Features » October 26, 2009

A Party With No Punch

Three parables for progressives and the Grand Old (Democratic) Party.

By David Sirota

Van Jones: burned by the boys in blue. (Photo by:Ethan Miller/Getty Images )

If someone like Paul Volcker is effectively the most powerful voice of the Democratic left in Washington, we should wonder if there even is a Democratic left in Washington.

A parable is defined as “a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson.” In a world of fine shading, it is difficult to find the broad strokes that paint such enduring tales. That’s particularly true in politics—many legislative and electoral moves are part of a bigger game, where seeming capitulation could be part of a grander, more complex plan of assault, and where purportedly bold stands are often the first step of a full-scale retreat.

So when potent political parables present themselves as clearly as they recently have, we should take heed. In the last month, three unrelated events revealed the nature of the modern Democratic Party more powerfully than any Ralph Nader treatise, Michael Moore documentary or Saturday Night Live sketch.

#1: Movement Activists Need Not Apply

Van Jones is, by any measure, one of the nation’s leading experts on energy and environmental policies—and their real-world ramifications. A bestselling author and founder of the non-profit Green For All, his appointment to the White House Council on Environmental Quality was arguably a step down for him. Despite the position’s media billing as a “green jobs czar,” it was housed in an advisory corner of the executive branch with none of the policymaking or enforcement power vested in Cabinet departments.

That Jones was quickly vilified by the conservative media is no surprise. A high-profile African American with a background in grassroots movement politics, his White House position—however advisory—was destined to make him a poster-child for a right-wing political lynch mob that has long attempted to paint President Barack Obama as a dangerous black nationalist.

The new and enduring parable that Jones came to personify, however, had almost nothing to do with the conservative movement. The right had long ago delivered a parable about its views on race through the Willie Horton controversy. This time, the “teachable moment’s” central story would be about Democrats.

During the early attacks on Jones, Obama officials remained largely silent, refusing to publicly defend him. When Glenn Beck and others amped up their assault by citing Jones’ signature on a 2002 petition questioning the government’s behavior before 9/11 as proof that he was a national security threat, White House officials went completely silent, even as Jones himself disavowed the petition. After a week of undefended attacks on Jones as a “9/11 truth” conspiracist, the administration showed him the door.

This is, of course, the same administration that aggressively defended Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner after revelations that he had not paid his taxes. It is also the same administration that put Wall Street-linked conservatives in major policy positions, and largely shut movement progressives out of those roles.

In the context of this reality, the Jones firing becomes a parable telling progressives that the Democratic Party that stands by corporate-connected insiders will quickly abandon movement-connected activists the moment their background becomes public or is made controversial by the right. As the Wall Street Journal aptly noted in its editorial about the Jones firing, the right “counts for more at this White House” than the left, and Democrats “will happily employ movement progressives, but only so long as their real views and motivations aren’t widely known.”

#2: Money Trumps Everything Else

The death of Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy was a devastating blow to what might be called Traditional Democratic Liberalism—that is, the legacy of robust left-of-center, labor-affiliated advocacy from a generation of U.S. Senate giants who first ascended to power in the 1960s and who comprised the ideological bulwark of the Democratic Party during its 20th-century glory days. With Kennedy gone, 1960s-rooted Traditional Democratic Liberalism is without an heir. (Bernie Sanders, after all, is not a Democrat).

Generational turnover will ultimately relegate Traditional Democratic Liberalism to the annals of history—but what happened after Kennedy’s death shows that passage is the product not just of ticking clock, but also the result of a more structural shift in Democratic priorities.

When the Massachusetts legislature empowered Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick to select an interim replacement for Kennedy, he had in Michael Dukakis the closest thing to a perfect candidate for the job. A three-term governor and a one-time Democratic presidential nominee, Dukakis had senior-statesman level experience representing Massachusetts constituents and working at the national level. As the Boston Globe said in an editorial endorsing Dukakis for the appointment, he “is far more likely to deliver tangible returns for Massachusetts residents than a career academic or anyone else who has never held elected office.”

Nonetheless, Patrick passed over Dukakis, a reliable Traditional Democratic Liberal, and selected Paul Kirk—a candidate touted for his friendship with Kennedy and his short stint as chair of the Democratic National Committee in the 1980s, but best known in political circles as a corporate-connected fundraiser.

As the Center for Responsive Politics reported, Kirk has been a registered lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies and has served on the boards of insurance and investment firms. Notably, he has never held any public office.

