Apologies to all for having posted this before it was really ready. Here is the streamlined and more pointed version I originally intended.
Democrats Need To Clean Their Own House
Over the last 45 years, the Democratic party and its candidates have gradually estranged millions of voters who should have, could have, or might have voted for Secretary Clinton in 2016’s Presidential election. It may be comforting for the Party to blame the Greens as they once blamed Ralph Nader during Gore vs. Bush, for the defection of voters they considered theirs, but this begs a large question. Why, if the choices between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ honest and dishonest, or competent and incompetent were as clear as Democrats claimed them to be was public opinion so closely divided that a third party’s nail-parings of 1% of the vote could flip the outcome to the opponent?
The argument here is that Democrats have gradually developed tone-deafness to legitimate feelings of betrayal and suffering on the part of a sizeable number of their constituents who have lost faith in them. This assertion rests not only on the evidence of the last election, but the loss of 60 Congressional seats during the last eight years, the collapse of unions and public schools. Furthermore, the degree to which Democrats have subordinated the interests of their base to embrace neo-liberalism, has created a perfect storm under cover of which Donald Trump gained the sanctum sanctorum of American political power.
If the reasons were not so apparent, Democratic protestations of confusion and dismay as to what happened in the Presidential and down-ticket elections might elicit pity. When that ignorance begs us to accept the confection that Democrats and progressives are the good guys and undeserving of this fate, however it exposes a willful blindness which cannot perceive contradictions between stated Democratic policy and the biases of candidates striving for political purchase. That growing blindness has created canyons between Democrats and their constituents.
A brief review of near history should highlight this point.
***
“The Fed began raising interest rates in 1977, and the American economy tipped
into recession in 1980, at which point the central bank took its foot off the brakes.
But inflation rates continued to rise, and so shortly after the economy recovered
(briefly) in July of 1980, Mr. Volker orchestrated a series of interest rate
increases that took the federal funds target from around 10% to near 20%.”[1] 1
Unintended consequences of this precipitous escalation on interest rates (under a Democratic president)— what Shakespeare referred to as “a pound of flesh,”— was the extinction of 22 million family farmers who had faithfully followed the advice of the official institutions supposedly helping them. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Farm Service Agency, Rural Development, Congressional subcommittees, local banks and savings institutions, et al, had assured farmers that rising land values and additional income from increased crop yields would insulate them from debts and urged farmers to mortgage their land to buy expensive equipment to plant and harvest fencerow to fencerow, and they did .
When Washington later signaled its seriousness about fighting inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volker (under a Democratic President), raised interest rates by five points in a single day. The farmers could no longer meet their new debt obligations and were scrubbed off their land as efficiently as if a tsunami had scoured it.
After the big wave came others, perhaps not as large but equally destructive. For every five farms that disappeared under the auctioneer’s hammer, a local business closed. Farming towns lost their their hardware and feed stores. their FFA leaders, their scout leaders, coaches, school principals and auto-parts stores. Deep depression and shame went viral in the farming belt and metastasized into a deadly scourge where the leading cause of death on the family farm became suicide.
Powerful, antigovernment resentments began to blossom in that blighted soil. In the Clinton years, when clinical depression and farmer suicides, (often disguised as bizarre accidents to secure insurance settlements for survivors) were peaking at an all time high, Federal mental health services budgets were cut. Into these crippled and disoriented communities, local militias and strict constitutionalists,(often the same folks) began to appear like mushrooms after a rain. Men with red-covered copies of the Constitution in their pockets, who would deal only with silver money began to offer them comfort and support. They branded all who had taken oaths to the Federal government—sheriffs, judges, game wardens—as mortal enemies and offered fund raising bake sales to the farmers and supported them at the of homesteads . They offered them shoulders to cry on, and most importantly, explanations. “It’s not your fault,” the farmers were reassured (and it wasn’t). “It’s the Jews” or (depending on the teacher’s belief system and operant prejudice), Nelson Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, the Queen of England, One-World government, or the UN and the black helicopters.” These theories were often embraced by broken hearts and minds tormented by unbearable losses. Before long, a toxic antigovernment, antiestablishment mold was viralizing in the farm belt.
On April 19, 1995, a former farmer, a militia member and friends blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding hundreds more. Until September 11, 2001, this was the worst terrorist attack on American soil in the nation’s history. Colorado newspaper editor, Joel Dyer, author of Harvest of Rage[2], a history of the post-Volker farm debacle, was the government’s chief witness and expert on militias at the Oklahoma City trial. He held that there were four to six people involved in the bombing. “The government caught two”, his inference being that other conspirators and cells were marking time awaiting their own opportunities for vengeance. Odd news stories surfaced from time to time about “farmers” being caught with sarin and ricin nerve toxins and plans to distract the government with some catastrophe to seize a section of the Midwest by armed force, as guerrillas in Latin America were doing. Dyer was not optimistic about near-term diminution of their anger.
