If Republican immigration completes the transformation of the Dems into a Blue Dog party–socially liberal, economically neoliberal–can a socially liberal, economically New Deal Left attract enough voters to be competitive? Or might we have better luck abstracting working class Dems from the Blue Dog version, articularly service workers and Millennials? A DNC party with emphasis on Blue Dog economics will be Pay-GO and Deficit Hawkery. Austerity at best, if no recession crops up. And a continuation of Bankster and Corporate Impunity that enrages the proles.
The crux, per Konczal:
“Yet any sufficiently important left project going forward is going to involve at least four things: a more redistributive state, a more aggressive state intervention in the economy, a weakening of the centrality of waged labor, and a broadening, service-based form of worker activism. These four points, essential as they are, will likely further drive Trump’s white working-class supporters away from the left, rather than unite them.” (https:/medium.com@rortybomb/would-progressive-economics-win-over-trumps-white-working-class-voter
s-43f78cc7f005#.qtuj3124z)
Dani Rodrik is more hopeful:
But there is a complementary perspective in politics that says political competition is as much about shaping those interests. The politics of ideas is about activating identities that may otherwise remain silent, altering perceptions about how the world works, and enlarging the space of what is politically feasible.
If left-liberals take for granted that the white middle class is essentially racist, hate the federal government, oppose progressive taxation, don’t think big banks and dark money are a problem … and so on, then indeed many of the remedies that progressives have to offer will fail to resonate and there is little that can be done. But why should we assume that these are the givens of political life?
A large literature in social psychology and political economy suggests that identities are malleable as are voters’ perceptions of how the world works and therefore which policies serve their interests. A large part of the right’s success derives from their having convinced lower and middle class voters that the government is corrupt and inept. Can’t progressives alter that perception? (http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2016/10/its-a-war-of-ideas-not-of-interests.html)
(Well, I would say there is a chance of making govt LESS corrupt and inept if the eye is on solving the problem and NOT creating new rents for donors through privitization schemes.)
Both of these papers are quite interesting and challenge pre-judgements. I recommend. And don’t skip the comments.
What kind of Dem Party ahead?
A corporate-owned Dem Party, just as it is now. A new Bernie Sanders would get the same treatment as did the old Bernie Sanders. Massive DNC stonewalling and massive media opposition/nonpersoning.
Want change?
Either build a new party or get on the wagon with one of the smaller parties…both of which possibilities are quite remote in terms of gaining any real power.
Or…wait for the economic glitz bubble to break and then retake the Dem Party.
No other choices that I can see. Elizabeth Warren is the best the party can offer now. If she were to run for serious power she would be forced towards the center in order to achieve that goal. Soon she’d turn into HRC II and that would be that.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
I didn’t find either article insightful or helpful.
Link for the Konczal article – Would Progressive Economics Win Over Trump’s White Working Class Voters?
So, Konczal chooses to argue his point by assuming that a fiction is true. Sheesh.
The fiction doesn’t stop there, and the comments reflect that they also buy this one (regardless if they identify as right or left), and that is that Democrats and Democratic policies = progressive. That stopped being somewhat true around 1975.
wrt the Democratic Party — it will consolidate itself as the Clinton Party. Some Republicans moving to it the same way that some Democrats moved to the Bush Party that was projected to dominate as a permanent majority for forty years. As a fundamental level, there’s not much difference between those two parties. Socialism for the MIC, law enforcement and incarceration, and money supply and private sector/capitalism for the people.
It’s been a tough slog to get those charter schools and proprietary secondary schools to perform as well as public schools; so, they’re a couple of decades behind on that one. But Americans have almost completely embraced private health providers over public health — they just whine about not being able to afford as much as they need and want which makes it a bit of a sticky wicket for Democratic politicians that pushed all that privatization. Transit, housing, utilities — all more of the same. Forty years of eating our seed potatoes could mean that there’s plenty more left to it. Or maybe not. Don’t expect any authentic change until it’s all long gone.
