I viewed myself as just to the left of the Democratic Party. Just when I thought it safe to get into the weeds of the reform movement in the Democratic Party, Sean Ahern sends me this interesting piece. It hasn't deterred me but it is a warning to go into this with eyes wide open. A long read but it touches on so many issues relevant to today. There is so much meat in this.
Davis deals with the moves of the New Deal Democrats into the New Politics and the neo-liberalization of the Democratic Party -- neo-liberals are fundamentally free-market, including education, and fundamentally anti-union which is why the Democratic Party basically abandoned the unions despite their slavish devotion.
Note also the mention of the Dem Party's work with the Business Rountable, which fired the first shot in 1983 in the coming ed deform wars to undermine public education and teacher unions. For fans of Al Shanker -- he jumped on board this so fast which began our decline.
He also hits at Shanker's Social Democrats USA right wing splitoff of the Socialist Party.
And with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) becoming such a big deal with some newly elected openly declaring themselves DSAs as does Bernie Sanders -- he covers its foundations.
Following
Bernie Sander's unsuccessful campaign for the Presidential
nomination in 2016, the Democratic Party has once more become a site of
struggle for socialists. Leading up to the November 6th midterms, could
the Democratic Party, in fact, be the best vehicle for social change? In
this essay, first published over 30 years ago, Mike Davis warns us
about the pitfalls of electoralism, and the passive clientelism that
tends to replace popular politics under the bureaucratic guidance of the
Democratic Party.
In the summer before the 1984 presidential elections, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, in a widely noted interview in the
New York Times Magazine,
boasted that ‘by now practically everyone on the left agrees that the
Democratic Party, with all its faults, must be our main political
arena’.
[1]In
recent historical context there was a peculiar irony in this assertion,
with its smug self-limitation of the ‘Left’. During the 1960s, American
social democracy had been debilitated, almost discredited, by its
advocacy of reform through the Democratic Party. The right wing of the
old Thomasite Socialist Party, ‘Social Democrats, USA’, had broken away
to become courtiers of Scoop Jackson and lobbyists for military victory
in Vietnam. Meanwhile, a centrist current led by Harrington and Howe
formed a small circle around
Dissent with negligible influence on
a burgeoning New Left which spurned their faith in the transformability
of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the key radical organizations of the
1960s, SNCC and SDS, understandably regarded the Cold War liberalism
incarnated by the Humphrey/Jackson wing of the Democratic Party (to
which both camps of social democrats oriented) as
the enemy,
primarily responsible for genocidal imperialism in Southeast Asia as
well as for the repression of the Black liberation movement at home.
From
the McGovern candidacy of 1972, however, sections of the former New
Left, together with a younger cohort of 1970s activists, began to slip
back into Democratic politics, initially on a local level.
[2] At
first there was no sharp ideological break with the sixties’ legacy.
The ‘New Politics’, as it was typed, seemed just another front of the
anti-war movement or another tactical extension of the urban populism
espoused by SDS ’s community organizing faction. By 1975, with the
sudden end of the Vietnam War, a strategic divergence had become more
conspicuous. On the one hand, an array of self-proclaimed ‘cadre’
groups, inspired by the heroic mold of 1930s radicalism, were sending
their ex-student members into the factories in the hope of capturing and
radicalizing the widespread rank-and-file discontent that characterized
the end of the postwar boom. On the other hand, another network of
ex-SDS ers and antiwar activists—of whom Tom Hayden was merely a belated
and media-hyped example—were building local influence within the
Democratic ‘reform movement’: the loose collocation of consumer,
environmental and public-sector groups, supported by a few progressive
unions, that had survived the McGovern debacle.
Although its
significance was only vaguely grasped at the time, this increasing
polarization between workerism and electoralism coincided with, and was
immediately conditioned by, the decline of the Black liberation movement
that had been the chief social motor of post-war radicalism. A
dismaying, inverse law seemed to prevail between the collapse of
grassroots mobilization in the ghettoes and the rise of the first wave
of Black political patronage in the inner cities. While Black
revolutionaries and nationalists were being decimated by J. Edgar
Hoover’s COINTELPRO programme of preemptive repression and infiltration,
Black community organization was being reshaped into a passive
clientelism manipulated by the human-services bureaucracy and the
Democratic Party. Although the civil rights movement remained an
unfinished revolution with an urgent agenda of economic and political
demands, its centrality to the project of a popular American left was
tragically, and irresponsibly, obscured in the late 1970s. The ranks of
the white, ex-student left, preoccupied with academic outposts and
intellectual celebrities, showed a profound inability to understand the
strategic implications of the halting of the civil rights movement. For
all the theoretical white smoke of the 1970s, including the endless
debates on crisis theory and the nature of the state, the decisive
problem of the fate of the Second Reconstruction was displaced beyond
the field of vision. With minimal challenge or debate, leading journals
like
Socialist Review and
Dissent tacitly demoted Black liberation—
the critical democratic issue in American history—to the status of another progressive ‘interest’, coeval with sexual freedom or ecology.
The
crisis of Black radicalism, and its attendant white incomprehension,
was soon followed by the disintegration of the workerist left. With the
important but solitary exception of the International Socialists, who
continue to play a vital role in Teamsters for a Democratic Union (the
onlysurviving
rank-and-file caucus from the 1970s), none of the workplace-oriented
offshoots of the New Left proved to have the stamina or internal
stability to weather the decline in union militancy that followed the
1974–75 recession. The bizarre implosion of the ‘new communist
movement’, as the Maoist left moved from the factory floor to frenzied
party building and street confrontations, reinforced, if only by
harrowing negative example, the growing claim of the electoralists to
represent the sole rational hope for a mass American left.
But it
is unlikely that the transition towards the orbit of the Democratic
Party could have occurred so rapidly without the intervention and
coordination undertaken by the Harrington–Howe group, now reorganized as
the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). The charter
concept of DSOC, according to a Harrington editorial written in the wake
of the McGovern defeat, was the belief that ‘the left wing of realism
is found today in the Democratic Party. It is there that the mass forces
for social change are assembled; it is there that the possibility
exists for creating a new first party in America.’
[3] To
pursue this realignment, Harrington and Howe proposed a two-storey
organizational strategy. DSOC was intended to provide a kind of
social-democratic inner sanctum within a larger liberal coalition, built
from the top down through the selective recruitment of ‘influentials’:
trade-union full-timers, local Democratic luminaries and well-known
academics. These ‘influentials’, in turn, helped sponsor the Democratic
Agenda, the ‘party within the party’, that aimed to coalesce progressive
forces within the national Democratic Party. In this fashion, the
Harrington–Howe group contrived to obtain a political leverage
disproportionate to DSOC’s modest membership or its meagre contributions
to day-to-day struggles.
The Democratic Agenda enjoyed a brief
heyday during the first half of the Carter Administration. It exerted
influence at national and regional party conferences, as well as
providing one of the main rallying points for supporters of the labour
law reform campaign of the AFL-CIO. However, after the 1978 rightward
turn of the administration (i.e., the rejection of détente, the firing
of Andrew Young, the savaging of the domestic budget, the abandonment of
health reform, the curtailment of urban jobs programmes, and the defeat
of labour law reform), the progressive pole notionally represented by
the Democratic Agenda steadily lost ground in the face of the rise of
‘neo-liberalism’. Traditional liberals, influenced by business PACs and
insurgent middle-class constituents, deserted the labour and civil
rights organizations in droves, recanting previous commitments to the
legacy of the Great Society and Keynesian reformism. Ironically, it was
precisely at this moment of crisis for the ‘left wing of realism’, as
the old liberal coalition began to break up, that significant additional
sectors of the ex-New Left began to gravitate towards DSOC ’s centrist
and electoralist positions. This convergence was abetted by the shift in
editorial and theoretical perspectives within the group of periodicals,
mutually descended from the seminal
Studies on the Leftof the 1960s, that bore most of the intellectual mantle of the US New Left:
Socialist Review (ex-Socialist Revolution),
Kapitalstate, and
In These Times. All
three had originally proclaimed the advocacy of ‘explicit socialist
politics’ and the building of a ‘new American Socialist Party’; on the
eve of Reaganism, each had retreated to pragmatic endorsements of reform
Democrats and to the embrace of a pseudo-phenomenal ‘New Populism’.
[4]
Social
Democracy’s surprising conquest of the New Left in the teeth of the old
liberalism’s demise culminated in 1982 with the merger of the majority
of the 2,500-member New American Movement with DSOC to form the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), largely on the basis of
political conditions (support for Israel, centrality of the Democratic
Party, etc.) dictated by the DSOCleadership. Any serious, detailed
analysis of the rightward transformation of the Democratic Party and the
new internal power balances that it entailed was completely obscured by
the rhetorical intoxication that became a hallmark of the new
organization. ‘Unity against Reagan’ and unqualified support for the
AFL-CIO Executive became the twin motivating slogans for DSA ’s headlong
rush, first to Edward Kennedy, and then to Walter Mondale.
Although
the invocation of ‘practically everyone on the Left’ was a sectarian
exaggeration, Harrington and Howe could certainly savour their success
in having brought a considerable fraction of the extant socialist left
‘home’ to the Democrats. Moreover, as other left groups, including
significant numbers of repentant Maoists, became increasingly involved
in Democratic politics from the 1982 mid-term elections onward, a new
orthodoxy arose. The principal object-lesson of the militant 1960s,
reliance on independent mass politics outside of and against the
national Democratic Party, was stood on its head. Participation in
bourgeois electoral politics was redefined as the admission ticket to
serious popular politics
tout court. Not since the meridian of
the Popular Front during World War Two, when the Browderite Communist
Party attempted to dissolve itself into the left wing of the New Deal,
had the majority of the American left been so fully submerged in the
Democratic Party.
In 1984, the spectrum of progressive groups who
ultimately rallied behind the Mondale banner included CISPES and the
Nuclear Freeze, as well as DSA and its ‘influentials’. All calculated
that entry into the campaign would strengthen their grassroots base as
well as their influence over liberal Democrats. All believed the spectre
of Reagan’s second term was most effectively combated through support
of the national Democratic candidate. All assumed that four years of
cutbacks and takebacks had jolted the Democratic electorate to the left,
creating a new receptivity to progressive ideas and providing an
incentive for millions of anti-Reagan non-voters to enter the rolls. The
1984 elections, therefore, provide a decisive test of the political
realism of the strategic shift to electoralism. At the same time, the
election results also offer important, if not completely unambiguous,
evidence about the changing sociology of the electorate and the future
of the party system in the post-New Deal era.
I. THE CRISIS OF THE REFORMIST LEADERSHIPS
The
most original phenomenon of 1984 was the unexpected and dramatic
demonstration of Black voters and their allies in favour of Jesse
Jackson and the programme of the Rainbow Coalition. The emergence of the
Jackson campaign posed the electoralist left with the unexpected
dilemma of choosing between insurgent Black politics or the traditional
trade-union leadership. In the event, a majority of DSA, including the
ex-DSOC leadership and most of the ‘influentials’, remained meekly
aligned behind the AFL–CIO Executive in its pre-packaged support for
Mondale. On the other hand, almost all the Black and Hispanic left
together with white ‘Marxist–Leninists’, dissident members of DSA, and,
discreetly, the CPUSA, supported the Rainbow candidacy, some with the
avowed intention of building a left-wing ‘party within the party’. The
old social-democratic goal of a ‘progressive realignment’ under
institutional labour–liberal auspices was suddenly confronted with the
fait accompli of
a progressive electoral groundswell outside the franchised limits of
official liberalism. To understand how this came about it is necessary
to retrace, in their respective turns, the different reactions of the
trade-union bureaucracy and the Black political establishment to the
general crisis of reformism provoked by the domestic right turns after
1978.
