13.01.2011

No change, no hope

Jim Creegan reports on Barack Obama's surrender to Congressional Republicans and the renewed ruling class offensive following the Democrats' defeat in the US mid-term elections

A few weeks ago, the media abounded in speculations that Barack Obama was fast losing political momentum and may turn out to be another failed, one-term president like Jimmy Carter. Now, in a reversal typical of a profession known for mercurial opinions, the ‘mediocracy’ - from Washington news-programme pundits to editorial writers for The Guardian and Le Monde - are outdoing one another with encomiums to the president’s new-found ‘realism’ and political finesse.

Obama is said to have got his second wind from a spate of legislative victories scored in the outgoing Democrat-controlled Congress during its final (‘lame-duck’) session (held following a Democratic rout in the mid-term elections of November, but before the new Congress was sworn in). With the strong support of his own party and a fluctuating number of Republican votes, the president in December managed to secure the passage of an ‘economic stimulus’ bill, an arms control treaty with Russia (Start), a measure permitting gays to serve openly in the military (repealing the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy adopted under Clinton), and a bill granting federal medical assistance to 9/11 ‘first responders’ (firefighters and first-aid workers) disabled as a result of their often selfless rescue efforts at the World Trade Center.

In fact, Obama’s ‘finesse’ consisted in nothing more than submitting to an act of extortion. Like Bill Clinton before him, he realised that progress on his legislative agenda could only be purchased at the price of handouts to an increasingly recalcitrant ruling class. The quid pro quo that made his victories possible was arrived at during negotiations over taxes and government spending.

Obama first went to Congress months ago requesting a 13-month extension of unemployment insurance for the country’s 6.3 million long-term jobless (out of work for at least 26 weeks), which now account for 42% of the country’s 15 million unemployed. He also proposed to reinstate expiring Bush-era tax cuts for two more years. But, following up on a campaign pledge to end his predecessor’s largesse toward the rich, Obama would have excluded part of the income of the top two percent of earners from the proposed reductions. For them, the first $200,000 earned by individuals, and the first $250,000 by families, would still have been taxed at the new, lower rate. Only income above these amounts would have been assessed at pre-Bush levels (39.6%, as opposed to the current 35%, for the top income bracket).

Republicans, supported by the crucial votes of a few rightwing ‘blue dog’ Democrats, opposed both these measures with arguments too self-contradictory to conceal their class motives. On the one hand, they blocked the unemployment extension, denouncing it as another example of the administration’s profligate spending. On the other hand, the ‘deficit hawks’ held out for an extension of the Bush tax cuts to ‘everyone’: ie, the wealthiest two percent. This gift to the rich would deprive the public purse of approximately $700 billion in future revenues, an amount roughly equal to the entire bank bailout of 2008. But, however transparent their hypocrisy, the Republican-blue-dog axis had the votes to filibuster Obama’s proposals in the Senate.

The president responded characteristically: with a few disapproving noises, followed by total capitulation. He had already signalled his willingness to accommodate the Republicans at the end of November, just as negotiations with Congressional leaders over the tax bill were getting underway. Then, Obama proposed a two-year freeze on the pay of the country’s 2.1 million federal government workers - a move that netted the government negligible savings, but telegraphed his agreement with the Republican aim of reducing the deficit at the workers’ expense. He next announced his willingness to allow tax cuts for the rich to continue for another two years. In exchange, the Republicans agreed to release emergency unemployment funds.

But this was not all they demanded in return. They also got a two-year extension of a Bush-initiated reduction in taxes on the profits of capital (the capital gains tax, lowered by Bush from 20% to 15%), and a completely new provision that exempts the first $5 million of inherited wealth (instead of $1 million, under the previous law) from any tax obligation at all, and lowers the levy on fortunes exceeding that amount from 55% to 35% for the next two years - a reduction that will help no-one but the upper three tenths of the top one percent of income earners, and cost the government an additional $68 billion. Business owners will also be permitted to take a deduction in the year of purchase on 100%, as opposed to the present 50%, of new capital invested in equipment. The administration likes to emphasise that these giveaways are temporary, and will be up for another vote two years hence. But, sanctioned as they were by a Democratic president and a solidly Democratic Congress, what is to prevent them from being renewed the next time by a Congress the Democrats are less likely to control, or from being made permanent, which is what the Republicans really want?

