Progressives have no power in a corporate, focus-grouped, Wall Street-leaning party.
December 26, 2014
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The Democrats’ conduct since the midterm debacle is as sad and sorry
as the campaign that caused it. The party’s leaders are a big problem. A
bigger one is the closed system of high-dollar fundraising,
reductionist polling and vapid messaging in which it is seemingly
trapped. Some say a more populist Democratic Party will soon emerge. It
won’t happen as long as these leaders and this system are in place.
Nancy
Pelosi says it wasn’t a wave election. She’s right. It was the
Johnstown Flood; as catastrophic and just as preventable. One year after
the shutdown Republicans scored their biggest Senate win since 1980 and
their biggest House win since 1928. Turnout was the lowest since 1942,
when millions of GIs had the excellent excuse of being overseas fighting
for their country.
Every Democratic alibi — midterm lull,
sixth-year curse, red Senate map, vote suppression, gerrymandering,
money — rings true, but all of them together can’t explain being swept
by the most extreme major party in American history. Citing other
statistics — demography, presidential turnout, Hillary’s polls — they
assure us that in 2016 happy days will be here again. Don’t bet on it.
It
took more than the usual civic sloth to produce the lowest turnout in
72 years. It took alienating vast voting blocs, including the young and
the working class of both genders and all races. The young now trend
Republican. Voters of all ages migrate to third parties or abandon
politics altogether. It’s the biggest Democratic defection since the
South switched parties in the 1960s. If Democrats don’t change their
ways, their 2016 turnout will be a lot harder to gin up than they think.
Democrats
are in denial regarding the magnitude and meaning of their defeat. It
is a rejection not just of current leaders but of the very business
model of the modern Democratic Party: how it uses polls and focus groups
to slice and dice us; how it peddles its sly, hollow message and,
worst, how it sells its soul to pay for it all. Party elites hope party
activists will seek to lift their moods via the cheap adrenaline high of
another campaign. For once, activists may resist the urge.
The
vital task for progressives isn’t reelecting Democrats but rebuilding a
strong, independent progressive movement. Our history makes clear that
without one, social progress in America is next to impossible. For 100
years progressive social change movements transformed relations between
labor and capital, buyers and sellers, blacks and whites, men and women,
our species and our planet. But in the 1970s progressives began to be
coopted and progress ceased. Their virtual disappearance into the
Democratic Party led to political stultification and a rollback of many
of their greatest achievements.
Much is written of the rise of the
right, but very little of the fall of the left. We’re apt to see the
left’s decline, if we do see it, as a consequence of the right’s
superior funding, organizing and messaging, of the corporate dominance
of all politics, and of white backlash against government, liberalism or
modernity itself.
It’s a bad analysis. The left’s fall is as much
a cause as an effect of what ails us. Middle-class anger isn’t about
race, taxes, social services or social change. It’s mainly about
middle-class decline and public corruption. Democrats talk a lot about
both problems — but if they were really trying to solve either one, we’d
all know it.
The prevailing analysis fosters
passivity. Whenever people speak of forces rather than choices it’s a
sure sign they aren’t about to do anything. Progressives who blame their
losses on globalization, white backlash or money in politics are less
apt to focus on the one thing they alone control: their own choices.
It
also fosters denial. We know there can’t be a strong middle class
absent a strong government to help create and sustain it. Social
Security, Medicare, civil rights and labor laws, public education and
market regulation are middle-class foundations. In the late ’70s they
buckled and the middle class buckled with them.
It was around then
that Wall Street began colonizing the Democratic Party and the
Democrats began colonizing the left. After Jimmy Carter squashed Ted
Kennedy, challenges to incumbent Democrats ceased. Grassroots movements
morphed into Washington lobbies and formed their first PACs. For the
sake of the Democrats in whom they’d reposed all their hopes and dreams,
progressives moved their debates indoors.
We know these things
but we don’t connect them and so we miss the chain of causation that
runs from the left’s fall to the fall of the middle class and finally,
the triumph of the right. Nor do we connect the left’s fall to its own
choices. It has a victimization story worthy of a Fox News anchor, but
in truth the left dismantled itself. Progressives traded their
independence for a seat on the far end of the Democratic bench.
Progressives turned their movements into mailing lists. Progressives put
aside proven weapons of reason, passion and conviction for the shallow
techniques of corporate marketing and modern electoral politics.
Our
problem isn’t partisan gridlock but the stagnation of a political
ecosystem imbalanced by the slow extinction of liberalism. In the
shutdown Ted Cruz bestrode the world like a colossus till the Kochs, of
all people, rode to the rescue. Wall Street was a major player but labor
was invisible and progressives said barely a word. Their silence didn’t
strengthen Obama, it weakened him. It was a perfect tableau of politics
in our time. When the left goes AWOL, the right goes crazy.
Democrats
think they need more money, better ads and a bigger computer. They
gripe about Republican wedge issues, but have their own; immigration for
Latinos, choice for women, student loans for students. What they need
is a blueprint for solving problems that matter to everyone. Since the
19th century, progressive movements have created the blueprints and the
public groundswells needed to enact them. Can progressives build such a
movement in this century?
They can do it but they’ll have to take a
time-out from electoral politics. They must declare their independence
from the Democratic Party, its ineffectual politics and its current,
clueless leaders. In the fall liberal pundits chastised Democrats who
“ran from Obama.” Democrats lost because they couldn’t run from
themselves. What they really needed to do was assure voters they saw the
flaws in Obama’s program and had a plan to fix it. They didn’t have a
plan because progressives never gave them one.
Democrats in
Congress seem bent on mass suicide. After their landslide loss they
reelected all their leaders without challenge. After the Senate
confirmed two utterly unqualified Obama donors as foreign ambassadors,
they caved on a budget that opened more sluices for the rich to pour
money into politics and hollowed out Dodd/Frank to let Wall Street cover
its bad bets with depositors’ money. In 2013 Obama said he wouldn’t
“pay ransom” to pass a budget. In 2014 he did just that.
A
Progressive Declaration of Independence is a risk, but it’s safer than
idling about on deck as the Democrats’ ship goes down. Movement building
is arduous work. Builders must agree on an agenda, finance and organize
a base, communicate their vision, and help people apply the pressure
needed to make change. It’s a huge task. If it hadn’t been done so many
times before you’d think it was impossible.
Some progressives will
spend 2015 trying to lure Elizabeth Warren or some second or third
choice into a run for president. Some will make their peace with
Hillary. Some will take other paths. A public debate among progressives
will unearth some disagreements on policy and a more fundamental
divisions over strategy.
Some say the Democratic Party is beyond
saving. Others say it’s our last hope. I see progressives taking leave
of Democrats not as abandonment but more like tough love. In the end it
may be the only thing that can save Democrats or for that matter
progressives, whose reputation has been tarnished by the party that
betrayed them. In any event it’s better for both parties for all future
business to be conducted on an arms’ length, cash-for-carry basis.
My
guess is that if you can’t take over the Democratic Party, you can’t
take over the country — and that a declaration of independence should be
followed by an actual rebellion. The Tea Party has shown you can work
within a party and yet be highly independent. But whether to work
within, against or apart from the Democrats is a call for later.
Building a strong progressive movement is work we must do now. Obama had
this right in 2008. We are the change we’ve been waiting for.
Progressives
once provided Democrats with policies. Now Democrats provide them with
slogans. Progressives say Democrats lack backbone and a bottom line, but
progressives used to provide those too. Want politicians to get the
courage of their convictions? It’s simple. First, get some convictions.
Courage will follow.
Bill Curry was White House
counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for
governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and
the politics of populism.
