Scroll down for links to six recent Thomas Frank interviews on the Real News Network
Thomas Frank, who understands American politics as well or better than anyone else I know of, is giving a series of interviews on the state of the Democratic Party to the Real News Network. I link to them below.
Most of my friends are liberal Democrats, like me, and they can’t understand why a working person would go against their own interests by supporting Donald Trump. But then they themselves go against their own interests by supporting Hillary Clinton.
The problem is not Clinton as an individual. As an individual, she is much more qualified to hold public office than Trump.
The problem is that the Democratic Party has come to depend on wealthy donors to finance its campaigns and it looks to well-to-do salaried professionals as its core voters. Working people are coming to realize that the Democratic Party does not represent them.
It is not that large numbers working people are turning to Donald Trump. The GOP is even worse than the Democrats. It is that increasing numbers of working people—black, white and brown—see no point in voting for either party.
Paul Jay of the Real News Network did a good interview with Thomas Frank, one of my three or four favorite political writers, on why Hillary Clinton is attacking Bernie Sanders at this late date. The interview starts about five minutes into the video.
Frank says Clinton has no just reason to hate Sanders personally. He conducted a relatively gentlemanly primary election campaign, and supported her loyally during the general election. She should be grateful that he decided to run within the Democratic Party in the first place, and not as a third-party candidate, like Ralph Nader in 2000.
But what Sanders represents, which is the pro-labor New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, is deeply threatening to the power of the corporate wing of the party, which is what Clinton and her husband have represented through their political careers.
I think the reason the Democratic Party has done so little to fight voter disenfranchisement and to register voters is that disenfranchised and unregistered voters are mainly in demographic groups that corporate Democrats don’t care about.
They would rather seek the votes of culturally liberal suburban Republicans, whose votes, as Frank noted in the interview, Clinton actually won in the 2016 election.
The argument of the corporate Democrats is that (1) the Republican leaders are so reactionary and dangerous that nothing else matters except defeating them, (2) this can’t be done without matching the Republicans dollar for dollar and so (3) Democrats can’t afford to advocate policies contrary to the interests of their big-money contributors.
This is why they found that Sanders campaign so threatening, Frank said. Sanders showed it was possible to conduct a political campaign based on small donations. As far as that goes, Clinton outspent Trump two to one, and she still lost.
Sanders and Clinton are both getting on in years, and I don’t think either has a future as a national political candidate. But I think there will be a long struggle between Sanders and Clinton factions under different names. The struggle will be bitter because the stakes are high—whether the U.S. government will be accountable to the common people or to a corporate and political elite.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as part of a fund-raising e-mail, asked donors to vote on which of the following they prefer for the next DCCC bumper sticker. They illustrate what’s wrong with the Democratic Party.
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What’s noteworthy about these slogans is that they are almost empty of content. They only point they make is that Democrats are not Republicans. This actually is the main Democratic talking point.
The middle two refer to an incident that most voters have probably forgotten or didn’t notice in the first place. Also, in the context of present-day American politics, Resistance as a political stance is a defense of the status quo. It doesn’t offer a path to anything better.
To show what I mean, here are meaningful slogans.
END THE WARS! DEMOCRATS 2018
DEFEND THE BILL OF RIGHTS! DEMOCRATS 2018
PUT AMERICANS TO WORK! DEMOCRATS 2018
HEALTH CARE FOR ALL! DEMOCRATS 2018
HANDS OFF SOCIAL SECURITY! DEMOCRATS 2018
I have a much longer list of issues in mind, but you get the idea.
Of course the present leaders of the Democratic Party would never adopt such slogans, and not just because they would open up so many incumbent Democrats to charges of hypocrisy.
Democratic war hawks are backing off their charges that Donald Trump’s victory was due to Vladimir Putin’s manipulations.
For war hawks, these charges may have served their purpose in making Trump back off from plans to make peace with Russia, and in casting suspicion on anybody who advocates peace with Russia.
For Democrats, the Russia conspiracy theory provided a basis for attacking Trump personally without having to propose constructive alternatives to his policies. But if investigations produce no evidence of any Trump-Putin collusion, these attacks will backfire.
