The Self-Defeating Argument That The Democratic Party Represents Meaningful Change

Both morally and politically, the Democratic Party has failed after forty years of pivoting to the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and a great deal of people are now taking action to fix that. Bernie Sanders, despite having been prevented from becoming the new face of the party last year by pro-Clinton Democratic leaders, he and others are making another go at reforming the Democrats. And should this effort fail, these progressives will still have the option of letting the already sinking ship which is the Democratic Party go underwater and rally around an alternative organization.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the Democratic base appears to be satisfied with their party's current form. During the 2016 campaign, more Democrats were found to be satisfied with Hillary Clinton than there were Republicans who felt the same about Donald Trump, and 56% of Democrats feel that their party represents them. While that latter figure would no doubt shrink to less than 50% if it were to include all of the left-leaning individuals who no longer affiliate with the party, an overhaul of the currently neoliberal Democratic leadership will be difficult for as long as so many Democrats remain unaware of what their party represents.

So in this piece, I'm going to attempt to change the minds of those who believe the Democratic Party in its current form represents a serious threat to the corporate state. I've made this argument many times before, but in those cases a mistake I might have made is focusing only on the actions of the party's leaders. A more effective way of proving the Democratic establishment represents the oligarchy is pointing out the fact that the oligarchy works to accommodate it.

The reality is that if Democrats were a party of the people, the political system in its current form would not allow them to have any power. When Bill Clinton said at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone," had he meant this genuinely, said forces would have immediately started doing everything to sabotage him. His campaign would have been attacked and/or ignored by the corporate media, he would have been shut out of the presidential debates and had a difficult time getting onto all of the ballots, and either Bush or Perot would have prevailed. So is the case with every other corporate-funded Democrat like him who claims to want systemic governmental change.

Just look at what's happened to the few politicians in the last several decades who have actually tried to bring about what Clinton promised. When Ralph Nader tried to enter a 2000 presidential debate simply as a member of the audience, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization run by evidently very partisan representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, barred him from entering the area. Something similar happened to him in 2004 when Democratic officials hurt his campaign by filing pointless and resource-draining lawsuits against it. Nader wasn't the only candidate like him who was sabotaged during that election cycle, as evidenced by the successful attempt by the corporate media to wreck Howard Dean's campaign. Another instance of this systemic effort to block out non-corporatist candidates occurred in 2012, when the NYPD, which has a history of attacking those who threaten the neoliberal order, arrested Jill Stein for trying to enter the site of the New York presidential debate.

But never has the oligarchy-friendly nature of the modern American electoral process been made more apparent than in 2016. While some have tried to claim the fact that the DNC officials who expressed bias against Bernie Sanders had little control over the results of last year's primary proves the contest wasn't rigged, WikiLeaks' findings were only one part of the picture.

Throughout the primaries, pro-Hillary Clinton election officials often went out of their way to sabotage Sanders, starting with the first contest in Iowa wherein widespread reports surfaced of voter suppression and a highly suspicious "re-staged" vote count took place. Similar (and successful) efforts to rig the primary against Sanders occurred in Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, the Nevada State Democratic Convention, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and California. Lesser but still consequential instances of electoral fraud took also took place in many other states, as evidenced by the numerous statistically impossible Democratic primary vote models which favored Clinton in every case. Another way Sanders was felled by a corporate-controlled political process, predictably, was the media blackout which plagued his campaign.

And then, to add insult to injury, Sanders' ideological successor for the 2016 election Jill Stein was sabotaged as well, with the corporate media having launched a smear campaign against her and the Commission on Presidential Debates having deliberately chosen polls which underestimated her support while deciding who could participate in the debates.

Judging from these and other ways the oligarchy has rigged our electoral process to benefit candidates and parties that represent it, one can only conclude that the best way to tell if a candidate or party doesn't intend to protect the people's interests is to see whether or not the media and the major political institutions are trying to get them out of the picture. And clearly, the Democratic Party fails this test simply because of the fact that it's succeeded in the current political system.

