Beyond the Democrats' Consensus: Democrats Agree on How to Play Defense, but What Are They Fighting For?
Meyerson, Harold
IT'S QUIET OUT THERE, too quiet. Though Democrats suffered a shattering defeat in last November's election, they're not arguing with each other as they have after other devastating losses. On...
...it's a risky one...
...the prospect of four more years of George W. Bush concentrated the Democratic mind...
...Democrats badly need them to win, however, not just because they have no governors in the largest states, but because they have few if any laboratories of democracy, in Louis Brandeis's famous phrase...
...Two who do are New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, and California's treasurer, Phil Angelides, who've both had some success in altering current capitalist practice...
...Some very smart Democratic wonks and operatives last year came up with a proposal for a program—the Apollo Alliance they called it—that would create up to three million manufacturing and construction jobs in a massive endeavor to retrofit much of industrial America...
...On other economic matters, however, such proof is harder to adduce...
...Some of the Democrats' problems were Kerry-specific, of course, but Kerry was surely the strongest candidate in the Democratic field last year...
...Their embrace of these newer movements and causes both strengthened and weakened them at the polls: they won the allegiance not only of minorities but also of college-educated professionals, even as they lost more and more white workers...
...Congressional Democrats— almost all the House members, and many of the Senators—support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would strengthen the NLRA so that workers could actually form unions and get a contract...
...Few have any idea where to begin...
...And we need to be for that, too...
...it involves moral complexities the party had damned well better acknowledge...
...Consensus reigns...
...All (or at least some) of these reforms will bring Democrats into conflict with many (though not all) of the figures in the financial world who have funded and influenced the party for decades...
...Consider the current recovery, which is now into its eleventh quarter...
...These days, labor has embraced a proposal from the Teamsters that the movement should focus its organizing in battleground and red states...
...Kerry was always more comfortable talking about America's proper role in the world than he was discussing America's economy, and Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg faults Kerry's campaign for failing to focus on the economy during the homestretch...
...It takes a jurisdiction as large as California—at minimum— to tinker effectively with the economic system...
...But by the end of the 1960s, corporate profit margins started to drop, in part because Europe and Japan were by then full-blown competitors...
...That Bush...
...They trust the man on whose watch the nation lost three million manufacturing jobs in four years, whose recovery has seen the lowest increases in wages and salaries of any recovery since before the Great Depression...
...For the really disquieting thing about the exit polling was that it showed that the number of selfidentified Republicans equaled the number of self-identified Democrats...
...In fact, now that the horses have broken down the barn door, the Democrats are building stronger doors...
...And what's the Democrats' position on the growing number of employers who don't offer their employees any benefits at all...
...In the eyes of many of those voters, the Democrats became the party of racial preferences, as government became the entity that taxed them in order to give money to blacks...
...On employers who violate the National Labor Relations Act rather than see their workers form a union...
...In battleground states, Kerry pulled down 3.6 percent more votes than Al Gore had four years before, and Bush exceeded his 2000 totals by 4.4 percent...
...It was not ever thus...
...American capitalism has changed, to the detriment of the American people and the Democratic Party...
...For the past quarter-century, the Democrats have been unable to deliver the kind of opportunity and security they once did...
...In olden days, the DLC might have made this argument, to the strenuous opposition of social liberals...
...But it's a secondary result that should really give the Democrats pause: 55 percent of these voters trusted Bush to handle the economy, compared to just 39 percent who trusted Kerry...
...In Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, they found and funded leaders who changed the rules of the game to their advantage—so much so that Northeastern capitalists who adhered to the social compact all but ceased to exist...
...California's public pension funds have also pressured corporations to behave responsibly to their workers—a mission that has apparently irked California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger no end, as he's sought to change the composition of the funds' governing board...
...On the plus side, that means that they're not as fiercely divided as they've been in years past...
...Creating new standards for pension funds, new rights for workers, new social investments in citizens, new rules for trade, new criteria for 28 DISSENT / Spring 2005 BEYOND THE DEMOCRATS' CONSENSUS board memberships, new restrictions on security trading—none of these is easily done or even conceptualized in an economy dominated by finance...
...Democrats would do well to remember, though, that the conservative activists who now control the Republican Party started out by going to war against the Republican Wall Street elites who were wedded to a model of capitalism that Democrats had created and that enabled Democrats to maintain their hold on power...
...Democrats cannot rebuild the past, and given the constraints of contemporary capitalism, have difficulty conceiving a worker-friendly future...
...But we are not talking about how better to exploit our advantage on the economy...
...As for globalization—well, Kerry condemned "Benedict Arnold CEO's" and called for an end to the laws under which corporations can write off the expense of shutting a factory in Youngstown, Ohio, and relocating it to China, but no one among Kerry's economic advisers thought that would arrest the export of middleincome American jobs...
