The Horror, the Horror, Part 2: How Did We Get Here?
I. Confessions of a Democratic Theorist: What History Tells Us

No, this is not an embarrassing instance of self-inflating or virtue-signaling. In the American Political Science Association, of which I was a member for many years, a “Democratic Theorist” is a practitioner of “Democratic Theory,” a sub-section of “Political Theory,” to which a member could choose to subscribe. Its topics are indeed theoretical, concerning how “democracy” actually worked, how it ought to work, questions about majority rule and minority rights, who were its most appropriate theorists, the role of religious belief, how the powers of the state were or should be divided or separated, minimalist versus maximalists versions of it, etc. Democratic theorists, so enrolled, could have very sharp differences of opinion and definition, but were all–we were all–specializing in the same topics: keeping the United States safe for “democracy.” Easier said than done.

In the Winter of 2005 I co-authored (with the late political philosopher Drucilla Cornell) an essay in the Journal of Social Philosophy, entitled “Rethinking Democratic Theory: the American Case.” (pp. 517–535). American democracy, so we argued, was in deep trouble, the flaws in its structure being, among other things, “The Role of Money in Politics,” “The Politics of Representation,” “Democratic Citizenship,” “The Question of Empire,” “The Role of Ideology,” and last and perhaps above all, “Communication Monopolies and Democratic politics.” Indeed.

Of course we had to come to some conclusion , containing both negative critique and positive hope. The latter might have been too much to ask, but Drucilla showed me a potentially climactic sentence: “Our very souls may be at stake.”.

To which I replied, “Drucilla, none of my friends will believe I wrote that sentence.” Instead we agreed to substitute the following conclusions, drafted by me: “Movements for political reform may prove to be fruitless unless we come to have a more general appreciation among us of the relationship between the character humans manifest and the institutions they create.”

Ouch! Has “anodyne”ever had a better example? Of course Drucilla was right: institutions and certainly nations do have a soul–- “the character humans manifest.”Where are we with that?

On the Night of Election Day, the American soul cracked wide open, breaking half and half between–how shall I put it?–a “normal” distribution of hard-fought opinions, and a contrary half that wishes the destruction of everything contrary to its hatreds–or his. The soul, so to speak, remained in the losing half, sticking by the old rules of vote-casting and vote-counting that go back to 1789: not quite internalizing that the theoretical clash between majority rule and equal rights was being realized in real time. Why was that happening?

Going back in time, as WW II began, spurred on by the New Deal’s legalization of collective bargaining, the industrial working class was solidly behind FDR, and thus the Democratic Party. But wait. That Party’s coalition consisted of Northern progressives, mostly from major metropolitan areas, and mostly working class. Naziism and anti-Semitism, however, were strong up to the moment when Hitler declared War on the U.S., and even in some circles during that War.

Only a few years later, in fact, Southern Democrats, most of them racist to the core (as well as anti-Semitic) were expelled from or walked out of the Democratic Party during the run-up to the 1948 Election. Their candidate, later to become a welcomed Republican, received millions of votes. With this historical introduction, we are now able to address the question that is burning, shrieking itself at every street corner: why did labor desert the Democrats so drastically.

II. This background is by way of backdrop to the rise and rise of Donald Trump:

The story going the rounds of the disappointed Left is that the Democratic Party, in the hands primarily of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, opted for neo-liberalism, deserted the working class, and paved the way for Trump and for Tuesday night. neo-liberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — “hollowed out communities while enriching a global oligarchy. Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional national and religious identities.” (Maureen Dowd)

Maureen Dowd goes on:
“Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology”.

And: from (Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor) “Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” — that most Americans distrust. As a party interested in competent technocracy, we lost touch with the anger people feel at government. We seized on indicators of growth and job creation as proof that the economy was booming, even though people felt crushed by rising costs. We let revulsion at white Christian nationalism bait us into identity politics on their terms — whether it was debates about transgender athletes, the busing of migrants to cities, or shaming racist MAGA personalities who can’t be shamed.

A Times headline — “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” — contains a sentence that stopped me cold: David Brooks warns that “There will be some on the left who will say Donald Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism, and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.”( Jim Sleeper in a critique of “identity politics.”)

