Thursday’s debate on Walt Disney’s ABC channel is shaping up as yet
another shameless charade. The pretense is that we are to select who the
Democratic presidential candidate will be. But most Americans, as the Irish say, vote with their backsides,
belonging to the informal but dominant party of non-voters who choose not to be
sucked into legitimizing the bad choices put before them.
The debate is being presented
as a reality entertainment show. The audience is invited to rate the candidates
who seem most likely to implement the policy they want – but not including the
economy. Most Americans are now living from paycheck to paycheck and cannot
come up with even $400 in an emergency. They are afraid to go on strike or even
to complain about their job, because they are afraid of getting fired – and of
losing their corporate health care, knowing that getting sick may wipe them
out. These problems will not appear on Walt Disney.
Voters basically want what Bernie Sanders is promising: a basic right to Single Payer
health care and a retirement income. That means protection against the
Republican-Democratic threats to cut back Social Security to balance the budget
in the face of tax cuts for the richest One Percent and rising Cold War
military spending. This means a government strong enough to take on the vested
financial and corporate interests and prosecute Wall Street’s financial crime
and corporate monopoly power. When neoliberals shout, “But that’s socialism,”
Americans finally are beginning to say, “Then give us socialism.” It beats
being ground down into debt peonage.
But here’s the trick that the
TV debates sweep under the rug: It is not the voters who are empowered to
choose the Democratic Party’s candidate. That privilege belongs legally to the
Democratic National Committee (DNC). Since stacking the political deck in 2016
to serve up Hillary Clinton as nominee, it has put in place rules that will
enable its Donor Class members, superdelegates and other lobbyists for the One
Percent to repeat the trickery once again in 2020.
I hope that the candidate who
is clearly the voters’ choice, Bernie Sanders, may end up as the party’s
nominee. If he is, I’m sure he’ll beat Donald Trump handily, as he would have
done four years ago. But I fear that the DNC’s Donor Class will push Joe Biden,
Kamala Harris or even Pete Buttigieg down the throats of voters. Just as when
they backed Hillary the last time around, they hope that their anointed
neoliberal will be viewed as the lesser evil for a program little different
from that of the Republicans.
So Thursday’s reality TV
run-off is about “who’s the least evil?” An honest reality show’s questions
would focus on “What are you against?” That would attract a real audience, because people are much
clearer about what they’re against: the vested interests, Wall Street, the drug
companies and other monopolies, the banks, landlords, corporate raiders and
private-equity asset strippers. But none of this is to be permitted on the
magic island of authorized candidates (not including Tulsi Gabbard, who was
purged from further debates for having dared to mention the unmentionable).
Donald Trump as the DNC’s
nominee
The problem facing the
Democratic National Committee today remains the same as in 2016: How to block
even a moderately left-wing social democrat by picking a candidate guaranteed
to lose to Trump, so as to
continue the policies that serve banks, the financial markets and military
spending for Cold War 2.0.
DNC donors favor Joe Biden,
long-time senator from the credit-card and corporate-shell state of Delaware,
and opportunistic California prosecutor Kamala Harris, with a hopey-changey
grab bag alternative in smooth-talking small-town Rorschach blot candidate Pete
Buttigieg. These easy victims are presented as “electable” in full knowledge
that they will fail against Trump.
Trump meanwhile has done most
everything the Democratic Donor Class wants: He has cut taxes on the wealthy,
cut social spending for the population at large, backed Quantitative Easing to
inflate the stock and bond markets, and pursued Cold War 2.0. Best of all, his
abrasive style has enabled Democrats to blame the Republicans for the giveaway
to the rich, as if they would have followed a different policy.
The Democratic Party’s role is to protect Republicans from attack from
the left,
steadily following the Republican march rightward. Claiming that this is at
least in the direction of being “centrist,” the Democrats present themselves as
the lesser evil (which is still evil, of course), simply as pragmatic in not
letting hopes for “the perfect” (meaning moderate social democracy) block the
spirit of compromise with what is attainable, “getting things done” by
cooperating across the aisle and winning Republican support. That is what Joe
Biden promises.
The effect has been to make
America into a one-party state. Republicans act as the most blatant lobbyists
for the Donor Class. But people can vote for a representative of the One
Percent and the military-industrial complex in either the Republican or
Democratic column.
That is why most Americans owe allegiance to no party.
The Democratic National Committee worries that voters may disturb this
alliance by nominating a left-wing reform candidate. The DNC easily solved this
problem in 2016: When Bernie Sanders intruded into its space, it the threw the
election. It scheduled the party’s early defining primaries in Republican
states whose voters leaned right, and packed the nominating convention with
Donor Class super-delegates.
After the dust settled, having
given many party members political asthma, the DNC pretended that it was all an
unfortunate political error. But of course it was not a mistake at all. The DNC
preferred to lose with Hillary than win with Bernie, whom springtime polls
showed would be the easy winner over Trump. Potential voters who didn’t buy
into the program either stayed home or voted green.
Starve out the DNC
Now is the time to start
thinking about what to do if and when the DNC presents voters with neoliberal
Hillary 2.0, preferring to lose with Biden or his clones than to win with
Bernie.
I think the only effective response
will be to boycott the Democratic Party – not only its presidential candidates,
but its Blue Dog candidates and incumbents.
