Digging Deeper on the Dismal Dems

From Description to Diagnosis

If you try to make the Democrats be what they are not and never will be, you will end up being more like what the Democrats actually are

Bob Avakian

Part of the reason survival-of-the-fittest periods are so relentless rests on the performance of the Democrats as history's second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.

Kevin Phillips

It is one thing to empirically describe and bemoan a terrible thing; it is something else far more important to go beneath description and scientifically explain and then respond in proper fashion to that terrible thing.

My right knee started bugging me enough to see an orthopedic specialist. I am only capable of describing and bemoaning the recurrent pain on the inner surface of the knee and relating some of the incidents that may have created the discomfort; the specialist has tools and knowledge that permit him to expertly analyze X-rays, reasonably interpret my description of the pain, and undertake a skillful physical exam to determine that beneath the surface of the knee the issue is likely hamstring tightness that can be overcome with physical therapy. If that doesn’t do the trick we turn to an MRI and re-assess. Knee injections or even surgery then become a possibility.

Take global warming, which is reaching catastrophic levels that make it arguably the single biggest issue of our or any time. It matters to acknowledge its existence, to chart its development, and to warn about the threat it poses. It matters to acknowledge and communicate that it is a consequence of human activity — the reckless and excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels.  

Beneath all that, however, it must be understood and communicated that the climate crisis is the result of the cancerous capitalist system, which has one goal and one goal only:  maximum profit for the investor class, combined with the constant growth that is required to keep the system afloat.  Deeply addicted to fossil fuels, capitalism is an inherently anarchic and competitive and imperialist system devoid of capacity for proper coordination of humanity’s interface with the natural environment on behalf of the common good. 

The natural and social, historical-material science is clear: capitalism must be replaced with a socialist system that elevates the common good and livable ecology above private profit. Therapy and treatment won’t do the trick; societal surgery is required from the top (the political superstructure) down to the mode (technical forces and social relations) of production and back up again. The diagnosis calls for revolution.

Or take the Democratic Party. I commonly interact with leftish, progressively inclined people, some of whom call themselves socialists, who are into complaining about how the Democratic Party doesn’t serve the working-class US majority and is therefore likely to hand US presidential and Senate power back to neofascist Republican Party of Trump in 2024-25. These leftish Dems are often good at detailing how the Democratic Party has betrayed its progressive and egalitarian-sounding rhetoric in service to the rich and the American Empire.  They describe the symptoms, listing the ways in which Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic establishment have demonstrated core allegiance to Big Business and US imperialism combined with elitist disdain for most of the populace.

My leftish friends and correspondents find this “disappointing.” They want the Democrats to be “better” and not do nasty stuff like deep-six Single Payer national health insurance, destroy Libya, deregulate Wall Street, pass NAFTA, sponsor right-wing coups in Honduras, starve Iraqi children, wage mass murderous proxy war in Ukraine, abandon labor law reform, expand oil and gas drilling, and embrace, fund, equip, and protect genocide in Gaza.

But while these frustrated progressives frequently do a good job of empirically describing what they perceive as the failures  of the “dismal Dems,” they fall short when it comes to causation and to the question of what is to be done. 

The symptoms and their empirical facts and their patterns matter, of course.  But what is the explanation, without which it is difficult to properly respond?

Why does the Democratic Party suck so bad?

Because the power that flows from private ownership and monopoly of the material means and modes of production, investment, distribution, communications, and more is richly political and ideological, not just economic. Reflecting on the plutocratic essence of the US corporate-managerial and finance capitalism that arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the leading American philosopher John Dewey noted in 1932 that U.S. politics was “the shadow cast on society by big business.” Things would stay that way, Dewey prophesied, as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.”

It might seem that Dewey spoke too soon. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, a significant reduction in overall economic inequality (though not racial inequality) and an increase in the standard of living of millions of working- class Americans occurred in the United States. This “Great Compression” occurred thanks to the rise and expansion of the US labor movement, the spread of collective bargaining, the rise of a relatively pro-union New Deal welfare state, and the domestic pressures of World War II and subsequent social movements.

But Dewey’s 1932 point held. Core capitalist prerogatives and assets – Dewey’s “private control” and “business for profit” and “command” of “propaganda” – were never remotely dislodged, consistent with New Deal champion Franklin Roosevelt’s boast that he had “saved the profits system” from radical change.

The gains enjoyed by ordinary working Americans were made possible to no small extent by the uniquely favored and powerful position of the United States economy (and empire) in the post-WWII world. When that position was significantly challenged by resurgent Western European and Japanese economic competition in the 1970s and 1980s, the comparatively egalitarian aggregate trends of postwar America were reversed by the capitalist elites who had never remotely lost their critical command of the nation’s economic and political institutions. Working, lower, and middle class Americans have paid the price ever since. For the last five decades, wealth, income, and power have been sharply concentrated upward, marking an ongoing  New Gilded Age of abject oligarchy. 