“Bernie Sanders Is Right: Democrats Have Abandoned the Working Class. The party chased former Republicans and rich donors, while alienating the working-class majority.“ The Nation

Why did they do that? The simple fact is that every Left-wing party in the advanced capitalism milieu (including even the South African Republic) had to make a choice between giving up socialism, social democracy, or any leftward move, or conceding power to the Right–to the big money. All made the same choice, and are still making it.

The key to all this, especially in the US, the least progressive of all the Western welfare states, is not any policies as opposed to others, but rather the decline of heavy industry in the post-War period: and still ongoing. Three examples will serve to illustrate the result of a major historical development in the modern period.

First, the striking success of the U.S. economy after the War was fueled in large part by the so-called Treaty of Detroit. In this 1950 agreement between General Motors and the U.A.W, the auto maker agreed that all profits fueled by technological advances would be shared with the workforce. Over the next decade it was difficult to enforce, though both JFK and LBJ did so, but was killed by the GOP when it took over Congress in the late ’60s. This was with help from the very conservative Federal Reserve, that made it legal for government bonds to be sold abroad without profit-sharing. I can’t go into technical details here, but what stands out is that capitalism at work inspires change without recompense for those who, as their share of productivity declines, suffer from it.

Second, when Harold Wilson became British Prime Minister for the first time in 1964, he had openly discussed plans to continue the movement toward socialism that Clement Attlee had started at the end of World War II. At a crucial point in his term, however, representatives of the Bank of England (this sounds like a thriller) came to him to let him know that if he proceeded along those lines, they would precipitate a run on the Bank that would destroy the Pound and his Party. He caved; Labour set out on the long road to Tony Blair and his repudiation of democratic socialism.

Third, and perhaps most revealing, Sweden was the home of social democracy, above all other European states. The source of that success was a near-revolution in 1931, that was settled by, primarily, the adoption of what came to be called The Meidner Plan. This Plan entailed that all wage or salary increases would go first, to the most needy. As feminist philosopher Carol Pateman told us, while on her way home from a semester in Sweden, she and her husband “looked for” poverty in Stockholm, but had been unable to find any. The Neo-Marxist Perry Anderson said the same thing in a Report to his journal, New Left Review).

However, unbeknown to both of us, the Meidner Plan was already dead, and had died because of a revolt of middle-class outrage, at a time when–as we have seen in the U.S.–the sheer weight of the social structural elements of class, was changing drastically everywhere, and no more so than in Sweden, where poverty migrated to refugees from Mid-East wars, and remains there to this day: with the attendant violent manifestations of hatred that are now familiar everywhere.

If we divided the work force into those who work at desks and those who work on factory floors or underground, the propositions had changed drastically, and significantly, since Marx’s (and Hegel’s) versions of “class” more than a century before. And the clash between majority rule and equal rights for minorities has deepened and, as we’ve now seen, threatens to undermine and destroy liberal democracy, which rests on those as two pillars holding up a fragile roof.

III Race and Gender in the U.S.

According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”

So yes, this is a a story of desertion, but not the usual one of the past week, which is oversimplified and unhelpful. It is a badly needed corrective, but not one that I have any ideas about how to implement it. Still, action depends on understanding. And the American case, perhaps, is deeper and darker. After all, that is what the Civil war was about, and it is still being fought.

To begin this story, the period after the assassination of JFK exploded with that conflict. What were called “race riots” broke out in one large city after another. Why protests after the victory of the Civil Rights Act, and even before the assassination of MLK?

The direct answer is that decades–centuries–of oppression were highlighted. The riots were, if you saw it that way, a resistance that had long been suppressed. LBJ, shaken, appointed the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, to chair an investigation that was supported by both major parties. Its result, however, was not. The Commission reported with the interpretation I’ve just offered–to its critics a Whitewash.”

Moreover, its own way, the Civil Rights Act also liberated the theme of equal rights, especially in organized sports for women, through Title 9, inserted at the last moment by the moderate Republic Senator Margaret Chase Smith. Together with Roe v Wade it closed a gap with the egalitarianism that male critics like to call “identity politics,” as though white men and women were somehow not susceptible to it.

