Coop Scoop August 12 The What's Harris Got To With It Edition

The What's Harris Got To Do With It Edition

August 12 2020
Issue #29

Since Kamala Harris was given the brass ring by Joe Biden I have oscillated between amusement and some bewilderment reading the complaints of so many self-styled “progressives” (a word I put in quotes cuz I have no idea what it really means).

Why is there is so much surprise…no…make that ANY surprise that a mainstream Democratic presidential candidate has named another mainstream Democrat to be his running mate?

Are there people who actually thought Joe Biden would choose a socialist (I know some Sanders supporters wanted that. Why would he choose Karen Bass who DOES have a radical past (very much in the past). And so on.

And why the disappointment? Progressives seem to be permanently disappointed with Democrats. And that is a very very unhealthy position. It puts you constantly in the position of a reactive supplicant, hoping and praying that the Democratic Party is going to “return to its roots.” Of course, it’s real roots were as a mostly agrarian party that fought a civil war to maintain slavery (though I think the PC word is now “enslavement).

The Democratic Party has never been, is not, and will never be a party of the “little guy” – that horrible American euphemism for the working class, the poor, and the oppressed. Except for the Roosevelt period (which did include a massive world war), I can never figure out when the so called golden period of the Democratic Party took place. Certainly, not before FDR. What it with Harry Truman, the cold war and the building of the national security state? Was it JFK and his love of the Special Forces, the origins of Vietnam and the Twilight Struggle against World Communism. Johnson and Vietnam? Carter and Iran and Afghanistan? Clinton and triangulation to pass NAFTA and gut the safety net? Maybe Obama, who did produce the ACA but did very little to rectify foreign policy while he signed off on a $1,6 trillion “modernization” of our nuclear arsenal? You tell me.

The party has had without question its admirable moments. The New Deal was a good deal. The civil rights and voting act legislation was good. So were some of its Supreme Court appointments. And certainly, with the advent of Reaganism that degraded into Bushism and Trumpism, the Democrats have been a much better choice than the Republicans, a party that has become a dangerous joke. That’s no thanks to the Democrats; it’s all the work of Republicans!

Being a better choice, a much better choice, than the Trumpies, however, should not produce amnesia nor fantasies about who the Democrats are. Like the Republican party, they are a party of capital, of Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and, last but not least, ardent supporters of our imperial foreign policy which maintains more than 150 overseas military bases and quietly brandishes enough nukes to blow a hole in the universe.

And while the Republicans went off the rails, the Democrats –really beginning with Clinton—made the very conscious decision to let the labor movement die, to capitulate to the blackmail about deficits, to ignore the urban poor (and the rural poor) and to instead court and shake down the professional managerial class that has occupied and gentrified most old urban centers and is headquartered in Silicon Valley.

The primary difference between the two parties is how they cleave the electorate in order to win elections and gain power. The Republicans rely on the wealthy, the white, the rural and the poorly educated who respond to their flag-waving. The Democrats also genuflect to the wealthy and happily take their money but have aggregated a base among minorities, youth, the better educated and some of the professional classes…. And oh yes, the 6% of the private work force that remains unionized. This is not a moral commitment. It’s an electoral strategy.

What’s thrown a wrench into thinking about this ruling duopoly has been the rise of Bernie Sanders starting in 2016. A very moderate socialist (really a social democrat), Bernie inspired millions of young people to join his cause and he created a bit of an earthquake inside the Democratic Party. That is all great and we should be happy about that.

The other side of the Sanders coin, and certainly not Bernie’s fault, has been the wildly excessive voluntarism and self-delusion of what we might call the Democratic Left… the Bernie and maybe even the Warren Left. Watching Bernie’s meteoric rise 4 years ago and his strong but short-lived start this time around created among way too many the totally false illusion that this new “progressive” wing was on the verge of taking over the Democratic Party. Really?

This led to further delusions: like progressives all of a sudden identifying all non-Sanders supporters as “centrists” and then turning that descriptor into something just short of being synonymous with fascist.

Note to progressives: If you ever come to national power, you are going to have govern in coalition with a whole lot of centrists unless you think something like a 20% plurality is enough to govern the United States.

This illusion of rising progressive power was further fueled by the congressional victories of folks like Ilhan Omar and AOC who were radicals elected as Democrats. Again, keep this in perspective. Both come from deep blue districts and of the 454 in the House, most experts figure that, at most, “progressives” of the AOC cut might be able to win in about ten percent of them. That leaves a lot of room for growth but also warns of a very low ceiling. An undeniable fact: most Democratic voters are pretty moderate. After all it was the African-American vote in South Carolina that dead-ended Bernie and boosted Biden.

The fundamental problem, IMHO, has been the failure of the Democratic Left to build political structures independent of the Democratic Party. There is no contradiction in being a Sanders supporter, or even a delegate and still belonging to a political organization that organizes independently.

Don’t know if you noticed, but the Democratic Party is not a disciplined Leninist party where you pay dues and hold a membership card. It’s merely a collection of local and national mafias that you decide to vote for as it is, indeed, the lesser of two evils. Voting Democratic does not and should not make you automatically a member of the Democratic Party,

And, yet, most progressives spend too much time muttering about how the Democrats are too weak, too timid, too soft and gosh darn I wish they would do this or that or choose this or that person. That is all time wasted.