So last night front pager Walter Einenkel wrote a diary about how Bernie Sanders in last night’s debate accurately called out Joe Biden for numerous statements Biden has made over the years indicating his openness to cutting Social Security. In response Einenkel was bombarded with many angry comments that essentially amounted to “how dare you criticize our presumptive nominee” and “he would never cut Social Security”.
The day before yesterday I wrote a couple diaries highlighting how the paid sick leave bill hammered out between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Trump Administration exempted the largest and wealthiest corporations from having to pay sick leave. For this I was similarly bombarded with angry comments accusing me of bashing Pelosi and dividing Democrats.
When I see how people are reacting to criticism of Democratic leaders, I am very discouraged about the prospects of progress in the coming years if Democrats regain control of the White House and Congress this fall. It seems many progressive Democrats believe the best political approach for our side is to unquestioningly defend our leaders.
But as someone who is very much guided by lessons from history, this approach is exactly the wrong one if we wish to achieve real progress and to keep our leaders from making terrible policy choices that will harm the people they represent and will do enormous political damage to our party and the progressive cause.
To give an example of how misguided the unconditional support view of progress is, here’s a tweet a few weeks ago sent by former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart in response to a tweet by Bernie Sanders in which he railed against the Democratic establishment.
Leaving aside the political wisdom of Sanders’ tweet, Lockhart’s tweet demonstrated a complete ignorance and misunderstanding of history that only a member of the out of touch ruling elite could pull off.
Let’s take civil rights. Lockhart is clearly referring to Lyndon Johnson’s stewardship of civil rights and voting rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. By the view of Lockhart and those who agreed with him, Johnson courageously and out of moral conviction spearheaded the efforts to pass those pieces of legislation.
But the fact is that without enormous pressure from the civil rights movement, from average Americans protesting and pushing and prodding leaders to do what was right, and if not for Johnson being terrified that liberals would “get” him, he would never have pursued civil rights.
This actually goes back to before he even became president. When Johnson was in the Senate, his mentor was arch-segregationist Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the architect of the numerous Southern Democrat filibusters of anti-lynching and all other forms of civil rights legislation, which Johnson dutifully joined for most of his time in the Senate.
In fact when Johnson became the Senate majority leader, he became a leader in crushing civil rights bills proposed by liberals. As Robert Caro writes in Master of the Senate, referring to Johnson’s successful defeat of a bill proposed by Paul Douglas of Illinois:
The Senate had won again. The citdel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. (799) In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had another formidable general in Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon “organized the Southern Democrats against civil rights this year so successfully that it was crushed,” Willis Robertson of Virginia wrote a friend. (Caro, Master of the Senate, 799-800)
It was only when Johnson saw his attempts at the 1956 Democratic nomination turned away by northern liberals who refused to support any candidate of the South that he finally began to change course.
As Caro writes:
But the lesson pounded into him in Chicago – that you couldn’t win the nomination as the “southern candidate,” that you had to have substantial northern support, and that northern antipathy to him ran very deep – had devastating implications for his chances to win the nomination in 1960. He understood now there was only one way to change his image in liberals’ eyes: to support the cause that mattered to them above all others; that so long as he didn’t change his position on civil rights, it didn’t matter what he did for them on other issues…“I want to run the Senate,” Lyndon Johnson told allies in private conversation. I want to pass the bills that need to be passed. I want my party to do right. But all I ever hear from the liberals is Nigra, Nigra, Nigra.” He knew now that the only way to realize his great ambition was to fight – really fight, fight aggressively and effectively – for civil rights; in fact, it was probably necessary for him not only to fight but to fight and win. (Caro, Master of the Senate, 832)
As a result in Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, a mostly toothless measure that nevertheless was the first civil rights bill passed since Reconstruction. Yet even this and another mostly ineffective civil rights bill Johnson passed in 1960 were not enough to satisfy liberals as Johnson lost the 1960 nomination to John F. Kennedy who at least rhetorically was more committed to real civil rights legislation.
Of course, we all know Johnson ascended to the presidency when Kennedy was assassinated, but it was not a foregone conclusion that he would pass civil rights. Johnson could have very easily gone the safe and cautious route that he’d pursued for most of his political career. Yet Johnson ended up passing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But Johnson did not do so out of moral conviction. Obviously this was a period when the civil rights movement was in full flower, with protests and demonstrations and the Freedom Summer voter registration drives in the South. And there was a hard political calculation at play for Johnson, as he himself admitted:
“I knew that if I didn’t get out in front of this issue, they (northern liberals) would get me. They’d throw my background against me, they’d use it to prove that I was incapable of bringing unity to the land I love so much...I couldn’t let that happen. I had to produce a civil rights bill that was stronger than the one they’d have gotten if Kennedy had lived.”
books.google.com/...
