There has been great weeping, gnashing of teeth, and rage, among the Democratic Party’s base in recent weeks since the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion on the pending Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case was leaked. The emotions have been focused on the Republican Party and at the Supreme Court justices who are likely to concur with that opinion, because they were placed on the court during the administrations of recent presidents elected by that party. That blame is well deserved. However an equal and perhaps greater measure should be directed to the leaders of the Democratic Party over the past four decades. They have taken a party that since the 1930s had been focused on the well-being of ALL Americans and moved it to a place where, judging from actions instead of words, that is no longer a priority. Whether this occurred because of deliberate betrayal or follows from a host of incremental decisions that seemed the right thing to do at the time makes no difference, although it’s likely there was some of both. In any case for women control of their own reproductive potential is right down there at the base of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. Aggressively advocating policies that address those needs, whether for access to adequate health care, housing, or for a woman’s right to choose, is no longer a priority of the Democratic Party. There’s talk about pushing a bill through Congress that would guarantee a woman’s right to choose throughout the country while the Democrats still have control of both houses and the presidency. Good luck with that! To understand why requires we take a look at how we got here.
.From the time of the Franklin Roosevelt administration going forward the Democratic Party’s grassroots base had been white and blue collar working people and their families – the common people – whereas the Republican base consisted of small business owners and professional people such as doctors and accountants. Importantly, the GOP also counted among its supporters most of the senior managers of big business as well as their owners’ and founders’ descendants. Especially noteworthy among these latter were the financiers of Wall Street whose businesses the 32nd president had deemed primarily responsible for the speculation bubble of the late 1920s, its burst in October 1929. and the subsequent Great Depression. In response he and the large Democratic majorities in Congress during his first two terms of office passed laws that severely curtailed the scope of business activities of corporations, and especially those of Wall Street.. This did not go down well with the moneyed classes and FDR, who was deemed “a traitor to his class,” famously responded publicly saying, “I welcome their hatred.” These actions which constrained the financial sector, combined with legislation that turned around the economy, empowered working people, and erected safety nets such as Social Security, are what led to the Democratic Party’s preeminence on the political scene for two generations.
In the intervening decades the underlying landscape of the society and economy changed, and the political environment within which the people were governed changed with it. Many women who during World War II had taken jobs that in prior times had been considered men’s work had mixed feelings about returning to their hearths and homes 24/7. Also the descendants of African slaves, non-white immigrants from elsewhere, and indigenous Americans were not about to return to the previous, subordinate roles “assigned” to them in American society after having served and worked just as honorably and competently during the war as had their European-descended counterparts.
When the women’s movement coalesced in the 1960s and early ‘70s there wasn’t much difference between the two major parties regarding abortion. There were lawmakers in both parties who supported women’s right to choose and also ones on both sides of the aisles who did not. This began to change in the late 1970s for several reasons. As President Johnson allegedly predicted on the occasion of signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party was losing its hold on the “solid south,” as those states elected ever more Republicans to the Congress and state legislatures. Also that party was becoming more conservative, putting behind it the centrist legacy of the Eisenhower administration. Finally, a political movement was emerging among charismatic Christians. Frank Schaeffer, whose father was one of the founders the movement, wrote in Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, that they test-marketed a list of issues to identify the top few that would ignite the emotions of their congregants, and that the two that cleared the bar were homosexuality and abortion. The former has largely receded into the rear view mirror of history as a contentious issue but women’s reproductive rights have not.
As the 1980 election approached the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, was the conservative contender for the Republican nomination for president. His campaign organization and the nascent “Moral Majority” movement came together, and when they decisively won the election the alliance was sealed. Reagan’s reelection for a second term was even more one sided. Another reason for these successes, in addition to the religious right support, was the hurdles that had been put in place by Republican efforts to diminish organized labor’s ability to organize and raise funds for political action. Unions, the reader may recall, had been the backbone of both financial and grassroots support of the Democratic Party since the FDR era.