A Counterfeit Labour Party?
To consider the
plight of the trade-union bureaucracy first, the ‘unified labour’
strategy was born directly out of the failure of the AFL–CIO Executive
in Meany’s last years to find political or juridical redress for the
organizational decline of union membership. The stunning defeats of
labour law reform and
situs picketing in the overwhelmingly
Democratic 95th and 96th Congress were interpreted by the Federation’s
leadership, not as failures of rank-and-file mobilization or grassroots
alliances, but rather as deficits of rightful influence within the
Democratic Party apparatus. The rise of neo-liberalism in the suburban
outlands of Democracy was taken as tantamount to a disinheritance of
Labour’s accumulated good work for the Party cause. So, upon succeeding
Meany in 1979, Lane Kirkland defined his principal brief as the
concentration of labour’s resources to recapture a dominating position
within the Democratic power structure. In the chain of substitutions by
which the AFL–CIO leadership had successively bargained away the role of
shopfloor mobilizations for the sake of a variety of ‘insider’
positions within the industrial relations and legislative systems, its
clout within the Democratic National Committee was reckoned to be the
most precious asset of all. As Harold Meyerson put it, for the
trade-union bureaucracy ‘the DNC was to be the Archimedean point from
which it would begin once more to move the world its way’.
[5]
It
is helpful to recall the peculiar form of labour’s subordination within
the New Deal coalition. From 1936 onward, the trade unions achieved an
interest-group (non-class) representation as junior partners alongside
the big urban patronage machines with their captive ethnic
constituencies, and the Solid South of courthouse cliques and local
ruling classes. This last component, of course, was guaranteed by Jim
Crow and sweeping disfranchisement of Blacks, Hispanics and poor whites:
national Democratic power was purchased by the addition of the
working-class votes in the North and their substantial subtraction in
the South. Although the national Democratic Party was also crisscrossed
by ideological alignments, they were relatively ephemeral compared with
the triad of socio-political blocs. Labour and liberal forces were
frequently distempered by machine and Southern outrages—especially the
latter’s role in the informal conservative bipartisan coalition that
blocked social reform from 1938 to 1964—but neither moved decisively
against their erstwhile partners in the Cold War Democratic ‘consensus’.
To take the most famous apparent case to the contrary, Truman’s brief
struggle with the Dixiecrats in 1948 over civil rights planks in the
party platform was immediately followed by appeasement, culminating in
Adlai Stevenson’s ignominious contrition to the citadels of segregation
in 1953.
[6] Similarly,
the AFL under Green and then Meany paid respect to civil rights on
ritual occasions, only to wheel and deal with the bosses and kingfisher
on a day-to-day legislative basis.
During the 1960s, however,
this unholy configuration of Rooseveltian unity began to collapse of its
own weight in face of the social recomposition of the big cities, the
challenge of the civil rights movement in the South, and the mass
opposition to the Johnson administration’s escalations in Vietnam. The
national Democrats fractured along three axes. First, the declining big
city machines, personified by Daley in Chicago, fought delaying actions
alongside their white craft union allies against the federalized welfare
and clientage networks constructed by LBJ, which attempted to
incorporate public-sector professionals and a section of the Black
leadership as a new pillar of the national Democratic Party. Secondly,
the Solid South crumbled, as Blacks and conservative Republicans
assaulted the Democratic
ancien régime from opposite sides amid
great radical polarization. Finally, Vietnam splintered first the
liberal wing of the party, then the AFL–CIO itself, as the Reuther–Meany
feud became a schism. All three sets of contradictions condensed into
the fractious infighting of 1968–72, as anti-war liberals refused to
support Humphrey, Cold War liberals repudiated McGovern, and Wallace
bolted with the white backlash.
With the collapse of the machines
and the Solid South, the trade-union bureaucracy, hitherto the minor
actor of the trio, increasingly became the main institutional support
for the continuity of party leadership and the maintenance of Cold War
liberalism (with its implicit relegation of social reforms behind
anti-Communism).
Simultaneously, however, the fight over the
recomposition of the Democratic Party became complexly entangled with
the power struggles within the AFL–CIOExecutive itself. In particular,
the Reutherites and their allies in the ex–CIO and public-sector unions
seized upon the new social forces of civil rights, antipoverty and peace
as potential levers to challenge the ascendency of the ex-AFL craft
unions in the merged federation. Reuther’s UAW, key proponent of a new
liberal–labour alliance from the late 1950s, was in the forefront of
efforts to reorient the AFL–CIO towards the reform forces in the
Democratic Party who were pressing for a retreat from Vietnam and a
greater sharing-out of power to minority and ‘new-middle-class’
constituencies. Through its generous financial support to SNCC and SDS
community projects, the UAW attempted to coax the most serious
organizers of the new left into the radius of liberal democracy. At the
opposite extreme, of course, were the locals of the old AFL construction
crafts. These last-ditch defenders of white job trusts in urban
employment remained the foot-soldiers of bossdom and the mindless
supporters of whatever regime in Washington was currently bombing
Southeast Asia.
Meany’s role in this turbulent period was often
more devious than the public image of cigar-chomping truculence
suggested. In the chain of events leading to Reuther’s exit in 1969
(partially as a result of deep disagreements over the Federation’s
political orientation) and then to the Executive’s boycott of the
McGovern campaign in 1972, Meany attempted to play the role of a
conservative reformer. On the one hand, he unwaveringly defended the
Gompersian labour-patriotism that wedded the AFL–CIO to the militarism
of the Scoop Jackson faction of the party hierarchy.
[7] The
protection of precious union jobs in the military–industrial complex
demanded no less. On the other hand, Meany was a cautious renovator who
saw as clearly as Reuther, and perhaps more forcefully, that the
disintegration of the Democratic ruling bloc might be labour’s historic
opportunity to claim a dominating position within the councils of the
national party. The old Albany lobbyist grasped from the beginning the
significance of the Johnson Administration’s attempt to use the Great
Society to regenerate the social base of the Democratic Party, and
repeatedly overrode the sectional interests of his own craft union
supporters to ensure the AFL–CIO’s influence across the breadth of
emerging civil rights and urban legislation. Under the generalship of
Meany and COPE director Barkin, the AFL–CIO ’s operatives on the hill
claimed a central role in funneling and moderating the demands of Black,
welfare and old-age groups through the Johnson Congress.
[8] By
making the new social movements dependent on the Federation’s financial
resources and legislative skills, Meany hoped to amplify the role of
the trade-union bureaucracy in national politics. Although Reuther was
willing, where Meany was not, directly to patronize the 1960s protest
movements, their strategic aims were not dissimilar. Both thought the
AFL–CIO’s institutional political role could be powerfully expanded
through skilful brokerage between the civil rights movement and national
bourgeois politics.
But where Reuther and his successors were
capable of conceding that the logic of incorporation of the new social
forces required some opening up and reform of the party’s nomination
process, Meany remained obdurate in his opposition to the post-1968
Democratic reform movement. Again his response was that of a grizzled
old politico. In the first place, he foresaw that Blacks, anti-war
liberals and women were all too likely to be natural allies of the
‘progressive’ wing of the AFL–CIO, tilting the balance against his
business union base. Secondly, Meany perceived that party reform was
decentralizing and fragmenting an already weak and tenuous national
party apparatus, dispersing power to increasing numbers of middle-class
Democrats who were unbeholden to COPEand insensitive to the union’s
traditional economic demands. Finally, Meany was appalled by the
prospect that a bureaucratized Black municipal power might succeed to
the role of the old white urban machines. His tolerance of middle-class
civil rights leadership was always conditional on its deference to the
trade-union hierarchy. As civil rights forces entered politics and
gained influence within the national Democratic Party, they threatened
to undermine the AFL–CIO’s claim to represent and hegemonize all popular
constituencies. Under Meany, and continuing under Kirkland, the
Federation became the major, implacable opponent of the reform process,
fighting against open primaries and delegate quotas, then, after their
adoption by the reform commissions of 1968–72, lobbying vigorously to
repeal their implementation. Throughout this period, as William Crotty
has emphasized in his study of the reform process, the AFL–CIO ’s
overriding goal was ‘to mute the effects of the quotas’ that increased
Black and female representation within the party.
[9]
The
rollback of Democratic reform, initiated in 1976 by the
AFL–CIO-influenced Winograd Commission, was consummated in 1981 by the
work of the Hunt Commission. The Hunt Commission was a temporary
alliance between the Federation, the Kennedy and the Mondale camps to
shore up simultaneously the roles of Democratic office holders and the
union bureaucracy, minimizing the chance that an ‘outside’ candidate,
like McGovern or Carter, could again use the primary path to win
nomination. Originally Kirkland had wanted a third of convention
delegates to be selected
ex officio, a move that would have
automatically returned the nomination process to the smoke-filled rooms
of yore (as in 1968, when Humphrey won two-thirds of delegates with two
per cent of the primary vote). Unnerved at the prospect of such a
flagrant anti-democratic restoration, the Kennedy representatives
secured a compromise: 14 per cent of the convention or 568
‘super-delegates’ would be ennobled from among Democratic officeholders.
Then, after reducing the required number of primaries (returning
Michigan, for example, to the party caucus system), the commission
restored the ‘winner take all’ rule in congressional district primaries
and ‘frontloaded’ the now shortened primary season so that the
‘official’ candidate—presumably Kennedy or Mondale—would be guaranteed
early success. Last but not least, the commissioners stripped the
mid-term Democratic convention of the policy-making power it had briefly
exercised during the 1970s, and substantially relaxed the quota
requirements for sexual and racial balance.
Although labour’s
leading role in the Hunt Commission has been retrospectively justified
by some DSA writers as a ‘social democratization’ of the Democratic
Party, increasing the role of ‘responsible’ elected officials
representing lower-class groups as against increasing numbers of ‘new
class’ interlopers, this is, most charitably, a convoluted
rationalization.
[10] In
rolling back most of the ostensible new democracy within the party (as
well as opposing reform of the seniority system in Congress), the
AFL–CIO under Meany and Barkin struck directly at the representation of
Black and minority Democrats. One aim was to blunt the emergence of a
Black Democratic establishment as a power in its own right (the UAW, by
contrast, welcomed the rise of Black electoral power). Another was to
prepare the way for the nomination of an AFL–CIO-backed presidential
candidate. It was Kirkland’s personal gambit to secure the
pre-nomination of Mondale as a ‘labour candidate’, calculating that the
early and massive concentration of AFL–CIO resources behind the winning
nominee would maximize the Federation’s influence over appointments and
legislation in the next Democratic administration.
This scheme to
counterfeit a surrogate labour party out of the Mondale candidacy
depended—apart from the candidate’s own, unlikely complaisance—upon the
unity of the trade-union bureaucracy. In the face of relentless pressure
from employers’ concessionary demands, and with George Meany
conveniently gone, the rebel unions that had been sporadically operating
outside COPE since the McGovern schism now rejoined the majority.
Although this reunion behind Kirkland’s electoral strategy was
celebrated as the triumph of ‘labour unity’, it in fact implied a
recantation of the ‘progressive alliance’ with civil rights and feminist
leaderships that the UAW under Fraser had explored in the late 1970s.
