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Part 9 of A New Politics in America. This concludes the series. All nine parts can be fond on the New Politics website, newpol.org

So what does this era of a new politics in America mean? How significant are new right and new left in America today? Where do we go from here? What are we in the left to do? Should we be building progressive Democratic Party campaigns? Should we just go back to building the movements? Or is there another option? To figure this out, we have to understand that though we are in a new political era, many of the old problems still remain.

It seems today in late March 2016, that Donald Trump will become the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party candidate. If that happens, where do Sanders supporters go? The attempt will be made to carry Sanders’ supporters into the Democratic Party and to get them to campaign and vote for Clinton by portraying their contest as a battle between reaction and democracy. The cry will be: “Vote Hillary to Stop Fascism!” 

Many no doubt will rally to this cry, but neither the danger or the remedy are what they seem. While Trump represents racist and reactionary policies, and while his campaign has conjured up all of the little fascist group, there is not, at least yet, a fascist movement in the United States. Once nominated, Trump will likely move a little toward the left, toward the center; and given his erratic political history, it is not inconceivable that he will adopt some relatively progressive economic and social rhetoric. At the same time Hillary will move to the right, toward the center—dropping the slogans and issues she has picked up from Sanders. In no way will Sanders campaign—no matter how successful it has been—influence Hillary Clinton to change her real views or future behaviors. She belongs to Wall Street and Washington.

When Ryan Lizza, a writer for the New Yorker, asked Bernie Sanders what he thought about Clinton’s role he was unequivocal. “He was adamant that Clinton could not deliver the kind of change that voters are demanding, no matter what policy positions she adopted,” writes Lizza. Said Sanders,

The issue is creating an economy and a political system that works for all Americans and not for the one percent. That does not happen through a speech. That happens by reaching out and mobilizing millions and millions of people There is no indication that Hillary Clinton has ever done that, or ever wants to do that. You don’t go and give speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street and be the same person that is going to rally the American people. That just does not exist.[1]

While Sanders has promised to endorse the Democratic Party nominee, who seems likely to be Clinton, it is hard to think that he could do so sincerely or enthusiastically, or that he could convince his followers to support her. And at the same time, it seems unlikely that he will organize a third party, since So where will they go and what will they do? Deeper into the Democratic Party?

Can the Democratic Party be Reformed?

Some argue that the Sanders campaign has laid the foundation for building a progressive movement within the Democratic Party. Eric Stetson writing in the Daily Kos:

The only effective antidote to the seduction of neo-fascism is a new progressive populism — the Sanders path, basically. That’s the way to get the swing voters who are dissatisfied with the establishment of both political parties — a huge and growing portion of the American electorate — to vote for the Democratic Party instead of the newly populist version of the Republican Party after Trump is done transforming it.

I would feel more confident in the future of American politics and the Democratic Party if I could see that hundreds of progressive candidates in the mold of Sanders are being groomed to run for Congress in 2018 — and that down at the state level, thousands of ordinary citizens are getting ready to run for office on a Sanders-inspired platform, building a base from which seasoned candidates can rise up and win Congressional seats in the future.

He goes on to say: “Really, there is no excuse for this not to happen — if, in fact, a progressive political revolution is to be created, which is what Bernie Sanders is asking for, and what we know is needed.”[2]

Stetson here is reviving an old strategy, arguing that the left can transform the Democratic Party into a progressive vehicle for social change, that is, into a social democratic or anti-capitalist party. There is virtually no chance of this happening.

The Democratic Party, while not a political party in the European sense with affiliated mass organizations, individual memberships, party programs, and a disciplined parliamentary delegation[3]—nevertheless is not a vehicle that can be commandeered by the left or the working class. The Democratic Party—while it is a broad party in terms of class, candidates, and permissible platforms—is not an amorphous collection of ordinary people and politicians; it is actually a tightly controlled, highly structured, and quite effective capitalist political party at the service of corporations and high finance.

Despite the name, the Democratic Party is not a democratic organization that can be taken over and controlled by working people. The Democratic Party has state-mandated structures, legislative organizations at the federal and state levels (speakers, party leaders, whips, party caucuses, committee appointments, sanctions against dissidents, etc.). The Democratic Party has policy organizations and think tanks, and it works closely with Madison Avenue advertising firms. And, of course, it is well connected to the banks, corporations, and wealthy individuals whose money funds the party and its related institutions. Most Democratic Party politicians in both houses of Congress are professional politicians, businesspersons, or lawyers (and, while the other of the three largest occupational groups in Congress comes form education, virtually few if any are there as representatives of the teachers unions or working people).[4]

The constellation of organizations and individuals who make up the Democratic Party is deeply committed to capitalism and the great majority is committed to its current neoliberal form, supporting policies of austerity for working people. Moreover, the growth of the rightwing of the Republican Party has tended to move the entire spectrum further to the right, pulling the Democrats along with it. However repugnant he was, Richard Nixon and the Republicans of his era were to the left of the Democratic Party today. The Democratic Party has not been able to resist the gravitational pull of the Republicans, and like twin stars they swirl toward the black hole of reaction.

True, there have been some liberal voices and victories in the Democratic Party recently, namely Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio, and there is the Progressive Caucus of Congress with its 69 of the House’s 435 members in its ranks. But de Blasio’s career as mayor, joining with Governor Andrew Cuomo to crush the progressive Zephyr Teachout’s bid for endorsement by the Working Families Party, and then backing Hillary Clinton, demonstrates clearly the limits of progressivism in the Democratic Party. To change the Democratic Party we in the left would have to elect thousands of Sanders-type candidates and to do so in a short enough time period to actually influence the party’s direction. At best this is an idealistic dream—at worst it is a distracting fantasy.

The 1930s Labor Upheaval and the Democratic Party

The Democratic Party can only be moved and changed, and American politics can only be transformed by building powerful social movements and a political party to the left of the Democrats. Most important, working people can only set their own agenda and challenge both employers and the government if they have their own party, a working people’s party.

Consider the 1930s. The Democratic Party of the 1930s was profoundly transformed, from a moderate party with the profound deformations of the Solid South’s racism, the second Ku Klux Klan’ anti-immigrant (anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic) views, and the crime and corruption of the big city machines. The Democratic Party was not transformed by progressive campaigns—though there were some of those—but rather by the labor upheaval of the 1930s which pushed the Democrats to the left.

The Communists, Socialists, and the tiny Trotskyist groups organized the first citywide general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Milwaukee in 1934. Union organizing campaigns continued throughout the 1930s with mass picket lines, factory occupations, and pitched battles between workers and police that led to the organization of the auto, rubber, glass, electrical, and steel industries, eventually created the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Those movements—which many Americans at the time were the beginning of a revolution—forced the Democratic Party to create public works programs, to pass Social Security, and to pass the National Labor Relations Act, giving unions legal rights to unions nationally for the first time.

The socialist leaders of those movements did not simply fight for unions, however. Most of them, when the period began in 1935, fought for three things: industrial unions, a labor party, and socialism. [5] Some socialists and labor unionists organized independent labor parties at the local or state level and some pressed for a national labor party,[6] but—though CIO leaders John L. Lewis suggested it in 1940[7]—no progressive or labor party was ever built. The Democrats, therefore, captured the labor unions, and the labor party and the struggle for socialism were pushed off the agenda.

Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, after granting unions the right to organize, succeeded in derailing the second and third goals of the left of the 1930s. During the World War II and in the post-war period, the Democratic Party was able to domesticate the labor unions, government, capital, and the labor leaders working together to win the war. The Communist and Socialist parties, though they ran presidential candidates in the 1930s, practically supported Roosevelt in an American version of the Popular Front. Independent politics disappeared during the war and afterwards the bipartisan prosecution of the Cold War and McCarthyism eliminated the left.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Democrats

The same thing happened with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy worked at first to contain the civil rights movement. The Democratic Party refused in 1964 to seat the movement’s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, leaving many Black activists feeling betrayed by the party. But the growing movement, engaging in civil disobedience that led to massive violent confrontations in several cities, finally forced Lyndon B. Johnson to push through Congress the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, a total victory for the civil rights movement.

After that, the Democratic Party opened its doors to Black civil rights leaders and to Black politicians in general. Once in Congress, these politicians formed the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971, initially advocates of civil rights and progressive policies, they also gradually became integrated into the Democratic Party without fundamentally changing its character. In this election, the Black Caucus endorsed Hillary Clinton and has played an important role in mobilizing Black voters support for her.[8]

Reverend Jesse Jackson’s1988 presidential Democratic Primary campaign also showed the limitations of the strategy of reforming and transforming the Democratic Party. Jackson ran on a progressive program advocating for workers and for Blacks, and in the course of his campaign he made links with virtually every social and labor movement, participating in protests and walking picket lines from Maine to the Mexican border in California. His campaign challenged both corporate capital and racism and even American foreign policy,[9] and he received support from much of the far left. The campaign, much like Obama’s in 2008 and Sanders today, took on the characteristics of a social movement.

Jackson did remarkably well, receiving 6.9 million votes and winning 11 states: seven primaries (Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico and Virginia) and four caucuses (Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont). But in the end, he went to the convention where he gave his famous two wings to fly speech: “Progress will not come through boundless liberalism nor static conservatism, but at the critical mass of mutual survival. It takes two wings to fly. Whether you're a hawk or a dove, you're just a bird living in the same environment, in the same world.”[10] A loyal Democrat, Jackson led his movement back into the Democratic Party, where it died.

The point should be made that candidates like Jackson have in the past played the role of both building the left and keeping the left in the Democratic Party, keeping those in it from leaving. So those who argue for strengthening the left wing of the Democratic Party should keep in mind that when they talk about changing the Democrats, they are also talking about preventing the development of an independent party. For it is from those in such a left that such a party would otherwise be built.

Build the Movements?

A second strategy for the future of Bernie Sanders supporters is put forward by Brad A. Bauerly and Ingar Solty who, after correctly assessing the important success of the Sanders campaign, then write, “the American left now has the opportunity (and, we think, obligation) to not let the Sanders mobilization eventually dissolve but integrate the millions of enthused, but often – not least because of their extremely young age – politically inexperienced Sanders supporters into (the already existing) social movements mobilizing around those concrete demands of ‘Medicare for all,’ ‘Fight for 15 and a union’ etc.”

Bauerly and Solty are certainly right that the movements must be built, but to direct Bernie Sanders’ supporters to the social movements without providing a political direction represents a retreat from politics. Many in the American left have for decades engaged in building social movements—some of them powerful—but have failed to recognize that the seeds they sowed in the movements were ultimately harvested by the Democratic Party. The labor and social movements need and deserve a political party of their own. Unless one provides a political alternative, movement activists will by default turn to and vote for the Democratic Party because it is the lesser of the two great evils. We have to offer something more to Sanders’ activists than protests, demonstrations, or even labor union activism.

Independent Political Action?

There is also a third alternative, this one proposed by former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges—who calls for what would be a real revolution as opposed to Benie Sanders' “political revolution”—and who has suggested that the vehicle for that revolution is the Green Party whose presidential candidate is Dr. Jill Stein.[12] Stein’s Green Party campaign, with its radical platform, certainly represents a left political alternative to the Democratic Party, whoever its nominee should finally be. Given the tremendous excitement surrounding the Sanders campaign, Stein and the Green Party have been hard pressed to get much attention.

The Green Party has had some real electoral successes, for example, Howie Hawkins’ campaign for governor of New York in 2014 in which he won 5 percent of the vote. The GP has elected legislators in Arkansas, California, and Maine, and a number of city council and school board members. But in national elections, however, the Green Party has received less than one percent of the vote for all of its candidates for congress or senate in all states, and only with Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign in 2000, which got 2.74 percent of the vote is the only occasion that the party has won more than1 percent of the vote.[13] And though it came out of the environmental movement, the Green Party today is not well rooted in the social and labor movements today. The Green Party, while it has the aspiration to become or to lay the foundation for a left third party, represents at this point a fine way to cast a principled vote against the capitalist parties, but is not at this point a vehicle to changing the balance of political power in the country. It will be hard for the Green Party to grow through the recruitment of Sanders followers, though it will get some.

The Role of the Left

The American left is small and divided into a large number of groups, and the Sanders campaign has not united them.[14] Many on the left want not only Sanders "political revolution," suggesting mass democratic participation and a changed agenda towards Keynesian liberalism, but they also want a socialist revolution that would overturn capitalism and the existing state and create a democratic socialist economy. Some Benie supporters have become interested in socialism, many have also become interested in the debates about the difference between social democracy and democratic socialism.

Only a few left groups have become actively involved in the Sanders campaign, particularly Socialist Alternative (SAlt), a Trotskyist group, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), historically a left social democratic group. The Communist Party USA is also silently involved in the Sanders campaign—but seems to be preparing to plump for Hillary Clinton to stop Trump.[15] Still, despite differences, there is some healthy discusion and cooperation on the left. In 2015, before the Sanders campaign got under way, several left organizations met in Chicago for a conference on the importance of independent political action.[16] And the Sanders campaign has led to respectful debates among both supporters and left critics of the Sanders campaign such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the Green Party (GP).[17] What are the prospects for the various left organizations as they attempt to relate to Sanders’ supporters?

Kshama Sawant’s successful election and reelection to the Seattle City Council gives her organization, Socialist Alternative, great authority on the left. Sawant, a model socialist in office, has not only been active in promoting legislation in the city council, but has also used her position to support movements such as the Fight for $15. SAlt decided to support Sanders’ campaign in the primary, and even created their own pro-Sanders organization, #Movement4Bernie.[18] Socialist Alternative has been the most active socialist recruiter from the Sanders campaign.

At the same time, from early on, SAlt made it clear early on that they want Sanders to leave the Democrats and run as an independent.  If Sanders loses the primary, Socialist Alterative will immediately leave for the Green Party and the Stein campaign. As SAlt's newspaper wrote: 

Sanders should not allow the political revolution to die at the July Democratic Convention…The emerging movement for a political revolution needs to urge Sanders to run independently all through November or to develop a plan B of support for the remaining strongest left, anti-corporate challenger, Jill Stein of the Green Party.[19]

The SAlt approach has won the support of some Bernie supporters, but the independent #Movement4Bernie organization and the advocacy for a Plan B before Plan A has been either successful or defeated, has alienated some rank-and-file Bernie supporters. Will Sanders supporters want to follow Socialist Alternative into the Green Party? Also a supporter of the Green Party option is the ISO, though since it has not been involved in the Sanders campaign is even less likely to attract many Sanders supporters. The small socialist-feminist group Solidarity—half-in and half-out of the Sanders campaign and not officially endorsing it—also likes the Greens, but it is in the same boat, having little presence in the movement. 

The DSA seems like the group best positioned to offer a left alternative to the Sanders supporters. Like Sanders, DSA has for 35 years defined itself as a “democratic socialist” organization, making it a logical destination for many Sanders supporters. DSA members have been very active in the campaign, principally in the many locally initiated organizations as well as mobilizing their own members to register votes and knock on doors. A democratic, multi-tendency organization with nearly 7,000 members, chapters throughout the country, and a youth group, the Young Democratic Socialists (YDS), DSA also has the size and resources to attract and hold new left activists.