The same can be said of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Johnson was being very deliberative about. That is until Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when civil rights marchers were brutally beaten by Bull Connor’s storm troopers while attempting to cross the Edmund Pettius Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Only then, as public opinion swung heavily toward sympathy with the marchers, did Johnson decide to pull the full weight of his presidency into passing the Voting Rights Act which became law on August 6, 1965.
The point here is that it was demonstrations and dissent and unrelenting pressure from activists and liberals that made Lyndon Johnson use his unrivaled legislative talents in service of the cause of civil rights. That without such pressure, which often was very harsh and unflattering to Johnson, he never would’ve gotten it done nor likely would’ve even attempted to do so.
The corollary to that of course is that blind, unquestioning support of leaders has never gotten a single piece of important progressive legislation passed in our history. Nor has simply settling for what conventional wisdom of the day holds as realistic or reasonable accomplished a single progressive reform.
The Progressive and Populist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century pushed for policies that back then were considered to be fantasy, policies such as the progressive income tax, the inheritance tax, farm subsidies, minimum wages and maximum work hours, unemployment insurance, you name it. Yet due to their efforts and that of subsequent generations of activists, organizers, and a few courageous, often maligned and ridiculed politicians did those things became reality.
For example, let’s take another example of the Democratic establishment’s supposed greatness as named by Joe Lockhart, Social Security. I suppose Lockhart and those like him would regard Social Security as solely the achievement of Franklin Roosevelt, who does deserve an enormous amount of credit for making it reality. But the fact is that Roosevelt faced enormous pressure to do so. Rather than rewrite this entire episode, I will cite an excerpt from a diary a wrote on this subject a few years back:
And of course there is Social Security, the crowning jewel of the New Deal, for which Roosevelt rightly deserves all the plaudits he has gotten for it. But forgotten by many was the vital role played by Dr. Francis Townsend and the Townsend movement in fomenting the political climate that made Social Security not merely a possibility but a political necessity.
In 1933 Townsend unveiled his proposal, the Townsend Plan, to provide elderly citizens with $200 a month which Townsend also claimed would bring about the end of the Depression.
Thousands of Townsend Clubs with some 2 million members sprang up all over the country in 1934 and 1935, they collected some 10 million signatures calling for passage of the Townsend Plan, and in the process they generated an enormous groundswell for some kind of old age pension plan. Several members of Congress were elected on the Townsend platform in 1934, such as California poet laureate John McGroarty. Harper's Monthly said of the Townsend movement's influence, "On Capitol Hill in Washington the politicians are amazed and terrified by it.” (Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History, 232).
Of the Townsend movement's role in creating the political momentum that enabled the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, there is little doubt. As the Social Security website's write-up on the Townsend movement points out:
There is even some evidence that President Roosevelt introduced his Social Security proposals when he did in order to stave off pressure from the Townsend Plan and related alternative pension schemes. FDR's Secretary of Labor quotes the President as saying: "The Congress can't stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we are studying social security, a solid plan which will give some assurance to old people of systematic assistance upon retirement."
If you read the rest of that diary, it is filled with numerous examples of how Roosevelt, under incredible pressure from his left, passed programs that were far more progressive and bold than her personally wanted, and that in some case those forces passed such programs over Roosevelt’s objections. That without such pressure, FDR and the New Deal would not have been as impactful and renowned as they are today.
But pressure from liberals is not only necessary to pass strong progressive reforms, it is also needed to keep Democratic leaders from doing things that would damage themselves and more importantly would harm their constituents. Just to circle back to Walter Einenkel’s diary about Biden and Social Security, the last thing we should do is to simply trust that Biden would never touch Social Security. A big reason we should not trust Biden is that he was part of President Obama’s attempts to cut Social Security during the 2011 debt ceiling debacle that Bernie Sanders almost primaried him over.
During the standoff over those negotiations, I vividly recall many Democrats who insisted that Obama would never cut Social Security despite numerous reports at the time indicating his desire to do so, and to this day many Democrats insist that Obama never tried to cut Social Security. But the facts are that he actually did try and had a deal with Boehner to do so.
