The Democrats: Fake Party of Compassion
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jul 24, 2009 in Commentary • 11 commentsLast week, we examined the Republican Party’s claims to be the party of small government, personal responsibility, free markets, and strict constitutionalism–and found it wanting.
But the same is true of the Democratic Party’s claims to be the “party of compassion” or to have a special regard for the welfare of “America’s working families.”
The Democratic Party, historically, has represented one faction of the corporate ruling elite. As described by sociologist G. William Domhoff and historian Thomas Ferguson, its primary constituency is large-scale, capital-intensive, high-tech, and export-oriented business. Far from being a “constraint” or “countervailing power” against Big Business, the twentieth century regulatory-welfare state was created primarily to serve corporate capital. As Murray Rothbard put it, “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.” Or in the equally apropos words of Roy Childs, “liberal intellectuals” have been “the ‘running dogs’ of big businessmen.”
That FDR was hardly the “traitor to his class” of official mythology is suggested by the role of General Electric CEO Gerard Swope in the New Deal economic agenda, and by the army of corporate lawyers and investment bankers in the Roosevelt “brain trust.”
Take, for example, the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act. The sectors of the corporate economy that supported FDR were capital-intensive, with long planning horizons that required stability and predictability, and hence extremely vulnerable to disruption. But labor costs were a modest part of the total cost structure of such capital-intensive industry. So the leaders of heavy industry were willing to offer workers significantly improved wages and benefits, in return for coopting the leadership of the labor movement and creating a class of union bureaucrats that would stamp out wildcat strikes and enforce contracts against the rank and file.
If the Republicans were originally the party of protectionism, the Democrats were historically the party of what William Appleman Williams called “Open Door Empire.” That policy led to the creation of a de facto corporate world government under the Bretton Woods institutions, after WWII, with the U.S. military as enforcer. Open Door Empire was the basis for the system of global corporate-state collusion popularly (and wrongly) known today as “free trade,” and more accurately as neoliberalism. The only thing it has in common with genuine free trade is the removal of tariff barriers. But in its reliance on “intellectual property” and other statist measures, it is if anything more genuinely protectionist than anything the GOP was doing a century ago.
The National Security State and permanent war economy were created by good liberal Democrats: FDR and Truman. The archipelago of military bases and garrisons around the world, and the grand tradition of CIA-engineered coups (who was President when Diem and Sukarno were overthrown, I wonder?) , are very much a bipartisan creation.
Much of the legal framework for neoliberalism was constructed in Bill Clinton’s watch (y0u know, that “peace and prosperity” Carville is so partial to). NAFTA, the Uruguay Round of GATT, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–you’d almost get the idea global corporate rule didn’t start with Bush.
And if that’s not enough to get your head around, the Bush police state didn’t start with Bush, either. Some of Bush’s most objectional dictatorial powers resulted, not from the USA PATRIOT Act, but from “counter-terror” legislation passed under Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing. A good example is the power to declare organizations “terrorist” by executive fiat and seize their assets without due process–thank Clinton for that. And some of the worst stuff in USA PATRIOT was originally proposed–unsuccessfully–in the Clinton legislation. That Chuck Schumer played a major role in crafting both pieces of legislation bears more than passing significance as well, I think.
Today, despite all the soccer mom rhetoric about “working families,” the leopard hasn’t changed its spots. The role of Robert Rubin (he of Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup) in Democratic policy circles should tell you as much. Nancy Pelosi, whose family net worth is $18 million thanks to her marriage to an investment banker, is only the 17th richest member of Congress; that should tell you something.
The Obama-Geithner TARP policy, despite some symbolic tinkering with executive compensation, is in its essentials a direct continuation of the Bush-Paulson version. It’s the ultimate in neo-Hamiltonianism, saddling taxpayers with interest-bearing debt in order to buy up the banks’ bad assets and reinflate them to something approximating their pre-collapse face value, so that just maybe the banks will use some of the resulting liquidity to start lending money back to the public at interest.
The Democrats, if anything, are more in collusion with the Copyright Nazis of the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft than are the Republicans–and that’s saying a lot.
“The only thing it has in common with genuine free trade is the removal of tariff barriers”.
That should be “…the selective removal of tariff barriers”. If you do that according to a rent seeking agenda, you end up with fewer but more highly correlated tariff barriers, and in fact the total distorting effect can and probably does go up. Any similarity with genuine free trade is only apparent.
P.S., typo: “y0u”.
