A Glass Nearly Empty
by Bill Bianchi, SolidarityEconomy.net
Imagine a Republican strategist, a little unnerved by signs of a Progressive revival across the US during the past few years, asking himself, ‘what can I do to discourage those fledgling leftist”? Well, sir, you couldn’t do much better than have them all read Robert Brenner’s speculative piece, Structure Vs. Conjuncture: the 2006 Election and the Rightward Shift. It relentlessly crushes any flowers of optimism that might have bloomed from last November’s Democratic electoral victories.
Brenner starts by framing the results as purely anti-Bush with no chance that they could also signal a surge of progressive movement within the Democrat party and in the country. No support is offered for this pronouncement, other than to say that it is “generally acknowledged”. Despite the Democratic victory in both houses of Congress, Brenner characterizes the Republicans loss a “remarkable” feat in which they “held their own” because their base, roughly one third of the electorate, turned out in strength. In Brenner’s view, it seems victory is nothing and defeat is success. Sounds like something you might hear on Fox News.
Brenner argues that the Democratic victory in 2006 represented nothing more than the further ascendancy of the center and right wing forces in the party. To prove his point, he points to the center-right Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which now numbers 60 members, over one-quarter of the Democrats in Congress. He also highlights the party’s more conservative Blue Dog caucus which won 44 seats, up 7 from the previous election.
So what of the remaining 130 Congressional Democrats, all of whom ran for election? No news from Brenner, but it takes only a few minutes of web surfing to discover that the Progressive Caucus is now the biggest grouping of Democrats in the Congress with 64 seats, up a huge 14 seats from 2004 (Nation Blog, Croweded Progressive Caucas, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=139093. What does their growth say about the party and the country for that matter?
If Brenner had surfed a little more, he would have discovered that two Blue Dog members who ran for the Senate, Ford of Tennessee and Case from Hawaii, both lost. And two Progressive Caucus members, Sherrod of Ohio and Sanders of Vermont, both won Senate seats. These results surely undercut Brenner’s thesis that the election victories strengthened only the party’s center-right. And there’s more.
Brenner and most of the main stream media attribute much of the Democrats’ success to Rahm Emanuel’s electoral leadership. But a close look at the election results shows that Emanuel’s vaunted efforts to run rigid centrists and “fighting Democrats” didn’t really pay off. Only 8 of his 22 hand-picked candidates won, and the three who received the most money from Emanuel’s group (DCCC), including the valiant Iraq veteran, Tammy Duckworth, all lost. What’s more, several progressive democrats beat Rahm’s candidates in the primaries and went on to win in the general election, despite receiving no support at all from the Democratic money machine. Jerry McNerney (California’s 11th) ousted an entrenched Republican incumbent, as did John Hall (NY-19). Finally, some of those Blue Dogs, though truly conservative on social issues, ran on progressive economic issues. No wonder that after reviewing these election results, many progressive writers debunked the idea that the election was a triumph for the party’s center right as a spin job.
Don’t buy all the crap coming from GOP talking-point memos or the blather from mainstream pundits. The midterm elections do not signal a move to the center. Yes, a few conservative Democrats were elected, but the big gainers were progressives. In particular, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is on the rise. (In These Times Nov. 08/06 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2914/)
And Jon Nichols of the Nation, quotes Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who asserted that the November election results, “… was not just a vote against George Bush and the Republican Congress, it was a vote for a Democratic agenda that is rooted in progressive values.” (Nation, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=139093)
After analyzing the past 60 years of US electoral politics, Brenner finally goes on to offer some conclusions about the meaning of the 2006 election for the future of progressive politics in the US. In his dark vision, he sees only continued movement to the right. He argues that the Republican far right is still strong, and the leaders of the Democratic party along with its conservative membership won’t offer much resistance because they trend rightward themselves. We can all agree on that, even without wading through pages of historical background. But why does Brenner absolutely ignore the growing force of progressives in the party and throughout the country for that matter? True the DLC and Blue Dogs caucuses may continue steering to the right, but the progressive grassroots are re-energized and growing and they will fight to veer left. Already they have begun to move the discussion on many issues to the left.
