The Democrats: A Critical History

© 2008 by Lance Selfa

First published in 2008 by Haymarket Books.

This edition published in 2012 by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Selfa, Lance.

The Democrats : a critical history / Lance Selfa.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-931859-55-4 (pbk.)

1. Democratic Party (U.S.)--History. I. Title.

JK2316.S45 2008

324.2736--dc22

2008036839

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: History’s Second-Most Enthusiastic Capitalist Party

Chapter Two: The Party of Slavery Becomes the Party of the People

Chapter Three: The Rise of the New Democrats

Chapter Four: From Hope to Hopeless: The Democrats in the Obama Era

Chapter Five: Social Movements and the Party of the People

Chapter Six: Defenders of the Empire

Chapter Seven: Can the Left Take Over the Democratic Party?

Chapter Eight: Why Is There No Alternative?

Conclusion: Is the Lesser Evil Good Enough?

Appendix: Hal Draper, Who’s Going to Be the Lesser Evil in ’68?

Notes

Introduction

What Happened to the New Era?

When Haymarket Books published the first edition of The Democrats: A Critical History in the fall of 2008, political pundits and analysts expected the Democrats to post a huge win that November. The outgoing Bush administration had discredited itself in numerous ways, from its incompetent handling of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina to its championing of the widely unpopular, and falsely justified, war in Iraq. In September 2008, the collapse of major financial institutions (Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and American Insurance Group, among others) added another disaster to the Bush administration’s resumé: ushering in what came to be called the Great Recession. By Election Day 2008, the question for analysts wasn’t whether the Democrats would win. The question was: by how much?

In any event, the Democrats—with Barack Obama leading the way to become the nation’s first African-American president—scored a massive victory. The Obama-Biden ticket defeated the Republican McCain-Palin ticket by more than 7 percentage points (52.9 percent to 45.6 percent) and by nearly ten million votes (69.5 million for Obama, 59.9 million for McCain). Obama became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter, and only the second since Franklin Roosevelt, to win an outright majority (i.e., more than 50 percent of the electorate). The Democrats won states like Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia that had been solidly GOP states for most of the last generation. At the same time, Obama brought with him the largest Democratic majority in the House of Representatives since 1992 and the largest Democratic majority in the Senate since 1977. By the standards of recent American politics, where it was common to describe the country as polarized nearly fifty-fifty between red and blue, the 2008 election counted as a landslide. Obama’s election set off jubilant multiracial celebrations in cities across the country.

Liberals looked forward to a new era of activist government along the lines that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt traced when he assumed power during the Great Depression. In his book Obama’s Challenge, which also appeared in the fall of 2008, Robert Kuttner boldly stated:

Barack Obama could be the first chief executive since Lyndon Johnson with the potential to be a transformative progressive president. By that I mean a president who profoundly alters American politics and the role of government in American life—one who uses his office to appeal to our best selves to change our economy, society and democracy for the better. That achievement requires a rendezvous of a critical national moment with rare skills of leadership. There have been been perhaps three such presidents since Lincoln.1

For conservatives, the prospect of a new New Deal presented something of a nightmare scenario. In a Financial Times op-ed entitled Beware the Coming Democratic Sea-Change, conservative former Bush speechwriter David Frum warned:

The stage has been set for the boldest and most dramatic redirection of US politics since Reagan’s first year in office. Of course, there are no guarantees in politics. An inept president could bungle his or her chances. Unexpected events could intrude: a nuclear test in Iran, a major terrorist attack on US soil or some attention-grabbing political scandal. But given moderate luck and skill, the next president could join Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the grand reshapers of politics and government.2

As I write this, in the fall of 2011, the great liberal expectations and conservative trepidation of fall 2008 seem as if they took place decades ago. Seven out of ten Americans believe the country is moving in the wrong direction, and only about four in ten Americans approve of the job Obama is doing.3 There is a very real chance that the Obama era will end in 2012, as Obama joins Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Herbert Hoover on the list of one-term failed presidents.