Previously dissident voices on the Executive, like Wimpinsinger of the
Machinists, were now more effectively muzzled than would have ever been
possible in Meany’s day, while Kirkland licensed a mind-numbing cant
that turned election day into ‘Solidarity Day II’, and Mondale into a
working-class hero. Although crusty old piecards knew that Kirkland
(whom A. H. Raskin apotheosized as ‘a leader of supreme intelligence’)
[11] was
really an emperor without clothes, a discreet, bureaucratic silence
froze the doubts and suspicions about how an unconsulted rank and file
might actually vote in the 1984 primaries.
Black Democrats under Siege
An
even more profound crisis has reshaped Black politics since 1978. The
incorporation of Blacks into the Democratic Party, and the
deradicalization of the civil rights movement, have depended on the
precarious material infrastructure of expanding federal employment
programmes and urban grants-in-aid. The new Black
professional–managerial strata of the 1970s have been disproportionately
employed in the management of the social services and educational
complexes of the inner city, as well as in administering the network of
Great Society programmes that provided temporary employment and minimal
welfare to the ghetto poor. Similarly, the ability of Black Democratic
city halls to pacify the cities and ameliorate their decay on behalf of
their corporate landlords has been in direct proportion to the federal
funding of urban budgets.
When, in the spring of 1977, the Carter
Administration announced a virtual moratorium on further social
spending, it marked not only a betrayal of its own Black loyalists, but
also a watershed in the historical evolution of the party. Since that
date, the majority of the Democratic national leadership has retreated
from the politics of full employment and hegemonic reformism that
characterized the Kennedy–Johnson revival of the New Deal. Democratic
opposition to Reagan’s dismantling of the remaining Great Society
programmes has been desultory at best. As Kirkland’s right-wing adviser,
Richard Scammon, put it, the Congressional Democrats’ strategy has been
to ‘keep their mouths shut. Developing an alternative programme is
asking for defeat.’
[12]
Underlying
this apparent collapse of political will has been the insurgent power
of middle-class voters, who, in collusion with corporate lobbyists and
an avaricious Pentagon, have created a new, implicit consensus in US
politics. Choosing between the vast income-transfer programmes that
disproportionately subsidize the middle class (Social Security, federal
aid to education, mortgage interest deductions, and so on), the new arms
race, and the much smaller sector of means-tested assistance to the
poor, the neo-conservatives and the neo-liberals have banded together to
slash the last. For its part, as Kim Moody has shown, the AFL–CIO has
also retreated, since the emasculation of the Humphrey—Hawkins
employment bill in 1978, from any energetic advocacy of full employment
measures, emphasizing instead the protection of its own organized
sectors.
[13]Left
without allies or partisans, Black America has been savaged by a new
immiseration. Nearly half of all Black children are growing up in
poverty, and in the upswing of the Reagan ‘recovery’, the Black
unemployment rate, which historically has been double that of whites, is
now three times higher (at 16 per cent).
[14]
Meanwhile,
the Reagan administration has been using its cutbacks in social
spending to do far more than simply redistribute income upward. Just as
Thatcher has launched a frontal assault on the institutional integrity
of the Labour Party (the attack on trade-union political funds, the
dis-establishment of Labour-led metropolitan governments, etc.), the
Republican Administration has pursued a strategy of disorganizing the
Democratic Party. Washington’s blows have fallen with particular fury
upon Black reformist leaderships. First, the Department of Justice and
the Berger Court, in tandem with the similar rollback in NLRB practice,
have grievously undercut the juridical supports of school integration
and fair employment, foreclosing the kind of legal reformism that was
the core of the ‘moderate’ civil rights activity exemplified by the
NAACP ’s Legal Fund. This has occurred with the complicity of most
Southern Democrats and the indifference of many Northern Neoliberals.
Secondly, in the words of the American Enterprise Institute’s budget
expert, Allen Schick, the Administration has attempted to ‘blow up the
political infrastructure of the urban Democratic Party’ by killing
programmes like Urban Development Action Grants or the Small Business
Administration that ‘buy power for people who walk around with a capital
D’.
[15] Again,
the impact has been most devastating on the patronage powers of Black
Democratic apparatuses. Thirdly, by permanently shrinking the federal
social budget, the Republicans hope to deepen the schism between
inner-city and suburban Democrats by increasing the competition for
scarce revenue sharing. Without control of federal spending, the
national Democratic Party has always tended to become a political
centrifuge, splintering along economic interest lines, as for example
during the Stevenson years in the 1950s. Today, the cutbacks are
aggravating the racial polarization within the party and sharpening the
conflicts between Black Democratic mayors and white Democratic governors
and legislatures.
With the unending economic depression in the
Black inner cities fuelling demands for relief that far exceed the
diminishing material resources of the Black political establishment, and
with Black influence in the national Democratic Party reduced by the
AFL–CIO-sponsored anti-reforms, it was inevitable that some elements of
Black reform leadership would contemplate alternative courses of action.
One option was a return to a civil rights movement format of protest
mobilization—an idea favoured by Black leftists and nationalists, but
predictably unpopular with most Black elected officials. Another was the
periodically canvassed proposal of forming an independent Black
political party, possibly around the seceding nucleus of the Black
Congressional Caucus.
[16] Finally, there was the notion of somehow kindling a protest movement
within the Democratic Party to force it to reaffirm its commitment to a Second Reconstruction.
In
the event, the strategy that emerged through the Jackson campaign was
to invoke the threat of the second option as a means to realize the
third; that is to say, Jackson built upon an ethos of Black
self-organization while limiting its aims to a renegotiation of the
‘contract’ between Black Democrats and their national party. The
ambivalence and tensions of this strategy were reflected in the elusive
slogan of ‘empowerment’, which meant voter registration while
simultaneously connotating more transcendent and militant images of
self-activity. The dual impetus and model for this rebellion against the
party from within the party was, of course, provided by the 1983
Washington campaign in Chicago. The failure of both Kennedy and Mondale
to support this long-overdue uprising on the Daley Plantation
radicalized the frustration of key sectors of the Black political family
with the official liberal leadership of the Democratic Party. At the
same time, the spectacular success of Harold Washington’s electoral
united front in mobilizing 150,000 new Black and Hispanic voters
awakened a new sense of Black political potential. The narrowly defeated
candidacy of Black socialist Mel King in Boston a few months later was
an added inspiration, showing in this case the practicality of a
‘Rainbow Coalition’ of minority communities, white progressives, and
elements of the trade-union movement.
The precipitous launching
of the Jackson candidacy provoked an important symptomatic split within
the Black political establishment. His earliest and most important
institutional support came from the Black churches—indeed his campaign
carried overtones of a rebellion of the old ministerial leadership of
the civil rights movement against the newer hierarchy of Black
politicians.
[17]Moreover,
his initial political sponsors, including Congresspersons Dellums and
Conyers (the two-man left wing of the Black Congressional Caucus), Mayor
Hatcher of Gary, California Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, and pioneer
Black presidential candidate and feminist Shirley Chisholm, were most
closely tied to Black working-class social bases. Their constituencies
were devastated by Reaganomics, and their electoral credibility was most
dependent on a willingness to strike a militant pose. Mondale’s Black
loyalists, on the other hand, tended to include figure-head crisis
managers with substantial white and business support, like Bradley (Los
Angeles), Goode (Philadelphia) or Arrington (Birmingham), as well as
representatives of the Black bourgeoisie like the National Black
Leadership Roundtable and Andrew Young (Atlanta having the most
politically significant Black middle class in the country). Given the
widely recognized and growing socio-economic wedge between the Black
poor and the new Black middle classes, the original polarization over
the Jackson candidacy could not help but have certain class overtones as
well.
[18] Where
the loyalist camp followed the line of defeating Reagan at any price,
the insurgent current represented by the Jackson campaign responded that
a Democratic victory might be meaningless unless the party returned to
supporting full employment and the welfare state.
II. CLASS STRUGGLES ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
The
Democratic primary battles turned out to be the most surprising events
of the election year. After all the careful finagling of the nomination
process by Kirkland and the Hunt Commission, the unbeatable Mondale
machine collapsed in the first heat, as a majority of AFL–CIO members in
New Hampshire bolted to Hart. Then the focus of issues in the primary
competition, assumed to run along the centre–right divide between
Mondale and Glenn, abruptly shifted with Jackson’s entrance and Glenn’s
disappearance in the oblivion of the Iowa caucuses. Although meaningless
image manipulations frequently obscured the real substance and basis
for division, the bitter three-person battle among Mondale, Hart and
Jackson inevitably revealed the deep ideological divisions within the
Democratic Party. The programmatic differences between the candidates
were, in turn, indices of underlying social realignments taking place in
the Balkanized constituencies of the national party. Table One
summarizes the most salient divergences in the politics of the three
camps.
The general economic strategies endorsed by the
candidates, despite predictable vagueness and elision, were particularly
revealing. Mondale, for instance, initially supported an eclectic
industrial policy coupled with selective protectionism. The primary
phase of his campaign was heavily influenced by the Industrial Policy
Study Group set up in 1983 by the triumvirate of Kirkland, Felix Rohatyn
(ex-financial overlord of New York City), and Irving Shapiro (former
CEO of Dupont, the second largest non-union employer in the United
States). The Study Group was essentially a continuation of the Carter
Administration’s ill-fated efforts to sponsor a feeble American version
of corporatism, and its membership, unsurprisingly, overlapped with the
Labour-Management Conference as well as the Carter Cabinet including Lee
Iacocca (Chrysler), ex-Secretary of Treasury Blumenthal (Burroughs),
ex-Secretary of State Vance (IBM), and Robert McNamara. Shorn of its
more grandiose pretensions, the Study Group plan was an attempt by
leading Democratic capitalists and their trade-union counterparts to
find common ground for a federal rescue of the declining industrial base
of the Northeast. Modelling themselves on the precedents of Rohaytn’s
austerity regime in New York from 1975 (the Municipal Assistance
Corporation or ‘Big MAC ’) and the Chrysler bail-out of 1979, the Study
Group proposed a reindustrialization strategy based on tripartite
consensus, a federal investment bank, incomes policies, and
industry-specific protectionism.
In attempting to nail the Study
Group’s recommendations to the masthead of the Mondale campaign,
Kirkland was implicitly committing the AFL–CIO to two extraordinary
precedents. First, he was virtually promising to institutionalize
concessionary bargaining when he accepted that the unions would trade
off wage freezes or ceilings in return for federal loans to industry, in
spite of the absence of any proposed reciprocal pledges by employers to
ensure the maintenance of employment levels. Secondly, the
Kirkland–Rohatyn–Shapiro plan was specifically targeted to preserve the
unionized industrial base with scant concern for the plight of workers
in low-wage industries, the public sector and the rapidly growing
Sunbelt regions, or, least of all, for the inner-city unemployed. In
fact, the Study Group proposals assumed continued fiscal austerity and
cost containment in the public sector: in fiscal 1989, Mondale projected
only a $30 billion increase over 1984 levels of funding for social
programmes, with most of the increase to be offset by savings elsewhere
in the domestic budget.
[19] In this sense as well, Kirkland was ready to codify the AFL–CIO ’s retreat from serious full-employment politics.