Yes, as I wrote in a comment in another thread recently, the media invention of white-working-class-man-as-canonical-Trump-supporter is a zombie that will not be put down. Or as a friend who is, like me, an avid gardener put it, the myth is “a hardy perennial”. Digby has been pointing out on her blog how the media have a collective quadrennial freak-out about angry white men who vote Republican but pay little attention to (say) women voters.
As for what the Democratic Party will be in the future: First, I fail to grasp the implicit claim in this post that if some GOP congressmen and supporters move to the Democratic Party, the Party will automatically move rightward. Let me ask: if you (generically) decide to join an organization, do you assume that the organization will automatically adopt your views? Not likely. More likely is that you will find yourself adjusting to the positions taken by the organization.
I disagree with many of your details but certainly agree that there have been way too many Democrats seduced by bad ideas like charter schools. The embrace of private health-care providers I suspect is a reflection of the fact that few Americans have any experience of anything else. I have a hard time envisaging how we would make a transition to something else, especially something akin to the British National Health Service, which truly is socialized medicine (and is basically a historical accident that arose because the government took over the medical system during the 2nd World War, when Britain suffered terribly from German bombing). I wonder if something like the French system could work: 80% of costs, I think, are covered via a single-payer scheme, and people have the option to buy an insurance policy (in a regulated market) to cover the rest. But this would be a hard sell, too, given the rugged-individualist mindset of so many of our fellow citizens.
I’ll respond but if your comment is just another attempt to engage in a meaningless fight for sport, I’ll ignore further comments from you.
I didn’t say that the Democratic Party will move to the right as Republicans (voters, media folks, and politicians) shift to back HRC. People shift to the winning side all the time with no impact on the trajectory of that winning side. Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman didn’t even slow down the GOP rightward drift. No Republicans are necessary for Democratic federal policies to continue advancing privatization, deregulation, corporate trade deals, displays of military might, etc.
Poor Democrats passively seduced by bad conservative ideas. No, those were economic regressives that called themselves Democrats because of one or more social issues (the cheap stuff in that it doesn’t impact federal spending to any large extent) that were advanced by progressives and most often directly and positively impacted the individual. That’s why they so quickly and easily embraced those bad ideas.
The NHS wasn’t an accident of WWII. It was a decision by the Minister of Health in 1941 (implemented in ’48) as to what the country’s health care system needed to look like after the war. Up through that time, the US and England were on the same path: expand private health insurance coverage to more people. That WWII accident was in the US by excluding employer paid health insurance costs from employee earnings.
Since the Nixon administration, we’ve heard from both parties that the next health care fix will reduce/contain medical costs and make health care more affordable for the average person (Obama’s “bend the cost curve” was the latest silly version). Hasn’t happened yet. If Japan, England, France, etc. spent anywhere near the per capita cost of health care as the US (and that number is understated by the large population that gets little to no care), their health care systems would have been bankrupt a couple of decades ago.
As a percentage of GDP, those other health care systems consume 9-12%. Again for everyone. The US is near 18% of GDP. And that figure is with a senior population at 13.7% while it’s 15-20+% in the comparison countries. What will aggregate health care costs be in 2020 when the senior population is 16.8% in 2020 and 20.3% in 2030?
Thank you for the reply. I’m not fishing around for an argument.
I realize that I did not word things carefully. You did not say the Democratic Party would move to the right if some Republicans decided to switch parties, but I have encountered that claim elsewhere on this blog many times.
Democrats have been as hooked as Republicans on trickle down from absurd levels of military spending. Where’s our damn peace dividend?
We’ll have to agree to disagree about the origin of the British NHS. What I wrote reflected what I heard from English folks during a sabbatical year.
I also didn’t claim that HRC wouldn’t move the party to the right. One only has to look at those she hangs with and fund her to know that. It was far more of a mixed bag in ’08 with Obama. Until he began naming his cabinet.