In the midterm election of 2010, Republican revanchists—stoked with the energy of their base in the guise of the Tea Party—staged their comeback. In the biggest congressional midterm landslide since 1938, the Republicans captured sixty-three seats, ending the four-year Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. The GOP failed to gain the Senate. But that was the only consolation for the Democrats. The Republican sweep was so broad that the GOP emerged holding nineteen state legislatures outright, twenty-nine governorships, and the largest percentage of state legislative seats since 1928.4 As a result of the worst recession since the Great Depression, the Republicans now hold more power at the state level than they have at any time since before the Black Friday crash of 1929! Working people soon discovered what those state-level gains meant, as Republican governors and legislatures move to outlaw decades-old collective bargaining gains for public sector workers. At the federal level, austerity and deficit-cutting dominated the national debate.

Although the GOP touted its gains as proof that Americans rejected President Obama’s socialist agenda, rejection of the Democrats had a less ideological explanation. It started with the economy’s terrible state. The recession, which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, left wreckage that will take years to clean up. Sixteen to 17 percent of the US workforce remained unemployed or underemployed, with record numbers remaining unemployed for periods of six months or longer. Median family income declined 7 percent to $49,445 between 2000 and 2009, with income levels returning to 1996 levels. At the same time, the nation posted the highest number of Americans living in poverty in fifty years.5 By mid-2011, lenders owned almost a million homes lost to foreclosure, with another million homes undergoing foreclosure.6 Only two years after the economic crisis punctured all the neoliberal and conservative myths about the free market and gave a Democratic administration the opportunity to change course, it seemed that not much had changed.

This produced what pollsters and pundits referred to as the enthusiasm gap between conservative voters who couldn’t wait to throw out the Democratic bums in 2010 and the traditional Democratic base groups (such as youth, African Americans and trade unionists), who showed much less interest in the election then they did in 2008. Patricia Elizondo, president of a Milwaukee International Association of Machinists United Lodge 66, told the New York Times that the union had trouble motivating its members to get out the vote for the Democrats. People have been unemployed for two years, and they’re unhappy that the health care bill was not as good as they expected, she said. 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.’7

ABC’s polling expert Gary Langer calculated that twenty-nine million Obama voters in 2008 stayed home during the midterms, compared to 19.5 million McCain voters in 2008.8 As a result, the electorate that turned up for the November 2010 midterms was much whiter, wealthier, older, and more conservative than either the 2008 electorate or the U.S. population as a whole. The result was predictable: a conservative landslide.

As Democrats gear up for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, they will have to contend with the skepticism and demoralization that has set in among their constituencies. For most of the period of unified Democratic control of Washington (2009–2010), Obama and the Democrats assumed the role as saviors of a corporate system teetering on the edge of abyss. Even though the Obama administration was not the originator of the massive bailouts of the Wall Street banks and the likes of insurance giant AIG, it became the chief defender of those programs.

It’s very likely that the massive government backing of the financial system saved it from meltdown, but that was cold comfort for millions of Americans who suffered from high unemployment, loss of retirement wealth, and a massive foreclosure crisis. Obama and the Democrats legitimized massive government spending without changing any of their neoliberal assumptions. Instead, the administration pursued a kind of neoliberal Keynesianism—putting trillions of taxpayer dollars at the disposal of private business and trying to incentivize business to carry out social policy. It didn’t work. The banks and big corporations were happy to take the money, but they didn’t commit to lending it, saving homes, or hiring workers.

The behavior of the Democrats in power illustrated one side of the party’s Janus-faced9 role in the American political system—as the hopes and aspirations of 2008 illustrated the other side. The Democratic Party’s mythological role as the party of the people, positioned against the party of the rich, the Republicans, clashed against the reality of the Democrats as one of the two big-business parties in the American system. Election atmospherics—and the very real hopes that millions placed in Obama—aside, support for Obama within many business sectors represented their calculation about how the president could help them to preserve the status quo.

About this Book

An understanding of the two sides of the Democratic Party illustrated here—the harbinger of hope for millions fed up with war and economic distress and the selfsame betrayer of those hopes—is central to the main themes of this book. I hope to show that the Democratic Party of today is the latest incarnation of an institution that appeals to the people while looking out for the interests of corporations. In the two-party system of American government, the Democrats have historically played the role of the party that appeals to immigrants, the oppressed, and working-class Americans with the promise of policies that increase economic and social opportunity. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, two influential Democratic netroots bloggers, have described this positioning in somewhat idealized tones: The [Democratic] New Deal . . . brought the nation out of the Great Depression by reforming the U.S. economy, strengthening labor unions, employing millions of unemployed Americans in public works projects, creating Social Security, and generally proving that government can be a force for good.10