Hart’s
economic proposals shared in this benign neglect of the unemployed and
the working poor. The Senator from Colorado had been one of the
principal gravediggers of the Great Society during the Carter
congresses, rising in 1978 to propose sweeping reductions in social
spending, tax cuts, an expanded arms budget, tax-based incomes policy,
and the deregulation of natural gas. Like Mondale’s corporate-labour
supporters, Hart also advocated an ‘industrial policy’, but his version
had opposite regional and sectoral orientations: utilizing market-based
mechanisms, like fiscal and manpower training incentives, to favour
sunrise industries and the Sunbelt. (Where Mondale had sponsored the
Chrysler bailout, Hart had sponsored legislation to rescue Johns
Manville, a Denver corporation, from the costs of its asbestos
litigation.) Vowing that he ‘would not guarantee people something unless
they are really down and out’,
[20] Hart
fetishized capital formation over welfare in almost identical formulae
to Kemp and the supply-side Republicans. His core vision seemed to be
the belief that if state spending were rigorously restructured to
subsidize the occupational and entrepreneurial mobility of the
professional and scientific middle classes, the ensuing boom would take
care of the rest of society.
In contrast to Mondale’s warmed-over
corporatism or Hart’s yuppie conservatism, Jackson’s domestic programme
was arguably the first social-democratic alternative seriously offered
to the American electorate in a presidential campaign (Debs’s campaigns
of 1912 and 1920 had been waged around a revolutionary programme).
Whereas Mondale and Hart insisted that significant social spending had
to be sacrificed to an expanding arms buildup (Mondale would have
preserved most of Reagan’s baroque arsenal with his projected $418
billion arms budget in 1989), Jackson straighforwardly proposed to shift
massive resources from defence to human services, emphasizing the
central role of public employment growth in the economy. He promised the
restoration and expansion of Great Society levels of welfare
expenditure together with aggressive enforcement of voting rights and
affirmative action in employment. Moreover, he was the only candidate
who actually fought for the full agenda of traditional labour movement
demands (as distinct from Kirkland’s Study Group concessions). It was
Jackson, not Mondale, who insistently denounced plant closures,
supported labour law reform, attacked the open shop and stood up for the
organizational rights of undocumented workers.
Foreign Policy
In
foreign policy, the divergence among the three campaigns was equally
profound. The positions of Mondale and Hart descended in large part from
the foreign-policy split within the Carter administrations. Hart’s
views were closest to, if never completely identical with, the
‘neorealist’ policies advocated within the Carter ranks by Cyrus Vance,
George Ball and Andrew Young. The gist of neo-realism was the belief
that it was in the best interest of the United States to ‘de-link’ the
socioeconomic crisis in the South from the Cold War, and that
revolutionary challenges in the Third World could be managed by US
diplomatic and economic power alone. The ‘liberal interventionists’, on
the other hand, whose views suffused Mondale’s campaign statements,
clung to the Truman Doctrine paradigm that had guided the Democratic
Party for forty years: military counter-insurgency combined with
cosmetic reform. Within the Carter Administration, Brzezinski and Brown,
from their respective power-bases in the National Security Council and
the Pentagon, had crusaded against the Vance–Young ‘human rights’
approach, and, after the fall of the Shah, forced the neo-realists out
of office. Mondale, of course, had presided over this purge, just as he
had played a crucial role in determining the rightward shift in the
administration’s domestic policy.
During the 1984 primary
campaign, these splits in the Democratic foreign-policy establishment
reverberated in the respective attitudes of Mondale and Hart towards
Reagan’s creeping military intervention in Central America. Mondale,
sharing the New Right’s preoccupation with the Cuban threat, dissented
only from Kirkpatrick’s and Helms’s
abrazo of such fascists as
D’Aubuisson and the Somoza palace guard. He did, however, hail the quiet
US invasion of Honduras and give discreet but influential support to
the bipartisanization of aid to El Salvador. (Duarte was given a hero’s
welcome by the Democratic Congressional leadership in May, and effective
opposition to Reagan’s intervention in El Salvador collapsed). Hart, in
contrast, categorically rejected the US military presence in Central
America, urged negotiations with the Sandinistas and closer coordination
with Mexico and Venezuela. His stance seemed principled and courageous,
a continuation of his original dedication to the antiwar purpose of the
McGovern campaign. Unfortunately, Hart’s neo-realism became
indistinguishable from Mondale’s interventionism in other sectors of the
Cold War. In their embarrassing efforts to outbid each other for the
support of Begin’s American admirers in the New York primary, they
embraced positions on the Middle East more bellicose and extravangantly
pro-Israeli than those of Reagan.
Meanwhile, the Jackson campaign first befuddled, then enraged its erstwhile liberal critics (who, like the
New Republic, had
a priori dismissed
it as a demagogic exercise in Black sectionalism) by unveiling a
coherent, alternative foreign policy—more comparable to a Nonaligned
Movement manifesto than to any hitherto imagined Democratic platform.
This foreign policy, with its central emphases on ‘support for
liberation struggles’, US non-intervention, and nuclear disarmament, was
elaborated through an extensive dialogue that involved the Hispanic
community, the peace movement, the Catholic left, and the oppositional
foreign policy establishment (notably the Institute for Policy Studies),
as well as Black pan-Africanists and nationalists. Jackson personally
underwrote the priority of these planks in his campaign by audacious
meetings with Ortega and Castro, as well as by his visible participation
in left-led demonstrations against the invasion of Grenada and
intervention in Central America. These initiatives far exceeded the
functional requirements of the primary campaign as a simple Black
protest against Democratic neglect. As Maulana Karenga has pointed out,
Jackson’s defiance of the rules of the Cold War courted repudiation by
the ‘new Black patriotism’ that had been ostentatiously endorsed by
various Black sports and entertainment celebrities. Instead he won an
overwhelming voter support, seconded by significant sections of the
Hispanic electorate, that can only be interpreted as a popular mandate
for the Rainbow Coalition’s strategic linkage of full employment,
disarmament and anti-imperialism.
[21] Given the generally dismal historical record of international social democracy on imperialism (from the capitulation of the
Reichstagdeputies,
to Prussian militarism in 1914, to the supine support of the British
Labour government for US genocide in Southeast Asia), the combination of
Jackson’s economic and social aims with his foreign-policy positions
was extraordinary indeed.
In sum, there was a political chasm
between the radical positions of the Jackson campaign and the varieties
of ‘Reaganism with a human face’ offered by Mondale and Hart. Whereas
the crisis of the trade-union leadership had propelled it rightward,
away from its traditional commitment to full employment and into the
dead-end embrace of concessionary corporatism, the crisis of the Black
reformist leadership produced the leftward, populist schism of the
Jackson campaign. In an electoral marketplace overstocked with
conservatives, it offered the only reformist agenda that encompassed the
actual immediate needs of every section of the US working class. Faced
with this fortuitous emergence of a ready-made social-democratic
programme and mass constituency during the 1984 elections counterposed
against the Cold War liberalism of the Democratic establishment
candidates, what was the response of the electoralist left? The US
affiliate of the Socialist International spurned its own destiny.
Instead of recognizing the Rainbow as the harbinger of progressive
realignment, DSA clung to Mondale and the labour bureaucracy—except in
California where the local DSA initially supported the Senator from B-1,
Alan Cranston. Despite some rank-and-file and local chapter sympathy
for Jackson, the DSA leadership deflected any serious consideration of
his campaign. Reading Harrington, Howe and Denitch, one would have
scarcely known that the Rainbow Coalition even existed.
[22] But
where they merely ignored Jackson, a swarm of other white social
democrats and liberal pundits were rushing to calumniate him. One of the
most hysterical attacks was Paul Berman’s article in the
Nation,
in which Jackson was compared to George Wallace and accused of running a
‘rightwing populist’ campaign that was ‘anti-labour’ and ‘a threat to
progressive politics’.
[23] Later,
Jack O’Dell, a key Rainbow staffer and former Martin Luther King aide,
incisively criticized the under-lying attitudes of the Jackson-baiters:
their implicit self-identification of the Left as ‘white’; their
minimalization of the Black social base; and their refusal to accept
that the progressive movement’s ‘majority leadership, not exclusive
leadership, will be coming from the Afro–American community’.
[24]
Mondale’s Corporate Strategy
Having
grandfathered Mondale’s nomination through the obstacles of political
principle, Kirkland and his COPE chieftains were forced to watch
haplessly as their ‘labour strategy’ was sex-changed into a ‘corporate
strategy’ after the Democratic Convention. The last months of the
labour-backed Mondale campaign were spent in a quixotic crusade to win
big business to the Democrats. Mondale’s appeal to the corporations and
financial markets was based on twin proposals to raise taxes by $70
billion and to place the new revenue in a special ‘deficit reduction
fund’ to ensure that it would not be used for anything other than
balancing the budget. In deference to Wall Street’s general qualms about
industrial policy, he refused to endorse the LaFalce Bill (HR 4360),
the crucial industrial policy legislation sponsored by House Democrats
to establish a latter-day RFC or ‘bank for industrial competition’.
Since his proposed budget provided for only marginally slower growth in
military spending (approximately five per cent per annum) than Reagan’s,
he planned to restore only about half of the 1981 cuts in social
spending, emphasizing those programmes most beneficial to the white
middle class. Lest there remain any doubt about which party stood for
anti-Keynesian fiscal restraint, Stuart Eizenstat, Mondale adviser and
architect of the Carter budget retrenchment, urged businessmen to ‘look
at the platform Mondale insisted upon: There are no specific spending
commitments for the first time; its central focus is on deficit
reduction rather than stimulus of the economy.’
[25] Other
Mondale advisers broadly hinted to the business press that a Democratic
Administration would be ready to undertake even more drastic pruning as
it became necessary. Ex-Secretary of Treasury Blumenthal told
Business Weekhe was convinced that Mondale would trim entitlement programmes and get social security under control.
[26] A
plan to impose a general spending freeze, championed by Bert Lance and
Felix Rohatyn, only failed to become a major Mondale plank because of
the fear of alienating Jackson and the Black vote.
[27]
By
pandering to the Business Roundtable in the illusory hope that business
might rally behind his campaign, Mondale repeated Carter’s gigantic
blunder of 1980: clothing the Democrats in the mantle of Hooverian
fiscal conservatism while the GOP, invoking Roosevelt and Kennedy,
crusaded as the party of economic growth. This relentless domestic right
turn—largely unopposed by trade unionists and social democrats trapped
in the logic of their ‘lesser evilism’—was further complemented by a
parallel attempt to outflank Reagan as the champion of Cold War
toughness.
‘Firmness’ and ‘resolution’ became the key Mondale virtues,
as his managers, advised by a coterie of ex-Kissinger and Brzezinski
aides (Robert Hunter, Barry Carter, Madeleine Albright, etc.) tried to
project a new set of campaign themes: a ‘quarantine’ of Nicaragua,
retaliation against terrorism, increased military support for Israel,
funding for ‘Midgetman’ and Stealth bombers, and so on. In September two
leading hawks, James Schlesinger, Ford’s Secretary of Defense, and Max
Kampelman, sometime Reagan envoy, were brought into the campaign with
remarkable ostentation in an apparent attempt to counter the roles of
the ex-(Scoop) Jackson Democrats, like Kirkpatrick, on the Republican
side.
[28] Just
as industrial policy had been summarily killed off as a campaign theme,
so too were the nuclear freeze and Central America clouded over with
ambiguous rhetoric and pushed into the background of foreign policy
debate. As a result, peace and Central America activists were
increasingly disorganized and muted where they had chosen to make
support of Mondale their focus.