I believe peace must occur before any peace dividend can be realized. Politicians are hooked on military spending because a) it doesn’t have to be paid for b) some dollars get disbursed to all (or nearly all) states c) zero accountability for the spending. On that last point — $5 billion in cash could be shipped to and disappear in Iraq with few questions. Spend $5 billion on low/no income housing that gets trashed within a few years and people never shut up about the waste.
If one must “do stupid shit” that costs the federal government serious money, domestic is better than foreign. Even if Trump’s stupid wall cost $100 billion (four times what some have estimated) that would more positively impact the US economy and workers than $100 billion spent occupying Iraq ($100 billion is 1/17th the additional cost to date for the Bush/Obama wars). But wars and walls don’t require any thought voters aren’t any smarter than the politicians/candidates that some up with this low-level stupid shit.
I love Jacobin writers–they say it so much more cogently than I can. Think about the way neoliberals think about the atomized citizen.
[Matthews]he sheds useful light on the standard liberal way of thinking about politics. Matthews seems to take individuals as the elementary particles of political life. The individual is apparently endowed with a more or less well-defined set of attitudes on all the major issues of the day.
…
I’ve seen most of the studies Matthews links to. As far as I can tell, none analyzed polling questions that actually asked people what was “motivating” them. Instead, they used standard polling questions like: What is your household income? Do you approve of Obama? Should taxes be cut? Should immigration be reduced? Is black poverty caused by a lack of effort? Actual motivations were never recorded: they were inferred by researchers, using math, and then imputed to Trump supporters en bloc. [And the guaranteed clincher, “Is Obama a Muslim?”]
…
The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war politics of the reactionary Tammany-versus-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that followed.
(Which is just what the Washinton Consensus wants, leaving Sanders as a fringe that cannot grow. So expect the demonization to continue, folks.) https:/www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/trump-voters-white-working-class-vox-racism
The ‘rugged-individualist mindset’ is a fabricated conceit which enables the profitable scavenging of every nook and cranny of the remaining assets and incomes of most American consumers.
We don’t know yet what kind of Democratic Party is ahead and won’t until the votes are counted for this election and Democrats see what exactly they have won and most importantly who among Democrats won what on what promises and platforms. The wheel is still in spin for the next three weeks at least.
And we don’t yet know whether the Republicans will destroy themselves as a viable party or limp along for a couple of cycles and restore themselves in some new form that either doubles down more or admits that the conservative movement was not only a failure; it was a disaster for the country that sapped it as a global superpower.
If as expected, the Democratic Party becomes the establishment duopoly party defending the Washington Consensus on both economic policy and national security, the obvious alternative party needs to be a loyal opposition party that can dissect the Washington Consensus and propose alternative policies wrapped in American traditions and rhetoric. Given the current historical situation, the key rhetorical terms to my mind are: peace, prosperity, freedom, justice, welfare (let’s redeem that term with a renewed understanding of what exactly it means now).
Yes, this rhetoric is the social construction of a new reality that is alternative to the social construction of the Washington Consensus.
But all that is just the pretty words to put on some practical policy that united the constituencies that can provide a consistent critique to establishment interests and would unite those who come out on the short end of the stick of establishment policies.
Who might those constituencies be in the wake of the crash-up of the Republican Party? What might be the blocks to engaging them in a new coalition?
The Republican coalition combined ethnic religious, fearful Southern and urban whites, anti-communist free-market fundamentalists, corporate elites, anti-anti-war military supporters (reactive patriotism), and traditional Republican family elites into a coalition that finally gained traction when they politicized the Southern white religious evangelicals and pentecostals (the working class churches). Who exactly of this are the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, who are left out of the new establishment alignment around Clinton?
What I see locally are the self-employed small business owners and tradespeople who understand their businesses as what the free market is all about and rightly feel that most government regulation differentially excludes them from the market by imposing relative higher costs of entry to markets. I think that those concerned about Blue Dog tendencies see the new Clinton party focused on bringing these folks back out of extremism through co-opting them with legislation. Their problem is the extreme Ayn Rand style economic ideology that has taken hold in these constituencies. And the toxic result of 70 years of red scares that never really came to terms with what Marx actually wrote.
