the problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others, but that long ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street.
Thomas Frank talking:
it’s not so much that they decided to—first they decided that they—that they didn’t want to be the party of the working class any longer. They didn’t want to really be the party of the middle class. And this goes back to the 1970s, if not—if not before. But by the 199—you know, wait, so the group that they decided they would represent was the affluent, white-collar professionals, beginning in the 1970s. And by the 1990s, that had really come into full flower with the Bill Clinton administration, and they became—you know, they actively courted Wall Street. And all through the last decade, you know, the years of the Bush administration, you had Democratic theorist after Democratic theorist talking about how there was this sort of natural alliance between the Democrats and Wall Street. Wall Street was supposed to be this place where the—you know, the professional class was doing these fantastic things, plucking wealth out of thin air. This was the creative class, you know, in full bloom—right?—doing these wonderful things, so creative. And, you know, everybody could see that this was a naturally Democratic industry. And the Clintons and Barack Obama all had a hand in this transformation of the party.
+relationship between the Democratic Party and the working class or organized labor. you could argue that the Democratic elite was pro-labor as long as there was an alternative out there in the world—the socialist bloc or the communist bloc. that provided an alternative vision for workers. Once you had the collapse of communism and socialism in other parts of the world, the Democratic elite no longer felt they needed to necessarily appeal to organized labor.
to lots of different groups, by the way. That’s the sort of the—I guess you would call that, you know, the very—the grand, sweeping view of history. But, in fact, the Democratic abandonment of the working class really does begin in the Vietnam era, and a lot of it happened for reasons that are very understandable and even admirable. You know, the Democratic Party wanted to sort of reconstitute itself in the early 1970s and move away from organized labor and remove organized labor from its structural position in the Democratic Party because of all the fights over the Vietnam War. You remember that a lot of organized labor was—had really supported President Johnson in those days, and the Democratic Party wanted to change itself. And, you know, to make a very long and winding story short, they made their decision to shift their allegiance to the professional-managerial class, and it turned out to be really good for them from a financial point of view, because we’re talking about very affluent people here. So everything sort of has worked out for them—for the Democrats, that is. It’s been great for them. For organized labor and for working people, it’s been a catastrophe. I mean, this is the reason that inequality is—or one of the biggest reasons that inequality is totally out of control in this country, is you don’t have a party in this country that really cares about working people.
NAFTA was negotiated by Republicans, by—remember, George Bush Sr. negotiated NAFTA. But it took a Democrat to get it passed, because Congress—you remember back, Amy, back in those days, Congress was always controlled by Democrats, I mean, going back to the Great Depression. But yeah, Clinton had five major achievements as president. And when I say these are his major achievements, that’s according to his fans, according to his admirers. And all five of them were Republican or conservative initiatives. In addition to NAFTA, you had the crime bill in ’94; you had welfare reform; you had deregulation, you know, across the board, of banks, also of telecoms; and you had the balanced budget. These are the five sort of great things that when people say, you know, Bill Clinton is this wonderful president, those are the things that they look back on. Every single one of them ended in disaster. And every single one of them—well, arguably, with the exception of the balanced budget, but every single one of them was a Republican, a conservative initiative. And he got them done.
I was around when—obviously, when Clinton was president, and I remember when the ’94 crime bill was passed. And it made me so angry. You know, it did things like federal death penalties went from three crimes to 60, or something like that, you know, and building prisons all over the country, and, you know, all of these sort of mandatory minimums. You know, this was a terrible, terrible thing. And I remember when it happened, and it infuriated me. And I was trying to capture that in my writing, when I was writing Listen, Liberal. And I remember talking to an expert on this, you know, and books take a while to write, you understand. I was talking to an expert about this, and we were talking about all the particulars of the ’94 crime bill. And she said to me, you know, “This is great that you’re writing this, but don’t think you’re going to change anybody’s mind about this sort of thing. It’s just—it’s futile to try to reason with the public about the, you know, mass incarceration.” And then, a few months later, Black Lives Matter happened. And lo and behold, the country—the entire opinion climate of this country has completely changed. It’s a wonderful thing.
