Acceptance by the Democratic Party and at least half its
liberal activists of its reliance on the New Majority signifies its acceptance of
the death of the New Deal coalition and, with it, of the century old
progressive agenda.
The New Deal coalition of the industrial and agricultural,
urban and rural American proletariat, the urban and rural poor including among
the latter the impoverished and marginal small farmers of all regions, supported
the biggest dose of socialism American had ever had to swallow in such a large,
single gulp, its most notable achievement being a vast and compulsory public
pension savings program, Social Security.
And that same coalition, though already beginning to fall
apart, enabled the further principal gains of the Great Society including
Medicaid and expanded Welfare, Food Stamps, Head Start, and Medicare.
And throughout it all there was an accompanying burgeoning
of the regulatory state in the interests of protecting America’s workers,
consumers, the general public, and the environment from the unacceptable
results in our own homeland of the dictatorship of capitalists through market forces
in the name of free competition.
And there were accompanying massive developments at the
national and state levels making higher and professional and technical
education much more widespread and available to the children of ordinary
Americans than ever before.
But the coalition was significantly eroded in the 1960’s when
the Democratic Party’s sacrifice of the blood and treasure of ordinary
Americans to finance a policy of global containment of communism on behalf of
global capitalism came to grief in Vietnam and created lasting antipathies between
America’s working class with its Cold Warrior labor leaders on the one side and
the rising generation of liberals who would be the party’s future leaders and
activists on the other.
That was the same decade in which the last great progressive
president, LBJ, knowingly gave up the “Solid South” to the Republicans by
vigorous measures against Jim Crow while all over the country Americans witnessed
unprecedented outbursts of long-enduring and reciprocal racial hatreds of
blacks and whites.
And then in the next decade the Supremes gave us Roe, the
Jewel in the Crown of the sexual revolution in the law it had been working at
since the late 1950’s, and liberals across America supported them at the cost
of another blow to the Democratic coalition that had previously included
grass-roots Protestant Christianity from the age of Bryan to and even beyond the
end of Prohibition.
The white South and much of the center of the country went
over to the Republicans, newly committed to conservative and fundamentalist
religion and morals along with the defense of white people against black and
other non-white enmities.
Over all that time, a party whose agenda was, in contrast to
the Republicans, one of advancing social democracy and control of the economy
for the good of its working class and ordinary people and whose electoral base
reflected its agenda has mutated enormously.
New elements have, over the years, been added to the working
class agenda of progressivism in successful efforts on behalf of secularism,
the sexual revolution, environmentalism, and racial equality and inclusion.
And thanks in part to the conservative takeover of the Republican
Party and the rise of the hard, Bircher right to national power the mass
politics of electioneering and propaganda of both major parties and all
political movements have fallen, in the US, more and more under the control of
Big Money out to rein in and even undo Big Government.
While its New Deal constituency has eroded over all that
time so has the commitment of the Democratic Party to American social democracy.
The real value to its dependents of Social Security and
Medicare has steadily dropped for decades under Republican and Democratic
administrations.
The affordability of higher education to the non-rich of
America has continuously dropped to the point of now being a national crisis.
The power of unions has diminished in the face of increasingly
hostile Republicanism and indifference from Democrats.
Bill Clinton betrayed the Great Society with his “welfare
reforms” and Barack Obama has betrayed both FDR and LBJ with his attacks on
Social Security and Medicare.
And O did it to finance other, more subtle betrayals, first
to finance a national program of compulsory purchase of health insurance from
private companies that has still left some forty million Americans without
health coverage.
And now to pay for a national program of public works to be
carried out as a boondoggle for private and anti-union contractors and not by
the new WPA the professional and further lefts have repeatedly called for since
the collapse of 2008.
The era of Big Government is over, as Bill Clinton told us,
to the everlasting shame of America’s most shameless man.
And the New Deal coalition of those whose interests it served
has now been pretty much openly and wholly abandoned.
The new model Democratic Party is quite frankly out to be as
friendly to the Big Money and the Big Money interests as it can be and still
win elections.
Elections it plans to win by relying not on a working class it
has helped to fragment into nearly complete political insignificance and
economic helplessness but on long-standing divisions among Americans around
issues of race, religion, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity.
And that will allow Democrats to win, once in a while, even
as they join with the Republicans across the aisle in bipartisan elite projects
of globalization in which liberals and conservatives, but especially the billionaire
class, sell us all out for the greater good of the very rich and, allegedly, of the non-rich who are not Americans
and are in so many ways more deserving of their solicitude than we.
