Why the Democratic Party Can't Save Us From Trump's Authoritarianism
Monday, August 21, 2017
By Henry Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) speaks alongside fellow Democrats, (L-R) Senate
Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Sen.
Joe Donnelly (D-IN) during an event to unveil 'A Better Deal On Trade and
Jobs', in front of the US Capitol on August 2, 2017 in Washington, DC.
(Photo: Mark Wilson / Getty Images)
There is a certain duplicity in the Democratic Party's attempts to remake
itself as the enemy of the corporate establishment and a leader in a
movement to resist Trump and his mode of authoritarianism.
Democrats, such as Ted Lieu, Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren, represent
one minority faction of the party that rails against Trump's racism and
authoritarianism while less liberal types who actually control the party,
such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, claim that they have heard the cry
of angry workers and are in the forefront of developing an opposition party
that will reverse many of the policies that benefited the financial elite.
Both views are part of the Democratic Party's attempt to rebrand itself.
The Democrats' new populist platform, called "A Better Deal: Better Skills,
Better Jobs, Better Wages" has echoes of FDR's New Deal, but it says little
about developing both a radical democratic vision and economic and social
policies that would allow the Democratic Party to speak more for the poor,
people of color and young people than for the corporate and financial elite
that run the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Their anti-Trump
rhetoric rings hollow.
For Democratic Party leaders, the rebranding of the party rests on the
assumption that resistance to Trump merely entails embracing the needs of
those who are the economic losers of neoliberalism and globalization. What
they forget is that authoritarianism thrives on more than economic
discontent, as the recent white supremacist violence in Charlottesville,
Virginia, made clear. Authoritarianism also thrives on racism, xenophobia,
exclusion, expulsion and the deeming of certain subgroups as "disposable" --
a script that the "new" Democratic Party has little to say about.
David Broder has recently argued that being anti-Trump is not a sufficient
political position because doing so inures people to a myriad of neoliberal
policies that have impoverished the working class, destroyed the welfare
state, waged foreign wars and a war on public goods, polluted the
environment, created massive inequities and expanded the reach of the
punishing and mass incarceration state. Even though these neoliberal
policies were produced by both Republicans and liberal Democrats, this
message appears to have been taken up, at least partly, by the Democrats in
a focused attempt to rebrand themselves as the guardians of working class
interests.
For too many members of the Democratic Party, Trump is the eccentric clown
who unexpectedly stepped into history by finding the right note in rousing
an army of "deplorables" willing to invest in his toxic script of hatred,
demonization and exclusion. Of course, as Anthony DiMaggio, Thomas Frank,
Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, Paul Street and others have pointed out,
this is a false yet comforting narrative for a liberal elite whose moralism
is as suffocating as is their belief in centrist politics. Neoliberal
policies, especially under Clinton and Obama, created the conditions for
Trump to actually come to power in the first place.
Trump's presidency represents not merely the triumph of authoritarianism but
also the tragedy of a neoliberal capitalism that benefited investment
bankers, Wall Street, lawyers, hedge fund managers and other members of the
financial elite who promoted free trade, financial deregulation, cutthroat
competition and commercialization as the highest measure of individual and
market freedom. Trump is not simply the result of a surprising voter turnout
by an angry, disgruntled working class (along with large segments of the
white suburban middle class), he is also the endpoint of a brutal economic
and political system that celebrated the market as the template for
governing society while normalizing a narrative of greed, self-interest and
corporate power. Trump is the mirror reflection of the development of a form
of illiberal democracy and authoritarianism that mixes neoliberal economic
policies, anti-immigrant bigotry, the stifling of free speech,
hyper-nationalism and a politics of disposability and exclusion.
A History of Betrayal by Both Political Parties
Getting in bed with Wall Street has also been a favorite pastime of the
Democratic Party.