Apart from the unemployment-insurance extension, only one provision of the bill actually put more money into the pockets of wage-earners: a two percent reduction in the payroll tax for a period of one year. These pay deductions, however, go to finance social security and medicare (retirement pensions and healthcare for the elderly). The effect will be to aggravate the alleged shortfalls in future funding for these programmes, routinely invoked as a rationale for trimming or privatising them. In addition, the bill makes social security - viewed since its inception under Roosevelt’s new deal as sacrosanct - into another budget item, to be adjusted (almost certainly downward) according to short-term political vicissitudes. The ‘payroll tax holiday’, moreover, replaced another tax credit beneficial to the working poor. Those earning under $20,000 a year will actually end up paying slightly more.

With its total price tag of $857 billion, this legislation greatly increases government indebtedness. It thus gives the lie to professions of urgency about the deficit coming from politicians of both parties. Where the pocketbooks of the rich and the profits of capital are concerned, all talk of shared sacrifice goes instantly by the board. The ‘difficult choices’ Obama sanctimoniously urges on the country are obviously reserved for workers and the unemployed. More than mere double-talk, running up the deficit is part of a Republican strategy known as ‘starve the beast’. It consists of moves to increase government debt today through military spending and tax giveaways, and then counting on the woefully short political memory of Americans to plead poverty tomorrow, when funding for social spending comes onto the legislative docket.

Obama’s surrender was so abject that it could not but give rise to howls of indignation from some Congressional Democrats, even among the party leadership. But, as pressure from the White House mounted - including a press conference at which Obama railed against the ‘purists’ of his party’s left wing, whom he said were “making the perfect the enemy of the good” - anger gave way to resignation. All but 13 Senate Democrats fell into line for the final vote. In the House, where opposition was stronger, 112 Democrats voted against the bill after a few desultory attempts to amend it, with 139 Democrats casting their votes in favour. Not without some internal misgivings, the Democrats once again fulfilled their function of putting a liberal imprimatur upon an act of institutionalised class robbery. Most were shamefaced, pleading in mitigation that surrender was the only way to get relief for millions of long-term unemployed. This was true under the immediate parliamentary circumstances. But the circumstances, as we shall see below, were part of a situation largely of the Democrats’ own making.

False compensation

Obama’s further legislative successes (Start, gays in the military, aid to first responders) came close on the heels of the tax bargain. Although these bills did not involve the direct horse-trading surrounding the latter, Obama’s cave-in on taxes no doubt went a long way toward buying the good will of at least a minority of Republicans.

Particularly useful to Obama in keeping liberals on board was the repeal of the infamous ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ (DADT) policy regarding gays in the military. Adopted as a compromise measure after Bill Clinton failed to open the military to gays in 1993, this rule forbade the armed forces from enquiring as to the sexual orientation of recruits, but also prohibited homosexuals from openly revealing their identity. Thirteen thousand were expelled for doing so. This time, when the Democrats introduced a bill permitting gays to serve openly, the usual political calculus in the Senate was reversed. Instead of a Democratic minority joining a unanimous Republican bloc, as is usually the case when it comes to economic issues, eight Republicans defected to vote with a unanimous Democratic majority, allowing the passage of the legislation, to the elation of gay and liberal activists.