After the Republican blowout in the 1984 elections some senior Democratic members of Congress and elected state officers organized the Democratic Leadership Council to push the party toward becoming more “business-friendly” in order to attract donations from that sector. Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, was not prominent enough nationally to be included among the DLC founders but he soon joined the movement and became an enthusiastic supporter. As the 1992 election approached, prospects for the Democrats did not look promising given the incumbent seeking reelection, George H. W. Bush, was the one who had overseen the decisive victory in the Gulf War of 1991, and on whose watch the USSR had disintegrated. Therefore several of the Democratic Party’s high-profile presidential prospects, such as Walter Mondale, Mario Cuomo, and Lloyd Bentsen, chose not to run. Governor Clinton, ascertaining a presidential run would raise his national profile even if his campaign was unsuccessful, threw his hat in the ring and won the nomination. However the presidential election of 1992 turned out not to be a routine two-horse race.
During the Reagan and Bush 41 years the national debt had exploded and its economic policies had incentivized corporations to move jobs out of the USA to subsidiaries and subcontractors in countries with lower wages. Ross Perot, a well-known billionaire industrialist from Texas, was alarmed by these trends and decided to run for president. He funded his own campaign to an extent somewhere north of $100 million and, although he didn’t win any states, post election data analyses suggested that in several states he had diverted enough votes from President Bush to tilt the Electoral College vote to Clinton.
A memorable metaphor from Perot’s campaign was the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs being drawn south of the border to Mexico. This was a result of the deregulation and laissez-faire policies introduced by the Reagan administration. The new president chose not to reassert the values that informed the political-economic policies of the Democratic Party’s New Deal legacy. Instead, under the tutelage of former Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Rubin, his Secretary of the Treasury, Clinton doubled down on the neoliberal policies that had been enacted by Republican administrations over the preceding twelve years. Among Clinton’s “accomplishments” were the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and bringing China into the World Trade Organization (WTO). The results were predictable.
The sucking sound became a roar, and it was also heard on the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean as American jobs went to Asian countries. The Democrats took another leaf from the Republican playbook, governing in a way that expanded opportunities for predation. For example antitrust and other consumer protection laws were not enforced rigorously, and obstacles were erected that made it much more challenging to discharge defaulted student loan debt through the bankruptcy process. To Wall Street’s joy the Clinton administration also proceeded with the final dismantling of the restraints on the financial sector, including the Glass Steagall Act.
The policies enacted during the Clinton administration achieved the main objective of the DLC; the Democratic Party did indeed become more than business-friendly enough to raise funds from big business. In fact since the Clinton presidency the party has been dependent on them. But the neoliberal policies also accelerated the job exports and did nothing about wage stagnation that were pushing the American dream out of the reach of ever more of the common people. And it wasn’t just blue and white collar, on-the-clock wage earners who were affected. The trashing of constraints on monopolization and predatory competitive practices were putting thousands of small businesses in the crapper as well.
Neoliberalism also enabled widespread corruption in the FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate – which led to the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse during the first decade of the new century. Shortly after he was sworn in, the newly elected Democratic president Barack Obama told the barons of Wall Street he was the only one standing between them and the pitchforks. He followed through by refusing to investigate, let alone prosecute, the millions of acts of perjury, forgery and fraud that inflated the bubble, And he threw sand in the gears of states' efforts to hold the villains accountable as well. Obama's actions made two things enragingly obvious. The Democratic Party’s dependency on big business Doughnations, and especially those from Wall Street, is an addiction. It also made plain that the United States justice system has multiple tiers; one for the wealthy predators and their minions, and another for the rest of us. (It has a third tier for some minorities but that’s a subject for another time.)
The fact that both parties' establishments are addicted to financial support from the same class of Big Doughnors is the root cause of the dysfunctional gridlock in Washington. Therefore they both have the same top three priorities: don’t piss off the Big Doughnors; don’t piss off the Big Doughnors; and finally don’t piss off the Big Doughnors. How do you avoid pissing off the Big Doughnor class? Simple. By enacting the laws they want, and killing the ones they don’t want. There are some differences among the Big Doughnors around the edges of policy that lead some to favor the Democrats and others the Republicans, but they generally agree on the predatory neoliberal political-economic framework and the imperialist foreign policy. Thus both party establishments minimize as much as possible discussion of these two issue sets. Never mind they are driving ever more people toward poverty with the deluge-up economy and edging us closer to nuclear war by inciting a civilizational confrontation. So much for the well being of the American common people. So how does all this pertain to women’s right to choose?
