by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“I will not live my life for any other person, nor ask
another person to live his life for mine.”
— Ayn Rand, Atlas
Shrugged
“We just keep
winning, winning, winning,” President Donald Trump boasted at a campaign-style
rally shortly after Republican Congressional candidate Karen Handel decisively
beat Democrat Jon Ossoff in a special election in Georgia — the fourth time in
a row a Republican had kept a House of Representatives seat from flipping
Democratic. The election occurred on the eve of another announcement in the
history of the Republican Revolution: Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s
promise that his house’s version of the bill to “repeal and replace” the
Affordable Care Act, popularly known as “Obamacare,” would finally be revealed
to the world after it had been drafted in secret by 13 Republican Senators —
all of them male, and all white except Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Forget just
about everything you’ve read about the “disarray” of the Trump Administration,
the discontent of the so-called “moderates” in the Republican Party and the
historically low “approval” ratings President Trump has reached in opinion
polls. The Republican Revolution — essentially a back-to-the-future campaign to
return the U.S. to what it was in the 1880’s, when corporations and their
wealthy owners ruled everything and
frequently purchased public office just to make themselves richer; workers
didn’t have the right to organize into unions; workers’ health-and-safety laws
didn’t exist and neither did environmental protections — is continuing despite
the speed bump it hit in the Senate when McConnell’s health-care bill couldn’t
attract enough Republican votes to pass.
The Republican
Party has been determined to return the U.S. to the economic law of the jungle
at least since the 1930’s, and arguably since the 1890’s, when pressure from
the original Populists forced the government to confront, and occasionally even
do something about, the excesses of unbridled capitalism: the increasing
inequality of wealth and income, the treatment of workers and the environment
as expendable commodities, the open purchasing of influence and power in the
halls of government. It’s fascinating to me that American political
commentators are so ill-informed about their nation’s history that President
Trump continues to be described as a “populist” when he’s exactly the sort of
politician the original Populists organized to oppose: a privileged rich person who bought public office
to make himself richer.
It was during
the 1930’s, with Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his Democratic
Congress vastly expanding government’s presence in the economy, guaranteeing
workers’ rights, creating Social Security to end poverty among senior citizens,
and passing laws like the federal minimum wage and the Wagner Act, which gave
workers a legally enforceable right to have unions and strike for better wages
and conditions, that the Right-wing reaction went into overdrive. The arguments
of the anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal and anti-progressive Right have a familiar
ring today: government was getting too big, too involved in the inner workings
of the economy; taxes were so high they were penalizing entrepreneurial success
and handing money to people who didn’t deserve it; and only by returning to the
order and discipline of the Free Market
could economic recovery be achieved.
Among the
propagandists for the Right who emerged in the late 1930’s was a woman writer
and refugee from the Soviet Union named Ayn Rand. Her first novel, We the
Living (1936), was an autobiographical story
about her life in Soviet Russia and her deepening conviction that any economic system other than total lassiez-faire capitalism would produce the devastating privation
and dictatorial authority she had seen first-hand in the Soviet Union. Along
with the “Austrian School” economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek,
Rand developed a political philosophy she called “Objectivism” but which is
usually known today as Libertarianism.
The fundamental
tenet of Libertarianism is that the individual is supreme, and people
essentially owe nothing to each other. In Rand’s two most important works, the
novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas
Shrugged (1957), she created stories in
which heroic capitalists representing untrammeled individualism did battle with
evil collectivists in government and wimps in the private sector who were
willing to compromise with them. Contrary to the public image of Rand as a
fierce defender of capitalists, there are as many capitalist villains in her
books as there are capitalist heroes, and what separates the two are their
attitudes towards government: Rand’s bad capitalists seek special favors from
government, while her good capitalists either ignore government completely or
treat it as just another customer.
Rand was so
convinced of the superiority of her capitalist heroes over the common run of
humanity that in her books she constructed plot lines in which her heroes lost
all their money — and then, through a combination of hard work and brute
strength and power, got it all back. She even believed the spirit of
entrepreneurial capitalism was so powerful it could literally change the laws of physics; John Galt, the legendary
figure around whom the plot of Atlas Shrugged is built even though he doesn’t appear until the
very end of the book, invents a super-motor that runs on air. And she
established a black-and-white Manichean view of society in which the handful of
people at the top who build and run successful enterprises are the “makers,”
and everyone else — workers, pensioners, the old, the disabled, as well as
ordinary people who aren’t at the level of brilliance of her heroes — are
“moochers” and “takers” out to shame, blackmail or force the “makers” to
support their wimpy little undeserving carcasses.