And therein lies the lesson: When given a choice, the modern Democratic Party will prioritize money, insider connections and corporate power over experience, qualifications and ideological grounding. That’s a truism proven by top-level administration appointments in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and by a Washington Democratic establishment that has often backed inexperienced, self-financing millionaire candidates while working to crush primary challenges from grassroots upstarts.

Now, regardless of how Kirk ends up voting, his appointment over Dukakis is the parable that reveals that larger lesson.

#3: Right Is Now Left

Wall Street “reform” can be hard to conceptualize. The difference between much-promised “real change” and oft-delivered “more of the same” usually comes down to tiny words. Indeed, a change of “shall” to “may” in a 1,000-page bill can turn genuine statutory reform into nothing more than a piece of paper.

Over the last month, oxymoronic signals about the future of financial reform have been everywhere. One week, President Obama is delivering a populist-themed speech on Wall Street that makes him sound like a tough-talking Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The next week, a Wall Street Journal story headlined “Democrats Soften Financial Bill” reports on the party’s efforts to water down its already meager regulatory effort at the behest of banking industry lobbyists.

To get a sense of what is actually going on, it helps to watch the words of someone who has no partisan interest in skewing the news one way or the other.

Enter Paul Volcker.

First nominated to be Federal Reserve Chairman by President Jimmy Carter and re-nominated by President Ronald Reagan, Volcker is known as a right-of-center voice—and more precisely, as a quintessential economic establishmentarian. In elite financial and political circles, this dour 82-year-old is the antonym of the word “radical.”

So when Volcker makes the headlines, it’s a sign something big is happening.

In stunning testimony to the House Financial Services Committee at the end of September, Volcker slammed the Obama administration’s “reform” plan, saying far from preventing the growth of mega-banks into behemoths that are “too big to fail,” the proposal effectively endorses that consolidation.

If the government explicitly backs these “systemically important” financial firms with the implied promise of bailouts, he said, it will encourage even more of the risky speculation. “The danger is the spread of moral hazard could make the next crisis much bigger.”

The message of Volcker’s testimony was as much about financial reform as it was about the structural forces that still dominate Democratic politics. When a Reagan-appointed Federal Reserve chairman becomes the loudest canary in Democratic Washington’s coal mine, it tells the bigger tale of an extraordinarily skewed economic debate.

If there is a moral to this third and final parable, it is that if someone like Volcker is effectively the most powerful voice of the Democratic left in Washington, then we should wonder if there even is a Democratic left in Washington.

In fact, perhaps that is the bigger parable all three of these stories construct. At precisely the moment when the left is realizing FDR’s old “make me do it” principle, we are being taught that our capacity to apply that pressure on a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president is far weaker than ever imagined. Maybe, at least, that parable will wake us up. 

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• Reader Comments

  I love reading Sirota’s stuff.  He is such a fucking idiot.  With all due respect, of course.

  A Party With No Punch?  How can you say that?  In nine short months, the Obama Progressives have utterly wasted over a trillion dollars on a stimulus package and other financial nonsense that has only stimulated the unemployment rolls, as planned.  Their domestic and foreign agendae are doing exceedingly well, by Marxist standards.  They will get a wasteful, corrupt, destructive, ineffectual health care bill and call it victory, but the recent global cooling has proven global warming to be a fraud and a deceit, so the energy outcome is in doubt.  But Progressives still can give our energy dollars to the Arabs, Russia, and Venezuela instead of investing them productively in America’s own abundant energy resources.  Obama has betrayed our friends in Eastern Europe, ignored our Allies everywhere, and toadied up to our enemies.  From a Marxist stand-point, this is quite a good record for a party with no punch.

  The Obama Progressives are ahead in comparison to Lenin in Russia in 1919 in destroying the American economy now.  At least Obama has so far resisted the urge to kill the peasants who stand in his way.  But other than genocide, Obama is at least as corrupt and inefficient as the Soviet Union ever was. 

  So, Sirota draws lessons from a “Ralph Nader treatise, Michael Moore documentary or Saturday Night Live sketch”, as well as The Communist Manifesto for his philosophy.  This is an excellent explaination of the intellectual arrogance, degeneration, and corruption of Progressive thought.

  Old Holier-than-Thou Sirota should have gotten himself elected as president.  Then he could have done it his way, and we could have seen how much more corrupt and ineffectual he could have made the American Republic.

  Posted by scorp on Oct 29, 2009 at 1:20 PM

  The left needs to put forward its own progressive agenda based upon what will unite working people:

  Peace.

  Real health care reform.

  Moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions.

  A real living minimum wage.

