It's Not, Not The Way The Right Has Absorbed The GOP
Marjorie Traitor Greene isn’t right about much, but she was right about Mitch McConnell being unfit for office. Dianne Feinstein has been much less fit— and before she was even elected last time. But I haven’t heard any congressional Democrats bringing that up. Traitor Greene also flexed her muscles by going out on a limb and screeching like a monkey about how she would shut down the government if… well, a whole list of crazy demands, the latest of which being for the House Republicans to formally starting the Biden impeachment, something extremely unpopular with a significant number of her colleagues, most of whom do not want to vote on it.
Last week, reporting for Jacobin, Chris Maisano wrote that while the Left agonizes over its relationship to the Democrats, the extreme right has few qualms about throwing elbows within the GOP. Socialists should follow their lead and accept doing battle within the Democratic Party as the only viable political option.” Fascists have taken over one piece of the GOP after another, including state party organizations. The Neo-Nazi president of the New York Young Republican Club, Gavin Wax, who invites German and Austrian Nazis to take part in their events. In a speech that Maisano reported on, Wax said, “we want more offenses; we want flanking maneuvers; we want to cross the Rubicon; we want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media, in the courtroom, at the ballot box, and in the streets. This is the only language the Left understands: the language of pure and unadulterated power.”
Maisano noted that for Wax and other fascists taking over the GOP, there is real value “in working with and influencing Republicans to pull them ever further toward the right-wing fringe.” On every level, these extremists have been taking over a GOP that doesn’t resist much. A Michigan training guide explains how to become a precinct captain says. “And then we can, from the bottom up, throw out all these RINOs and make the GOP a solidly America First party.”
In the 1950s something like this happened in the Democratic Party. My grandfather, a socialist was very excited about and explained it to me. Max Schactman advocated leftist labor uniting with civil rights activists and left-leaning liberals— “liberal” had a different meaning then than it does now— to kick Southern reactionaries and corrupt urban bosses out of the party. All of my earliest political fights were inside that milieu. There was virtually no Republican Party in Brooklyn when I was growing up in the 1950s.
I was born in 1948 and I don’t remember the Truman-Dewey race but I do remember both Eisenhower elections in 1952 and 1956, when Democrats lost the elections and lost New York State but still won Brooklyn. These are the percentages of the vote the GOP won in Brooklyn starting with FDR’s first election:
1932- 25.0%
1936- 21.8%
1940- 34.4%
1944- 34.0%
1948- 30.5% (Dewey won statewide with 46.0%)
1952- 39.8% (Ike won statewide with 55.4%)
1956- 45.2% (Ike won statewide with 61.2%)
1960- 33.5%
1964- 25.0%
1968- 32.0%
1972- 49.0% (Nixon won statewide with 58.5%)
1976- 31.1%
In 1966 I was president of the Young Democrats on my campus. That didn’t last long and I quite and joined a socialist group. Socialists made some headway with the Democrats— but not as much as the far right made inside the GOP. Maisano wrote that “It’s commonly said on the Left that the realignment strategy failed. If one understands realignment as aiming at the wholesale transformation of the Democrats into something like a Western European labor or social democratic party, then yes, it failed. But that’s not necessarily how its practitioners on the Left understood the basic goal at the time. In his 1968 book Toward a Democratic Left, [one of my college heroes, Michael] Harrington argued that ‘the important thing is to allow the public a choice of liberal and conservative alternatives.’ By this criterion, realignment did indeed happen. The Dixiecrats were driven into the Republican Party, while liberals gathered under the Democratic Party label. By almost any measure, the Republicans and Democrats became more polarized and internally coherent than they ever were before. Whatever we think of the two parties, it’s just not the case, as George Wallace claimed during his 1968 third-party presidential run, that there’s ‘not a dime’s worth of difference’ between them.
What did not happen is the second step many left-wing realigners hoped would come to pass. The labor-liberal wing failed to win a leading position in the Democratic Party coalition in the wake of the two parties’ political realignment. For one thing, the house of labor was sharply divided over the New Politics movement and its vision for transforming the party. Craft unions descending from the premerger American Federation of Labor bitterly opposed it, while industrial unions descending from the Congress of Industrial Organizations, together with the public sector unions, generally supported it.
Moreover, realignment took hold at precisely the moment when the labor movement, particularly industrial unions in the private sector, entered a seemingly endless period of decline, and the mass phase of the civil rights movement was largely exhausted. In this context, the neoliberal New Democrats led by Bill Clinton— much like Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain’s Labour Party— were able to win the leading position in the party, where they have remained ever since. The “de facto social democratic party based upon the unions and operating within the Democratic Party,” as Michael Harrington described it in his book Socialism, couldn’t muster the forces to push the Democrats’ realignment even further to the left.
But the radical right wing of the Republicans did succeed in pushing the GOP even further to the right. While realignment made the parties more ideologically consistent, it tended to hollow out party institutions, thereby opening more space for insurgent candidates to win primary elections— particularly if they could count on funding and foot soldiers.
For the radical right, realignment was fortuitously timed to coincide with the end of the New Deal order and the postwar economic boom. While the unions and civil rights movement organizations were entering a period of protracted decline, the radical right benefited from the mass mobilization of white evangelical Christians into Republican Party politics.
