Civil War, and Neo-Nazi torchlight parades, to Korean nuclear confrontations, global warming amplified natural disasters, wet ones, the endless procession of women victims of male outrages and workplace crimes…to the fall elections and the upset in Alabama’s Senate race. Did I forget anything? Oh yes, another round of horrendous wildfires in California, weather intensified. So how is the citizen to focus on the state of the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party amidst this circus-kaleidoscope of civic life? Only if someone pulls the pieces together in one place is my response.
So here it goes.
billofrights
Frostburg, MD
Part One: The Fault Lines
From time to time, I’ve been known to comment on the shape and feel of being a registered Democrat, especially out here in the Red State portion of Blue State Maryland - the Western Mountain region, formally considered to be part of Appalachia, and of the Appalachian Regional Commission, the “ARC” that Trump wants to zero out in the budget. Our two counties voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries, and gave Donald Trump margins approaching 2:1 in the Presidential election even as the full state again went decisively for Mrs. Clinton, as it did in the primary.
It’s my strong impression after three years in the region that the dynamics between me and the Democratic Party mirrors the alienation that independent voters feel, as well as the angry Trump voters, tensions which were visible long ago to sharp regional observers, like the late Joe Bageant in his Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (2008).
Like other Democrats, and just decent human beings, I’m pleased when the revulsion against Trump and candidates like Roy Moore in Alabama result in a rising tide to turn out the Republican Right. However, our national politics, as in much of Europe, has seen emotional waves time and time again over the past three decades, in both directions, so my focus now is on the substance of what the Democratic Party does or doesn’t stand for, which will determine its viability over the long haul.
I put my thoughts into a posting at the Daily Kos back on June 30th of this year, with quite a bit of detail, complaining about the poor communication between the party and its registered voters, and the high prices it charged to attend the Western Maryland Summit, whose tickets were tiered at $80 - and $35 for students. Given the demographics of our local colleges, that’s an insult right out of the gate, and a clear deterrent to participation for the poorer “rank and file.” That late April Western Maryland event (which showcased the gubernatorial candidates) followed the “invitation only” feel of a Center for American Progress Ideas Conference (the CAP is sometimes called the Clinton’s think tank) held in May at an upscale Georgetown hotel, where the tentative topic was an economic Marshall Plan with job guarantees to the non-college educated working class voters, via a WPA type program. That’s the closest the party has come to travelling down the progressive populist road on economics, despite the Senator Chuck Schumer-inspired “Better Deal” from July. Since then it has backed away from such decisiveness, perhaps hoping to claim the credit to ride the supposedly good feelings generated by the positive “official numbers” of our national economic performance: low employment, low inflation and a 3.3 increase in GDP growth in the 3rd quarter according to the commerce department. Here’s what I wrote back in June: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/30/1676756/-Some-Mid-Summer-Thoughts-About-the-Democratic-Party-or-They-Want-Our-Votes-Not-Our-Minds ; and then one month later in response to that strange July press conference held in Berryville, Virginia, the “Better Deal” roll-out: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/30/1685512/--Deaths-of-Despair-in-America-New-Deal-Fair-Deal-to-Schumer-s-Better-Deal-A-Dialogue
And we should keep in mind, looking back over the party since the election of Reagan, that it never got behind an urban Marshall Plan when our de-industrializing cities and their black ghettos were being overwhelmed by a crime and drug deluge. Instead, the groundwork for Mass Incarceration was laid, which some have called “the New Jim Crow.” There were calls for a Marshall Plan, but the Party and the nation settled for benign neglect, hoping that market forces over time would gentrify the old neighborhoods, Harlem being a prime example. So apparently, neither the black underclass nor the white working class are deserving of a domestic Marshall Plan, a proposal which was always less than the more universal “Second Bill of Rights” that FDR outlined in 1944 – and which threatened to be more divisive if pitched to just one constituency.
