By Jon Schwarz
The Democratic Party is at its lowest ebb in the memory of
everyone now alive. It’s lost the White House and both houses of
Congress. On the state level it’s weaker than at any time since 1920.
And so far in 2017 Democrats have gone 0 for 4 in special elections to
replace Republican members of Congress who joined the Trump
administration.
How did it come to this? One person the Democratic Party is not going
to ask, but perhaps should, is legendary consumer advocate and
three-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
Nader, who’s now 83 and has been been based in Washington, D.C. for
over fifty years, has had a front row seat to the Democrats’ slow
collapse. After his bombshell exposé of the U.S. car industry, Unsafe at Any Speed,
he and his organizations collaborated with congressional Democrats to
pass a flurry of landmark laws protecting the environment, consumers and
whistleblowers. Journalist William Greider described him
as one of America’s three top models for small-d democratic activism,
together with Saul Alinsky and Martin Luther King, Jr. Meanwhile, the
1971 “Powell Memo,”
which laid the groundwork for the resurgence of the corporate right,
named him as a key enemy of “the system,” calling him “the single most
effective antagonist of American business.”
But of course Nader has been persona non grata with the
Democratic Party since his 2000 Green Party candidacy for president.
George W. Bush officially beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes, with the
state’s electoral votes putting Bush in the White House even though he
lost the national popular vote. (In reality, a comprehensive,
little-noticed study released soon after 9/11 found that Gore would have won Florida if all disputed ballots had been recounted.)
Democrats excoriated Nader, who received over 97,000 votes in
Florida, for handing the election to Bush. Since it’s impossible to
rerun history, there’s no way to know whether Gore would have
won without a Nader candidacy. He certainly might have, but it’s also
possible that — since the Nader threat noticeably pushed Gore to take
more popular, progressive positions — Gore would have performed even
worse in a Nader-less election.
In any case, it’s now undeniable that the Democratic Party has
significant problems that can’t be blamed on Ralph Nader in 2000. In a
recent interview, Nader provided his deeply-informed, decades-long
perspective on how U.S. politics got to this point:
JON SCHWARZ: I’m interested in the history of the
Democrats caving, being more and more willing to do whatever the right
wants, for the past 40 years. Take the recent stories about Jared
Kushner. Whatever the ultimate underlying reality there, I think it’s
fair to say that if a Democratic president had appointed their
son-in-law to hold a position of tremendous power in the White House –
if Hillary Clinton had appointed Chelsea’s husband Marc Mezvinsky – and
stories had come out in the Washington Post and New York Times about him
trying to set up a back channel with Russia, he would have been out the
door before the day was over.
RALPH NADER: Do you want me to go through the
history of the decline and decadence of the Democratic Party? I’m going
to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are
milestones.
The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman
from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure
chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money,
corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money. Why leave it up
to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for
money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area?
And they did. And I could see the difference almost immediately.
First of all, they lost the election to Reagan. And then they started
getting weaker in the Congress. At that time, 1980, some of our big
allies were defeated in the so-called Reagan landslide against Carter,
we lost Senator [Gaylord] Nelson, Senator [Warren] Magnuson, Senator
[Frank] Church. We had more trouble getting congressional hearings
investigating corporate malfeasance by the Democrat [congressional
committee] chairs. When the Democrats regained the White House [in 1992]
you could see the difference in appointments to regulatory agencies,
the difficulty in getting them to upgrade health and safety regulations.
The second millstone is that they didn’t know how to deal with
Reagan. And the Republicans took note. That means a soft tone, smiling …
You can say terrible things and do terrible things as long as you have
[that] type of presentation.
[Democrats] were still thinking Republican conservatives were dull, stupid, and humorless. They didn’t adjust.
RN: Increasingly they began to judge their challenge to Republicans by how much money they raised.
You talk to [Marcy] Kaptur from Cleveland, she says, we go into the
Democratic caucus in the House, we go in talking money, we stay talking
money, and we go out with our quotas for money. …
As a result they took the economic issues off the table that used to
win again and again in the thirties and forties for the Democrats. The
labor issues, the living wage issues, the health insurance issue,
pension issues. And that of course was a huge bonanza for the Republican
Party because the Republican Party could not contend on economic
issues. They contended on racial issues, on bigotry issues, and that’s
how they began to take control of the solid Democratic South after the
civil rights laws were passed.
Raising money from Wall Street, from the drug companies, from health
insurance companies, the energy companies, kept [Democrats] from their
main contrasting advantage over the Republicans, which is, in FDR’s
parlance, “The Democratic Party is the party of working families,
Republicans are the party of the rich.” That flipped it completely and
left the Democrats extremely vulnerable.
As a result they drew back geographically, to the east coast, west coast and so on.
And that created another millstone: You don’t run a 50-state
[presidential] campaign. If you don’t run a 50-state campaign, number
one you’re strengthening the opposing party in those states you’ve
abandoned, so they can take those states for granted and concentrate on
the states that are in the grey area. That was flub number one.
Flub number two is what Ben Barnes, the politically-savvy guy in
Texas, told me. He said, when you don’t contest the presidential race in
Texas, it rots the whole party down … all the way to mayors and city
council. So it replicates this decadence and powerlessness for future
years.