One cannot
understand the Republican Party of today without understanding the philosophy
of Ayn Rand. When Paul Ryan, currently the Speaker of the House, was Republican
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, it was revealed that
every time Ryan hired a new member of his Congressional staff, he gave them a
copy of Atlas Shrugged and told them to
read it as an indication of what he wanted from them. Romney himself expressed
the Libertarian credo more simply and comprehensively than Rand ever did on May
17, 2012, when in a private fundraiser for his fellow 0.01-percenters in
Florida that was secretly recorded and released four months later, he said:
There
are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president [Obama] no matter
what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has
a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health
care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That — that’s an entitlement. And
the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no
matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off
with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent
of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.
And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what
they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those
people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility
and care for their lives.
GOP Health Plan:
Libertarianism in Action
A lot of the
commentary on the U.S. Senate’s proposed health care bill since it was released
on June 22 has called the legislation “mean” and “cruel.” It’s focused on the
Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) projection that if it’s passed 22 million
Americans who are now covered by health insurance won’t be. Many of the
comments have noted that the bill goes far beyond a “repeal and replace” of the
Affordable Care Act to attack the very basis of Medicaid, the government
program passed in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that offered
health care for the poor and gave state governments basically whatever they
needed to cover everyone they decided should qualify. Both the House and Senate
Republican health care bills would eliminate this guarantee and instead cap
federal funding at current levels, adjusted for overall inflation — which would
dramatically diminish the money available for Medicaid coverage over time
because health-care costs are going up several times faster than anything else.
Well, as
computer geeks say, to the Libertarians who currently control the Republican
party, those aren’t glitches: they’re features. The Republican health care
bills gut Medicaid and slash health-care funding to finance huge tax cuts for
the rich because that’s what Libertarians believe government should be doing. To a Libertarian, it’s none of
government’s damned business to guarantee health coverage to all its citizens.
In the Libertarian world, health care is just another commodity: if you can
afford it, you should have it; if you can’t, you should do without or beg for
help from families, friends or churches. Former Republican House member and
Presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-Texas), father of current Senator Rand Paul
(R-Kentucky), angrily told off Democrats when, during the debate on the
Affordable Care Act, he said that government had no business funding health
care for people who couldn’t afford to pay for it. Told that people would die
if his attitude became law, he came back by saying when he grew up that had been the law and no one had died for lack of health
care. There’d always been a private source generous enough to cover the cost.
The Libertarians
in charge of the current Republican Party see the attack on the Affordable Care
Act as simply the first step in an overall challenge to the entire concept of
social insurance in the U.S. They already persuaded Democratic President Bill
Clinton to eviscerate the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)
program — the one usually colloquially known as “welfare” — in 1996, renaming
it “Temporary Assistance to Needy Families” and insisting that recipients work
for their benefits. Now they’re after the Big Three of the entitlement state —
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and they see getting rid of the
Affordable Care Act as the first step towards bringing an end to social
insurance in the U.S. forever.
They’re aware it’s
going to take them a while to build up enough political capital to take down
Social Security — especially since so much of the Republican base is
concentrated among older Americans for whom Social Security is literally the
difference between life and death — so they’re willing to do it in increments.
Indeed, the biggest surprise about the Republican health care bills is that
they were willing to leapfrog over step one of their anti-social insurance
campaign, the low-hanging fruit of the Affordable Care Act, and go right into
step two, the attack on Medicaid. The drafters of the current Senate bill have
found themselves caught between conservative pragmatists like Ohio Governor
John Kasich, who came out against the bill because his state took advantage of
the Affordable Care Act’s opportunity to expand Medicaid and use the money,
among other things, to address his state’s epidemic of opioid addiction, and
hard-core Libertarians like Charles and David Koch, who’ve threatened to
finance primary challengers against Republican Senators who vote for the bill
because they don’t think it’s harsh enough.