...But it is deadly to any long-term prospects of a Democratic renewal...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 29...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 27 BEYOND THE DEMOCRATS' CONSENSUS In those days, even corporate-takeover artists adhered to the New Deal social compact: the economies they wrung from their new companies did not include wage concessions or diminished pensions...
...Congress, it's worth remembering, still provides its own members with defined benefit pensions...
...The Democrats may not be one big happy family, but all wings seem prey to the same basic bewilderment...
...These numbers come from Democratic poll analyst Ruy Teixeira, who has been rummaging around in the raw data from the exit polling...
...Weekly, and a columnist for the Washington Post...
...we are all cultural moderates...
...During the Clinton recovery of the early 1990s, however, wages and salaries had risen by just 7.4 percent by the time the eleventh quarter rolled around...
...Something—not just Kerry or national security or the values gap or even racial politics— is badly wrong...
...What Needs to Be Discussed What's disquieting about the Democratic quiet is that it signals a failure to grapple with this most crippling of conundrums...
...That was before software writing and medical diagnosis were sent to Bangalore...
...26 DISSENT / Spring 2005 BEYOND THE DEMOCRATS' CONSENSUS Politically, the declining strength of unions has hurt the Democrats most within the white working class...
...It's particularly instructive, and depressing, to look at the turnout figures in the non-battleground states, where neither party was buying the airwaves or flooding the mailboxes or walking the precincts to get out their vote...
...In addition, the Bush people were certainly more successful depicting Kerry as a cultural plutocrat (not that hard a job, really) than Kerry was in depicting Bush as the economic plutocrat's favorite president...
...That's the white working class, flocking to George Bush...
...If John Kerry or any other Democrat were president, would the recovery be yielding greater wage advances...
...Their identification with the New Deal, by contrast—when they've been able to sustain it— has been an unalloyed positive, as the current battle over Social Security makes clear...
...Perhaps this collapse of confidence in Democratic economics isn't as bad as it seems...
...TO PUT IT BLUNTLY, if you take away the New Deal order—the institutions, laws, and practices by which the Democrats had guaranteed a certain economic security for America's working class—there's no reason why the Democrats should be the majority party...
...To be sure, Bill Clinton repositioned the party by ending welfare, and won back some of that white working class...
...The buffalo are not coming back...
...Over the past forty years, white union members have tended to vote Democratic at a rate roughly 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts...
...Is it too much to ask Democrats to go to war against Democratic Wall Street elites who are wedded to a model of capitalism that Republicans have created, and that enables Republicans to dominate the government today...
...Now, Democrats must confront the economy without illusions...
...In policing Wall Street for just a few short years, Spitzer seems to have uncovered every swindle known to the capitalist mind...
...For all these practices, American corporations and banks have a justification: everything they do, they do for their shareholders...
...In the quarter-century following the Second World War, historian Steven Fraser reminds us in his massive, new Every Man A Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life, shareholders took a backseat to consumers, employees, and the government in the calculus of the boardroom...
...And when we argue for justice, we'd do well to invoke the God of justice— the only God that most Democrats can invoke without sounding ridiculous...
...In serving on the boards of the nation's largest employee pension funds, Angelides has steered capital to such socially useful and politically potent projects as investment in aging, inner-ring suburbs...
...A number of longtime free-traders, John Kerry among them, have come to understand that the universal deregulation and evisceration of labor and environmental standards enshrined in such free-trade debacles as the North American Free Trade Agreement hurt both American workers and many workers abroad...
...Of course not...
...When it comes to fighting for Social Security, Democrats don't have that hard a task convincing voters—white working-class voters definitely included—that they're on their side...
...One point on which all Democrats agree is that the party needs a red-state strategy...
...Besides, Kerry was hardly the only Democrat to lose: the party suffered a net loss of five Senate seats spread across the red states...
...And among precisely the voters—the white working class— who've lost the most economically during his presidency...
...The economy...
...but more than that, it means changing the rules and nature of our capitalism so that the risks and burdens of the system aren't borne entirely by workers...
...We are all talking about how to inoculate ourselves on cultural and security concerns...
...We are all Democrats...
...This transformation of American capitalism is inextricably linked to the rise of the right over the past four decades, of course...
...That means changing labor law and trade policy, creating national health care, paid parental leave, more affordable college educations...
...Sunbelt capitalists, disproportionately from "right-to-work" states, supplanted the Northeastern moderates as the chief donors and dominant force in the Republican Party...
...BUT EVEN IF Democrats distance themselves from pure Rubinism—as they seem to be doing by their reluctance to pass CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement that is stuck in Congress—what do they do affirmatively...
...On the minus, that means that none of them has a clear idea of what to do...
...her cultural baggage, said Geffen, is too heavy for the party to schlep...
...During the Clinton boom years, Democrats elided this challenge by proclaiming—and believing— that education was the solution for the economic stagnation of working America...
...It registered more voters than ever before, got them to the polls, got a record turnout in the ghettos and barrios of the battleground states...
