Social Democracy Isn’t Going to Save the West

A Human Alternative is Needed

This piece was cross-posted on CounterPunch.

Over the last five or so decades, American elections have become increasingly defined by what they don’t accomplish. The classical liberal model of free and fair elections to select representatives who act in the public interest has been replaced with a rogue foreign policy establishment attached to public - private mechanisms (propaganda, censorship, and surveillance) meant to maintain social control. Rampant slaughter abroad and political repression at home now represent America’s relationship with the world.

In recent history, few Americans recognized the Biden administration’s end run around left politics for what it was. Recall, the left critique of woke ideology isn’t that it is directionally wrong. The critique is that it is misguided politics. Many of us who put the argument forward lived through the creation and long, sad, decline of Affirmative Action. The problem is that the frame of LeBron James being oppressed because he is black, while my neighbor who digs cans out of the garbage to live is privileged because he is white, is flawed.

For those who lived through it, the attack on Affirmative Action came by placing largely contrived, but otherwise representative, accounts of poor and working-class whites being denied opportunities in favor of ‘minorities.’ In fact, large corporations become large by crushing smaller competitors. And with nonexistent economic mobility in the US, the children of the rich inherit social control over the children of working people and the poor. Capitalism is a system of economic domination, not of equitable distribution. Just ask Donald Trump.

The two points made as the national Democrats acted to change the subject from economic maldistribution to identity-based bias were 1) the US has been down this road before, and the strategy that didn’t work was state-sponsored bias remediation and 2) the corporations ‘voluntarily’ launching DEI programs would abandon them the minute that the political tide turned. We can argue theory until we are blue in the face, but it was the left critique that produced the correct prediction about how DEI would be ended.

The broader question of liberal impact has it that income and wealth distribution are as concentrated as they have ever been, racial segregation is today accomplished through economic (class) segregation, and the US is ruled by a small group of oligarchs who use the state to make themselves ever richer. The Democrats have governed through enough of this to have these be their policies as well. Bill Clinton was one of the few Americans who really subscribed to Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal economic vision.

The domestic political result is that the two branches of the uniparty are now dedicated to reversing each other’s policies rather than conducting the people’s business. The way that this currently appears is that the Trump administration is reversing the state mechanisms that facilitated the Democrats’ hold on power 1933 – 1973, aka the New Deal. Through a weak read of history, Donald Trump’s supporters imagine that the gilded age that both branches of the uniparty have spent decades trying to recreate presented opportunities that it didn’t.

In his 1980 contest against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan presented what is today called neoliberalism as a radical rebuke of state power. His (Reagan’s) project was to shift power from the state that had sponsored the Vietnam War to capital that had supplied ‘us’ with Hula-Hoops and black-and-white televisions. However, in a now disappeared quote. LBJ offered that ‘he can’t end the (Vietnam) war because his friends were making too much money from it.’ This later represented Joe Biden’s explanation of why war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are good for the US.

Graph: the bipartisan trend in privatizing Medicare finds recent Democrat and Republican administrations privatizing approximately the same proportions, with 8% going to the recent Democrat and 7% going to the past and current Republican. What swings the balance however (thus far) is that it is the ‘best practices’ provision in the ACA that will lead to total privatization. The provision gives political hacks working for economic hacks the power to declare privatization a ‘best practice,’ making it official Medicare policy. Source: kff.org.

For those who missed it, Donald Trump hasn’t offered that his policies would benefit ‘us all.’ He has argued that his policies will benefit ‘the worthy.’ This is (Bill) Clintonism 101. Both Clinton and Trump argued that ‘opportunity’ is the best that the state can offer. Bill Clinton asserted that ‘a level playing field’ united the autoworkers who his passage of NAFTA rendered unemployed with Donald Trump, who in the mid-1970s inherited a real estate empire worth about $300 million dollars (inflation adjusted). Both men oversaw the return of income and wealth concentration to gilded age levels.

“True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist

party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism.

As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the

Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary

Right than make common cause with the Reds.” Michael Parenti.