Not that the
Senate health bill is likely to stay dead. When the first version of the House
legislation was abruptly pulled from an expected floor vote in March because
there weren’t enough Republican Congressmembers on board to pass it, Democrats
and progressives prematurely celebrated a victory. But in May the Republican
leadership was able to grab the votes they needed from so-called “moderates”
even though the second version of the bill was a harsher attack on the social
insurance state than the first had been. Among other things, it allowed states
to let private health insurers discriminate against people with pre-existing
conditions — a particularly nasty bit of legerdemain America’s for-profit
health insurance industry practiced for decades that essentially locked people
out of the health-care system for life if they happened to have had an illness
that was going to be too expensive for the for-profit insurers to finance
treatment.
The Senate is
likely to pass a health-care bill similar to the one Mitch McConnell abruptly
pulled from the calendar on June 27. It will, as President Trump suggested,
include a few more dollars to buy off this or that Senator from this or that
state. Just as the House bill included a pathetically inadequate sum to help
people with pre-existing conditions get coverage despite its abolition of the
guarantee under the Affordable Care Act that insurers couldn’t discriminate
against them, so the Senate will likely throw a few extra dollars at Senators
whose states have higher-than-usual rates of opioid addiction and who are
worried about the decimation of substance-abuse treatment that will otherwise
happen as Medicaid, which funds quite a lot of it, is cut back.
But make no
mistake: barring an absolute rebellion among their constituents back home and a willingness on the part of Senate Democrats to
shut down the Senate completely until the bill is finally and definitively
withdrawn, the Senate will pass
some version of the anti-health care law, the House will approve it (likely
simply adopting whatever the Senate passes so they don’t have to deal with the
delay and additional uncertainty of appointing a conference committee to work
out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill), Trump will
sign it into law and, as he has promised, the Affordable Care Act and its
promise that someday Americans, like their counterparts in every other
economically advanced country, would have universal health care will be dead.
Then the
Republicans in Congress will be able to move to what they’ve loudly proclaimed
is their next legislative priority, so-called “tax reform,” which in practice
will mean another huge tax cut for the
rich on top of the huge tax cut for the rich they’ll have just enacted as part
of the bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. They will do this
as part of the Libertarian ideology that the rich are the most deserving
members of society and therefore deserve the lion’s share of wealth and income, and that any attempts to tax
them to help the not-so-rich is not only bad public policy but downright
immoral. They will also do this as part of another bit of ideological myth
they’ve adopted: the idea that tax cuts for the rich will give rich people more
money to invest in the economy and therefore will stimulate economic growth.
This myth has
had many names: in the late 19th and early 20th century
it was called “trickle-down economics.” In the 1980’s it was called
“supply-side economics” and in the 21st century it’s usually been
referred to as “unleashing the private sector.” The reason its advocates have
to keep changing its name is that every time it’s tried, it doesn’t work. It
was tried right after the Civil War and produced the “Panic” (19th-century
speak for “depression”) of 1873. It was tried in the 1880’s and produced the
“Panics” of 1893 and 1897. It was tried in the 1920’s and produced the Great
Depression.
It was tried in
the 1980’s, and the only reasons it didn’t completely tank the economy the way
it had in the 1870’s, the 1880’s and the 1920’s were, first, President Ronald
Reagan and Congress authorized such a massive increase in military spending it
stimulated the economy and helped make up for the otherwise devastating effect
of the tax cuts for the rich. Second, Reagan was enough of a Right-wing
pragmatist (instead of a Right-wing ideologue) to pull back on the tax cuts and
authorize a tax “reform” in 1986 that was precisely that: a scaling back of the
earlier tax cuts for the rich and a genuine attempt to produce a fairer tax
system for all. But in the 2000’s it was tried again, and this time it helped
produce the economic meltdown of 2008.
To sum up, the
Republicans are on an ideological mission to re-create the U.S. as a
Libertarian utopia, which is what they thought they were doing back in the
1880’s before all those pesky populists, socialists, communists, progressives
and liberals got in the way. In her books, Ayn Rand actually named the 1880’s as
America’s golden age, and it’s become clear from the way President Trump has
actually governed (as opposed to the meaningless promises he made on the
campaign trail) that the 1880’s are the time during which he believes America
was “great” and to which he promised to return us when he said he would “Make
America Great Again.”
