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I M P R E S S I O N S
Hi, my name is Steve, and I’m a recovering New Democrat. My conversion to the New Democrats in the early ’90s was a marriage of convenience. While I disagreed with much of their ideology, I was impressed by their ability to win elections, something liberal Democrats had been failing to do at the national level. The switch didn’t happen overnight. Mine was a slow-burning disenchantment. I can trace it back, I suppose, to the 1968 presidential election, the first campaign to stir my political consciousness. I was 13 at the time and a passionate supporter of Hubert H. Humphrey. I watched with horror as many fellow liberals refused to support Humphrey, based mostly on his somewhat equivocal position on the Vietnam War. Although Richard Nixon was unquestionably a much worse candidate from both a liberal and an anti-war perspective, these liberals refused, “as a matter of principle,” to vote for Humphrey. Their reward? Politics of racial division, enemies’ lists, Watergate, the Burger Court and four more years of Vietnam.
Nixons’ victory caused the first of three great episodes of politics-induced depression in my life. It left me feeling morose for weeks, particularly since Nixon had promised to appoint conservative "strict constructionists" to the Supreme Court — an act I viewed as nothing less than apocalyptic. There is a certain irony, I suppose, in the fact that some 32 years later, Chief Justice Rehnquist, a surviving Nixon Supreme Court appointee, was part of the five-justice majority that gave the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, thereby bringing on the most recent episode of politics-induced depression. As they say, some gifts just keep on giving. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Before Bush, there was the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, which caused the second (and most profound) depression. The election was a watershed event in American politics, and I knew it. Up until that time, I had always viewed Reagan as a fringe politician — a right-wing nut, if you will. Now, all of a sudden, he was the mainstream and I was the oddball. Reagan’s two terms were followed, of course, by one term of George H. Bush. All told, between 1969 and 1993, the GOP held the White House for all but the four years of the Carter administration. By the early ’90s, the political landscape of the United States had changed in fundamental ways: The “wealth gap” between the very rich and the rest of society had grown substantially; regulation of business abuses had become a joke; labor unions had been largely emasculated; the national debt had skyrocketed; and the Supreme Court had gone from liberal to conservative, and then from conservative to extreme-right-wing conservative. And one other thing had happened: I was sick and tired of losing, and so too, I believe, were most other liberal Democrats. We wanted the White House. And in exchange for a winner, a lot of us were prepared to make some pragmatic compromises. Enter the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC is, of course, the organization of the New Democrats. New Democrats are, in many ways, very similar to the old Republicans who used to run the GOP, back before the Religious Right took over. They tend to be moderately liberal on social issues and moderately conservative on economic issues. In other words, they are both pro-choice and pro-business. These folks are pragmatic with a capital P. There has, in fact, always been a certain finger-in-the-air quality to the DLC. New Democrats often support politically popular, but socially unproductive policies like the death penalty, mandatory-minimum sentences for drug offenses and ‘three strikes and you’re out” laws. They have also been extraordinarily successful, as Democrats go, in corporate political fund raising — which at times has seemed to mute their willingness to fight for economic justice for working people and consumers. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the DLC policy agenda, from a liberal perspective, is their almost total abandonment of the party’s traditional defense of the economically underprivileged. New Democrats have, for example, strongly supported some of the cruelest aspects of welfare reform legislation. All this being said, however, the truth remains that the New Democrats kept their promise to the Democratic Party — they gave us the presidency. And we had it for a full eight years, which was no small accomplishment considering that before Bill Clinton no single Democrat had won two terms in the White House since FDR. They also helped to make the party broadly respectable again. Let’s face it, the old party had lost the confidence of much of the public; it needed a good kick in the butt and the DLC delivered. But the Democratic Party also paid a price for embracing this new brand of pragmatic politics. I don’t think I personally realized how great that price was until the post-election Battle of Florida. Then, along with the rest of America, I saw, to my amazement, how much harder the Republicans were willing to fight than we Democrats were — and how much more they seemed to care about the outcome. Democrats were interested; Republicans were inflamed. It may not have changed the final result, but the truth is, we let them push us around. Later, after the Supreme Court handed the election to Bush, rank and file Democrats did finally get mad, boiling mad. But by then there was nothing we could do about it. This lack of activism on the part of Democrats, at a time when all the marbles were on the line, mystified me at first. Plainly, we had at least as much reason to get worked up as the Republicans did. Our guy, after all, had won the popular vote and almost certainly would have won the race in Florida if election officials there had done even a halfway competent job of running the election. The real question was not, as the media kept insisting, why Democrats couldn’t just accept the Bush “victory” and move on. The real question was why so many of us accepted it so easily. Where, in short, was our passion? The answer, I’m afraid, is that most Democrats felt there was little to be passionate about. Aside from Gore’s populist-tinged acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, which made Gore sound almost like, well, a Democrat, the campaign quickly fell back on the DLC’s cautious, hug-the-middle positions. Then there were all the little compromises of principle Gore made on issues that many Democrats care about. For me, the worst example was his argument for the death penalty. There he was, the nominee of my party, telling the nation during one of the debates that he supported capital punishment because of its value as a deterrent. “Bullshit,” I remember muttering at the time. While I could almost accept that Bush was dumb enough to believe that, there was no way Gore was. It was a political cop-out. He was saying what he thought would sell — just as the New Democrats had been doing for the past decade. “I’m sick of New Democrats,” I told a friend the next day. “I want my party to stand for something.” Yes, I still voted for Gore. But voting for someone is very different than throwing yourself into the race, and my vote is all Al Gore got. He didn’t get my labor, my energy or my passion. The same was true with a lot of other progressive Democrats, the more disillusioned of whom turned to Nader. And when the election was on the line in Florida during the recount, most of us just sat on our hands and waited to see what would happen. Gore had just never generated the kind of passion that would cause supporters to storm the political barricades. I can’t help but believe that the timid pragmatism of the DLC, which had been Al Gore’s political companion for so long, betrayed him in the end. And that’s a damn shame, because every thing else I’ve said notwithstanding, I honestly believe that he could have been a truly fine president, especially if he had only been willing to take the chance of following his beliefs. The damage this compulsive pragmatism has done to the Democratic Party still haunts us today, and is particularly apparent in the Democrats’ absurdly timid response to Bush’s political agenda. Here’s a guy, remember, who was elected without a mandate and who, despite having campaigned as a moderate, has now jetted to the right faster than John Ashcroft can say “God save the Confederacy.” If Democrats don’t have the backbone to fight under these circumstances, when will they? But there they were, 12 Democratic senators, voting in favor of a Bush tax plan that was not only a shameful payoff to his wealthy campaign contributors, but was also based on numbers that simply don’t add up. Apparently, the thought of voting against anything entitled a ‘tax cut,” just seemed too politically dicey for this bunch. So here I am, a recovering New Democrat. Make no mistake, I still want to win and I still have no use for the ’spiting into the wind” brand of politics represented by the Nader campaign. But I also want winning to mean something more than just being able to say, “Thank God the other guy didn’t win.” I want the next Democratic candidate to stand on principle. I want my party to be more than a weathervane. In the final analysis, after all, progressive politics isn’t supposed to be all about victories at the polls. It’s also supposed to be about victories in the battle for social justice. It’s time for the Democratic Party to get back its soul. Steven C. Day is an attorney practicing in Wichita, Kansas. His column appears here bi-weekly. Related Sites |