Another crop of future Trump supporters was nurtured when Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” legislation imposed an absolute lifetime limit of five years on government assistance to needy families. That legislation ended Federal definitions of eligibility and all guarantees of assistance to anyone. Under the new legislation each State could determine whom to exclude in any manner they chose as long as they did not violate the Constitution. Little imagination is required to intuit the reactions of received by poor minorities and poor white households nationwide.
For sixty previous years, Aid to Families with Dependent Children had been an entitlement, now a dirty word, but then a term with two critical conceptual parts: a federally defined guarantee of assistance to families with children who met the statutory definition of need, and a federal guarantee to the states of a matching share of the money needed to help those qualified for assistance.
Under the new laws, mothers found themselves dropped from the welfare rolls and required to accept any available job, with no additional money for travel, day-care, transportation, or baby-sitting. The dignity of labor was expanded to include losing their fingernails plucking chickens in Tyson processing plants or working at Walmart for minimum wage while stressing family, relatives and friends to care for their children. This legislation expanded membership in a new serf class, working 40 hours a week, and still not earning enough to surpass Federal poverty standards. These “legal” minimum wages left these households one accident or illness away from penury. (An added benefit to employers [read campaign contributors] of this sudden flood of of virtually conscripted cheap labor was the undermining union negotiating efforts for fair wages.)
The media contributed by broadcasting “controversy” over coded dog-whistle language, insinuating that “some” believed food stamps and welfare were giveaways to African Americans.( In reality white women were the major beneficiaries.) The blowback from this legislation caused further stress and dangerous eroding of the working poor’s confidence in government— a crop of beliefs the country harvested on November 8, 2016.
In 1979, the Treaty of Detroit, a longstanding agreement between Automakers and Labor that had guaranteed basic cost-of-living increases, pensions, health insurance, and rising wages as profits rose, was destroyed by the United Auto Workers Union, one of the original participants. After purging “leftists and socialists” under the guise of keeping American industry “competitive,” the Union now forced its own members to give up benefits and rights to keep their jobs. The Democratic party missed the opportunity to champion and protect labor and the unions have never recovered.
* * *
“The Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s (commonly dubbed the S&L crisis) was the failure of 1,043 out of 3,234 savings and loan associations in the
United States from1986 to 1995:…In 1996, the General Accounting Office estimated the total cost to be $160 billion, including $132.1 billion taken from taxpayers. The FSLIC and RTC were created to resolve the S&L crisis.”[3]
When all final costs to the taxpayer were tallied, the actual tab was a staggering $220 billion.
Barely more than a decade later, in 2000, Congress loosed the reins again, allowing the antsy horses of Wall Street to have their head and run away with investors’ cash. In this same period, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, (the Financial Modernization Act of 2000) nullified laws and regulations which had protected and stabilized the economy since the Great Depression. The skids on which these major controls—preventing financiers from speculating with investors’ money— were slid offstage, had been greased by millions of lobbyists’ dollars pouring into Congress to support the legislation. The 25% who resisted were buried by a chorus of Reaganomic mantras asserting that transferring money from the working class to the wealthy would incentivize business owners to expand and create new jobs. The yammer overwhelmed feeble Congressional resistance, 343-86, and the Act was signed into law by a Democratic president. While they were at it, Congress also removed laws against usury by credit card companies.
Within eight years, by 2008, the weakening of banking regulation and oversight produced the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. Month after month, TV provided shocking displays of families being evicted from their homes (6,000,000 a month at one point), armed police protecting movers carting furniture, bedding, tools, memorabilia—all possessions—out on the lawn, so that the same banks which had issued worthless mortgages could reclaim the houses and sell them, while neighbors looked on in pity, horror, and fear.
This collapse was another massive recruitment drive for later Trump voters, but Democrats failed to notice the defections because they were making as much money from the lobbyists as everyone else, so perhaps they can be forgiven for overlooking the eventual day of reckoning. In the new economic laissez-faire of post-Glass-Steagall, the 1/10th of 1% of the nation’s wealthiest were raking in astronomical profits and spending them freely to conscript members of Congress as their personal concierges. They coopted the entire electoral process by underwriting the election campaigns of both parties reducing the labor of candidate to holding focus groups to discover which “message” might win them a hall pass to Washington. Their return on investment was extraordinary as their employees in Congress weakened and rewrote tax laws in their favor and offered them loophole relief from “onerous” regulation currently protecting the public commons of our environment, food, and the health and safety of workers.