Though Trump
didn’t run for President as a Libertarian, he’s been governing as one because
Libertarianism feeds the two things most important to Donald Trump: his fortune
and his ego. Libertarianism tells billionaires like Trump that not only does he
deserves to be rich, his wealth marks him literally as a superior specimen of humanity who should be
recognized as such by the rest of us. It also generates public policies that
will make Trump and his fellow 0.0001-percenters richer. Indeed, while other
people — including other sorts of conservatives — bemoan the increasing
inequality of wealth and income, not only in the U.S. but the entire world,
Libertarians regard economic inequality as a good thing because it means the “makers” are getting more
of what they deserve and the “moochers” — the people Mitt Romney denounced as
expecting the government to take care of them and being unwilling to “take
personal responsibility and care for their lives” — get the pittances that are
all they deserve.
And so far,
despite all the chattering amongst the commentariat about how Trump’s
administration is supposedly disorganized and constantly verging on chaos,
Trump is quietly and methodically getting virtually everything he wants. With
the aid of Mitch McConnell, he got Neil Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court. He’s
reversed President Obama’s policies on the environment, regulation of the
financial industry, preserving Internet neutrality and, of course, immigration.
The U.S. Supreme Court just handed Trump a huge win on the controversial anti-Muslim travel ban, allowing the
administration to enforce virtually all of it. And though the Trump agenda had
a setback when McConnell had to pull the Senate health care bill from a floor
vote it was certain to lose, no doubt the Senate version, like the House’s,
will be back and will pass once
enough Senators can be cajoled, bribed or scared into supporting it. Indeed,
like the House’s health bill, the one the Senate finally passes will probably
be even worse than the one they
started with as Trump and McConnell “compromise” to get the most hard-line
Right-wingers like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee on board.
Republicans’
Full-Spectrum Dominance
The two most
dramatic phenomena of the Trump administration are the record of solid
Right-wing accomplishments he’s racking up, despite the surface bluster that
allows progressives, liberals and Democrats to keep underestimating him (let’s
face it, if they’d been right about Trump he never would have won the election)
and the near-total impotence of the opposition party to do anything to stop
him. The high point of recent Democratic power came in the first two years of
the Obama Presidency, when Obama came in with solid partisan majorities in both
the House and Senate. Since then, every
national election has been a disaster for the Democratic Party. They lost the
House in 2010. They lost the Senate in 2014. Even before that, the Democrats
had been losing state governments right and left — today 25 states are totally
controlled (the governorship and both houses of the legislature) by Republicans
versus only six by the Democrats (and, aside from California, all the states
controlled by Democrats are small and relatively uninfluential).
The Republicans
are on the verge of what President George W. Bush’s chief strategist, Karl
Rove, called “full-spectrum dominance of American politics.” Because they have
been so successful in winning control of state governments, they have virtually
unlimited power to rewrite the election rules. They can gerrymander House and
state legislative districts with such computer-generated precision it will be
virtually impossible for the Democrats ever
to dislodge them. They can impose photo-ID requirements, make voter
registration more difficult, disenfranchise more people altogether, eliminate
early voting, place plenty of polling places in affluent areas and few in
lower-income districts, and do all sorts of things to minimize voter turnout so
the people less likely to vote Republican — poor people, young people, people
of color — won’t be able to vote at all.
Not only has
President Trump formed a national commission to investigate “voter fraud”
(“voter fraud” is Republican-speak for “letting non-Republicans vote”), the
people he chose as its chair and vice-chair are Vice-President Mike Pence and
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who not only launched an aggressive
voter-suppression effort in his own state but was fined $1,000 for presenting
misleading evidence in an election-related lawsuit. On June 28, a statement
from the office of Vice-President Pence said “a
letter will be sent today to the 50 states and District of Columbia on behalf
of the Commission requesting publicly available data from state voter rolls and
feedback on how to improve election integrity.”
As Washington Post
reporter Christopher Ingraham explained (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/29/trumps-voter-fraud-commission-wants-to-know-the-voting-history-party-id-and-address-of-every-voter-in-america/?utm_term=.657c969f575a),
the data being requested by the Commission will include “the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last
four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of
potentially every voter in the state.” What’s more, Kobach has said that all
the data the Commission gets from this request will be released to the public —
so there will be a publicly available database of every voter in the United
States, including their personal
identification information and their party affiliation. So much for America’s
tradition of free elections and secret ballots — and all this is being set in
motion by a President who famously said during his campaign that he would only
accept the election results “if I win,” and who has since maintained that he
would have won the popular vote for President if there hadn’t been 3 to 5
million fraudulent votes cast against him.