...But still—running 16 points behind Bush on the economy, among working-class voters...
...And John Kerry did nothing to indicate that he would reverse Clinton's changes...
...The social liberals among them became Democrats in the mode of Robert Rubin, who retains his iconic stature in the party despite his promotion of free-trade, finance-friendly policies that made it measurably more difficult for Democrats to carry a state like Ohio...
...The shift away from the Democrats came chiefly among white, working-class women, who voted nine points more for Bush this time than they had four years ago...
...If preserving Social Security is a worthy cause, how about preserving defined benefit pensions...
...John Kerry's was not a factional defeat, after all...
...And for the past quarter-century, the Democrats have lost five of seven presidential contests and the last six contests for the House of Representatives...
...It raised more money than anyone had dreamed of, and in a way that Democrats had dreamed of but despaired of ever actualizing: from small donors, through the miracle of the Internet...
...If you average all the postwar recoveries from 1949 through 1982, by the eleventh quarter private-sector wages and salaries had risen by 18.2 percent...
...going up against Arnold may prove the most thankless of tasks...
...Since the mid-1960s, the Republicans have made hay attacking the Democrats for their support for the particularistic liberalism that emerged in that decade—the liberalism of individual rights and group benefits...
...On employers who shift their production overseas...
...Spitzer and Angelides are planning to run for governor of their respective states next year...
...In the current Bush recovery, they have risen by a scant 4.5 percent...
...Business sought to retain those margins by squeezing its employees...
...The silence among Democrats is understandable...
...And it wasn't enough...
...As with the election, so now with the post-mortems: Labor is not bashing the Democratic Leadership Council (indeed, labor is bashing labor), the DLC is not savaging liberals, minorities are not complaining that the party's voter mobilization efforts were insufficient...
...But the real challenge for Democrats and labor is to transform millions of low-end retail- and service-sector jobs—there are twelve million Americans at work in restaurants alone, to convey some sense of the challenge—into decent-paying and secure employment...
...During last year's elections, in covering Democratic efforts in Ohio, I met with leaders of Auto and Steel Worker locals that had shrunk to a thousand or two members from twenty thousand in the mid1980s...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 25 BEYOND THE DEMOCRATS' CONSENSUS And did they ever flock...
...Here, Democrats joined Republicans in legislation that has hastened the shift to the more tenuous, less valuable 401(k)s...
...Kerry lost white, working-class voters—a group that constituted roughly half of the 2004 electorate—by 23 percent, six points worse than Gore had done in 2000...
...In Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, where no major offices were on the ballot, turnout hit an all-time high...
...These days, no less a Hollywood liberal than David Geffen has argued against nominating Hillary Clinton in 2008...
...Besides, the Democrats have been losing the white working class since 1968...
...But in non-battleground states, where voters were left to their own devices, Kerry increased his total over Gore by just 1.5 percent, while Bush boosted his total by 3.9 percent...
...Democrats were unified last year as they had not been in decades...
...After all, once Kerry lost these working-class voters' trust on national security, his trustworthiness on other topics likely plummeted as well...
...Abortion, as Hillary herself has declared, is no longer a question just of women's rights...
...Bush...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, Democrats redefined themselves as the party of civil rights, women's rights, and environmentalism, without repudiating their New Deal past...
...From Social Security to Medicare, the universal programs that the Democrats devised and defend remain broadly popular, and the Democrats clearly gain from that defense, which is one reason why many congressional Republicans wish that Bush would abandon his campaign to privatize Social Security altogether...
...After all, 2004 was the year when the party seemed to get a lot right...
...To a considerable degree, that's a function of their trust in Bush on matters of national security: 66 percent of white, working-class voters said they trusted Bush to handle terrorism, compared to just 39 percent who trusted Kerry...
...American capitalism is no longer the capitalism that the New Deal reshaped, in which, for the quartercentury after World War II, working-class incomes rose as steeply as upper-middle-class incomes, in which Americans had pensions they could count on, in which jobs were relatively secure and prosperity was broadly shared...
...Though the killer issue in last November's election, we know, wasn't really moral values...
...Now, however, the Bush administration is going after the Democrats' support for the universal programs of the 1930s, and it seems to have hit a brick wall...
...it was national security...
...That entails enlarging the social sphere...
...In the name of share value, they deny benefits and resist unions, ship jobs abroad, overpay CEOs (something that you might think shareholders could and would oppose, if CEOs had not eliminated all restraints on their own discretion in the name of share value...
...But with the rate of private-sector union membership now down to an abysmal 7.9 percent, the voting habits of working-class whites have shifted markedly rightward...
...To a considerable degree, that's because we've lost our advantage on the economy, and we don't know how to get it back or even what to advocate to get it back...
...It's not just a daunting challenge...
...HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of the American Prospect, political editor of L.A...
...Will that get us back into the majority...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