Most outside observers of the 2008 debacle, particularly Federal regulator William Black, investigator and prosecutor of the earlier Savings and Loan scandal, called the bankers’ shenanigans—the liars loans and subprime mortgages,— criminal fraud. Not a person from Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s or Fitch, the ratings agencies who defrauded millions of investors by rating nearly worthless tranches of mortgages as AAA safe investments went to jail or was ordered to pay back as much as a library fine.
Mr. Black insisted that these events could never have transpired without the criminal collusion of the firms’ CEOs and CFOs. He certainly agreed with the Editorial Board of aol.com who stated:
“What both the S&L crisis and the current financial crisis share are their root causes: Clever manipulation of the banking system that allowed financial firms to reap huge profits while shifting the risks, and ultimately the costs, onto taxpayers.”[4]
A compliant Congress made every fiscal transgression, act of favoritism toward the billionaire class, and betrayal of the working class, legal. The public was urged to believe that the resulting windfall profits to the multimillionaires and billionaires underwriting Congressional campaigns was only happenstance. Most Democratic and Independent voters expect this type of class bias as routine from Republicans, but they were unprepared for the devastating friendly fire from their own side.
Predictably, it all came a crapper, and once again, not one CEO, Vice President, or CFO who took irresponsible risks with investors’ money was held responsible for the loss of billions of dollars in pension funds, citizens’ savings, and accumulated wealth. Not one was fined ½ a percent of what they made, and no one but Bernie Madoff went to jail.
And the faux-befuddled Democrats are still wondering what happened?
PART TWO
It is a truism that when human societies become frightened, they seek saviors. This time, their hope is personified in the shape of President-elect Donald Trump whose entire life has been dedicated to self-aggrandizement and the accumulation of personal wealth, litigation and Barnum and Bailey type showmanship. It is a measure of the people’s desperation and disgust with the Establishment that they chose such a wildly impulsive, thin-skinned, secretive, mean-mouthed figure to represent our Nation. The TV newsreaders and commentators who secured his national prominence by offering him all the free air time he could fill, now appear uneasy about the collateral damage stemming from their enlarging their own audience share and network revenues dedicating so much air-time to Mr. Trump. Had Mr. Trump been less colorful and behaved less like a Tourettes patient, media would have consigned him to the political exile where they have banished David Duke, Lyndon LaRouche, and the Ku Klux Klan. The media folk have begun, too little too late, asking “tough questions”— not of Mr. Trump who does not deign to speak with them— but of his surrogates, and the Democrats, rather than assessing their own flaws and faults are only too happy to concentrate on Trump’s. Crowds are massing in the streets vainly trying to reverse the election that has enthroned a new leader who embarrasses and frightens well over half the Nation, but to date there has been little serious analysis as to specifically how the Democrats failed their constituents.
The fears about Trump are understandable, but misplaced and counter-productive. Fear is what delivered our Nation into this state of affairs —fear of the economy, fear of “the new”, fear of immigrants, globalism, Muslims, Blacks, Latins, global warming, poverty, the loss of American prestige and power in the world. Fear (and anger) created Mr. Trump’s Presidency and so fear and anger will never antidotes to his influence.
The root cause of our divided and fearful Nation is deeper than anything that can be solved by law, economics, ideology, or a single leader. All such fixes seek a cause outside of the central actor in every case—the individual human being. Under stress we search for an imagined leader to represent our imagined selves. We create in our mind’s eye a glamorized, faux human as a candidate and a constituency composed of the selves we imagine we are. Simultaneously, we disown the shadow of each preferred quality we expect our leader to inhabit. Our personal selfishness, larceny, greediness, and unethical behaviors we project onto those we consider “the other.” This creates “perfect” enemies who are undefeatable because they are phantoms. Such people never actually existed except in our imaginations. Simultaneously, this bifurcation of ourselves into qualities we like and qualities we refuse to own relieves us of any need for deep self-examination.
Out in the heartland of America, on the farms, in the rust belt and the small towns crippled by the economic blitzkriegs of the last 45 years—the farmers who still own anything or who now work their previous property as serfs of mega-agribusiness; the working poor who own less, and the masses of the never-considered, too consumed by struggle to remain abreast of public policy— all witnessed the gradual or sudden disappearance of their towns, factories and incomes, their children moving away seek to work.