+Earlier this spring, Republican mega-donor Charles Koch has said he would—could support Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over a Republican nominee in November.
it’s so ironic. You know, I love irony. But, you see, this is a man that the Democratic Party has spent millions and millions of dollars, you know, assailing and berating and mocking. And, you know, the Koch brothers is on the tip of everyone’s tongue as what’s the matter with America these days. And now it looks like, hey, he thought Bill Clinton was pretty OK. He a Democratic president was just fine. Yeah, well, he sort of made my point there. A fellow Kansan. That’s wonderful.
Bernie Sanders was completely right. One of the—several things leaped out in what he—in the clip that you just played. When he said that the business model of Wall Street is fraud, well, to a certain degree he’s exactly right. And one of the things that we are going to remember about the Obama administration was its complete failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for a whole long list of apparently fraudulent behavior. And this is—this is one of the sort of abiding mysteries of our time: Why do they do this? I mean, even George W. Bush, remember, got tough with the guys from Enron, who were his pals, his campaign donors—right?—his best friends. And those guys are still in prison. But Barack Obama couldn’t go after Wall Street, you know? Why not? And it’s one of the questions that I really tried to answer in Listen, Liberal.
And the answer that I finally came up with is that it’s not just all the—you know, all the campaign donations; it’s a sort of class solidarity between the kind of people that fill Democratic administrations these days, you know, the cream of the professional-managerial class, the people at the very apex of our country’s meritocracy system, our status system, and the people on Wall Street. I mean, it’s not a coincidence that there’s this—in the early years of the administration, anyway, there’s this incredible, you know, revolving door action between the administration and Wall Street. Today, the revolving door is all between the administration and Silicon Valley, but back then it was as though there was no difference between—they were just both two different nodes, you know, of the American meritocracy, one in Washington and the other in New York City.
But, you know, Bernie Sanders, to get back to him, when you think about the way that the Democratic insiders and the sort of liberal establishment of this country reacted to him, it was almost like an allergic reaction. What he was saying was just so utterly unacceptable to them. And when you think about it, what he’s saying is very deep in the Democratic tradition. It’s not radical. It’s not strange. It’s straight out of the New Deal. I mean, he sounds like—he sounds like, you know, a New Dealer. He sounds very familiar to me. The things that he was proposing are right out of, you know, the Democratic platform when Roosevelt was president, when Harry Truman was president, that sort of thing. And I think, for our modern-day Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders represents this past that they think they have put behind them, that they don’t think they should need to deal with anymore. I mean, there’s something about their reaction to him that was just so strange. It’s like—you know, like he’s the bad conscience, the guilty conscience, that they want to put behind them, you know. They never want to have to hear that stuff again.
Donald Trump, this guy is—this guy is a gold-plated buffoon, you know? What we have to—what we have to consider here with Donald Trump is we have to understand that what’s happening with Donald Trump, this is not—you know, there’s all sorts of different ways of describing it, but what we’re really seeing here is a reaction to—I mean, you know, to inequality. This is what it looks like when vast parts of America are—you know, when the economy has basically dried up and blown away. You know, this is what deindustrialization—at the end of the day, this is what it looks like, when, you know, Democrats go around celebrating this wonderful new information economy that we’re in. And by the way, they’re doing it today on The New York Times op-ed page; they do it all the time. They celebrate that. And the other side of the coin is that, you know, the middle class is shrinking. Wages never go anywhere. You know, the percentage of the gross national product that is—that goes to labor these days is the lowest it has ever been since World War II. You know, look, for a lot of people, the promise of American life is over. It’s gone.
And this is only going to get worse under a Hillary Clinton presidency. And, well, it would get much, much worse under a Donald Trump presidency. But what I’m getting at here is that this phenomenon, inequality, is going to get worse. All the problems that we’re looking at today, our economic problems, are going to—are going to get worse. And four years from now, you’re going to have another Trump. And, you know, the good side of that coin is that you’ll also have another Bernie Sanders. You know, so this can all end—it can have a happy ending. You know, you could have a president in the Bernie Sanders mold somewhere down the road. But there’s also really, you know, a frightening side to this: You could have someone like Trump somewhere down the road. And that—you know, that should terrify us. But that is the direction we’re going.
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Thomas Frank
author of the new book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? He’s also a founding editor of The Baffler.
— source democracynow.org