Of course the temptation now is for the old line Clinton-corporate dominated party to ride Trump’s unpopularity and the ostensibly good economy delivered by Barack Obama for all its worth, making gestures (we’ll see what in fact is going on shortly, in Part II) to appease the Sanders wing while actually standing pat on the party’s centrist ideology. Some of Senator Schumer’s ideas point, it is true, to a modest left turn, especially on anti-trust, but the strange timing of their release, July 24th, (neither July 4th nor Labor Day) and their evaporation since then leave us wondering if this is not yet just another version of the famous Clinton-Obama “two-step”: gesture left populist and govern corporate centrist.
A good example of my worries came in this commentary in the New York Times the day after Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in the infamous Alabama Senate Race. The article, by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, says the victory was due in part, to affluent Republican suburbanites offended by Trumps’ extremism, especially women, who turned to a moderate Democrat, reminding me of the Chuck Schumer calculation that for every blue-collar voter in Western Pennsylvania who voted against Hillary, there would be two suburbanites who fled to her from Trump. (“4 Takeaways from Doug Jones’s Alabama Victory.”) Schumer’s calculation was off, and the Autopsy report on the party we will cover later hones in on it.
Recently I had an online disagreement about the current economic dynamics with well-known economist Dean Baker at the blog site for the world’s second largest organization of professional economists (The World Economics Association) where I am graciously allowed to participate, although I am not a professional economist, and not regretting that at all. I conceded the two official “bragging” numbers, but also disclosed what they hide, and that I don’t see an era of good economic feelings yet in my day-to-day life: https://rwer.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/janet-yellen-and-barack-obamas-economy-is-looking-good/
I should add that in the touting of low unemployment and inflation (as opposed to the labor participation rate, which is getting better but still lagging), no one mentions the Social Security stall-out, where deductibles for Medicare keep increasing, what recipients must pay out-of- pocket first, but Social Security payments don’t rise, a significant factor suppressing overall demand in rural Red State America, where there are many beneficiaries, the young having fled for the hoped for coastal abundances, where most of the jobs have been generated. (See Harold Meyerson’s fine article about Democratic Party neglect of rural America, part of the American Prospect’s excellent series on the white working class: http://prospect.org/article/place-matters )
My discussion with Baker later made me think of The Great Gatsby, written during the famous era of giddy but misleading economic feelings – euphoric times is not too strong a word - “the Roaring Twenties.” What many have called the Great American Novel has a very bitter-sweet feel to it, and some may recall that Fitzgerald also included, amidst the lavish parties and expensive autos, a brief section about who lived in the “Valley of the Ashes”: his version of today’s rural Red State America: a place populated by little people, average people being ignored, mistresses being badly used – and abused, to put it in a very contemporary context. In fact, F. Scott disclosed worse than that: the little people are being pushed around by the East Coast elite who are busy celebrating the “good numbers” then, as now, on the stock exchanges (tickers then, electronic screens now.) To me, and I’ve had this feeling since August, the stock market performance today seems based on the very inegalitarian benefits the Fed policy has bestowed on not just the 1%, but the top 20%, and there has not been much good news, until very recent months, for the bottom 60%.
Janet Yellen, the outgoing Federal Reserve Chairwoman, has looked to the economic horizons and said she does not see another financial crisis “in our lifetime.” She didn’t make it clear just whose lifetime she was framing from, but this sounds too much like the triumphalism of the profession in the 1990’s, the belief that they had banished the business cycle and could cope with any crisis, thanks to the geniuses of the “Committee to Save the World.” Chairwoman Yellen, I’m waving the yellow caution flag over that statement as you leave.
