In one of his most significant works, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges argues that the traditional bulwarks against corporate power no longer fulfill that role. He asserts
that the liberal class has failed to confront the rise of the corporate state and argues that the five parts of the liberal establishment--the press, liberal religious institutions, unions, universities, and the Democratic Party--are more concerned with status and privilege than justice and progress.
While I did not completely agree with everything he said in the book, the author did offer some pretty compelling illustrations to support his thesis. Today, Rick Salutin offers a similar view as he looks at the Democratic Party in the U.S., arguing that people like Joe Manchin are not the real reason that Joe Biden's progressive agenda is being impeded.
For 80 years, efforts to stifle even minimally “progressive” measures like universal public health care have been led not by individuals like Manchin but by the party establishment — including Biden himself for the last five decades. Come tiptoe through a few of the weeds on this with me.
•FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s genuinely moved the U.S. leftward with its social programs. By 1944, when he was preparing to run for a fourth term, the party bosses pressured him to replace his vice-president, the left-wing Henry Wallace, with a typical “party machine” Democrat, Harry Truman. Wallace ran against Truman as the Progressive Party candidate in 1948 and lost.
•In the 1960s, president Lyndon Johnson could’ve completed FDR’s New Deal agenda by finally confronting the racism issues that Roosevelt ducked. But Johnson was destroyed instead by another U.S. dilemma, its imperialist impulse, embodied in the Vietnam War. He flinched, backed the war and chose not to run for re-election. The party elites then beat back anti-war candidates for president and nominated a pro-war Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, who was defeated by Republican Richard Nixon.
•In the 1980s, Arkansas Democratic governor Bill Clinton lost a re-election bid and concluded he’d been seen as too “progressive”; he became pro-death penalty and anti-welfare. He was elected president in 1992 with the same approach. He put his wife Hillary in charge of health-care reform. They refused to even consider a universal public program. Their project died inelegantly.
•Barack Obama was seen as progressive when elected in 2008. But in his first crisis, the financial crash of that year, he bailed out banks and did nothing for people who lost their homes. He was absorbed into the party establishment.
•In 2016, independent “socialist” senator Bernie Sanders ran for nominee against Hillary Clinton, surprising even himself with how well he did. In 2020 he ran again and held a clear lead, when the Clinton-Obama forces joined to defeat him in the South Carolina primary. Sanders graciously supported Biden for president in the hope of moving the party’s agenda leftward. He succeeded.
There were many progressives sufficiently motivated to run for the party, such as Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, resulting in the defeat of a number of conservative stalwarts and subsequently helping to form Biden's current agenda, an agenda that looks increasingly at risk.
They continue to take on a party elite that has struggled against serious social change, going back to the years just after the New Deal and the Cold War’s onset.
Salutin, however, is not particularly optimistic that the old guard will cede their power willingly. He draws upon an example from Buffalo, where a self-described democratic socialist, 39-year-old Black nurse India Walton, won the mayoral nomination against the four-term Democratic mayor. The election is next week.
The establishment response was to try and get the former mayor on the ballot anyway, and then to have the position of mayor itself eliminated. Last week, the party chair for the state announced they won’t support her, just as they wouldn’t support David Duke — the longtime KKK leader — if he won a primary in nearby Rochester. These are people who’d rather lose an election than lose control of “their” party, and they often get their wish.
Sadly, it would seem that "serving the people" is just another example of empty rhetoric instead of words approximating reality.