DSA members have always been active locally in the social movements. And while DSA has throughout its history worked with progressive candidates in the Democratic Party, some in the organization have recently proposed the option of running socialist candidates both within the party and as independents. Finally, some DSA members are advocating that DSA make work among rank-and-file union members and union reform caucuses more central to the organization’s strategic goals. This combination of independent political action plus militant labor movements and powerful social movements represents the best future for Sanders’ supporters.

Setting aside the difference among left organizations, all of us who have been involved in or simply enthused about Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign need to find a way to working together to build a new American left, independent from Wall Street and Washington, both a social movement and a political power. The Sanders campaign has shown us that there are hundreds of thousands of young people in the United States who want to change American politics and who are not afraid of the word "socialism," who in fact want to work to define it for a new era.

We need to build a larger and more united left that can work with these new leftists. We have the opportunity and responsibility to present to these activists the genuinely democratic socialist alternative, the building of an independent party for the socialization of our economy, for not only a political revolution, but also a social and cultural revolution that changes the face of our country and the world.

Dan La Botz is a Brooklyn-based teacher, writer, and activist. He is a member of both Solidarity and of the Democratic Socialists of America. He is also a co-editor of New Politics (www.newpol.org) and the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis (http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php).  

 

This is party 7 of A New Politics in America. Part 6 and links to earlier parts can be found here.

Progressive Politics

Occupy, though it had eschewed politics, had important political ramifications. A few liberal Democrats soon appeared to give expression to the new movements within their rightward moving party.

Elizabeth Warren—a former Harvard law professor who had served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to keep an eye on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) created by Bush and had then headed the Consumer Protection Bureau for Obama—decided to run for senator in Massachusetts. In The Two-Income Trap, written with her daughter Amelia Tyagi, they wrote, “Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules—and the game is stacked against them.” Coming from a background of modest means, daughter of a “maintenance man” as she wrote in her biography A Fighting Chance, Warren put herself forward as the defender of ordinary working people against the banks and corporations—and was elected the first woman senator from Massachusetts in 2012. Many progressive Democrats, unsatisfied with or even hostile to Hillary Clinton, hoped that Warren would run for president in 2016—but she declined.

In New York City, another liberal Democrat, Bill de Blasio, ran for and won the office of mayor in 2014. De Blasio, who had been one of the many youths attracted to the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, visiting the country in 1988 and become a supporter of its socialist government. Moving to New York City he became a Democratic Party politician connecting with all the right people and making all the right moves. He served in Mayor David Dinkins' administration, managed Congressman Charlie Rangel’s 1994 reelection campaign, served under Bill Clinton as the highest Housing and Urban Development official in the region, was elected to the New York School Board in 1999, managed Hillary Clinton’s successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2000, and was elected to the city council in 2001. He became the city’s Public Advocate from 2010-2013, giving him the role of the people’s ombudsman to the government.

When de Blasio ran for mayor in 2014, he was backed by a diverse coalition of community groups; the unions divided their forces among several candidates with de Blasio winning the backing of only a few. De Blasio ran as an opponent of the city’s racist police stop-and-frisk program, an advocate of more affordable housing and of universal pre-kindergarten education. He won election with a remarkable 73 percent of the vote.

The elections of Warren and de Blasio gave a strong indication that at least in the Northeast, some in the Democratic Party electorate were turning against the politics of the Democratic Leadership Council and against austerity combined with police repression. Space also opened up to the left of the Democrats. In Seattle, Kshama Sawant, an Indian immigrant, erstwhile college instructor with a Ph.D. in economics, and an activist in the Occupy movement, ran as Socialist Alternative’s candidate and was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, the first socialist to hold office in Seattle in nearly 100 years (though there had been Socialist Party mayors in Milwaukee and Connecticut up until the 1960s). Sawant’s victory signaled that it had now become possible for socialists to run for and win office in the United States.

The elections of Democrats Warren and de Blasio and of socialist Sawant hardly represented a trend, much less a force, but they did demonstrate the continuing existence of liberal and left currents within American politics. The Democratic Party has, of course, always had such politicians—Dennis Kucinich and Ron Dellums come to mind—and the Congressional Progressive Caucus has about 70 members. The existence of a left-liberal wing of the party, usually too weak to have much influence on the whole party’s course, is precisely what makes it possible for the Democrats to hold on to voters and to contain labor and social movements when they begin to become a challenge to the party’s fundamental commitment to the banks, corporations, and capitalism.

Democratic liberals and progressives soon find out exactly how far they can go. De Blasio provides an excellent example of the limits of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. When it appeared that New York’s Working Families Party, which functions as a pressure group on the Democratic Party, might decide to endorse for governor the progressive Zephyr Teachout, de Blasio—dependent on Democratic governor Cuomo for much of his budget—worked to pressure the WFP to support the center-right Cuomo.[i] And, after months of vacillation, de Blasio also joined Cuomo in supporting Hillary Clinton—not the more progressive Bernie Sanders.[ii] Progressive though he may be—and that is very debatable[iii]—de Blasio was forced to back Cuomo and Clinton, the embodiments of the party’s centrist, corporate leadership.     

Black Lives Matter

In 2014 another social movement erupted on the American scene much as Occupy had. Black Lives Matter—founded by three Black women organizers Alicia Garza, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Patrisse Cullors, Director of the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in Los Angeles; and Opal Tometi, an immigrant rights activist—had been founded in 2013 with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to protest the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who had killed Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old Black youth.

The movement remained small until August 2014 when it began to grow rapidly in response to another police killing, that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where the grand jury decided not to indict his killer Darren Wilson. In Ferguson local activists reinforced by supporters from around the country took to the streets in peaceful demonstrations and disruptive activities, at times accompanied at times by looting, arson, gunshots and riots. The militarized local police, armed with high-powered weapons and using tanks, could not suppress the movement—not with the whole world watching.

Black Lives Matter organized a “freedom ride” of 500 activists to Ferguson to support the protests there, an event that created a sense of identity and community among the participants. Leaving Ferguson, the young Black activists returned to their hometowns to continue to work together to turn the movement into a national organization. What had been a network of activists thus became a national movement.

Black Lives Matters, founded as it was by women, broke with the patriarchal and heteronormative notions of Black movements of the past. Of course, there have always been Black women leaders from Ida B. Wells, who fought against lynching, to Ella Baker of the Student Non-Violent Organizing Committee, as well as gay leaders, such as civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin. In the past, both women and LGBT people faced discrimination not only in the broader society, but also in the Black movement itself. Black Lives Matter also made it clear that all Black lives matter, whatever their gender identity, including those of the foreign-born who may have a different culture, religion, language, or legal status.

Throughout the end of 2014 and the first months of 2015, tens of thousands of mostly young Black people, often accompanied by Latino, Asian and white allies, demonstrated in cities around the country protesting the many police killings of Black men. While the demonstrations were peaceful, they were also militant: marchers blocked major streets and highways, sat-in in front of sports arenas, interrupted political candidates, including both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and challenged government officials at public meetings and press conferences. While Black Lives Matter focused its demonstrations against the police and the criminal justice system, but Black activists also criticized economic inequality, lack of access to housing, and racism on college campuses.

In September 2015 at the University of Missouri Black students began to hold “Racism Lives Here” protests over racist epithets and symbols displayed on campus, forcing the resignation of President Tim Wolfe resign. The student victory at Missouri sparked protests at public and private colleges across the country from East to West: Princeton in New Jersey; Ithaca College in New York; Smith College in Massachusetts; Yale in Connecticut; the University of Michigan; Arizona State College; the University of California at Los Angeles; and at many others as well.