Ending discrimination against gays in the armed forces, or anywhere, is an elementary democratic gain. Yet the support it surely deserves should not stand in the way of understanding how so-called cultural issues often function in the bourgeois political arena. Sexual orientation is class-neutral; there are proportionally as many gays among the ruling class as there are in other classes, and opinion on this question is therefore just as divided at the top as elsewhere in society. And, while anti-homosexual demagogy has indeed been useful to the bourgeoisie in diverting public attention from its core class agenda (in addition to the fact that some members of the ruling class, as well as many backwater politicians who serve them, are bigots themselves), such hate-mongering is becoming somewhat less serviceable, as tolerance regarding sexual orientation gradually gains ground in society at large, despite the horrific acts of anti-gay violence that still take place.

It is symptomatic of changing attitudes that, when Bill Clinton attempted to admit gays to the armed forces 17 years ago, virtually all of the military brass, headed by Colin Powell, lined up against him, whereas Obama and the Democrats proceeded to undo the tawdry DADT compromise with the support of Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Robert Gates, the secretary of defence appointed by George W Bush, and, this time round, of Powell himself.

The mounting offensive of capital against the wages and welfare of the working population over the past 35 years has been accompanied during roughly the same period by another trend: greater social equality for gays, women and the members of oppressed racial and national groups fortunate enough to have risen into the middle class (Barack Obama being a prime example). The second trend has bulked larger in American popular consciousness than the first, partly due to the fact that it has been seized upon by politicians. The social fissures opened up by the progress of women and minorities have given both capitalist parties a convenient way to conceal their common support for ruling-class attacks behind a spectacle of mutual opposition that is ultimately superficial. The Republicans typically appeal to status anxiety and fear of change among white males and society’s more backward and provincial layers, while the Democrats play more often to the egalitarian sentiments of the women, urban professionals and minority voters who form a large part of their base.

Some on the left, from sectarians to social democrats, tend to regard conflicts over ‘social issues’ as a diversion from the class struggle. Such a view is profoundly mistaken. The oppression of women and minorities is real and deeply rooted, not a contrivance of the ruling class to keep the workers divided; social reaction is a potent and potentially lethal menace, to be combated by socialists with all the force they can muster. Yet these particular struggles can be divisive, if not conceived as part of a larger movement for human equality whose goal is socialism and whose agency is the working class. Class solidarity is the most powerful force for equality in society - and the class struggle the strongest antidote to social reaction.

The identity politics that emerged in the 70s, and continues to cripple the US left, substitutes loyalty to one’s particular oppressed group for class-consciousness. Instead of recognising the sale of labour-power as the universal condition to which the majority is necessarily subjected under capitalism, and therefore seeing the fight of workers in their own name as an encompassing unity of all the exploited and oppressed, identity politics, at best, treats workers as one oppressed group alongside the rest, and is inclined to regard the advancement of one’s own sector - at the expense of others if need be - as the principal gauge of progress.

Thus a measure like the repeal of DADT can be viewed through an identity-politics lens as an adequate counterweight to bipartisan class attacks, and permit the Democrats to burnish their liberal credentials among their base just as cynically (if not as perniciously) as the Republicans conceal their class intentions by stoking obscurantist prejudice. The capitalist class, on the other hand, is much less confused than the left about what is essential to its interests. Even a minority of Republicans are beginning to realise that gay-bashing and ‘right-to-life’ rhetoric are slowly losing traction, and can be usefully traded in for more important things, like the multi-billion-dollar windfall just handed them by Congress.

Media pundits are now extolling the ‘realistic compromises’ of the departed lame-duck session as another triumph for the ‘triangulation’ pioneered under the administration of Bill Clinton (although Obama, fearful of diluting his own brand-name, has banned the use of this term by his staff). The strategy consists of placing oneself at the apex of an equilateral triangle, above and equidistant between the two base points of right and left. The pundits see triangulation as the template for future cooperation between the White House and Capitol Hill.

