Breakdown

Curt Mudgeon

July 2005

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has been making headlines. He hates Republicans, called them brain-dead, evil, and corrupt.  He also accused them of bigotry---ah, are they not the party of “white Christians”?  Many of them, he averred, do not work an honest day, and Tom DeLay, majority leader of the House, belongs in jail. 

Political analysts of the liberal press somehow excuse this deportment as a device “to energise the base” of the Democratic Party, and dismiss it as “passionate rhetoric.”  Although a few---very few---prominent Democrats in the Congress piously distanced themselves from the chairman’s boorish utterances, no one asked Mr Dean to resign or even to apologise.  Actually, those who seem to reprove his behavior have been guilty of the same sin for about five years.  Repeatedly, leading Democrats in the House and the Senate have accused the president of lying to the people, of betraying the country, of using his office to enrich his wealthy friends, of starting a war to gain political power, and of general ineptitude and perfidy.  More recently, the Senate minority leader called him “a loser” before an assembly of high-school students, and Illinois senator Richard Durbin, minority whip, equated the treatment of enemy detainees at Guantanamo to practices of nazi camps, Soviet gulags, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, thereby likening the Bush administration to murderous dictatorships.  After declaring that he would not apologise, Mr Durbin presented what he called an apology but was not really an apology and did not fool anyone acquainted with the English language.  Again, Democrats and friends invoked the notion of “passionate rhetoric” to minimise the senator’s outrageous accusations, as if passion could excuse anything.  The same kind of questionable “passion” pervades Senate hearings to the point that they have lost their investigative purposes to become a platform used by Democrats constantly to defame the Bush administration. 

So, Mr Dean is not just a loose cannon, and reports that Democrats with presidential ambitions would have discreetly asked him to shut up are dubious. The DNC chairman, who is no more offensive than, say, Senator Kennedy, actually represents the mainstream of the party, and much more so as his rants actually “energise the base.”  His conduct yields good hints about the party’s strategy, the tenor of his mission, and why he got his job.

Under the guise of “fighting for the little guy,” Democrats for decades maintained a status of majority party with a New Deal vision of government backed up by big labour unions.  Even though fewer Democrats than Republicans had voted in Congress for the passage of the civil-rights laws, the Democratic Party under the banner of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society managed to secure the support of racial minorities.  Eager to firm up their grip on power, they expanded their base to a motley coalition of pacifists, feminists, environmentalists, homosexuals, and other groups with causes, including the ACLU and hordes of tort lawyers.  There, they achieved some measure of success not so much by legislation, but through decisions by judiciary allies who contrived to find in the Constitution new special rights or interdictions. 

Regardless, by the late 1970s, our economy was in the dumps, and many “little guys” started realising that the results of the Democrats’ governance did not match its social promise.  The unabashed partisanship of the liberal mainstream media, the class-warfare theme of the campaign, and the accusations that the Republicans would inaugurate an era of misery could not stop the Reagan revolution.  Mr Reagan, whom Clark Clifford called an “amiable dunce,” understood politics, economics, and human nature better that most of his predecessors.  He tangibly demonstrated to the people that, contrary to the opposition’s claims, tax cuts not only effect economic expansion, but also increase government revenue.  The idea that “soaking the rich” was bad policy started gaining ground in the electorate.   That the “amiable dunce” could put the economy on track, restore American self-confidence, and at the same time cause the demise of the USSR also exposed the Democrats’ strategy for what it was, invectives substituting for ideas.

Twelve years later, still smarting from the successes of the Reagan administration and seeing a need for strategic corrections, the DNC found a suitable candidate in Mr Clinton, who managed to present himself as a “little guy” who had made good and therefore could claim some empathy for the condition of the “little guy.”  Mr Clinton also had reserves of empathy for other segments of the population.  He impressed on blacks that he uniquely appreciated their plight by making up memories about his childhood in the South.  Mr Clinton somewhat toned down the class-warfare rhetoric and understood that some of the prosperity inherited from the tax cuts of the 1980s should be preserved.  He nevertheless raised taxes, taking advantage of the unfortunate “read my lips” reversal of his rival.  By that time, as Republicans were regaining a majority in the House, the influence of big labor unions had declined, and Mr Clinton’s “triangulation” set out to expand the party’s base to suburban middle-class and upper-middle-class constituencies---yuppies and “soccer moms”---by asserting that their prosperity was too fragile to forgo government intervention.  That worked, even in the confines of Silicon Valley, where well-to-do computer programmers and engineers had been inculcated during their time in college with leftist opinions about social democracy and big government. 

