Well, you’d be acting crazy too if you had just gotten out of jail after 25 long, hard years in the slam. And that’s where the Democrats are coming from.
All real Democrats, that is, which doesn’t include squishy neo-lib, “pragmatic”, compromising wimps like me—dudes who believe in free markets (most of the time) and free speech (pretty much all the goddamn time), who believe that climate change presents significant but not catastrophic problems, that any government bureaucracy’s first priority is inevitably the size of its own budget, and that “oppression” does not guarantee wisdom. Yeah, squares like me are seriously on the outs. So how did that happen?
It all goes back to that devil Bill Clinton, who won the presidency in 1992 when all the smart guys in the Democratic Party thought no Democrat could pull it off. Bill ran a rather cunning campaign, targeting “Reagan Democrats” by promising to fight for people “who work hard and play by the rules”, claiming, among other things, that he would cut taxes on hard-working middle-class folks while “eliminating welfare as we know it in two years” (although it actually took him four).1
Once in office, however, Bill went seriously bi-coastal/neoliberal, first championing the rights of gays in the military—and the white folks in the South who voted for Bill did not think of gays as “people who work hard and play by the rules”—and then, when he actually learned something about economics, raised taxes to help reduce the deficit and make legendary free market champion/Fed Chair Alan Greenspan happy. On top of all that, he put most of his effort into his politically disastrous universal health care plan, which, shockingly, a lot of people saw as “welfare”, because it raised taxes on those who had health insurance (largely through their employers or Medicare) in order to provide health insurance to those who didn’t.2 The fact that employer-provided health insurance is in fact a disguised form of welfare (as is Medicare) is lost on 99% of the population, who are happy to be fooled when it benefits both their self image and their pocket book.3
The only issue on which Clinton actually “delivered” for the people who work hard and play by the rules in his first two years was his “Million Cops” tough on crime bill, which really delivered for the police unions, who were happy for the cash, and finally got rid of the Democrats’ “soft on crime” image, which the Republicans had used against them ever since the great urban race riots of the sixties had ignited a vast upsurge in violent black crime.
Making Alan Greenspan happy very fortunately made the economy happy, and Democrats discovered the joy of free markets. Markets were up, budget deficits and crime were down, and Bill won a second term, and the “new Democrats”—the neolibs—would surely have won a third if only Bill could have kept it in his pants. The “old Democrats”—who championed big government and organized labor, who hated big business—couldn’t find an opening. They had no money, and no organization. No one needed them. They were powerless, and they would stay that way for four more presidential terms, under both Bush and Obama.
Not that the neolibs were entirely happy. They couldn’t get their way on gay rights, and in fact had to pretend that they were against gay rights, when they clearly wanted to champion them. Much of this was sincere, but much of it was also the traditional liberal tendency to romanticize the outsider, to feel sorry for whoever the middle class did not feel sorry for. The neolibs also had to pretend they hated marijuana, and were “tough on drugs” in general—to keep the old “soft on crime” charge at bay. And they didn’t get to spend as much money as they wanted on the environment, not the sort of “big plan” that they dreamed of—for liberals love big plans of almost any sort, any sort of undertaking that will put them in the driver’s seat.
The rule of the neolibs was only intensified by Barack Obama’s big win in 2008, fueled by a seemingly unlimited flood of Wall Street cash. Barack thought he had a deal with Wall Street: they’d give him universal health care, and he’d trim entitlements. But Wall Street never delivered on health care—did not pressure Republicans to accept some sort of compromise—while the Republican leadership was in no mood to let Obama do Wall Street any favors by limiting entitlements, and the Republican rank and file were no more interested in seeing entitlements cut than were the Democratic rank and file. Both Democratic and Republican elites were starting to collide with political reality. Cash is great but votes are decisive.
Even though Obama won re-election, and became the first president since Reagan to win two terms with a majority of the popular vote in both elections (and the first Democrat since FDR), his eight years in office were disastrous for the Democratic Party as a whole, and the effect was to discredit the neolibs as a bunch of Wall Street sell outs who compromised the party’s soul on gays/“sexuality”,4 on drugs, on crime, on gun control, on immigration, and the environment. The “new Democrats” who felt the Bern in 2016 couldn’t understand how the Party could have been so wicked as to compromise—that is to say, “sell out”—on these issues, because they had no experience, and thus no understanding, of how much social conditions and social attitudes have changed since the early nineties. Underpinning all of this discontent, of course, was the economic hardship and disappointments that so many American have experienced since 2008. Those goddamn Baby Boomers spent all the money on themselves and left us nothing!
Hillary Clinton’s painful defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, unexpected by most and agonizingly close, set the final seal on the failure of the neolibs. For aging paleolibs like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who had suffered in durance vile for decades, well, they were free at last! Free at last! Great God Almighty, I’m free at last! Free to be a real Democrat! At last we can have it all! And so the bidding has begun, to see who can be the most liberal, the most “irresponsible”, instead of, as in the bad old days, who can be the most pragmatic. Because what did “pragmatism” get us? Donald Trump!
Afterwords
Obviously, I’m very much in disagreement with nine-tenths of the rowdiness going on in the party today. I don’t like any of the front runners, and can only hope pathetically that, you know, something will turn up.
Democrats, who once firmly embraced Silicon Valley as a guarantee of an ever-growing economy, have come to (largely) hate it as a source of destructive rather than creative destruction. The new paleolibs are aggressively “progressive” on social issues, but retrograde on economic ones, longing for “security” and fearful of change. They are convinced that their ideas are “wildly popular”, and the fact that they somehow don’t translate into huge majorities must be blamed on something. Their continuing obsession with “hate speech”—I hate Donald Trump. Can’t I say that?—is deeply disturbing.
1. Bill was talking out of both sides of his mouth pretty outrageously on this one, encouraging the working class white folks to believe that he was just going to shut down “welfare” (principally what was then called Aid to Families with Dependent Children), while “explaining” to liberals that he would eliminate welfare by creating a federal jobs program that would provide recipients with “real jobs”, offering middle-class pay and benefits. The actual reform package he signed did not create any federal jobs at all (fortunately) and, in my opinion, was a real reform (except, as he acknowledged at the time, the anti-immigrant measures Republicans insisted upon), because it discouraged welfare dependency, a real problem that real liberals proudly refuse to recognize. I riffed on this subject in more detail here.
2. Bill very unfortunately put Hillary in charge of the health care initiative. It’s bad enough when the boss’s wife redecorates the office. When she starts making policy, it’s a disaster. Hillary was arrogant and ignorant, damaged herself and her husband’s administration.
3. Federal law says that health insurance premiums paid by an employer are tax exempt only if the insurance is available regardless of prior condition, which is not the way insurance companies want to do business. Of course, excluding the premiums from an employee’s taxable income is a subsidy in any case. But almost no one notices this.
4. In Obama’s second term, his administration began to move aggressively on these issues. But liberals moved even more aggressively, and old folks like Joe Biden don’t seem to be from another time, but rather another planet, and not a very nice one.
