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© 2021 The Somerville Times. All rights reserved.
Part 3: How the Democratic Party betrayed the working class
By William C. Shelton
(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)
The Democratic Party is the oldest political party on the planet, and protecting poor and working people became its historical mission. It sided with slave owners and their ideological heirs well into the 20th Century. But its New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society programs uplifted working people, outlawed de jure racism, and created what we think of as the middle class.
Yet for the last forty years, the Party’s leaders have betrayed working people to serve professionals and elites. Consequently, the 2016 election turned on White working people defecting from the Party, and working people of color staying home.
From 1936 onward, labor unions’ organizing and money had been essential to every Democratic presidential campaign. They made their greatest and most effective effort in 1968, turning that year’s election from a Richard Nixon landslide to a Hubert Humphrey almost-win.
But post-1968 Democratic-Party reforms mandated percentages for Convention representation. They included categories for young people, women, and minority delegates, most of whom were affluent. They consciously excluded a labor category.
This exclusion marked the beginning of three trends. It created the opportunity Republicans needed to begin wooing abandoned working-class voters with culture-war tactics.
It initiated a courtship with the professional class, who eventually displaced workers as Democrats’ key constituency, and who have little respect for organized labor. The New-Deal and Great-Society coalitions were gradually abandoned, as their class-oriented policies became distasteful to “New Democrats.”
And it began a pattern of Democrats’ failing to oppose, or actually colluding with, Republicans’ historical campaign against workers’ rights to organize, redress their grievances, and influence public policy. Working-class fortunes steadily declined, not merely because of forces like “globalization” and “technology,” but because public policy makers failed to reckon with them, as opposed to their counterparts in countries like Germany.
Jimmy Carter ran as a post-Watergate reformer. Once elected, he snubbed labor, canceled major public works projects, enacted tax cuts for the rich, and commenced the first deregulation wave. His economic advisers were contemptuous of unions.
He, and succeeding Democratic nominees Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, presented themselves as “post partisan,” relying on expertise and innovation for market-oriented solutions. Voters rejected each of them.
Meanwhile, Democratic-controlled Congresses cooperated with Ronald Reagan’s dismantling the social safety net, slashing taxes on the wealthy, taxing social security benefits, busting unions, endowing predatory cable communications monopolies, and further deregulating banks, setting up the Savings and Loan Crisis.
When Bill Clinton accepted his party’s presidential nomination, he did so “in the name of the hardworking Americans who make up our forgotten middle class.” He went on to implement policies that savaged those hardworking people’s lives.
His “triangulation” strategy was based on more than making up for the loss of working-class votes and contributions with those from educated Democrats, Republicans, lobbyists, and corporate America. He was wildly successful, accomplishing what Republicans had yearned for but could never achieve without a Democratic president as an ally.
He drove approval of the NAFTA trade agreement, promising increased exports to Mexico. Instead, the U.S. incurred a $97.2 billion Mexican trade deficit by 2010, while two million Mexicans lost their farms. Working Americans lost 680,000 jobs, while their corporate employers obtained a powerful tool for beating down the wages of those still working. If those workers didn’t like what they were offered, there was welfare or prison.
Or maybe not welfare. Clinton negotiated and signed legislation that replaced a justly hated welfare system with a much worse one. The expanding investment-bubble economy masked the initial results. Since then, the poverty rate exploded, and the number of families living on $2 per day or less increased by 160%.
Regarding prison, he pandered to the right, calling on Congress to produce the most extensive police-state bill in history when violent crime had been declining for several years. The gulag that it created imprisons more people than does any other nation on earth, while throwing off juicy corporate profits.
While Clinton’s treatment of his party’s traditional base was brutal, his response to Wall Street and the superrich was obsequious. His telecom deregulation encouraged monopolization and high consumer prices. His electricity deregulation produced the Enron fiasco.
His blessing of executive stock-option compensation boosted corporate fraud. Cuts of (capital-gains) taxes on income from speculation, combined with net increases of taxes on income from working, massively accelerated economic inequality.
His deregulation of interstate banking, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and approval of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act led directly to the global financial meltdown, 2.6 million working Americans losing their jobs in 2008 alone, and about 7 million losing their homes.
He was even secretly working with Newt Gingrich to partially privatize social security. Monica Lewinsky and impeachment ended that collaboration.
The Clintons dominated Democratic Party apparatus, think tanks, big donors, and “super delegates” for the next quarter century. The resulting hope for change felt by many who accounted for Barack Obama’s historically high 2008 vote count was the hope that he would return the Democratic Party to its economic populist roots and change the policies that were hollowing out the middle class.
Instead, these voters got more of the same—what Maureen Dowd calls “an Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hung out with celebrities, lectured Congress and scorned the art of political persuasion.”
