25.08.2016

Different plot twists, same ending

Jim Creegan shows that there is nothing progressive about the Hillary Clinton’s platform

Immediately after Hillary Clinton was officially nominated on July 26, wealthy givers left the sidelines to party and open their chequebooks. Oblivious of the protesters gathered outside, corporate CEOs and lobbyists descended upon Philadelphia to sip cocktails in the vaulted marble bar of the downtown Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The New York Times reported that:

… For many Clinton donors, particularly those from the financial sector, the convention is a good time to shed what one called the ‘hypersensitivity’ that had previously surrounded their appearance at Mrs Clinton’s fund-raisers or at her political events, during a period when Mr Sanders repeatedly attacked Mrs Clinton’s connections to Wall Street and her six-figure speaking fees from financial institutions” (July 29).

The party’s rainmakers were celebrating Hillary’s success in defeating Bernie Sanders and maintaining the grip of the party apparatus on delegates and voters. To be sure, the going had been rougher than usual. Sanders had made an unexpectedly strong showing in the primaries, and although Clinton went into the convention with enough delegates to secure the nomination, it was not clear how the 1,900 delegates pledged to Sanders would behave. Their anger was stoked by the well-timed Wikileaks release of nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), supplying proof positive of what Sanders supporters had known all along: that the party’s supposedly impartial governing body had been secretly working for Clinton throughout the primary season. The Democratic national chairwoman, Florida congressperson and Clinton flack Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign, along with three other top DNC officials. Hundreds of Sanders delegates booed loudly whenever Hillary’s name was spoken during the first night of the convention. They later walked out and joined protesters outside, chanting, “Hell No, DNC! We Won’t Vote for Hillary!”

Yet, in the end, events followed a well-worn playbook. Treading in the footsteps of earlier left-liberal challengers to a centrist Democratic frontrunner - from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich - Sanders endorsed the party’s nominee. At one gathering he did so over the loud boos of some of his own ‘Bernie or Bust!” supporters, who had deluded themselves into disbelieving the vows of party loyalty their candidate had made at the beginning of the process.

Nor did Sanders, as others had hoped, offer a merely pro-forma endorsement of his rival. He had just appeared with her at a campaign rally in New Hampshire. His convention speech was full of glowing praise for both the candidate and the great “achievement” represented by the “most progressive party platform ever”. The platform is a notoriously meaningless document, no sooner written than forgotten about, especially by candidates and elected officials. Sanders highlighted all the bones thrown to him by the platform committee - a call for a $15 per hour minimum wage, free education at public universities, lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 55 - while pointedly ignoring its refusal to include - even in a virtually irrelevant piece of paper - any language on Palestinian rights, and the insertion of a clause affirming the intention to “resist Russian aggression” in Ukraine. The Clintonite committee majority also voted down a clause opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), ostensibly out of deference to Obama and his efforts to ram approval of the pact through the ‘lame-duck’ session of Congress that meets between now and election time. Sanders also made a motion from his seat in the Vermont delegation that the roll-call vote on the nominee be dispensed with, and that Clinton be affirmed by acclamation.

Eyes right

After some of the party’s leading left-liberal lights - Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison - were allowed to appear on stage on the first night to bookend a speech by Michelle Obama, the gathering, in a likely preview of the campaign’s future trajectory, took a decided right turn. Hillary had already signalled her intentions with the choice of Tim Kaine, the resolutely middle-of-the-road Senator from Virginia, as her vice-presidential running mate. Like her, Kaine was formerly a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, which had been instrumental in moving the party to the right in the 90s. Like her, Kaine had been a reliable supporter of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and the TPP, before having a sudden pre-campaign change of heart regarding the latter. Hillary’s well known big business-friendly tilt was now emphasised on the convention floor by the speech of Michael Bloomberg, New York’s former three-term Republican mayor, who, with a fortune estimated at about ten times that of Trump, debunked the latter’s multiple bankruptcies and frauds with the authority of an upstanding, honest multi-billionaire like himself. Hillary has received with open arms the endorsement of the ultra-right billionaire activist, Charles Koch.

