The Democratic establishment and "accelerationism"

I've said for the last 15 years or so that the biggest divisions in the Democratic Party are two overlapping ones. One is between the left and the neoliberal "moderates" (I'm trying to be generous here!). The other is a more temperamental one, that between Democrats who think the party and its elected officials should actually fight for their own side and those who don't.

Here less than four months before the midterm elections and in the wake of the Dodd decision overturning Roe v. Wade, both are appearing in tandem. But on the abortion rights issue, the two divisions are basically completely overlapping at the moment.

Why are the Democrats so often oddly (in appearance) unwilling to fight for their own official positions. There are numerous answers. The dominance of wealthy donors is the single most important one. When it comes to business deregulation, low taxes for the wealthiest, and defense budgets that increase every year, the Democrats and Republicans to a large degree essentially agreed. The Republicans are the conservative party (a clearly radicalized conservative party for at least the last quarter century), so their constituents are largely receptive to those economic and class priorities.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are the "people's party" whose base is among workers, ordinary middle-income citizens, and people particularly concerned with democratic rights. They are less inclined to favor policies tilted toward the One Percent. So the Democrats have to offer them other reasons to get out to vote for them.

Alex Pereene gives a helpful and concise summary of the Democratic approach with an insightful twist. (The Never-Ending War on the Woke The Forum 07/11/2022) The ConservaDems like to accuse the activists of being "accelerationists" who want to "heighten the contradictions" by letting Republicans take power so that things will get so bad people will turn to the left. Alex gives a different twist on who has been depending on accelerationism:

... I was a bit taken aback recently to see the [accelerationist] argument made quite explicitly in a book about the 1990s. Not because the era itself seemed inhospitable to accelerationist ideas — it was, after all, the age of Adbusters and the WTO protests—but because of which side of the political spectrum was so openly espousing it. As you likely remember, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, and then his Democratic Party lost control of Congress in 1994. Left Behind, a new book by the historian Lily Geismer (which I recently reviewed for The New Republic), revisits the New Democratic vanguard in and around the Clinton White House, and examines the broader forces behind that political movement. And in the middle of it, the reader learns that key Democratic Party strategists literally, on paper and everything, welcomed what came to be called the Republican Revolution.

“The 1994 elections have wiped the slate clean and liberated Democrats from special-interest liberalism,” [i.e., labor, civil rights advocacy, defense of abortion rights, social services, health care] Al From and Will Marshall wrote in 1995 to fellow members of the Democratic Leadership Council [DNC], the organization of centrist Democratic politicians and policy gurus that Clinton led prior to his presidency. From was one the DLC’s founders, and Marshall was (and is) the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a stolidly centrist Democratic think tank. Both men were enormously influential members of the Democratic Party establishment, and both had the president’s ear. And both apparently celebrated an election that saw the end of a generation of Democratic control of the House of Representatives, because it would force their party to institute a purge.

The two were not just making the best of a bad situation. Indeed, they had plotted out the Democrats’ strategy over the 1994 midterm cycle. The key themes of From and Marshall’s analysis are likely to have a familiar ring for anyone monitoring the run-up to the pivotal 2022 midterms, most especially the tail-chasing lamentations voiced by centrist Democrats about the accursed spirit of wokeness and cancellation fatally weakening the party from within. In a May 1993 memo, Marshall, writing to From, frets that “placement of ‘PC’ activists in key policy positions” in Bill Clinton’s administration would “drive white moderates out of the party, not to mention alienating swing voters.” Clinton had famously promised to appoint an administration that “looked like America.” That in and of itself seemed to pose a problem to these two leading lights of the New Democrat movement. So they concluded that their president, and the Democratic Party at large, would be better off with a Republican Congress than a diverse cabinet and the inclusive thinking behind it.

New Democrats concluded that their president, and the Democratic Party at large, would be better off with a Republican Congress than a diverse cabinet and the inclusive thinking behind it. [my emphasis]

This kind of thinking still seems to be what key Democratic leaders - Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer - are using as their general guideline. Assume that the "hippies," the women's-rights "activists" (a sneer word for establishment Democrats), Black and Latino voters, and union members and left-leaning workers generally have nowhere to go but the Democrats, and then count on the Republicans to be nasty and radical-right and focus the Democratic appeal to the famous centrist "suburban voter." As Alex Pereene puts it, "The big idea of the New Democrats [DLC] was that denying all of these annoying groups any material gains would please the White Suburban Voter, who had emerged from all the social upheavals of 1960s and beyond as the Main Character of American Politics."

This 20-minute podcast from Josh Marshall (of the Talking Points Memo site) gives a good picture of why it is important for Democratic candidates and officeholders to give clear signals on major issue on the minds of their own voting base, like abortion rights are right now. It's a good description of how fluffy messaging on marginal issues may not make much of a difference in a given election. But looking and sounding serious about *doing something substantial* about issues the base voters care a lot about really is important in getting people to turn out to vote. Mini Pod: On The Record 07/09/2022:

Josh says at one point, "The big hit here is that half the population just lost this basic right [abortion rights] that they have enjoyed for about half a century. But I think a compounding thing is, people feel like, 'Is there a connection between what I do [when I vote] and there being a result?'"

Obviously, the message for specific get-out-the-vote efforts has to be, yes, the Democrats will make a difference that's important enough to make it worthwhile to go vote. But most voters who don't spend a lot or effort parsing the history of the filibuster rule are also subject to the feeling that Josh characterizes as, "we've spent the last year where Democrats are in the majority and yet the things they supposedly support don't happen."

Republicans like to encourage that kind of cynicism about voting among people not inclined to support Republicans. But especially in the face of a lot of states enacting Jim-Crow-era type voting restrictions, people having some confidence that their votes will make a difference on policies they care about really does matter.