He came into office with a Democrat-controlled Congress and a public outraged by the bankers and politicians who had brought them the great recession. But he had raised more from Wall Street campaign donors than his opponent had, and more importantly, they were comfortably of his elite professional class. So he appointed the same officers and advisers whose policies had created the financial crisis.
In March 2009, two months after inauguration, Obama reassured Wall Street CEOs that he would not prosecute them, restructure their industry, or change U.S. economic policy, thereby fueling the Tea Party movement.
He reneged on his commitments to allowing judges to modify bankrupted homeowners’ mortgages, and to the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made workers’ collective bargaining easier. He declined to enforce laws prohibiting monopolies and oligopolies.
He did get the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking act passed. Like his other signature accomplishment, Obamacare, its accommodations to corporate interests made it incredibly complicated, difficult to implement, feeble in effect, and vulnerable to future Republican administrations.
By this July, administrators had written 22,000 pages of Dodd-Frank regulations and loopholes and still had 83 rules to write. It did not reinstate Glass Steagall. The too-big-to-fail banks are now bigger, while the number of community banks has shrunk by 14 per cent. And America is still vulnerable to reckless Wall Street speculators.
Before taking office, Obama had expressed support for both a Canadian-style single payer system and a “public option.” Instead, his administration dredged up the conservative Heritage Foundation’s plan from the 1990s. Obamacare mandates patronage of Big Pharma and big insurers. It relies on the cooperation of state governments, a majority of which want to kill it. And as predicted, Affordable Care Act care is increasingly unaffordable.
Throughout his tenure, Obama has been a remarkably passive president. He was disinclined not only to fight for his stated policy preferences, but for Democrats who could have supported them. His presidency will end with Democrats in possession of 11 fewer Senate seats, more than 60 fewer House seats, 15 fewer governorships, and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures than when it began.
He seems to have calculated that working people unhappy with his performance would have nowhere else to go. Enough working people decided that they did have somewhere else to go—or that choosing between two sets of false promises would make no difference in their lives—to put Donald Trump in the White House.
Since the election, Democratic establishment figures are at pains to attribute their failure to anything but themselves. In fact, Russian hacking, or an FBI Director’s letter, or racist appeals to working class voters would have nowhere near the potency required to swing an election in the absence of forty years of deepening working-class distress and betrayal by their historical party.
The excuse makers are like the proverbial blind person who grasps the elephant’s tail and demands our acknowledgement that an elephant is like a snake. But with elephants, as with all things, the truth is in the whole.
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Good analysis.
https://youtu.be/RdGDCQjGjVc
Eh – I usually agree with the writer, but this is a steamy load. Same echo chamber punditry that gets most everything wrong. I suppose fake news and commentary has become normalized.
All the verbiage aside, boil it down the dems lost because not enough of them bothered to go out and vote. That simple. All the rest is mental…self-abuse.
Elitists? You think the reps are suddenly the champions of the working class and the downtrodden? Snap out of it. These guys are just out for themselves 100% and most Trump “supporters” will be calling for his head on a pike once they finally come to – and even the dumbest and meanest among them will not fail to realize how badly they got burned. Sadly, many will never admit it.
Maybe we need to go through a Trump to get to a Sanders. Unfortunately, the journey will be a painful one.
It is ludicrous that you are blaming the voters, like Hillary is doing, to cover up her lack of vision and her incapacity to stand for things voters would want to vote for.
“boil it down the dems lost because not enough of them bothered to go out and vote”
Ludicrous? That’s hilarious. OK then, I’ll take you by the hand and walk you through it…
Ask yourself this: Do you think that “vision” and a capacity to “stand for the things voters would want to vote for” was best served by Donald J. Trump? Sure, he lied a lot, telling people what they wanted to hear, and will go back on most everything he promised them. I suppose that is the kind of campaigning that impresses you. I respectfully suggest you think that over more carefully.
Next, I have never seen a credible source confirming that Sec. Clinton has been “blaming the voters”. Sounds more like a typical soundbite for right-wing talk radio. Keep that in your repertoire.
Finally, thanks for repeating the core reason for the ridiculous state of our country now: the dems lost because not enough of them bothered to go out and vote. It can’t be said enough, and God help us if we forget it next time around.
Now, I want you and every other self-righteous objector who failed to cast a vote for Sec. Clinton to pay attention and feel responsible when, over the next few years, we hear about the many poor and aged who will suffer for want of basic necessities such as food, shelter and health care; how climate change will be fully delegitimized, perhaps tipping the situation past the point of recovery; the further degradation of race relations and the probable alienation of millions of innocent fellow human beings; the many thousands, or perhaps millions, who may die or suffer in yet another series of unjustifiable wars, propagated only for the benefit of the defense industries.
That and much more awaits us. So man up when that happens and admit you helped to bring it about. But by all means, take pride in your little protest over not getting to vote for Bernie, or not liking private email servers, or the so many other oh-so very important matters that kept you from casting a vote that would have helped to prevent this disaster.