Democrats fail mid-terms

The mid-term elections that preceded the budget deal were, in Barack Obama’s phrase, a “shellacking” for the Democrats. They managed to hang on to a slim majority in the Senate, where only a third of the seats were in play. But in the House of Representatives, where all seats were contested, the Republicans gained 60 seats, giving them control of that chamber. It was the biggest gain in the house for either party in more than half a century.

Although some of the more outlandish Tea Party-backed candidates, like Carl Paladino of New York, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Sharron Angle of Nevada, lost to Democrats, five of the six new Republican senators and most new Republican Congresspersons were endorsed by the Tea Party. All of the traditionally Republican (so-called red) states that went over to Democrats to give Obama his 2008 victory went back into the Republican column, along with several critical swing states.

A leading Republican representative from California, Darrell Issa, immediately followed up his party’s victory by sending out a letter of inquiry to 150 trade groups, businesses and corporate lobbyists. It asked them which regulations on business they would like to see ended. The new speaker of the House of Representatives, a Republican congressman from Ohio named John Boehner, spends a good deal of his leisure time acquiring his trademark sun tan on lavish holiday junkets with members of the army of corporate lobbyists that surrounds him. He was once observed handing out cheques from the tobacco industry to his colleagues on the floor of the House.

It would be incautious, however, to read these election results as indicating a pronounced rightward shift in public opinion. A New York Times/CBS poll of registered voters found their mood to be troubled, but politically amorphous. One issue is conspicuous by its absence: almost none of the respondents mentioned either the war in Afghanistan or the continuing occupation of Iraq among their main concerns. Foreign policy was a virtual non-issue in this election.

The survey registered a mood of widespread dissatisfaction and anti-incumbent feeling, with the economy as its leading cause. Forty-eight percent disapproved of Obama’s performance, against 45% who approved. Only a minority listed the budget deficit as their main worry, and a majority (53% to 38%) approved of Obama’s original proposal to withhold tax cuts for families earning over $250,000 a year.

The chief economic issue on the minds of an overwhelming majority of respondents was jobs. And, while those surveyed expressed a growing distrust for politicians of both parties, 63% felt this in respect of the Democrats, while 73% said they did not trust Republicans. Democrats were deemed more likely to “help the middle class” than Republicans by 55% to 33%, and 44% thought the Democrats were a better bet for creating jobs, with 38% favouring the Republicans. Only on issues to which voters assigned lesser importance - immigration and combating terrorism - did the Republicans come out on top. Forty percent echoed Republican talking points to the effect that Obama had “expanded the role of government too much”. But 35% thought that the size of government was “about right”; taken together with the 18% who opined that government was not doing enough, the results amounted to a repudiation of the Republican position by an 18% margin (The New York Times September 16).

The above survey was one among many, but did not differ dramatically from others conducted at the time. The poll suggests that the widespread mistrust of politicians it discovered among voters did not automatically translate into a groundswell of Republican support. If anything, respondents seemed to lean toward the Democrats. How, then, do we explain the Republican victory at the polling booth? Part of the answer suggests itself when we heed the advice of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s famous Watergate mole: follow the money.

Right turn on Wall Street

The rightwing corporate funding behind the Tea Party - from the Koch brothers and Freedom Works - has been described in an earlier article (‘Tea Party tempest’ Weekly Worker March 18). A more recent development is the flow of Wall Street cash from Democratic to Republican campaign coffers in the months before the mid-term elections.

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times writes: “Less than two years ago, Democrats received 70% of the donations from Wall Street; since June, when the financial regulation bill was nearing its passage, Republicans were receiving 68% of the donations” (August 31). Sorkin also reports that Daniel S Loeb, one of the street’s most influential hedge-fund managers, and a prominent backer of Obama in 2008, wrote a letter in August that was “forwarded around the circles of the moneyed elite, from the Hamptons to Silicon Valley”. Loeb wrote that “Washington has taken actions over the past months ... that seem designed to fracture the populace by pulling capital and power from the hands of some and putting it in the hands of others” (ibid).