Then, just a few days ago, I saw an interview from David Sirota’s column at the International Business Times with Democratic reformer Robert Reich. Here at: http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/presidents-obama-clinton-failed-defend-middle-class-robert-reich-2621714
Reich, if anyone, should have some insights, from close range, about whether the “good” economic stewardship attributed to Bill Clinton (and that was implicitly pending from Secretary Clinton, had she won) and Barack Obama has made a decisive difference in changing not just “the indicators,” but the way people feel about the economy. Reich hedged a bit, he being now an “outsider,” conceding “good stewardship” from the two presidential caretakers, (remember Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardner in the movie “Being There?”) but said bluntly that neither had dealt with the deeper structural anomalies of the economy. I concur with Reich’s assessment on this, and so far the public has not transferred admiration for the two good key numbers into support for the current White House resident, to put a lot of understatement on the matter. Trump isn’t getting the good feelings transfers - what Bill Clinton got during his late 1990’s turmoil.
Reich fumbled though, when he tried to clarify the problematic relationship between the new 3.3% GDP quarterly growth and the calamitous state of “nature,” nature groaning, its ecosystems in tatters under the vast Neoliberal extraction and consumption regime. Even in Green Germany a crucial part of nature is facing “Armageddon,” in tandem with Great Britain’s insect life, as Michael McCarthy called our attention to in his emotionally riveting book The Moth Snowstorm.
Here at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germany-insect-armageddon.html?_r=0 , leading to this brief Times editorial on the subject:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/opinion/insect-armageddon-ecosystem-.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article )
Global Warming is winning, and nature, including us, is losing, fragmenting and declining from that dynamic and many other human induced pressures: this is a serious, critical matter, but needs its own posting, and I’ve addressed that issue here http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue76/Smith-et-al76.pdf in a three way dialogue about the book “Green Capitalism: the God that Failed.” Suffice it to say now that what we need is a new political-ecological economy: with larger public investments, on a much grander scale than currently exist, to get us to an non-carbon alternative energy economy; public employment programs explicitly targeted to repair all the environmental damage suffered in the extractive regions of rural Red State America, (and elsewhere) and to pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by changing how much, what and where we plant. Without those changes, better GDP growth will not make a difference in changing our environmental predicament, despite the arguments of economic mainstreamers who say GDP growth must precede, is the precondition for the public’s willingness to make the great changes needed.
The nature of economic growth, the size and content of missing public investments and employment programs to carry them out are a good part of the struggle for the “Soul of the Democratic Party,” about which Reich says this: “ ‘The Democratic Party – there’s no there, there. It’s just a big fund raising machinery…the real energy…is at the grassroots.’” And by that he meant that the party “machinery” needed to stop looking at the Sanders forces as “opponents” and rather see them as the “’source of energy and momentum and mobilization and the future of the Democratic party.’”
It’s worth our while to explore the ramifications of Reich’s statement a bit further. I’ll do that by comparing the forces within “Our Revolution” - the Sander’s movement headed now by Nina Turner and I like to think, the union National Nurses United - against the panel put together at the Center for American Progress’ Ideas Conference on May 16, described as “the Resistance,” including Indivisible (Leah Greenberg); Astrid Silva (Dreamers), DeRay McKesson (Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero) and Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos (MM). Moulitsas is the “elderly statesman” on the panel, who, whatever he once was as a young “gate crasher,” had become by 2016, if not earlier, a Clintonista who gets the “cautions” talking about the Dems trying to recapture the white working class. Here’s the full discussion, 43 minutes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLjma-vOxQ I’ve listened to it about half-a-dozen times to catch the nuances of what was being said.
This panel has been presented as being representative of the new face of the Democratic Party, and when they get around to discussing economics, very little is said about the Marshall Plan proposed as the idea of the day, for the conference itself. MM says Fox News has the white working class locked up, and that the Democratic left “Old Guard,” in the persons of Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders, was/is too male, too white (and too old?) to be relevant. Besides, he says, in muffled tones, everyone here basically agrees on economics, so let’s go out to register voters, spend at least $100 million to flip Georgia and Texas, door-to-door, voter registration is the key, the message less important, and to make his point about the assumed consensus on economic policy, didn’t you know that Hispanics register as the “most socialist” wing of the party? Really? I hadn’t noticed that, not at all, despite working with quite a few Hispanics at Target not so long ago. And Bernie Sanders, far from fading away into a retirement home, is now the most trusted national political figure, who certainly would not buy many, if any, of MM’s assertions, except perhaps spending the money on voter drives in all 50 states, especially including the South and West.