  If we can’t get real peace and real health care reform out of Obama and these Democrats we should dump them by with holding our votes… it is called “accountability” which is central to democracy.

  It is time to explain to the American people what socialism really is… then the right-wing will have something to really cry and yell about.

  Posted by alanmaki on Oct 30, 2009 at 3:37 AM

  So, scorp, the global warming is a fraud and a deceit. Thank you for saying so, it must have been a rumor spread by those nasty people called “leftists”. Long live Wall Street and corporations, which have contributed to make this peaceful, just and equalitarian world. Congratulations for your good manners on calling Sirota “a fucking idiot” but adding “with all due respect”, that shows you are a true gentleman.

  Posted by Maria on Oct 30, 2009 at 5:00 AM

  Mr. Sirota,

  Your post triggers two quite conflicting points in me: at once I agree with what you have stated here, and I feel that you are perhaps too rash in judgement.

  My initial gut reaction is- the only the that the Left has in common with Liberals is the letter L. Once upon a time, prior to my 40 year life, the Left actually had some minuscule effect on the Democratic Liberals, if not in name, in spirit. But alas to expect wholehearted courageous embracement of that which is abundantly obvious to those of the Left by our elected Liberal Democrat politicians is-comment dit- premature. Perhaps a better phrase would be untimely. On the one hand a scathing reproach of the Democrats is far beyond past due, yet on the other hand such absolutely justified and necessary critique is best served once the Liberal Democrats have conquered the discourse, by the Right, which branded liberalism as the “dreaded L word”.

  Most of my life has been a witnessing of the utter marginalization of Liberal voices(Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr.). The societal consensi (consensus pl.?) which reigned during my childhood years were systematically destroyed over the last 30 years, leaving a political discourse where anything left of utter of the Right wing fringe was considered virtually unamerican. Though the Left did not cease to exist, the voices of the Left remained unheard by the vast majority of Americans. Privatization, deregulation, “free-trade”, market-solves-all-ills, became common sense for the masses. The suffering caused by such policies was held to be an individual affair, a personal shortcoming, not something fundamentally wrong with society.

  The effective silencing of Left, weakened the Lefts’ moral and ethical pull on the Liberals, depriving them of the, shall we say, gumption, to be able to withstand the tidal wave of Neo-con discourse, which was just as prominent under Clinton as it was under Bush Jr. If it weren’t for the utter and abysmal failures of Bush Jr.‘s policies, If yet another Right wing reactionary had become President instead of Obama, It might have been another 50 years before someone like Obama could have been elected. So close were we to the utter vanquishing of sensitivities and sensibilities that the Left has brought to our body politic.

  I do not wish to sound like an apologist. And I know that I am skirting such in posting this. But it will take time for the seeds which are now being sown to bear fruit. I do not wish to admonish you, in any sense, for anger and disappointment are more than justified- but these are the product of a hope, a glimmer of not-so-far-off horizon, which Obama has symbolized, whether rightly or wrongly,  which renders possible having the sensitivities and sensibilities of the Left become something once again perceivable, audible to the masses. Only as the masses begin to unlearn personal shame and begin to rightly attribute their malaise to the forces at work will our political discourse be informed by the spirit of the Left. As time progresses the urgency of scathing critique of the Liberal Democratic party will surge and Liberals will have to fear being labelled the “the dreaded L word” by the Left, instead of by Neo-con Right wing reactionaries.
  continued….

  Posted by Karl Zollner on Oct 30, 2009 at 6:40 AM

  continued….
  If we are preaching to the choir then scathing critique is par for course. If we are participating in a broader discourse we might wish to mix recognition of palpable shifts while highlighting the gulf between that which has seemed promised and that which they are actually saying and doing. Given our still current context, a context in which a radically weak Democratic party, which still does not have the chutzpah to OWN the influences of Left, which inspire them, from whence they draw their strengths: how can we lambast them for being other than what they are- representatives and elected officials who only share in common with the Left the still sullied L.

  Perhaps I am far too optimistic. Perhaps I am far too willing to tolerate that which in the last instance should be intolerable. Perhaps I am too grateful to see a government for once in my life where the word “Left” is not exclusively seen as something antithetical to our cultural identity, even if in MSM parlance “Left” only signifies economic neo-liberalism. Beyond that which the MSM wishes to signify using the word “Left”, the Left is being spoken too, and at no point in my Life has their been more bountiful opportunity for the Left to speak to the world.

  omg did I really just drag myself into meta-discourse, someone put me out to pasture ;)

  Posted by Karl Zollner on Oct 30, 2009 at 6:41 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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