So who remains as oppositional constituencies that will very rapidly fall from the establishment party?
First of all is the environmental movement that was completely bypassed in this election, no matter how defensively they voted against Trump. And there are Native Americans who in the #NoDAPL movement have allied themselves with the part of the environmental movement that senses extreme urgency for action.
Second there is the movement that is increasingly concerned about the perpetual state of war that the United States is in and how our national security institutions have self-interests in preserving that state of war and the fear surrounding it in order to feather their personal financial nests. Added to this are those concerned about the increasing surveillance state and unconcern for computer and network security breaches because they want sally ports for cyberwar activities.
Third, there are naturalized immigrants concerned about relatives in their countries of origin, both for their safety and for ways to help their prosperity–the failure of which results in their emigrating to the “land of hope and plenty”.
Fourth, there are the populations of the economic regions that the establishment has cavalierly abandoned as the establishment has more profitable customer bases and supply chains and sources of resources through globalization, that just coincidentally treats foreigners worse than they, the abandoned Americans, were treated.
Fifth, there are people who are experimenting with contingency institutions, alternative supply chains, reduction of resource loads, and other potentially useful mitigation tools in the face of local environmental collapse.
Sixth, there are the large number of people currently receiving income from what is currently being called entitlements and who might soon be hurt by one of the Washington Consesus’s favorite wet dreams–some sort of grand bargain that get billionaires out of paying taxes.
Seventh, there are those who the current tax code actually does disadvantage–most of the ordinary people who have income withheld, fill out a return with standard deductions and exemption and little complication, and return it regularly every year without roll-forwards and roll-backwards of tax liability. And pay a higher effective rate of tax than do most of the 1%.
There is a populist narrative that might cover all of these people. It might be possible to frame this narrative compellingly and without internal contradiction so as to appeal to a coalition who cannot be united under bipolar ideological alignment (liberal-conservative) that the Republicans brilliantly forced on American politics maybe 100 years ago.
Finally, there are the factions in the culture war, all of whom are seeking governmental weight on their end of the judicial scale. How do we as a society strip out the falseness of these discussions so that they become cultural discussions instead of political discussions of who the government is oppressing. In principle no one should be enlisting their interests in politics. In practice, they are what has caused the extreme polarization and acrimony. What God tells me I need to do, contrary to everything else. How my parents raised me. My freedom to do what I want to do. How do these get de-politicized so that politics can function on the actual people’s business? How do you sort out the cultural defenses of privilege and the claims to a right to discriminate so that equal protection under the law becomes closer to a reality?
And then there are the common interest constituencies seeking to make government less corrupt, taking money out of elections and under-the-table deals with politicians, and making the political process drive from the bottom up instead of from the monied down.
The first action to take is to suspend your cynicism of the possibility long enough to identify what the blocks to such a opposition party will be. And what the agenda would be if the opposition party against all odds actually took power.
The second is to lay out a plan to field opposition candidates to the Washington Consensus within the Democratic Party or in as separate coalition party. An opposition internal caucus seems better adapted to the US system for those who know how to use the levers of power in each of the Houses of Congress.
The third is to discover how to network the sufficient number of people that one would need to win seats in Congress and legislatures to be an effective opposition presence beginning in 2019.
So the question here is what part of the rump Republicans after Clinton sucks them into the Democratic victory, having been released from Trump and from an conservative identity (a harder task) could reasonably fit in this kind of opposition party?
very clear, thanks
If election outcomes mattered as much as your comment seems to assume, why did we get GHWB’s campaign pledges by voting for and electing WJC (with the single exception of an income tax increase)?
It’s not up to constituencies but whatever the elite movers and shakers want. They’ve been in charge since at least 1966 and have no difficulty “buying” the constituencies needed in any one election cycle. It’s not in their interests to completely crush either party because one party leads to all sorts of undesirable and unintended consequences for them.