Sleep well on that.
I like the metaphor about the blind people and the elephant that Bill Shelton has been using in this series. It applies so well to Bart Hearn’s reading comprehension and election “insight.” He pronounces this article as a “steamy load,” but offers no evidence to rebut it, or evidence that he even understands it.
He says that the Democratic candidate lost because Democrats didn’t vote. That’s deep. It’s like saying that the ocean is wet because it’s full of water. Or to use Bill’s metaphor, “an elephant is like an elephant.” He makes no effort to explain why Democrats didn’t vote, or why they voted for Trump, which this article does persuasively.
He accuses Oliver Seppo of being “self-righteous,” and assumes that Mr. Seppo did not vote. Then he delivers a self-righteous rant about how climate change, racial strife, armed conflicts, and the suffering of the poor and elderly are all the fault of Oliver Seppo.
If the Democratic leadership thinks like Bart Hearn, the party has no future. Citizens have no obligation to support a party that does not support them. This article eloquently details how the Democrats have betrayed their base for forty years. That’s why Obama’s “presidency will end with Democrats in possession of 11 fewer Senate seats, more than 60 fewer House seats, 15 fewer governorships, and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures than when it began.” People will vote for false promises only so long.
Bart is right. I like Bill’s ideas but the choice was still clear. Politicians are politicians and they never deliver on all their promises. Its up to the people to decide who the best choice is to lead the country. We messed up bigtime on this one.
Mmmm…I think you’re right. Mr. Shelton’s article was well researched and written, and speaks to those particular issues eloquently. My apologies for the criticism towards it/him and to all else concerned.
But I still say you’re missing my main point. Dwelling on the faults of the Dems in comparison to the shear horror of what the Reps are up to ignores the big ugly elephant in the room (since we’re so fond of elephant metaphors). Whatever the deficiencies of the left, at least it is not fanatically devoted to eliminating Social Security and Medicare, defunding Planned Parenthood/criminalizing choice, killing the ACA, fostering bigotry, leading us into another arms race and illegitimate warfare, etc., etc., etc…. You now the list. This was not a secret on November 8. The main culprits are the voters, who didn’t do their jobs, to stop that horror. It really is that simple and “deep”.
The Obama years were not perfect, but they were amazingly productive in many ways. Not the least of which was pulling us out of the economic disaster wrought by the plundering right. And here we go again.
Great analysis.
Dems would rather give sanctuary to an illegal than help a veteran.
Keep calling Trump voters mean and dumb, but realize we are all around you. Chain yourselves to barrels on I93 and have your vigils.
Trump has pulled back the veil and exposed both parties’ elites for the fraud that they are.
The unions support of Dems is most comical – Somerville’s union contracts have all expired and are moving to arbitration. Last DPW contract was out for 7 years yet Mayor and Board got their raises – help the illegals, but hate the workers.
Populism will come to Somerville at some point, like UK, US, and EU, and I can’t wait.
“The dems lost because not enough of them bothered to go out and vote”??
Then can someone explain to me how Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote by over 2 million?? That means that over 2 million more people actually voted for her over Donald Trump.
It makes me sick now when I hear that we should go out and vote because our votes matter. They only matter if the electoral college decides they do.
Hillary won the popular vote largely because she annihilated Trump in places like New York, California and Massachusetts. Unfortunately for her (and the Democrats) the Electoral College was designed to offset the simple numerical dynamic and advantage that the more populous states hold–and held.
I knew there were stormy waters ahead for her after the Superdelegate declaration in New Hampshire by the DNC chairperson Debbie Whatshername Shultz.
When I learned that Hillary had not even visited Wisconsin since last April, I thought back–as remote as this may sound–to a documentary I’d seen many years ago about NAFTA and the closure of Briggs and Stratton’s manufactory in Milwaukee and its relocation to Mexico. One of the workers they interviewed, who happened to be a person of color, was earning $15/hr. at the time with benefits and had to find work in the service sector working two jobs with nowhere near the benefits. I remembered Bill Clinton’s stalwart support of NAFTA and thought of how, on its surface, that would be perceived as a bad thing for manufacturing workers and how Wisconsin seemed like a ripe plum for the picking to any Republican. It took 20 years for that to come to pass, but it finally happened. Same with Michigan and Pennsylvania. Bernie Sanders articulated the degree of corporatist influence that had infiltrated the Democratic Party and was subsequently castigated for it by the Democratic Party’s leadership. And thus, the die was cast. I don’t know much about this Trump guy, but if the Democratic Party doesn’t do some real serious surgery on its own platform, it would not surprise me to see the Repubicans gain a supermajority in the Senate in 2018. The funny thing is, the more the Democrats try to discredit Trump, the more it seems they end up discrediting themselves. Just my opinions of course.
Jar, you’re right, it’s important to remember that the US is not a democracy and some votes are far more important than others.