To me, MM’s complacent certainties on a supposed economic consensus clearly are contradicted by the history of the four terms of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Robert Reich’s interview drives those points home. But perhaps more troubling is DeRay McKesson’s statement that economics must wait: when black bodies are not secure, that takes precedence, and Astrid Silva, from the perspective of those about to be deported back to Mexico and Central America, agrees. And doubtless had feminists had a clear representative on the panel, and if re-run today, in December of 2017, then sexual harassment in the workplace, and male sexism more generally, Patriarchy, would be the number one problem, not the economy.
Now the Democratic Party I’ve come to know over almost five decades of political life is never going to abandon black causes, immigrant causes, women’s causes, new sexual minority complaints, nor, I’d like to think, environmental ones, except I remember 2000 and Al Gore’s campaign, but the party certainly jettisoned old labor’s (the AFL-CIO’s) number one priority, labor law reform under both Clinton and Obama: the AFL-CIO was baited and switched. It still can’t speak with a strong independent voice, even on Labor Day, a holiday which, with each passing year, seems faded and tattered, barely registering, step-in-step with labor itself since 1980. And yes, the campaign for $15.00 an hour is the bright and glaring exception to the trend, and management is going to respond, and how, with all the automation they can summon, and the age-old struggle will shift to a different arena.
Both Clinton and Obama pushed away from the New Deal (Obama preferred the Republican Teddy Roosevelt, not FDR, hitting that hopeful bi-partisan note hard, only to be stonewalled by the rabid Right), and buried the notion of a big federal government coming down on the little person’s side economically (remember: Obama Care was a Mitt Romney Massachusetts passed, conservative think tank solution…it helped, but it was clumsy).
So the great question is: what is the party going to lead with, deep economic reforms heading to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights from 1944, (what will be called “economic security” in the party Autopsy paper below) which means putting economic justice first - and then adjusting the other themes and pressing issues – or instead the smorgasbord that was Hillary Clinton’s campaign? (I wrote about the tensions within the Progressive movements here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/10/27/1710411/-The-Riptides-and-Cross-Currents-of-Progressive-Identity-Crisis-Politics).
The retort to my worries about the competing themes of the different progressive causes each naming their own “nation’s number one problem” while the dominant corporate status quo smiles knowingly, will surely be “intersectionality,” a concept rooted in academe and which I hadn’t heard until Nancy Fraser’s essay in Dissent magazine took me there, her “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism.” Here at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser
Intersectionality is about the multiple, sometimes overlapping “identities” which modern, or post-modern life, based on our deep divisions of labor and multiple roles in society, has given us – or maybe better, imposed upon us. Thus I can be an old labor-egalitarian and an environmentalist at the same time – must be – I would assert, in a way FDR and the CIO didn’t have to be, couldn’t be, in 1935, although the Civilian Conservation Corps began to point in the direction of a “fusion” but certainly came far short of Aldo Leopold’s ethic, and Bob Marshall’s too) and they criticized its lack of integrated thinking along ecological, holistic lines. (Credit here to Neil M. Maher’s Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement.) Women say they are often torn apart by their roles as bread-winners, mothers, wives, family therapists, and social fabric menders. Black Lives Matter raises the issue of black poverty/class, racial identity and reparations of various types – and black power too, including community control of schools and police – and told Bernie Sanders no “Deal,” new or old, until we feel safer when we leave our houses. Since juries seem not to ever want to convict law enforcement in these awful wrongful death cases, how do we construct alternative institutions that can win broad public legitimacy and produce less one sided outcomes? You get the idea: we hope “intersectionality” can bridge the gaps staring at us every day, but the jurors don’t seem to have any intersections to enable them to sympathize with the underdogs.