And this has happened with the collaboration of the Democrats, who the former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips described in 1990 as “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” – a telling comment two years before the ascendancy of Bill Clinton, who would undertake massive deregulation of finance capital and pass the epic neoliberal corporatist and US job-destroying North American Free Trade Agreement.   The Carter presidency, Phillips noted, marked a return to the corporate era Democrats’ previously unqualified Wall Street norm:

“The solitary Democratic President of the Gilded Age, Grover Cleveland, was a conservative with close Wall Street connections. In the 20's, the Democratic Presidential nominees in both 1920 (James Cox, an Ohio publisher) and 1924 (John W. Davis, a corporate lawyer) were in the Cleveland mold. Even Alfred E. Smith, who ran in 1928, would eventually oppose Roosevelt and the New Deal. In the 20's, Congressional Democrats competed with Republicans to cut upper-bracket and corporate taxes… Fifty years later, Jimmy Carter, the only Democratic President to interrupt the long Republican hegemony after 1968, was accused by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. of an ‘eccentric effort to carry the Democratic Party back to Grover Cleveland.'..He built foundations that would become conservative architecture under Reagan: economic deregulation; capital gains tax reduction and the tight-money policies of the Federal Reserve. (The Fed's chairman, Paul A. Volcker, was a Carter appointee.) Congressional Democrats even echoed their policies of the 1920's by colluding in the [regressive] bipartisan tax-bracket changes of 1981 and 1986….Thus, the Democrats could hardly criticize Reagan's tax reductions. For the most part, they laid little groundwork for an election-year critique [of class disparity] in 1988, leaving the issue to Jesse Jackson, whose appeal was limited by his race and third-world rhetoric, and to non-candidates like Mario M. Cuomo. Michael S. Dukakis was obviously uncomfortable with populist politics. Though several consultants and economists urged him to pick up the theme of economic inequality, Dukakis made competence, not ideology, his initial campaign issue.”

Clinton, Obama, and Biden have all followed in those Clevelandian, Carter-esque and Dukasist grooves, with slight qualifications required to maintain some credible distance from the rightmost of the two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties.  Seen in broader historical perspective, the New Deal interregnum/era (1933-1978) was the (very limited) social-democratish aberration, required by the times – a Great Depression, inter-imperialist global war, the emergence of a new mass production unionism, the fear and threat of socialism and communism at home and abroad, including actual socialist regimes in Russia and China.

The Dems have also continued a different and longstanding aspect of their commitment and captivity to US capitalism unmentioned by Dewey and Phillips: dedicated service to US imperialism whose strategic interests include the support of a genocidal apartheid and occupation regime in Israel along with other repressive and right wing governments around the world. (This imperial commitment to Judeo-fascist Israel may now help cost Joe Biden a second term.) The Dems are and have long been if anything the more effective and aggressive manager and agent of the American Empire Project, which eats up more than half of US federal discretionary spending in service to US global corporate and financial interests broadly  understood, not (contrary to a common left misunderstanding) just military contractors.

“The Dems,” a radical historian writes me, “ are a right-wing party, in world perspective, like (say) the British Tories, who have followed the Neo-Liberal playbook, just as have the Dems (and Biden did not change very much). And…the Dems, just as much as the Repub-fascists, expertly run the biggest, baddest, ‘Evil Empire.’"

On the Democratic side of the US capitalist party system, this is mostly same as it ever was. On the rightmost – maybe we should now say Reich-most – side of that binary system, however, things have changed.  While the left-“disappointing” party of Cleveland, Carter, Clinton, Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s Just the Way it is” Pelosi, and Joe “Make America Competitive Again” Biden creeps along in its standard cringing,  faux-progressive service to capitalism-imperialism, the  palingenetic ultra-nationalist Republican Party has over the last decade crossed into virulent and cultist Amerikaner neofascism.  The Republifascists are ready, willing, and able to deep-six previously normative bourgeois democracy, parliamentarianism, civility, tolerance, and rule of law, such as they are/were.  It will do so with no small buy-in from the capitalist ruling class, for whom  even that strictly limited “democracy” has always been dispensable. The “shadow cast on society by Big Business” can get very dark indeed, combining with the dark shadows cast by white supremacism, patriarchy, fundamentalism and palingenetic nationalism to potentially eclipse what’s left of popular sovereignty, always an illusion under the class rule of imperial capital.