The tyranny of the current moment bespeaks a long history of betrayal by a
financial and political class that inhabits both major parties. It is no
secret that the Republican Party has been laying the groundwork for an
American-style authoritarianism since the 1970s by aggressively pushing for
massive tax cuts for the rich, privatizing public goods, promoting a culture
of fear, crushing trade unions, outsourcing public services and eliminating
restrictions designed to protect workers, women and the environment. But
they have not been the only party reproducing the dictates of neoliberalism.
Getting in bed with Wall Street has also been a favorite pastime of the
Democratic Party.
It was the Democratic Party, especially under President Clinton, that
prepared the groundwork for the financial crisis of 2007 by loosening
corporate and banking regulations while at the same time slashing welfare
provisions and creating the conditions for the intensification of the mass
incarceration state. The Clinton administration did more than court Wall
Street, it played a decisive role in expanding the neoliberal gains that
took place three decades before he was elected. Nancy Fraser insightfully
sums this up in her contribution to The Great Regression anthology:
Neoliberalism developed in the United States roughly over the last three
decades and was ratified with Bill Clinton's election in 1992.... Turning
the US economy over to Goldman Sachs, it deregulated the banking system and
negotiated the free-trade agreements that accelerated
deindustrialization.... Continued by his successors, including Barack Obama,
Clinton's policies degraded the living conditions of all working people, but
especially those employed in industrial production. In short, Clintonism
bears a heavy share of responsibility for the weakening of unions, the
decline of real wages, the increasing precarity of work, and the rise of the
'two-earner family' in place of the defunct family wage.
The Obama administration continued this abandonment of democratic values by
bailing out the bankers and selling out millions of people who lost their
homes while at the same time aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers. It was
the Obama administration that added a kill list to its foreign policy and
matched it domestically with educational policies that collapsed education
into vocational training and undermined it as a moral and democratizing
public good. Obama mixed neoliberalism's claim to unbridled economic and
political power with an educational reform program that undermined the
social imagination and the critical capacities that made democracy possible.
Promoting charter schools and mind-numbing accountability schemes, Obama and
the Democratic Party paved the way for the appointment of the hapless
reactionary billionaire Betsy DeVos as Trump's Secretary of Education. And
it was the Obama administration that enlarged the surveillance state while
allowing CIA operatives who tortured and maimed people in the name of
American exceptionalism and militarism to go free. In short, the flirtation
of neoliberalism with the forces of illiberal democracy was transformed into
a courtship during the Clinton and Obama administrations and until death do
us part under Trump.
The growing disregard for public goods, such as schools and health care, the
weakening of union power, the erosion of citizenship to an act of
consumption, the emptying out of political participation, and the widening
social and economic inequality are not only the product of a form of
ideological extremism and market fundamentalism embraced by Republicans. The
Democratic Party also has a long legacy of incorporating the malicious
policies of neoliberalism in their party platforms in order to curry favor
with the rich and powerful. Neoliberalism stands for the death of democracy,
and the established political parties have functioned as its accomplice.
Both political parties, to different degrees, have imposed massive misery
and suffering on the American people and condemned many to what David
Graeber has described in his book The Democracy Project as "an apparatus of
hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future." While
Trump and the Republican Party leadership display no shame over their strong
embrace of neoliberalism, the allegedly reform-minded Democratic Party
covers up its complicity with Wall Street and uses their alleged opposition
to Trump to erase their criminogenic history with casino capitalism. With
Republican majorities, mainstream Democrats share an unwillingness to detach
themselves from an ideology that challenges the substance of a viable
democracy and the public spheres and formative cultures that make it
possible.
Democratic Party Remains Complicit in Neoliberal and Authoritarian Politics
Chris Hedges has laid bare both the complicity of the Democratic Party in
neoliberal and authoritarian politics as well as the hypocrisy behind its
claim to be the only political alternative to challenge Trump's
illiberalism. He is worth quoting at length:
The liberal elites, who bear significant responsibility for the death of our
democracy, now hold themselves up as the saviors of the republic. They have
embarked, despite their own corruption and their complicity in neoliberalism
and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous moral crusade to topple Donald
Trump. It is quite a show.... Where was this moral outrage when our privacy
was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on
Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3
million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people
of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the
vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of
legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea
of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks
and hedge fund managers? Why did they cater to the foibles and utterings of
fellow elites, all the while blacklisting critics of the corporate state and
ignoring the misery of the poor and the working class? Where was their moral
righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East
and our militarized police carried out murderous rampages?
