President Donald Trump:  the True Fruit of the DLC

Not Donald Trump, but “President Donald  Trump.”  What a bad taste that brings to the mouth that voices it.  How did it occur that he defeated” the most competent person to ever run for the presidency”?   Many reasons certainly:  Variously denounced by GOP elected officials and “never Trump” Republicans, he is still the natural outcome of GOP thought and action; the anger of Whites (especially older males) at “losing” their country to those who appear different from them (reminiscent of the Know-Nothing movement of  the 1840s, which railed against Irish and other Catholic immigrants, but lacked the instruments of social media and twitter); a disinclination to be “politically correct” when speaking of those perceived as different.  But the main reason for the Clinton defeat was the outcome of the since-dissolved (in 2011) political organization that took over the Democratic Party in the late 1980s and 1990s:  The Democratic Leadership Council.

The DLC preached that the Democratic Party from the 1960s through the 1980s could not win presidential elections because it was too “leftist” – read “liberal.”  The Party needed to move to the center.   It’s big success was the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.  And that sowed the seeds of the Trump debacle.

During the Clinton/Gore administrations, I often joked that Bill Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower, or of the entire 20^th Century.  And, indeed, he was.  True, he championed universal health coverage, and important campaign promise, and put Hillary in charge of concocting a plan.  The Clinton plan was a jumble of pieces that depended on what had become traditional healthcare coverage in the U.S., with a strong modicum of dependence on competition.  It was presented to Congress as a done deal, something not to be altered, and it went nowhere.  But it had its effects.  Although by the end of the Clinton-healthplan debate, public opinion was about where it had been before the debate, support dropped in the interim, and anti-government sentiment soared and remained high.  Clinton was burned, as was the Democratic Party in the 1994 elections, and universal health coverage was dead for two more decades.  A good member of the DLC, Clinton took Republican ideas and ran with them.  For example, he “ended welfare as we know it.”  More importantly, he negotiated, and passed, trade agreements that devastated American manufacturing and wages.   Clinton was lucky that he was president during a time of low inflation, especially in health care, where the move to managed care temporarily held costs in check.  But he was not lucky politically.  The GOP, with the center occupied by the Democrats, moved where it would be expected to:  further right.   Far from being cooperative “across the aisle,” the GOP laid the groundworks for later total obstructionism.  They also got burnt – Newt Gingrich, much of the GOP for the ludicrous impeachment that only made Clinton more popular.  And their next candidate, Al Gore, ran a campaign with such a narrow margin that the election could be stolen in Florida.  Some learned from that – the DLC and the Democratic Party didn’t.

And the workers were left behind.  How had it been after WWII?  The unions, released from wartime restrictions, were strong – despite Harry Truman’s shutting down a major national strike.  My father, a sheet-metal worker, had a medical deferment from the military and went to work building airplanes during the war, and was never laid off in his 37 years thereafter.  It was quite a come-up after the bad years of the Great Depression.   Along with the rest of the populace, my parents added five of us children in the first nine years of the Baby Boom.  Times were good enough to allow for that.  In 1965, under LBJ’s Great Society, another universal health coverage debate occurred, and at least resulted in Medicare coverage for the aged and Medicaid coverage for the truly poor, as well as an Older Americans Act for elders, and a Civil Rights Act and a Voting rights act for minority Americans.  The latter were the outgrowths of a Civil Rights Movement that prospered in the good years of the 1950s and early 1960s.  But the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement and other mass movements of the late 19060s, and the GOP’s adoption of a Southern Strategy to play on racism to supplant the Democratic Party in control of the Solid South put an end to that.  The working class was split between young and old around cultural issues.  But even Nixon’s election put into power a GOP that today seems liberal.  A universal health coverage debate took place under Nixon that gave us one “reform”:  HMOs could operate nationally.

Then came Reagan.  He attacked unions and won – remember PATCO?  He pushed through tax cuts for the wealthy, he supported coups and interventions worldwide to support the interests of American corporations.  And he started the devastation of American workers and the middle class more generally.   The machine of American productivity would churn on; but now most of the benefits would go to the rich, little or none to workers.

As a case in point, consider the “reform” of Social Security.  This most-successful social program in American history had for half a century used age 65 as the age of full eligibility.  But what would happen when the Boomers began receiving it?  In defiance of all logic, a response to a possible underfunding of the SS Trust Fund could be corrected by making beneficiaries wait longer for full eligibility – improve full funding by taking up to two years of benefits away from future Boomer beneficiaries.  But the “reform” was projected to ensure that the Trust Fund would be solid in perpetuity.  The negotiators of this policy were not stupid – their projections truly showed a healthy future for SS.  So what happened?

Social Security is pay-as-you-go.  Current beneficiaries are paid from current SS taxes (FICA taxes), with a surplus to help weather any problem times.  Those taxes were projected to be adequate, given the structure of incomes in 1983.  But FICA taxes have a cap – income earners pay FICA on all dollars up to the cap but nothing on dollars above the cap.  But the Reagan Revolution, and subsequent policies, changed the distribution of income, with most gains going to those better-off, ABOVE the CAP.  So now that we Boomers have hit SS, there is doubt about the sustainability of SS.  And today’s retirees must wait two extra years to receive their full benefits.