Nevertheless, Brenner is relentlessly pessimistic about the chances for the new Congress moving to the left. He bluntly states no major new programs on healthcare, education, or public infrastructure can be enacted because the Democrats are committed to the “pay-go” rule for government spending. His prediction is off. “Pay-go” won’t preclude funding new social programs. One thing proved during the Clinton era is that a just tax structure that makes the rich and corporations pay their fair share will yield ample surpluses that can be applied to new social programs, even with a “pay-go” philosophy. I predict that the Republicans will be unable to stop new initiates on health and infrastructure because everyone knows the money is there.
Brenner rightly charges that Democrats are relying more and more on corporate funding, thereby precluding the likelihood of any anti-corporate legislation. But he seems oblivious to the new sources of funding that have emerged from the progressive grassroots. Howard Dean, Moveon.com, and a host of other grassroots groups and candidates raised millions from small donors. Those contributions demonstrate that progressive candidates can raise the funds they need to run successful campaigns, if they appeal to the grassroots with progressive messages.
Brenner acknowledges that the new Congress will question the government’s free-trade agenda, but he hastens to add, it’s too late to do anything about it. He cites the 15 Democrats who supported CAFTA giving a winning margin of essentially 1 vote. However, that occurred in 2005, the new Congress would be very unlikely to pass CAFTA.
Finally, after trashing nearly all progressive hopes, Brenner opens the door a sliver to one possibility that could stop the right-ward slide. His hope: an economic crash. If the bursting housing bubble pushes the US into recession while the disaster in Iraq continues to unfold, then, he says, ‘things might get more interesting”. Indeed they would, but who in Brenner’s view would take that “interesting” situation and create a progressive political movement?
If the left in this or any other country accepted Brenner’s analysis at face-value, then they might as well turn on the TV, hunker down on the coach, and wait for the crash—some probably will. Fortunately, not everyone is limited by his world view. While much in Brenner’s analysis of the Democratic Party and its leadership is accurate, little is new, and a lot is missing. He focuses on only half the picture, totally ignoring the growing progressive force in the US and in the Democratic Party. The real focus of our analysis today should be the struggle for control of the party which is taking place now. Such analysis might actually help the left gain power.
Any analysis that ends with the conclusion that, absent the flood, the future is hopeless, seems pointless. And perhaps that’s the idea of this piece. Perhaps the intended message is that for the left, electoral politics are a dead end. If that is the argument, than what’s the alternative to electoral politics, and who is pushing it forward?
[Bill Bianchi is a member of the Chicago Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America]
3 Responses to “A Glass Nearly Empty”
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February 28th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Where’s the beef?
I agree with Bianchi. All that analysis reaching back to FDR, but no ‘What Is To Be Done?’ Whatever happened to ‘the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’?
Besides, even the analysis in problematic. Brenner would do well to pay a little more attention to the Globalist vs US hegemonist divide worldwide, then the the nationalist opposition to both, and he’d get a deeper understanding of divisions in both parties. Rahm Emanuel is my favorite Democrat to focus my fire on, by the party has about six contending factions at the moment, and he’s only one of them.
Now I hold no fundamental hope for either party, and try to following a strategy and tactics that will unravel both and create something new, reflecting the politics of this site.
But this doesn’t help much.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
I’m a longtime admirer of Robert Brenner’s work, but Bianchi’s rebuttal is a strong one. As it turns out, the same issue of the New Left Review that carried Brenner’s article also carries one by Mike Davis on “The Democratic Return.” Let me paste part of it below:
Was the November 2006 midterm election an epic political massacre or just a routine midterm brawl? In the week after the Democratic victory, partisan spinmeisters offered opinions as contradictory as those of the protagonists in Rashomon, Kurosawa’s famously relativistic account of rape and murder. On the liberal side, Bob Herbert rejoiced in his New York Times column that the ‘fear-induced anomaly’ of the ‘George W. Bush era’ had ‘all but breathed its last’, while Paul Waldman (Baltimore Sun) announced ‘a big step in the nation’s march to the left’, and George Lakoff (CommonDreams.org) celebrated a victory for ‘progressive values’ and ‘factually accurate, values-based framing’ (whatever that may mean). On the conservative side, the National Review’s Lawrence Kudlow refused to concede even the obvious bloodstains on the steps of Congress: ‘Look at Blue Dog conservative Democratic victories and look at Northeast liberal gop defeats. The changeover in the House may well be a conservative victory, not a liberal one.’ William Safire, although disgusted that the ‘loser left’ had finally won an election, dismissed the result as an ‘average midterm loss’.