According to Katie Sanders, writing in PunditFact, under the Obama
presidency, the Democrats "lost 11 governorships, 13 U.S. Senate seats, 69
House seats, and 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative
chambers." And the losses and humiliations got worse in 2016 elections. It
is no secret that the Democratic Party is a political formation of
diminished power and hopes. Yet, in the face of Trump's authoritarianism, it
has attempted to reinvent itself as the party of reform by updating its worn
out economic policies and ideological scripts. As proof of its
reincarnation, it has proposed a platform titled "A Better Deal," signaling
a populist turn in economic policy. A number of its economic reforms would
certainly help benefit the poor and underprivileged. These include proposed
increases of the minimum wage to $15, tax credits to encourage job training
and hiring, regulations to lower drug costs, stronger anti-trust laws and a
trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. The platform, however, does not support
universal health care, and it says nothing about providing free higher
education, reducing military spending or reversing the huge growth in
inequality.
As Anthony DiMaggio points out, the plan "doesn't even reach a Bernie
Sanders level of liberalism, and it is a far cry from the kind of
progressive populist policies introduced in FDR's New Deal and Johnson's
Great Society/War on Poverty." Eric Cheyfitz adds to this argument by
insisting that the plan does nothing to challenge the rapacious system of
unfettered capitalism the Democrats and Republicans have supported since the
1970s. Democrats are completely unrepentant about having supported the
deregulation of capital and thus ushered in a new form of US
authoritarianism. Moreover, any reform policy worth its name would directly
address income inequality and the power of the military-industrial complex,
while fighting for single-payer health care and a redistribution of wealth
and power. There will have to be a massive refiguring of power and
redistribution of wealth to address the health care crisis, poverty, climate
change, inadequacies in education and the plague of mass incarceration --
problems not addressed in the Better Deal. It is not unreasonable to assume
that such vexing challenges cannot be addressed within a two-party system
that supports the foundational elements of predatory capitalism.
In spite of the horrendous neoliberal ideology and reactionary policies
driving the Democratic Party, various Democrats and progressives cannot
bring themselves to denounce either capitalism as the bane of democracy nor
its suffocating hold on its reform efforts. They appear thunderstruck when
asked to denounce a corrupt two-party system and develop a social movement
and political apparatus that supports democratic socialism.
For instance, unrepentant centrist liberals, such as Mark Penn and Andrew
Stein, have castigated progressives within the party while unapologetically
embracing neoliberalism as a reform strategy. They believe that the
Democratic Party has lost its base because it rushed to defend "identity
politics" and leftist ideas and that workers felt abandoned by the party's
"shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing
police and tough anti-crime measures." Instead, they claim that the
Democratic Party needs "to reject socialist ideas and adopt an agenda of
renewed growth, greater protection for American workers ... return to fiscal
responsibility, and give up on ... defending sanctuary cities."
This sounds like a script written by a Trump policy advisor. It gets worse.
Others such as Leonard Steinhorn have argued that the real challenge facing
the Democratic Party is not to change their policies but their brand and
messaging techniques. This argument suggests that the Democrats lost their
base because they failed to win the messaging battle rather than the loss
being due to moving to the right and aligning themselves with corporate and
moneyed interests.
Suffering from an acute loss of historical memory, Jonathan Chait argues
that the Democratic Party never embraced the policies of neoliberalism and
has in its recent incarnations actually moved to the left, upholding the
principles of the New Deal and Great Society. As Leah Hunt-Hendrix observes:
One need not be anti-capitalist to understand that the Democratic [Party]
... allowed for policies that deregulated the finance sector (under
President Bill Clinton), allowed for the privatization of many public goods
(including the weakening of the public education system through the
promotion of charter schools) and bailed out Wall Street banks without
taking measures to truly address the needs of struggling working Americans.
Chait seems to have overlooked the fact that Trump and Sanders have proved
conclusively that the working class no longer belongs to the Democratic
Party or that the Democratic Party under Clinton and Obama became the
vanguard of neoliberalism. He goes even further, arguing implausibly that
neoliberalism is simply an epithet used by the left to discredit liberals
and progressive Democrats. Chait appears oblivious to the transformation of
the Democratic Party into an adjunct of the rich and corporate elite.
Is Chait unaware of Clinton's elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act, his
gutting of the welfare system and love affair with Wall Street, among his
many missteps? How did he miss Obama's bailout of Goldman-Sachs, the
abandonment of education as a public good, his attack on whistleblowers, or
the Democrats' assault on organized labor via NAFTA? Was he unware that, in
a White House interview given to Noticias Univision 23, Obama admitted that
his "policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I
had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican?"
In the end, Chait is most concerned about what he calls an attempt on the
part of the left to engage in the trick of bracketing "the center-left with
the right as 'neoliberal' and force progressives to choose between that and
socialism." He goes on to say that "The 'neoliberal' accusation is a
synecdoche for the American left's renewed offensive against the center-left
and a touchstone in the struggle to define progressivism after Barack Obama
[and] is an attempt to win an argument with an epithet." Because of his fear
of democratic socialism, Chait is like many other centrists in the
Democratic Party who are oblivious to the damaging effects of the
scorched-earth neoliberal polices adopted under the Clinton and Obama
administrations.
Other progressive spokespersons, such as John Nichols and Leah Hunt-Hendrix,
and groups, such as Our Revolution and the Incorruptibles, want to rebuild
the Democratic Party from the base up by running candidates with progressive
values "for local offices: in state houses, city councils, planning
commissions, select boards and more." The emphasis here would be for
activists to revitalize and take over the Democratic Party by turning it to
the left so that it will stand up for the poor and underprivileged.
Tom Gallagher adds to this reform strategy by arguing that Bernie Sanders
should join the Democratic Party -- forgetting that when he supported
Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, he presented himself as a
defacto member of the party in all but name.
Many of the strategies proposed to move the Democratic Party away from its
history of centrism and the violence of neoliberalism are noble: If they
were enacted at the level of policies and power relations, they would
certainly make life easier for the poor, vulnerable and excluded.
Progressives are right to be motivated and inspired by Sanders's courage and
policies. Sanders's campaign against a rigged economy that redistributed
wealth and income upward on a massive scale to the rich and corporate robber
barons, coupled with his critique of the fixed political system that
protected neoliberalism, provided a new language that had the potential to
be visionary. But there is a difference between calling for reform and
offering a new and compelling vision with an emphasis on a radical
transformation of the political and economic systems.
At the same time, calls for a new vision and supporting values for radical
democratic change do not mean abandoning attempts at reforming the
Democratic Party as much as viewing such attempts as part of a broader
strategy designed to make immediate progressive gains on a number of fronts.
Most importantly, such a strategy moves beyond reform by pushing the party
to its ideological and political limits so as to make visible the endpoint
of liberal reform. At stake here is the assumption that such a strategy will
make clear that the Democratic Party is incapable of being transformed
radically and as such should not be expected to be on the forefront of
radical democratic change.
Political and ideological centrism is endemic to the Democratic Party: It
has never called for restructuring a system that is corrupt to the core. As
a result, in the words of Nancy Fraser, the antidote to authoritarianism "is
a left project that redirects the rage and the pain of the dispossessed
towards a deep societal restructuring and a democratic political
'revolution'." The power of a left-progressive presence in the United States
will, in part, depend on developing a comprehensive and accessible narrative
that is able, as Nancy Fraser observes, to "articulate the legitimate
grievances of Trump supporters with a fulsome critique of financialization
on the one hand, and with an anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-hierarchical
vision of emancipation on the other." The left needs a populism with a
social conscience, one that allows young people, workers, the middle class,
and others to see how their futures might develop in a way that speaks to
their needs and a more just and equitable life, one in which the utopian
possibilities of a radical democracy appear possible.