Next, the stage was turned over to the war hawks. Clinton had already been endorsed by two key Republican ‘national security’ figures: air force general Michael Hayden, George W Bush’s CIA chief; and John Negroponte, Bush’s director of national intelligence - who, as Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, played a pivotal role in running the Contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Now, at the Wells Fargo Stadium, the delegates heard former secretary of defence and CIA director Leon Panetta extol Hillary’s ability to act as commander-in-chief. He was briefly drowned out by Sanders supporters incanting “No more war”, before the lights were turned out over the sections they sat in, and Hillary loyalists waving signs reading “Strong America” replied with chants of “USA!” The scene repeated itself when marine general John Allen, who had commanded US forces in Afghanistan, took the stage accompanied by a martial drumbeat and a phalanx of admirals and generals, to affirm - against Trump’s threats to decrease Nato funding - America’s unbreakable commitment to its allies. A few journalists remarked that the proceedings of the second half of the Philadelphia spectacle seemed eerily familiar… from their previous coverage of Republican conventions.

The imperial notes sounded on the convention floor were reinforced by the offstage efforts of the Clinton campaign to divert attention from the undisputed contents of the Wikileaks emails by alleging that they had come to Julian Assange via Russian hackers, said - only on the basis of conjecture - to be acting on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Democrats then disparaged Trump’s patriotism with insinuations that he was somehow working in cahoots with the Russian president. The suggestion was based on a few of The Donald’s usual off-the-cuff (and off-the wall) assertions that he had a “great relationship” with Putin (although he later admitted he had never met him), and a quip to the effect that he wished more Russian hackers would penetrate Democratic email systems to reveal other damaging secrets.

Several hundred people - Sanders delegates and other activists - flocked during the convention to a Socialist Convergence event sponsored jointly by Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organization - American affiliates, respectively, of the Socialist Party (UK) and the Socialist Workers Party (UK). The audience booed the leftwing journalist, Chris Hedges, who had never supported Sanders, when he made remarks critical of the Vermont Senator, for whom even disillusioned delegates still harbour a great deal of affection. But Hedges’ position is based on a bitter truth: that, despite the deep vein of discontent that Sanders tapped into, and the class feelings he aroused, he had in the end functioned in the same way as leftish Democratic challengers in the past: to steer dissidents into support for a mainstream, neoliberal candidate, and to help put a convenient left face on what is at bottom a pro-corporate, pro-imperialist party. Some Sandernistas will no doubt defect in disgust to the Green Party and its nominee, Jill Stein. But most, if polls are to be believed, will hold their noses and vote for Clinton as the lesser evil in November. With the Republican campaign in what looks like total meltdown - with Trump plummeting in the polls, with one Republican politician after another withdrawing support, and some endorsing his rival, and with Wall Street lucre pouring more freely into Democratic campaign coffers than ever before in recent memory, Hillary appears poised to become the country’s next president.

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, offered consolation to worried Republicans:

All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can’t rally behind their favoured candidate is crazy. The GOP angst, the gnashing and wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is getting old.

They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the US Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with the hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up - unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.

The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary (August 14).

No honeymoon

It is probably safe to say that the second Clinton White House will not enjoy the prolonged honeymoon that the Democratic base accorded Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton is one of the most widely disliked and distrusted candidates ever to seek the White House, and even if she did manage to save the bacon of the party bigwigs for the time being, it is unlikely that the post-2008 discontents that roiled the waters of both parties this season will go away any time soon. Recent developments therefore make it possible to contemplate the decline of the Democratic Party, and the rise of a leftwing alternative, not as a hope for the distant future, but a real possibility. It may therefore be in order to try to anticipate the forms this may take.

First, I think we can by now predict that no major change in the political landscape will occur due to a slow accretion of members to any small revolutionary socialist group, no matter how flawless its programme; a sudden influx of members to such groups is also unlikely. Such a sea change is, moreover, virtually inconceivable without further turmoil within the Democratic camp, involving the growing disaffection of youth, union members and minority groups who have thus far formed the party’s base and functioned within its orbit. Further, such malcontents will not defect with revolutionary working-class consciousness, but rather with militant reformist and vaguely populist ideas. Marxist groups can only grow their influence by interacting with these forces in some larger political arena. The Green Party may be one such arena, provided Marxists are permitted full freedom of expression. But here the perennial question arises: are insurgent Democratic Party campaigns, such as that just waged by Bernie Sanders, and others that will no doubt follow, an appropriate medium for socialist participation?