All of these machinations are designed to convert the U.S.
political system from one in which any number of political parties can exist
but only two really matter, into one in which multiple parties can exist but
only one will matter: the Republican
Party. Ironically, given how thoroughly Trump has built his political brand by
bashing immigrants in general and Mexicans in particular, the model appears to
be Mexico as it was governed during the last two-thirds of the 20th
century, in which many parties existed but all the major elections were won by
the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which therefore had a decades-long
monopoly on power.
And Trump and the Republicans are able to get away with
this long-term because the Republican Party has built a fanatical political
base over the last few decades, starting in 1968 (when Richard Nixon and
Right-wing independent candidate George Wallace between them got 57 percent of
the Presidential vote to 43 percent for Democrat Hubert Humphrey, signaling the
end of the New Deal Democratic coalition and the rise of a Right-wing majority
that has been the dominant force in U.S. politics ever since) and ending in the
1980’s, when Ronald Reagan’s victories put the seal on America’s Right-wing
political realignment. The Right did it by mobilizing the white working class
through appealing to their racist and cultural prejudices, and also by
“flipping” the two major parties’ historical positions on civil rights — the
Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became
the party of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965;
while the Republicans switched from being the “party of Lincoln” to the party
of white racism and reaction — so the once solidly Democratic South has become
the solidly Republican South.
Things only got worse for the Democrats and the American
Left in general after Reagan got in. One of the biggest things he did was get
rid of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that had previously put restrictions
on the extent to which broadcast media could be partisan. The “Fairness
Doctrine,” which existed from 1949 to 1987, said that broadcast outlets could
only cover politics if they represented both sides of each issue equally. Once
Reagan got rid of it, the AM radio band became the virtually exclusive property
of the Right, which created nationwide networks of talk-radio hosts who
broadcast virtually identical points of view and, despite some individual
stylistic differences, read from pretty much the same media playbook. The rise
of Right-wing talk radio in 1987 and the formation of Fox News, which brought
the same relentless Right-wing propaganda to cable TV, in 1996 has meant that
there is a permanent Right-wing media party of immense power to keep both
Republican politicians and their voters in line behind an uncompromising
ideology combining economic Libertarianism and social, moral and cultural conservatism.
Leftists who write about U.S. media generally analyze it in
terms of the corporations who own it, and in particular how many media outlets
are merging or being bought out so there are fewer diverse voices and most of
the material on the air comes from a handful of giant corporations. This
analysis is right as far as it goes, but it vastly underestimates the extent to
which, just as American capitalists have two pro-corporate political parties
(the hard-Right Republicans and the Democrats, who in European terms would be a
center-Right party), they have also organized two pro-corporate media parties. The Right-wing media party of Fox News, talk
radio and Web sites like Breitbart, Townhall, and Infowars constantly attack
the credibility, legitimacy and even the right to exist of the less
ideologically driven “mainstream” media like the broadcast TV networks, more
moderate cable networks like CNN and MS-NBC, and newspapers like the New
York Times and Washington Post.
One of the most dramatic developments of the Trump
administration has been the extent to which the President himself is a true
believer in the Right-wing media party. Richard Nixon deliberately cut himself
off from the mainstream media and relied on his staff to tell him what was
going on in the world. Ronald Reagan handled the mainstream media the way he
handled the opposition party in Congress, basically by charming them. The
Bushes accepted the support of the Right-wing media party but they weren’t
really of it the way Trump is. Trump
not only appointed Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart, as his chief
strategist, many of his infamous tweets are based on information from the
Right-wing media. He’s made it clear that the only media outlets he trusts are
Right-wing ones like Fox and Breitbart; not only do Trump and his press
spokespeople, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, constantly dis the
mainstream media — the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN in particular — as “fake news,” they’re clearly
making policy based on the Right-wing fantasies being broadcast on Fox News,
talk radio and Breitbart.
At present, President Trump and the Congressional and state
Republicans hold virtually all the political cards in the U.S. They own the
White House, Congress and the Supreme Court. They have a cadre of
multi-billionaire political donors willing to give scads of money to persuade
people to vote for the most Right-wing candidates they can find. They have an
immensely powerful media party giving Right-wing activists and voters their
marching orders on a daily basis. And they have an organized political effort
masterminded at the highest level of government to make sure people who
wouldn’t vote for them will not be able to vote at all. While nothing in
politics lasts forever, the Republican Party is poised to dominate American
politics for a generation or more and fulfill their long-standing ambition to
re-create the U.S. as a Libertarian utopia and eliminate all social programs and any other policies that might reverse
the increasing inequality of wealth and income in the U.S.