So, first incomes of workers, no longer effectively protected by unions, failed to rise.  Then a global economy put strains on the U.S. economy.  Then DLC policies such as NAFTA and other “free trade” (not Fair Trade) agreements devastated American manufacturing.  And the Democratic Party now owed allegiance to Wall Street, not to American workers.  The stage was set for Trump.

After the 2000 election was stolen by the GOP, George W Bush ignored warnings about what was to happen and allowed the U.S. to be attacked on September 11, 2001.  He quickly seized on the attack to “bring the U.S. together” and go to war – first in Afghanistan, where there was at least some tenuous connection to the attack, and then in Iraq, where there was clearly no connection.  And the DLC fully supported the war.  Senator Hillary Clinton voted the resolution that allowed the Iraq invasion.  The U.S. entered the quagmire of Iraq, while still engaged in Afghanistan. 
Anyone studying the situation knew that the arguments for the Iraq War were totally bogus, and that the U.S. actions constituted war crimes, but the DLC didn’t know that – it would be years later that Hillary Clinton said she’d made a mistake.

Still, Bush’s administration ended in disgrace, after years of the Iraqi quagmire and with a failure to dealt with Hurricane Katrina when it devastated New Orleans.  So Hillary thought the path was clear to her becoming the first woman president.

Then came Obama.  He was young, articulate, and charismatic.  He was a lawyer who  was an instructor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago.  He had quit his corporate law practice to do community organizing in Chicago.  He had been elected a senator from Illinois.  And he challenged Hillary for the Democratic nomination, won that, and won election amidst the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and became the nation’s first African American president.  (Those of us who had supported him through the primaries and the general election would later note that we worked to elect a community organizer but got a corporate lawyer as president.)  Still, he promised universal healthcare.  And we nearly got it.  The plan was cobbled together by a Democratic Congress, so did finally pass; and Obamacare truly was a great reform.  It has been a boon to millions of Americans who would now have coverage, and provided benefits for those of us on employer insurance, and elders on Medicare.  But it was basically a GOP plan – Romneycare from Massachusetts.

What didn’t get a hearing re health coverage?  Single payer.  The type of system that is so successful in Canada.  Oh, but the U.S. is not ready, would never be ready, for single payer.  Actually, the most-efficient healthcare coverage plan in the U.S. IS single payer – Medicare.  And it is very popular – remember conservative signs saying “keep the government out of my Medicare”?  And it still allows for choice:  private Medicare-supplement plans provide further coverage, and Medicare Advantage plans allow choice of purely-private coverage under Medicare.  Medicare is run by one of those horrible, bureaucratic bureaucracies (in Baltimore, as part of the Social Security Act, Title 18).  And it has between 3 and 5% overhead.  By contrast, under Obamacare, private insurance companies are limited to 20% overhead, a big come-down from the 30% that some had sported before Obamacare.   So a truly-American single payer system could be elaborated based on decades of experience.  But single-payer never gets a hearing; and conservative elderly voters who love Medicare apparently cannot conceive of Medicare for all.

So what led to Trump?  The Democrats abandoned unions, unionized workers, workers in general, and their devastated communities.  (Actually, Obama’s administration did save American auto companies, Chrysler and GM. which returned to profitability under government oversight, but that was a small, ignored story.)  This led to calls for a fairer distribution of income, the Occupy Wall Street movement that challenged the rule of, by, and for the rich.  And then Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary, and the Democratic Party’s following the now-dissolved DLC’s approach.  As with Obama eight years earlier, the avatar of the DLC, Hillary, had an intra-party challenger with a popular base of support that approached being a movement.  But the Party had learned  from 8 years earlier and had structures in place that ultimately thwarted the Sanders movement and made Hillary the candidate. Meanwhile, a huckster saw the opening, preached against trade deals, a crooked Washington, and put together a movement of angry White MEN that got him elected.  But it was still workers, including union workers, who gave him the edge.  Former true-blue Democratic voters cracked Hillary’s “blue wall” – and Trump was declared the winner when he narrowly took Pennsylvania.  And as horrible as the result is, there is one point of delicious irony:  who did it come back to bite?  Hillary.

In one view, it looks like Germany in the 1930s.  When times are bad for a big portion of the population, and when the left or even moderates cannot or will not respond, the door is opened to Fascism.  Now, Donald Trump is no Fascist – he has no ideology other than what is good for Donald Trump.  But there is a “basket of deplorable” behind him, and they promise to bring far-right nuttery into an American administration, even beyond the craziness of so many of the existing GOP lawmakers.  In that pessimistic view, we ask whether we can survive.  Will there be an election in 2020?  Only time will tell; but make sure your passport is current.

But there can be another option.  Bernie showed the way, and he will be the ranking minority on the Senate Budget Committee.  He will have leadership in the Party.  His movement CAN speak to workers and others left behind, White, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American – to all.  The issue is for the Party to return to the unions and to speak to all workers, all the oppressed, all who have been  left behind.  The party can appeal morally and intellectually to those with college degrees, but it can dedicate itself to those on the bottom.  It will be a long, hard slog – but then Trump has shown that a movement tapping into the rage of the left behind can build rapidly to take the presidency.  And Trump as president is unlikely to effectively serve those feeling that rage, more likely to hurt them with Republican policies such as tax cuts for the wealthiest.  So, we can try to feel the Bern; and in 2020, maybe the first woman president can be elected:  how about Elizabeth Warren?