William Greider: Voters appear on stage at election time. "But are given no lines to speak or songs

Last edited Tue Jun 16, 2015, 01:28 AM - Edit history (1)

to sing"

Greider has for a while been recognizing that we common everyday people are tired of the way things have been going. He has written about it powerfully several times.

I was reminded of this while reading WillyT's post about Greider's latest article

In March he wrote about the brewing dissatisfaction in The Nation.

But Is Hillary Ready for Us?

It's a long article, discussing the policies of Clinton and Obama ties to Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and others. I am posting mainly from the end of the article.

A young friend of mine with working-class sensibilities told me recently that the driving subtext for 2016 will be “anger.” A labor Democrat, he has a keen ear for popular attitudes, and he’s afraid this election could leave the country with a harsh right-winger as president—someone who can skillfully exploit confused and angry citizens by scapegoating the usual target groups.

Democrats, at least most modern Dems, don’t do “anger” very well. It makes them uncomfortable. Most of them would rather talk “hope and change.” Democratic candidates tried to make “hope and change” their theme in 2014 but got shellacked. Their rhetoric was hopelessly at odds with the painful evidence in their own lives.

That is often the problem with the standard party spiel. It’s top-heavy with cerebral abstractions—words like “inequality” or opaque economic statistics—but it’s short on gut-level wisdom.

The rising of insurgents could swiftly create greater authenticity, because most of them are grounded in grassroots realities. They speak the language people can understand, they know well the local texture of anger. Their version of “hope and change” has believable punch to it.

All I know for sure is this: if the Democratic party rejects the watershed potential of 2016 and sticks with the old guard’s way of thinking, they are only adding to their formidable burden for the 2016 election. American society is going to be put through some rough big changes in the years ahead. People know this in their guts, but they are confused and anxious and angry. They need some help understanding things; they need strong new ideas about repairing the damage and restoring hope.

Greider also recognizes when the party started down the road which is ending in angry people seeking another way.

Greider: The trouble started when the party abandoned its working-class base.

Instead of addressing this reality and proposing remedies, the Democrats ran on a cowardly, uninspiring platform: the Republicans are worse than we are. Undoubtedly, that’s true—but so what? The president and his party have no credible solutions to offer. To get serious about inequality and the deteriorating middle class, Democrats would have to undo a lot of the damage their own party has done to the economy over the past thirty years.

Long ago, the party abandoned its working-class base (of all colors) and steadily distanced itself from the unglamorous conditions that matter most in people’s lives. Traditional party bulwarks like organized labor and racial minorities became second-string players in the hierarchy that influences party policy. But the Dems didn’t just lose touch with the people they claimed to speak for; they betrayed core constituencies and adopted pro-business, pro-finance policies that actively injure working people.

The shift away from the people was embraced most dramatically when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats came to power in the 1990s. Clinton double-crossed labor with NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements, which encouraged the great migration of manufacturing jobs to low-wage economies. Clinton’s bank deregulation shifted the economic rewards to finance and set the stage for the calamity that struck in 2008. Wall Street won; working people lost. Clinton presided over the financialization of the Democratic Party. Obama merely inherited his playbook and has governed accordingly, often with the same policy-makers.

“The people,” of course, are still present in the party, but they’re treated mainly as data for election strategies. The voters themselves resemble the supernumeraries in a grand opera: they appear on stage at election time, always lavishly praised by the pols. But they are given no lines to speak or songs to sing.

The policy started decades ago...to get enough corporate money so as to not have to cater to the people like minorities, unions, or the needy.

There's a lot of anger, suspicion, and fear that will have a strong bearing on the future of both parties. There's been too much "bipartisanship" and not enough opposition.

It should be an interesting year ahead.