The Democrats’ Catch-22
And ranged
against the awesome power and influence of the Republicans is a rival major
party that has been so beaten down by continued defeats and so staggered by
their own overconfidence that they can barely even summon the energy to resist.
Since Donald Trump’s election as President, there have basically been two
centers of opposition. One has done its job superbly: starting with the women’s
marches on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, and continuing
through a series of marches based on human rights, science and immigrants’
rights — including the spontaneous protests at airports when the various
iterations of Trump’s travel ban were announced — and the disruption of
Republican Congressmembers’ town-hall meetings over the health-care bills, the
direct-action resistance movement to Trump has turned out some of the largest
and most spirited crowds in the history of American protest.
Alas, social
change in a democratic republic does not come about exclusively through direct action, just as it does not come
about exclusively through electoral politics. It takes both, and so far the Democratic Party — which, under
America’s terrible system of single-member districts and winner-take-all
elections, is the only vehicle by
which anti-Trump, anti-Republican and anti-Libertarian candidates can actually
win public office — has proven itself pathetically unable to amount an
electoral resistance anywhere near comparable to the anti-Trump resistance
being staged by progressives in the streets. So far there have been four
special elections in which Democrats have tried to take seats in the House of
Representatives after Republican incumbents vacated them to serve in Trump’s
Cabinet — and the Republicans have won all four.
The Democrats’
spin machine has been working overtime, pointing out that these were districts
in which the previous Republican members had won by 20 points or more (true)
and they came a lot closer than previous Democratic challengers had — also
true, but totally irrelevant under the
rules of U.S. politics, in which you don’t get any prizes for finishing second.
In American elections, a win is a win is a win, and whether you win by 20
points or by two points — or even, as Donald Trump did with the popular vote,
you lose by two points but
through the quirks of the system you win anyway — you have the same amount of
power.
The Democrats
have steadily been losing contested elections in the U.S. for at least a
decade. It’s becoming more and more clear that Barack Obama’s two Presidential
victories were flukes, the first one driven by the near-meltdown of the economy
in September 2008 and the second more by voter inertia than anything else. As
I’ve pointed out in these pages before, the so-called “Obama coalition” was
able to elect only one person: Obama
himself. The Republicans have pulled together a powerful voter base built
around two of the groups that were once bulwarks of the Democratic Party —
Southerners and white working-class voters in the Northeast and Midwest — and
they’ve done it by embracing those voters’ racism and cultural prejudices.
After 2016 there
was a lot of talk among Democrats about what they could do to win back the
white working class that deserted them en masse to vote for Donald Trump. The depressing answer is very little. The
white working class has slowly been pulled away from the Democratic Party; the
people who in the 1980’s were the so-called “Reagan Democrats” in 2016
re-registered, cutting themselves off from their Democratic roots once and for
all to make sure they could vote for Trump in Republican primaries — and now
that they’ve taken the psychological step once and for all and “come out” as
Republicans, it’s unlikely they’ll be coming back. Besides, the only way the
Democrats could win them back is
to embrace their racial and cultural prejudices — and that would piss off and
drive away too many groups that are bulwarks of the current Democratic coalition: people of color, women
(especially single college-educated women), Queers and what’s left of the
1960’s counterculture.
A lot of
commentators are writing about the war between the conservative and progressive
wings of the Democratic Party as if it’s something new. It isn’t. It’s been
going on at least since 1896, in which — as in 2016 — the race for the
Democratic nomination was between an establishment candidate and a progressive
insurgent. The establishment candidate was the incumbent President, Grover
Cleveland. The insurgent — the Bernie Sanders of 1896, as it were — was William
Jennings Bryan, who because of his prosecution of John T. Scopes for teaching
evolution in Tennessee in 1925 has gone down in history as a religious
conservative, a prototype of today’s radical religious Right.