I. VICTORY AND ITS WOES
But Safire doth spin too much. Although the Democratic victory in 2006 was not quite the deluge that the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay unleashed in 1994 (see Table 1), it was anything but an ‘average’ result. Despite the comparatively low electoral salience of the economy, the opposition’s classic midterm issue, the Democrats managed to exactly reverse the majority in the House (the worst massacre of Republicans since 1974) and reclaim the Senate by one seat. Indeed, the Senate gained its first self-declared ‘socialist’, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
Democrats, for the first time ever, did not lose a single incumbent or open House seat. Independent voters (26 per cent of the electorate) swung to the Democrats by an almost two-to-one ratio—‘the biggest margin ever measured among independents since the first exit polls in 1976’. With the strongest female leadership in American history, they outpolled Republicans among women 55 to 45 per cent in House races; but more surprisingly, they also managed to reduce the gop’s famous lead among white men (a staggering 63 per cent in the 1994 House contests) to 53 per cent. According to veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg, one out of five Bush voters moved into the blue column; but none so dramatically as the electoral market segment of ‘privileged men’ (college-educated and affluent) where the gop’s 2004 margin of 14 per cent was transformed into a slim Democratic majority. Although the slippage among the gop hardcore—evangelicals and white rural and exurban voters—was slight, the party of the moral majority declined 6 per cent among devout Catholics, while angry Latinos, recoiling from the gop grass roots’ embrace of vigilantes and border walls, murdered Republicans in several otherwise close contests in the West.
In state races, the Democrats demonstrated even more traction. On election eve, the gop boasted a majority of governorships (28 to 22) and a slight lead in control of state legislative chambers (49 to 47, with 2 tied). Contrasted to overwhelming Democratic dominance in state legislatures before 1994, when Republicans controlled only 8 states, this rough parity—according to John Hood, the president of a North Carolina conservative think-tank—has been ‘one of the most significant and lasting products of the Republican Revolution’. But it is a legacy now lost as the Democrats have exactly reversed the partisan ratio of governors (leaving Republican executives in only 3 of the 10 most populous states), while winning control of 8 more state chambers (now 56 Democrat versus 41 Republican, with 1 tied). ‘What’s worse for the gop’, Hood points out, is that the majority parties in state legislatures will control congressional redistricting in the wake of the rapidly approaching 2010 Census. ‘If Democrats retain their current edge, the us House will get a lot more blue.’
Regionally, Republican candidates were decimated in the gop’s original heartland, New England—including notoriously conservative New Hampshire, where Democrats took over the legislature for the first time since the Civil War—and the Mid-Atlantic states, leading one prominent conservative to lament that ‘the Northeast is on its way to being lost forever to the gop’. Democrats also made surprising gains in the Midwest and the ‘red’ interior West, especially in Colorado where hi-tech money leveraged a growing Latino vote. Even in the South, the Democrats managed to arrest their long-term decline and claw back 19 seats in state legislatures. (Despite the prevalent myth of a solidly Republican South, the Democrats still retain a 54 per cent majority in Dixie state houses.)
In Kansas—Tom Frank’s icon state of voter false consciousness —Democrat Nancy Boyda defeated incumbent Jim Ryun (the former Olympic track star) in a congressional district that Bush had carried by 20 percentage points two years earlier. Popular Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius was easily re-elected, while the other top state offices, the lieutenant and attorney generalships, were won by former Republicans running as Democrats—a startling reverse in the trend of political conversion. The state’s foremost cultural conservative, the fanatically anti-abortion attorney general Phil Kline, was pulverized: receiving barely one-third of the vote in the usually Republican exurbs of Kansas City (Johnson County). Nothing seemed particularly ‘wrong’ with Kansas in the fall of 2006.