Update 3/21/2017: Evidently I spoke too soon. Trump opponents seem determined to keep the investigation of Trump-Russia contacts going as long as possible, even though every article I’ve read contains a paragraph somewhere that says there is no evidence of collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence.
I suppose Democrats, war hawks and especially Democratic war hawks think they have nothing to lose by keeping the pressure on, even if nothing significant is uncovered in the end.
FBI director James Comey reported that the FBI has been investigating possible Trump-Russia connections since last July. It will be interesting to know what, if anything, the investigation discovers. The mere fact that an investigation is going on has no more significance that the fact of that Hillary Clinton’s handling of her e-mails was being investigated.
Recommended Reading: Giant Russia Theory Edition by Nina Illingworth for Nina Illingworth Dot Com. [Added 3/31/2017] A definitive collection of links on reasons to be skeptical of claims that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election.
It is important to remember this because merely attacking President Trump (as justified as these attacks may be) will not, in and of itself, bring back the Democratic vote.
You can’t beat something with nothing. Unless Democrats offer a path to prosperity and peace, they will very likely lose and, even if they win, their victories won’t matter.
Political scientist Thomas Ferguson is always worth reading and listening to. In this interview with Paul Jay of the Real News Network, he said the Democratic formula of “Wall Street plus identity politics” is dead.
That formula is to take Wall Street money and then champion the interests of women and minorities in ways that don’t threaten Wall Street’s profits.
The problem from the standpoint of the Democrats is that so many people—including women and minorities—are more worried about keeping their jobs, earning a decent wage and paying their bills than they are about Donald Trump’s offensive way of speaking.
But it’s hard to do anything about jobs, wages and debt and stay in the good graces of big donors.
He said Donald Trump could be a popular and successful President if he follows through on certain of his campaign promises, particularly the one to begin a major public works—that is, infrastructure—program.
Is there a chance he would do that? Too soon to say, Ferguson said.
One of the main things I’ve learned from reading American history is that political alignments in the past were very different from what they are now, and that, prior to the New Deal, “populists” and “liberals” were rarely found in the same party.
By “populist,” I mean someone who defends the interests of the majority of the population against a ruling elite. By “liberal,” I mean someone who takes up for downtrodden and unpopular minorities.
Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, was a populist. He gained fame as the leader of a well-regulated militia, composed of citizens with the right to keep and bear arms, who defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans and who fought for white settlers against Indians in what later became the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.
He was regarded as a champion of poor workers, farmers and frontier settlers. In an epic struggle, he broke the stranglehold of the financial elite, as represented by the Second Bank of the United States, on the U.S. economy. Jacksonians fought for the enfranchisement of property-less white people.
In standing up for the common people, Jackson denied any claims to superiority by reason of education and training. He defended the spoils system—rewarding his political supporters with government jobs—on the grounds that any American citizen was capable of performing any public function.
Jackson was a slave-owner and a breaker of Indian treaties. He killed enemies in duels. He was responsible for the expulsion of Indians in the southeast U.S. in the Trail of Tears. He was not a respecter of individual rights. He was not a liberal.
This was opposed by almost all the great New England humanitarian reformers of Jackson’s time and later. They were educated white people who tried to help African Americans, American Indians, the deaf, the blind, prison inmates and inmates of insane asylums. Almost of all them were Whigs, and almost all their successors were Republicans.
They were liberals, but not populists. Like Theodore Parker, the great abolitionist and opponent of the Fugitive Slave Law, they despised illiterate Irish Catholic immigrants in his midst. Poor Irish people had to look for help to the Jacksonian Democratic political machines.
My parents were New Deal Democrats, and I was brought up to revere the memory of Franklin Roosevelt and to believe that the Democrats were the party of working people.
But a strange thing happened in American politics during the past 20 years. Blue-collar workers and high school graduates have become the base of the Republican Party, while college-educated professionals are now the base of the Democratic Party.
