The DLC’s National White Man’s Conversation

White men are terrified of them – which explains why the poor fellows get all confused and vote against their own interests every time it is imagined that they – “special interests,” Blacks, unions, and the dangerous people who call for health care, jobs, peace and justice – are about to intrude on the “national conversation.”

According to Penn’s poll numbers, white men feel more secure with George Bush in charge. This is quite curious, since Penn also finds that, overall, “Fewer than half of those surveyed (48 percent) think [Bush] deserves to be reelected and 53 percent said the economy is heading in the wrong direction.” Nevertheless, white men are increasingly Republican, indicating that their fears and insecurities get the better of their brains, every time.

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: