[D66] Democratic debate begins the 2020 election campaign with a blast of demagogy

[A.OUT]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/06/27/pers-j27.html

Democratic debate begins the 2020 election campaign with a blast of demagogy
27 June 2019

Wednesday’s debate among ten Democratic presidential candidates, the
first of a two-night event held in Miami, was the first official event
of the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. It follows
the kickoff of Republican President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign
June 18, in Orlando, Florida.

The initial Democratic debate is being held over two nights, ten
candidates each night, with the Democratic National Committee claiming
that the huge number of candidates made any other arrangement
impractical. Candidates are limited to one-minute answers and 30 seconds
in rebuttal, a format that ensures that empty slogans and prepared
one-liners will be the main content of the debate.

There was demagogy aplenty on the first day, with candidates claiming
that if only they are elected president, the American people will have
decent healthcare, improved living standards, plentiful jobs, a clean
environment, secure pensions and rebuilt social infrastructure.

The proceedings took on the character of the absurd, or the grotesque.
The various candidates doing their best to speak in generally hackneyed
Spanish, as if this would help in covering up the Democratic Party’s
active participation in the victimization and deportation of
immigrants—including under Obama, the “deporter-in-chief.” Bill de
Blasio, for five years the mayor of New York City, the center of
American finance capital, declaring that the Democratic Party must
become the party of the working class. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker
attempting to convince listeners that he personally confronts gang
violence and police killings on a daily basis outside his front door.

Throughout, there was a studious avoidance of the actual record of the
political organization, the Democratic Party, for which the candidates
are vying to be the representative. There was much fulmination over
social inequality, without anyone—including the moderators—caring to
take note of the fact that the Obama administration presided over the
bailout of the banks and the greatest transfer of wealth from the
working class to the rich in world history.

For decades, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the US ruling class
has been engaged in a social counterrevolution, driving down living
standards, social benefits, pensions, the environment and every other
aspect of social life.

The debate was held against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s
escalation of the fascistic attack on immigrants. In the wake of the
horrifying events on the US-Mexico border, Democratic presidential
candidates have cried crocodile tears over the detention camps housing
child and adult prisoners of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its
private prison contractors.

But when the Senate voted Wednesday on legislation that would provide
$4.6 billion more for Trump’s concentration camps, the Democratic
leadership and most Democrats joined in an 84–8 bipartisan vote to
approve the bill. The seven Senate Democrats who are running for
president were all in Florida, preparing for the debate, and did not
vote, although most agreed with giving Trump the money.

In one of the few intelligent media comments ahead of the debate, John
Harris of Politico noted that the radical-sounding slogans like
“Medicare for All” and a “Green New Deal” are being voiced by
politicians with distinctly non-radical records, “ladder-climbing
careerists.” In Harris’ words: “This cadre of Democrats believes the
ideological tides, within the party and the country more broadly, have
shifted leftward.”

The purpose of the “left” talk of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,
now taken up by many other Democratic candidates, is to head off the
radicalization of workers and youth in America and divert it back inside
the framework of the second-oldest capitalist party in the world, to
block the emergence of a genuinely independent political movement of the
working class that would threaten the capitalist system.

The real class loyalty of the Democratic Party was summed up by the
current frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden, who assured a Wall
Street audience last week that the promises being made by the Democrats
to working people would not impose any significant burden on the rich.
“No one has to be punished,” he said. “No one’s standard of living would
change. Nothing would fundamentally change.” Biden, along with Sanders,
will participate in the second stage of the debate tonight.

This allegiance to the capitalist class is expressed in foreign policy
as well as domestic policy. The Democratic Party is unshakably committed
to the defense of the worldwide interests of American imperialism. This
is shown by the Democrats’ embrace of Trump’s trade war against China
and their rubber-stamping of Trump’s record military build-up. Through
the anti-Russia campaign based on bogus allegations of a conspiracy
between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election campaign, the
Democrats acted as the political attorneys for a section of the
military-intelligence apparatus, seeking greater US intervention in
Syria, Ukraine and eastern Europe against Russia.

One of the more chilling, and revealing, episodes in yesterday’s debate
was when the candidates were asked to list the most important threat to
the United States, with many taking the opportunity to denounce China,
concluding with De Blasio’s denunciation of Russia.

Despite the profusion of candidates and pretense of popular
consultation, the selection of the next Democratic presidential
candidate is anything but an exercise in genuine democracy. Over the
next eight months, not a single vote will be cast. Instead, the
candidates will rise and fall based on media-driven polls, fundraising,
and sordid backroom maneuvers by the powerful business and
military-intelligence factions that call the shots in capitalist politics.

And once the voting begins next February, the corporate media and the
Democratic Party establishment will intervene aggressively to ensure
that whatever candidate emerges as the nominee is acceptable to the
party’s two main constituencies: Wall Street and the CIA.

The 2020 elections are unfolding under conditions of deepening world
economic crisis, rising conflicts between the major powers, and a
growing movement from below, expressed in strikes, mass protests, and
outright rebellions against longstanding dictatorships, as in Sudan and
Algeria. There will undoubtedly be political upheavals and surprises in
US politics as well.

There is already the example of Pete Buttigieg, a political nonentity,
the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, number 306 among US cities as ranked
by population. The 37-year-old Buttigieg has been built up into a major
political figure over the past six months, with the help of his identity
as an openly gay man (exciting the advocates of identity politics) and
his record as a intelligence agent who helped direct Navy SEAL death
squads in Afghanistan (reassuring the military-intelligence apparatus).

After rising to fourth place in some polls, Buttigieg may now plummet in
the wake of the police killing of a 53-year-old black man in South Bend
last week. After hurrying from campaign events in Florida to a town hall
in South Bend, “Mayor Pete” was heckled and denounced by an angry crowd,
mainly working-class and African-American.

The particular event was an expression of a more general reality.
Whatever the rhetoric of the candidates, employed with varying degrees
of skill or lack thereof, the Democratic Party is a right-wing party of
Wall Street and the military. Genuine opposition to the Trump
administration, social inequality, authoritarianism and war, will not
come through this organization, but in irreconcilable opposition to it.

Patrick Martin