While the Democratic campaign was
being reshaped for the benefit of the bankers and the hawks, Blacks,
whether Mondale loyalists or Jackson supporters, were being frozen out
of the campaign leadership and the media spotlight. The treatment was so
contemptuous that even Andy Young exploded at the ‘smartassed white
boys’ on the Mondale staff who treated all Black Democrats as campaign
liabilities. Again, it was only the conciliatory intervention of Jesse
Jackson that headed off a rupture. A meeting of Jackson supporters in
Chicago, debating the potential for Rainbow candidates at the
congressional and local levels, had urged Jackson to run as an
independent in the South Carolina senatorial race. Precisely because
such an initiative might have had incalculable consequences—creating a
third party precedent as well as radically challenging the political
submission of the Black Southern electorate to lesser-evil conservative
white Democrats—it was successfully squelched by Jackson’s moderate
advisers and the Democratic National Committee. This effectively marked
the end of the nascent Rainbow Coalition’s independent role in the 1984
elections.
As the last liberal vestiges of the Mondale platform
disappeared in white smoke, his left supporters sought refuge in a
wonderland of ever more fantastic scenarios. While noting the rightward
deflection of their candidate, DSA argued that this was all the more
reason to ‘transform the election from an ordinary campaign into a bold
progressive crusade’—as if grassroots mobilization could somehow
compensate for right-wing policies. Mondale was officially invested with
‘exceptional left-liberal credentials’ and crowned as the next
‘people’s president’.
[29] An
extraordinary tableau was unveiled to show how the ‘party within the
party’ might be activated to defeat Reagan and reshape the Democratic
Party leftward. Hopefully christened after Truman’s famous
come-from-behind effort of 1948 (despite the fact that Mondale’s
economics were now to the right of Dewey’s), this fantasy of the
‘people’s campaign’ presumed the dramatic activation of a ‘silent
majority’ of anti-Reagan voters. A Mondale victory—it was imagined—would
be secured by the coincidence of five strategic factors: 1) the AFL–CIO
’s capacity to deliver at least 65 per cent of the vote of union
households (compared with 48 per cent in 1980); 2) a continuation of
Black voter registration at the unprecedented levels of 1983 and early
1984, with an equally high Black turnout to assure Democratic victory in
at least some of the seven Southern states that Carter lost by less
than 3 per cent of the vote; 3) a widening gender gap—at least 15 per
cent—and increased female voter turnout; 4) the inability of the
Republicans to exploit comparable reserves of conservative ‘hidden
voters’; 5) a dramatic leap in voter participation, reversing the
twenty-year decline and assuring an overall turnout of at least 100
million out of a voting-age population of 174 million.
III. THE DELUGE
Every
one of these hopes was drowned in the Reagan tide of November 8.
Although the Black vote contributed a historic share of the total
Democratic presidential vote—over half in the South and nearly a quarter
nationally (compared with 7 per cent in 1960)—it shrunk by one point as
a percentage of the total popular vote (from 9 per cent to 8 per cent)
as did the women’s vote (from 50 per cent to 49 per cent).
[30] At
the same time, the ‘labour strategy’ central to Mondale’s campaign
debouched in an uneven union effort, ranging from enthusiastic to
dispirited depending on union, region and degree of previous
rank-and-file electoral organization. The unions delivered only a slim
majority of union households to Mondale (53 per cent), instead of the 65
per cent that had been vouchsafed to the Democratic National Committee,
and the NBC exit polls in Michigan actually showed UAW households
sliding to Reagan, 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Although the AFL–CIO
would later claim posthumous victory by referring to the percentage of
union members, rather than households, voting for Mondale (60–65 per
cent, exclusive of the pro-Reagan Teamsters and the unaffiliated NEA),
the Federation’s own polls indicated a decisive Reagan majority among
their younger white male members.
[31] The
really catastrophic statistic, however, was the Gallup Poll’s discovery
one month after the elections that a plurality of skilled workers
indicated allegiance to the Republicans for the first time since the
1920s.
It is difficult to resist comparing this tendential
Reaganization of the white craft working class in the United States with
the similarly massive defection of skilled English workers from the
British Labour Party over the past four years. It would seem that in
political terms, if not also in socio-economic status, the working class
in both countries is becoming increasingly disunited in a way that
repeals the solidaristic achievements of earlier decades of labour
struggle and drastically reduces the claims of either the Democratic
Party or the Labour Party to represent most of the industrial
proletariat—never mind the growing numbers of effectively
disenfranchised low-wage service workers.
In the larger
working-class electorate, non-union and unorganized as well as union,
the AFL–CIO labour strategy was clearly and unambiguously defeated. From
the beginning of the campaign, Mondale’s pollsters and strategists had
been aware that the crucial battle of the election would be the
competition for the hearts and minds of the third income quintile: the
fifth of the population midway up the income ladder with average annual
earnings of $19,000. This quintile includes both organized semi-skilled
and many skilled workers; it was the least affected, positively or
negatively, by the 1981 tax redistribution, but is highly sensitive to
changes in the employment level or to threats of tax increases. In
December 1983, Mondale seemed to enjoy a comfortable margin among this
fifth of the population, as various polls showed him with a majority of
votes from families earning $20,000 or less per annum (Hart also won
this group from Reagan). Less than a year later, following the
Democrats’ move to fiscal conservatism and the acceleration of the
Reagan recovery, the Mondale threshold dropped below $10,000 (compared
with $15,000 for Carter in 1980). Reagan’s support in the crucial
$12,500 to $24,999 income range rose 13 per cent and in November he won a
clear majority of the overall blue-collar vote (even increasing his
union vote by 2 per cent over 1980).
[33]
There
still might have remained some comfort for the Democrats if the gender
gap had widened or held to its 1980 level. Instead, it unexpectedly
narrowed, as 10 per cent more women voted for Reagan and the global
male/female differential (vis-`-vis the Democratic vote) declined by
half. In the South, the only region in the country to give Carter a
majority of the female vote in 1980, the gender gap simply disappeared,
as women shifted sides by a massive 16 per cent.
[34] Similarly,
in key Western and Northern industrial states where the Democrats had
hoped for a powerful confirmation of 1980 trends, they were stunned to
see their advantage amongst women voters tumbling, with only New York
remaining an exception.
[35]
This
national reversal of political gender differentiation is undoubtedly
linked, particularly in the South, but also elsewhere, with the
increasing racial polarization among women voters. Indeed, a racial
disaggregation of the female vote reveals one of the most glaring gaps
in the electorate: the 65 per cent of white women (compared with 68 per
cent of white men) who voted for Reagan versus a bare 6 per cent of
black women.
[36] Without
slighting the long-term political implications of the continuing
incorporation of white women into the economy as low-wage workers, it
would appear incontestable that much of what remained of the gender gap
in 1984 (approximately 7 per cent differential) was an epiphenomenon of
the remarkably Democratic vote of black and minority women. This is a
fact that must be related to the refusal of the National Organization of
Women (presigned by the AFL–CIO for Mondale) and most feminist groups
to give a serious hearing to the Rainbow Coalition.
[37]
As
with workers and women, the sun again failed to rise for the Democrats
with new voters. The broadly shared expectation on the left that
opposition to Reaganism was drawing millions of new Democratic voters
into polling booths was cruelly disappointed. In the first place
Democratic registration drives became ensnared in a tangle of rivalries
between candidates and constituencies. During the primaries, for
example, when Black voter interest was most intense, the national
Democratic apparatus refused to finance registration efforts for fear
that they would enhance the Jackson vote. Later in the campaign, Black
voter groups retaliated, refusing to share names with some white-led
registration campaigns.
[38] Meanwhile,
the trade-union voter drives which had been expected to be the backbone
of the surge of new voters frequently failed to meet minimal quotas.
One major campaign in Los Angeles, crucial to Democratic chances in
California, registered barely 10,000 new voters despite large
expenditures over many months. After its New Hampshire debacle, the
AFL–CIO had made a last-minute attempt to launch ‘one-on-one’ canvassing
and registration on the shopfloor. Successful in a few progressive
unions, this theoretically plausible approach more typically ran afoul,
as Harold Myerson has chronicled, of the atrophied, depoliticized state
of shop-steward organization across the country.
[39]
In
unhappy contrast, the National Republican Committee, which since 1974
has functioned as kind of super-consulting firm, coordinated a
streamlined registration driver that drew awe-inspired accolades from
jealous Democratic operatives. With a $30 million budget, as well as the
corroborative efforts of the Moral Majority’s separate registration
crusade among born-again Christians, the Republicans were able to match
the Democratic registrars voter by voter, and better.
[40] Where
the ‘Human Serve’ campaign—inspired by radical social scientists
Piven’s and Cloward’s idea of ‘movement-building’ through aggressive
assertion of voter rights—sought to use social service employees as
registrars of the poor, the Republicans countered by deputizing members
of the Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce.
[41] Where
the AFL–CIO attempted to mobilize union households and public
employees, the Republicans, with their unassailable mastery of direct
mail techniques, successfully targeted millions of employees of
non-union businesses and military personnel. Using high-tech survey
methods pioneered by GOP poll-master Richard Wirthlin and his cadre of
Mormon computer hackers, the Republicans were able to identify and
register pro-Reagan voters, avoiding duplication or the registration of
Democrats. It was in the South, where Reagan’s 1980 margins had been
thinnest, that this logistical disparity between the two campaigns
became truly decisive. The almost nonchalant attitude of the DNC toward
Black voter registration was parried by the Republicans’ vigorous
enlistment of fundamentalists, military families and anti-Castro Cubans,
who helped tilt the South one-sidedly to Reagan by unexpected margins
of 18 per cent and more.
[42]
Just
as the 1964 Goldwater debacle had dashed belief in a ‘hidden
conservative majority’, so 1984 destroyed the analogous left-wing hope
of reshaping the electoral balance of power with millions of progressive
new voters. In the event, Reagan’s margin among first-time voters was
identical to his majority amongst previous voters. Although the
‘people’s campaign’ may have registered as many as two million new
Democrats, the combined total of the Republican National Committee and
the Moral Majority was probably twice as great.
[43] Even
more importantly, the Republicans were able to motivate their new
voters to turn out on election day. Although the Jackson primary
campaign had inspired Southern Black voters to register in historic
numbers, almost closing the gap with Southern whites (71 per cent versus
77 per cent), 62 per cent of the whites actually voted (overwhelmingly
for Reagan) as against only 41 per cent of eligible Blacks (7 per cent
less than in 1980)—a vivid indication of their disenchantment with
Mondale.
[44] Nationally,
the overall turnout was only 0.7 per cent higher than the postwar low
point of 1980; although 12 million new voters had been registered since
1980, only 4 million bothered to vote. The final total of 92 million
voters fell disastrously short of the 100 million minimum targeted by
the Democrats and their allies, and most of the increase over 1980 seems
to have consisted of new Republican voters.
[45] Despite
the ‘labour candidacy’ and four years of Reaganomics, almost as many
workers occupied barstools intead of polling booths in 1984 as in 1980.
Finally,
rampant crossover voting ensured that the relationship between the
Reagan landslide and the national congressional vote was the most
disarticulated in history. Despite a near tie in the aggregate
congressional popular vote, the House remained Democratic by a three to
two margin thanks to an all-powerful incumbency effect (95 per cent of
incumbents were reelected) and the partisan reapportionment of
congressional districts carried out by majority Democratic statehouses
since 1980. Although House minority leader Michels complained about the
selfish fit of Reagan’s coattails, he might more fairly have blamed the
business PACs which, by and large, refused to subsidize Republican
congressional challengers. The election was a pyrrhic victory for
Mondale’s corporate strategy insofar as Tony Coelho and his Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee had attracted business contributions to
Democratic incumbents.
