The Democratic Party and the Left

We are not even through the mid-terms and the hand wringing over 2016 has already begun. Ted Rall proves that it is not just the psychopathic, knuckle-dragging right who has given up on even the possibility of standing united as Americans. At Some Point, Progressives Need to Break Up With the Democratic Party, a great way of saying "Happy Birthday America!" This almost rote lament that our leadership class is pretty much right wing and extreme right wing is rather trite in this thirty third year of the Reagan Revolution. Money being the only standard of value in American politics, cash is speech, cash is votes, cash buys legal power, cash buys everything and everything is for sale. Usually this lament that Democratic presidents are bought is followed by some variation that "change comes from below" or at least to concentrate on local politics. Not here, Rall implores "Progressives" to dump the only non-insane American political party and become absolute pariahs because Democrats don't listen well enough.

The first fallacy asserted is "[t]raditionally, Democrats were pro-worker... Democrats cared about the poor... Democrats aren't supposed to invade sovereign countries for the hell of it... Democrats want single-payer healthcare" and ticking off reasons Hillary Clinton is not interested in these things. Traditionally? I'm afraid history does not back this up. When exactly does this tradition start? Should we start at the beginning? The Republican Party started by Thomas Jefferson and other slave-owners was pro-worker? Okay, when the Jeffersonians became the Democratic Party did they start to care about the poor? Was Andrew Jackson breaking tradition when he conquered Florida (thanks a lot for that by the way Old Hickory)? How about when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines into Da Nang? Or the Dominican Republic? Or when Woodrow Wilson joined the Allies as an Associate Power during the Great War? I suppose it is true that Truman was shot down by the AMA when he tried to get single payer healthcare, and the Taft-Hartley Act basically destroyed the right to organize over his veto, but Truman also broke up strikes and spied on labor organizers out of fear of communism.

These are just a few examples but there are many more. I am not citing them to bash my party, nor to dismiss Rall as a crank but in the real world of American politics there is no purity. Ideology changes over time, tradition is shifting sand for anyone calling themselves "Progressive" to try and anchor an argument in. Tradition is for conservatives, not the idiots and corporate shills who call themselves conservatives, but real ones. We have never really had a conservative tradition here either. The Democratic and Republican parties are shades of liberalism and capitalism. Progressives were urban reformers with technocratic ideas to make elections more democratic, government more professional, the economy more efficient, and the populace more educated... a century ago. The story goes that after decades of right wing demonization of liberals and liberalism, the left re-adopted the identity of progressives to dodge the label.

Should we instead adopt the Chomskian model that there is one business party in America with two wings? Rall seems to think so when he states "Progressives... are like a kid with two rotten parents. The dad drinks and hits him; the mom drinks less and hits him less. The best call is to run away from home -- instead, most children in that situation will draw closer to their mothers." American political mythology holds that like Richard the Lionheart, Good King Kennedy was betrayed by Bad King Johnson and America was betrayed by Evil King Nixon. And this is a story that even many frothing conservatives believe to the point of being quite schizophrenic about Jack Kennedy, waxing nostalgic about when Democrats were the good guys. But as Richard Bradley noted in his book on the subject, the John Birch Society and southern conservatives generally thought Kennedy was a traitor and a wimp.

Posted around Dallas, November 1963

Here's the thing, Democrats try to be the president of the United States. Republicans, at least since Reagan, are only presidents of big business and right wingers. It is nearly impossible to represent all three hundred million Americans coherently. So Democratic presidents listen to the loudest voices. It is not right, or correct, or even good in any definition, but that is what we have. Republicans divide and conquer, then serve their corporate masters openly. Democrats take their friends for granted and then try to appease the special interests. Yeah it sucks for committed liberals, yes we keep getting burned but there is just as little option today as there was when Samuel Gompers first committed labor, i.e. the broad working class, to supporting the Democratic Party over building an actual Labor Party like what exists in many European countries. But even then, does the Labour Party in the UK represent the needs of British workers anymore? As it was in the 1930s, today the right is on the march. If we could somehow unplug the average angry American male from fox news or talk radio it might be possible to reach them on some level, but until those freaky old people die off not much realistically will change. There is no running away, we either get Mom to sober up and leave Dad or he will keep beating us both.