[font size=5]The false promise of political 'realism' in a time of right-wing radical extremism[/font]

by markpkessinger

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One of the chief distinctions Hillary Clinton has been attempting to draw between herself and Bernie Sanders is that she is a political ‘realist’ who won’t make promises she cannot keep, where Sanders is a dreamer who will not possibly be able to deliver on his proposals. Chelsea Clinton recently said that Sanders, unlike her mother, doesn’t understand what is “possible” to achieve in government (a rather curious thing to say about someone who has been in the Senate for 9 years, and in the House for 16 years before that — but I digress). Hillary has insisted that her moderate centrism (a description she was happy enough to “plead guilty” to until her campaign realized it was a liability to her vis-à-vis Sanders), and not Sanders’ pie-in-the-sky promises, will be the best bulwark against the treachery o f the political right. But is that really the case?

Imagine, if you will, that our politics are a game of tug-of-war, with the two major parties as the competing teams. Now, in a formal tug-of-war match, the rope is marked in three places: the center, and at two points (one for each team) equidistant from the center (in formal competitions, the distance of each team mark from the center mark is is 4 meters, or about 13 feet. The match starts with the center mark on the rope positioned over a mark in the ground, and whichever team can manage to pull the other team’s mark over the mark in the ground is the winner. But imagine if one team’s mark is, say, only 6 feet from the center mark, and the other team’s mark remains at 13 feet. Obviously, this puts the team whose mark is further from the center at a significant advantage, because they have a significantly shorter distance they must pull the other side in order to win. Certainly no self-respecting Irish tug-o’-war team would willingly compete if they were disadvantaged in such a way!

Yet, metaphorically, that is exactly what the Democratic Party did beginning in 1985 and on through the next two decades: it moved its team’s own mark much closer to the center mark, thus ceding the political advantage to its opposition. In 1985, Al From founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which argued that in order for the party to remain politically viable, it had to abandon the party’s long-standing economic populism (i.e., its support for labor, the poor and the working and middle classes), and embrace an economic platform that was solidly pro-business, and find solutions that were “market-based” rather than government program-based. This, it was argued, was the only way the party could once again become a major player on the national stage.

The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 was seen as the vindication of the DLC’s ideas. And indeed, the DLC’s ideas figured strongly throughout Clinton’s presidency, resulting in things like welfare reform, financial deregulation, truly egregious criminal justice legislation, and trade deals such as NAFTA and CAFTA, all of which the DLC (and HIllary Clinton) vigorously and vocally supported. The solemn pronouncement that “the era of big government is over” rolled off Bill Clinton’s tongue as easily as if his name were Newt Gingrich.

Now, whatever might be said of the effectiveness of the DLC’s strategy with respect to presidential elections, it proved to be a Faustian bargain when it came to Congressional elections. The Democratic Party’s long-standing commitment to economic populism had enabled it to maintain a dominant majority in Congress for four decades. When did that change? Not during the Reagan administration, nor that of his successor, George Bush. It changed in the 1994 midterms, after Clinton had signed NAFTA and CAFTA, which many organized labor voters saw — and not without — justification as a betrayal of their loyal support for the Democratic Party. The result was that demoralized labor voters, having concluded that neither party any longer represented their interests, stayed away from the polls in 1994 in a big way, enabling Republicans to gain control for the first time in 40 years. They held control for 12 years until 2006. But they regained control yet again in 2010, when once again, working and middle class voters, reeling from the economic collapse, were left to conclude that neither party really represented their economic interests.

We don’t really know what a President Sanders, or a President Clinton, will be able to accomplish. Certainly, neither will accomplish everything they set out to accomplish — no president ever does. The assumption that a President Sanders will not be able to accomplish any of his agenda is based on the notion that the partisan composition of Congress will remain unchanged. And we simply don’t know that one way or the other. But if we accept, as our starting point, solutions that we think are merely politically attainable, as opposed to solutions that we actually need and should pursue, then we will have ceded the debate turf to our opponents.

Given that the Republican Party has been overtaken by a kind of radical extremism that apparently unlimited in how far to the right it is willing to push, the notion that we can hold the center while occupying it is not grounded in political reality. Absent some serious pushback in the opposite direction, the “Overton Window” — that range of political ideas that are considered to be within the mainstream of our political discourse — will continue to move to the right. Indeed, the very fact that Bernie Sanders is regarded by many as a “far left” candidate stands as evidence of how far to the right that range has already shifted as a result of the DLC’s misguided ideas. As Noam Chomsky recently pointed out, whatever label we apply to Bernie Sanders, and whatever label he himself uses to describe himself, in reality he is a New Deal Democrat in the mold of FDR. Indeed, as an article appearing last month in Bloomberg View pointed out, in Europe, Sanders would be considered center-right.

Having an honest understanding of the current political climate is certainly important for any politician. But political ‘reality,’ such as it is, is immutable only to the extent voters accept it as such. And in the face of the kinds of deep and systemic problems we face, settling merely for what appears, at any given moment, to be attainable is the surest recipe for making no substantive progress towards solving those problems.

Note: The DLC, as an organization, formally dissolved in 2011, but its philosophies and its adherents are still very much with us, passing under labels such as “New Democrats” and the “Third Way Democrats.”