Guest Post Proposal for Democrats: Go Radical Change

One path for Democrats is to face the fact that they need to choose a different path.  

Serve the middle class and those aspiring to be in it.  Understand that the enemies are the oligarchs of American power: Big Business, Big Finance, and Big Military.

Guest post author Herb Rothschild, a retired university professor and current peace activist, lives in southern Oregon.  He reads this blog and accepted its challenge to define the pathway for Democrats going forward.   I believe this approach reflects a significant vein in American leftist thinking and it is generally consistent with Bernie Sanders' approach, as I heard him make it, that "the billionaires" are the enemy because our laws and our economy serve their interests, not the interests of the vast majority of American citizens.  

In this analysis, the remedies would be more progressive taxation, breaking up banks, stopping or reversing corporate mergers, prosecution of financial and white collar crimes, renegotiating trade deals including NAFTA.

This is a profound--radical--change from current Democratic orthodoxy.   There is significant disagreement on the root cause.  The Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, John Kerry establishment Democratic party has not defined our own leading institutions as the enemy.  They worked with those power centers.  They attempted a great coalition in which those organizations were sometimes leading advocates for employment diversity and inclusion,  for environmental cleanup, for progressive change.   

Often big corporations had the wherewithal and vision to be progressive; the problem wasn't them.  The Apples and Googles and Pfizers and even the Exxons had too much at stake to be a "bad corporate citizen."   Often those big businesses--"oligarchs" as Rothschild terms them--are leaders in innovations environmentalists and progressives support: solar energy, smart grids, climate change, build out of the internet, electric cars, support for education, racial and ethnic diversity, and opposition to prejudice.   The problems came from the  little guys, often from the heartland, the Koch Brothers from Wichita and the small town baker who didn't want to make a cake for a gay couple.  The modern Democratic establishment made peace with wealth and turned their focus onto behaviors, not class.  The problem wasn't "bigness"; the problem was ignorance and prejudice, as they defined it.

Is General Electric the enemy--or an ally?

Rothschild says the Democratic establishment's accommodation to wealth became service to it and thereby they turned their back on the middle class.  They couldn't serve two masters.  It was a moral loss, a policy error, and a political disaster for them.

My own view is that Rothschild is wrong in his diagnosis.  My sense is that the oligarchs of power reflect the realities of the modern economy and that it is as impossible for Democrats to make America great again by returning to Teddy Roosevelt and Trust Busting as it is for Donald Trump to make America great again by returning to Eisenhower and the post-war 1950s.  I think the policy remedies of progressive taxation, etc. are necessary because those great power centers are inevitable, not because they are the enemy.  Democrats have no choice but to make peace with the oligarchs because the oligarchs are the great engines of American prosperity.   The job is to distribute that wealth, not fight the source of it.

But I will let Rothschild speak for himself:

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild:  "Who Will You Serve?"

Herb Rothschild

In political as well as personal life, answering this question is foundational to any new beginning. Up Close has rightly challenged Democrats to find a unified self-understanding as a prelude to renewed electoral success. But has it appreciated how radical (meaning “back to the root”) that quest must be?

Early in Sunday’s blog, Sage quoted a reader who said that he thought he understood what Republicans stood for but he criticized Democrats for lacking a comparable clarity: "Republicans value initiative, individualism, self determination, and freedom from government intervention and regulation (unless it comes to drugs and sex). Republicans define themselves as people in opposition to Democrats. As framed above, Republicans mostly win when talking of values because they sound so, well, American.  Democrats have had so many factions, such a 'big tent,’ that they seem to be stuck with 'identity politics' -- policies and programs for a rainbow coalition of different identities.” There are two reasons why this observation cannot serve us as a starting point. First, it confuses what it calls values (Republicans purportedly have them) with policies and their beneficiaries (Democrats purportedly have too many of both). Second, it seems to accept that Republicans’ values guide their behavior in office.

Actually, it’s easy enough to draw up a list Democratic Party values: A fair shot for everyone to move into the middle class; equal care and concern by government for all Americans regardless of status; an unwillingness to let anyone in America die for lack of food or health care; affirmation of diversity; protection of the natural environment. It would be hard to find a Democratic candidate unwilling to espouse these values publicly. Further, there is a smaller gap between these values and Democrats’ behavior in office than is the case with Republicans.

Only when we return to the root question—Who will you serve?—can we identify the basic obstacle to a unified Democratic self-understanding and self-presentation. Those who have been in control of the Democratic Party, perhaps since Jimmy Carter’s presidency and certainly since Bill Clinton’s, have been trying to serve two masters. They have served Big Business, Big Finance and their global enforcer, Big Military, while simultaneously trying to remain loyal to the middle class and those aspiring to enter it.

Serving two masters

But it cannot be done, and whenever the impossibility becomes stark, they go with the oligarchs—e.g. Clinton’s deregulation of Wall Street, Obama’s almost cost-free bailout of it in 2009, their pitifully small readjustment upwards of the top marginal income tax rates, Clinton’s willingness to maintain military spending at high levels and Obama’s escalation of it beyond what Congress was willing to approve, and both of them on international trade pacts.

Some of the impacts of these policy choices on those people that the Democratic Party claims to serve are obvious. Reduced tax revenue and increased military spending constrain spending on the domestic discretionary programs essential to the well-being of low-wage workers. So, for instance, in 1979 the HUD budget was $32.6 billion; in 2014 it was $31 billion. In constant dollars it had shrunk by two-thirds. Since only federal intervention in the market can create enough affordable housing to meet the need, there is an acute shortage of it across the country, one of the key components of low-wage workers’ struggle for survival. It’s true that Republicans devastate such programs when given the chance, but the point is that Democrats are merely inflicting less pain, not offering the positive alternative that they may think they are. Similarly, NAFTA and the bi-lateral trade  agreements that Obama pushed through as unfinished business from George W’s time in office helped shrink the blue collar component of the middle class.

But even when Clinton/Obama Democrats aren’t making obvious choices between the interests of the two masters they wish to serve, their service to the Big Money that handsomely funds their personal campaigns and the DNC they have controlled means support for a system of grossly asymmetric economic power in which the majority cannot thrive. For example, their tolerance of mega-mergers has led to a constriction of free enterprise and, in the case of mega-mergers in the communications industry, a constriction of meaningful debate about economic and foreign affairs. The voice of their other master has been muted.

It’s true that Democrats can win some elections without making a fundamental choice of masters. Since at the national level both parties have been disappointing, the hopes of the majority of Americans for many years, the volatility of dissatisfaction almost guarantees that the two parties will continue to swap control of the White House and Congress. But if Democratic strategists will stop thinking about how to win in the next two to four years and begin thinking about how to become the nation’s dominant political party once more; if they stop thinking about how important it is to beat Republicans and begin thinking about how important it is to save U.S. democracy from oligarchic subversion and the human race from climate disaster, then we will find a starting point from which to work our way toward unity.