It is an open question, still, for me at least. The dilemmas point towards equality, greater equality for all the striving identities within the nation, especially equality before the law, a tall order since it encompasses race, gender, and now sexual identity. Did I leave class out? How could I do that, when, in the 2017 the American workplace is a huge space where inequality and subordination, rigid hierarchies are the rule, and ordinary civil rights are often checked at the door upon entry, like free speech and the right to advocate for a union? Equality: can that grand word ever regain its rightful place in our values? Since independent entrepreneurs account for just 10-15 percent of the workforce, how can the remaining vast majority maintain their dignity when very little in our contemporary culture asks them to join together as workers, as employees with common needs and interests? That once was a rallying passion on the left and an international one too. Simply stating it today shows how fractured we have become under post-modern globalized Neoliberal capitalism.
On that aspect of contemporary life, I invite American readers to pick up Wolfgang Streeck’s book, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, recommended on its back cover by no less than Martin Wolf, one of the grand patriarchs of the more enlightened reaches of late capitalism. And reviewed at the Real World Economics Blog by Jayati Gosh, triggering a cascade of commentary, including three long ones by me, “gracchibros.” Here at https://rwer.wordpress.com/2017/11/17/not-with-a-bang-but-with-a-prolonged-whimper/ I wish somehow that Dean Baker could grapple with Streeck’s very different take on late capitalism, circa 2017-2018.)
Part II: Scenes and Settings of the Struggle
So let us see how these vast strains in American society, and truth be told, within the Progressive movements, play out in the struggle for control of one of American society’s great historical parties, one which has moved to the center, if not further to the right than that in matters of economics, since at least 1973, and certainly by end of Jimmy Carter’s term, 1976-1980. It’s a party which has, let us not forget, been steadily losing governorships, state legislatures, the control of both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court… despite winning two consecutive presidential terms in 1992-1996, and again in 2008 and 2012. How can that be for the “party of the people,” completely losing touch with rural Red State and de-industrialized America? (Of course, Thomas Frank has told us how in Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? And his explanation is pretty convincing.)
Here is the setting, and the key documents, since Bernie Sanders has thrown down the Social Democratic gauntlet to the Clinton-Obama business centrists of the party and since Tom Perez and Keith Ellison battled for the Chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, which the centrist Perez won - this all in 2017. In an attempt to heal the substantial divides, a Democratic Unity Reform Commission was created, with 21 appointees named by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and the new DNC Chairman Perez. The Clinton forces were able to name 13 participants, Sanders only 8. They came out with their reform recommendations over the weekend of December 9-10, cutting the number of Super Delegates down from 712 to 300, limiting some of the conflicts of interest between the DNC and its contractors, making the party primary nominating caucuses more accessible to working people, and mandating public reporting of “raw” vote totals from the caucuses. The outcome sounds pretty good for the Sanders reformers, but the broader context – where the reported reforms must go next, could be an Iron Curtain that will shut out the new light.
The commission’s work was upstaged by that of four members of the dissident wing of the party, leaning strongly in Sanders’ direction, who issued a report on October 30 entitled “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” The authors were Karen Bernal, the Chair of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party; Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org; Pia Gallegos, an employment-civil rights lawyer in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Sam McCann, a communications specialist with the International Center for Transitional Justice. These were interesting bios to me, but, as I suspect for most activists nationwide, they were hardly household names. And perhaps that’s better, since we then have to judge them by the ideas they put forth in critiquing the party. Here’s the link to the report: https://democraticautopsy.org/ And here to one long- time Democratic Party critic’s take on it, William Greider at The Nation magazine, here at https://www.thenation.com/article/what-killed-the-democratic-party/
The “Autopsy” had to have a very familiar ring to Greider, he having authored his own “autopsy” on our “democracy in trouble” way back in 1992, with his book “Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy,” warning of American corporations (and their lobbyists) stepping in to fill the power vacuum left by the decline of the New Deal’s “countervailing powers,” especially those wielded by the unions. Bill also left us with one of the benchmark warnings about the domestic impacts of Globalization, and the rise of China, his 1997 work One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism.