As recently as 1992, when Bill Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush, he had a huge lead among workers earning less than $50,000 a year, and high school graduates and dropouts. The elder Bush won by a similarly large margin among workers earning $100,000 a year or more, and narrowly carried college graduates.
In contrast, a CNN poll conducted right after the 2016 conventions gives Hillary Clinton a 23 percent lead among college graduates and an 18 percent lead among voters earning more than $50,000 a year. Donald Trump is competitive among voters earning less than $50,000 a year and has a 26 percent lead among whites with high school educations or less.
This isn’t because Republicans actually represent the interests of working people. Leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan—and including Donald Trump—still believe that the key to prosperity is deregulation and tax cuts for rich people, policies which have been tried and failed for the past 25 years.
But Trump, in his saner moments, at least talks about the concerns of working people. Hillary Clinton at the moment seems more interested in reaching out to conservatives and anti-Trump Republicans.
My guess is that she will win in November, probably in a landslide, based on an alliance of racial and ethnic minorities, women and college-educated white professionals, plus the disgust of middle-road voters with Trump’s antics.
But if she governs in the interests of Wall Street, as her political record and donor list indicate she will, Republicans could reinvent themselves as champions of the working class.
The political platform of a political party is not binding on its candidates, but it is significant because it reflects what people who are most active in the party would like to see happen.
Since I think Americans should be open to voting for small political parties as well as large parties, I look at what the top five parties advocate concerning war and peace, which I think is the most important issue.
To sum them up:
The Democratic Party says it wants peace, but that it is threatened by ISIS, Syria, Russia, North Korea and others.
The Republican Party says peace is threatened by ISIS, Syria, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and others, and no limitations should be placed on possible U.S. military action.
The Libertarian Party opposes military intervention and “entangling alliances” and believes in armed neutrality, like Switzerland’s.
The Green Party thinks the USA should be guided by the United Nations charter and only engage in military action when authorized by the UN Security Council.
The Constitution Party opposes undeclared wars, treaties that commit the United States to military action and membership in the United Nations and other international bodies.
None of these is exactly what I think. I’m somewhere between the Democrats (their platform, that is) and the Libertarians and Constitutionists.
∞∞∞
Below is a slightly more detailed summary of the party platforms, with my comments.
As my friend John (Jack) Belli points out, five major parties are running candidates in this year’s election.
The five parties are the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green and Constitution parties. They are “major” parties because their presidential candidates are on the ballots in at least 20 states and could in principle win a majority of the electoral votes.
In this post, I merely provide Wikipedia links to the five major parties and their candidates, as basic and more-or-less neutral sources of information. The links show that the three small parties are not only different from the two large parties, but very different from each other. In subsequent posts, I’ll compare and contrast their platforms on important issues.
When Barack Obama was nominated for President in 2008, he offered Hillary Clinton, as the price of her support, a Cabinet post and the promise to back her candidacy in 2016.
Bernie Sanders asked much less in return for his support of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy—merely a non-binding Democratic platform that supported his progressive agenda. He didn’t even get all of that. The Democrats have come around to a $15 an hour minimum wage, but refuse to take a stand on fracking or the odious Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.
The difference between 2008 and 2016 is that Obama and Clinton were both candidates of the status quo (which I didn’t realize then) whereas the Sanders candidacy was a real threat to the moneyed interests that who support Clinton.
It is not that Sanders supported anything radical. Although he called himself a socialist, he ran as a Hubert Humphrey Democrat. He supported restoration of New Deal programs that worked well in the past and a few programs, such as Medicare for all, that have worked well in foreign countries, while having little to say about foreign policy.
But to enact these modest reforms would require a real political revolution because they are unacceptable to the kind of bankers and billionaires who made Bill and Hillary Clinton rich.
People say that a vote for a third-party candidate such as Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump. But in reality, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to empower future candidates such as Donald Trump.
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, and Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of Truthdig, talk about how the candidacy of Donald Trump is a product of the failures of Democratic leaders such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
For the past 20 or so years, as Frank points out, the leaders of the Democratic Party have turned their backs on working people on the theory that such people have nowhere else to go.