Far-right activists also benefit from a structural advantage that their counterparts on the Left simply can’t match: the seemingly endless parade of crackpot capitalists willing to pour vats of cash into their organizations, election campaigns, conferences, and publications. Rich liberals are typically not interested in funding socialists, and there aren’t many rich socialists. The unions, for their part, are extremely risk averse and firmly ensconced in the Democratic coalition, as they have been for about a century. Left-wing advocates of a new socialist or labor party bank on union support as insurance against sectarian isolation, but they rarely grapple with the fact that unions are just not likely to back risky new party initiatives. Unions are largely consumed with putting out fires and holding on to what they have left.
If we can’t count on funding the way the far right can, how exactly are we going to make a new party a viable concern?
US socialists who want to change the world have, by and large, pragmatically accepted the need to run candidates in Democratic Party primaries. Even so, the Left’s relationship to the Democratic Party continues to inspire the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. After beginning to find success through Democratic Party electoral politics, many socialists— including many in DSA, the traditional home of the realignment strategy— want to run away from it as quickly as possible.
The impulse is understandable, but its long record of practical futility should give us pause.
The American left, despite its best efforts, has never been able to set itself up fully independently of liberalism. Even at its height, the SP couldn’t win more than 6 percent of the vote for its presidential candidate. When the SP split and collapsed, many of its best elements went into farmer-labor politics. That movement produced a new Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, but it wound up merging with the state’s New Deal Democrats in the 1940s.
The SP itself went nowhere during the Great Depression, and many party members effectively became left-wing New Dealers through their labor organizing and other activities. The Communists never became a mass movement and elected very few people to office. But they made their biggest, if still limited, steps out of marginality when they positioned themselves on the New Deal’s left wing in the 1930s and ’40s (relatedly, they also stopped trying to organize their own independent “red” unions, opting instead to work within the labor movement’s existing organizations).
The historical record, particularly since organized labor and racial justice movements went into the Democratic coalition in the 1930s, seems clear. If democratic socialists want to be politically effective, they need to act, at least for the purposes of electoral politics, as a left-wing faction in the Democratic Party.
The far right has no qualms about swimming in the Republican mainstream, as you can see in Moore’s Nation story. They settled these questions decades ago; by every indication, it seems to be working out quite well for them. They set for themselves the task of pushing the Republicans’ realignment as far to the right as possible, and they didn’t give up on it even when GOP leaders disappointed them. Trump’s election to the presidency richly rewarded their efforts, and demonstrated how flexible and penetrable— the very characteristics that have made them so durable for so long— the two major parties can be.
The Democratic Party may be flexible and penetrable, but this means that many different actors, not just democratic socialists, see opportunities to exercise power through it. Both major parties have fallen sway to a “disorderly assortment of actors” that the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld call “the Blob.” Each side has its Blob, but they don’t look or act the same way.
The Republican Blob, Schlozman and Rosenfeld contend, “has adopted a take-no-prisoners, don’t-sweat-the-details zeal on both procedure and substance with no parallel on the other side,” where the “groupedness of the Democratic coalition of interests is more visible and pronounced than in the GOP case— comparatively speaking, the seams show.” These seams often make it difficult for the Democrats to advance a comprehensive partisan vision. But at the same time, they provide space for the Left to organize together with parts of the Democratic base that must be part of any viable left-wing political project.
Transforming the United States in a progressive direction is a damned difficult business. From our geographically extensive and federated polity, to the ethnic and racial conflicts that have divided our working class, to the fragmented and localized structure of our labor movement, the deck has always been stacked against socialist politics in this country. We owe it to ourselves and to the people whose interests we profess to serve to be as ruthlessly effective as we can possibly be, given the conditions we face.
“The burden of the American left,” as Adam Hilton argues in a brilliant analysis of the Democrats and the Left, “is to build the power of the working class without the assistance of a working-class party. When it comes to translating that power into votes, and votes into seats in government, which is necessarily part of the struggle, we have very few options.” Socialists should come to terms with what this implies, namely the strong unlikelihood of ever having a major labor-based third party.
This does not, and should not, entail a chastened accommodation with the Democratic establishment. If anything, it entails heightening direct conflict with this establishment and its corporate funders— who would like nothing more than for the Left to spend precious time, energy, and resources on “independent” politics instead— through primary challenges and the advancement of a strongly left-wing legislative agenda.
Accepting these realities clarifies the actual strategic choices the Left confronts, and might even reduce the debilitating political neuralgia that continues to afflict the Left concerning the party question. The first choice is deciding whether pushing the Democrats’ realignment further to the left, so that it becomes the functional equivalent of a labor or social democratic party, is possible. If it is not, there appears to be just one realistic option left: acting as a minority faction in the Democratic coalition and working to leverage that position to the fullest possible extent. Partisan polarization centered on the presidency has squeezed out any room there might be for a third option, or any kind of break from the existing two parties— clean, dirty, or otherwise.
In this sense, the Left could stand to learn from the radical right. Its representatives stopped agonizing over their relationship with the Republican Party long ago, faced up to the dilemmas of protest and partisanship, and set out to make history under circumstances, as one particularly notable socialist put it, not of their choosing but “existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Speaking of being from Brooklyn… so are Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Fuggedaboutit! And it’s where Trump got his start as well.