Hillary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders, a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party
There is an epic battle being fought in the Democratic Party. While it is getting coverage, the context of the coverage is all wrong. The battle is not about who best serves Democrats. It is about the soul of the Democratic Party. It is about what it will mean to be a Democrat going forward. First a bit of background.
Democrats sold out their values over the last 30 years. Ronald Reagan successfully gave the country a semblance of supply side economics success.Reagan used Keynesian economics with a supply side facade. He slashed taxes mostly for the wealthy and supplemented the shortfall with deficit spending. When the economy recovered taxes were never raised to the appropriate levels and the country was served with deficits ad infinitum. The double injection of money into the economy from deficit spending and tax cuts gave America the semblance of prosperity.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton continued Reagan’s supply side economics with a bit more common sense as taxes were raised and the top line budget was brought into balance. Clinton believed in triangulating to win and triangulating to govern. In the process he gave a huge gift to Wall Street. He allowed the repeal of Glass Steagall which along with George W. Bush’s fiscal ineptitude virtually destroyed the world’s economy in 2008.
The election of President Obama decidedly provided a progressive path with not enough progressivism for most. But it was in effect a progressive turn. If one listened to Obama, in 2008 he always spoke about turning the juggernaut slowly or nudging the juggernaut. .
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The democratic party base in 1994 was 65% centrist and 8% far left, and today its only 30% centrist and 38% far left.
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From 1939 through 1957, neither liberals nor Democrats "controlled" the House very often (and the mid-1930s were shaky, too). Democratic majorities meant that Democrats were committee chairmen and held the (very weak) speakership, but it was the "conservative coalition" of Republicans and Southern Democrats that held the balance of power in the House, and won on pretty much any issue they cared to. Not only were many committee chairmen extremely conservative Southern Democrats, but the crucial House Rules Committee was generally run by the conservatives. Today, Rules is the instrument of the party leadership, but that wasn't the case until the 1960s. Conservative coalition dominance wasn't just about race, either; perhaps the most important law on economic issues passed during these 20 years was the Taft-Hartley right-to-work bill; it's not a crazy stretch to argue that this 1947 law's long-term (and slow developing) effects have been more important for inequality and general economic development than anything that President Ronald Reagan or those 1990s Republican Congresses did.
Rules Committee reforms and others happened after the huge 1958 landslide gave liberals real majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in 20 years, which led them to realize that House procedures still prevented them from using that majority. Reform took about 15 years to produce the modern, party-dominated House. And as the South realigned, Democratic majorities were more likely to be liberal majorities. Still, the conservative coalition was important, if not dominant, from 1967 through 1974. And even after reform, the first Reagan Congress in 1981-1982 essentially had a conservative majority in the House. So, yes, the 1994 election ended a liberal Democratic majority, but one that had only been in place continuously since 1985. Not 1930.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-15/democratic-party-wasn-t-always-liberal
Indeed, looked at with a longer focus, it's true that a Democratic "swerve to the left" was responsible for the party eventually losing the House in 1994. This is true so long as "swerve to the left" describes the Democrats' decisive break (which itself took several decades) from their history of racism, and the subsequent slow-motion shift of white Southerners from the Democratic "Solid South" to very large majorities voting Republican. Against that huge development, whatever minor changes Bill Clinton made to mainstream liberal thought were tiny blips.
from FDR to George McGovern was liberal and you did not have to be far left to fit in. Jimmy Carter had a foot in both camps and by the time Bill Clinton and the DLC moved us out of the New Deal era the party had moved to the right of the center. Oh, yes those of us who are even now New Deal FDR Democrats were there all the time but we did not have the power to stop the move to the center.
Plus the center is way right of what the party was before the DLC. The destruction of Glass-Steagell and the damage done to the media can hardly be called a tiny blip. To those of us on the bottom this rightward movement is NOT a tiny blip.