All of this made clear that a layer of young Black activists both in the colleges and in the streets was growing, developing, and radicalizing throughout the country. The new Black movement became part of the broader radicalization on the left that had begun with Occupy, though how far left remained an open question. Several of Black Lives Matter’s founders and leaders are politicians, hold appointive government office or inhabit the world of the NGOs that at its highest levels merge with the inside-the-DC-Beltway lobbyists and think tanks or the Manhattan world of philanthropy and foundations as well as at the more rarefied levels within the Democratic Party. With some of its leaders and activists involved in that world, maintaining political independence would be a challenged.

While Black Lives Matter has not yet endorsed any candidate in the Democratic Party,[iv] it did become part of the Democratic primary, working with the Democratic Party National Committee to organize town hall meetings,[v] and some BLM activists are now running as Democratic candidates in local elections, an issue that has divided the movement. DeRay Mckesson, a prominent Black Lives Matter leader and the special assistant in the office of human capital with Baltimore City Public Schools, opted to run as a Democrat for mayor of Baltimore.[vi]

In a somewhat different case, Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a sitting Democratic Party State Senator in Missouri and a Black Lives Matter leader decided to run for the U.S. Congress against William Lacy Clay Jr., an eight-term incumbent whose father was a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus.[vii] In Philadelpia, Movita Johnson-Harrell, a Black woman, a Muslim, and the founder of the Charles Foundation that assists at-risk youth, is running a “progressive Democrat.”[viii] Not all Black Lives Matter candidates are Democrats. Rashad Turner of St. Paul, is running on the Green Party line for the Minnesota House. There will be tremendous pressure for Black Lives Matter to move into the Democratic Party and eventually into Hillary’s campaign for the presidency, presuming she wins the nomination.

In the larger picture, it is clear that, like Occupy, Black Lives Matter represent part of what seems to be a new era of short-lived, pop-up social movements that despite their evanescence are contributing to a new left-leaning demographic among youth. The young people who created Occupy and those who created Black Lives Matter share—albeit in different ways and to different degrees—share a conviction that the establishment is failing them and that there has to be some other way forward. And they have had an impact and an influence among millions of other mostly people mostly young but also some older folks who in the current political season have in large numbers looked toward Bernie Sanders as the candidate who not only offers the genuinely progressive agenda so long absent from American political campaigns, but also talks about democratic socialism, an idea that not only does not scare this generation, but intrigues and attracts.  

Yet it seems that Black Lives Matter has had little measurable impact on the larger Black community’s political loyalties. Among black voters, three quarters or more support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Disturbed by this trend, Michele Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow asked Black readers, “Why are we supporting Hillary Clinton?” given that Hillary had supported all of Bill’s policies. Alexander explained

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history….He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack vs. powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement.

Bill championed the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.”

When Bill left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. 

But, despite criticisms like Alexander’s, most African American voters were not moved to break with Hillary Clinton. Why?

We on the left in America have always believed that African-Americans stood to the left of the white working class or practically any other group in our society. African-Americans, after all, have always constituted the most oppressed and exploited sector of American society, together with Latinos and especially undocumented immigrants. Blacks’ experience of the fight against slavery, of the struggle for Reconstruction, of resistance to Jim Crow, and of the Great Migrations and of the fight for Civil Rights had given Black people a critical view of government and our society. The exploitation Black workers suffered at work—fewer job opportunities, fewer promotions, lower wages, worse jobs (always the hard, hot, heavy and dangerous work), also made African-Americans leaders of the labor movement. At the same time, their higher levels of unemployment, greater poverty, and fewer resources made Blacks more likely in general than whites to look upon government intervention as desirable.

The two related but different sorts of experiences—as fighters for their rights and advocates of state intervention—made African-Americans among the most loyal members of the Democratic Party, especially during its more liberal periods in the 1930s-40 and the 1960s-70s. At the same time, given teir history as a kind of dispersed Black nation within the United States, to a far greater degree than whites, Blacks have tended to stick together; about 70 percent of Black voters have always supported the same party, Republican until 1936 and Democratic since then. All of those experiences have made Blacks more likely to stick with the Democratic Party establishment and with the Democratic politicians from whom they could get a hearing.

At the same time, the Democratic Party leadership shrewdly and successfully worked to maintain this loyalty by building relationships with Black churches, Black civil rights organizations, with labor unions with Black leaderships and memberships and, naturally with Black politicians and businessmen. Many Black voters remember—and are encouraged to remember—the Bill Clinton years not for high rates of incarceration and welfare-to-work programs, but for their relative economic prosperity.[ix] And, as already discussed, Blacks remained proud of and loyal to President Obama, even though their situation did not improve during his presidency. All of this has insured that Hillary Clinton, who promises to build on Obama’s presidency, has a virtual stranglehold on the Black vote.

This is Part 6 of A New Politics in America. Part 5 and links to early parts can be found here.

The Tea Party 

The Great Recession and the government’s response to it gave a new impetus to the right. President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 in the midst of the recession proved an ideal catalyst for the bringing together of a new far right movement.

A Black president whose anthropologist mother’s peripatetic career had provided him with a Kenyan father, birth in Hawaii, and a childhood in Indonesia, he was for many conservatives—who believed or claimed that he was not really born in the United States and was a Muslim—the ideal bogeyman. He was not only Black, but in their view a foreigner, and, as a putative Muslim, a traitor in the White House. How, they asked, could a man of such alien origins be our president? They did not accept this possibility in their minds or hearts and they soon took their anger about this foreign-born, Muslim, Black man to the streets.

As early as 2007 the Tea Party took to the streets demonstrating against “illegal immigrants,” decrying immigrant access to any government services, and opposing immigration reform as “amnesty.” President Obama provided the Tea Party with a target when he proposed his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, conceived in 2009 and signed into law in 2010. Though it was a market-based insurance law written by health and hospital corporations and the pharmaceutical companies, and similar in many ways to the auto insurance that the states require, the far right attacked “Obamacare,” as they called it, as not only a government intrusion into citizens’ private lives but also as “socialist.”

While the Tea Party movement had genuine local roots in some areas, its growth was fertilized by money from Charles Koch and David Koch and their foundations, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. Their largesse, as reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker in 2010, provided the money to propagandize and to organize the Tea Party movement. It was the Koch foundations that actually organized the Tea Party’s April 15, 2009 Tax Day Protests. Fox News and its commentators such as Glenn Beck promoted the organization and its activities, as did other rightwing radio and TV talk-show hosts. By 2009 the Tea Party had about a thousand local chapters across the country. But it was not only a social movement; it was also a political organization that succeeded in electing scores of Republican legislators at the state and national level, often by defeating more traditional conservatives.

Tea Party members and supporters tended to be older whites from the Midwest or the South with higher levels of education and higher incomes than other Americans. They got their information from Fox News programs or from Clear Channel Radio station that broadcast a steady stream of conservative propaganda and rightwing commentary. Tea Party followers opposed Obama, whom they considered a socialist, disliked Democrats and especially liberals; and while most Tea Party members were Republicans, they were also critical of their own party as representing big government and making too many compromises with the Democrats.[i]

The demonstrations against Obamacare became mass protests against the president and his allegedly socialist agenda. Throughout the country Tea Party members showed up at town hall meetings to protest Obamacare and to lambast the president. While they denied that they were racists, Tea Party members either brought or tolerated in their demonstrations signs that carried racist caricatures of President Obama. Such signs either portrayed Obama as an African tribesman with a bone through his nose or as a monkey, while other placards claimed that Obama had turned the United States into Kenya or Uganda. The signs called Obama and his Obamacare law either socialist, communist, or fascist and they were decorated with swastikas or the hammer-and-sickle symbols. Some demonstrators carried signs saying, “We came unarmed—this time.”