It is no surprise then, in Greider’s take on the Autopsy, that on financial deregulation and free trade, Hillary Clinton’s positions were muddied by the actions of her husband during his two terms, so that “on the central domestic issue of our time, she had nothing convincing to say.” The thrust of the report, he continues, was that the Democratic Party ignored its base and “the general distress of working people (white, black, brown.)”
Now Clinton the candidate ran on the “good economic stewardship” of Barack Obama, a feel good economy, and there was much lip service paid to how economically progressive the party platform was, concessions to Sanders’ social democratic intensity/policies. Hillary often bemoaned how close they were on policy positions, so why does he persist in undermining me? Yet as I have tried to emphasize in Part One of this essay, the Progressive movements which make up the core of the Party’s base each have their own diagnosis of what’s wrong with the nation, and in my experience, the greatest intensity of support for Clinton I found to be among professional women who saw her as primarily a feminist pioneer, poised to shatter that highest glass ceiling. My take is that there was an inverse relation between this view and naming what Greider did, the economic dimension, as the “the central domestic issue of our time.” The black community gave only modest support to the “economic populist” Sanders despite the endorsement of some prominent young black dissidents (and some older ones: Michelle Alexander and Cornel West) and the cruel reality of the still lagging economic standing of black citizens compared to whites.
And of course, there is the authenticity issue for the Clinton candidacy, and as we will see, for the party itself. Her well paid speeches to the banks, never shared with the public, the fortune amassed by her and Bill since he left office in 2000, facilitated by their entangled networking with the Davos 1% crowd, the globalized elite and their own philanthropic organization, made Sanders the near perfect foil, and his standings in the eyes of the public have borne out this dynamic now a year after the election of Trump.
What struck me as the two most powerful passages of the Autopsy’s findings spoke directly to the party’s authenticity questions. They thus involve the reasons for Senator Sanders’ national standing, whether he runs again or not, and the downplayed but central role that corporate power exercises inside the Democratic Party – and on public perceptions of that relationship. On Sanders:
The Director of the Labor Institute, Les Leopold, recently pointed out: ‘Sanders didn’t change but the world did. His message about the ravages and unfairness of runaway inequality hit home because it is true. He and his campaign became the next phase of the revolt against the 1 percent initiated by the remarkable, yet short-lived Occupy Wall Street. Sanders took this discontent many steps forward by clearly initiating a social-democratic agenda for working people. He turned ‘We are the 99 percent’ into a clear policy agenda. That agenda, not just his enormous integrity, is why he remains so popular.
Those Clinton global-corporate entanglements unfortunately are reflective of the powerful economic influences which reigned in, if the reigning in was indeed actually necessary, on policy matters, throughout the four terms of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Therefore, the Autopsy authors found that
The Democratic Party is badly positioned to present itself as a foe of the powerful forces causing widespread economic distress for working people, the poor and ‘near poor,’ the elderly, millennials, people of color – in short, the party’s purported base. Weakness of messaging is directly related to the comfort that corporate power enjoys not only in legislative halls across the nation but also within the party itself. Such corporate dominance prevents the party from truthfully projecting itself as an ally of the working class. In contrast to all the posturing, the institutional lack of authenticity is a key reason why 40 percent or more of voters consider themselves independents, a number well above the 30 percent or less for Democrats and Republicans alike. (Editor’s Note: the numbers as of November 2-8, 2017, from the Gallup Organization, are: Republicans 25%; Independents 42% and Dems 30 %.)