Fortunately this sad state of affairs, wherein one can only trust a politician to uphold the popular interest if they're being shut out of the political process, will have a good chance of changing in the very near future. Economic inequality is now at a level not seen since the late 1920's, right before the public rose up to bring about the New Deal, and a similar event is certain to take place within the next few years. But in order to make this overthrow of the corporate power structure effective, we'll need to take a firm stand against the corporatists who currently control the Democratic Party.

The Cultural Dynamics Behind The Rise Of Clintonism

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone.

Those are the words of Bill Clinton as he was accepting the Democratic nomination in 1992.


I think I've said enough in past articles about why that statement of his was false. For the sake of my audience, who mostly know why as well, I won't reiterate in detail the fundamental corruption of the Clintons, the numerous ways that they and others like them have changed the Democratic Party for the worse, and the consequences that that has had for the country (though if you don't know what I mean, you can read about it here). I'm instead going to focus on why the American people have allowed the Clintons and Clintonism to come-and stay-in power.

To fully articulate the following study, though, I should give some context: after making that promise, Clinton, along with the other neoliberals now in control of the Democratic Party, did exactly the opposite, enacting NAFTA, consolidating media companies, killing welfare, incarcerating more racial minorities, outlawing gay marriage, and, perhaps most consequentially, deregulating Wall Street. And yet the Democratic base, despite largely disagreeing with these policies, remained (mostly) loyal to their party, with Clinton having an approval rating of 66% at the end of his term and Democrats being the most popular party at that time.

With all due respect for those who were among that crowd of loyal Democrats, why did so many Americans continue to support status-quo politics? Why didn't more people see through Al Gore's claim of being a populist improvement of his predecessor during the 2000 campaign and turn Ralph Nader into a serious competitor? Why did liberals become as indifferent towards the injustices that their leaders were responsible for as conservatives are about theirs?

The answer is more ominous than you would guess.

In my previous article, I concluded that the cause of the Democrat's shift towards the interests of the elite was the result of the conservative trend in public opinion left over from the Reagan/Bush years. Although the legacy of that era indeed had an influence on Democratic strategists' decision to move to the right, since the late 90's the public has returned to a firmly liberal state. The real question is why the left, despite being so out of step with the Democratic Party since then, has remained subservient to it. To find that out, we'll need to take a look at how America itself has changed between now and the time when Democrats represented the people.

The period I'm speaking of, which can be loosely defined as lasting from the end of World War II to the start of the Reagan era, was a relatively high point in American history. This was when scientific, technological, and social progress was at its highest rate ever, voter participation levels typically reached above 60% (more than the turnout of the 2008 election), and the Democratic Party, perhaps not coincidentally, was an institution that harbored democratic socialism.

You know what happened next, though. After income inequality reached its lowest point in modern history, with the top 0.1% wealthiest citizens owning a mere 7% of the country's money in the year 1978, the gap began to steadily increase. With the rise of Ronald Reagan (who's campaign poetically began the year after 1978), this and other negative trends became greatly escalated. In 1983, when the top 0.1% owned 9% of the wealth, the number of corporations that controlled a majority of U.S. media was 50. By 1992, that number was 14.

The neoliberal model of government now being applied, in addition to creating such a corporatized system from which Americans got their information, did the same to education. By 1990, the disparity between the quality of education that rich children and poor children experienced was tragically high. And the decrease in funding of schools in America, meanwhile, gave the same corporations that were enjoying tax cuts because of it the opportunity to take control of the schools themselves.