The picture of the Presidents in the post-office changed, but the constant of TV screens transmitting ads of deliriously happy consumers, and the blather of the perfectly coiffed men and women laughing and gossiping on the news as if nothing could ever touch them became only more omnipresent. The heartland people following television’s record of days learned at least two things by watching for decades: First, that nothing ever changed for their benefit —not money, law, return of jobs, ceaseless pressure of debt, or the diminution of costly State and local regulations which appear to serve corporate profits rather than insure their health and well-being. Secondly, the new guy, the tough billionaire running for President this time was unapologetically raising his stiff middle finger to the entire Washington and media elites. Midwesterners might not have agreed with some of his racist utterances, and many probably found his bluster and self-promotion difficult to square with Christian modesty and farm-country charity. Others may not have appreciated his misogynistic views on women but Trump’s campaign spokesman Kelly Anne Conway—a very bright bulb indeed—offered a very clear distinction of the difference between what “embarrassed” some voters and what “affected” them, pointing out that they definitely favored Trump for the latter. He offered them (apparently) straight talk, the promise of brute force and simplistic solutions, said what he felt, and voiced their deepest suspicions about a rigged political and economic system out loud. Can they be blamed for hoping that he might, at last, be a champion for them as well?
The forty million odd people who did not vote for Mr. Trump are scared of his ‘straight talk’ and see it as intemperate. They are scared of his compulsive response to anything he considers derogatory to himself, moreso because he has the power to order a nuclear attack, (and has wondered aloud why they were made if they are never to be employed.)Minorities, civil libertarians and pro-choice advocates fear the judges he will appoint to the Supreme Court, and the racist utterances made by some he is currently installing in his Cabinet. Surrendering to such fears helps no one accepts pollsters.
The first law of the Universe is that everything changes and there is unshakeable evidence of that truth. Mr. Trump will be changed and constrained by the Presidency or evicted from it. He will chafe against the restraints of the Congress but he will have to learn to deal with them. I am not suggesting that “everything will be okay” and that concerned citizens can relax their vigilance. I am more concerned that Democrats appear to be insulated by a bullet-proof faith in their own righteousnesss, and thus will not take a fearless inventory of their y callous disregard they have inflicted on the constituencies which denied them this election.
Democrats’ whinging about the need to change their message or their leadership, and missing the obvious fact that sizeable numbers of their voters have seen through their messages, directly into the core values of the Party’s which are the pursuit, generation, protection and facilitation of wealth. Everything else is lip-service. Democratic social liberalism may allow one to do it with anybody and put it anywhere, but their guarded core is corporatist, neo-liberal, and cash-green. The voters they required for victory have discovered this as surely as the Iraquis discovered our true intentions in their country and began setting IED’s two months after they had danced in the street welcoming us. Voters decided they are more comfortable with candidates who declare their greed forthrightly.
To pursue remedies in the same habitual manner of attempting to discredit or otherwise obliterate one’s enemies (as if the world will be left pure and perfect by their absence) is to court failure because it derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. Another path available which is based on the way things really are. It needs to be considered if National traumas ever hope to heal. A short digression may clarify the issue.
From 1975 to 1983 I served for eight years as a member and then Chair of a California state agency—The California Arts Council— during Governor Jerry Brown’s first two terms in office. The first 18 months was a disaster due to my outspokenness and a one-sided belief in the exalted truth of my own positions. I (speaking for the Council) had declared that the Council’s future emphasis would be on the grass-roots Community Arts and not the already wealthy major institutions which I referred to as “dinosaurs.” Within 18 months, a combination of intemperate speech and exclusionary bias had dead-locked the State.
In the midst of these struggles, I was called into the Governor’s office for a chat. He was cordial and said only one thing to me by way of political instruction and I have never forgotten it. “In a democracy,” he said, “all boats rise or all boats sink. You can’t play favorites.” It was incontrovertibly clear (and also fair) to me that every tax-payer in California had a right to expect their culture to be fairly acknowledged if not represented.
Council an abrupt about-face with the major Arts organizations and Legislators we had previously offended. As spokesman, I offered them sincere apologies, shared our plan for a $20 million future budget in which each and all the constituencies had a place, and asked them to join us in trying to win it. I was surprised to discover how willing they were to forgive and how, in a newly civil climate were willing to listen to Council’s needs and concerns as well. In short order the Arts Council, now harmonized with its larger-community, went on to win a $5 million dollar budget the next year and succeded in winning raises every year afterwards until, within eight years, we were operating with a $16 million annual State budget and had secured the respect and support of our colleagues in the field and in the Legislature.