Yet after the heyday of Democratic dominance from the 1930s to the 1960s, millions of working-class Americans—particularly African Americans—felt left out of the great society that Democratic administrations promised. Organized labor had provided much of the human force that transformed the Democrats into a viable political institution reaching from the White House to Main Street. But it felt alienated enough by the Democrats’ pro-business policies to consider itself locked into what Mike Davis described as a barren marriage with the Democrats.11

The contention of this book is that these Democratic betrayals are not primarily the result of unscrupulous politicians or office holders who sell out—although there are plenty of each of those in the Democratic Party. Rather, they are the inevitable outcome of a political institution that socialists have long described as a capitalist party that only pretends to be a friend of working people. To develop this argument, I rely on much historical and analytical data. Nevertheless, this book does not purport to be a definitive or exhaustive history of the Democrats. It does not try to profile leading personalities or relate insider stories about Democratic administrations. Nor is it an attempt at muckraking, exposing Democratic corruption and double-dealing. Many books have done this far more effectively than I can here. And anyone interested in reading about John F. Kennedy’s peccadilloes or Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky will find dozens of other books to choose from.

This book presents an analysis, informed by Marxism, of one of the leading political institutions in the United States. Chapter 1 outlines the socialist case for why the main liberal reform party in the United States should be understood as a capitalist institution. Chapter 2 traces the Democratic Party’s two-hundred-plus-year past, as it evolved from the party of slavery in the nineteenth century to the party of Social Security and Medicare in the twentieth. Chapter 3 focuses on the Democratic Party of the last generation, during the conservative ascendancy that found its echo in a right turn in the Democratic Party. Chapter 4, newly added for this edition, situates the Obama presidency in the overall analysis.

Chapters 5 and 6 take up more topical concerns about the Democratic Party’s roles both in and out of office. Chapter 5 addresses the Democrats’ record as the party to which most progressive social movements of the last century have looked for support. Chapter 6 looks at Democratic administrations’ record in their conduct of the foreign policy of the United States as it rose to superpower status. Chapter 6 emphasizes Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s role in continuing and institutionalizing—rather than burying—the foreign policy of his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

Chapters 7 and 8 take on the vexing question of the relationship between the Democratic Party, which in common parlance represents the left of the political mainstream, and those activists committed to a genuine left or transformational project. Chapter 7 discusses the strategies and histories of those on the left who have unsuccessfully sought to use the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social change. Chapter 8 provides a brief post-1960s history to explain why no alternative to the Democrats resulted from that era’s radicalization. The book concludes with a brief sketch of how we can expect real social change to be accomplished, regardless of which party is occupying the White House.

Socialists understand that the Democratic Party is the default option for millions of Americans who want positive social change. Indeed, the two-party setup of mainstream American politics practically forces this choice, as it blocks the emergence of independent parties committed to popular and pro-working class policies. But as the history recounted here shows, millions who have started down the path of participation in Democratic politics—from antiwar activists in the First World War to labor activists in the 1930s and civil rights activists in the 1960s—have drawn the conclusion that the Democratic Party is not an effective vehicle for genuine social change.

My aim with this book is to provide a new generation who want to fight for a better world the political and historical tools they will need to understand the Democratic Party today. Whatever happens in 2012, the attraction of the Democratic Party will remain one of the chief political challenges to anyone attempting to build an alternative on the left in the United States. I hope this book helps in some small way to meet those challenges.

Acknowledgments

All books are a collective effort of many people’s time, energy, and ideas. This one is no different.

My editor Sharon Smith helped to streamline my arguments and to make them accessible to a wider readership. Chapter 1 benefited from astute comments from Sam Farber. Sherry Wolf provided me with material on the LGBT movement and the Democrats. At various points, Joe Allen, Joel Geier, Phil Gasper, Shaun Harkin, Eric Ruder, Todd Chretien, Paul Street, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Jessie Kindig, and Ashley Smith came up with factoids, ideas, or sources that helped me to make or to tie down an argument.

The folks at Haymarket Books deserve special recognition. Thanks to Anthony Arnove and Julie Fain, who encouraged me to bring this all together into a book. And thanks to Rachel Cohen, Sarah Grey, and Dao X.Tran for their careful proofreading and production work.