[46] To
an increasing extent, opposite trends are operating within what James
MacGregor Burns once characterized as the American ‘four party system’
of autonomous Democratic and Republican congressional and presidential
coalitions.
[47] In
the case of the Democrats, while the presidential coalition has become
more dependent upon the contribution of Blacks, minorities and labour,
the congressional wing, as Thomas Edsall has emphasized, is increasingly
reliant upon business PACs and middle-class interest groups.
[48]
Revenge of the Neo-Liberals
Well
before Mondale’s November doomsday, his impending defeat was being
celebrated by leading neo-liberals. At the end of July, Senator Tsongas
of Massachusetts, a pioneer neo-liberal and Hart confidant, was already
boasting that ‘the next crop of candidates will all come out of our wing
of the party. For that reason, several of us would be just as
comfortable if Mondale loses as if he wins.’
[49] An
even more brazen advocate of sending Mondale and old-style liberals to
hell in a handbasket was Mayor Koch of New York. He had been
barnstorming since the fall of 1983 to turn the Democratic Party away
from the ‘left-wing special interests’ (read ‘Blacks’) and toward the
middle class: ‘The Party’s left wing doesn’t give a rap about the middle
class. Koch’s alternative was a clone of Kemp’s and Gingrich’s
prescription to the Republicans: flat-rate tax reform, victim’s rights,
the curbing of entitlements, urban enterprise zones, and so on.)
[50]
On
the morning after the election, Tsongas’s and Koch’s views were echoed
by a vast chorus of depressed Democratic office-holders. At a meeting of
the AFL–CIO-backed Coalition for a Democratic Majority, LBJ’s
son-in-law, Governor Charles Robb of Virginia, minced no words about the
need to return the party to the middle class, against the ‘special
interests’. He articulated the consensus of Western and Southern
Democratic leaders that the Democrats must be the ‘party of business
leaders, doctors, pharmacists, stockbrokers, and professionals’. Robb
was immediately seconded by the strikebreaking Democratic Governor of
Arizona, Bruce Babbitt, who had shown his independence of special
interests by twice sending in the National Guard to terrorize locked-out
copper miners.
[51] As a programmatic contribution towards such a middle-class reorientation, the
New Republic urged
the Democrats immediately to dump the nuclear freeze, election campaign
reform, comparable worth, affIrmative action, and bilingual education.
[52]
Meanwhile,
Black Democrats, far from reaping new influence because of their
stalwart loyalty to the party ticket, were scapegoated by virtually the
entire white Democratic establishment for losing the election. Former
Johnson aide Harry McPherson, testifying before the Center for National
Policy, warned that ‘Protestant male Democrats are becoming an
endangered species . . . (since) Blacks now own the Democratic Party.’
[53] Robert Strauss, the former DNC chairman, talked darkly to
Timemagazine about the ‘hunger’ of ‘women, Blacks, teachers, Hispanics’ and Jesse Jackson’s grip on the party.
[54] He
was upstaged, however, by Morton Kondracke’s shrill warning that
‘Jackson could . . . use this Black base, the largest single bloc in the
party, to push his agenda of drastic cuts in defense spending, large
new social expenditures and identification with third world liberation
causes . . . This is a script for making the Democrats into an American
version of the British Labour Party, with Mr Jackson playing the role of
Tony Benn.’
[55] Kondracke’s
New Republic,
the site of a particularly virulent strain of Democratic
neo-liberalism, underlined the threat to Western Civilization posed by
the Black electorate with a raving editorial in near
Goebbelssprache.Submerged
in ‘pathologies of crime, violence, arson and drugs’, Blacks ‘were more
stunted politically than at any other point in a generation’. This
collective criminal class—‘exceptional’ in its political immaturity and
irresponsibility—would no longer be indulged by white liberals or other
Democratic constituencies. ‘In another time and under another ethos,
perhaps we would all feel morally burdened by these humiliating
pathologies of so many of our fellow citizens; but we would have to live
a more spacious conception of citizenship than the one we now live by.’
[56]
The
chic racism that had invested liberal critiques of the Jackson campaign
in the spring came flooding down the spillways after November in even
more strident forms. Nor was the putatively left press immune to such
fulminations. In January,
In These Times published a retrospect
of the Rainbow Coalition’s role in the election by James Sleeper that
sounded, even if more gently and paternalistically, many of the same
themes of the
New Republic. Jackson’s rallies ‘were group
exercises in therapeutic self-assertion, bonfires that failed to
illuminate the larger political landscape because they generated few
constructive programmes for American society as a whole . . . Jackson’s
up-front appeals for racial solidarity in the election arena violate(d)
traditional American political culture . . .’
[57] Dissent,
for its part, brought an ex-Black revolutionary turned born-again Jew,
Julius Lester, to denounce Jackson as a racist and anti-Semite, of
‘questionable morality’, who had tried to pretend that he was a Black
‘Wizard of Oz’. Lester blamed the Rainbow for attempting to build a
futile coalition of ‘rejected groups’ instead of looking towards the
broad middle classes, the true source of ‘empowerment’.
[58] Meanwhile,
for Social Democrats USA, Bayard Rustin was on hand at Norman
Podhoretz’s birthday to denounce Black extremism and to praise the great
man for ‘refusing to pander to minority groups’ in his fight against
quotas and Black studies.
[59]
Black
Democrats and Jackson supporters were stunned by the vitriolic
intensity of these attacks on themselves as an anarchic special
interest. Jackson lashed back at what he described as a ‘cultural
conspiracy against Blacks’, and criticized the Democratic leadership for
its failure to provide ‘a rational analysis of why it lost.’
[60] He also specifically condemned the AFL–CIO Executive for its role in scapegoating his campaign. Yet at the same time, the
New York Times reported
that he ‘was chastened by the reaction of party regulars’ and once
again made conciliatory moves towards the DNC. A friend was quoted as
saying, ‘Jesse doesn’t want to leave the party. He’s afraid the party’s
leaving him.’
[61]
Jackson’s
apprehension is probably correct. Mondale’s incontestable defeat has
dramatically accelerated the succession process through which younger
neo-liberals, with scant loyalty to labour or minorities, are replacing
the leadership of older New Dealers and Southern conservatives at all
levels of the Democratic Party. During 1984, two new power poles emerged
to contest the party’s future. First, Kennedy liberals and Mondale
regulars lost the leadership of the House Democratic Caucus to an
aggressive group of young neo-liberals, sportingly known as the
‘Wednesday night bridge club’, led by Richard Gephardt, who succeeded
Gillis Long as Caucus chair, and Tony Coelho, the corporate fundraiser
extraordinaire of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
[62]Frontrunner
to become the next Democratic whip, Coelho has tended to supply the
tactical skills, while Gephardt has provided the ideological direction.
Indeed, this latter congressman from the white, segregated and heavily
Catholic suburban fringe of St. Louis, who earned his seniority opposing
programmes for the poor, school busing, and women’s rights, has become
something like the Doctor Faustus of congressional neo-liberals. In
1982, he drafted the Democratic Caucus’s economic blueprint that shoved
aside traditional Democratic welfare priorities to argue for a high-tech
industrial policy along lines that anticipated Hart’s platform in 1984.
Since then he has been a passionate lobbyist for a Democratic
realignment away from Blacks and labour, and towards the upwardly mobile
middle classes.
[63] He
and Coelho have several times succeeded in defeating older New Dealers
and Kennedy liberals, notably in their sabotage of a proposed American
Defense Education Act that would have forced Reagan to provide $9
billion in aid to local schools. Long before November, his ‘bridge club’
was discussing how to turn a Mondale defeat to its advantage and impose
‘a major overhaul of both the party’s ideological image and the way its
leaders communicate with the public’.
[64] This
‘new Democratic agenda’ has been spear-headed by the ‘tax
simplification’ bill which Gephardt has co-sponsored with neo-liberal
Senator Bill Bradley, in an obvious attempt to head the Reaganites off
at the pass with a tax reform that offers even more to high-tech
industries and to the professional middle classes.
Confronted
with the onslaught of the Gephardt–Coelho current and their Senate
allies, Kennedy liberals have given ground or changed their stripes
altogether. In the House, lame-duck Tip O’Neill has agreed to devolve
power to the thirty to forty younger Democratic subcommittee chairs and
caucus leaders. At the same time, O’Neill has virtually conceded that
effective Democratic congressional opposition to Reaganomics is now
impossible, given the overlapping of ideological perspectives between
the neo-liberals and the administration. In what the
Washington Postcharacterized as an ‘extraordinarily conciliatory statement’ about not blocking Reagan’s budget proposals’,
[65] O’Neill
sounded many of the neo-lib themes himself, saying he was ‘willing to
slash billions from revenue sharing and grants to local governments for
community development and urban projects. He has told fellow Democrats
they must shed the image of being “knee-jerk defenders of spending and
weak on defence”.’
[66] No
one has shed faster, however, than the ‘West Side’ machine of
Congressmen Howard Berman and Henry Waxman in Los Angeles. This
predominantly Jewish political network, which is the coming power in the
California Democratic Party, has made a hard turn to neo-liberalism in
the wake of the Mondale defeat, jettisoning its historic alliance with
Los Angeles’s Black Mayor, Tom Bradley, whose political aspirations and
social base are now seen as a hindrance.
[67]
A
second centre of neo-liberal succession has emerged among Democratic
officeholders in the Sunbelt, particularly the Democratic governors. It
is one of the ironies of recent American history that the middle-class
tax ‘revolt’ of the late 1970’s has been responsible for a great
reinvigoration of the power of governors, as fiscally crippled cities
have been forced to throw themselves on the mercy of statehouses and
legislatures. In the Democratic Party, this has taken the specific form
of strengthening the intra-party influence of governors against big city
mayors. Since early 1983, when they scrapped the Democratic Governors
Conference—a subordinate arm of the DNC—to form the independent
Democratic Governors Association, Southern and Western Democratic
governors have been in the forefront of demands for a ‘return’ to the
white middle class.
Business Week was probably prophetic when it
observed that the fundamental political direction of the governors is
‘moving further right from neo-liberalism’.
[68] Although
Robb and hawkish Georgia Senator Sam Nunn are prominent spokesmen, the
real ideologue of the Sunbelt governors, and functional counterpart to
Gephardt in Congress, may be Babbitt. An exponent of ‘radical centrism’
(as well as scab-herding), he has connived to combine Gary Hart themes
with consistent support for major Reagan programmes like tax
simplification (‘a superb proposal’), merit pay, and anti-urban
federalism. At San Francisco he was the leading proponent of Iacocca for
vice-president.
[69]
In
the immediate aftermath of the election, Babbitt and Robb led their
confederates from the Sunbelt in a blocking action against any
diminution of the power of white-dominated state party machines in the
South or any increase in the influence of Black Democrats. In San
Francisco, the Jackson delegation had demanded the reform of the
nomination process towards a proportional representation system that
would prevent the kind of disfranchisement which occurred in 1984.