The Tea Party also targeted the labor unions. When Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin pushed through the state legislature sweeping anti-union legislation, the Tea Party rallied to him. As I wrote elsewhere:

During the winter of 2010-11 the Tea Party organized demonstrations against labor unions in cities and towns around the United States. Most were counter-demonstrations that pitted Tea Party activists against union members in face-to-face confrontations, many of them shouting matches. While the unions rallied in solidarity with Wisconsin workers, the Tea Party demonstrated to back Governor Scott Walker and to support his attack on public employee unions’ bargaining rights in Wisconsin. One Wisconsin Tea Party activist told the media, “Wee see this as the opening salvo of the 2012 election season. The Tea Party movement facing off against the unions. We like the odds.”[ii]

The Tea Party was not only a social movement, but also a political movement aimed at driving the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress to the right. Dozens of Tea Party candidates ran for local, state, and federal offices throughout the United States, often challenging conservative Republicans who were not conservative enough. By 2013 the Tea Party caucus had 48 members of more than 10 percent of the 435 members of the House of Representatives. Many of these would later rally to Senator Ted Cruz's call to paralyze Congress.

So, by the 2010s, the United States had both a far right social movement and a rightwing political movement, and, interestingly, for the first time in 70 years a debate about socialism. The Tea Party had, unwittingly, by attacking Obama as a socialist, overcome the legacy of the Red Scares of the 1920s and the 1950s and made socialism a legitimate subject of debate in American society.

Occupy Wall Street 2011

A new left also began to appear in the wake of the Great Recession after the government moved to save the banks while leaving the foreclosed and the evicted, the jobless and the homeless to fend for themselves.[iii] The Occupy Wall Street movement began in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in New York City in mid-September 2011, crying out against the overbearing power of the corporations, the enormous inequities of American society, and the inordinate role of money in politics—and within a few weeks the movement had spread across the country. The brilliant slogan “We are the 99%” captured the imagination not only of the participants, but of large swathes of the broader American public as well, and for good reason.

Over the previous decades, there had been an epoch-making upward re-distribution of income to the top 1%, while capital and the rich had established a stranglehold on politicians and government not seen since the Gilded Age. During the fall months of 2011, thousands participated in Occupy encampments in cities from coast to coast while tens of thousands participated in marches and protest demonstrations organized by the movement. Occupy emerged as the largest and most important social movement in the United States since the 1960s and 70s, though it lacked the depth, breadth, and it would turn out the endurance of the movements of that earlier era. Still its impact was huge.

Occupy Wall Street and its offspring were the first serious response by working people to the economic crisis of 2008, and it briefly played the role that in an earlier period in American history or in another country might have been played by a mass labor movement or an emergent populist or socialist party. Occupy’s “Declaration” represented a wide-ranging radical challenge to the economic and political establishment and to the status quo such as we had not seen since the civil rights and Black Power struggles, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and Students for Democratic Society (SDS).[iv]

The Occupy movement’s antecedents were in the anti-globalization and global justice movements that preceded and then rapidly expanded after the Battle of Seattle, the massive environmental and labor protests against the admission of China to the World Trade Organization at its meeting in Seattle, Washington in 1999. The Battle of Seattle brought together a range of environmental organizations and unions such as the United Steel workers, Teamsters, and International Longshore and Warehouse Union that shut down the streets of Seattle, providing a model of militant direct action against corporate globalization.

The Battle of Seattle encouraged the global justice movement’s massive and militant demonstrations of radical youth, environmentalists, and labor unions at a series of international trade and policy meetings of government and corporate leaders around the world in the following couple of years. Though never socialist, the global justice movement represented a significant, radical social movement, but it was suddenly interrupted by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the almost immediate rightward turn of both government and society.

Mass protest didn’t return to American streets until the spring and summer of 2006 when millions of immigrants, most of them Latinos and most of those Mexicans, demonstrated for a reform of immigration laws that would allow them to live and work legally in the United States. In cities like Los Angeles and Chicago as many as a million immigrants filled the streets—the largest protests in American history—carrying their own nations’ standard and the American flag. While the movement was not radical and the demonstrations were not militant, in Los Angeles, Chicago and some smaller cities where some employers supported it, the movement became something like the 2004 film “A Day without a Mexican,” somewhere between a virtual general strike and a national Latino holiday.

Though President George W. Bush had sparked the movement with his call for immigration reform in 2004, Congress refused to act and the movement, defeated and disappointed, dispersed. Its million of of participants returned to their mostly low wage jobs in the fields and on construction site, in hotels and restaurants, and in private homes and gardens. From the streets the immigrants were driven back into the shadows, but the children of these immigrants, many of them citizens and growing old enough to vote, would not forget their disappointment, and some would become part of the new progressive and radical movements.

The immediate predecessor of Occupy Wall Street was the Wisconsin protest of 2011, a reaction against Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation. As many as 100,000 union members and their allies protested in the state capital of Madison, as thousands occupied the capitol building itself while at the same time teachers engaged in wildcat strikes. Though the labor bureaucracy and the Democratic Party worked to end the protests as quickly as possible and succeeded in channeling the movement into the recall efforts and electoral politics, still the Wisconsin uprising had provided the model of the occupation of public space, mass protests by working people, and wildcat strikes. Wisconsin, occurring at the same time as the Egyptian occupation of Tahrir Square, and both of those provided the prototyped for Occupy Wall Street.

When the Occupy movement began, the rightwing Tea Party movement fille the pages of the newspapers, television screens, and the radio waves, but almost from the moment that it appeared, Occupy pushed the Tea Party off the front pages and the TV screens and took center stage, spreading its message through the Internet and social media. Virtually the entire political establishment had been pushing austerity–reductions in workers' standards of living–as its basic response to the economic crisis, and, only weeks before, the Obama administration, following its own Bowles-Simpson commission, had proposed a “grand bargain” for reducing government spending and balancing the budget, especially by cutting social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But, in a matter of months, the Occupy movement had changed the national conversation from the Tea Party’s rightwing agenda of tax-cuts and budget-cuts to discussions of the inordinate salaries and bonuses of the bankers and CEOs, the financial contributions of the wealthy to the politicians, and, above all, the economic crisis facing tens of millions of Americans. Obama himself had to drop, for the time being—until after the election—all talk of belt-tightening.

Occupy criticized the continuing high rate of unemployment, the foreclosures on homeowners, the inadequacy of the health system (including Obama’s health plan), and the crisis in the costs of higher education. While never explicitly anti-capitalist and certainly not pro-socialist, Occupy’s critique of the economy and politics tended to challenge the system as a whole—and the system was capitalism even if it usually went unnamed. The movement’s cry, “We are the 99%!” rang out not only in the stone canyons of Wall Street, but also in cities, towns, and university campuses across the United States and soon reverberated around the world as Occupy sites were established in countries in Europe and Latin America.

The Rejection of Demands and Politics

The Occupy movement defined itself negatively as the rejection of traditional organizations and political organizations that had so often failed the people. Movements, unions, and parties all had representative and delegated leadership structures where the leaders soon escaped the control of the members. Occupy would have none, adopting the old slogan: “We are leaderless. We are all leaders.” Occupy declined to make specific demands in large part as a defense against cooptation by the Democratic Party, the labor unions, and the far left sects all of which urged the movement to define itself by a list of demands. Such program seemed to Occupy’s activists to be the first step toward institutionalization and co-optation.