This book is also a product of more than two decades of collaboration with a group of talented activists and writers for Socialist Worker newspaper and the International Socialist Review. So special thanks are due to Alan Maass, Ahmed Shawki, Paul D’Amato, Lee Sustar, Elizabeth Schulte, Nicole Colson, David Whitehouse, Bill Roberts, Eric Ruder, Adam Turl, Joel Geier, and Sherry Wolf. Their insights, advice, and critiques have shaped my understanding of U.S. politics. My work is better as a result.

Last, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank Carole Ramsden, without whose love and support this book wouldn’t have become a reality.

Chapter One

History’s Second-Most Enthusiastic Capitalist Party

As he geared up for his 2012 reelection campaign, President Barack Obama roasted the Republicans who opposed the administration’s plans to spend billions to hire workers to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Appearing at the foot of the Brent Street Bridge in Cincinnati, Obama decried a tax system tilted toward the rich.

In the United States of America, a construction worker making fifty thousand dollars shouldn’t pay higher taxes than somebody pulling in fifty million dollars, he told a raucous crowd filled with union members. That’s not fair. It’s not right. And it has to change.

The Republicans in Congress call this class warfare, Obama continued. "Well, you know what? If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a warrior for the middle class, I’ll wear that charge as a badge of honor.

I’m a warrior for the middle class; I’m happy to fight for working people, Obama shouted to the cheers of the crowd. Because the only class warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade.1

Obama’s speech tapped the wellspring of Democratic Party support—the notion that the Democrats represent the people, while the Republican Party represents big business and the rich. At the beginning of what looked to be difficult reelection effort, it was easy to forget that Obama—not his 2008 Republican opponent, Arizona Senator John McCain—raked in the lion’s share of corporate, business, and wealthy individuals’ contributions in 2008. Officially, Obama raised more than three quarters of a billion dollars—doubling McCain’s haul. Obama bested McCain by factors of two, three, and four to one from industries as diverse as lawyers and lobbyists; communications/electronics, finance, insurance and real estate (a.k.a. Wall Street), and defense. And while he received overwhelming support from labor organizations, Obama’s total from the labor sector amounted to $585,000, compared to forty-two million dollars from Wall Street. 2

As this chapter and the next two will show, the contradiction between Obama’s class warrior rhetoric and his corporate backing is no accident. The Democratic Party is one of the two major political parties that have shared in governing the United States at all levels of government since the Civil War. The Democrats’ reputation as the party of the people follows largely from the party’s Golden Age, the New Deal period (1933–1945), in which Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted a number of important social reforms. The 1960s Great Society, under which Democratic administrations inaugurated Medicare and the War on Poverty, solidified the identification of the Democratic Party with the downtrodden.

Yet, viewed with a wider lens, this history of Democratic reform on behalf of the people spans only about forty of the 150 years since the Civil War era. Even in the last generation, when working-class living standards have been cut, unions have been destroyed, and the majority of American workers have lost their belief that their children will have a better life then they did, the Democrats have done little to stem that tide. Since 1973, when the median wage in real terms peaked, the Democrats have held the White House for half as long as the Republicans have, but they have held the majority in Congress and the state legislatures for most of that time. Yet they did little to reverse the conservative-inspired offensive against working people’s living standards. Kevin Phillips, a former Republican operative who turned against the dominant conservatism of the Reagan era, explained the persistence of the assault on working people in 1990:

Much of the new emphasis in the 1980s on tax reduction and the aggressive accumulation of wealth reflected the Republican Party’s long record of support for unabashed capitalism. It was no fluke that three important Republican supremacies coincided with and helped generate the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties and the Reagan-Bush years.

Part of the reason survival-of-the-fittest periods are so relentless, however, rests on the performance of the Democrats as history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party. They do not interfere with capitalist momentum, but wait for excesses and the inevitable popular reaction.