The problem, for those who choose to see it, is that the entire ‘left’ program that was handed to the Democrats in both 2016 and 2020, from Bernie Sanders’ ascendance to the Black Lives Matter protests, is now a flaming bag of dog excrement waiting to be stomped out. The phrase ‘the Democratic party is the graveyard of social movements’ comes to mind. Sure, Donald Trump’s political program certainly gives the US the appearance of a former empire in free-fall. But then so did the DNC propping up Genocide Joe in a low-budget remake of Weekend at Bernie’s.

With Donald Trump throwing policy bombs and lighting fires domestically, the global class war that has been raging for the last fifty years has been brought home. Mr. Trump’s proponents see him, and themselves, on the winning side of history. This is exactly how American Democrats perceived themselves in the aftermath of the 2020 election of Joe Biden. But outside of life and death, history doesn’t have winners and losers. As Bob Dylan put it “… the loser now, will be later to win.’ History isn’t over until it is over.

This is to point to the folly of ideologically driven reforms rather than coming to some level of public agreement, sometimes known as democratic consent, over national governance. The Democrats enacted DEI and the next Republican president reversed it. Donald Trump tears down the permanent government and the Democrats spend the next four years launching foreign wars. That Democrats don’t know that their party is overwhelmingly responsible for privatizing Medicare begs the question of agency?

It is a sense of repeating cycles that replaces one national ideological predisposition with its opposite. But if history has a voice, it ties to underlying causes. The pattern hasn’t been a symmetrical back-and-forth where national balance is recovered. For five decades now, American politics have represented a relentless march to the hard right. No balance has been recovered via the electoral back-and-forth between the parties.

This point is important to understand. Both Democrats and Republicans claim ideologies. That the national politics has moved hard-right for five decades implies either that Republicans have controlled the politics for all five of these decades--- which they haven’t, or that both Democrats and Republicans are right-wing parties. Given that the parties have taken turns governing, Republicans haven’t led the move hard-right. The answer that remains is that the Democrats are a hard-right party. As irony has it, neither party would last five minutes without the other.

This may be painful to read inside the sense of emergency being caused by Mr. Trump’s current idiot-King schtick as it is being applied to actual human lives. But Mr. Trump neither caused the dysfunction that brought him to power (twice), nor does he stand any more chance than the Democrats of fixing it. The result is that both parties have migrated from pretending to solve national problems to erasing the efforts of the other party. Mr. Trump is currently winning that effort to the great detriment of the American people.

There was a blood sport of sorts begun in the 1990s of guessing how long it would take various European Social Democratic parties to govern from the neoliberal right after winning election. They would run on the European equivalent of the political marketing campaigns of American Democrats, and then govern from the neoliberal-right upon election. What became apparent was that there were supra-national forces, call them political economy, that converted the wills of disparate electorates into a unified neoliberal front that transcended national borders.

Graph: it’s easy enough for those unfamiliar with the data to associate the large decline in life expectancy with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The problem with doing so is that the graph looks largely the same in relative terms, when compared with peer nations. What this suggests is that the Covid-19 pandemic brought-to-light the existing deficiencies of the US healthcare system that were supposed to have been fixed by passage of the ACA. After shoveling billions more dollars in public largesse into health insurer executive bonus pools, the ACA has produced the worst healthcare system in the developed world. Why? Source: worldbank.org.

This paradox, where voters vote but donors control the policies that emerge, represents political disempowerment for all but the rich. With more nuance than yours truly imagined likely, Donald Trump’s targeting of Federal employees has targeted the PMC (professional-managerial class), meaning Democrats, quite effectively. This was Mr. Trump’s variation on Bill Clinton’s use of NAFTA to realign the Democrats with the interests of capital. The class that will remain in the burned-out shell of the US will be the oligarchs.