Loeb’s sentiments were echoed by other one-time Obama supporters like Jamie Dimon, the head of the leading commercial bank, JP Morgan Chase. A hedge fund manager named Anthony Scaramucci confronted Obama at a ‘town meeting’ in September, saying, “I represent the Wall Street community. We have felt like a piñata. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re beating us with a stick, but we certainly feel like we’ve been whacked with a stick” (The New York Times October 2). High finance’s hostility toward Obama reached near fever pitch when Stephen Schwartzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, compared the president’s efforts at financial regulation to Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

Expanded opportunities for big business to increase its already enormous influence on elections were opened at the beginning of last year by a landmark Supreme Court decision called ‘Citizens United’. By a majority of five to four, the court, now dominated by Republican appointees, allowed corporations (along with unions) to engage directly in political advocacy, overturning all previous laws forbidding them to produce and market campaign advertising. The decision also gives corporate donors a convenient way to avoid still-binding laws requiring them to disclose all direct contributions to political parties. Since the court extended freedom of advocacy to profit and non-profit corporations alike, it became possible for firms to set up political front groups in the form of non-profits, which are not required to disclose their funding sources. The campaign thus saw the proliferation of non-profit advocacy groups handsomely backed by anonymous contributions. The most well known of these corporate cash receptacles is Crossroads, headed by the master Republican strategist, Karl Rove.

Wall Street’s sudden disenchantment with Obama presents something of a puzzle, given the persistent efforts of the president and his party to reassure the financiers of their loyalty. Not only did Obama appoint two well known friends of Wall Street - Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers - to his administration’s top economic posts, but Democratic politicians also worked effectively behind the scenes to make sure that the regulatory legislation coming out of Congress in the wake of the 2007-08 meltdown would leave the most vital interests of the moneymen untouched.

The crisis of two years ago was caused most immediately by banks and investment houses that were threatened with bankruptcy as a result of their ruthless speculative activity, and then came running to the government to bail them out with taxpayer money. The government complied out of fear that their going under would pose a risk to the entire financial system: ie, that they were ‘too big to fail’. Any serious attempt at financial reform would therefore have entailed reducing their size, requiring them to come up with their own future bailout fund, and/or curbing their speculative activities. The regulatory legislation ultimately voted by Congress - the Dodd-Frank bill - did nothing to reduce the size of giant financial concerns, and proposals for the banks to ante up a $19 billion emergency fund bit the dust early on. Provisions to limit speculation were half-hearted at best.

Authentic proposals were indeed made at the beginning of the legislative process, in the spirit of the Roosevelt-era Glass-Steagall Act - abolished by Bill Clinton - which forbade commercial banks from engaging in financial speculation. A bill was introduced containing the so-called Volcker rule, which would have prohibited banks from undertaking proprietary trading: ie, speculation with their own funds (as opposed to trading accounts for customers, which is still permitted). Another proposal would have forced banks to sell off their derivatives-trading divisions. Neither of these proposals came out the other end of the Congressional meat-grinder in its original form. They were eviscerated by a series of manoeuvres too Byzantine to describe here. But Mike Taibbi, a reporter for Rolling Stone, captures the essence of the process:

“... Throughout the debate over finance reform, Democrats had sold the public on the idea that it was the Republicans who were killing progressive initiatives. In reality, Republican and Democratic leaders were working together with industry insiders and deep-pocketed lobbyists to prevent rogue members ... from effecting real change. In public, the parties stage a show of bitter partisan stalemate. But, when the cameras are off, they fuck like crazed weasels in heat” (August 6).

The very sponsors of the legislation, Democratic representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Democratic senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, conspired to weaken it. The end result was a bill that exempted insurers, mutual funds and trusts from the proprietary trading ban altogether and still allowed banks to gamble with three percent of their assets. “In practice,” writes Taibbi, “it will be up to future regulators to define how that limit will be calculated - and one can only imagine how banks like Goldman Sachs will manage to stretch the loopholes in what’s left of the Volcker rule” (ibid). Banks were also allowed to keep their derivatives desks by moving them into subsidiary units. Whole classes of derivatives, moreover, are exempt from even this watered-down rule. All in all, experts agree that the Dodd-Frank bill will at best have only a marginal effect on the business practices that led to the crisis of 2007-08. Bankers themselves boasted that they had dodged the regulatory bullet.