Now Donald Trump has come along and given them somewhere else to go. He doesn’t have good answers, but he is the only one of the two major-party candidates who is an alternative to the status quo.
If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will pursue the same policies, and, four years from now, there will be another Donald Trump—but one more self-disciplined, less openly racist and less obviously foolish and ignorant. And that Donald Trump will likely be elected.
The video above is 47 minutes long, but worth watching. Thomas Frank is an entertaining talker and he knows what he is talking about.
I looked forward to reading Thomas Frank’s LISTEN, LIBERAL -or- What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? I finished reading it over the weekend, and it’s as good as I thought it would be.
It is an explanation of how the Democratic Party ceased to be an advocate for the interests of working people and organized labor, and instead became the party of the credentialed professional class, as exemplified by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Thomas Frank is best known for his book, What’s the Matter With Kansas? which is about how a once-radical state became a stronghold of the right wing. In this book, he explains how the party of the New Deal became the party of bank bailouts and pro-corporate international trade deals.
Thomas Frank
The change began with the split between college-educated idealists and blue collar union workers in the late 1960s. Young radicals thought that the New Deal was yesterday’s news and that labor leaders such as the AFL-CIO’s George Meany were obstacles to peace in Vietnam and justice for minorities and women.
The young radicals triumphed in 1972 when they nominated George McGovern for President, under convention rules written so as to guarantee representation for minorities, women and youth, but not for union members.
When McGovern went down in humiliating defeat, the party leaders rewrote the rules so as to prevent another McGovern from arising again. They did not, however, return to their New Deal roots. Instead they started to bid against the Republicans for support of the business class.
These two factions of the Democratic Party – social liberals and the business conservatives – eventually came together.
Their common ground was belief that the world should be run by an elite of smart people. Their liberalism consisted of belief that there should be equal opportunity to enter this class based on educational credentials and professional achievement.
The idea was not to raise the material standard of living poor people and the working class in general, as in New Deal days. It was to give everybody, through access to education, an equal chance to be part of the elite, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or social or economic class.
Then, if you still couldn’t succeed, it would be your own fault. Maybe you didn’t study hard enough in the fifth grade.
This is not to say that Democrats became the same as Republicans.
Republican leaders wanted to be governed by an elite of tough, successful competitors. Democratic leaders want to be governed by an elite of enlightened thinkers.
Republican leaders embrace economic inequality because they believe the laws of the free market are moral values. Democratic leaders accept economic inequality because they believe the laws of the free market are scientific laws. Republicans despise losers. Democrats sympathize with losers, but do not think it is feasible to help them.
Republicans govern in the interests of the top 1 percent of income earners. Democrats, as Frank wrote, govern in the interests of the top 10 percent. [1]
Back in 1972, Democratic voters nominated a candidate, George McGovern, who was unacceptable to the Democratic leadership. Top Democrats such as Lyndon Johnson silently supported Richard Nixon, who won in one of the biggest landslides in American history.
Hillary Clinton seems to be basing her campaign on the top that the same thing will happen in reverse—that the top Republicans and also upscale Republican voters will support her, or remain neutral, because they can’t support Donald Trump and she is a sensible conservative
This would be bad for the nation. It also would be a disaster for the Democratic Party.
Trying to out-Republican the Republicans was the strategy of her husband, Bill Clinton, in the 1990s. He stole the Republicans’ thunder by balancing the budget, cutting back welfare, support mass incarceration and deregulating finance.
Barack Obama used the same strategy. His legislative program consisted of asking Republicans in Congress to enact their own past policy proposals. The Republican responded by simply everything Obama proposed regardless of merit—except, of course, pro-corporate trade deals, military intervention and shielding Wall Street from prosecution.
From the standpoint of political expediency, this strategy worked to the extent that Clinton and Obama won re-election, the first Democrats to do so since Franklin Roosevelt. The strategy failed to the extent that, during both their administrations, Democrats lost control of Congress.
What could Hillary Clinton offer Bernie Sanders if she wins? What could he accept? Above all, will he turn over his list of 2 million small donors and on what terms?