While many of Occupy’s practices, such as its interminable open assemblies may be criticized, they arose as part of a healthy rejection of everything that was undemocratic, bureaucratic, and stifling about many more traditional movements, NGOs, unions and parties. Occupy represented an idealistic if naïve—yet still tremendously inspiring—attempt to begin society and politics anew: transparent, democratic, and participatory. And though Occupy rejected politics, would have a profound political impact, eventually finding expression in the Democratic primary campaign of 2016.

The combination of a radically democratic movement, with the socially disaffected, and with workers employed and unemployed, together with leftists, and all of it taking place in the heart of the city and poised to mobilize at a moment’s notice in forays against banks and corporations, posed a serious threat not only to city governments and the corporate elite headquartered downtown, but also represented a general and potentially more dangerous threat to the system and the state precisely because it might be only the beginning. The perception of this threat would lead to massive and sometimes brutal repression by the mostly Democratic Party mayors and city councils throughout the country, apparently in coordination with the Obama administration in Washington.[v]

Occupy encampments were demolished, as occupiers were manhandled and roughed up, beaten, pepper gassed, and arrested by the hundreds. Throughout the country there were thousands of legal actions against occupiers ranging from tickets and fines to misdemeanor and felony indictments. Altogether there were 7,361 arrests in 117 cities in the United States between September 2011 and July 2012.[vi] The authorities also sought to link Occupy to leftwing group and brought charges of terrorism and use of violence against persons in Cleveland and Seattle who could be linked to or had been involved in or been on the periphery of Occupy movement.[vii]

The Obama administration and state and city government—most of the cities run by Democrats—suppressed the Occupy movement, but its primary political ideas—economic inequality and the inordinate role of money in politics—not only continued to reverberate throughout American society but would in a few years find expression in the first seriously left leaning and openly socialist campaign by a major political figure in the entire post-war period: Bernie Sanders, socialist, candidate for president in the Democratic primary.

 

This is Part 5 of A New Politics in America. Part 4 and links to earlier parts can be found here.

If American politics have changed in the 2010s, however, it is in large measure due to disappointment in the Obama presidency. Many Americans thought in 2008 that they had elected a progressive, but they soon found out that the new president was nothing of the kind.

President Barack Obama was elected on his slogans of “Hope” and “Change” by voters who believed that he would end the economic recession, withdraw the United States from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, do something to help the labor unions, deal fairly with the immigration issue, and confront the environmental crisis. Almost eight years later it is clear that he either could not or would not do those things because he was, rhetoric aside, a centrist corporate Democrat whose first allegiance was to the political establishment, high finance and big business. His search for compromise with Republicans in Congress cost him his majority in the House and led to the paralysis of his administration. Disappointment in his presidency would lead more people to move away from the center, moving either toward the right or toward the left.

When Republican George W. Bush handed off the Great Recession to Democrat Obama, there was fundamental continuity in policy. Above all, both believed the banks must be saved. Both shared the view that the banks were “too big to fail,” and used the taxpayers’ money to save them while at the same time failing to provide adequate assistance to those who lost homes or to provide jobs to the unemployed. Obama’s economic stimulus, as liberal economist Paul Krugman argued for months, proved to be far less than needed to quickly revive the economy that continued in recession for years, a recession that for many hasn’t ended yet. 

Conservatives called Obama a socialist, but there was nothing socialist about his capitalist health plan. Obama’s principal program, the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare as it came to be called, was written by the insurance, health care, and pharmaceutical corporations, and it didn’t create universal coverage but forced Americans to buy private insurance that was often too expensive and frequently inadequate. As the New York Times wrote at the time, “The health insurers are the most direct beneficiaries of the law.”[i] A columnist for Forbes wrote an article the title of which told all: “Obama care enriches only the health insurance giants and their shareholders.” While nine million previously uninsured people did get health insurance, some 33 million—about ten percent of the population—were still left without it.

Similarly, Obama’s education program didn’t fight to protect and improve public schools, but undermined teachers unions and encouraged private charter schools. As educator Lois Weiner wrote back in 2009, "Obama is pushing for the states to increase the number of charter schools and decrease regulations on how they operate." Education Secretary Arnie Duncan and Obama Chief-of-Staff and later Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel took the lead in fighting teachers’ unions and parents to impose testing programs that could be used to close public schools and fire teachers. While there is no hard evidence that the total number of public schools has declined, the number of charter schools has grown, now reaching 6,500 enrolling some 2.5 million children. But, as Dianne Ravitch has argued, since 2,500 charter schools have also closed for financial or academic reasons, it’s hard to argue that they represent any sort of improvement. School closings of both public schools or charter schools created instability, undermined public education, weakened teachers’ unions, and distrupted students’ education. Obama trampled on the teachers and their unions, the very organizations that had formed the foot soldiers of his voting base and of his political success.

Hopes for comprehensive immigration reform also evaporated. Obama’s program turned out to be comprehensive deportation. The Obama administration deported more immigrants than any of his predecessors, expelling 438,421 in the peak year of 2013. The administration supposedly carried out a policy shift in 2015, intended to integrate immigrants rather than deport them, though by December of 2015 Latino immigrant groups around the country were protesting a new wave of holiday season deportations aimed principally at Central Americans. The Obama administration acted aggressively as recently as 2015 to deport undocumented immigrants to the United States, expelling some 235,413. While those deported came from 181 countries, the largest numbers came from Latin American countries and principally from Mexico which had 146,132 of its citizens removed from the United States. Many of those returned to Mexico find it difficult to reestablish themselves, and some children and adolescents may not know the country or speak the language. A study by the Mexican Secretary of the Interior (Gobernación) describes the returnees as stigmatized as “failures and delinquents” and often face problems of health, employment, and education, reports La Jornada, the Mexico City daily.

Obama’s key trade program, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is a bigger, broader version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994 between Canada, Mexico and the United States, but this time with 11 other countries–Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam—and it will surely have many of the same results. As Public Citizen has argued, TPP will lead to more off-shoring, lower wages, and a weakening of environmental and health standards. Obama’s TPP represents the program of the financial and corporate giants, not the interests of working people.

The idea that unions might win a law permitting card-check elections or some other sort of labor law reform also disappeared. Such a change was only possible during the first two years of Obama’s administration when the Democrats had a majority in Congress, but on the labor reform issue, as on so many others, Obama failed to strike while the iron was hot. Republicans took advantage of the situation, going on the offensive in the states, rolling back the unions’ gains of earlier years, eliminating the agency shop for public employees in several states and the union shop for private sector employees in a few. West Virginia passed a right-to-work law in 2016, the twenty-sixth state to do so, joining Midwestern states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana where such a development was unthinkable only a few years before.[ii] With Obama in power, the American labor unions not only continued to decline but also experienced a qualitative loss of economic and political power. Union membership today is 11.1 percent, but only 6.7 percent in the private sector.

Obama’s election as the first Black president was understandably a source of great pride for the African American community—he won 96 percent of the Black vote in both elections and generally has an approval rating of 80 percent among the Black population. But a number of Black leaders have argued through his presidency that he has failed the Black community in terms of both economic issues and racial justice. In 2013, Benjamin Jealous, head of the NAACP, told Meet the Press that Black people were no better off under Obama, and in fact they were doing worse. Tavis Smiley, the radio and TV talk show host, argued in 2014 that during Obama’s presidency Black’s had “lost ground.” Prof. Cornel West, the most radical and outspoken of Obama’s Black critics, told Salon, “He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency.” He is right. Under Obama, the wealth gap between whites and Blacks has increased, and the president put forward no initiatives to deal with the problem. African-Americans, however, still largely see no alternative to supporting the Democratic Party and most, so far, have voted for Hillary Clinton, rather than Bernie Sanders, in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries.

