I am truly not attacking Joe-all I’ve done is to try and address serious concerns a lot of us have with his campaign and its strategy. I want the guy to win, to get a solidly Democratic(and progressive) House and Senate that will push through a strong program of change.
And the points I’m making about the way the Democratic Party deals with progressives go back long before Bernie-they go back to at least the mid-Seventies, when the party decided, for no valid reason, that the only way it could win was to move further and further and further to the right on economic issues-the only issues we were ever able to get the support of working-class people on-while embracing an absurdly militarist foreign policy and offering nothing beyond a timid, non-transformational barely-liberalism on choice, the environment and LGBT rights-issues which are important, true, but which are defined by the fact that they asking no sacrifice whatsoever of the rich. Our record, after our leaders made the decision to stick rigidly with that strategy, was mostly one of humiliating failures in presidential elections.
Jimmy Carter was elected on a progressive platform in 1976-a platform that, good man as he is, he chose to mostly abandon after getting elected, focusing instead on the rich man’s fixation with low inflation while doing nothing to protect working people from job loss(this was, to be fair, due in large part to Paul Volcker being appointed chair of the Federal Reserve and using that position to impose austerity economics and end job security) while getting us into an easily avoidable hostage crisis due to his pointless insistence on supporting the Shah of Iran to the bitter end, even when it was clear that at least 90% of the Iranian people wanted him gone. He took only 40% running against Reagan because he did what Volcker demanded, and enabled the betraye the working people that elected him with the creation of the conditions that Reagan was able to call “the misery index”.
We took only 41% against Reagan in ’84 because, being obsessed with proving we would balance the freaking budget-something only billionaires were insisting on-we offered nothing remotely close to a full-employment economy, no restoration of Reagan’s brutal cuts in social services; gave only tepid support to the nuclear freeze movement, with Mondale refusing to let the party do the decent thing and back “no first strike/no first use” pledges on nuclear weapons, even though there could never be a morally defensible reason for the U.S. to start a nuclear war; refused to back the Central America solidarity movement(Mondale’s platform called for a “Cuban-style embargo” against Nicaragua, for god’s sakes, a country that had done nothing to us, and was fine with the rest of the status quo in U.S. foreign policy), and quite frankly, offered nothing to anyone but the big donors who wanted to vote for a party that just pretended to be liberal but was safely Eisenhower Republican in practice.
We got 46% against Bush the First, a candidate we SHOULD have been able to beat in a walk, because the ticket and the rest of the party refused to fight back against the smears inflicted on the nominee and because the nominee, by refusing to defend liberalism, essentially conceded the argument-without gaining any votes in doing to-that liberalism was an unclean thing.
Bill Clinton won in 1992 on a split vote and with only 43%- a LOWER vote share than the losing Democratic candidate of ’88. He won on healthcare, but chose instead to pretend he was elected because he told progressives to go to hell on pretty much everything else. He lost Congress because he demoralized the base out of voting; they felt that, if things were going to pretty much stay the same, it was pointless for them to think that voting mattered. He was re-elected as a Democrat in name in 1996, but even then took only a pathetic 49%, losing both houses of Congress again when he should have been able to retake the House in a walk after Newt Gingrich alienated the whole country in the shutdown.
Clinton spent most of his presidency persecuting black America-endorsing the racist narrative that everything most people saw as bad in American society at that point-out of wedlock births, welfare fraud, drug use, crime-were overwhelmingly “black things”, even though most of the people who actually DID most of those things were white.
He also signed a despicably punitive “welfare reform” bill that represented, for all practical purposes, that on his watch, the Democratic Party didn’t give a damn about black voters and would never defend them against any line of attack. No only that, but, rather than having the decency to veto the bill or at least let it go into law without his signature, he made a big event out of signing the bill with two black welfare mothers-why did they have to be BLACK welfare mothers, for god’s sakes?-posed on either side of him in, to represent Black America as he officially sold it down the river(and yes, I do know where that phrase starts and meant to include that resonance in my use of it). Clinton didn’t gain any significant number of votes in staging that event or signing that bill-he’d have taken 49% no matter what.
The pointless, vindictive conservatism of the Clinton Democrats then caused the rise of the Greens in presidential elections. Clinton drove the people who voted Nader out of the party by making it clear that he had no respect for them or anything they supported and that as long as he was president, they and all other progressives were going to be totally out in the cold.
Al Gore, who is a decent man, blew what should have been an unlosable election in 2000 by refusing to agree to the “vote sharing” agreements which were proposed-agreements in which Democratic voters in safe “red” or “blue” states would vote Green in exchange for Green voters voting Democratic in swing states-had Gore accepted this, he almost certainly would have won both Florida and New Hampshire, without losing anything anywhere else.
John Kerry lost another unlosable election in 2004, by insisting on keeping the platform more or less in support of the Iraq war-at a time when there were no longer ANY voters who’d have even considered voting Democratic that still thought we were right to be in Iraq-his promise on that was “We Can Do It Better”, which made no sense because the country was realizing that we shouldn’t even have been in Iraq at all-by refusing to make any pledge to reconsider the foreign policy status quo at all-and by having his convention motto be the ridiculous slogan “Ready To Serve”-the same words printed on cans of Dinty Moore’s Beef Stew. A lot of progressives and former antiwar types worked hard for Kerry, but he gave them next to nothing to work with and his campaign treated them as though they didn’t matter at best or had to be silenced at worst.
Obama won by, at least as a candidate, breaking with all that-he ran as a passionate progressive pledged to get the U.S. out of the unwinnable wars in the Arab/Muslim world, by seemingly promising to cut the war budget, and by coming out for a strong universal healthcare program-AND by promising the activists in the “Obama movement” they would have a real say in what his administratio stood for. While the man did have a fair amount of successes as president, he destroyed the possibility of a long-term realignment of American politics in the Democratic Party’s favor by, as soon as the votes were in, locking the activists out in the cold, hiring Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff to KEEP them out in the cold-there was no other explanation for Rahm’s hiring-escalating the pointless wars we’re still in rather than doing the sensible thing and ending them the day he was sworn in, and by letting nearly everything that mattered by stripped out of the healthcare bill and not taking the 2010 midterm campaign seriously.
In all of the examples of failure I listed above, the common thread was the insistence on the party leadership of leaving most of the Democratic base(other than the big donors)and most of the activists who could have been brought into the party and improved it with their ideas and their energy, out in the cold in one way or another-choosing low inflation over full employment, militarism over peace, and cutting deals that were more defeat than victory with the GOP over mobilizing the enthusiasm of the grassroots and winning deep, transcendant victories.