Similarly, Hart wanted a reduction of the power of elected officials in
the selection process. Mondale had purchased Jackson’s pledge not to
bolt the convention and Hart’s support of most of his programme by
agreeing to establish a ‘fairness commission’ to review the nomination
process. But under ferocious counter-attack by COPE and labour
delegates, Mondale postponed the appointment until after the convention,
when Hart and Jackson would have reduced leverage. In November 1984,
the Association of State Democratic Chairpersons, meeting in the Virgin
Islands, unanimously voted to pack the membership of the commission with
party regulars.
The liaison with Gephardt that was crucial to
pulling off this Virgin Islands coup soon led Babbitt and Robb into a
full-scale alliance with the House neo-liberals. In February 1985 they
defied the Democratic National Committee by establishing, under
Gephardt’s chairmanship, their own dual-power Democratic executive, the
Democratic Leadership Council. The initial membership of the DLCincluded
ten governors, led by Babbitt and Robb, fourteen senators, led by Sam
Nunn, and seventeen representatives, led by Jim Jones, the powerful
chair from Oklahoma of the House Budget Committee. Only four of the
founders were from the Northeast, there were no women, and only two
Blacks (one of whom, however, is the potential spoiler of the Black
Caucus: William Gray III of Philadelphia, highest-ranking Black
Committee chair).
This concert of the House neo-libs with the
Sunbelt statehouses has thrown the former followers of Ted Kennedy on
the defensive, spoiling whatever hopes the younger dynast might have had
of turning the Mondale defeat to his own advantage. Not only was the
new DNC chair and ex-Kennedy aide Richard Kirk forced to acquiesce in
the Democratic Leadership Council’s
coup de main, but within days
of his difficult election, he was signalling his own distance from the
labour movement (‘I am not a captive’) and his Great Society past (‘The
Democrats must return to traditional values’; they must ‘earn anew the
political respect of mainstream America’, etc.).
[70] Concurrently
the AFL–CIO virtually went to ground, fighting rear-guard actions over
tax policy but generally avoiding any sharp confrontation with the
ascendent neo-lib Sunbelt alliance. The most energetic exercise of
labour’s lobbying power in the six months following the election was its
combination with these same forces to attack minority caucuses. With
the AFL–CIO leading the charge, the DNC voted to revoke the seats that
the convention had allotted to caucuses on all standing committees,
allowing only Blacks, women and Hispanics to maintain a residual
presence on the Executive, while disestablishing the gay, liberal and
Asian-American caucuses. Then, according to the
New York Times,
labour ‘helped punish one of its political enemies’ by mobilizing to
defeat Mayor Richard Hatcher, Jackson’s campaign manager, as a
vice-chair of the DNC.
[71] Since
Hatcher was the official nominee of the Black Caucus, his rejection was
a signal that the Jackson forces and their allies could expect to ride
in the back of the bus of the Neo-liberalized Democratic Party. As
Hatcher himself put it, this was ‘a message to white, male America that
Blacks, Hispanics and women aren’t going to control the Democratic
Party.’
[72]
IV. WHAT’S LEFT AFTER THE DEMOCRATS?
Although some left-liberals profess to find a silver lining in the ascendancy of the neo-liberals,
[73]and a few social democrats even propose what amounts to a strategy of ‘constructive engagement’,
[74] the
post-election power struggles, following in the wake of the
sociological verdicts of the election itself, do not offer much solace
to advocates of the ‘left wing of realism’. Given the considerable
investment of hope and resources by most of the left during the
election, if not also in the long-range strategy of realigning the
Democratic Party, it seems particularly urgent to debate the lessons of
1984. For my own part, I think a provisional balance-sheet on the left
and the Democrats would have to include the following points:
(1)
The turn of the ex-new left toward the Democratic Party coincided,
almost to the exact moment, with the liberal retreat from the Great
Society programme and the beginning of the abandonment of a hegemonic
reformism that included the Black poor. Almost every major theme of
Reaganism was prefigured in the 1977–78 domestic and foreign policy
shifts of the Carter administration (thereby inviting one to reverse Ted
Kennedy’s description of Carter as ‘Reagan’s clone’).
(2) The
ascendancy of electoralism on the left, far from being an expression of
new popular energies or mobilizations, was, on the contrary, a symptom
of the decline of the social movements of the 1960s, accompanied by the
organic crisis of the trade-union and community-service bureaucracies.
Rather than being a strategy for unifying mass struggles and grassroots
organization on a higher, programmatic level, electoralism was either
imagined as a substitute for quotidian mass organizing, or it was
inflated as an all-powerful catalyst for movement renewal.
(3)
Most of the pro-Democratic left generally misread the direction of the
class and racial polarization taking place in the United States and its
impact on traditional electoral alignments. Starting from the
misconception that a ‘left’ politics (whether hyphenated with liberalism
or socialism) could be re-established directly on the basis of
anti-Reagan populism, it seriously underestimated the power of the
petty-bourgeois insurgency which is sweeping both parties and
recomposing their leaderships. By the same token, it wildly
overestimated the attraction of the Democrats, who lack any serious
alternative economic programme, to a divided and socially dispirited
working class.
(4) The naive belief in a hidden left majority
indicated a deeper incomprehension of how the electoral arena is
socially structured and technically manipulated. Refusing to recognize
the implacable fact that the power of US capital is reinforced by a
field of property interests
millions strong, the electoralist
left acted as if middle-class and corporate domination of the
institutions and media of the political system could be equalized merely
by mass voter registration—at times appearing to give credence to the
parliamentary cretinism that believes the electoral system to be a level
playing field between social classes. In fact, the American electoral
system, historically the most
structurallyantagonistic to radical or independent politics, has virtually become an extension of the advertising and television industries.
(5)
The role of the trade-union movement in 1984 demonstrates all too
clearly the contradictions of attempting to manipulate the system
through its own elite apparatuses. The AFL–CIO Executive mobilized a
great deal of organizational and financial clout, with only paltry
political result. The logistics of power-brokerage within the DNC, and
of packaging a candidacy for sale in the national TV marketplace, led
labour successively to minimize and then contain its own objectives. As a
result, the AFL–CIO failed to defend the Second Reconstruction or to
advance a serious jobs programme. Its Gompersian option for an alliance
with finance capital, founded upon an abortive reindustrialization
policy, abandoned any pretence of acting in the name of the entire
working class. In retrospect, it would have been better in 1984 for the
unions to have remained politically divided along previous lines (as
from 1972 to 1980). At least some of the more ‘progressive’ unions,
including the public-sector unions with large Black and third-world
memberships, might have been freer to express the will of their
memberships, particularly toward the Jackson primary campaign.
(6)
The ‘top down’ strategy of DSA and its various influentials was
guaranteed to keep them minor pawns in the political machinations of the
trade-union bureaucracy. Behind the rhetoric of ‘labour unity’, the
Kirkland policy represented not a progressive opening, but a
recrudescence of the political right wing of the union movement. By
binding themselves to Mondale
in advance of any programmatic
agreement, and generally without any consultation of their memberships,
the unions lost crucial room for manoeuvre around their own demands
(like plant closure legislation) as well as any leverage at the
convention. The last act in this charade was Mondale’s ability to forge
his own corporate alliance and make a definitive right turn immediately
after the convention.
(7) The decision of the Nuclear Freeze and
sections of the anti-intervention movement to make the Democrats the
main priority in 1984 was an unmitigated disaster. Far from creating a
mass arena for antinuclear, anti-interventionist politics, participation
in the Democratic camp seriously disorganized these movements, as they
allowed themselves to be trapped in the process of accommodation and
‘consensus management’ that defeated the Freeze at the convention and
made Central America a non-issue in the fall. Ironically, the most
effective electoral actions were carried out by local anti-war and peace
groups on the West Coast who remained completely independent of the
Mondale campaign and relied on traditional referenda.
(8)
Because, as James Weinstein has pointed out, the historic
social-democratic leadership has conceived itself playing an essentially
‘courtier’ role vis-à-vis the trade-union and Democratic leaderships,
[75] it
was unwilling to ally with the one mass left constituency in American
politics: the Black electorate. Indeed, with its explicit
anti-imperialism, the Jackson campaign probably invited an impossible
leap from DSA leaders like Harrington or Howe who have given life-long
dedication to liberal zionist and anti-Communist causes. Moreover, the
absence of any serious debate about the election in DSA, except from a
passionate group of Black members, leaves open (and unlikely of positive
resolution) the question of whether even the ‘Debsian’ grassroots of
that organization are capable of challenging its traditional mortgage to
Israel and the Cold War, or of realigning the organization toward mass
political currents that do not have the endorsement of liberalism.
(9)
At its worst, the backlash among sections of the white left against the
Jackson campaign exposed an ugly neo-racism. More generally, the
patronizing reactions to the Rainbow Coalition revealed how profoundly
‘white’ the self-concept of many left-liberals had become, and how
unwilling they remain to accept even a modicum of non-white leadership.
The contrasting reactions to Ferraro and Jackson are sobering in that
regard. Moreover, as the shrinkage of the gender gap in the election
indirectly showed, no matter how important feminist consciousness must
be in shaping a socialist culture in America, racism remains the
divisive issue within class
andgender. There can be no such thing
as a serious reformist politics, much less an effective socialist
practice, that does not frontally address the struggle against racism
and defend the full programme of a Second Reconstruction.
(10)
The Jackson campaign had a complex, ambiguous significance. On the one
hand, it tested the waters for a left politics of jobs and peace based
on a multi-racial coalition of the most oppressed groups in American
society. Among Black people especially, it revealed a profound yearning
to revive the liberation struggles of the 1960s—a desire that flowed
easily and self-confidently into channels of independent political
action and protest against the Democratic establishment. On the other
hand, the Jackson candidacy remained circumscribed by its self-defeating
goal of renegotiating the terms of Black
subordinacy in the
Democratic Party. In this sense, Jesse Jackson acted as the Father Gapon
of Black reformist politics, leading a supplication of inner-city
office-holders to the ‘little father’, Walter Mondale.
(11) In
the event, of course, the galvanization of the Black primary vote by the
Jackson campaign cut directly across the path of the neo-liberal
succession in the Democratic Party. The clearest aftermath of November
1984 is the bitter message that the white yuppie
establishment-information has sent to Black Democrats. Self-effacing
loyalty to the party has only brought hypocritical charges that Blacks
are a power-hungry ‘special interest’; unprecedented contributions to
the national Democratic vote have brought the accusation of causing the
white backlash. Far from having won a new deal within the party, Black
Democrats now face the prospect of becoming pariahs in the post-New Deal
party of Gephardt, Babbitt, Koch and Hart.
New York Times Sunday Magazine, 17 June 1981, p. 24.
[2]The
first major trial run for new left electoralism, however, was Robert
Scheer’s unsuccessful anti-war congressional campaign in Berkeley in
1966. This experience rehearsed in miniature all the problems and
contradictions of trying to build a movement from inside the Democratic
Party and under the constraints of a campaign schedule.
[3]Newsletter of the Democratic Left, March 1973, p. 5.
[4]For
a debate on the class-political trajectory of neighbourhood
movements—whether a rebirth of Populism or an insurgency of
right-leaning, middle classes—see Harry Boyte’s essay in
Socialist Review, 40–41, July–October 1978, and my critique in the same issue.
[5]Meyerson, ‘Labor’s Risky Plunge into Politics’,
Dissent, Summer 1984, p. 286.
[6]For an unsparing discussion of Stevenson’s assuasive cultivation of the Dixiecrats, see Herbert Parmet,
The Democrats: The Years After FDR,
New York 1976. Stevenson’s ‘Southern strategy’ was a major impetus
behind Reuther’s attempts to reconstruct a new liberal–labour alliance
committed to serious civil rights enforcement.
