The Democratic Party with All Its Warts
In case you haven’t guessed already, I am a man of the left politically. Baptized in the twin crucibles of Black Power and anti-US imperialism in the 1960s, I wished to “blow up the whole system” back then. That is why as an academic I studied revolution; and it’s why I’m fascinated by populist movements on the right and left today.
The Hogan Thesis
Early in my academic career during the Clinton presidency I was venting about how centrist Democrats were caving to the Reaganist consensus and moving the needle to the right in public policy. This was over lunch with one of my mentors, the late Dr. Eugene Hogan (professor of American Politics, Western Washington University).
After my tirade was spent Gene Hogan gathered himself and marshalled a most eloquent argument that the Democratic Party is the greatest people’s political party in the era of liberal democracy in the Western World.” Given that the United States in the eyes of knowledgeable observers has the weakest social welfare state and the greatest economic inequality of all the advanced capitalist Western democracies, I found his thesis quite shocking.
The Social Democratic parties of Germany, Italy and Scandinavia, French Socialists, British Labour: those parties led the way, often in coalition governments, in creating cradle to grave social welfare states in those countries. Those systems feature levels of taxation unimaginable in American. But they also have universal health care, generous maternity leave, excellent public transportation and less economic inequality overall. The US has none of these policy sets as widely as Western European countries do. So how could Gene Hogan make the audacious claim that American Democrats are the greatest party of the left in Western History when they haven’t been able to deliver those kinds of policies universally?
On that afternoon Dr. Hogan began by reminding me that Andrew Jackson’s Democratic party, though it was white supremacist and male chauvinist, presided over the first expansion of the franchise beyond propertied white men in US history in the 1830s.
He went on to chronicle the way that having been tied to slavery up to the Civil War, the party resurrected itself as the vehicle for European immigrants and their trade unionism to be integrated into national political institutions from 1865 - 1914.
The rest of his narrative described how Blacks and Mexicans were brought into the system (though unevenly) by the unions and the and political machines tied to the Democratic Party. All those (post-civil war) forces congealed to catapult the Democrats, FDR and his New Deal into the White House in 1932 (though FDR only won the majority of the Black vote in 1936).
After World War Two the New Deal principle of equity for every American was extended to minoritized races. That caused many Whites of all classes to abandon the Democratic Party and join a Republican Party promising “colorblindness,” which progressives saw as a soft form of white supremacy.
As it hemorrhaged White voters in the 1960s, the Democrats never discarded the civil rights agenda. Rather, they absorbed the identity politics of the new social movements” (races, women, LGBTQ, environmental, etc.).
But from the depths of Reaganism Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition emerged in the 1980s. The Rainbow, built from the template of King’s Poor People’s Campaign, flipped the focus from race to race and class and offered a “multiracial social democratic” vision for America. Though the Rainbow imagery evokes racial identity, Jackson’s platform uplifted all the social identity movements in his presidential bids of 1980s. That new progressivism linked cultural and economic dimensions of injustice; and it created a network of activists who continued to work within the Democratic Party.
For Hogan the Democrats faced a far more challenging political landscape than the Western European left for two reasons. Foremost was the fact that in America along with class, there were deep-seated racial divisions arising from the dispossession of indigenous peoples and chattel slavery. The European countries had ethnic differences but were White and their populations were all indigenous. There was no issue of dispossession, nor of slavery by the late 19th century.
Also, often overlooked was the fact that America was founded on capitalism and the destruction of the aristocratic class. Thus, there hasn’t been a privileged class which had a sense of “noblesse oblige” (obligation of the nobility), which could be mobilized to support welfare state policies. In America there was only a White capitalist class poised against workers of many races against whom race-based divide and conquer tactics worked quite well.
That story, proffered as it was by Gene Hogan before the millennium, was enough to convince him that the Democrats had navigated the treacherous waters of a race and class divided society as well a could be expected. It gave me something to think about, but I didn’t buy it totally.
Then millennium came and with it the succession of retooled new social movements: The unprecedented immigrant rights movement (2006), Occupy Wall Street (2011), Ferguson (2014), Standing Rock (2016), MeToo (2017), Parkland Mass Shooting Movement (2018), and finally, George Floyd/Defund the Police (2020).
For the most part these youth-dominated mass movements frightened many, but opened the eyes of many others. Like their predecessors in the late 20th century, much of their energy (though by no means all of it) has been channeled into the Democratic Party.
Commentators since the Great Recession have decried the emergence of populist movements. In Europe it is right-wing white nationalist populism which has been seen as the biggest threat to stability. Only in the US (until the recent French elections) has a robust populist left endured.
This left produced Bernie Sanders behind the slogan “We are the 99%!” Unmobilized by the uninspiring Clinton campaign in 2016, this left poured onto the streets for the Women’s March on Trump’s inauguration day in 2017. Its force eddied into a plethora of existing progressive organizations and new formations. This left anchored the flip the House of Representatives to the Democrats in 2018. It pushed Joe Biden into the presidency and the Democrats into control of both houses of Congress in 2020.
It was the fear of fascism that fueled Biden’s victory in 2020, but he didn’t appear up the job of incisively countering Trump this year. In an act of patriotism and humility, Biden has ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination. All I can say is Hallelujah! Harris has the charisma and the smarts to lead our movements to victory in the fall.
Sampling South Africa
In 1983 the apartheid government in South Africa introduced the idea of a parliament that would offer representation for Whites, Coloureds and Asians, but not the African majority. Over 1,000 civic organizations of all races formed a United Democratic Front to oppose the idea. One of the leaders of the Front was Reverend Frank Chikane. In a stemwinding speech to activists Chikane exclaimed “We will go house to house in Soweto! We’ll go house to house in Mitchell’s Plain! We’ll go house to house in Phoenix! We’ll go house to house all over South Africa to defeat this racist constitutional proposal!” The video of the speech ran chills through my body!
With Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket this fall we must follow Reverend Chikane’s charge. We must go house to house in Georgia! We must go house to house in Wisconsin! In Pennsylvania! In Arizona! In every nook and cranny across the length and breadth of this great country, the American populist left, the children of Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders must create a “peoples’ storm” in the streets and at the ballot box to overwhelm the neo-fascist Trumpists.
Then I might finally accept the Hogan thesis that the Democratic Party is the greatest peoples party in the history of not just the West, but the entire world!
