Fearful
white men and confused white women, says the DLC, must be
retained at all costs within the ranks of the Democratic Party.
Just in case these “swing voters” are not fearful enough,
DLC chairman Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) warned: “The Democratic
Party is at risk of being taken over from the far left.''
Since this is clearly an outcome unacceptable to the DLC and
its corporate funders, it must be assumed that the DLC is
preparing to bolt from the Party if rich white men don’t get
their way.
The
rich rump of the Party
We
have seen and heard it all before, starting with the slaveholder
Democrats’ secession from the Union in Charleston, December
20, 1860; to Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat desertion from the
national party in 1948; to the wholesale southern white defection
to the GOP that began with the Goldwater campaign of 1964
and continues without letup to this day.
At each of these historical junctures, the "progressives"
of the time were urged to appease the ranting, rich white
men of the Party and the stupid, racist poor white men and
women who follow them. Lincoln tried, but (fortunately) the
slaveholders insisted on war. In the following century, national
Democrats resisted a civil rights platform as long as they
could, but it took one speech from Hubert Humphrey to cause
the Dixiecrats to bolt in 1948, anyway. Substantive civil
rights legislation drove southern whites decisively to the
GOP after 1964, firmly establishing the Republicans as the
White Man’s Party of the South.
As
Associate Editor Bruce Dixon recounted in a June 12 commentary
(“Muzzling The
African American Agenda – with Black help”), a “rump faction”
of white Democrats founded the DLC in the mid-Eighties as
a reaction to “the
1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, in which the
black candidate received a percentage of the vote considerably
higher than the proportion of 
black
votes in several states, and sparked a significant expansion
of the party's base constituencies among minorities, labor,
and even some white rural voters. The Democratic Party was
actually growing - but in the wrong direction to suit the ‘rump faction’ centered
in the white South.” The corporate-bankrolled DLC gained national
power with the election of Bill Clinton, and now threatens
to desert the party if it cannot control the campaign of 2004.
That’s what the “national
conversation” in Philadelphia was all about – what the despicable
Evan Bayh (whose late Senator father, Birch Bayh, was a leading
party liberal) means when he raises the specter of a takeover
from the “far left.” The DLC is panicked over the candidacy
of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, now the top fundraiser
in the primary race. But the forces
they fear in the party are minorities, organized labor, women’s
organizations, environmentalists and the peace movement.
The white voters that the DLC invokes have already
left the Party, especially in the South. Thus, even if Blacks
and progressives were willing to once again sacrifice their
own agendas to appease the insecure (actually, just plain
racist) whites of both sexes, the electoral rewards would
be minimal. The U.S. already has one White Man’s Party.
The DLC cannot build another one with a white rump of "swing"
voters - and this year, Blacks and progressives are determined
to stop them in the attempt.
The DLC’s shrill rhetoric indicates that
their defection from the Party has already begun. In this
context, we ask readers to consider the following passages
from Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr’s 2001 book, "A More
Perfect Union", an excellent examination of the DLC’s
role in Democratic Party politics. Rep. Jackson (D-IL) begins
with a critique of his father, the Rainbow/Push leader:
“The shortcoming of his two presidential campaigns
was the failure to build a sustained grassroots political
organization that specifically helped find, train, and elect
genuinely progressive candidates; something highly politically
organized within the Democratic Party just short of a third
party. Had he created a lasting progressive wing of Democrats,
conservative Democratic presidential candidates – and conservative
Democrats generally – could not say to progressives that
they need to get on board because 'they have no place else
to go.' Under such circumstances, progressives just might
be able to go someplace else.
“Am I suggesting that that means progressives
should, at some point, consider bolting the Democratic Party
en masse for a third party? Not necessarily. Perhaps we
should try something never tried before, seriously organizing
political progressives within the party so we will be respected
for what we bring to the table and treated as full participants
in the existing Democratic Party. Conservative Democrats
have much more of a destructive history of leaving the party
(and the Union) than progressives. Ralph Nader is the rare
modern-day exception.
“The independent Democratic experience in
Chicago is that when progressive Democrats won fair and
square, conservative Democrats abandoned the party. When
Harold Washington won the primary for mayor of Chicago,
the current Mayor Richard M. Daley and other Democratic
conservatives organized a third and fourth party rather
than support the Democratic nominee. And most of the Democratic
leaders who came back did so only after a white regained
the mayor’s office. Progressive Democrats, but especially
the African American community, have invested much more
in local Democratic parties, Congress, and the president
than they have received from the current Democratic Party.
Yet they have remained more loyal than the conservative,
Blue Dog, and DLC-type New Democrats who have this inside
track and have received the most lucrative terms on their
investment.
Jackson points out that Bill Clinton’s
“conservative and southern Democratic supporters” were “the
first to dump the president and jump overboard” during the
Monica Lewinsky-related impeachment attempt, while Blacks
and progressives remained loyal. The right wing of the Party
is the most unreliable faction, as well as the least effective
among its claimed base: “Democrats haven’t won in the white
South since the civil rights movement,” Rep. Jackson reminds
us.
Let
them go where they belong
The
DLC makes even more of a public fetish of white males than
do the Republicans, who have a secure lock on the core, racist
vote. It is difficult to imagine where the DLC would harvest
all of these white male voters, particularly in the South
– or the political lengths it is prepared to go in appealing
to them. As BC wrote in our December 26 commentary (“Lott,
Thurmond and Duke: Three Kings Bearing Gifts”), in 1990
“David Duke…won 60% of the white vote in his race for U.S.
Senator from Louisiana. Astoundingly, the youngish ex-Nazi
and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan won seven out
of every ten white male votes…. This is the base vote of the
White Man's Party. The relative liberalism of Dixie's suburban
"swing voters" is over-rated - Duke won his state
legislature seat from a New Orleans suburb.”
The DLC’s appeal is empty, but its leadership’s
threat to undermine or desert the Party is real. Blacks and
progressives must seize the opportunity to politically isolate
and marginalize the DLC, whose role as distributors of corporate
contributions has enabled them to subvert and co-opt otherwise
honest Democrats. Blacks and progressives need more than just,
in Jackson’s words, “someplace else to go.” They need “something
highly politically organized within the Democratic Party just
short of a third party” – a place worth staying in.
African Americans, especially, have made an
investment in Democratic structures at every level of organization.
Let the Right retreat to where they belong: the Republican
Party.
We have no idea where that will leave Blue Dog,
DLC Black Democrats such as Rep. Harold Ford (see “Harold
Ford: Mess of the Blue Dog,” October 17, and "The
Harold Ford Show,” November 14, 2002.) Ford was the centerpiece
African American at the Philadelphia “National Conversation,”
making as much sense as one would expect from a man chosen
by People Magazine as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World."
Ford’s standout strategy is simple: he hangs with a very ugly
crowd.
