Is Leftist politics about creating solidarity among groups that previously did not understand their common interest? Or is it about dividing people into marketable slices in order to win the next election?
Once upon a time, the politics practiced by the Democratic Party were aimed at uniting groups marked by diversity of ethnic origins, gender, race and age. This was accomplished by focusing on class with the aim that the 99% would see their common interest and vote against the 1%. There is no finer example of this approach than the 1936 stump speech of Franklin Roosevelt:
The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House—by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.
Those who used to have pass-keys are not happy. Some of them are desperate. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America’s working people. Only reckless men, heedless of consequences, would risk the disruption of the hope for a new peace between worker and employer by returning to the tactics of the labor spy.
What we see today in the little "messages" delivered to workers by bosses that implicitly threaten job loss with voting Democratic are nothing new. Bosses employed the same tactic in 1936. Roosevelt was happy to use that tactic openly and explicitly against the bosses who opposed him. He was even bolder, not calling the bosses "savvy businessmen" but calling them obstacles to freedom and prosperity:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
Sadly, Roosevelt did not personally fulfill the glorious promises made in his rhetoric. He ignored the plight of our black brothers and sisters. He foolishly listened to the "businessmen" he excoriated in his speeches and cut the federal budget and brought on another recession in 1937.
But at least, he had the rhetoric right.
More than three decades later, another Democrat tried to expand FDR's rhetoric to include even the brown men and women who lived in other countries. This extraordinarily bold effort led to electoral defeat--nothing surprising there--but it remains as the high water mark of American politics, especially when we consider that the two present Presidential candidates happily agree on droning villages if they contain a single "terrorist" according to our supposedly infallible "intelligence" services.
George McGovern stood before the assembled Democratic Party that had just nominated him for President and deliver a speech entitled "Come Home America":
I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day.
There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North.
Has any other major party candidate before or since expressed one iota of concern for the victims of our imperialist policy? It was an extraordinary moment.
It was an attempt to create solidarity among Americans and the rest of the world.
The Republicans hated both FDR's attempt to focus American politics on a class basis, i.e. the 99% vs. 1%--and even more intensely McGovern's attempt to include in American politics a concern for the welfare of the 99% in the countries we might like to designate as our enemies.
Sadly, Democrats have chosen to follow the Republicans' lead rather than fight it.
The Obama campaign exults in its skill in parsing the electorate into tiny segments to be "sold" via the latest targeted marketing. Today, after the most recent Republican ignorance re: women, the Democrats are engaging in a skilled campaign to gain a few votes here and there using their media outlets. Divide and conquer. Differentiate and market. Those are the Democratic Party's maxims these days. Democratic leaning media outlets parrot the Republican approach to interest group politics rather than challenge it.
It's sad to see Democrats employ the same sick methods that Republicans use. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Republicans should feel quite complimented.
Is this what politics is about? Is fear of class-based politics so great in the Democratic Party's hierarchy that it must play the Republicans' game?
FDR, Truman and now McGovern must be turning in their graves.