[7]According
to John Herling, during the 1972 primaries the AFL–CIO provided a staff
man as speechwriter for Jackson, who compiled a fifty-page ‘white
paper’ that ‘so distorted McGovern’s record (nearly perfect COPE voting
score) that it was distributed by Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the
President’. (See ‘Change and Conflict in the AFL–CIO’,
Dissent,
February 1974, p. 4801.) Jackson led an anti-détente fraction of the
Democratic Party that included, besides Meany and COPE, leading defence
firms, major Jewish organizations and much of the party officialdom.
[8]Thus
the AFL CIO quietly bankrolled the National Council of Senior Citizens
and helped it shepherd the Medicare plan through Congress in 1965. At
the same time, it pressed for civil rights legislation through the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights headed by Andrew Biemiller, the
Federation’s chief lobbyist, Joseph Rauh of Americans for Democratic
Action, and Charles Mitchell of the NAACP. The LCCR was designed as an
alternative to the mass civil rights movements led by SNCC, CORE and the
SCLC—the AFL CIO refusing to endorse the great 1963 March on
Washington. In pressing for the inclusion of a fair employment practices
provision (Title VII) in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Meany hoped to
obtain ‘an umbrella of law’ to enforce the compliance of his own craft
unions with job integration without having to confront them head-on. Yet
at the same time by opposing the inclusion of affirmative action or
super-seniority in Title VII, Meany aimed to ensure that integration of
the workplace was basically token, leaving intact seniority structures
and nepotistic apprenticeship practices. (See Joseph Goulden,
Meany, New York 1972, p . 310 passim.)
[9]William Crotty,
Party Reform, New York 1983, p. 132.
[10]‘Many
of the more progressive unions, particularly the UAW, whose president,
then Douglas Fraser, co-chaired the Hunt Commission on rules,
entertained a more Europeanized model of party structure. Their goal was
to restrict the prenomination franchise to party members, a
transformation that could be accomplished
de jureby having 30 state legislatures rewrite the laws or
de factoby
switching from primaries to caucuses . . . The UAW also had a
longstanding concern over the lack of accountability of the Democratic
Congressional Delegation to the party platform. What better way to
promote their accountability than make them automatic convention
delegates?’ Meyerson, ‘Labor’s Risky Plunge’, pp.286–87. In this account
of the UAW’s move, after Reuther’s death, to an anti-reform position
kindred to Meany’s and Kirkland’s, Meyerson elides the fact that without
formal constituency organization and/or official trade-union bloc
votes, an unreformed Democratic Party would be most likely accountable
only to officeholders,
apparatchiksand business interests.
[11]Raskin, ‘Labor Enters a New Century’,
The New Leader, 30 November 1981, p. 13.
[12]Quoted in
In These Times, 2 February 1982, p. 7.
[13]Moody, ‘Not Just Four More Years’,
Labor Notes, 20 November 1984, pp. 8–9.
[14]Economist, 26 January 1985.
[15]Quoted in the
Wall Street Journal, 4 February 1985, p. 4.
[16]For
a history of modern attempts from the Gary Convention of 1972 onward to
found an independent black politics, see Manning Marable,
Black American Politics, Verso, London 1985.
[17]See Frances Beal, ‘US Politics Will Never Be the Same’,
Black Scholar, September–October 1984.
[18]See the
Black Economist,
January 1985. It is important, however, not to overstate the new class
contradictions within the Black community. Unlike the white social
structure, the Black middle strata are predominantly based in the public
sector, far more dependent upon two wage-earners (the wife in a Black
middle-income household contributes about 60 per cent more than her
white—equivalent see Ibid., p. 49), and generally more vulnerable to
downward mobility. It is essential to distinguish between the small, but
expanded, Black middle class of private-sector managers and
entrepreneurs on one side, and on the other, the new ‘state middle
class’ of public-sector managers and professionals. This latter group,
including Black teachers, welfare workers and lawyers, comprised some of
the most vociferous supporters of the Jackson campaign.
[19]See Timothy Clark, ‘New Ideas Versus Old’, NATIONAL JOURNAL, 17 March 1984.
[20]Ibid.
[21]Karenga, ‘Jesse Jackson and the Presidential Campaign’,
Black Scholar,
September–October 1984, p. 59. Karenga also emphasized the exemplary
role of Jackson’s campaign in combating the trivialization of Black
culture, ‘the focus on sports, vulgar careerism, music and music idols .
. .’.
[22]For
one of the finest polemics of the election year, see Alexander
Cockburn’s and Andrew Kopkind’s fiery denunciation of the white left’s
flight from the Jackson campaign, ‘The Left, The Democrats and The
Future’,
The Nation, 21–28 July 1984.
[23]‘The Other Side of the Rainbow’,
The Nation,
4 July 1984, pp. 408–09. For Berman, the ‘real Rainbow Coalition is
Blacks and liberal Jews’ which Jackson has ‘done most to disrupt’. Since
anti-Semitism was the invariable pretext of left Jackson-baiters in the
period following his unfortunate ethnic slur in a private conversation,
it is useful to consider briefly what the Black-Jewish coalition has
actually entailed. Although typically presented as selfless political
altriusm by which liberal Jewish organizations have sustained the civil
rights movement with money and legislative support, Black electoral
support has in fact been a principal means by which Jewish Democratic
politicans have magnified their representation and power out of any
proportion to the size of their ethnic base, as well as a means to
reinforce the veto of the pro-Israel lobby on US policy. As the
following table demonstrates, Jewish representation in the House is
almost equal to that of Blacks and Hispanics combined.
[24]Interview in
Black Scholar, September–October 1984, pp. 55–56.
[25]Quoted in
Business Week, 30 July 1984, p. 35.
[26]Quoted in ibid.
[27]See Felix Rohatyn, ‘The Debtor Economy: a Proposal’,
The New York Review of Books, 8 November 1984.
[28]See Mondale interview,
New York Times, 23 September 1984, B–9.
[29]Timothy Sears,
Democratic Left, September–October 1984, pp. 4–6.
[30]For the Black vote see
National Journal, 11 October 1984, p. 2132; 1960 figure from Richard Rubin,
Party Dynamics,
New York, 1976, pp. 92–93; decline of relative vote, Thomas Edsall, ‘Politics and the Power of Money’,
Dissent, Fall 1985, p. 150.
[31]See
AFL CIO News, 1 December 1985, p. 6; and discussion of union vote by David Moberg in
In These Times,
21 November–4 December 1984, p. 7. COPE was also battered by
deindustrialization and the loss of 2.5 million manufacturing jobs
between 1980 and 1984. In West Virginia, traditionally the most tightly
organized state in the nation, union membership has declined from half
to a third of the labour force since Reagan’s inauguration, with
devastating results for the state COPE and Democratic Party.
[33]Washington Post/ABC
Poll, December 1983 and November 1984; also data from Everett Carll
Ladd, ‘On Mandates, Realignments and the 1984 Presidential Election’,
Political Science Quarterly, 100, 1, Spring 1985.
[34]CBS, ABC and NBC exit polls; Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘The Elections, the Economy and Public Opinion’,
PS, Winter 1985, p. 36.
[35]See Laurily Epstein, ‘The Changing Structure of Party Identification’,
PS, Winter 1985.
[36]Ibid.
[37]Jackson
was the only candidate who campaigned for the restoration of social
service programmes for women and children, linked the passage of the ERA
to the defence of the Voting Rights Act, pledged a female running mate,
and, despite his personal beliefs, advocated the legal right to
abortion.
[38]For a detailed account of these rivalries, see Joan Walsh in
In These Times, 26 September 1984, p. 9.
[39]See Meyerson, ‘Labour’s Risky Plunge’.
[40]See
National Journal, 29 September 1984, p. 1812;
Guardian, 5 December 1984.
[41]See Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, ‘Towards a Class-Based Realignment of American Politics: a Movement Strategy’,
Social Policy, Winter 1983.
[42]Lipset, ‘The Elections, The Economy and Public Opinion’.
[43]Edsall, ‘Politics and the Power of Money’, p. 149; Lipset, ibid.
[44]From a study by William Kimmelman, University of Alabama at Birmingham, quoted in
Seattle Times, 8 February 1985
[45]Washington Post, 8 January 1985, p. A5.
[46]Cf. Kuttner, ‘Ass Backwards’; Edsall, ‘Politics and the Power of Money’; and Maxwell Glen, ‘Corporate PAC Pie’,
National Journal, 19 January 1985.
[47]The Deadlock of Democracy, Englewood Cliffs 1963.
[48]Edsall, ‘Politics and the Power of Money’.
[49]Tsongas, quoted in
Business Week, 30 July 1984, p. 71.
[50]New York Times, 7 August 1983, p. 1.
[51]International Herald Tribune, 30 November 1984, p. 3.
[52]‘Now What?’
New Republic, 26 November 1985, pp. 7–9.
[53]McPherson, quoted in
Washington Post, 17 December 1984, A–6.
[54]Quoted in
Time, 19 November 1984, p. 29.
[55]Quoted in
Wall Street Journal, 15 November 1984, p. 33.
[56]‘How Not to Overcome’,
New Republic, 21 January 1985, pp. 7–9.
[57]16–22 January 1985, p. 8.
[58]Julius Lester, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’,
Dissent, Fall 1984.
[59]See the account in
New York Times, 1 February 1985, p. 13.
[60]Washington Post, 11 February 1984, A13.
[61]New York Times, 1f5 February 1984, p. 11.
[62]Richard Cohen, ‘House Democratic Leadership’,
National Journal, 2 July 1984, and ‘Damaged House Democrats’,
National Journal, 1 December 1984.
[63]Profile in
Washington Post, 5 December 1984, A4.
[64]Cohen, ‘Damaged House Democrats’, p. 2288.
[65]23 January 1985.
[66]Quoted in
New York Times, 10 January 1985, IV, p. 1.
[67]See Bill Boyearsky, ‘Democrats Divided by an Old Idea’,
Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1985, IV 1, 2.
[68]21 January 1985, p. 86.
[69]Ibid.
[70]Quoted in
New York Times, 15 February 1985, p. 6.
[71]15 February 1985, p. 12.
[72]National Journal, 9 February 1985, p. 325.
[73]Mother Jones’s political
columnist David Osborne, ignoring the Rainbow Coalition and the fate of
minorities, argued that New Deal liberals ‘deserved their beating’ and
urged a marriage of ‘Hart’s new ideas and Mario Cuomo’s soul’. (
Mother Jones, January 1985, p. 60.)
[74]Within
DSA, Joseph Schwartz and National Political Director Jim Schoch appear
to have gone furthest in suggesting that left politics must accept part
of the terrain offered by Neo-liberalism. As Schwartz has put it, ‘the
neo-liberal ideologues are at least taking on some tough questions about
the transformation of the American political economy. Our role will
likely be limited to struggling to get into the public arena a more
sensitive, feasible and democratic alternative to their romance with
“high-tech” and “picking winners”.’ (See ‘The role of DSA in the coming
period’,
Socialist Forum6, p. 54.) In a similar vein, political scientist David Plotke, a former editor of
Socialist Review,
criticized Mondale’s supposed over-identification with the poor, and
taking the perspective of the Democratic Party’s practical needs to
sustain an electoral majority, called for ‘combining Hart’s themes with
Jackson’s means’. (‘Democratic Dilemmas’,
The Year Left 1985, London 1985, p. 125.)
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