In time for Clintonism's ascension, the takeover was complete. The 0.1% controlled the media, the educational system, and 13% of all the new income, and the result was a politically apathetic population. With many young people feeling detached from the political process after receiving insufficient educations and the majority of Americans getting their news from pro-corporate outlets, rates in political awareness, and political participation, suffered. This was reflected in how voter turnout in the 1996 election was a dismal 49%, turnout among young people was at 40% in the 1996 and 2000 elections, and, of course, in the small amount of scrutiny that the Clintons and the Democratic Party received from their liberal supporters during that time.

In short, Reaganism had turned America into an oligarchy with an uninformed and politically submissive citizenry, which laid the foundations for Clintonism. This dystopian situation was assessed by the author Augustus Cochrane in his book Democracy Heading South: National Politics In The Shadow Of Dixie as being the same societal condition which afflicted the mid-century south. Paul Rosenberg explains Cochrane's analysis in the article Clintonism screwed the Democrats: How Bill, Hillary and the Democratic Leadership Council gutted progressivism:

Cochrane argued that the same sorts of maladies which afflicted the South circa 1950, diagnosed in V.O. Key’s classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation, had come to afflict the nation as a whole. The specific structures might differ—lungs vs gills—but the functions, or dysfunctions were strikingly similar, he argued, with political power held tight by wealthy elites while the majority of voters were confused, disengaged, or entirely absent, with politics serving them primarily as entertainment. In the 1950s-era South, its one party system was functionally a no-party system, operating somewhat differently from state to state. In the country at large, the same result later came from a dealignment of politics—the White House controlled by one party, congress by another—a frequent, but not dominant pattern in American politics until 1968, after which it’s become the normal state of affairs. The intensified role of money and media served to accelerate the breakdown of party bonds and further entrepreneurial politics, in which individual politicians thrive by branding themselves, regardless of how party allies may fare.

The good news is that this degenerate form of democracy, where the masses apathetically submit themselves to a continuation of the status quo, was not built to last. Though the state of America's media and educational system has only gotten worse since the 90's, as income inequality has soared to obscene levels, more people have been compelled to revolt against the political establishment that they could once afford to prop up.

After another poor voter turnout in the 2000 election, it soared to 56.7% in 2004, with 49% of young voters participating. This had correlated with a major surge in support during that year's Democratic presidential primaries for the leftist candidate Howard Dean, who, barring the series of attacks that the media and the Democratic establishment unleashed on him, would have likely been elected in 2004. This new strength in political involvement, especially among young people, became more apparent in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the latter of which had a turnout of 58.23% with 66% of participants under thirty voting for Barack Obama.

Because Obama and the other Democrats of his generation then proved to be more or less as Clintonist as their predecessors, voter participation then dropped again, with a 39.9% turnout in the 2010 midterms, a 54.87% turnout in 2012, and a tellingly small 36.4% turnout in 2014. But with the appearance of Bernie Sanders, it was clear that young people and others were fully poised to defeat Clintonism. 29% more young voters chose Sanders than those of them who chose both Trump and Clinton combined. And though Hillary prevailed in the end, had more independents been allowed to vote in the primaries, he could have easily won. There's also evidence that had the voting process itself been conducted fairly, Democrats alone would have propelled Sanders to the nomination.

But in the next few years, given the Democratic Party's steady decline and the coming dominance of millennials over the electorate, we may well see the death of Clintonism occur not with a reform of the Democrats but with the rise of a populist third party.

Whether Clintonism's replacement will indeed be something to the left of it, or if it will be the dark, degenerate brand of populism that Trump espouses, will have to be determined later. But what's certain is that even if Obama isn't the last Clintonist president we'll see in our lifetimes, Hillary herself will be.

Clintonism may have sown its own destruction in the short term, but after America is returned to something more economically equal and the citizenry becomes happy with its government, there's no reason it won't one day take a new form and rise again. When that time comes, many decades from now, hopefully Americans will be able to remember the lessons from this era and reject Clintonism before it retakes control. And if we can reach that state as a nation, where such a cynical and deceptive brand of politics has been made a thing of the past, we'll be able to truly say, "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone."