There was, however, one provision of the bill that liberals counted as a gain: the creation of a consumer financial protection bureau, a watchdog agency for the financial industry. Its intended purpose is to prevent the kinds of deceptive lending practices that led to the threatened financial collapse. But the bureau was deprived from the outset of any independent authority, and placed instead under the control of the Federal Reserve, a prime mover behind financial deregulation in the first place. The agency was, moreover, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor known for her unsparing exposure of the ‘liar loans’ used to inflate the housing bubble. Her record made her the liberal left’s favourite to head the agency, and the bane of the bankers, who lobbied against her appointment from both outside the government and on the inside through their man at the treasury department, Tim Geithner.

Obama addressed the problem with a signature sidestep: he appointed Warren not to head an independent agency, but as an advisor charged with helping to set up the bureau, with her main detractor, Geithner, as her boss. Thus was Warren given a title, and deprived of any real power. While it is true that she would have required Senate confirmation to head the bureau, which she was unlikely to get, Obama had the option of avoiding a confirmation fight by installing her temporarily by means of a recess appointment, a device George W Bush did not hesitate to use for putting in place his appointees against the wishes of a hostile Senate. Obama, of course, declined to employ this option.

So, once again, why, in spite of all these genuflections, did Obama, in the run-up to the November elections, become Wall Street’s hate object?

The answer is that finance capital has ruled the roost for so long without hint of a challenge that even the mildest flourish of populist rhetoric from elected officials, or a few marginal changes in the rules of the financial game, can drive them into paroxysms of fury. When queried as to the reasons for their hostility toward Obama, many seemed mortally offended by the mere suggestion that they be held liable in any way for the events of 2007-08, and were particularly incensed by the president’s reference to ‘fat-cat bankers’ (for which he immediately tried to make amends) on 60 Minutes, a popular Sunday evening news programme. Far from being grateful that the regulatory legislation passed by Congress left their essential operations intact, they were enraged that the subjects of tighter regulation, higher taxes and reduced bonuses had been raised at all. They are determined to avoid paying even a fraction of the cost of the crisis.

In the pre-neoliberal era, the ruling class tacitly understood that politicians needed a certain latitude in which to strike an occasional populist pose for their constituents. Obama tried to remind a meeting of disgruntled bankers of this traditional prerogative in March 2009, when, after hinting that some people might feel a trifle put out by their swindling, added that “My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks” (Politico April 3 2009). Having become unaccustomed in recent decades to the sight of pitchforks, the bankers would have none of it.

The Republican and Democratic parties serve the same masters, but they are not identical. There is a division of labour between them. The Republicans specialise in actively advancing the interests of the ruling class; the Democrats excel at preventing the working class and its potential allies from fighting back. The Republicans mobilise ruling class opinion; the Democrats demobilise everyone else.

The Republicans are the preferred party of the bourgeoisie. Only when the latter’s image is tarnished by economic crises and/or foreign disasters, as it was by both in the Bush years, are the Democrats called upon to refurbish the image. The Democrats can only perform this service because their base includes those groups most likely to become disabused. But, once the storm clouds have passed, as they have now that profits have rebounded and bonus cheques are bigger than ever, the oligarchs become increasingly uncomfortable with the ascendancy of a party that may have to make concessions to its base in order to get re-elected, and return to their party of first choice. This is what accounts for the shift in the opinion, and the financial contributions, of Wall Street between 2008 and 2010.

