Why 90s were Great for Progressive Electoral Efforts

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Thu Nov 12 10:14:24 PST 1998


-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>


>The Reps still control Congress, an overwhelming
>majority of governorships, are gaining in state legislatures. According
to
>the big table in today's NYT, Reps got 51% of the popular vote for the
>House, down from just 53% in 1994, but up from 50% in 1996, and way up
from
>46% in 1992. And despite the increase in black turnout, the Republican
>share of the black vote rose from 8% in 1994 to 11% in 1998. With Newt
>gone, the Reps could burnish their image with young-Bush-style
>"inclusiveness," and 2000 could be a whole different ballgame.

Doug's and others' comments about Dems sometimes seem to argue: A. Clinton sucks B. Dems in Congress are about the same C. One reason Clinton sucks is that there are now less of B

Which goes something like the complaint that the prison food sucks and there's not enough of it. But it also reflects the fact that those who argue against working in the Democratic party steadfastly refuse to differentiate between politicians within the Dems in order to strengthen their argument against them by tarring everyone with the same brush.

But for those like myself who care about the proportion of strong progressives within the Dem caucus, especially the Progressive Caucus, the 1990s have been a great period of progressive electoral success. Why third party people can be so excited about a few Green city council members, yet dismiss the growth of the Progressive Caucus is sometimes beyond me.

The Progressive Caucus has a platform as radical as any of the third party groupings, including slashing military spending and corporate loopholes, expanding taxes on the wealthy, guaranteeing full employment, defending affirmative action and expanding equal rights, tying international trade agreements to environmental sustainability and economic equality, a focus on human rights and demilitarization in foreign policy, community-based economics, single-payer health care and expansion of social insurance, and public funding of elections. See Fairness Agenda at http://www.dsausa.org/pc/pc.fair1.html

The fact is that throughout the 1990s, the Progressive Caucus has expanded, while the conservative Democratic factions, including the DLC-types have shrunk.

Look at the election cycles:

1990- Bernie Sanders elected along with a number of other progressives, including Wellstone in the Senate.

1992- The 1992 reapportionment created a massive jump in the ranks of the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses, jumping the Congressional Black Caucus alone up to 39 members. These changes significantly moved the center of gravity within the Democratic Party to the left and helped lead to the creation of the Progressive Caucus, led by independent Bernie Sanders and other left-progressives in the House. The Progressive, Black and Hispanic Caucuses became the backbone of the fight for Single Payer health care and against NAFTA.

1994- Where the 1992 election strengthened the left-wing of the Democratic Party, the 1994 Gingrich-led takeover of the House decimated the ranks of Boll Weevil and "New" Democrats. Democratic Leadership Council leaders like Rep. McCurdy of Oklahoma and Rep. Cooper of Tennessee failed miserably at attempts to move to the Senate (and were gone from the House). While some liberals were among the 50+ seats that moved over to the Republican column in 1994, the vast majority were from the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Emblematic of the change was the fact that where roughly 65 "Boll Weevil" Democrats allied with Reagan in 1991-92, there were only 32 Democrats in 1995 that became part of the "Mainstream" forum that signed onto Gingrich's "Contract with America." More significantly, none of the 32 renegade Democrats were in leadership positions with the House Democrats. And a number of those renegades just changed their party affiliation over to the Republicans, further lessening the conservative presence in the Dem caucus.

1996- Progressive Caucus adds members, although the DLC-style New Democratic Caucus adds a few as well, but far below their strength at the beginning of the 90s. And the hard-core Boll Weevil caucus basically has disappeared. The strengthened position of progressives within the Democratic caucus is shown when Fast Track trade authority is defeated with three-quarters of Democratic voting against it, versus the two-thirds who voted against NAFTA back in 1994. To give some sense of the changes, back in 1977 there were 63 House Democrats who voted against increasing the minimum wage (at a time when inflation was ravaging its real value). Since that time, each vote on the minimum wage has seen a decrease in opposing Democrats to the point in 1996 when only 2 Democrats voted no on increasing the minimum wage.

Which brings us to 1998: Reports I've heard indicate that the Progressive Caucus may add up to 15 new members come January, bringing their total up to 70-75 members. These likely include: Tammy Baldwin (WI2), the first open lesbian to be elected to Congress and a strong progressive; Rush Holt, an environmentalist from NJ12; Jan Schakowsky, a consumer advocate and women's rights supporter from IL9.