The Case Against The Democratic Party

The scene during Hillary Clinton's infamous "white noise" incident.

It was April 9, 2016. Hillary Clinton was holding an outdoor fundraising event at the house of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. As the Democratic icon talked to the group of government and big business insiders, for some reason, the reporters couldn't hear a thing she said despite being within ear shot.

This was because she and her associates wanted the words spoken there to heard by themselves alone, and had installed white noise machines around the event.

In a democratic society, this story would make every average citizen in the country deeply suspicious; why would you go out of your way to conceal the words of a speech from the public, especially one being given to such powerful individuals? Come to think of it, why would you associate with such types in the first place?

But this is not a democratic society, because human beings are not born with Democratic values. They are born with tribal values, which means that when someone that identifies with their group violates the group's rules, their first reaction is not to turn against the traitor but to try to excuse their behavior.

If you're a Democrat who is proud to be affiliated with your party, I can guess your thoughts when coming across this article; I'm dissatisfied with my only option. I'm not scared enough of the Republicans to want to unite with you. I'm acting like the mistakes that the Democrats have made define the party in general.

Well, let's take a good look at those "mistakes."

When I say that the Democratic Party is not a force for good, I'm not talking about the party that started social security, or put a maximum 90% tax rate on the wealthiest of citizens, or fought for civil rights. I'm not talking about the Democratic Party that started and helped prolong the war in Vietnam, either, because for better or for worse, those eras are too far back for us to call it the party as it currently exists. A good place to start is in November 1991, when Wal Mart founder Sam Walton sent out a memo to all of his corporate managers to donate to Bill Clinton's campaign.

Walton was planning on voting for Bush in the general election, but he had singled out who he wanted the Democrats to nominate. The political system was already very much influenced by corporate donors, of course, but while it didn't seem like it at the time, Clinton was the choice that would advance that influence the most.

After saying at the Democratic National Convention "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time is up," Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. In case you're wondering, this was a huge deal, both literally and figuratively. It allowed companies in Canada and the U.S. to export their labor to Mexico where the minimum wage is far lower, which since then has cost nearly 700,000 jobs.

And then, of course, came the advancement of the war on drugs, and then so-called welfare reform, and then catastrophic deregulation of Wall Street, and much more. But you can go to those links to read about those things, and I can go on forever about Bill and Hillary. The point is that for 25 years, they have helped make their party into something that no real liberal would ever want to support (Though it can't all be blamed on them).

Loyal Democrat, I hear your objection. You need to work with the opposition if you actually want to get things done. You can't expect too much from Democrats when they're under such fierce opposition.

And to an extent, I agree with you.


Fifty years ago, the political system was not nearly as dominated by big business interests. The political parties were less centralized and organized more by local members, making change easier. But as income inequality has increased, so has the wealthy elite's control over politics. And it's become very hard to pass meaningful reform. But the problem is that the Republicans are not are not the only ones who have been bought.

Democratic leaders like Harry Reid have of course tried to divert attention from their party's soft money connections, such as in 2014 when he more or less claimed that Democrats have no billionaire backers. This was debunked in a June 23, 2014 Politifact article:

We cross-checked the Open Secrets list of the top 100 individuals donating to outside spending groups in the current election against the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and found that, as of June 19, there were 22 individuals on the Open Secrets list who were billionaires. Of those 22 billionaires, 13 -- or more than half -- gave predominantly to liberal groups or groups affiliated with the Democratic Party. The other nine gave predominantly to conservative groups. (A list of billionaires and how much they donated can be found here.)

And while it is true that overall, Democratic politicians recieve less donations from special interests, that's beside the point. The point is that the political system has been bought out by the few, and the Democrats are very much part of that system-just look at how the DNC itself raises most of its money. If you believe that they care about the people, you need to ask yourself a few honest questions:

If they care about the people, why did they stand by as Bill Clinton did almost nothing but do the bidding of the banks and the corporations?