Am I making too much out of the lack of “authenticity?” Well, the day after Democrats released a set of more “populist” policy proposals in a small rural Virginia town, on July 24, called a “Better Deal,” (here at http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/democratic-agenda-unveiling-virginia-event/index.html ), the Autopsy report tells us that Nina Turner, president of Sanders’ Our Revolution” organization, took 115,000 signatures on a petition supporting the “People’s Platform” to the front door of the DNC in Washington, where the petitions were not accepted and she was denied entrance. In a retort to the Better Deal, she said that what was needed was “‘a new New Deal.’”
To get some more finely tuned insights into how these competing visions for a more populist, progressive Democratic Party are playing out inside the DNC, let’s look at a broadcast from the Real News Network, where the redoubtable Paul Jay, whose questions invariably seem to be the ones I would ask, set the stage with an interview of Nina Turner prior to the vote held by the Reform Commission. The date of the broadcast was November 28, here at http://therealnews.com/t2/story:20578:2020-and-the-Fight-Within-the-Democratic-Party - just 21 minutes long.
Here is Jay’s assessment of how inclusive the party is becoming, or not, noting that out of 187 appointments to the DNC under new Chairman Perez, only four are Sanders’ people, and most importantly for the modest reforms reported out of the Reform Commission this December, they still must go to the Rules and Bylaws Committee, where there are no Sanders’ people, and then to the full DNC, where it takes a 2/3 vote for reforms to be adopted:
PAUL JAY: Well it was rigged and Tom Perez needs to bring people in, Sanders' supporters in. How is Tom Perez doing with the inclusiveness thing? Well, Sanders' supporter James Zogby was demoted from the DNC Executive Committee to an at-large position. Sanders' ally Keith Ellison, his supporters, New Hampshire Democratic Chair Ray Buckley, the first trans person elected to the DNC, Barb Siperstein, and Ellison's former secretary, Alice Germond, were removed from DNC positions. Former lobbyist Jeff Berman, who represented the private prison group GEO group and the Keystone XL pipeline company, along with Maria Cardona and Minyon Moore, senior officials at Dewey Square Partners who represented predatory lender, Countrywide Financial, were appointed to the DNC committee. Tax lobbyist Chris Lu and Frank Leone, a lobbyist for anti-environmental interests, were also appointed to the committee. Jaime Harrison, a former coal lobbyist, ran for the DNC chair, endorsed Perez after dropping out, well he was appointed. Joanne Dowdell, a senior executive in the lobbying division for the Fox News parent corporation News Corp, was appointed an at-large member and to the Resolutions Committee.
Registered lobbyists Calla and Roxanne Brown were appointed at-large members. Clinton fundraiser and registered lobbyist Tonio Burgos was appointed to the DNC Finance Committee. Daniel Halpern was chosen to serve as co-chair of the DNC Finance Committee, as chairman of the Georgia restaurant association, Halpern played an active role in shutting down a bill that would've increased Georgia's state minimum wage. Hillary Clinton advisor, Tony Coelho, received appointments. Former Ready for Hillary national finance co-chair Francisco Domenech was appointed as an at-large member, despite his formal support last year for Republican Jenniffer Gonzalez's bid for Puerto Rico's resident commissioner. It goes on. Hillary Clinton's Nevada and Colorado state director, Emmy Ruiz, was given an at-large position. Clinton campaign staffer, Ellie Pérez, Craig Smith, Cristobal Alex were also appointed. Former Bill Clinton advisor, Harold Ickes was also appointed to the Rules Committee despite his record of outbursts that include biting a political rival on their leg.
Out of 187 DNC appointments, 187, the only Sanders' supporters included Keith Ellison who was moved down to the Executive Committee, James Zogby, at-large Resolutions Committee, Larry Cohen at-large and Symone Sanders at-large and Resolutions Committee. Most importantly none were appointed to the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which will be presented for the Unity Reform Commission's recommendations in December 2017 (Editor’s Note: the emphasis here is mine.)