And the mobilization around the country of labor, blacks, latinos, feminists and others not only moved four state houses back into Democratic hands, it also meant elections of a range of progressives into those state legislatures.

And my old home of California now has the chance to pass some significant progressive legislation with the elimination of Pete Wilson's veto (although budgetary changes are hard given the supermajorities required for passage from the Prop 13 era). The Dem leadership of California is mixed but includes some very strong Progressive folks.

I've heard that in places like Alabama, the recent mobilization for the election is leading to a wholesale reorganization of the party led by progressives. Which highlights one of the massive changes in the Dems from a generation ago. Instead of the white segregationists of a generation ago, the most prominent Southern House members are now mostly African-American. This change was foreshadowed by Jesse Jackson's run for the Presidency in 1988 where he won the most primaries in the Super Tuesday races in the South. The conservative Southern wing of the Democratic Party is no more. Instead, for the first time in US history, there is now a pro-Civil Rights, pro-labor base of a progressive electoral structure in the South through the Congressional Black Caucus and associated state groups.

What we have seen in the 1990s is a broad realignment of the Democratic party, as the conservative members have largely become or been replaced by Republicans. The drop in Dem members is deceptive, since the change in voting patterns is rather minor between the Dems eliminated and their Republican replacements. Actually much more significant has been the replacement of many moderate Republicans by hard-right Republicans. Shifts in national policy are much more due to a rightward shift within the Republican party than from the replacement of conservative Dems by Republicans.

At this point, the Progressive Caucus is positioned to continue solid gains election by election and, if the Democrats as a whole regain a majority, Progressive Caucus member David Bonior will become Majority Leader (or possibly even Speaker if Gephardt runs for President), while a range of other Progressive Caucus members will assume chairs of key committees. It will still take more years of expansion of the Caucus itself to assure majority passage of most of the Fairness Agenda, but it will be a start.

Again, as I've noted, electoral gains are not social change- they are usually the reflection of social change and mobilization. But the question is how to effectively reflect our power in the streets and workplace in the legislative chambers. Third party strategies are one way but have been notably ineffective in electing anyone; those pushing within the Democratic Party have seen eight years of progress in expanding the Progressive Caucus.

And if the measure is creating organized spokespeople for propaganda for left issues, Maxine Waters position in Congress has been critical in keeping a semblance of public attention on the CIA-Contras-crack connection as just one example. Dan Hamburg's departure from Congress and subsequent career as Green Party candidate for governor resulted in little additional attention to core environmental concerns.

I would love to see Greens, Labor Party, Socialist Party members in Congress. I just have not seen any good explation or empirical demonstration of how such strategies win in the context of a first-past-the-post system and ballot access laws that so favor a two-party stranglehold. Taking over one of the parties, while hard in the sense of the moblization needed to win electoral majorities of any kind is hard, is not as hard structurally as the third party strategy.

That is relatively obvious theoretically and is even more obvious when you look at the empirical success in growing the Progressive Caucus versus the failures of the Greens or others. The Greens are still heralding city council successes because they have yet to win even one of the country's 6775 state legislative seats, much less a Congressional seat anywhere in the country.

The Progressive Caucus has as leftwing a platform as any labor or socialist party in Europe (save possibly the remaining splinters of the Communist Refoundation in Italy and a few tiny left parties in Scandanavia).

Unless one urges a completely symbolic approach to politics, the question I'd ask is why supporting a strategy of expanding the Progressive Caucus - intending to act in coalition with the remaining Dems in a majority government - is any different from Communist voters in France, Green voters in Germany, (expected) Italian Communist voting in Italy or any other kind of voting where the assumption is of coalition government? Such voting pushes for a larger portion of the governing coalition to be progressive and working-class, but the desire is also for the coalition as a whole to have a governing majority.

First-past-the-post systems tend to have the fight for the ideological balance within the governing coalition happen during the primary election with the overall governing coalition decided in a general election, while proportional representation has both the ideological balance and the governing coalition elected in the same election. The latter may be preferable, but we don't have it, which means if progressives and socialists bypass the fight for ideological balance at the primary level, we are unlikely to (and have generally failed to) make up for it by running third party candidates at the general election.

As I've said, the last paragraph is a theoretical analysis of the structure of politics, but acting on it as a strategy has been confirmed by the growth of the Progressive Caucus in the 1990s. That success is worth building upon.

--Nathan Newman



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