Some of Clinton’s supporters say they aren’t willing to modify the Democratic platform in order to placate Sanders. From their standpoint, that makes sense.
Sanders already has done immense damage to Clinton by raising peoples’ hopes. The whole argument for Clinton is that nothing much good can be done, and she is the one qualified to keep things from getting worse.
I think Clinton’s election strategy will be try to persuade corporate conservatives that she is preferable to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz—which, from their standpoint, she is. She will treat progressives and Sanders supporters as an embarrassment—which, from her standpoint, they are.
What she could offer Sanders is the promise of not trying to block him from retaining his Democratic Senate committee assignments and seniority rights. This would be important to him carrying on the progressive fight from the Senate.
His endorsement of Clinton wouldn’t help her much, but the lack of an endorsement, or a lukewarm endorsement, would hurt.
Sanders’ core supporters back him because of his positions on important issues. Some still are under the illusion that Sanders and Clinton stand for the same things, except that he is a bold idealist and she is a cautious pragmatist. The first group would not be influenced by his endorsement or lack of endorsement; the second group might.
The big thing that Sanders has to offer is his donors list—the 2 million people who kept him in the race, mostly with donations of less than $200 each.
Democratic election officials in Brooklyn aremay be using the same tactics to purge voter rolls as used by Republicans in Florida, Wisconsin and other states. Investigative reporter Greg Palast has the story.
Greg Palast
Francesca Rheannon, whom you may know as the host of Writers’ Voice radio, did the civic thing by volunteering to work the polls in a town east of New York City.
“I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election district, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit ballots. The last [election] I worked in, exactly ONE voter needed an affidavit ballot.”
That’s nearly one of four voters. Why? Their names had gone missing from the voter rolls.
An affidavit ballot (called a “provisional” ballot in most other states) is a kind of placebo ballot. You get to pretend to vote – but the chance it will actually be counted is …well, good luck. If your name is wrongly removed, kiss your vote – affidavit or not—goodbye.
Rheannon’s experience was hardly unique. In Brooklyn alone, over 125,000 names were quietly scrubbed from the voter rolls in the five months leading up to the primary.
To put it in prospective, the number of voters purged equals about half of the number who got to vote. Scott Stringer, the New York City Comptroller will now audit the Elections Board–now that the election is over. Hey thanks, Scott.
Neal Rosenstein, the lead voting rights attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, which plans legal action, notes that part of the problem is that partisan hacks sit on the Elections board in New York—hacks from both parties.
Brooklyn is under the control of the Kings County Democratic Party, one of the last of the big city machines. Would they attack their opponents’ voter registrations?
I don’t have to guess: in my wasted younger days, I was in the Brooklyn County elections office with the hacks where we were assigned by the Party to challenge voters’ signatures en masse. (I wouldn’t and nearly lost my state job.)
Am I saying the machine “fixed” the election for Hillary Clinton? Without further investigation, it would be irresponsible for me to pronounce judgment. Some of the purged may have moved, some have died. But those who waited in line only to fill out affidavit ballots are unlikely to be deceased.
If the Machine had been aware of the mass purge underway, would they have stopped it? As they say in Brooklyn, Fahgeddabouddit.
Andrew O’Hehir writes in Salon that Hillary Clinton and other establishment Democrats are just as dedicated to preserving the status quo are are establishment Republicans.
For Hillary Clinton and the political faction she embodies or represents, America is pretty much OK, both in itself and in its relationship to the world, and American politics are mostly OK too. Yeah, the Republicans have gotten really weird and increasingly crazy and some significant tweaks are needed to correct for that: We need to consolidate gains in LGBT rights and push back on women’s reproductive freedom and confront the lingering legacy of racism. We can make guns a little tougher to buy, make college a little more affordable and make sure that working people have slightly more resources and better healthcare.
Those are not bad things! Moreover, it’s understandable that to many Democratic voters those sound like realistic and potentially achievable goals, whereas the Sanders agenda of “political revolution” and free stuff for everyone sounds unhinged and impossible.
