"...What the Democratic Party Needs is a Rump Formation of Dissenters..."--William Greider

[KoKo]

[b[How the Democratic Party Lost Its Soul

The voters themselves resemble the supernumeraries in a grand opera: they appear on stage at election time, always lavishly praised by the pols. But they are given no lines to speak or songs to sing.


William Greider
http://www.thenation.com/article/190385/how-democratic-party-lost-its-soul

Long ago, the party abandoned its working-class base (of all colors) and steadily distanced itself from the unglamorous conditions that matter most in people’s lives. Traditional party bulwarks like organized labor and racial minorities became second-string players in the hierarchy that influences party policy. But the Dems didn’t just lose touch with the people they claimed to speak for; they betrayed core constituencies and adopted pro-business, pro-finance policies that actively injure working people.

The shift away from the people was embraced most dramatically when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats came to power in the 1990s. Clinton double-crossed labor with NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements, which encouraged the great migration of manufacturing jobs to low-wage economies. Clinton’s bank deregulation shifted the economic rewards to finance and set the stage for the calamity that struck in 2008. Wall Street won; working people lost. Clinton presided over the financialization of the Democratic Party. Obama merely inherited his playbook and has governed accordingly, often with the same policy-makers.

“The people,” of course, are still present in the party, but they’re treated mainly as data for election strategies. The voters themselves resemble the supernumeraries in a grand opera: they appear on stage at election time, always lavishly praised by the pols. But they are given no lines to speak or songs to sing.

Instead of actually talking to people, as the old party precinct captains used to do, the campaigns now rely on TV ads to shape public opinion, and polling and focus groups to monitor the views of citizens. The communication is reversed: instead of asking people what they need as a guide to governing, people are asked what the party needs to say (or not say) to harvest votes.

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What we need is a rump formation of dissenters who will break free of the Democratic Party’s confines and set a new agenda that will build the good society rather than feed bloated wealth, disloyal corporations and absurd foreign wars. This is the politics the country needs: purposeful insurrection inside and outside party bounds, and a willingness to disrupt the regular order. And we need it now, to inject reality into the postelection spin war within the party. On one side, the right-wingers will blame the loss on Obama’s unpopularity, claiming his economic policy is too liberal; progressives must counter that the Democrats lost because they had no economic message aside from Obama’s replay of tired Wall Street bromides that misfired so spectacularly.

This is the fight that really matters, and it was coming no matter how bad the Democratic losses were.

http://www.thenation.com/article/190385/how-democratic-party-lost-its-soul