General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: In 18 years since Naders run, what has been accomplished by attacking the Dem party from the left? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)There was no way, in that decade, to fight for the labor movement, for peace, for the preservation of the social welfare state WITHIN the Democratic Party. There was no way to fight for the powerless within this party then. Our leaders had reduced our objectives to winning elections for the SAKE of winning elections, to power for power's sake.
Even if the nominee had had to be further right in 1992-and that's conjecture at best, btw, given that Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis didn't lose running as liberals, they lost running in the fall running as technocratic centrists who put the Wall Street priority on low inflation ahead of the people's priority of a full employment economcy, and who obsessed on balancing the federal budget and reducing the deficit when there was no good reason to put those goals ahead of restoring the services Reagan-there didn't need to be a total silencing of debate within the party in the Nineties, and a total bar on grassroots activists working on change from below. The party did not need to become a left-free zone to beat Republicans.
These are the things I refer to as a massive swing to the right:
A) The unquestioning embrace of the death penalty;
B) The commitment to mass incarceration as a crime policy-a decision that has destroyed two generations of lives in some communities;
B) The refusal to either defend the character and morality of poor when they were under savage(and often sexist and racist)attack,
or to challenge the Republican narrative that welfare fraud, out of wedlock birth and drug abuse were all "black things"-in truth, they were mainly white things;
C) The agreement to maintain a hawkish foreign policy in an era(1992 to 1996) when the Cold War had ended and we no longer had any reason to treat Russia as anything but simply another country, when we easily could have removed at least half of our missiles from Europe-a commitment which did as much as anything else to put Vladimir Putin in power in Russia;
As a trade off to all of that-none of which was necessary in terms of pragmatic public policy-the only mildly progressive things that happened were the defense of choice, RBG on the court, a tiny program for health care for poor kids and the palest green environmental measures. It was an era when the party totally appeased white heterosexual resentment on social issues and hardline hawks on foreign policy. Voters of color were out in the cold on policy, as were LGBTQ voters-there were no significant victories for either group in that era.
We never had to reduce the Democratic agenda to that, and as the 1992 result showed, there's no evidence that the huge swing to the right(and the repudiation of everything the Rainbow Coalition stood for)made any real gains in votes for us. We'd have had that with Tom Harkin. We'd have had that with Jerry Brown. We'd have taken that with a mannequin. And the landslide loss of Congress in 1994 proved that moving right didn't give us any lasting electoral benefits.
In practical political terms, it would have been better if there had been no Nader phenomenon. Obviously.
But it's not as simple as saying "they should have just keep voting for the Dem ticket no matter what".
If we want loyalty from any group of voters, we have to at least, at the very least, treat that group of voters and what they care about with respect. We needed to, at a minimum, find the way of saying "we can't do what you want right now, but if you'll hang in there, we guarantee we'll do at least some of it after the NEXT election". We had no right to demand loyalty to those we were showing no loyalty to. And we had no right to blame the left for our defeats in the Eighties when those defeats weren't their fault in the least, and then to demand that they support our ticket no matter what as if they needed to do penance for the Eighties defeats they weren't responsible for.
BTW, I never wanted the party to go "hard left". It's not hard left to expect the Democratic Party to defend the poor, the labor movement, and the role of activists in public life. It's not hard left to expect the party to stand up to right-wing bullying and right-wing lies. Or to want this party to be a voice for the otherwise voiceless. It's just about wanting us to stand for something.
We can't prosper as a second party of the comfortable and privileged.