When they abandoned the red states, they abandoned five states in the
Rocky Mountain area, and started out with a handicap of nine or ten
senators.
You may remember from your history, the two senators from Montana
were Democrats, Senator Church from Idaho was a Democrat, Senator Frank
Moss, great consumer champion, Democrat from Utah. Now there’s almost
nobody. The two senators from Wyoming are Republican, the two senators
from Montana are Republican [John Tester, the senior Montana senator, is a Democrat],
the two senators from Utah are Republican. I think the Democrats have
one seat in Colorado. Then you get down to Arizona and that’s two
Republicans.
So they never had a veto-proof majority even at their peak in the
Senate. And of course later when they weren’t at their peak it cost them
the Senate again and again. And now they’re in a huge hole, with the
debacle in the Senate races in 2016, they’re facing three times as many
Democrats up for reelection in 2018.
The [third] millstone is they decided to campaign by TV, with
political consultants influencing them and getting their 15-20 percent
cut. When you campaign by TV you campaign by slogans, you don’t campaign
by policy.
Next millstone, the labor unions began getting weak, weak in numbers
and weak in leadership. They began shelling out huge money to the
Democrats for television. And as they became weaker they lost their
grassroots mobilization on behalf of the Democrats.
The Democrats began the process of message preceding policy. No — policy
precedes message. That means they kept saying how bad the Republicans
are. They campaigned not by saying, look how good we are, we’re going to
bring you full Medicare [for all], we’re going to crack down on
corporate crime against workers and consumers and the environment,
stealing, lying, cheating you. We’re going to get you a living wage.
We’re going to get a lean defense, a better defense, and get some of
this money and start rebuilding your schools and bridges and water and
sewage systems and libraries and clinics.
Instead of saying that, they campaign by saying “Can you believe how
bad the Republicans are?” Now once they say that, they trap their
progressive wing, because their progressive wing is the only segment
that’s going to change the party to be a more formidable opponent.
Because they say to their progressive wing, “You’ve got nowhere to go,
get off our back.”
And this went right into the scapegoating of the last twenty years.
“Oh, it’s Nader, oh, it’s the Koch Brothers, oh, it’s the electoral
college, oh, it’s misogyny, oh, it’s redneck deplorables.” They never
look at themselves in the mirror.
RN: Republicans, when they lose they fight over
ideas, however horrific they are. Tea Party ideas, libertarian ideas,
staid Republican ideas. They fight. But the Democrats want uniformity,
they want to shut people up. So they have the most deficient transition
of all. They have the transition of Nancy Pelosi to Nancy Pelosi,
four-time loser against the worst Republican Party in the Republican
Party’s history.
If you put Republican politicians today before the ghost of Teddy
Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and “Mr. Conservative” Senator Robert
Taft, they’d roll over in their grave. That’s how radically extremist,
cruel, vicious, Wall Street, militarist the Republican Party is. Which
means that the Democrats should have landslided them. Not just beaten
them, landslided them in legislatures around the country, governorships,
president and the Congress.
But no, it’s always the scapegoat. Maybe Jill Stein, the little Green
Party, they took Pennsylvania and Michigan from Hillary the hawk.
JS: Democrats seem to have internalized the Republican perspective on everything involving the military.
RN: [Another] millstone is they could never contrast
themselves with the Republicans on military foreign policy – because
they were like them. They never question the military budget, they never
question the militarized foreign policy, like Hillary the hawk on
Libya, who scared the generals and ran over [Defense Secretary Robert]
Gates who opposed her going to the White House to [push for] toppling
the regime, metastasizing violence in seven or eight African countries
to this day.
So they knocked out foreign and military policy, because they were
getting money from Lockheed and Boeing and General Dynamics and Raytheon
and so on. Even Elizabeth Warren when she had a chance started talking about maintaining those contracts with Raytheon. Here’s the left wing of the party talking about Raytheon, which is the biggest corporate welfare boondoggle east of the Pecos.
[Another] millstone is: Nobody gets fired. They have defeat after
defeat, and they can’t replace their defeated compadres with new,
vigorous, energetic people. Labor unions, the same thing. They [stay in
positions] into their eighties no matter how screwed up the union is.
You don’t get fired no matter how big the loss is, unlike in the
business community, where you get fired.
The last millstone is, they make sure by harassing progressive third
parties that the third party never pushes them. I’m an expert on that.
They try to get them off the ballot. We had twenty-four lawsuits in
twelve weeks in the summer of 2004 to get us off the ballots of dozens
of states by the Democratic Party. Whereas if we got five percent, six
percent of the vote they would be under great pressure to change their
leadership and change their practice because there would be enough
American voters who say to the Democrats, “We do have some place to go,”
a viable third party. They harass them, they violate civil liberties,
they use their Democrat-appointed judges to get bad decisions or
harassing depositions. Before [third parties] finally clear the deck one
way or the other it’s Labor Day and they’ve got an eight-week campaign.
There are some people who think the Democratic Party can be reformed
from within by changing the personnel. I say good luck to that. What’s
happened in the last twenty years? They’ve gotten more entrenched. Get
rid of Pelosi, you get Steny Hoyer. You get rid of Harry Reid, you get
[Charles] Schumer. Good luck.
Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to
defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant,
corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer,
anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history.
End of lecture.
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