The SPD came back to government in 1928 as well.
As for the SPD being "institutionally" more working class, who cares if it doesn't lead to better policies? And you can't compare proportional representation systems to first-past-the-post systems, a point seemingly lost continually in these discussions.
To create a working majority, under proportional systems, inevitably "working class" parties AFTER an election form alliances with sectors of capital represented by moderate and liberal parties. In first-past-the-post systems, working class organizations such as unions etc. form such alliances BEFORE an election to nominate someone who can win a majority.
Alliances with capital or other non-working class forces are made in either system. Proportional systems just allow working class forces to get into office before doing so.
Yes, and just as such electoral alliances to govern parliamentary systems are opportunistic and often lack strategy, so neither does the "Democratic Party" - not a party in any sense comparable to European proportional systems - but it is the component working class forces within the party such as unions etc. that do have strategy, including which Democrats they support and which they withhold support from - see the demise of Rep. Martinez last year.
What betrayal would make me "leave the Democratic Party"? None, since the party doesn't exist. Believe it or not, I voted both Green and Republican at points for strategic reasons, but as long as the vast bulk of working class forces operate in Democratic primaries, that is where progressives should be.
-- Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael McIntyre" <mmcintyr at wppost.depaul.edu>
I assume 1928 was a typo - the SPD came to power in 1918, of course. Their deflationary policies were constrained by the international context in a way that Dem policies never have been. It's not particularly telling against the SPD that they pursued a policy of conciliating capital. Social democrats always conciliate capital one way or another. What made the SPD a working class party was not its policies but its institutional structure. As an organization, it depended on working-class institutions, many of which it created, in a way that the Democrats never have. The Dems, in contrast, are institutionally dependent on sectors of capital that choose to cover their bets by purchasing influence in both parties or, more rarely, prefer the Dems to the Pugs. Throw in trial lawyers as a wild card in the Dem pact, add union support, and you basically have the coalition. (I'm talking about the FISCAL coalition here. Of course the Dems also count on captive voting blocs that pr! ovide the party with few financial resources). The difference betweent he Dems and a working class party is that the Dems can treat working-class institutions as captive constituencies, while they compete for support at the margins with sectors of capital that are sitting on the fence. Compare that to real social democratic or labor parties, who depend on working-class institutions for their survival. Sheeyit, even Labour depended on the TUC until 1997! (Don't like my Latin? Pardon mah French!)
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