Another typo: “Nazi” ;^)
I know that it is common usage to refer to any overbearing/controlling person or institution as “Nazi”, but this usage always grates me (especially in political discussions) because it can be so insulting and also confuses the issues.
The “Nazi” label can easily be dismissed by saying “well, I’m not committing racist genocide, am I?” In the end, I’m afraid that the general public will forget that a person can be a tyrant even if they aren’t a Nazi (or a fascist).
Anyway, good review. I’ll post a link at Freedom Democrats.
Thanks a lot, Adam. I confess I use the term “Copyright Nazi” because, on a visceral level, it just feels so damn good. Frankly, when it comes to the Valenti/Glickman/Gates vermin, the maximum possible degree of insult is the whole point. They should thank God on their knees every day that all I have the power to do is insult them, as opposed to the treatment they and their ilk mete out to the Pirate Bay defendants and their other victims. They deserve, at the very least, the kind of tarring and feathering Crown officials experienced during the Revolution.
Let me add that when I wrote an article for Labor and Corporate Governance on shifting the Bush Social Security proposals from index funds to ownership and control of one’s own firm, the AFL-CIO Investment Office was not pleased – and did not print the second part of the series which advocated for real reform in how unions and businesses operate.
Many of the Democratic Party’s nastiest sins came from when it had conservative members – for example, the requirement that families be broken up for receipt of financial assistance. Clinton also signed life time limits on welfare, which can be seen as a cause of abortion – although keep in mind that this was a GOP provision. You are right that Clinton was hardly liberal. When he was president, I shared with his office the same comments I tried to publish in Labor and Corporate Governance. He wasn’t much into them either.
His Social Security reform is only marginally different than the Bush reforms, since he would add retirement savings accounts in addition to Social Security. Even then, his plan depends on the buying of stock in multinationals which uses the profits generated by foreign workers to fund retirees – just as the GOP plan does. Global Capitalism is the way out of the aging crisis for both sides – however the answer is to find a way to incentivize more births – not exploiting foreign workers – who if history is any guide, won’t allow themselves to be exploited for long.
Clinton couldn’t have survived as a popular Democratic governor in a right-to-work state without knowing how to tack his sails to the wind. Bill Becker, the late head of the state AFL-CIO, used to say that Clinton would shake your hand and piss down your leg at the same time.
With all due respect, Mr. Carson (and i understand your perspective from socio-economics), the Democratic elite being in the pocket of banksters also makes this cabal the central political piece of the War Machine. Its role is to play advocate of the opposition, but trade “compassion” for political capital every single time faced with the decision to be noble moral agents or slaughter children like the young boy murdered on May 4 — by a man I saw as a noble moral agent for peace when I stood in that muddy field at Grant Park as a young college student — murdered at the push of a button by Barack Obama: http://littlealexinwonderland.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/so-obama-calls-neda-soltanis-death-heartbreaking/
If my point is lost, your article is very good, but I’m wondering why when presented with a criminal who stole $100 one day and $1000 the next day, the primary focus is on the $100 with the $1000 left almost unseen. The hypocrisy is in the lack of compassion. What less compassionate than being collaborators in the War Machine? The article lacks scrutinizing “humanitarian intervention”, relative to being Big Business collaborators.
without disputing the core of this argument, i think that there are two strategies of government, with each party placing relatively more emphasis on one over the other (but still using both). Briefly, these are “bread and circuses” and “guilt and intimidation”.
I think that Kevin has admitted to favoring more “bread and circuses” (i.e. Democrats) — but i guess the point here is that the Dems still rely on a lot of guilt and intimidation. But is it the majority of their strategy?
I think the Dems will eventually split, as the GOP is angling for a Darwin Award. After health care, the Administration is going to do immigration. The GOP won’t be able to help themselves. They are doing a pretty good job of embarrassing themselves over Sotomayor. The third of the Latino vote that they have will abandon them and the people who will soon be legalized – and who will eventually vote – will remember who opposed them. Since these folks tend to live in states with a GOP remnant, I suspect that the GOP is in a catch 22. If they oppose legalization (without the votes to do so) they alienate Latinos. If they don’t, the new voters become Democrats anyway in their strongholds. (Kiss right to work goodbye).
My point here is not to dance on the graves of elephants, but to point out that the Democrats have a coalition that won’t hold together either. Eventually it will split into factions around corporatism, the environment, abortion, the deficit, gays and race. How these factions sort themselves into two parties is anybody’s guess and depends both on which faction Obama supports and who leads the other faction.