Goldwater helped the GOP to clear out the dregs of the McCarthy era and McGovern helped to begin clearing out the New Dealers. There are freaking reasons why Nixon could go to China and his DP appears progressive compared to that of the “New Democrats” today.
More than Presidents get elected; that is something that progressives have forgotten since 1966. And the civil service advisors of political appointees also have political histories; embedding political appointees as civil service appointees did not start with George W. Bush as he made his exit.
I’m not sure what makes 1966 significant in terms of the transformation to a Citizens United and lobbyist systme in Congress, but what you say has been the trend. But elites are conflicted among themselves depending on their place in the political system and the economy. Voter action randomly or deliberately does become significant when elites collide.
LBJ was was opposed by a segregationist caucus in his own party on certain issues and a bipartisan conservative movement in Congress on others. The Vietnam War was not one of those issues.
Nixon was opposed by a Democratic Congress that was not yet ideologically aligned. It was not true that only Nixon could go to China. Conservatives would scream and holler if anyone opened relations with China because they were Communist. One wonders what would have happened if JFK or LBJ and restored relations with Cuba and opened relations with the Peoples Republic of China. Fait accomplis do sometimes work.
Who lost when McGovern went down in 1972? Most of the New Deal era pols like Olin Johnston or even LBJ were either retired or dead. Who didn’t go down were war hawks like Scoop Jackson.
Election outcomes matter. Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America victory in 1994 completely transformed the Clinton Presidency and most likely the trauma of that transformed the Clinton’s approach to politics. A lot of what got attributed to Clinton was either Republican initiatives that Clinton was forced to accept or Clinton’s attempt to triangulate around Gingrich’s hardnosed conservative agenda. For example, welfare reform was tempered with programs that could indeed (and did at first) get people off of welfare so long as a economic policy amd the economy was supplying the jobs.
The dregs of the McCarthy era were the conservatives as were the dregs of the Dixiecrat Democrats. Goldwater cleared out others and opened the Republican Party to Strom Thurmond and Albert Watson. Would be interesting to see who did lose in 1964.
The New Democrats arose as the South started hemmorhaging Southern Democratic “moderate” members of Congress and governors in the late 1980s. And accelerated after they lost their third Presidential election in a row to George H. W. Bush. It was likely a mistake on the same order as New Labor, which was the reaction to Maggie Thatcher’s victories. A large part of the Labor Party now thinks so as does a large part of the Democratic Party; there are still holdouts however. (Cough, Evan Bayh)
The election outcome in 1980 mattered. The election outcome in Congress in 1994 mattered. The election outcome in 2000 mattered a lot. The election outcome in 2002 mattered. The election outcome in 2006 mattered. The election outcome in 2008 and 2012 mattered. But so did the election outcomes going in the opposite direction in 2010 and 2014; we did clear out the Blue Dogs. And the election outcome this year will matter significantly because it is likely that Trump has significantly damaged the Republican Party in a way the McGovern did not damage the Democratic Party.
Clinton will be holding up the Democratic wing of the duopoly’s policies; she won’t be kowtowing to the Kochs or Sheldon Adelson or the mining industry; she will be receptive to only a certain part of Wall Street, CitiBank, JPMorganChase, etc. but not the hedge funds that supported Trump. She might listen to the Waltons. But what is troubling is the slice of national security experts she will be listening to, thanks to Madeline Albright and Zbigniew Brezinski.
But that is not where I am going. I am just saying a large Democratic majority in Congress will be more comfortable in restraining Clinton as President than will a slim majority that has to be mustered to counter Republican obstruction of the good policies and Republican support of the elite folly.
Not so sure that the left had a lot to do with cleaning out Blue Dogs. POC did not show up to vote when Obama was not on the ticket. Might have been enough all by themselves to do most of it.
Now we are evidently a party Joe Lieberman can love again.
Neoliberals still BELIEVE!!!! Chucky’s first act will be permanent (if he can manage it) repatriation tax cut for corporations in order to fund a public/private infrastucture bank the govt will hand off to states to manage or monkeywrench(and loot). That has to happen quickly before the Europeans get too much of it.