Norman Solomon, one of the four authors of the Autopsy report, delivers two withering assessments himself, one at Common Dreams, and another with Paul Jay again at the Real News Network. At the Common Dreams site, he noted what I have experienced over and over again with my interactions with the party, especially out here in Western Maryland, as I outlined in Part One of this essay. Solomon notes that
‘We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming to all,’ the Democratic National Committee proclaimed anew at the start of this month, touting the commission meeting as ‘open to the public.’ Yet the DNC delayed and obscured information about the meeting, never replying to those who filled out an online RSVP form – thus leaving them in the dark about the times of the meeting. In short, the DNC went out of the way to suppress public turnout rather than facilitate it.’
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/12/11/battle-democratic-party-after-unity-reform-commission ; https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/12/dncs-unity-commission-dividing-party.html
And this, towards the end of his interview on December 8, at the Real News Network, before the reforms came out this past weekend:
We as progressives have a dual responsibility and we can't shirk either one of them. One is to fight the right, the racists, the misogynists, the xenophobes and at the same time to fight for a truly progressive agenda and platform and implement it. The mass media and the hierarchy of the Democratic Party for that matter try continually to tell us directly and indirectly that you shouldn't do both and actually try to deceive people into thinking if you want to fight the right, you have to moderate your politics and move toward the so-called center, what C. Wright Mills called the crackpot centrist position. But actually the only way to effectively defeat the right wing is to have genuine progressive populism. In a real way, that's what the struggle within the Democratic Party now is all about. (Editor’s Note: My emphasis.)
I concur, and will have more to say in the near future about what such an economic populism might recommend as an alternative economic vision for Rural Red State America, including the de-industrialized Rustbelt regions which helped tip the election to Trump.
I write, in closing, about something which I do not tire of repeating, because it is has been seared into my mind. I have no doubt the missing dialogue out here in Western Maryland Trump country is significant, indeed, it has been missing nationally for far too long as well, the one on the shape of the current political economy and its possible alternatives. It is within such an information vacuum, what “polite” company, including members of the county Democratic Central Committee, don’t seem to want to discuss, that the illusions of Trumpism (and the Republican Right) can have such a grip, almost a “history free” pass to take our nation into a clear crisis of democracy, with the economic/ecological crisis likely to follow in its wake.
I sensed trouble coming when I attended my very first Appalachian Festival at Frostburg State University in September of 2014, and heard regional author and academic Silas House give the keynote address entitled “The Other America.” I kept waiting for the link to Michael Harrington’s influential book of the same title, from way back in 1962, which laid the moral and intellectual groundwork for the Appalachian Regional Commission, the War on Poverty, and yes, Medicare itself, a book I’m rereading now and finding still, sadly, very relevant, despite a very changed economic context. But the linkage in that keynote speech never came, and author House admitted when I asked him a public question that he was not familiar with the work.
Harrington’s lament, even then, was that the Congressional Committees examining the problems of poverty were going to stress the “culture of poverty,” but avoid the scale needed and especially the direct job creation he called for, the same troubling reluctance of today’s corporate Democrats to intervene boldly into labor markets.
Have a good Christmas.
Best,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD
Graccibros in other forums.
PS It being Christmas gift-giving time, if you can afford it, I thought I’d mention a few titles sitting in a pile on my sofa. Two already were referenced in the text above, Streeck’s “How Will Capitalism End,” and Maher’s “Nature’s New Deal” (about the CCC); I also liked Dona Brown’s “Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America,” Michael Lind’s “Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States,” and I am about to start Steve Nichols “paradise found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery,” and Mark Lilla’s “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.” And let’s not forget one of the major themes of our times, implicit in my criticism of the Democratic Party: that Neoliberal Economics has placed democracy itself on the defensive, here, in Europe, and around the world, elites and their favored institutions would like to take economic issues, the fundamental ones, away from the ability of democratic majorities to reclaim their fair share of what the 1% has stashed away – and certainly not invested in Red State Rural America. Thus also my list are the late Sheldon Wolin’s “Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” and Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.”