Empty vessel?

The question is answered in the affirmative by Jason Schulman, who, in a letter of March 24 to Weekly Worker, upbraids “various American Trotskyists” who write here - I am presumably one - for being “insistent on missing the opportunity for building a mass socialist movement that the Bernie Sanders campaign represents”. Schulman refers readers to the arguments he makes in an article, ‘Bernie Sanders and the dilemma of the Democratic “Party”’, which appeared in the American socialist magazine New Politics (Winter 2016). The author is a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the US affiliate of the Second International, and the country’s leading (and only significant) social democratic organisation. Schulman claims to have abandoned any hope of realigning the Democratic Party to the left - the strategic aim of the DSA’s late icon, Michael Harrington, champion of what he called the “left wing of the possible” (read: the left wing of the permissible). Schulman seems to agree that the ultimate goal must be to lead a segment of the Democratic Party base toward the exits, and into some kind of left or labour party formation. Yet he remains true to what has always been his organisation’s bottom line: commitment to working within the ‘progressive wing’ of the party - at least for now.

The word ‘party’ appears in inverted commas in the title of Schulman’s article because he argues that the Democrats (like the Republicans) are not much of a party at all, and that the ultra-left habit of denouncing them as the ‘party of capital’ and the ‘party of imperialism’ is based upon a misunderstanding of American electoral politics. By his lights, the Democrats are not the party of anything. Unlike European ‘private association’ parties, which are free to include or exclude anyone they wish, and have local branches like, for example, the Labour Party’s constituency organisations, American parties are little more than ‘ballot lines’, ie, labels affixed on election day with almost no indication of the ingredients contained in the package. Anyone who wants to run as a Democrat (or Republican) can do so by acquiring the requisite number of signatures from individuals registered as members of his/her party. There are no rules on how candidates must vote if elected, whom they must endorse if defeated, or from whom they must take money to finance their campaigns. And if, as Schulman argues, American parties are empty vessels into which just about any political content can be poured, doesn’t it make more sense to avail oneself of the advantages - access to voter lists, participation in candidates’ debates - that running under the Democratic label sometimes confer, than to remain righteously but impotently outside the tent? Were not the ten nationally televised primary debates a better platform for spreading Sanders’ ideas than a corner soapbox? And did not taking part in the campaign put participants in a better position to pressure their candidate to run independently than exhorting from without?

The problem with these arguments is that they emphasise formal party rules to the almost total exclusion of very real interests and internal pressures. ‘Progressives’ may not be obliged to accept corporate donations or endorse the mainstream candidates to whom they lose, but most of them wind up doing exactly these things (Bernie Sanders, who refused corporate cash, was a rare exception). Schulman says candidates act as they do only because they choose to do so. This, however, seems a bit like saying that someone given the choice between an all-expense-paid vacation in the Bahamas and two weeks’ wandering alone in the Sahara desert, will ‘choose’ the former. Let us consider the question of endorsing the winner, which Bernie Sanders pledged to do, not at the end of the primary contest, but before it even began.

Obstacles

First, although it is true, as Schulman points out, that the old-fashioned party political machines that ran things prior to the 1960s no longer exist, there are local, state and national party apparatuses that are not without important powers. Many state Democratic committees, for instance, deny access to computerised voter phone lists to candidates challenging incumbents in the primaries - a tactic recently deployed by the just-cashiered DNC chairwoman, Congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, against a pro-Sanders competitor, Tim Canova, in her home district in Florida, provoking a legal challenge by Canova. And, thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks, we have a better idea of the ways in which the Democratic National Committee brings its power to bear. Even before the DNC emails were exposed, Wasserman-Schultz put her thumb on the scales by scheduling several key presidential debates, which she thought would favour Sanders, on holiday weekends and Saturday nights when viewership is at a low. And in the emails themselves we can read how one member of the committee was toying with the idea of using Sanders’ supposed lack of religious observance against him, and how a top official - Luis Miranda, forced out along with Schultz - instructed his subordinates to circulate a bogus news story that Sanders supporters behaved violently at one state gathering. Then there are the 700 unelected convention ‘superdelegates’ - senators, congressmen, DNC members and ‘distinguished party leaders’ - who account for 15% of the total delegate vote, and who can be relied upon with few exceptions to back the establishment candidate. The superdelegates were created precisely to ensure that primary voters did not run amok and choose some crazy left-liberal, like the ill-fated George McGovern, who split the party by campaigning against the Vietnam war in 1972. And these two obstacles - DNC dirty tricks and superdelegates - were ones that Sanders faced even after he had promised to support the party’s presidential pick.