The problem with all that is not the agenda itself but the reassuring frame of “regular-order democracy” around it, in which such things might actually happen. No such democracy exists, which was and is the fundamental point of the Sanders campaign.
You won’t hear Hillary Clinton use the term “oligarchy” to describe the way the United States is governed, as Sanders does in every stump speech. Why should she? She’s one of the oligarchs, or more properly one of their trusted employees. You won’t hear her say that free-market capitalism has utterly failed to improve the lives of ordinary people, or that the neo-liberal economic regime of low taxes and government austerity is a disastrous scam that has robbed from the poor and given to the rich. Or that much of this resulted from the deregulation of financial markets carried out by her husband’s administration and a Democratic Congress, as directed by their oligarch overlords.
Hillary Clinton genuinely believes, I suspect, that things are not nearly as bad as hothead Bernie makes them sound, that most of the problems are things a competent and compassionate administrator can fix, and that the Democratic Party hasn’t made any fundamental mistakes. Change a couple of the proper nouns and that is exactly, word for word, what Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney believed too.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations taught the Republicans to accept the New Deal.
In recent times, the Clinton and Obama administrations taught the Democrats to accept Reaganomics.
Democrats cannot adequately represent working people unless they free themselves from that legacy.
Thomas Frank wrote a good article in The Guardian about this:
In my younger days, the Democratic party seemed always to be grappling with its identity, arguing over who they were and what they stood for all through the 1970s, the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Bill Clinton
What Democrats had to turn away from, reformers of all stripes said in those days, was the supposedly obsolete legacy of the New Deal, with its fixation on working-class people.
What had to be embraced, the party’s reformers agreed, was the emerging post-industrial economy and in particular the winners of this new order: the highly educated professionals who populated its clean and innovative knowledge industries.
The figure that brought triumphant closure to that last internecine war was President Bill Clinton, who installed a new kind of Democratic administration in Washington.
Rather than paying homage to the politics of Franklin Roosevelt, Clinton passed trade deals that defied and even injured the labor movement, once his party’s leading constituency; he signed off on a measure that basically ended the federal welfare program; and he performed singular favors for the financial industry, the New Deal’s great nemesis.
In the Reagan era, I thought that since the Republican Party had become an ideological party of the right, the Democratic Party would become an ideological party of the left, and this would result in meaningful choice for voters.
Democrats like to think that the political tide is running their way. African-Americans and Hispanics are a growing proportion of the population. Young people are more liberal than older people. Public opinion is slowing shifting toward a liberal position on gay marriage and abortion rights.
But this may not translate into political power, at least not anytime soon. The map above shows which political parties control state legislatures, before and after the 2014 elections. The map below also shows how Republicans won most 2014 elections for governor, senator and representative.
I would have thought that the manifest failure of Sam Brownback in Kansas, Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana would have caused voters to turn against the Republican Party, but this didn’t happen.
The reason is, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out in a recent article, is that the Republicans are more united as a political party, and more pro-active, than the Democrats.
Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Along with the usual set of tax cuts for high-income individuals and business-friendly regulations, the result has been:
An unprecedented wave of restrictions on abortion rights
The spread of union-hostile “right to work” laws into the Great Lakes states
New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction
Large-scale layoffs of teachers and other public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats
He said the Republicans are likely to control the House of Representatives for the indefinite future. The distribution of voters, with Democrats more concentrated in cities, favors the Republicans to begin with. Control of state legislatures enables the Republicans to gerrymander districts so as to give them an even greater advantage.
There are two sources of political power in the United States, money power and people power. The Republicans have both. No matter how much certain Democrats cater to big business, the Republicans will always be able to out-do them. But the National Rifle Association, the right-to-life movement and other conservative causes give the Republicans grass-roots support as well.
As Yglesias pointed out, there is no state, not even Vermont, in which corporate business is not influential. And, I would add, no politician, not even Bernie Sanders, who could or wants to eliminate business as a factor in American politics.
Organized labor, on the other hand, is strong only in certain states, and the Republican Party has a feasible strategy for eliminating labor.