Such results convincingly refute the legend of invincibility that had been woven around Karl Rove’s signature strategy of intensive base mobilization (usually stimulated by hysteria over some imperiled Christian value) and massive negative advertising (usually perpetuating some outright lie or slander against the opposition). According to Stanley Greenberg, ‘the Republican Party has ended up with the most negative image in memory, lower than Watergate’. But the Democratic pollster (writing in collaboration with Robert Borosage and James Carville) was adamant that Republican losses are not necessarily Democratic gains. ‘The Democratic Party also ended up being viewed more negatively during this election than in 2004 . . . Democrats have only modest advantages—and are chosen by fewer than 50 per cent on such key attributes as being “on your side”, “future-oriented” and “for families”.’
Thomas Edsall agrees that ‘Democratic triumphs are fragile’ and warns that they are ‘based far more on widespread dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq than on the fundamental partisan and ideological shift that was apparent in 1980 and 1994 Republican breakthroughs’. Partisan registration remains closer to parity (38 per cent Democrat versus 37 per cent Republican) than at any time since the late nineteenth century, and control of the House is arbitrated by swings of just a few percentage points: the reason the Republicans have been so keen to undertake controversial midterm redistrictings and gerrymanders to buttress their power.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:37 am
Bianchi makes some very good points.
The facts simply don’t support the view that Rahm Emanuel ‘engineered’ the Democratic victory. He’s no Karl Rove… but he does represent a power-center in the Democratic Party that is contending for influence. And regardless of public opinion, his ability to attract money is an asset for him. And he is clearly using that money to support very specific types of candidates, not just the Democrat.
Following the Democratic victory, the Nation, in particular, was quick to announce the end of the Republican Revolution.
To me, that represents wishful thinking, the gains of the Progressive Caucus notwithstanding.
First, the Republican Revolution — and its policies like welfare reform (passed by Clinton), the estate tax, income tax, and the Iraq war — represent the culmination of 30 years of patient organizing in communities, developing a hard core of activists, inflitrating key institutions in our government and taking over the Republican Party.
That one mid-term election has reversed or marked the end of this, I doubt.
To truly bring the Republican Revolution to and end would require, I think by definition, a ‘counter-revolution,’ a major progressive shift similar to what the radical Republicans have achieved over the past decades.
While I think Bianchi’s analysis of the significance of the mid-term results is accurate, I think we’re still far from a progressive revolution.
1. The progressives don’t yet constitute the hegemonic bloc in the Democratic Party. They are are on the ascendancy and are the biggest single caucus as pointed out by Bianchi. This is important. I am convinced that there are still a significant amount of voters who voted in opposition to Bush, not in favor of a progressive agenda.
2. The progressive caucus doesn’t yet represent a coherent, comprehensive alternative vision. There’s still a fine line between free trade, anti-trade and protectionism. Economic populism can go left or right. While there is consensus in OPPOSING Low Road trade agreements, a High Road, alternative vision is lacking. What do high road trade policies look like? How would a progressive agenda promote the development of a robust, High Road economy with a focus on the backbone of that economy: small and medium manufacturing firms? There is lots of evidence that we’re not “loosing jobs” to low-wage countries, but that succession is a bigger culprit: what role does employee ownership play in a progressive vision?
3. The anti-war movement, which is succeeding in bringing people who have not traditionally associated with protest movements out into the streets, it’s still having a hard time going from opposition to proposition. You can only organize people against something for so long… you have to also be for something (this is related to point two).
4. The DLC still exerts a lot of influence over the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton will be a contender for sure in 2008. She is overly cautious, doesn’t lead on any issues (she still can’t say the Iraq War is wrong: “It’s time for the Iraqi government to take responsibility”) and is an opportunist.
But my conclusion is not Brenner’s.
I do see hope, and it is in the potential convergence of the objective factors of a poorly-performing economy, stagnant to declining wages, an intolerable war, the rising number of uninsured Americans and the resurgence of grassroots activism, the growth of the Progressive Caucus and groups like PDA who are in a position (though not yet doing so, I don’t think) to define a positive, alternative political platform for a progressive revolution.
The Left needs to engage all of this critically and dialectically.