No one was under the illusion that a final agreement had been nailed down and was ready for signatures, but when Obama and Boehner shook hands that afternoon, there was a general feeling that they would work through the remaining details relatively easily. Before the meeting at last broke up, Obama mentioned to the others that they would have to carefully think about how to roll out the deal, to make sure that both sides were saying the same thing publicly. That night, Jackson and Loper sent over a three-page proposal based on the discussions; in exchange for agreeing to the $800 billion in additional revenue, they asked for more than $450 billion in combined cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next decade alone, as well as a series of changes to Social Security, including a new formula for calculating benefits and a higher retirement age.
www.nytimes.com/...
Furthermore, it was Biden who provided Obama with encouragement to pursue a Grand Bargain with Boehner.
Boehner would later tell me that he was determined to do this because he was tired, after 20 years in Washington, of seeing one Congress and one president after another ignore the coming explosion of spending on entitlement programs and the growing public debt. He also shared Obama’s view that a grand bargain would actually be easier to pass than a smaller deal — that if lawmakers were going to have to make a bunch of politically explosive cuts, they were more likely to go through with it if they could go tell voters that they’d achieved something truly transformative. As Biden put it, “There’s no point in dying on a small cross.”
Only by a stroke of dumb luck did this deal not go through as, ironically, it was Tea Party Republicans who scuttled the deal over the tax increases in it. But it was not the last time that Biden was involved in making bad deals with Republicans, after all he was the point man in the fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012 that gave us sequestration, a series of austerity measures that hindered the economic recovery which ended up being the slowest of any recovery in the postwar era.
So snakebitten were Democrats over Biden’s deal that when the debt ceiling came up again in 2013, Harry Reid purposely kept Biden out of negotiations:
When President Barack Obama laid out his strategy for the current debt-limit fight in a private meeting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this past summer, Reid stipulated one condition: No Joe Biden.
And while Biden attended the White House dog-and-pony show meeting last week with congressional leaders, Reid has effectively barred him from the backrooms, according to sources familiar with the situation.
The vice president’s disappearance has grown ever more noticeable as the government shutdown enters its eighth day with no resolution in sight and a debt limit crisis looms. Biden was once Democrats’ deal-maker-in-chief, designing budget pacts with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the summer of 2011 and New Year’s Eve 2013.
But Biden’s deals rubbed Democrats raw. He gave up too much, they said.
And for that, they have frozen him out — at least for now.
“None of the deals Biden has struck have aged well from the perspective of the Democratic Caucus,” said one Senate Democratic official aware of Reid’s face-to-face insistence that Biden be excluded.
www.politico.com/...
Given all of that, given all of the examples Einenkel named in his diary of Biden advocating for Social Security cuts, and given Biden’s repeated utterances that he wants to make nice and even share power with Republicans, simply trusting that he will not cut Social Security should not be an option. It is imperative that we put the fear of God into Biden so that he will not dare to even think of cutting Social Security. Obviously because doing so would be incredibly harmful to the very people Democrats are supposed to represent, but also because it would be in Biden’s own best political interests. In other words, we must heavily pressure and criticize Biden in order to save him from himself.
This is why I feel so strongly about this tendency on the part of too many people here and on our side to engage in mindless cheerleading and reflexive defenses of Democratic leadership. Doing so will guarantee that we will not achieve the best possible outcomes, that we will not even try to pursue the best possible outcomes, and worse it may result in our leaders pursuing policies that are detrimental to us.
Because it would’ve been better for instance if Democrats and progressives were able to exert far more effective pressure on President Bill Clinton to veto the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act rather than sign it into law, would’ve been far better if more pressure had been applied on Obama when he failed to pursue a more robust housing rescue in 2009 instead of the plan Geithner cooked up which was aimed more at foaming the runways for banks than helping distressed homeowners.
If we don’t demand more of our leaders, we will end up with situations such as what we see now where Mitt Romney of all people is proposing measures that are far bolder than what our Democratic leadership, with their lack of boldness and imagination, is proposing, and where libertarian congressman Justin Amash is to the left of Nancy Pelosi on the subject of making large corporations provide paid sick leave to their employees.
Believe it or not, I actually see a great deal of potential in Joe Biden. If he wins the presidency he would be the most experienced and accomplished legislator to enter the White House since Lyndon Johnson. But as with Johnson, Biden’s considerable experience and skill will not be put in service of the maximum progressive ends possible if we do not exert enormous pressure on him, and certainly won’t if we uncritically support him as many here and elsewhere are too willing to do.