If the Dems had really been a working-class party, they would have treated the long decline in union membership from the mid-1950s on as a threat to their party's survival. They did nothing of the sort, even before the New Deal coalition came apart post-1968. They were content to keep the AFL-CIO as a wasting asset while securing their real identity as the second party of capital. The acid test came after 1980, when it was apparent that the Dems had suffered a major strategic failure. The choice the party made at that point was crystal clear. It distanced itself even further from its residual ties to labor and appointed Tony Coelho extortionist in chief. Coelho successfully peddled the "as long as we have a lock on at least one house capital better pony up" strategy for most of a decade, then made a clean getaway one step ahead of the Keating scandal. After 1994, even that Dem strategy came off the rails. Clinton's response was to suck up the capital that Coelho had be! en siphoning off to the congressional party, while divorcing his campaigns from the house & senate. So now here we are: the Big Guy is gone, the congressional party is in disarray, most state parties are in no better shape (Pug dominance of statehouses continues unabated), and the decline of an organized working class makes it more difficult than ever for the Dems to refashion themselves as a real working class party even if they wanted to (and only a small fraction would even want to try). This is a party without a strategy of any kind, let alone a strategic dependence on the strength of the working class.
A modest proposal: instead of extenuating every Dem failure, you really ought to draw a line in the sand sometime. Ask yourself what Dem betrayal would prompt you to leave the party for good. Then all we'll have to do is wait for the inevitable and throw a party for you after you slam the door behind you.
(Just to be fair, I promise to reconsider the Democrats when they mount a fight to the death to restore the Wagner Act by repealing Landrum-Griffin and Taft-Hartley. Don't hold your breath.)
Michael McIntyre
>>> nathan at newman.org 06/08/01 08:46AM >>>
But the point remains that the SPD when it got into government in 1928 it did pass deflationary policies. They promoted a "reconciliation" between labor and capital in coalition government. The SDP was not alone in this- most of the socialist parties when they got into government as with the French Popular Front and the Labour Party did not pass particularly radical policies beyond New Deal like policies like the eight-hour day and collective bargaining laws. The main exception were the Scandinavians, but generally the "working class" parties of Europe were not particularly distinguishiable from Democrats in the US in actual policy.
After World War II, the large differences in party were due more to the weakness of capital's power in Europe after the war compared to the strengthed power of US capital in domestic politics. The convergence of European politics towards the US is largely due to the recovery of European capital over the years, not to some essentialist distinction between "working class parties" in one country versus another.
-- Nathan Newman