Yglesias went on to say:
Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition.
Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.
The Republicans, and the conservative movement within the Republican Party, got to where they are through decades of effort. It’s unlikely that it will be reversed overnight. It will take a concerted effort such as Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy on a permanent basis.
Democrats base their hopes on Republican failure. But that will only give them temporary victories. The political party that achieves a lasting majority will be the party that advocates policies that will achieve peace and prosperity, convinces the public the policies will work, and makes a good-faith effort to implement the policies.
Update 6/23/2015. This post turned out to be much ado about nothng. The State Board of Elections ruled that Bernie Sanders’ party status will be no barrier to him appearing on the 2016 Democratic Presidential Election Ballot.
Bernie Sanders might not get on the ballot for the 2016 New York Democratic presidential primary.
That’s because he’s not a Democrat. He is a socialist who was elected Senator from Vermont as an independent.
Under New York law, you have to be a member of a political party in order to be a candidate in that party’s primary election, unless the governing committee of that party makes an exception.
The chair of the New York Democratic Party is former Gov. David Paterson and the executive committee chair is Sheila Comar. The committee headquarters is in mid-town Manhattan, and the committee can be contacted by through its web site.
Sanders has said that he will support the nominee of the Democratic Party. So unless the New York Democratic Committee opens the state primary, New Yorkers won’t get a chance to vote for him at all—unless he wins the nomination, of course.
One oddity of American political life is the voter who support Democratic candidates because he or she doesn’t believe their campaign rhetoric.
I encountered this in 1992 when I talked to a United Auto Workers leader who was working to elect Bill Clinton for President because he was convinced that Clinton didn’t mean what he said about the North American Free Trade Agreement.
True, the UAW guy said, Bill Clinton said he’s for NAFTA, but he also said he is for a lot of other things, such as treaty protection of labor and environmental rights, that would negate NAFTA. So in effect, his reasoning went, Clinton is really against NAFTA.
But Clinton betrayed him. He pushed NAFTA though, just as he said he would. The part he wasn’t serious about was the protection of the labor and environmental rights.
I saw the same thing among supporters of President Obama. Every time Obama would do something such as offering to cut Social Security and Medicare as part of a budget-balancing deal, they would say this is something he “had to” do.
Really? “Had to”? Did somebody like the Luca Brazzi character in The Godfather put a pistol to his head and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse?
Hillary Clinton
Now we have the same thing with Hillary Clinton, but with a twist. She is trying to steal Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ thunder by talking about economic inequality, while signaling that she doesn’t really mean it to the Wall Street figures, who have made her rich by paying her six-figure fees to give speeches.
It will be interesting to see where Clinton comes down on the Trans Pacific Partnership. She historically has supported trade agreements and in her 2014 book called the TPP the “gold standard” for such agreements. Now she declines to take a clear stand.
A lot of the political commentary describes her “dilemma” over the TPP—the dilemma consisting of the politics of the TPP, not the merits of the agreement.
If she were to come out strongly against the TPP when her opposition might have some effect in defeating it, I would give her credit for a sincere change of heart. I don’t expect this to happen, but I would be pleased to be proved wrong. Otherwise I will view Clinton’s campaign rhetoric with the same skepticism that is being asked of her Wall Street supporters.
I don’t think this happens so much in the Republican Party because there is less of a disparity in the Republican Party between what’s said to the voters and to the financial backers.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is running for the Democratic nomination for President, supports a breakup of the too-big-to-fail banks, higher taxes on the ultra-rich, Medicare for all and repairing America’s decaying physical infrastructure.
He is opposed to the war on drugs, bank bailouts and the Trans Pacific Partnership.
He voted against the original USA Patriot Act, authorization to use military force against Iraq, confirmation of John Brannan as director of the Central Intelligence Against and immunity for telephone companies who conduct illegal surveillance for the government.
That sounds good to me, but I have been warned by Bruce A. Dixon on the Black Awareness Report not to be fooled. Sanders’ function, he wrote, is to be a “sheepdog” to herd angry liberals and progressives back into the Democratic Party.