By the end of the 1990s, the Democrats’ constituency was showing a few cracks.  First, the assemblage of special interests with many conflicting demands on the government had become a tad brittle and difficult to satisfy.  Second, Mr Clinton’s triangulations with an eye on the political center did not sit well with the sizeable hard-left segment of the party base represented in the House by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC).  Third, the Republicans had gained in 1994 a majority in the House, thus showing that the suburban votes could not be taken for granted.  Fourth, the mainstream information media, long-time allies of the Democrats, had lost their quasi monopoly on the delivery and analysis of the news.  Conservative voices that had found effective outlets on the radio, cable television, and the Internet were convincingly challenging the Left’s societal model.  Their popularity, constituted a potential threat to the Democrats’ very base.  Strategic adjustments to meet this threat were to define the theme of Mr Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.

What could the Democrat candidate do to win the election?  The old reservoir of favors to special interests was running dry.  The Clinton administration’s push for a government-run universal health insurance had failed.  Shrill claims of activists notwithstanding, matters of civil rights had become moot with the widespread application of racial preferences in hiring and education, along with the myriad of programs benefitting minorities.  Since the 1980s, the politics of envy had lost some of their effectiveness, and a substantial fraction of the citizenry looked upon promises of government largess with growing suspicion.  There were, however, a few problems of national importance to which a candidate of presidential mettle could have proposed solutions, namely, the foreseeable demise of the Social Security and Medicare programs, and an imminent recession.  The former---the “third rail of politics”--- required too much caution and too much imagination to constitute a reliable plank in the Democrats’ campaign platform.  Effective measures to parry the latter---tax cuts---were ideologically too repugnant to the Left for consideration, even though they could have been easily justified by the budget surplus. 

Thus Mr Gore, a man of little imagination, had nothing positive to propose in support of his candidacy.  He also worried about the possible effects of conservative broadcasts on the vulnerable components of a Democrat electorate that no longer clearly outnumbered its Republican counterpart.  So, he chose to focus his efforts on “energising the base” by depicting the Republicans as a bunch of obscurantist, despotic, greedy, bigoted churls bent on turning the clock of civilisation back to the Dark Ages.  The inflammatory rhetoric also aimed to attract the “Democrats-and-Republicans-are-the-same” crowd that customarily voted for some fringe socialist candidate, or for Ralph Nader, or just did not vote.  This move implicitly redefined the party base as a hard-left bloc.  It also advanced the CPC’s progress towards the objective of framing Democrat policies, with consequences for the future of the party.

For unknown reasons, the CPC somehow manages to escape the scrutiny of the news media.  Relatively few people know about it in spite of its interesting raison d’être.  It was created in the early 1990s as a congressional arm of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) with the declared objective of evolving our republic into a social democracy.  Initially represented on the Internet by a link on the DSA’s site, it got its own site at the end of the decade, probably to be a tad more discreet about its purpose.  To lift any doubt about the political hue of the organisation, suffice it to mention that its chairmanship is shared by Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, and that its roster, fifty-four strong, includes John Conyers, Rosa DeLauro, Barney Franks, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Tom Lantos, James McDermott, Jerrold Nadler, Fortney “Pete” Stark, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, and minority leader Nancy Pelosi.  The group’s political strategy essentially consists of gumming up the works.  The CPC is fond of revealing conspiracies that do not exist, of accusing Republicans of evil designs, of practising parliamentary obstruction, and of rousing its constituencies with claims of “social injustice.”  Its anti-capitalist rhetoric is the same as that of a European far Left in search of a political “Third Way” that differs from socialism only in name. 

That an unrestrained Howard Dean was elected to head the DNC perfectly fits the strategy and tactics of the Democratic Party, which are currently indistinguishable of those of the CPC and inescapably suggest a commonality of goals.  This wide shift to the left, however, may be seen by some strategists as benefitting the party in the long run.  In the current climate, any Democrat with presidential aspirations able to tone down his rhetoric only by a notch and showing just a hint of moderation will comparatively look reasonable and electable.  The mainstream news media will call that a “move to the center” even though there will be no such move, only a change of dress intended once more to fool some of the people.  Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden have already sent some signals of such bogus “move.”  If successful, however, the candidate once in office will have to toe the hard-left line of a base radicalised by eight years of foulmouthed politics, a victory for the CPC, and a terrible loss for the Republic.