Wayne O'Leary

Class, Capitalism and Democrats

Someone said recently (who currently escapes me) that President Joe Biden’s approach to politics and governing is to determine where the center of the Democratic Party is at any given moment and position himself there. That’s not the recipe for a profile in courage, but it does beg one important question as we enter the 2024 political season: Exactly where are the Democrats, ideologically and strategically, at the present time?

One answer was provided by a former co-chair of the party’s Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, who informed the press in April that the Democratic left was laser-focused on “the fight against the isms: fascism, racism, sexism” — in other words, identity politics plus antiauthoritarianism. Grijalva is an excellent congressman, but his prescription leaves out a key component, the problems associated with another ism, modern American capitalism.

Grijalva is not alone. Much of the Democratic Party has become mesmerized by the presumed success of 21st-century capitalism (despite two recessions and a financial crash) and is inching rightward, seeking the embrace of Wall Street and the corporations. This notably includes New York’s once staunchly left-leaning state party, the party of FDR and Sen. Robert Wagner, now under the sway of “moderates” like Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Their viewpoint, perhaps shaped in part by the scare of losing several congressional seats to the GOP in 2022, was expressed unambiguously by ex-corporate lawyer Jeffries earlier this year: “Hard-left progressives tend to view the defining problem in America as one that is anchored in class. That is not my experience.”

Rep. Jeffries’ party colleague, Mayor Adams, a former Republican and ally of the real-estate industry, has pushed an agenda that includes a municipal austerity budget, support for charter schools, advocacy of hard-line policing, and enthusiastic backing of pro-business policies. Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the redoubtable “AOC,” gets the political headlines out of New York, but the power in the Empire State lies elsewhere for the time being.

For a regional Democratic progressive-populist stance, it’s necessary to look west, as in the days of the original Populist Party. The first stop on this westward trek should be Arizona, where another progressive, Rep. Ruben Gallego, chased Sen. Kyrsten Sinema out of the Democratic Party on the strength of his emerging Senate primary campaign. Whereas Sinema was making cultural weirdness the calling card of her ill-fated run for renomination, Gallego has gone back to basics; he presents himself as a former worker who will represent “working-class families.” It’s a message Democrats need to hear.

Another step on the road back to a more populistic progressive Democracy is in California, where Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who co-chaired Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, has seconded Gallego’s call for economic renewal on behalf of America’s working class. Khanna is needlessly carrying some baggage, what with his unseemly role in pushing for increased FDIC deposit insurance for corporations and the upper classes. (See my previous column, 7/1-15/23 TPP.)

Notwithstanding that ideological contradiction, which requires a re-think on his part, Khanna is one of the few senior party voices calling steadfastly for a Democratic reconciliation with the working class through an uncompromising economic message that “captures the imagination of working-class Americans and inspires them.”

Unfortunately, Khanna represents a California state Democratic Party presently determined to go headlong in the opposite direction, witness its suicidal support for unpopular racial reparations — 70% of Americans oppose them, according to the Pew Research Center — on behalf of those descended from slaves. Toward that end, California’s Democratic legislature has created a reparations task force to plan parcelling out public funds to right historical wrongs.

Implementation includes a bizarre effort to quantify grievances and past discrimination to reach a morally acceptable dollar figure — presently reckoned at $1.2 million per Black Californian. The total cost is estimated to be on the order of double the state’s annual budget. Can you say “California, the red state,” fellow Democrats? This is identity politics run amok.

Such political thinking on the left has been lately skewered with good reason by socialist scholar and columnist Adolph L. Reed Jr., Black himself, in the pages of The Nation (5/29/23). Reed makes the point, which can’t be made often enough, that the best way to attack racial inequality is through broadly applied redistributive social democracy; that is, through universal social benefits, not through futile cultural-identity or “race-reductionist” policies. In short, universalist policies beneficial to Whites will also benefit Blacks.

Reed offers the observation that such policies (on employment, housing, education, healthcare), preeminent on the Democratic left during and after the New Deal years, have been abandoned to the detriment of all. They’ve been replaced by a growing Democratic reliance on the marketplace, a change indirectly celebrated recently in hosannas to the supposed glories of unrestrained American capitalism by that newly minted centrist Democrat David Brooks. Writing in the New York Times, Brooks hails the statistical economic achievements of our existing capitalist system (mainly, GDP growth, easily the most imperfect measurement of socioeconomic progress), decrying assaults on it by leftists angered by economic inequality brought about by neoliberalism and globalization.

The intellectual vanguard of this leftist criticism includes Thomas Piketty (“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” 2013), whom Brooks equates with rightist culture warrior Tucker Carlson (!) and whose seminal work he dismisses as obsolescent in light of America’s latter-day “capitalist-turbo” of growth and mobility. Tell that to the younger generation of labor activists now manning the barricades on behalf of unionization, or to the older generation of retirees whose retirement security is at risk. Tell it to members of the intermediate generation who struggle to afford food, can’t pay rising rents, and find healthcare increasingly monopolized by profit-gouging insurance companies bent on privatizing and corporatizing the entire system.

The apparent inability of the American center-left to react to any of this appears to come down to an abiding fear of Donald Trump and Trumpism. David Brooks speaks for many centrist Democrats paralyzed by the specter of Trump. We must move rightward to head him off, they reason. No chances can be taken; otherwise, it’s the MAGA apocalypse.

So, persuade yourself, like Brooks, that the great capitalist machine is humming along, all sunshine and balloons, and sign up for the duration.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2023

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