I am just saying a large Democratic majority in Congress will be more comfortable in restraining Clinton as President than will a slim majority that has to be mustered to counter Republican obstruction of the good policies and Republican support of the elite folly.
That’s where you and I totally disagree. However, we seem to have very different historical memories and interpretations. I specifically chose 1966 because that’s when the GOP outside the south had electoral successes at both the state and federal level. But it was far more complicated than the binary (pro-civil rights v. racism) and (pro-war v. anti-war) or even pro-New Deal and anti-New Deal) choices that you suggest. In the Senate only three seats flipped to GOP: IL – Percy, OR – Hatfield, and TN – Baker. Can you put anyone of those men in your boxes?
’70 — ’74 Scoop Jackson Democrats weren’t making any net gains — although, tossing out Fulbright and Metzenbaum in favor of Bumpers and Glenn added MIC weight. But Metzenbaum came back in ’76 to take a GOP seat (one bright spot in that year).
’76 — ’80 were the disasters for liberal Democrats. How the hell does the GOP go down with a crooked administration (both resigned) and two years later more conservatives are elected? Given a choice between Brooke (R) and Tsongas (D), why would any liberal vote for Tsongas?
Voters have been kicking out Congressional DINOs in favor of Republicans in the past three elections, but the ranks of Democrats leaning left has been compromised in the past eight years by the party power structure and they will absolutely walk in lock-step with HRC. Except when they can dodge a vote because some (most or all) Republicans are willing to cross-over. If HRC wins with higher EC and popular vote margin than BHO did in ’08, I’d be willing to wager that the non-teabag Republicans will go along TPP and HRC’s version of the Grand Bargain. There simply won’t be enough principled liberal Democrats to defeat that.
interesting analysis….
You can dream all you like all de-politicizing culture wars issues, but it isn’t happening. The Erick Ericksons of the world say “abortion is murder”. They are not going to back down. They cannot compromise when they see compromise as accepting murder under certain circumstances. And they’re going to fight against normalizing LGBT people because again they see the existence of LGBT folks as an affront to the Bible.
They may adopt a lower key rhetoric, but they’re not going away.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/21/showing-strength-political-revolution-sanders-raises-2m-
two-days-downticket-dems
Sanders raises money for down ticket
Hey, Marie. It worked. And I made a note I can find again. lol Thanks.
Mino — you seriously need to learn how to provide links to articles. I’ll try to walk you through it again — it’s not difficult.
Begin with a: <
next: a
followed by a space
next: href=
next: “
next: copy the address link and paste after the “
next: “
next: >
next: article title or whatever you want to call it
next: <
next: /
next: a
next: >
Jacobin is on a mission to draw attention to the untapped reservoir of underclass for lefty recruitment…
Many white workers aren’t voting for Democrats this November. And not for the reasons you think.
The pundit class, however, can’t see these flaws. As members of wealthy, coastal communities, its backers see only the symbolic achievements of the twenty-first-century Democrats and none of the failures. We are talking about a class of people who believe the anger and bitterness of white working-class middle Americans in 2016 is rooted in the anxiety that “their whiteness has lost its value.” No, it couldn’t be that they’ve lost their livelihoods, families, or homes — it’s that they’ve just been told George Wallace isn’t coming to save them after all. It’s not only not true, it’s garbage politics. In effect, it is nothing more than academic jargon used by the affluent to dismiss and slander working people’s rightful belief that as a society grows far wealthier (as the United States has over the past several decades), they’re entitled to rising expectations — not diminished ones.
So while we’re told about just how insane white workers are for voting the way they do, I frankly don’t find it surprising. Many still vote for today’s affluent, professional-class Democratic Party with low expectations. Some, with no labor union or political organization to corral them, fall back onto reactionary prejudices and throw in with people like Trump for the worst reasons.
And most, understandably, just stay home on Election Day. Until we change that fact, social justice in the United States will continue to remain out of reach for everyone who has to work for a living.