Pay Attention! We’re About to Decide Whether the Democratic Party Lives or Dies
The Democratic National Committee is electing a new chair — and the consequences couldn’t be more dire
by ANDREW DOBBS
From Feb. 23 to 26, 2017, the Democratic National Committee will elect a new chair, one of the most consequential votes in the party’s history.
While there are no fewer than 10 people vying for the position, the contest is seen as a heads-up race between Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez.
The race is also considered a choice between the party’s establishment — largely backing Perez — and progressive grassroots activists, especially those who lined up behind Bernie Sanders in last year’s presidential race — all of them now behind Ellison.
Bernie’s political movement has coalesced around several nascent or revitalized institutions, especially the Our Revolution national political network and the Democratic Socialists of America. As millions of Americans have been looking for a way to plug into progressive political efforts in the wake of Pres. Donald Trump’s ascension these organizations have experienced explosive growth.
DSA and Our Revolution, however, have one foot out of the door of the Democratic Party. If Ellison is elected they will likely work with the Democrats, but if Perez wins there will be strong incentive to bolt.
This race gives new insights into the profound crisis facing the party — ending Trump’s regime is the primary political demand of the moment, but the Democratic Party can’t accomplish this straightforward task because it won’t surrender its allegiance to the very forces that created him.
The choice between Ellison and Perez will determine whether they seek to solve this crisis or deepen it, but what’s best for the movement may not be what it seems.
Political splits like this are always rooted in different sets of material interests, and they express themselves in different answers to basic questions. The basic question at the root of the DNC chair race is — “What responsibility does the Democratic Party bear for Trump’s election?”
If the Democratic Party is centrally responsible for Trump then there are fundamental problems at the heart of the party that need to be addressed in an emergency fashion. If other forces external to the party are to blame then the Democrats can remain basically the same with just some strategic shifts needed to get things back to normal.
Concretely, this is about who has what power. If the party is fine and doesn’t need radical change then the people who have always had power in it should retain their power. If the party has problems at its core then the people running it to date need to be replaced with new people and political elements.
Ellison’s faction, of course, takes the latter position. The party bears a fundamental responsibility for Trump’s election by putting too much power in the hands of corporate-friendly moderates out of touch with both the suffering of the U.S. masses. The solution is to ditch the party’s current ruling class and re-establish roots in the progressive grassroots.
Perez’s side takes the other stance. The Democrats made mistakes for sure, but the real solution is to improve the party’s “messaging” and to better market the same group of leaders. This is why Perez received the support of Joe Biden, Virginia governor and former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe and most of the Obama cabinet members that have bothered to endorse in the race.
But the powerful individuals really in question are the unaccountable class of elite political consultants that have gotten filthy rich off of the party and controlled its decision-making in the era of recent hack leaders such as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and McAuliffe.
Perez is very much the preferred candidate of these operatives, which helps to explain the nature of the divide. If you make your money developing propaganda for the party then your interest is in convincing them that they need to spend more money on more and better propaganda — it’s a problem of “messaging.”
You certainly don’t want your main sales leads in the party structure getting the heave ho, so you likewise have an interest in keeping the party’s ruling class intact.
Finally, since you spend the campaign off-season doing market research and other propaganda services for major brands and lobbying for professional associations and big corporate clients you certainly can’t tolerate any political line skeptical of corporate power as a whole.
A “pro-innovation” message that idolizes Silicon Valley, a “corporate responsibility” message that matches the bullshit coming from your P.R. buddies at the big brands, a little lip service to the most polite and least effective big unions — also clients — a liberal “internationalism” that justifies imperial intervention in places that benefit your multinational clients and a heavy dose of cultural liberalism to comfort your big city, degreed social milieu and to justify not just joining the GOP.
This is the political center of gravity for these folks, and for the Democratic Party they’ve dominated for more than a quarter century.
This “message” has been a disaster for the party. In the 25 years since Bill Clinton sealed the neoliberal wing’s victory the Democratic Party has gone from long-standing dominance of U.S. politics to an isolated and structurally disadvantaged minority with a garbage brand in most of the country.
The numbers have been reported in lots of places — more than 1,000 legislative seats lost in the last seven years, 57 years of House control in the 61 years before Clinton and only six years since then, only five states under total Democratic Party leadership today versus 25 for the GOP. Anybody arguing that the Democratic Party doesn’t need a fundamental change of direction is either grossly uninformed or making money off the party’s failure.
Ellison’s base is neither — it is rooted in the party’s progressive grassroots which is typically organized around social movements on the front lines of the GOP’s rightwing assault on life and liberty. They also see how the Democrats’ out of touch policies combine with the distress brought on by decades of bipartisan neoliberal depredation to make voting for the Democrats a very low priority for working class constituencies.
