Democrats' Reagan PTSD and their big money donors

Paul Rosenberg gives a good summary of the attitude that leads establishment Democrats to their how-quickly-can-we-surrender approach in Democrats' Trump-era quandary is familiar: Play offense or defense? It ought to be obvious by now Salon 07/28/2019:

Republicans live in fear. “Fear of a Black Planet,” fear of strong women, fear of people with different faiths (or the “wrong” version of their own) — those three fears were the cornerstones of “The Long Southern Strategy” ...

But Democrats live in fear, as well: Fear that Republicans will say mean things about them — and won’t vote for them.

Indeed, actual Republicans almost certainly won't vote for them. But there are plenty of other folks out there. Not just independents and "swing voters," but large numbers of non-voters and only-sometimes voters, as well as the Democratic base. Non-voters overwhelmingly support Democrats ...

Furthermore, a broad range of progressive policies have majority support — sometimes supermajority support ...

For decades, Democrats have been obsessed with winning the votes of people they’re unlikely to win, while mostly neglecting, and sometimes actively attacking, those whose votes are much more easily within reach. Republican attacks on Democrats are aimed at energizing the GOP base and depressing the Democrats', both psychologically and operationally: Depressing activism, engagement and turnout.

Democrats’ attempts to placate Republicans, or win them over, not only fail to counter the GOP’s strategy but actively support it. By striking a defensive stance they implicitly validate Republican attacks, always acting as if they’ve got something to apologize for. No wonder the Democrats have so many more non-voters on their side: they’ve given them so much less reason to vote. [my emphasis in bold]

This is a great description of the current establishment Democratic approach to politics, epitimized today by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

It's consistent with the analysis Ryan Grim makes in Haunted by the Reagan era Washington Post 07/05/2019:

The way the older and younger House members think about and engage with the Republican Party may be the starkest divide between them. Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Joe Biden, Steny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer were shaped by their traumatic political coming-of-age during the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the rise of Ronald Reagan — and the backlash that swept Democrats so thoroughly from power nearly 40 years ago. They’ve spent the rest of their lives flinching at the sight of voters. When these leaders plead for their party to stay in the middle, they’re crouching into the defensive posture they’ve been used to since November 1980, afraid that if they come across as harebrained liberals, voters will turn them out again. [my emphasis]

But together with this defeatist attitude comes the mutually reinforcing drastic dependence of the Democratic Party on corporate donors. Grim in his book We've Got People (2019) describes the pivotal turn twoard dependence on corporate cash in the 1980s associated with California Congressman Tony Coelho, California Democratic liberal wheeler-dealers John and Phil Burton, and their "San Francisco Democrat" Nancy Pelosi. John Burton as a Congressman fought against the remaining power of Southern Democrats in the Congress. Grim portrays his death from a heart attack at 56 as a tragic lost opportunity:

Burton's untimely death cut off the potential of a counter history for Democrats. At the time, said John Lawrence, Burton was one of the few Democrats who understood that the party did not have a permanent lock on the House of Representatives, and it was that overconfidence that stunted the party's ability to think strategically about what kind of a coalition it wanted to be a post-Civil Rights era. Instead, Coelho strip-mined the [Democratic Congressional] majority for every corporate dollar it was worth - until it collapsed.

The Burtons had worked with Pelosi on fundraising. And, of course, San Francisco was then as now a staunchly Democratic city. So the real political contest in Pelosi's first Congressional election contest, a special eleciton in 1987. Her main opponent in the Democratic primary was Harry Britt, a democratic socialist and left activist. Ryan relates:

The Los Angeles Times reported it as an establishment versus insurgent candidate. "The Democratic establishment backed Pelosi, a 46-year-old mother of five who has raised large sums for her party's candidates. Younger, more liberal activists and the city's powerful gay community backed Britt," the paper wrote.

Pelosi ran on the prophetic and on-brand slogan "a voice that will be heard," and on election night she beat Britt 36 to 33 percent, with the rest of the votes scattered among lesser candidates. In the top-two system California uses today, both Pelosi and Britt would have moved to the general election. That electoral innovation, for better or worse, was 25 years away; and Pelosi's total was enought to move to the general against a hapless Republican. Big money and establishment power, in her first race, had beaten grassroots, leftwing energy.

And, as he also notes, Reagan's tax rerforms favoring the One Percent "made it so there were many people tht had the means to pay up big."

The wealthy donors on which the Democrats were now far more dependent were amenable to civil rights concerns and supportive of public investment in education, somewhat less militaristic, and the extractive industries (oil, mining) tended to favor the Republicans. But they wanted what we now call "neoliberal" tax and regulatory policies, much the same as Republicans.

So the Democrats' defeatist attitude is real. But it's also true, as Cenk Uygur likes to say, that corporate Democrats are paid to lose.

Rosenberg provides a useful set of bullet-points on why Pelosi's anti-impeahment stance is such a bad approach. Althoug, perhaps surprisingly, he also says, "I’ve long believed that she’s been the most effective legislative leader of the last 40 or 50 years. But she’s lived her whole political life in the disintegrative phase of our political system, adroitly pushing back against disintegrative forces. She has excelled at that."

In other words, she has been operating from a point of institutional conservatism, trying to preserve policy gains of the Democrats that are acceptable to big donors while maintaining her own position in the party and that of other corporate Democrats.