Nothing could be
further from the truth: the real Bryan
was an economic radical who regarded the idea that corporations were persons as
literally blasphemous. (His argument was that if you believed the statement of
the Declaration of Independence that humans were given “unalienable rights” by
God, then those rights applied only to God-created persons — human beings — and
not to person-created persons,
corporations.) His call for the free and unlimited coinage of silver was, in
modern terms, a demand to stimulate the economy and bring about full employment
even at the risk of inflation. Even Bryan’s opposition to evolution was a
twisted offshoot of his progressive economic ideas; faced with the Libertarians
of his time, the so-called “Social Darwinists” who argued that the rich were a
higher and more evolved race and therefore deserved the overwhelming share of
the nation’s wealth and income they were grabbing by sheer power and
willfulness, Bryan decided that the fault lay not only with Social Darwinism
but Darwinism itself.
The conflict
between conservatives and progressives in the Democratic Party flared up again
in the 1920’s, another period of conservative Republican dominance, when
conservative William Gibbs McAdoo and progressive Al Smith deadlocked for the
1924 nomination. The Democrats ended up nominating Wall Street attorney John W.
Davis, who got creamed by Calvin Coolidge in the general election — and who
last turned up in the public eye in 1954 when he argued against the civil rights of African-Americans in the Supreme
Court hearings on Brown v. Board
of Education. The Democrats split in 1948,
when progressives upset by President Harry Truman’s embrace of the Cold War
bolted and formed their own party, running Henry Wallace, the progressive
Franklin Roosevelt had wanted to
be his successor, as an independent candidate.
The Democrats
split again in 1960 between progressive Hubert Humphrey and conservative Lyndon
Johnson before they ended up nominating John F. Kennedy, who had so tiny a
political record (he’d technically been a Senator from Massachusetts but his
chronic illnesses had kept him away from the Capitol for most of his term) and
was so calculatedly ambiguous in his public statements that both sides claimed
him for their own. The Democrats split more infamously in 1968, when despite
not having run in any primaries, Hubert
Humphrey, now representing the conservative party establishment, grabbed the
nomination after the death of Robert Kennedy and ended up with only 43 percent
of the vote, a harbinger of the Republican realignment that would take place
over the next four Presidential elections until Ronald Reagan solidified the
Republican Presidential majority.
In 1972 the
progressives actually got their candidate, George McGovern, nominated by the
Democratic Party. What they didn’t realize was that not only was he the weakest
possible candidate they could have put up against Richard Nixon’s re-election
bid, but Nixon and his people were well aware of that — so much so that a key
part of their elaborate attempt to rig the election, which became known as
“Watergate,” was to make sure McGovern got the Democratic nomination by
targeting his potential rivals with dirty tricks. Once McGovern went down to a
landslide defeat, the Democratic establishment decided that from then on one-fourth
of the Democratic convention delegates would be “superdelegates” appointed by
party bosses. It was a change meant to make sure no progressive would ever win
the Democratic nomination again, and it worked: from Ted Kennedy in 1980 and
Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 through Gary Hart in 1984, Howard Dean in 2004
and Bernie Sanders in 2016, the route to the Democratic nomination is littered
with the corpses of candidates who tried to take on the superdelegate system
and lost.
The one
progressive who actually made it through the gantlet of the Democrats’
undemocratic superdelegate process and won both the nomination and the
election was Barack Obama — only he deeply disappointed the progressives whose
hard work had helped win him the nomination by the way he governed. Harvard
University political science professor Joseph Nye has drawn a distinction
between “transformational” and “transactional” Presidents: between ones who
took the office pretty much as they found it and tried to do things within the
limits of the existing power sources, and ones who tried to break the rules and
achieve sweeping changes. One reason for the bitterness in the 2016 Democratic
Presidential race was that the party’s progressives were still upset over the
way Obama had promised to be a transformational leader during his campaign, but
once in office had governed as a transactional President.
Instead of
grabbing hold of the economy and focusing his efforts on creating jobs,
sparking an economic recovery that would have actually benefited working
people, and punishing the people in the financial industry who had destroyed
the economy — the way Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress had done
after 1932 — Obama wasted his political capital pushing through a Rube Goldberg
plan for health insurance that no one liked. Progressives didn’t like it
because it not only preserved private, for-profit insurance companies as the
bulwark of America’s health care system, it actually made it illegal not to purchase their product — the “individual mandate” that has remained the least popular part of the Affordable
Care Act (so-called “Obamacare”). Right-wingers didn’t like it because it
promised a major expansion of the social welfare state that they had targeted
for elimination altogether.