Serving up what the Big Doughnors want is much easier for the Republicans than it is for the Democrats because of the differences between their grassroots activist and voter bases. Since the GOP allied with the religious right forty plus years ago, evangelical protestants and conservative Roman Catholics have displaced small business and professional people as the dominant demographic in the party’s grassroots. For the most devout of these religious people abortion is an issue that overrides all other considerations. But ever more of today's grassroots Republicans had once usually voted Democrat, in spite of differences on some social issues, because of pocket book interests. When they began to realize it was the Democratic Party’s money that spoke on its side of the aisle in the halls of Congress, and not words needed to follow through on what was spoken and implied back in the states and districts, they started voting red. This was most true of those who disagreed with the Democrats’ social policy agenda, and also people who had been personally mugged by the real world consequences of neoliberalism.
The Democratic Party establishment faces a quandary: the progressive policies fervently favored by the most energetic sector of its base, programs that boost everyone's well being, are antithetical to what their Big Doughnors want. The dilemma this presents is how to keep both the Big Doughnors and the progressive party base on board, and the Party insiders have evolved a layered approach to meeting this challenge. The first layer can be summed up in one word, distraction. Keep the progressive grassroots people thinking and talking about anything other than why the Party doesn’t come through for them in Washington. The Republicans are quite helpful in this regard since there are so many loose verbal cannons on their sides of the aisles in Congress and various state houses around the country. And then there was President Trump. If the Democrats had to lose a presidential election, losing it to a loose-lipped, narcissist like Donald Trump was a god-send. For four full years they were able to keep the progressives at bay by shouting, “But Trump . . . !“
The second layer, Revolving Villain, comes into play when a Democratic president is supported by majorities in both houses, such as is the case with the present 117th Congress. To keep the more strident progressives on board the Party must introduce and push aggressively bills for their favored policies. But when Big Doughnors really, really oppose them the Party leaders in Congress must enlist members of one house or the other to cross the aisle and kill them. Now I'm just a guy in Flyoverland, not a Congress insider. But I do pay attention and make inferences from what I see. And the fate of the Build Back Better bill put forth by the Biden administration in 2021 was a classic example of Revolving Villain in action. Initially Speaker of the House Pelosi promised the progressive activists to couple the Infrastructure bill which Big Dough very much did want with BBB which they abhorred. But late in the process the Speaker reneged on her commitment to the progressives. Both bills passed the House with narrow margins, reflecting the high single digit majority the Democrats held. However the Senate was split 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote. Sure enough two Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kristen Sinema of Arizona, signaled from early on they might vote against BBB as they indeed did. To repeat I’m not an insider. But my guess is that the leaders decided from the get-go that, one way or another, Build Back Better was not gonna happen. All the planning and communicating of how it was going to go down was probably done with vague comments about difficulties, winks, nods and pregnant silences.
There’s been talk of pushing through a bill to establish a right to abortion into federal law but it will probably go down the same way as did Build Back Better. My guess is that the percentage of Big Doughnors who favor stringent bans on abortion is less than that of the population as a whole, which is in the low double digits. However several factors mitigate against the likelihood their hive-mind wants to see such a bill passed by both houses and signed into law. The first is the knowledge that, even if they live in states with stringent restrictions such as Texas or Oklahoma, if their paramours or granddaughters finds themselves inconveniently pregnant they know they have the means and connections needed to get the matter taken care of safely and with utmost discretion. Therefore it’s not a very high priority for them personally on its merits. It’s only the Untermensch who’ll have to live with the consequences. Then there’s the fact abortion is just such good provocation of distraction. Better to keep the controversy simmering as long as possible than to let minds wander to the more basic dysfunctions of neoliberalism such as hit and miss access to overpriced health care and pervasive financial predation. Finally even in their sociopathic hearts the Big Doughnors probably worry that passage of such a law could set up a confrontation between branches of the federal government that could lead to god only knows where.
I'm interested in removing the money from influencing politics... And a lot of other people are too. The more you focus on solutions to that end the better as far as I'm concerned. Cheers.
You are so very close to realizing that at the federal level both parties have been 100% bought and sold for 100 years now and that neither one 'represents' every day Americans at all.
I would focus more on the 'dough' though... Absolutely no one cares about your memories of what got us here.
How do you solve these problems... That is all any one of any seriousness is looking into and focusing on.
But also, don't listen to me, I'm an
complete a**hole.
Keep up the good work.