In the United States, elections arguably play a more important cultural and economic role than in other lands. Because we lack a hereditary aristocracy or Establishment, our leadership elites and the alignment of wealth are more the product of political cycles than they are elsewhere. Capitalism is maneuvered more easily in the United States, pushed in new regional and sectoral directions. As a result, the genius of American politics—failing only in the Civil War—has been to manage through ballot boxes the problems that less fluid societies resolve with barricades and with party structures geared to class warfare.3

So despite their (at times) populist rhetoric and support for social reform legislation, the Democrats are at their core an elite party concerned with sharing the responsibility of ruling the United States with the GOP. The differences that separate the Democrats and Republicans are minor in comparison to the fundamental commitments that unite them. To be sure, if there weren’t differences between the two parties, there would be no justification for a two-party system. But for corporate America, which generally supports the Republicans more fervently than the Democrats, the two-party system plays an essential role. If one party falls out of favor with the voters, there’s always the other one—with predictable policies—waiting in the wings. Even as the New Deal rearranged mainstream American politics, a well-known radical social commentator, Ferdinand Lundberg, stressed that the underlying nature of U.S. politics hadn’t changed: The United States can be looked upon as having, in effect, a single party: the Property Party. This party can be looked upon as having two subdivisions: The Republican Party, hostile to accommodating adjustments (hence dubbed ‘Conservative’) and the Democratic Party, of recent decades favoring such adjustments (hence dubbed ‘Liberal’).4

A Bosses’ Party: What Does This Mean?

Although the Democratic Party is one of the longest-existing mainstream parties in the world, it doesn’t really compare to many of the world’s political parties on the most basic levels. It has no fixed membership or membership requirements. Voters are Democrats if they vote for Democrats in elections. The party has no stated set of principles or programs. The closest approximation to a program is the party platform approved at the party convention every four years. As party conventions have developed into little more than trade shows rolling out that year’s model (the presidential candidate), the party platform is usually synonymous with the candidate’s talking points. In any event, Democratic Party candidates—from the presidency to the city council—are free to follow or to ignore the party platform in their election drives. It has no official political leadership outside of its candidate for president and important Democratic congressional officials. The Democratic National Committee, composed of hundreds of elected politicians, union leaders, lobbyists, and campaign donors, exists mainly to raise money for Democratic candidates. Its role in policy making or determining the direction of the party is fairly minimal. In essence, the Democratic Party is a loose federation of candidate-based local and state electoral machines.5

The Democratic Party isn’t a membership organization or a mass party of the type developed by reform socialists in the late 1800s in Europe, in which party members joined a myriad of organizations, from singing clubs to trade unions, and subscribed to a party press that analyzed events from the party’s ideological point of view. 6 It is more accurate to describe the Democratic Party as something closer to what mainstream political scientist Maurice Duverger described as a caucus-cadre party of notables. In this type of party, a vestige of pre-twentieth-century forms, small groups of prominent people (politicians and business leaders) hire themselves activists (i.e., a cadre) to maintain the mechanisms of a party (getting out the vote, distributing patronage). These prominent people (the notables) aren’t interested in involving more people or expanding democratic participation—in fact, they view voters and constituents as passive objects of the party’s operation. The cadre is motivated to work for the party less because of a commitment to shared values or ideology than for career advancement—the possibility that they could climb the ranks of the party to become part of the circle of notables. 7

While this description may seem theoretical, it becomes clearer when illustrated by its most visible example: a Democratic Party–run urban political machine. In the classic case of the machine of Richard J. Daley that dominated Chicago from the 1950s to the 1970s, Democratic Party members started out as doorbell ringers, working in the jobs their sponsors got for them, pushing the ward book [of tickets to party fundraisers], buying the tickets, doing the favors, holding the coats, opening the doors, putting in the fix, and inching their way up the organizational ladder, waiting for somebody to die and the chance to go on to the legislature, into the City Council, and maybe someday something even bigger.8 A modernized version of this system, where city contracts played the role that patronage armies once did, operated in Chicago under the heir to the family dynasty, Richard M. Daley. 9 As we will discuss later (in chapter 7), generations of reformers who have thought that they could change the Democratic Party from within find out that this operation is highly effective at defusing their demands for increased democracy or for social change.