Party without a message

The Democrats were decisively outgunned in the mid-terms, financially and politically. Flush with Wall Street contributions, and aided by a Tea Party generously supplied with corporate cash in its own right, the Republicans were able not only to energise their traditional base, but deploy a government-bashing rhetoric to channel the growing discontents of a crucial slice of independent voters. Exit polls showed, for instance, that most voters who opposed the bank bailout cast their ballots for Republicans.

For their part, the Democrats were unable to mount an effective counter-mobilisation, not, as the pundits say, because they failed to ‘communicate effectively’, but because they had no unified message to communicate. They mostly confined themselves to recalling the failures of Bush and denouncing the refusal of Congressional Republicans to cooperate with them in passing legislation. Their candidates around the country sought to distance themselves from a president whose support in the opinion polls was sinking steadily, and concentrate instead on local issues.

The Democrats’ ineptitude was due to the abiding contradiction of their politics. Their party relies for votes on unions, blacks, Hispanics, youth - all the groups at which the Republicans are pointing their political knives. The only thing that could unite these varied constituencies, and infuse them with a passion comparable to that of the Tea Party, is a clear-cut appeal to their class interests. Yet this is an appeal that the Democrats, fearful of biting the corporate hands that feed them, can never make on any consistent or sustained basis. Hence, a politics that wants to appear in some sense ‘progressive’, but is always ambiguous, half-hearted, equivocal; hence senators and congresspersons who take the immediate voting arithmetic of Congress as the outer limit of what they can accomplish rather than using Republican intransigence to stoke public anger in hopes of a bigger majority in the future; and in turn nothing to stand on at the hustings but the record of retreats and half-measures compiled during the past two years in power - a record that could almost have been deliberately designed to demoralise Democratic voters.

And so it did. Although voter turnout was about average for a mid-term election (around 40% of eligible voters), it was decidedly lacklustre among the very groups that trooped so enthusiastically to the polls to put Obama over the top in 2008: down from 18% to 11% among those under 30; down from 13% to 8% among blacks, and roughly the same for Hispanics. (Zogby International). Figures on the number of trade union voters who turned out are harder to come by, but the remarks of Patricia Elizondo, the president of a big machinists’ local in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, probably give a good indication of the mood of many: “People have been unemployed for two years, and they’re unhappy that the healthcare bill was not as good as they expected ... Two years ago, I had many members going door to door to campaign. Now they’re saying, ‘Why should I? We supported that candidate, but he didn’t follow through’” (The New York Times September 18).

By thus creating an ‘enthusiasm gap’ between themselves and the Republicans, the Democrats managed to accomplish their own defeat in the mid-terms, even in the absence of any broad rightward movement amongst the electorate. Their loyalty to the existing order sometimes comes at a certain electoral price, but one they would rather a thousand times pay than contemplate the alternative.

Rallies without demands

Democrats, however, continue effectively to occupy the political space in which a counter-mobilisation could take place. This is their enduring value to the ruling class. They attempt not to fan the flames of discontent, but to extinguish them.

They act to manipulate the base through dense intermediate layers of union bureaucrats, NGOs, think tanks, journalists, academics, media personalities and other middle class professionals. To these individuals and institutions grants are disbursed, government consultancies handed out and White House invitations tendered, endowing the intermediaries with the prestige of high office in the eyes of those below, and giving them the illusion of being political players. In return for these emoluments, the intermediaries raise funds for the Democratic Party and continue to tout it as the party of progress - or at least as the lesser evil, which from their standpoint, it certainly is. Republicans as a rule prefer to shun the go-betweens and rely exclusively on the counsels of their corporate underwriters.

Neither the fact that Obama, almost the minute after he was elected, dropped any real support for the AFL-CIO’s main legislative cause, a bill to make it easier for workers to unionise called Employee Free Choice Act, nor his mounting attacks on teachers’ unions, nor his wage freeze for government workers, deterred the federation’s president, Richard Trumka, from stumping tirelessly for the Democrats in the months before the election, or from spending $50 million and fielding 1,500 full-time campaign workers to get the party’s candidates elected in 26 states.