In any event, the collapse of the Treaty of Detroit weakened the working-class attachment to the Democratic Party, but was accompanied by a social change in the nature of labor itself that was much more decisive. People sometimes do make history in some of its aspects, but only within bounds set by the rise and fall of historical structures beyond their control. All these developments in the means of production, together with the effects of the Oil Boycott and the unstoppable globalization of manufacture and finance, as well as the billion-dollar strike-breaking industry, produced a new American–-and world-order that became neo-liberalism.

And this is where we properly begin:

IV. Alienation

The Democratic Party did not “desert labor.” Lyndon Johnson made a choice: to pass the voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act: a choice which, together with subsequent riots in the big cities, alienated millions of white men and women.

This condition is one that any democratic theorist will recognize: that democracy, or at least liberal democracy, rests on those two pillars: the rule of the majority, and equal rights for minorities. And these are not the same thing, not at all, and indeed are often in conflict with each other: and nowhere more so than in the United States, where this conflict is historically deep and dark.

And so, the period after the assassination of JFK exploded with that conflict. As I’ve noted, Southern Democrats had often aligned themselves with conservative Republicans to form a ruling coalition in Congress. But when LBJ broke with those Dixiecrats to push through the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964–65; the result was revolutionary.Majority rule and minority rights were no longer compatible if they ever had been: Democratic theorists such as myself have been bewildered ever since:

Thus in the 1968 Election George Wallace, with the encouragement of the GOP, a complete detachment that was already under way, winning not only popular votes in the South but electoral votes as well. More strikingly, The Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, who’d long been considered organized labor’s best friend in the Senate, got only 42 % of the popular vote. To summarize: In the light of Humphrey’s debacle, the assassinations of both Kennedys, LBJ’s failed prosecution of the War in Vietnam, and Wallace’s rise, were followed by what became known as the expression of so-called Hard-hat pro-War rage; a violent attack on anti-War protesters that was accompanied by Fascist slogans, vindicating, as it turned out, the warnings of those who’d said we’d come to regret our Washington marches.

Taking all these eventts into account, we can take a look at the last fifty-plus years of American electoral politics–of the popular vote — and this is what we see.

To begin from 1968, the year that alerted the GOP to a “Southern Strategy,” to 1992, the year of Clinton’s first election, there were six (6) presidential elections. The GOP won five of them, which included two historic sweeps, in 1972 (Nixon) and 1984 (Reagan). Even Carter’s election in 1976 was a gift, so to speak, from Nixon’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s bumbling. Race was an issue in every one of them. Less educated workers–not at all.

Above all, this is the history that turned Bill Clinton into the triangulator who, among his other transgressions, paved the way for the Party to become the home of Neo-liberalism in his determination to recapture the working-class vote. If you ask who was responsible for that turn, the most appropriate answer is History. Or, we might say with more complexity, the history of democracy, equality, and capitalism.

Here, though, is an astonishing statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics data: Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they were in 2000, or are now in 2024. And most of the failure came during those Republican administrations. To the extent that free trade was a slogan of international enterprise, both parties were devoted to it–until Donald Trump came along.

At the same time two signal events were happening on the ground. First, at the 1992 GOP convention, Patrick Buchanan stunned the attendees with a ringing declaration of War–that is, of a Culture War that was already well under way–and conservatives were losing it. Television above everything else was the battleground, and in fact there was good reason for its one-sidedness. The purpose of the TV world was to make money by appealing to the biggest audience possible–which meant that to the extent that world had an ideology, it was pluralism. That entailed a tacit acceptance of liberal norms: what Robert Dahl had labelled “The American Creed.”

Second, a new approach to democratic government was being adopted, with the goal not of improving it but of impoverishing and ultimately abolishing it. This was the brainchild primarily of Newt Gingrich, who as Majority Leader in the House under Clinton pioneered two innovations. First, he instructed Republicans to use words such as “betray, bizarre, decay, destroy, devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish, shame, sick, steal, and traitors” about Democrats as an example of a breach in social norms. Beyond that, he brought about a shut down the Government on several occasions, with the pure purpose of destruction in mind. That is how we got here.

At this moment it is Donald Trump’s governing purpose.

But how did this counter-revolution come about? Concluded in Part 3, to be posted shortly.