The party platform, an amalgam of general rhetoric, attacks on the Republicans, and a laundry list of specific policy recommendations, changes with every convention—and with the political winds. The 1972 Democratic platform, written when the 1960s’ movements exerted influence on public opinion, would seem radical when compared with today’s Democratic policy statements. For the 1988 election, pitting the technocratic liberal Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis against George H. W. Bush, the Democrats produced a platform that included such right-wing staples as a call for a drug czar, a call for a strengthened federal role in local law enforcement in order to secure the safety of our neighborhoods and homes, endorsements of fiscal responsibility, and warnings against the Soviet threat (when, ironically, the Soviet Union stood on the verge of collapse).10 The current statement of the Democratic vision reads: The Democratic Party is committed to keeping our nation safe and expanding opportunity for every American. That commitment is reflected in an agenda that emphasizes the security of our nation, strong economic growth, affordable health care for all Americans, retirement security, honest government, and civil rights.11

How can this seemingly ramshackle and decentralized operation act as one of the two parties by which the U.S. capitalist class exercises its rule? Describing the Democratic Party as a bosses’ or capitalist party doesn’t mean that it is a cog in a conspiracy in which a Wall Street cabal or top industrialists give orders for the party to follow. The relationship between capitalists and the Democratic Party is very open and often a source of tension with other major party donors and interest groups, such as organized labor. To answer the question about how the Democratic Party can be described as a capitalist party, we must step back and consider what, in theory, a bourgeois political party is.

The standard picture of a political party handed down to us from civics and political science classes is one of a collective body of people organizing to get from government what they can’t get as individuals. The political party in a democracy represents the citizens, who indicate their preferences about what they want from government when they vote to put the party’s candidates in office. And yet it’s clear that this oversimplified model does not reflect reality.

A recent case in point would be the experience and aftermath of the 2006 congressional midterm elections that handed the Congress back to the Democrats after twelve years of Republican rule. Even the most mainstream analysts ascribed the Democratic victory to a public desire to end the war in Iraq. In polls taken immediately after the election, the public’s desire to see the end of the Iraq War increased. Almost six in ten Americans supported a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, and 73 percent of Americans said the United States should withdraw from Iraq within a year if the Iraqis wanted it, according to an early December 2006 poll conducted for the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. In fact, a September 2006 poll of Iraqis, conducted by the same polling outlet, found that 71 percent of Iraqis wanted the United States out within a year. So the majority of Iraqis and Americans agreed: the United States must leave Iraq—the sooner the better.12 Yet less than a year after that historic election, the Democratic leadership in Congress had already folded on setting a timetable and, to the outrage of its most consistent supporters, had approved more than $120 million in continued war spending—providing even more money than President Bush initially requested. At the same time, the leading Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination were engaged in a process of redefining withdrawal from Iraq to render the term meaningless, in an effort to shift public opinion to approving a continued long-term occupation of the country.13 Clearly, this isn’t the way political science textbooks describe the operation of a democracy or a responsible political party.14

Meanwhile, the party that claims to be a party of the people has acted against the people time and again. Bill Clinton came to Washington promising to reverse twelve years of Reagan-Bush trickle-down economics and to put people first. Expectations were so high that the Rainbow Coalition’s Reverend Jesse Jackson, the standard-bearer for Democratic liberals at the time, told Jet magazine that Bill Clinton and a Congress controlled by the Democrats have the opportunity to put America back to work and rebuild America with jobs, education, housing, health care and cleaning up the environment.15 But Clinton insiders knew all along what the administration had in store. Only days after Clinton’s 1992 election, an unnamed Clinton spokesperson told the New York Times: Labor, minorities, environmentalists, Blacks, Hispanics, women, retired people, you name it, all see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And somebody is going to be very disappointed.16

Indeed, one year into the administration, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen summarized its achievements: When was the last time that you saw a Democrat who could stake his political career over a free trade agreement as this president over NAFTA? Who would have predicted a year ago that this administration would tackle one of business’s number one concerns, that of deficit reduction? . . . Who would have expected a Democratic administration to propose cutting 252,000 jobs over the next five years, and bringing that one about?17

Who would have thought? Certainly not the millions of people who voted in 1992 for Clinton’s message of change. These Democratic Party actions are perfectly understandable, however, if one evaluates them from a different conception of mainstream political parties. This conception sees the Democrats not as a representative of voters or the people, but as one of the leading institutions that sustain the U.S. political system on behalf of the ruling capitalist class. To understand what this means, it is useful to understand the relationship among the state, social classes, and government that James Petras and Morris Morley used to analyze the 1980s’ transition from dictatorship to electoral democracy in Latin America:

The state refers to the permanent institutions of government and the concomitant ensemble of class relations which have been embedded in these same institutions. The permanent institutions include those which exercise a monopoly over the means of coercion (army, police, judiciary), as well as those that control the economic levers of the accumulation process. The government refers to those political officials that occupy the executive and legislative positions and are subject to