Looking Beyond the Democratic Party
A new vision for change cannot be built on the legacy of the Democratic
Party. What is needed is a concerted attempt to figure out what democratic
socialism will mean and look like in the 21st century. This suggests
rethinking the meaning of politics, one that can rekindle the social
imagination. Central to such a struggle is the role education must play in
creating the formative culture capable of creating critical and engaged
citizens. In this case, politics moves beyond ephemeral protests and
recalibrates itself to create the public spheres that enable progressives to
think about what long term movements, organizations and institutions can be
aligned to create new political formations willing to confront neoliberal
capitalism and other forms of oppression, not simply as symptoms of a
distorted democracy but as part of a more radical project unwilling to
compromise on identifying root causes.
Michelle Alexander is right in warning us that it would be a tragedy to
waste the growing resistance against Trump "by settling for any Democrat the
next time around." I would similarly argue that we should not settle for a
choice between good or bad Democrats. We must instead struggle for a radical
restructuring of society, one that gives meaning to a substantive democracy.
Resistance cannot be either defensive or ephemeral, reduced to either a
narrow criticism of Trump's policies or to short-lived expressions of
protests. As Michael Lerner has pointed out, protests are moments, and
however pedagogically and politically valuable, do not constitute a
movement. As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis have suggested in their
book Liquid Evil, protests function as "an explosion of political
subjectivity" and generally tell us what people are against but not what
they want. Coupled with a new vision, moral language and democratic values,
the left and other progressives need a platform for thinking beyond
neoliberal capitalism.
As David Harvey observes, the problems Americans face are too intractable
and extensive to resolve without a strong anti-capitalist movement. This
will only take place if progressives create a broad-based social movement
that aligns struggles at the local, state and national level with democratic
movements at the global level. The peripheral demands of single-issue
movements cannot be abandoned, but they must translate into wider
opportunities for social change. There should be no contradiction between
the call for educational reform, women's rights and ecological change and
what Katrina Forrester calls an alternative economic and political vision
for America. At the same time, it is a mistake for progressives to look at
society only in terms of economic structures and issues. A mass-based
movement to challenge neoliberalism and authoritarianism cannot be
constructed unless it also commits to struggle against the many forms of
oppression extending from sexism and racism to xenophobia and transphobia.
Only a movement that unifies these diverse struggles will lead us toward a
radical democracy.
Politics becomes radical when it translates private troubles into broader
systemic issues and challenges the commanding institutional and educational
structures of neoliberalism. To be effective, it must do so in a language
that speaks to people's needs, enabling them to both identify and invest in
narratives in which they can recognize themselves and the conditions that
produce the suffering they experience. For this reason, the call for
institutional change is inextricably connected to the politics of social
transformation. Such transformation must propel us toward an international
movement to build a society that embraces the beauty of universal
emancipation and promise of a radical democracy. At a time in history when
the stakes for democracy are so threatened and life on the planet itself so
imperiled, collective action is the only way out of the age of illiberal
democracy. It is time to go for broke.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission of the author.
Henry Giroux
Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for
Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished
Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Professor
at Ryerson University. His most recent books include The Violence of
Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of
the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015) and coauthored with Brad Evans,
Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City
Lights, 2015). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His
website is www.henryagiroux.com.
Related Stories
Clinton, Trump and Budget-Busting Tax Cuts
By Dean Baker, Truthout | Op-Ed
Democratic Resistance to GOP Senate Health Care Push Takes Shape
By Sam Sacks, The District Sentinel | Report
Democrats in Congress Need to Go Bolder, Not Backwards
By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org | Op-Ed