The legal kerfuffle raised by
Sanders supporters in the aftermath made the switcheroo official. The courts
affirmed that the Democratic Party’s candidate for president is legally chosen
by the DNC alone, and may or may not be the candidate elected by voters in the
primaries. To cap matters, the superdelegates serve as a safety valve against
any candidate unwilling to go whole-hog neoliberal. A legal tangle of state and
national U.S. election laws effectively blocks third parties from meaningful
representation in Congress. Registered Independents such as Sanders are
constrained to caucus with and serve on committees of one of the two parties.
That makes it difficult for any third party to play more than the role
of a spoiler in elections. When
the Democratic Party runs its right-wing Blue Dog candidates, a third-party
protest will throw the Senate or Congressional election to the Republican –
until the DNC finally just walks away.
It would not help much to take
over the Democratic Party as long as its rules cede control to Wall Street
donors. For the party to be reconstituted, the coterie that has imposed
Rubinomics, Hillary’s neocon military empire, and is threatening to balance the
budget by cutting Social Security needs to be isolated.
The most obvious start is to
run real progressive candidates against incumbents, like AOC in Queens. If the
DNC bans consultants from working with them, they should be attacked in the
primary and then either stay home or vote for a third party in the fall
election to defeat the incumbent rather than participate in the fake choices of
just which neoliberal may be the least worst.
Democrat leaders will denounce
the Third Party, claiming that voters would have supported Democratic
otherwise, much as they blamed Ralph Nader in 2000. The reality is that voters
refused to support the right-wing neocon Joe Lieberman (how appropriate that he
became Obama’s Senate mentor) and his neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council
front-man Gore, who would have given George W. Bush a run for awfulness.
The only way to make the Democrat Party democratic is to clean house, to boycott its Blue Dog
candidates even though this throws elections to the Republicans until the DNC is
emptied out. Only at that point can its rules be replaced with ones committing
the party to follow the choice of voters and the majority non-Democratic (even
non-voting) bloc instead of big donors and super-delegates.
This tactic may lead to
Republican sweeps in the next few elections. That is the price that the
Democrats have forced to be paid for their neoliberal intransigence that has
made Donald Trump their president as much as that of Republican voters.
There is no such thing as centrist stability in a polarizing economy
There is no “middle class” policy in an indebted economy polarizing at
an accelerating pace as financial rentiers lord it over an indebted majority. That is why wage earners have lost their identity with the
Democratic Party’s loyalty to Wall Street. Although Democratic politicians
presents themselves as the only alternative to Republican corporate lobbyists,
the DNC is a smoke-filled room of donors, packaged in identity politics – every
identity except that of indebted wage earners. It is merely a diversion to focus on personalities and to
claim that economic reform is “divisive” because it may offend centrist voters
such as the Democrats’ dream of attracting suburban Republican women.
Joe Biden’s promise of a
moderate centrist policy is like Warren Harding’s slogan of a “return to
normalcy” a century ago, in 1920. But a “return” would mean rolling back the
enormous post-1980 increase in debt, the privatizations, deregulation and other
neoliberal nightmares. Today’s U.S. economy – like that of Europe – has no
middle ground. Attempts at a “moderate” party are merely a euphemism for
backing the financial and real estate sector, the oil industry and the
military-industrial complex.
If America had a parliamentary
system reflecting voters’ preferences for parties, the Democratic Party would
share the fate of German and other European Social Democrats that have embraced
neoliberal economics and would poll about 5 percent of the vote, just barely
being represented in a truly democratic congress. Voters are rejecting neoliberalism everywhere, but the DNC and foreign
formerly left-wing party bureaucracies are holding onto it. They have become
zombie party hacks.
Sanders rightly blames Wall
Street and the One Percent for the economy’s financial mess. Warren strikes a
resonant chord in seeing the need to alleviate the debt burden saying in
effect, “It’s the debt, stupid.” But she also seems prepared to go along
opportunistically with the rest of the Democratic Party’s platform.[1] Even
so, the DNC seems quite willing to throw the election to Trump as its major
funders and super-delegates back Biden, Harris and Buttigieg.
When Bernie says he will take on Wall Street, people believe him. When Elizabeth Warren says
that, voters worry about just how far she may compromise. When Biden or Harris
say that, most voters realize that they are simply grabbing slogans that play
well in focus groups, selling their personalities without policy content.
Most potential voters have no party in the United States, but are
forced into a choice between Republican and Democratic neoliberals. The polls
euphemize most voters as “undecideds,” as if they have not decided to avoid
both parties and try to scrape by as best they can with the bad choices put
before them: Republican corporate lobbyists, or Democratic Wall Street
lobbyists, both parties supporting military spending and representing the One
Percent who form their donor base.
Most Democratic voters have decided not to back Biden or Harris. They
realize their interests were betrayed first by Clintonomics and its
deregulation of Wall Street and stripping away of social spending, and then by
Obama protecting his Wall Street donors from “the mob with pitchforks,” namely,
those who voted for his empty promise of hope and change. That is how the DNC
views its constituency – to be manipulated and its attention diverted onto the
Fantasy Island episode aired on Thursday on ABC.
Notes
[1] She
also seems to welcome support from the Clintonites and is seeking their
super-delegates. See Jonathan Allen, “Warren and Clinton talk behind the scenes
as 2020 race intensifies,” NBC, September 7, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/warren-clinton-talk-behind-scenes-2020-race-intensifies-n1049701