After the defeat in Massachusetts, Democrats lurch to the right

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

After the defeat in Massachusetts, Democrats lurch to the right
8 February 2010

The three weeks since the special election to the US Senate in
Massachusetts have seen a deepening political crisis of the Democratic
Party. The party which controls the White House and has huge
majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives has
bowed and scraped before the minority Republican Party, which was
repudiated by the electorate in the 2008 election.

On January 29, President Obama, as part of his “outreach” to the
Republicans, met with the entire House Republican caucus—whose members
include several co-thinkers of the “birthers,” the ultra-right
elements who claim Obama is of foreign birth and hence occupies the
White House illegitimately.

Obama announced later that he would begin to hold regular meetings
with the House and Senate Republican leaders (along with their
Democratic counterparts), something rarely done by President George W.
Bush when the Democrats were in the minority.

This obsessive deference to the Republicans is not new. From the first
days of his administration, Obama has sought to rehabilitate the
Republican Party. His administration has to all appearances been based
on the premise that its success, and perhaps survival, is dependent on
winning the support of sections of the minority party. This is bound
up with the contradiction between the appeals his campaign made to
popular aspirations for progressive change and the repudiation of his
campaign promises once in office and pursuit of a uniformly right-wing
program.

For their part, the Republicans early on took their measure of the
Obama administration and decided to block its initiatives, calculating
they would benefit from growing popular anger and frustration. Despite
Obama’s appeals, they show no signs of abandoning this strategy.

At a special session of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
Saturday, Obama sought to buck up the party’s spirits after its recent
electoral defeats, including the gubernatorial contests in Virginia
and New Jersey last November and the January 19 loss of the
Massachusetts Senate seat held for five decades by Edward M. Kennedy.

The Massachusetts election, in particular, was an unmistakable
expression of growing popular disillusionment with the former
candidate of “change” and “hope.” Under conditions of near-Depression
levels of unemployment and rising poverty, Democratic voters, angered
over the refusal of the administration to provide jobs, its efforts to
cut health care services for millions of workers, and its ongoing
bailout of Wall Street, either abstained in large numbers or
registered a protest by voting for the little-known Republican candidate.

Despite the loss in Massachusetts, however, the Democratic caucus in
the Senate controls 59 of 100 seats—the largest number held by either
party in more than 30 years, except for the brief period from June
2009, when Democrat Al Franken was certified the winner of the Senate
seat in Minnesota, to last month.

Since the defeat in Massachusetts, both the White House and leading
congressional Democrats have shifted further to the right. Obama has
made it clear that his entire legislative agenda will be subordinated
to reaching bipartisan consensus with the Republican Party.

This shift cannot be explained as a consequence of the loss of two
governorships and a Senate seat, or of political calculations related
to the upcoming congressional elections in November. The Republican
Party remains widely discredited and unpopular, standing far lower in
the polls than either Obama personally or the Democratic Party as a whole.

Throughout the period of Republican congressional dominance, from 1994
to 2006, with a House caucus never larger than 232 out of 435,
compared to the current Democratic caucus of 257, and a Senate
majority never larger than 55 out of 100, compared to the current
Democratic caucus of 59, the Republican Party pursued its right-wing
program aggressively and without restraint, going so far as to impeach
a twice-elected president, Bill Clinton, in 1998.

In early 2001, after Bush was installed in the White House by the
Supreme Court, despite having received half a million fewer votes than
Democrat Al Gore, the Republicans controlled the Senate by the barest
of margins, a 50-50 split with Vice President Cheney casting the
tiebreaker. Nonetheless, aided by 12 Democrats, the new Republican
administration pushed through its signature domestic policy, a $1.1
trillion tax cut aimed largely at the wealthiest Americans.

In 2009, despite enjoying a 59-40 margin in the Senate, increased to
60 with the swearing in of Franken in June, the Democrats and the
Obama administration were unable to enact any significant legislation,
except for measures to continue and expand the Wall Street bailout and
a stimulus package consisting largely of tax cuts and extended
unemployment benefits, but avoiding any hint of public works or other
direct job creation.

This historical record refutes the claim—now peddled incessantly by
media pundits—that the Obama administration and the Democratic Party
are compelled to change course and shift further to the right because
they no longer control the vital 60-vote margin in the US Senate
required to halt a filibuster. If the Democratic Party was advancing
genuinely popular and socially progressive policies, it would be able
to mobilize sufficient public support to overcome anti-democratic
tactics by the minority opposition.

The reasons for the defensiveness and disarray of the Democrats and
the aggressiveness and arrogance of the Republicans have nothing to do
with either procedural obstacles or short-term electoral
considerations. They rather relate to the intrinsic nature of each
party and the differing roles they play within the US two-party
political structure.

Both parties, the Democrats no less than the Republicans, are parties
of the financial aristocracy, devoted to the defense of the property
and profits of the ruling elite, both at home and abroad. In foreign
policy, there is little to separate the two. Both are deeply
reactionary instruments of US imperialism, as Obama now demonstrates
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and other potential battlefields, to
say nothing of Iraq.

In domestic policy, the two parties have served distinct purposes for
the ruling elite. The Republican Party has long been the most
intransigent opponent of any measures to restrain the depredations of
the financial elite, while the Democratic Party postured as the
“friend of labor,” the party which advocated a greater measure of
“fairness” or even “social justice” in the operations of the
capitalist system.

The ruling elite has generally preferred the Democrats during periods
of acute economic and social crisis, as in the 1930s and the 1960s,
and today with Obama. Of particular importance has been the role of
the trade unions, which have subordinated the working class to the
Democratic Party and sought to block any popular struggle against the
government, even more openly when a Democratic administration was in
the White House.

This specific political role inevitably gives the Democratic Party a
two-faced character. Republican politicians present their right-wing
nostrums with an undisguised ferocity and determination. Democrats are
typically half-hearted, insipid and insincere.

They make appeals to working people on behalf of policies that are
tailored to the interests of the millionaires and billionaires. Many
of the politicians are themselves multi-millionaires, a fact which
gives their “populism” even less credibility. And this supposedly
“people’s” party includes a sizeable bloc of right-wingers, in both
the House and the Senate—invariably dubbed “moderates”—who regularly
vote with the Republicans.

Over the past two decades, under the auspices of formations such as
the Democratic Leadership Council, once headed by Bill Clinton, the
Democratic Party has moved significantly further to the right in its
public policy offerings, essentially disavowing any social program
outside of the private market. This is what has given such a
reactionary character to efforts like the health care plan of Obama,
which is completely subordinated to the profit interests of the
insurance companies and drug manufacturers.

The prostration of the Democrats opens the door to an even more
right-wing political outcomes, along the lines of the ultra-right
hysterics of the Tea Party convention and the demands by congressional
Republicans for the complete privatization of Medicare and Medicaid
and the other remnants of past social reforms such as Social Security.

The only alternative is for working people to break out of the
framework of the big business-controlled two-party system. An
independent mass political movement must be built to oppose the profit
system and advance a socialist program to meet the needs of the people
for jobs, decent living standards, education, health care and housing,
and to defend democratic rights and oppose the bipartisan foreign
program of militarism and imperialist war.

Patrick Martin

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/pers-f08.shtml

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********