Key to this effort has been to conflate what politicians say about their policies with what the policies actually accomplish. Remarkably, even as a key provision in the ACA (Affordable Care Act) represents the clearest path for the Trump administration to privatize all of Medicare, Democrats are quadrupling down on their commitment to the program. The ACA provision, called ‘best practices,’ allows one politician in a position of authority to define privatized Medicare (Medicare Advantage) a ‘best practice,’ making it Federal policy to end non-private Medicare.

Graph: after relentlessly criticizing the deportation of immigrants by the Trump administration, Democrats slept through the Biden administration’s massive increase in deportations. The irony is that the Trump campaign spent its prior four years downplaying what the Democrats were doing. It was selling the fantasy of a ‘massive increase in illegal immigration.’ This is why I keep asking my Republican friends why they don’t vote for Democrats? Joe Biden did exactly what they just elected Donald Trump to do. Source: nytimes.com.

As readers certainly know by now, 54% of Medicare (graph above) has already been privatized, mainly by Democrats. The incongruity of Democrats nodding in the affirmative to claims by Democratic politicians that they will ‘save’ Medicare (and Social Security) is perfectly contradicted by the facts. Not only have Democrats privatized more of Medicare than have Republicans, but the ‘best practices’ provision of Obamacare seems designed to privatize all of Medicare. That Democrats don’t know this makes them dangerously misinformed.

In a similar vein, righteous anger over the Trump administration’s violent and likely illegal deportation of Venezuelan citizens who were legally in the US to a gulag in El Salvador is based on ignorance of the actual history of deportations by Presidents. As the graph above illustrates, following the public anguish over Donald Trump’s deportation of immigrants during his first term, the Biden administration doubled the number of deportations. Democrats who oppose the mass deportation of immigrants need to learn at least a few facts about the party that they claim to support.

To possible distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deportations, the left has fought capital over open borders for several centuries. Industrialists long fought for open borders so as to flood the US with desperate workers in order to lower wages. The politics that took labor out of consideration is telling. Those who don’t care about labor tend to be aligned with capital. This would be the PMC left, American liberals, and the oligarchs. Having worked white-collar and blue-collar jobs, no working person would voluntarily open the door for their replacement.

While I didn’t participate in the national ‘Hands Offs’ protests, I spoke with friends who attended local events. The local politicians who attended are neoliberal, neoconservative, Zionist, apparatchiks. In a city plagued by FBI efforts to entrap its citizens in fake ‘terrorist’ plots, and that is a dumping ground for state projects that can’t be built elsewhere due to public opposition from powerful forces, the local politicians are aligned with national Democrats against the citizens.

The richest 1% of Americans (the oligarchs) owns over half of the stock market. And the richest 10% owns ninety percent of the stock market. Finance is what empowered the oligarchs. Ending its value could restore something resembling a democratic social order. Note that Democrats have spent the last five decades doing everything in their power to raise the value of the stock market. Bill Clinton was / is a stock market god, having overseen the largest market bubble until the next two market bubbles.

The point is that the stock market is a major source of the oligarch’s power. Letting the stock market fall to valuation levels of earlier stock market history would cut the economic power of the oligarchs down to size. Broadly economically adverse outcomes would accompany the move. But without dampening the economic power of the oligarchs, restoring economic and / or political democracy is impossible. Concentrated wealth will continue to purchase political power until it is made to stop doing so.

The current political lining-up, with Democrats protesting Mr. Trump and his policies under the idea that the next Genocide Joe will be incrementally better than the Republican alternative, misses that the US is an empire in free-fall. The post-War period when the US had the only intact industrial base is long past. The Democrats were urged to put together an industrial policy, and chose not to. This left the Trump – right to inflict its version of an industrial policy. The best guess here is that it will not end well.

Changing economic relations from the bipartisan neoliberal model to something else can proceed from the right or the left. Both the Democrats and the Republicans chose to hand the task to the Trump-right. Please re-read the quote from Michael Parenti above. In extraordinary circumstances, count on the Democrats to side with the right. What the US needs is economic redistribution to accomplish political redistribution. But the American Social Democrats (Democrats) like the current arrangement just fine.