Demobilizing the base - standard operating procedure for corporate Democrats

Jamie Galbraith did an essay for Jacobin's academic journal Catalyst 1:3 (Fall 2017) titled The Predator State that points to an important part of how the Democratic Party during the Obama-Biden Presidency consciously weakened itself as an organization willing and capable of responding to popular pressure against the policies associated with the neoliberalism that became the dominant economic paradigm in the US and Britain during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the early 1980s.

Neoliberalism is characterized by its general orientation toward business deregulation, financialization of the economy, reductions in government services and social insurance, privatization of government property and key functions including education, a priority for reducing taxes on the wealthiest while accepting a radical increase in the maldistribution of wealth and income, and an negative emphasis on "individual responsibility," so that the weak and the poor are condemned for their failure to successfully manage their own personal "portfolio" of skills. It is associated with political demobilization and a dominant media with a strong affinity for oligarchical interests.

Galbraith gives us this summary:

This political dispensation [neoliberalism] was initiated in the late 1970s, strongly advanced under Reagan, and fully formed by the middle years of the Clinton administration. It was the heart of politics in the Bush years. There might have been some reason to hope, when President Obama was elected, that it would be contained if not reversed in the wake of the financial crisis. Unfortunately there was no such luck either in the financial sphere or in the way health care reform was designed. The result has been an embedding of predatory encroachment of corporate interests in government on a bipartisan basis, with intellectual consequences that include the subsumption of public administration into such topics as outsourcing, transparency issues, civic engagement, performance metrics, and the like - anything to disguise and distract from the erosion of an autonomous public power. Related phenomena include the public-private “trans-actors” - a wonderful word - and “shadow elites” which have been described by the anthropologist Janine Wedel. [my emphasis]

The Obama-Biden version of the neoliberal approach was not as grim, vicious, and lawless as that of Trump. Although Obama and Biden and their Attorneys General were adamant that there would be no priority on criminal prosecution of members of the Bush-Chene3y Administration for criminal actions they committed in office. And the Obama Administration was also famously unwilling to seek criminal prosecution of criminal actions by major bank executives that originated the financial crash of 2008 and left millions of people with the homes foreclosed.

And Galbraith describes how the Obama team consciously went about guarding against an activist party base being able to bring intra-party pressure against such policies. It's important to remember here that Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee 2005-2009 had pushed hard to develop a "50-state strategy" aimed at challenging the Republicans even in conservative congressional districts and building a new bench of Democratic office-holders, political leaders, and activists at the local and state levels.

President Obama was elected on a surge of pan-racial popular enthusiasm in 2008, and he assembled a very adept campaign at the time, effectively using new technologies with every prospect of building a renewed popular and participatory base for the Democratic Party. However, that prospect would have been lethal for Wall Street. It would have put in place a power base that was not prepared to tolerate the preservation or resurrection of conditions that had led to the financial crisis, and therefore for that and perhaps other reasons, it was not pursued.

Instead, over eight years the party was allowed, even encouraged, to wither away, abandoning whatever popular organization and base it could have developed or was developing in the last years of the Bush administration. What was left by the time Hillary Clinton assumed her role as the party’s nominee was largely a coterie of policy professionals, of in-and-outers from finance, law, the Ivy Leagues, and the think tank world, whose focus was largely on mission-specific, career-building trajectories, and backed by a political operation whose major focus was advertising and polling. [my emphasis]

Marshall Ganz, a longtime organizer for the United Farm Workers union, headed Obama's field operation in 2008 and took a movement-building approach that helped Obama successfully bypass much of the "coterie" of party operatives and cautious campaign professionals that Galbraith describes. But once elected, Obama quickly folded his "Obama for America" campaign organization into the regular party structures. And ousted Howard Dean as DNC chairman in favor of safe corporate Democrat Tim Kaine, who became Hillary Clinton's running mate on the 2016 ticket which they lost to the Malicious Orange Clown Donald Trump.

Back in late 2010, Ganz argued in How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back Los Angeles Times 11/03/2010 that the times in which Obama became President called for transformational leadership. But what the Obama Administration has provided had been transactional leadership: "The nation was ready for transformation, but the president gave us transaction. And, as is the case with leadership failures, much of the public's anger, disappointment and frustration has been turned on a leader who failed to lead."

Obama and his team made three crucial choices that undermined the president's transformational mission. First, he abandoned the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education. Next, he chose to lead with a politics of compromise rather than advocacy. And finally, he chose to demobilize the movement that elected him president. By shifting focus from a public ready to drive change - as in "yes we can" — he shifted the focus to himself and attempted to negotiate change from the inside, as in "yes I can." [my emphasis]

"Yes I can" instead of "Yes we can" is a good brief definition of the neoliberal ideological meaning of "personal responsibility."

During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a polldriven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within - within him and within us. In his Philadelphia speech on race, we learned of his gift not only for moral uplift but for "public education" in the deepest sense, bringing us to a new understanding of the albatross of racial politics that has burdened us since our founding.

On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president's speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of antigovernment rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. [my emphasis]