Obama’s
Presidency was marked by the Affordable Care Act becoming a rallying point for
his opposition — particularly the “Tea Party” movement within the Republican
Party and in the streets — as well as an economic “recovery” whose benefits
went almost exclusively to the richest people in the country. Obama also
pursued the disastrous “free trade” agenda that helped U.S. companies ship
good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas and devastated entire communities. And,
far from bringing Wall Street officials and the financial and banking officials
who had wrecked the economy to justice, they were allowed to become even richer
and more powerful. The banks that had already been declared “too big to fail”
became even bigger, and the people — especially working-class whites —
responded by deciding that the Democrats were no longer the party of working
people. Instead they were the party of the people both above and below them,
the snotty Internet billionaires who talked blithely about “disruptive” business
models without giving a fig about the people whose lives they were going to
disrupt, and spoiled people of color and other poor people who, in the view of
most working-class whites, wanted what they
had won with their sweat without being willing to work for it.
That is how Donald Trump won the Presidency in 2016:
because the Democrats blew their last chance to show that they were truly the
party of working people — the two short years, 2009 and 2010, when they
controlled the Presidency and Congress, and instead of pursuing policies that
would have put Americans back to work they pursued a health insurance reform
that just made insurance companies richer and forced people to buy health
insurance whether they wanted it or not. They’re not likely to get another
chance. Oh, the Democrats may win the Presidency again, but it will be in what
political scientists call “deviating” elections. The only three Democrats
who’ve been elected President since 1968 — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama — did it by attracting enough votes from the South to neutralize
the Republican advantage in the region. Carter and Clinton did that by being
white Southerners themselves and Obama did it by mobilizing so many voters of
color, particularly fellow African-Americans, he was able to be competitive in
at least some Southern states.
When the
Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 they gave a gigantic finger to the
white working-class voters that had once been a bulwark of their coalition.
Clinton was about as establishment as they come: she had long since sold her
soul to Wall Street for six-figure speaking fees. Working-class America largely
hated her because it had been her husband who pushed through the loathsome
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the beginning of the cycle of
so-called “trade” agreements that helped grease the skids on which employers
slid jobs out of the U.S. and into low-wage foreign countries. Ironically,
Trump in office has been every bit as
much a part of the Wall Street establishment as Hillary Clinton — he’s at least
the fourth President in a row who’s appointed a Treasury Secretary who used to
work at Goldman Sachs; he openly introduced Jamie Dimon of Citibank as his
advisor in gutting the rules governing the finance industry; and for all his
talk about “draining the swamp,” he seems to have dumped the dregs into his
government.
But Trump isn’t
suffering politically from his fealty to Wall Street and his own class the way
the Clintons and Obama have. Against all evidence, his supporters in the
electorate still cling to their image of him as a sort of political White
Knight, one who by his very boorishness and combativeness will somehow bring
about the reckoning that will magically restore their industrial jobs and once
again make the economy work for all
Americans. One of the things the Democrats keep forgetting about Donald Trump
is that his much-vaunted “approval rating,” which has hung around the low 30’s
and high 40’s since he’s been in office, is meaningless because a lot of voters
who may not “approve” of Trump will nonetheless vote for him.
While Democrats
tend to judge candidates on the basis of their personal qualities as people,
Republicans keep their “eye on the prize” and judge them by their ideology and
what they will do in office. It’s unlikely very many evangelical Christians
“approved” of Donald Trump the human being, but they voted for him
overwhelmingly because they wanted to make sure the next President would be a
Republican who would appoint Right-wingers to the U.S. Supreme Court — and in
Neil Gorsuch, Trump fulfilled that promise.
The Democrats
lost four out of four special Congressional elections in early 2017 because,
while there are a lot of voters in heavily Republican districts who don’t fully
trust Donald Trump, they haven’t been sold on the Democrats as a viable
alternative either. The Democrats are in a bizarre Catch-22: they can’t win
elections until they can convince voters (especially voters who don’t live on the East or West Coasts) that they can be trusted
to govern, and they won’t get the chance to convince voters they can be trusted
to govern until they can start winning elections.
The
Republican/Libertarian revolution may collapse of its own weight, especially if
Trump and the Republicans in Congress push it too far. Ironically, they’ve
duplicated the mistake Obama and the Democrats made in 2009 — instead of big
jobs and infrastructure programs, they’re spending their political capital
pushing an unpopular health-care plan. But it will take a much smarter, less
naïve and more organized political party than today’s Democrats to take
advantage of the opening that will emerge if the Republicans do overreach.