The obstacles thrown in Sanders’ path had he refused to commit in advance would have been uglier by orders of magnitude. After he had lost the primaries, Sanders was booed in the Democratic progressive caucus for not endorsing Hillary early enough. To the extent that the Democratic Party is a party, its life revolves around elected officials, who may act and vote in different ways, but band together on election day, especially in the face of any left challenge. One has only to remember the lengths to which the party went - legal and otherwise - in 2000 to keep Ralph Nader of the Green Party off the ballot in as many states as they could. How does Schulman think they would react to a Democratic primary candidate who might be thinking about leaving the party after losing the primary, and running in opposition? Even the most progressive candidates are career politicians. They depend upon collegial relations with other elected officials like themselves - the ability to join their caucuses, to collaborate in crafting legislation, to engage in political horse trading, etc, etc. They know that they could do none of these things in the political Coventry to which they would be consigned for having violated the sacrosanct obligation of electoral party unity. Their careers - at least as the kind of ‘pragmatic’ politicians they have been or aspire to be - would effectively come to an end.

To submit to the pressure and fall in line behind the standard bearer, however, means to short-circuit any radical impulses a dissident campaign may have unleashed. What good are all the ‘socialist’ ideas the Sanders bid is said by its supporters to have raised, if those ideas - leaving aside the question of their content - are prevented from assuming any organised form after the convention ends? And preventing them from doing so is precisely one major function the Democratic Party performs for the ruling class. If the ideas raised by Sanders, and the votes they got, will serve any post-convention purpose at all, it will be to burnish the phony ‘progressive’ credentials, and swell the vote totals, of Hillary Clinton. By replicating this oft-repeated pattern, even the best-intentioned left-reformist office seekers act in the end as enablers of centrist or rightwing front-runners.

Schulman argues that leftwingers working inside campaigns like Sanders’ will be better positioned to pressure the candidate to break away from the Democrats. He seems to forget that it is the candidate who defines the campaign, and not the campaigners who define the candidate. What instrument do rank-and-file doorbell ringers and envelope stuffers have for exerting pressure? There is no democracy in Democratic campaigns. All major decisions are up to the candidate.

With all that said, it should be acknowledged that what we are seeing in this election cycle is not simply more of the same. The currents of anger now coursing through both parties have already breached Republican floodgates and almost overflowed Democratic ones. It is therefore not entirely inconceivable that a future left Democratic candidate may seriously threaten to fly the coop. Such a contender would have to be a very different political animal from the go-along-to-get-along types we have seen up to now, but politics can produce strange mutations in turbulent times. But can Schulman name a single present or prospective Democratic candidate who, out of leftwing principle, has given any indication of being prepared to go as far as have the numerous Republicans who are now refusing to endorse Donald Trump, by refusing to endorse Clinton? If by some miracle Sanders had captured the nomination you can be sure we would see numerous defections by rightwing Democrats. When and if a figure of comparable backbone emerges on the left, we will have reason to reassess. But none has appeared thus far, nor are we aware of any Democratic grouping, affiliated with DSA or anyone else, which is demanding that a current or prospective candidate be willing, as a condition of their support, to quit the party after losing in the primaries. Sanders was certainly no such candidate; there was no reason, given his pre-primary pledge, to think he would be any different in this respect from the left challengers who came before. In the event, things played out - albeit with more bumps along the road - as they have in the past, and the millions who “felt the Bern” ended up with the blues in same old marshland of disappointed hopes.

Jim Creegan may be reached at egyptianarch@gmail.com