In almost every Presidential year, he noted, there is some Democratic candidate—Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich—who gives voice to the discontent of working people, minorities and progressive intellectuals with the existing Democratic Party policies.
Afterwards, feeling they have had their say, they vote for the establishment Democratic candidate. Ford thinks the same thing will happen in 2016. After venting their feelings by voting for Sanders, Democrats will fall into line and support Hillary Clinton as the latest lesser evil.
There is something to this. As Dixon correctly pointed out, you would think, to listen to Sanders, that all the USA’s problems stem from the Republican Party, Wall Street bankers, Fox News and the Koch brothers, and have nothing to do with Barack Obama, Bill or Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party.
That is the price of party loyalty. If you ask for a political party’s nomination, most members of that party would expect you to support that party’s ticket. The same dynamic operates on the other with Rand Paul and the Republicans.
How was it that Rahm Emanuel was re-elected mayor of Chicago when he did so many unpopular things? Such as:
Awarding no-bid contracts to big campaign donors.
Closing and privatizing public schools, almost exclusively in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
Shortening red light camera intervals to bring in more revenue in traffic fines.
Stonewalling on police abuses, up to and including torture.
Politically allying with Gov. Bruce Baumer, whose aim is to make Illinois a right-to-work state.
Emanuel was so close to Chicago’s financial elite he is nicknamed “Mayor One Percent.” So how did he win re-election, with the support of Chicago’s black wards and poorest voters?
I read two good articles this morning about the Chicago election, one on Naked Capitalism and the other on the Black Agenda Report. This post is based on those articles.
Emanuel’s victory was not just because of his money advantage and his support by the press. This was a given, and could have been overcome.
It was because black politicians, from President Obama on down, threw their support to Emanuel, and because his opponent Chuy Garcia, the Cook County commissioner, didn’t really attack the corrupt established system in a meaningful way.
Garcia could have made a strong effort to register voters in black neighborhoods, and aggressively campaign against gentrification, austerity and police abuses, but he didn’t. His only jobs program was to hire 1,000 more police.
President Obama in his 2013 State of the Union message proposed tying the minimum wage to the rate of inflation.
A blogger named Jamison Foser pointed out that the Democrats, who had a majority in the Senate, did not introduce any legislation in 2014 to accomplish that.
President Obama in his 2014 State of the Union message proposed an increase in the minimum wage.
Foser pointed out that the Democrats, who still had a majority in the Senate, introduced a bill in April to raise the minimum wage and, when it failed, they did not try again.
The Republicans who controlled the House of Representatives meanwhile passed bill after bill to repeal Obamacare.
Pundits ridiculed them for this, but in the 2014 elections, the Obamacare mess was a much bigger issue for voters than minimum wage. Some states that passed referendums to increase the minimum wage still voted Republican.
This is a failure of the whole Washington leadership of the Democratic Party.
What good are politicians who won’t fight for the public good even when it’s popular?
Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, was a populist. He gained fame as the leader of a well-regulated militia, composed of citizens with the right to keep and bear arms, who defeated the British in 
But a strange thing happened in American politics during the past 20 years. Blue-collar workers and high school graduates have become the base of the Republican Party, while college-educated professionals are now the base of the Democratic Party.
Hillary Clinton seems to be basing her campaign on the top that the same thing will happen in reverse—that the top Republicans and also upscale Republican voters will support her, or remain neutral, because they can’t support Donald Trump and she is a sensible conservative
Some of Clinton’s supporters say they aren’t willing to modify the Democratic platform in order to placate Sanders. From their standpoint, that makes sense.
For Hillary Clinton and the political faction she embodies or represents, America is pretty much OK, both in itself and in its relationship to the world, and American politics are mostly OK too. Yeah, the Republicans have gotten really weird and increasingly crazy and some significant tweaks are needed to correct for that: We need to consolidate gains in LGBT rights and push back on women’s reproductive freedom and confront the lingering legacy of racism. We can make guns a little tougher to buy, make college a little more affordable and make sure that working people have slightly more resources and better healthcare. 