The relevant part of this digression concerns relationships formed with Conservative legislators. By admitting errors and mistakes, tensions dissolved and we were able to find common ground and common interests. These men later saved the Council’s bacon, insuring that our budgets passed through their committees, even if they personally voted against us on the record to protect themselves at home.
Listening to older politicians reminisce about the days when “Washington worked”; when men and women fought on the floor of the House and Senate by day and then retired afterwards for cordial drinks and visits together, I was reminded of those fence-mending meetings during my years in State government. The technique of listening is a time-tested process that offers a critical hope for healing our politics.
Along with the Arts Council I’ve had over 40 years of spiritual practice as a Zen Buddhist. The simplest way to frame that lessons I garnered from both is that I am my opponent. I am the one I think of as the other, meaning that I possess the same capacity for myopic self-righteousness, judgmental stupidity, greed, hatred, envy, and delusion as those I consider my opposites. They possess the same qualities of intelligence, ethics, probity, selflessness and empathy that I would prefer to reserve exclusively as my own.
It may not be pleasant for me to discover that Donald Trump has a permanent residency in my psyche, but he is there, alongside Saddam Hussein, the Dalai Lama, addicts of various stripes, mothers, Nelson Mandela, street sweepers, pro and anti-choice activists, environmentalists, loggers, farmers, nurses, teachers, and bikers. All humans are like radios calibrated to receive the entire spectrum of humanity. We can be silly, loving, or kind one minute and in the next, giving the finger to a driver who has cut us off— an impulse a perilously close to pulling a trigger.
Not knowing our full capacity as humans makes us dangerous because our reflexive assumption of goodness allow us to ignore our shadows—the facets and qualities of humanity we prefer to remain ignorant of. If we don’t double-check our motives however, and simply assume ourselves good, we create unintentional catastrophes. Our unclaimed impulses rummage in the world, loosing havoc that we never understand we have caused. As a patriotic American, it not easy for me to admit that the good guys, my country, practiced ethnic cleansing on our Native population; enslaved Africans as property for two and a half centuries, blacklisted and imprisoned citizens for their political beliefs, or in the case of the Japanese, their race. I don’t like knowing that we are the only Nation that ever employed nuclear weapons—twice. Our invasion of Vietnam killed 3.8 million people there[5] and later during the Iraq war 500,000 children died of dysentery and disease (a number the Pentagon accurately predicted) when we bombed the water treatment plants in Baghdad. Had the situations been reversed could we Americans have ever considered the people doing that to us as “the good guys?”
If we believe ourselves to be reflexively good, we will never allow ourselves to explore the full range of consequences stemming from our actions. We will measure ourselves only by our known motives, and will always offer ourselves a pass, based on our intentions. If, in a dispute, I assume that the goodness, kindness and wisdom, rests only on my side of the argument, my opponents will read my assumptions and judgments of them and as clearly as if they were tattooed on my forehead. They will judge me in the same way and defend their platitudes and the holes in their arguments as vigorously as I do mine. This is why our political system has devolved into its current rancorous blame game, with both sides impugning the motives of the other and insisting that only they hold the high ground.
The most useful qualities we can contribute to public life are kindness, empathy, and the willingness to listen to an opponent without judgment. One Party’s victory never insures victory for the Nation unless we can integrate the losers back into the population. This does not necessarily mean that either of side is always correct or always wrong, but that in order to communicate we must first deeply understand what our opponents mean, beneath the slogans, statistics, and rhetorical ploys we all enlist to make our points. This is what it means to say I am them. This is what allows us to see ourselves in those with whom we disagree and dedicating the time to do this, can calm the wild swings of history’s pendulum.
When we observe that self and other are simply different states of the same thing— like water and steam-- we also discover that opposing views may not be as irreconcilable as we might have previously thought. No one in this world is pure and there is no place for us to stand outside the messy everyday world to judge others. That should afford us all some common space to talk and listen. We are all joined by pulse and breath. We rely on the same oxygen, sunlight, water, and pollinating insects, microbes in the soil— the identical web of life. We all inhabit the same tiny blue pearl glowing in the vastness of space and, if we’re not careful, our shadow-side thinking may ruin it for habitation. We have evolved technically to a level capable of destroying the planet and every world we have created. Certainly our evolution should have space to include the ability to deepen our understanding of our humanity.?
[2] Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer. Basic Books
[5] From the pre-publisher edited manuscript of Chapter 6 in R.J. Rummel, Statistics of Democide, 1997.