Finally, Obama’s foreign policy—continuing a U.S. role in Afghanistan and Iraq while claiming to have ended the wars—represents a continuation of America’s bipartisan, imperial foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. While George W. Bush’s Iraq War must be held largely responsible for the rise of ISIS and the wars today in Iraq in Syria, Obama’s failure to withdraw U.S. troops from the region has continued to fuel the anti-Western movements, some of them terrorists. Under Obama, the United States, though its economic superiority has diminished, continues to attempt to maintain its position as the dominant military power in the world. Obama’s strategy, now the strategy of the U.S. Pentagon, has been to create a military that is “smaller and leaner, agile, flexible, ready, and technologically advanced.” The most notorious example of this approach is Obama’s use of drones, ostensibly to kill terrorists in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but killing civilian non-combatants 90 percent of the time according to one report.

Democratic Party voters had either been deceived or deceived themselves—for surely Obama was neither a liberal nor a progressive—and their disappointment with his pro-business record has been a major contributor to the current political mood. His failure to pursue a progressive agenda has helped to create the conditions for a new politics on the left. Many young people who previously supported Obama, reject Hillary, and have turned to Bernie Sanders. Yet, while Obama disappointed liberals, progressives, and the left, he was for conservatives virtually the anti-Christ.

 

This is the fourth part of A New Politics in America. Earlier parts of the series can be found here.

The Republican Party responded to the white middle class and working class voters who had lost status, income, and pride in their country by working to turn their disappointment and depression into ressentiment and political power. Richard Nixon famously first saw how whites' resentment could be turned in the Republicans' direction during his 1968 presidential campaign, adopting the “southern strategy” of winning over the South’s racist white voters—the former Dixiecrats of the Democratic Party.

Building on Barry Goldwater's relative success in the South in 1964 and learning from George Wallace's American Independent Party campaign, Nixon advocated "states' rights," code for racial segregation, and won several of the southern states and the 1968 election. In 1972 Nixon won 70 percent of the vote in the Deep South, the presidential election again, and a place in history as the creater of a new Repubican majority.

Throughout the social turmoil of the 1970s and through the rest of the century, Southern white voters moved into the Republican Party in large numbers. Ronald Reagan continued this strategic focus on race and resentment in his 1980 election campaign, also endorsing “states’ rights.".[i] George W.H. Bush in his 1988 campaign transformed the southern strategy into a suburban strategy, appealing to the racism of white middle class and working class voters in the North. Bush senior attacked Democrat Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, for creating a prison weekend furlough program that had released Willie Horton, a convicted murderer, who had failed to return from his furlough and committed a robbery and rape. A photo of Horton with a large Afro became the racist centerpiece of G.W.H. Bush’s successful campaign for the presidency. Horton came to represent everything that many southern and suburban white resented, feared, and hated.

Throughout those years, the Republicans succeeded by appealing to white voters’ racism in winning and holding middle class and working class voters. Certainly by the 2000s the Republican Party had become identified in the minds of most Black Americans as the party of racism, and few would vote for it.

If white working class voters went over to the Republican Party, it wasn’t only because it seemed to have become their champion, but also because the Democrats seems to have neglected and spurned them. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed in 1985, and its Progressive Policy Institute worked to move the Democrats in a more conservative direction. Bill Clinton came to exemplify their “Third Way” approach, meaning a position between the social liberalism associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and the Reagan Republicans’ arch conservatism. The DLC, while continuing to support the historically bi-partisan imperial foreign policy, advocated pro-business policies, welfare reform, meaning reduction of the welfare rolls, education reform that included charter schools, and backed the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

As Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor (1993-1997) in Bill Clinton’s administration, recently wrote:

            Democrats also abandoned the white working class.

Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.

But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. 

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.[ii]

So not surprisingly union members began to migrate out of the Democratic Party, with about 40 percent of labor union households regularly voting for Republican candidates in recent elections. While white workers turned in increasing numbers from the Democratic Party, Black Americans—despite Bill Clinton’s attack repressive criminal justice politics and attack on the social welfare system—continued to see the Democrats as the only possible alternative.

When George W. Bush barely defeated Al Gore thanks to a Supreme Court decision on the Florida vote recount, becoming president in 2001, he was not a particularly popular. But Bush’s patriotic and militarist response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, D.C., brought him sudden approval and support. But as the Afghanistan and Iraq wars dragged on, his popularity waned. Still, despite massive anti-war demonstration—one of them a global protest larger than any ever seen—Bush continued the expensive and death-dealing wars until they had eroded his popularity, while the Great Recession of 2008 destroyed it virtually completely. 

The Economic Crisis of 2008

The most important development driving the more recent polarization of American society and the rise of a new politics in America was the economic crisis of 2008, the Great Recession. Speculation in bundled, securitized, subprime mortgages led to bursting bubbles in 2007 and 2008 and to the folding of a slew of mortgage lenders—more than a hundred of them—and then to the collapse or near collapse of several major banks and other financials including AIG, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual. By the end of 2008 it seemed that not only the American economy but the world economy might collapse.

The U.S. government—first under George W. Bush—intervened to arrange mergers, to take over banks temporarily, and to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial sector, nevertheless, the financial crisis ramified through the economy sweeping away $19.2 trillion in household wealth as banks foreclosed on 12.5 million homes between 2007 and 2013.[iii] The 2008 depression eventually wiped out more than two million jobs in the first year, affecting virtually every sector of the economy from mining to manufacturing to services and soon leading to an official unemployment rate of 10 percent, though many thought the real jobless rate might well be 16 percent.[iv] Millions of Americans found themselves without work, some without homes, and many without prospects as the recession dragged on. While the government announced that the recession that had begun in 2007 ended in 2009,[v] for many it seemed even as late as 2014 that it had never ended.[vi] In many parts of the country it is still not over.

The Great Recession finished off the reputation of George W. Bush, or what was left of it after the failed Iraq War. He left office having failed at both foreign and domestic policy, the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq having utterly discredited his administration in the minds of many, while the 2008 recession that began on his watch turned him into a loathed public figure. Both liberals and conservatives turned against Bush, leaving the country disillusioned with politics as usual, hoping for change.

 

This is the third part of A New Politics in America. Part 1 looked at the Civil Rights movement and the White Backlash; Part 2 examined the impact of the economic crisis of the 1970s; Part 3 discusses the decline in American power, and then turns back to look at how all three elements contributed to the growth of a New Right from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The United States: A Declining World Power

While the United States remained a world power—and the greatest military power on earth after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991—U.S. military might did not necessarily always lead to military victory and modern weapons could not always ensure its place as the leading world power.

True, the United States easily defeated Iraq in Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War of 1990-1991, but few in government noticed that America was walking through a mine field. In the next decade there were no such easy victories.

Wars tended to become quagmires, swamps and quicksand—swamp metaphors that oddly enough worked well to describe the desert wars that sucked both significant numbers of fighters and enormous amounts of money and military hardware into a vortex of permanent insurgency and civil or religious war. The IED—the "improvised explosive device" made by amateurs out of industrial junk—turned out to be capable of defeating the most sophisticated army and of sending hundreds of soldiers home with amputations, cranial trauma, and often-permanent brain damage. The United States attempted to impose order on an expanded Middle East that came to stretch from Tunisia to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the territory proved to be covered with landmines both literally and figuratively.