The absence of any political edge, let alone class theme, was evident at the two bigger leftish events of the campaign season. The first was the October 2 ‘One nation working together’ rally on the Washington mall - an event whose politics are evident from its title. The gathering was intended as a riposte to the rightwing ‘Restore honour’ rally called by the unofficial Tea Party spokesperson, Glenn Beck, in August, and held at the same spot. It was endorsed by over 400 ‘progressive’ organisations, and contained a small ‘socialist contingent’ supplied by, among others, the social democratic Democratic Socialists of America and the International Socialist Organization, the American orphan of the British Socialist Workers Party. The major funding and biggest contingents, however, came from the AFL-CIO and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the country’s largest black advocacy group).

Although the event was not officially in support of any political party and featured only one minor elected official, it was obviously intended as a pep rally for the Democrats. The speakers’ list contained two unelected black Democratic politicians, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, as well as the Democrat-loyal labour chief, Richard Trumka. There was a lot of very general talk in the speeches about justice, jobs and the need for federal aid to education, but no specific demands were made of the administration, and the only utterance resembling criticism of Obama came not from the politicians and bureaucrats on the platform, but from the venerable calypso singer and activist, Harry Belafonte, who, without mentioning the president by name, called for an end to the Iraqi occupation and the Afghan war.

No official political endorsements were made, but in the speeches given that day there was only one villain: the Republican Party. When repeated denunciations of the latter were combined with lectures on the importance of voting in November, the message was more than clear. The turnout, estimated by some at 175,000, equalled or exceeded that of the earlier Glenn Beck rally, but observers also commented on the gathering’s ritualistic atmosphere, and an understandable lack of enthusiasm among the crowd.

The second event was far quirkier: the ‘Restore sanity’ rally that took place on October 30 in the same location, also called to counter the Glenn Beck-Tea Party event. It was called by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, two political satirists whose irreverent television send-ups of rightwing politicians have earned them a quasi-cult following among youthful viewers, for many of whom Stewarts Daily show and The Colbert report are the principal source of news. Upwards of 65,000 flocked to the capital in response to the summons of the two comedians, many perhaps hoping for deadly comic thrusts against the right. Any such hopes were rapidly dashed. While comic routines were acted out on stage, what the audience got in the end was a serious and heartfelt plea from Stewart for political moderation. He appealed for a toning down of the supercharged rhetoric from both the right and left, exhorting politicians and Americans in general to be more cooperative and reasonable with one another. Throughout, Stewart posited an equivalence between fanatics of the right and fanatics of the left, comparing the Tea Party to such groups as Code Pink, a leftish group famous for staging theatrical protests in Washington and elsewhere.

The Stewart-Colbert rally was not tailored to the specific electoral purposes of the Democratic Party, like the ‘One nation’ event earlier in the month. It was, however, representative of the mentality of the middling layers upon which the Democratic leadership leans for support - a mentality in which right-left conflict is a matter of political tone and not opposing material interests.

The results of the Democrat-inflicted paralysis of all the forces that could resist capitalism’s mounting austerity drive were swift in coming. On January 5, an emboldened Republican majority took their seats in the House of Representatives vowing to repeal Obama’s already pathetic healthcare reform and slash the federal budget by $100 billion, leaving no doubt at whose expense. Taking their cues from Washington, state governors across the country, Republican and Democrat alike, are seeking to lay the blame for continuing economic distress on public workers’ unions, which they are pledging to curb or even eliminate.

The Obama White House has responded by moving even further to the right, just having appointed William Daley, the mid-western head of JP Morgan Chase, as chief of staff to replace Rahm Emanuel in an unmistakable bow to Wall Street. The so-called progressives who sold the Democrats to the people in 2008 and again in 2010 have sown the wind. Now they, and millions more besides, are reaping the whirlwind.