The US Democrats: A Dead End For Working People

January 14, 2008 at 3:16 pm (Democratic Party, Democrats, elections, green, iraq war, left, TWP, United States)

Much discussion has been taking place on various left blogs and in the left press on the upcoming US presidential election as the two main capitalist parties choose their candidates for the upcoming election in November.

My co-blogger, Voltaire’s Priest, has endorsed John Edwards after briefly backing Barack Obama. I have spoken out against this on simple socialist grounds and so too has Martin Smith in the latest issue of Socialist Worker in his article “Are the Democrats Any Different?”

I believe both Volty and Smith are missing the point – but from different angles. Smith is correct in pointing out the record of the Clinton years:

“The gap between rich and poor increased almost ten-fold. The number of federal prisoners nearly doubled. Clinton ordered US forces into combat situation as many times as his four previous predecessors combined and ended the federal welfare system – something right wing president Ronald Reagan could only dream of doing.”

This is fundamentally correct and is why Volty’s attempts to garner support for the Democratic Party by claiming that one must “if it is even temporarily in the interests of working people to do so” are utterly false. It has proven time and again to be in no way in the interest of working people to support the Democratic Party.

But Smith misses the point too when he goes on to describe the Democrats as a successful amalgamation of social movements and US capitalists and then concludes they are exactly the same as the Republicans. The fact is that they are not exactly the same as the Republicans.

The popularity of the Democratic Party as evidenced by last year’s congressional defeats for the Republicans is down to a number of factors, but most importantly the war. This is an incredibly contentious issue and is one of the first times in many years that the US public may be voting on their president based in large part on international policies and not solely domestic ones.

Smith claims that working people have been suckered into supporting the Democrats, but it is absolutely true that the Dems have been talking left on the war for some time now – and the American working class are responding to it. This is why Clinton has had to apologise and dodge questions time and again on her record of support for the war – something unthinkable even two years ago.

Now it has to be said that the majority of the US working class are not opposing the war in Iraq for “political” reasons in the same way those of us on the left in Britain may be doing so. Most often the opposition is based on the fact that Iraq has been a “failure” and one gets the impression that if it had been successful, a number of people would’ve supported it. In addition, there is still a huge amount of support for the war in Afghanistan and even Obama has said he wouldn’t rule out military action against Iran.

So what makes the Democrats different in this case is that they are tapping into this populist and quite frankly isolationist sentiment amongst the US working class. But so too are some of the Republicans. Right-wing populist Mike Huckabee has been expressing sympathy with the sentiment that the war should end immediately, but insists that America’s “prestige” and ability to fight future wars will be irreparably damaged if there is an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

In addition, the Democrats are different because two of their top candidates are a black man and a white woman – the first time in United States history that this has ever occurred. This creates a sense among all voters that the election is something historic, something to participate in and will most likely increase voter turn out. It would be a change in the United States to have a female or African-American as president – but this would merely be a superficial change.

The US working class does not necessarily recognise the change as superficial but will consider it dramatic. This is why, with the amnesia about Clinton’s actual record, it is a very real possibility that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. In fact, polls done in the last two elections indicated that people would’ve voted for Bill Clinton above Bush if he were to have run again. This is their opportunity to put Clinton back into the White House. Don’t forget that while the gap between rich and poor increased during the Clinton years, a number of people participated in the dot-com boom and the seeming “end of history” as liberal democracy appeared to be the triumphant order of the day and everything was on the up and up before those halcyon memories were destroyed in an instant with a dodgy election, 9-11 and the war on terror.

But just because the US working class and trade unions will largely be supporting the Democratic Party does not mean that socialists should. As much as it is easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm for a change from the debacle that was Bush, it must be remembered that big business is looking for a change as well. They don’t want the instability of the Bush years and will do their best (and indeed have done their best in the form of campaign contributions to the Democratic Party) to get Hillary or Barack into office. And one can rest assured that no matter how much money the trade unions donate to the Dems, it is a drop in the bucket compared to the corporations – corporations which are going to expect return on their investment.

However, none of this should be surprising. The Democratic Party never was a working class party. It was never set up in the interest of working people and only acted in their interest as a result of saving “free enterprise” as during the New Deal of the 1930s, as Martin Smith correctly points out. (It should be remembered that it was none other than Bill Clinton who dismantled a number of the gains from this time period while in office).

In fact despite large left organisations in the form of the Socialist Party in the 1930s, the embryo of a US working class party was destroyed by internal contradictions and external smashing up by the state. This organisation was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or the “Wobblies” as they were known. While it is often dismissed as a simple “anarchist” or “anarcho-syndicalist” organisation (of which it bore some elements) the truth is that the same kind of cadre that made up Hardy’s Independent Labour Party in Britain were those who found themselves in the IWW. It was a very heterogeneous organisation. Most of this leadership was executed or imprisoned by the state whereas, for a variety of reasons and differences between England and the US, the leadership of the ILP was actually incorporated into the electoral system.

Ever since the disintegration of the IWW, various attempts as mass organising were tried which included the creation of the Communist Party, Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party – all of which contained old Wobblies – but the sad fact remains that never again was there a mass organisation with the strength and militancy of the IWW. In addition, as the CP became Stalinist, their support and wedding to the Democratic Party grew. This is in spite of CPers being blacklisted and expelled from their trade unions by Democratic Party members in one of the blackest periods for the US labour movement in its history – McCarthyism.

Today the remnants of all three parties still exist in incredibly degenerated forms with the CP still wholeheartedly backing the Democrats despite their treachery during McCarthyism. The most interesting point to take from this is that when the working class in the US organises, it organises outside of the Democratic Party. At no point in the Democratic Party’s history has there been a break to the left to form an explicitly workers’ organisation.

However, something that is overlooked by those on the left in Britain (with the exception of Derek Wall it has to be said) is the break from the Democrats by Cynthia McKinney. Cynthia has announced her break and is now standing as a candidate for the Green Party, putting forward a number of very progressive policies, with particular emphasis on rebuilding the areas still suffering as a result of hurricane Katrina. Anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan who supported the Democratic Party for some time has also broken away in disgust over the Dems rolling over when it came time to vote on increasing war spending while hypocritically talking tough against the Bush administration. In fact there has been a massive debate taking place in the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice (UFP&J) after the leadership decided they would place emphasis on getting the Democrats into office in November and writing letters instead of holding more anti-war rallies. The outcome has yet to be decided, but the debate is ongoing with the possibility of an alternate coalition being formed.

Time will tell if, for the first time in history, a break from the Democrats results in the creation of a working class party or organisation. But it is the Cindy Sheehans and Cynthia McKinneys that are every socialist’s ally in the United States today and it is to them and those who are critical of the Democratic Party that we should be looking to – not the capitalist party candidates which have always represented and will continue to represent the interest of the United States ruling class.