The American government apparently easily overpowered Afghanistan in 2001—but fourteen years later the war continued with no end in sight. Similarly, the Iraq War of 2003 saw President George W. Bush declare victory in his shipboard “mission accomplished” speech, but the war soon turned into a disaster of enormous proportions, taking hundreds of thousands of lives, costing billions of dollars, virtually destroying the nation of Iraq. The War in Iraq still goes on today, now as a fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a vast geographic and intense ideological struggle that eludes resolution. Americans understandably have found the goals, methods, and developments of these wars incomprehensible, since neither the government nor the media had any clear explanation of their purpose or their objectives beyond stopping what Bush called “the bad guys.”

The War on Terrorism, launched by Bush and continued by Obama, guided by no clear moral, ideological, or strategic goals, became a shifting, shiftless, and murderous affair. The more conservative among the American people, however, attributed the defeats in those imperial wars not to the Republican George W. Bush who had launched them, but to the Black, Democratic Party president, who some believed was a Muslim who had not been born in the United States. Many white Americans, especially the men among them, men who had lost their high paying jobs and their former role as patriarch, now also saw their country in what seemed like permanent defeat.

Defeated on the battlefield, the United States was also being defeated it seemed to many in the world marketplace. Without a political labor movement, neoliberal globalization—global investment, production, and trade—became institutionalized in trade agreement and international organizations. President Bill Clinton negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, a treaty that in essence formalized the economic integration of Canada, Mexico, and the United States that had been taking place. The banks and corporations of all three countries could now exploit the natural resources and the workers of the entire continent. U.S. unions demanded some protections, but the “labor side agreements” provided little enforcement of labor rights violations in any country. Many in the unions and in the working class came to believe that NAFTA had been the principal source of job loss and low wages in America.

Similarly the Clinton government supported the admission of China to the World Trade Organization—and though Longshoremen, Teamsters other unions and environmentalists carried out militant demonstrations against it at the Battle of Seattle—China was admitted in 1999. China’s economic growth averaging over 10 percent a year between 1992 and 2008 made it the second largest capitalist economy in the world and a rival to both the United States and the European Union. Many in the American working class—who found that virtually everything they purchased in big box stores like Walmart had been made in China—now believed that Mexico and China represented their chief competitors and that the United States had to change its trade policies.

While it was Bill Clinton who had negotiated NAFTA and supported admission of China to the WTO, it was George W. Bush who had granted “permanent normal trading relations” to China. And President Obama put the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a NAFTA-like agreement with 11 countries on four continents, at the top of his agenda for 2016, calling it a “made in America” agreement. Both major parties, it seemed to many workers, were unwilling to protect them from the movement of jobs abroad. Sections of the American ruling class of bankers and financiers, their political allies and ideologues also became concerned that the United States was losing the ability to dominate global developments. The decline of American power and the need either to reassert it or to transition to some new international order became a central concern among both conservative and liberal leaders, among both Republicans and Democrats.

The New Right of the 1980s

As during the 1970s the prosperity of the post-war period ended, social conflict increased, and America suffered defeat in Southeast Asia, the white middle classes—that is the small business people and the better paid layers of the working class—most of them living in the suburbs, found solace in a variety of places: in the Evangelical churches, in the right-to-life movement, in the National Rifle Association, and in the Republican Party. These organizations and a constellation other conservative religious and civic groups, often financed by wealthy rightwing foundations, constructed a “New Right” that in the 1980s and found a political home in the Republican Party, where Christian fundamentalists and right-to-life activists generally happily cohabited with the Chamber of Commerce, the National Manufacturers Association, and the anti-union Right-to-Work organizations of the economic conservatives.

Basing their thinking on the culturally profound America belief in individualism inherited from Protestant forbearers, John Locke, and the authors of the U.S. Constitution, a wide variety of rightwing preachers, journalists, and intellectuals constructed a new ideology founded on the Christian religion, traditional family values, the American dream of homeownership, a conservative conception of community embodied in the segregated suburb, the right to bear arms to defend one’s home and family, the economic importance of small business, and a belief in America’s role as the indispensible nation. Conservative Evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Christian commentators like Paul Weyrich became the leaders of the New Right, though other sorts of conservatism were growing too.

Also living in the Republicans big house—for white people—were the Neocons, that is the neoconservatives—some are former anti-Stalinist leftists, others students of Professor Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago, yet others followers of American Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, or writers and readers of Commentary and The Weekly Standard. The Neocons included such figures as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Paul Bremer, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, a small crowd of highbrow intellectuals, politicians, and activist bureaucrats who had learned their skills directing cloak-and-dagger skullduggery and the military intervention of the murderous wars against the poor and the left in Central America.[i]

The Neocons advocated an aggressive foreign policy internationally to reassert what they called American leadership in the world, but what might be more accurately described as a return to American imperialism of the Golden Years. Remarkably their Weltanschauung formed at places like the University of Chicago largely coincided with the views of many of the Evangelicals and NRA members, and with the outlook of many white middle class and working class victims of industrial collapse and conversion: all looked back to the good old days and forward to the coming sunrise of American power and prosperity. “Let America be America Again,” one might say.[ii]   

Another important ideological strand that also began to develop within the Republican Party, growing stronger in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century was libertarianism. The roots of libertarianism might be found in John Locke’s political and economic theory, some call him the “father of libertarianism,” though, of course, Republicans and Democrats also often trace their roots back to Locke whose ideas formed the basis of American constitutionalism and capitalism. It was the Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand, however, who popularized laissez-faire capitalism in her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and her popular Atlas Shrugged (1957), and who inspired many of the first American libertarians.

A secular rationalist, Rand’s ideals appealed to those on the right who were not attracted to the moralism of Evangelical Christianity. Libertarians adopted classical economic views, arguing that government should be kept to a minimum, allowing citizens to do as they liked, not only in the marketplace but also in society. So, like other conservatives, libertarians opposed government regulations and government social programs, but different than others also took a hands-off position on questions of abortion and gay rights, which they considered matters of personal liberty. Some libertarians even criticized corporations on the grounds that they were government creations, while others opposed military conscription as an imposition on individual liberty.

Libertarianism developed as a political force in the Republican Party several years later out of the presidential campaign of Republican Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater was, as Gary Wills argued in a recent article, the founder of the “hard right” that we see today in candidates like Ted Cruz. Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), became what Patrick Buchanan called the “New Testament” of conservatives of the time. Wills summarizes Goldwater’s remarkably rightwing agenda:

Goldwater called for the elimination of Social Security, federal aid to schools, federal welfare and farm programs, and the union shop. He claimed the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision was unconstitutional, so not the ‘law of the land.’ He said we must bypass and defund the UN and improve tactical nuclear weapons for frequent use.[iii]

E.J. Dionne Jr., the Washington Post columnist, argues in his Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond, that all of the basic elements of the future Tea Party movement could be found in Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. But it would take decades more of economic crises and political conflicts before those ideas became politically viable and before a constituency for them to grow out of the wreckage of the industrial economy, out of white racial resentment, and out of the sense of insecurity created by the country’s decline both domestically and on the world stage.

All of these conservative currents became increasingly attractive to Americans, especially to the white middle and working classes who had been threatened by the civil rights and women’s movements and battered by the economic upheavals of the 1970s and early 1980s. Between the economic crises of the 1970s and the age of War on Terror in the 2000s, many former union members and Democrats, independents, and Republicans moved into this world of conservative organizations and ideologies. Today then, it is not surprising that “Republicans hold a 49%-40% lead over the Democrats in leaned party identifications among whites. The GOP’s advantage widens to 21 points among white men who have not completed college (54%-33%) and white southerners (55%-34%).”[iv]