If they care about the people, why did they vote for the Patriot Act  almost identically with the Republicans in congress?

If they care about the people, why did 29 Democratic senators vote for the invasion of Iraq despite clear evidence that the WMD claims were false, making it a 77 to 23 decision in favor of the war instead of the 52 to 48 decision in favor of not starting it that would have come to be had all the Democrats done the right thing?

If they care about the people, why did they knowingly embrace a completely impractical and destructive Wall Street bailout while actually having to convince the Republicans in to agree with them?

If they care about the people, why did they fail to pass universal healthcare in 2010 despite having the majority in congress? (Just so you know, 33 million Americans are still without healthcare.)

If they care about the people, why did they propose to cut social security?

If they care about the people, why did they go out of their way for a pointless military intervention in Libya?

If they care about the people, why did they extend the Bush tax cuts?

If they care about the people, why are the vast majority of them determined to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

If they care about the people, why did they nominate for president someone who is funded by Wall Street, the Walton family, Monsanto, and prison lobbyists, pushed for the TPP dozens of times before claiming she was against it in addition to having supported every other right-wing policy that the Democratic party has embraced, and relied on voter suppression to win?

And finally, if the Democrats care about the people, why haven't they spent all these years fighting for reform like they actually mean it? Why haven't they tried to raise taxes on the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, expand health care and employee benefits, end the war on drugs, and regulate carbon consumption and unethical business practices, with real determination and persistence? The Republicans aren't the only reason America isn't the same as many other developed countries in it's distribution of wealth and welfare of the citizenry.

What you're surely thinking at this point, loyal Democrat, is that I'm not being reasonable. It doesn't work that way, your leaders have told you, and you can't expect too much change in such a change-resistant government.

I remember you saying a similar thing earlier, and my answer to that is to look at such a mindset more closely.

The so-called incremental method of progress, whether it's even being used as an excuse to push the party to the right or not, has proven time and time again to be ineffective. And the Affordable Care Act is no exception; Democrats had every opportunity to go much farther, and they didn't. The same is the case for every other inadequate step forward they've taken; when it's time to fight, for whatever reason, they always back down.

I'll leave Jacobin writer Matt Karp (in a quote from his piece Against Fortress Liberalism) to properly explain what I am saying, for risk of simply repeating his argument:

The simple truth is that virtually every significant and lasting progressive achievement of the past hundred years was achieved not by patient, responsible gradualism, but through brief flurries of bold action. The Second New Deal in 1935–36 and Civil Rights and the Great Society in 1964–65 are the outstanding examples, but the more ambiguous victories of the Obama era fit the pattern, too.
These reforms came in a larger political environment characterized by intense popular mobilization — the more intense the mobilization, the more meaningful the reform. And each of them was overseen by an unapologetically liberal president who hawked a sweeping agenda and rode it all the way to a landslide victory against a weakened right-wing opposition.

In short, the Democratic Party is not progressive, it is owned by corporations, and it has no excuse for not holding up to liberal goals.

And then comes the loyal Democrat's last ideological defense: "it's not like they're better than the Republicans. They don't blatantly and totally promote an agenda of greed, bigotry and war, and to stop supporting the Democrats is to help their truly awful opponents."

This is the one notion that's held back America's majority left-wing population from getting their way for many, many years. It's the idea that there is simply no way to change the party system, making the Democratic party our only alternative to outright madness. But once you look beyond the media propaganda, you see that the Democratic Party is just that: a party. People can leave it whenever they please, and the more people leave it the less relevant it gets. Democrats are already in fact a minority, with the most recent estimate putting it at 29% compared to Republican's 26%. That's 45% that affiliates with neither of these incurably corrupt institutions. And where this will have lead by the time Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump's first term is finished can only be imagined.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by putting the Democratic Party behind you and joining the real movement to put power back in the hands of the many. And if anyone tells you differently, it's just white noise.