Ellison will ultimately empower these elements by shifting to a more community-based, grassroots organizing model that centers the political priorities of these movements. Ellison is prioritizing the organizers over the consultants and social movements over corporate interests.
The Democratic powers-that-be have responded with predictable levels of distress and anger. The most intense attacks against him have invoked Ellison’s college-era work organizing the Minnesota contingent of the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March and mild student newspaper editorials critical of Israel.
Haim Saban, a billionaire, creator of the Power Rangers (really), arch-Zionist and the Democrats’ largest individual donor called Ellison “clearly an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel person” because Ellison — the first Muslim member of Congress — dared to echo international law with regard to Israel’s criminal actions against the Palestinians.
The Palestine/Israel issue itself is not important here, but what it symbolizes about the race and the lines of cleavage within the Democratic Party is. The fact that one reactionary billionaire donor can freeze the entire party crystallizes the Democrats’ major problem. Imagine how another set of donors responds to suggestions that medicine be socialized. Now you understand how Obamacare comes to pass.
Bullshit trade agreements, hostility to the fight for a $15 minimum wage, refusal to prosecute anybody for the financial crisis or to break up banks — this episode makes it all clear.
Even Ellison himself flaked on the Palestinian question after this, but he nonetheless represents at least a partial re-examination of party positions driven by craven donor service. Perez is most emphatically all about more of the same.
So what’s going to happen? Either Perez wins, Ellison wins, or one of the other candidates emerges as a compromise candidate — functionally not much different from electing Perez.
If Perez or a compromise candidate like South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg is elected there will be very little reason for the Bernie crowd and their booming political formations to stick with the Democratic Party. The party insiders are the folks, you’ll remember, who put their thumb on the scale to ensure that Bernie lost the nomination.
They went so far as to steal debate questions and pass them on to Clinton, not to mention limiting the number of debates in the first place, scheduling them for times when voters were unlikely to watch, ceding ratings and campaign narratives to the GOP for months.
These are the folks that would rather lose with the ruling class than win against them, and they will be ratified as the leadership of the Democratic Party.
A strata of older, more moderate and less visionary activists from this movement are sure to resign themselves to the party, but they will be both a distinct minority of the faction and dead weight to boot. The vast majority of the creative, energetic, young activists who raised over $100 million and 13 million votes nationwide for a disheveled Jewish socialist from Vermont will decide to see what they can do without a dying party weighing them down. It will be the birth of something new.
That’s why an Ellison victory, paradoxically, may not be a good thing for the Left. Despite all the ink spilled and pixels lit up about this race, its significance is symbolic. The DNC chair has very little power to meaningfully change the party. Ellison as a progressive, African-American Muslim would provide a striking counterpoise to the Trump regime, and the fact that Our Revolution, DSA and other post-Bernie progressive grassroots groups would stick with the party would have some influence for sure.
But the system is bigger and more deeply rooted than they are and will win. The best analogy for the Left’s relationship with the Democratic Party is Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football in Peanuts. Every time they convince themselves that this time will be different, and every time they end up on their ass.
This time will be especially demoralizing and dangerous as it will channel the profound popular resistance to Trump into a vehicle that can only end up in the sorts of places Haim Saban and his class allies approve of. It will all be neutralized and suppressed — once again. This is probably why Chuck Schumer was an early endorser of Ellison. He’s a hack, not a fool.
And such newfound mainstream power will only amplify major internal problems within Left-oriented social movements today. Another way of looking at the Perez/Ellison divide is as a reflection of the divide between electoral and issue-based organizing. Professional organizers working for issue-based progressive NGOs often look down their nose at mainstream party activists, but their self-proclaimed “radicalism” is directed toward projects that can secure foundation and major donor funding.
They use these resources to provide services to marginalized communities that let the NGOs claim advocacy positions within these communities, mediating their needs and demands in a way that donors and policymakers find at least somewhat acceptable.
This gives them power in this system, and they turn this power into concessions that keep the community pacified. Giving these ersatz “movements” more power doesn’t actually build the power of marginalized people, it just means that those broad, voiceless elements of the community not connected to the gatekeepers are further suppressed.
These forgotten people are the only hope for real change in this country, because only the people who haven’t had power to this point can take us somewhere we haven’t already been. The only way to ensure this is to build new institutions, and the most promising opportunities for such political innovation will be trapped by the Democratic Party if Ellison wins. Lucy will yank the ball away yet again.
The good news is that there are folks still preparing for something new. Just this week a new petition from some key Bernie activists went up demanding a new People’s Party to challenge the ruling class parties — it already has 14,000 signatures.
This plan is flawed and it might not be the path that ultimately wins out — it’s just a petition right now — but the point is that the idea of new alternatives is no longer absurd, especially in light of the profound absurdity of the status quo.
Next week we’ll have a key crossroads for this movement, for the Democrats, and for the country at large. Stay tuned, and stay defiant.
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