Progressive Democrats: Resist and Submit,
Retreat and Surrender
By
James Petras
July 13,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Over the
past quarter century progressive writers,
activists and academics have followed a
trajectory from left to right – with each
presidential campaign seeming to move them
further to the right. Beginning in the 1990’s
progressives mobilized millions in opposition to
wars, voicing demands for the transformation of
the US’s corporate for-profit medical system
into a national ‘Medicare For All’
public program. They condemned the notorious
Wall Street swindlers and denounced police state
legislation and violence. But in the end, they
always voted for Democratic Party Presidential
candidates who pursued the exact opposite
agenda.
Over time
this political contrast between program and
practice led to the transformation
of the Progressives. And what we see
today are US progressives embracing and
promoting the politics of the far right.
To
understand this transformation we will begin by
identifying who and
what the progressives are and describe
their historical role. We will
then proceed to identify their trajectory over
the recent decades.
We will
outline the contours of recent Presidential
campaigns where Progressives were deeply
involved.
We will
focus on the dynamics of political regression:
From resistance to submission, from retreat to
surrender.
We will
conclude by discussing the end result: The
Progressives’ large-scale, long-term embrace of
far-right ideology and practice.
Progressives by Name and Posture
Progressives purport to embrace ‘progress’, the
growth of the economy, the enrichment of society
and freedom from arbitrary government. Central
to the Progressive agenda was the end of elite
corruption and good governance, based on
democratic procedures.
Progressives prided themselves as appealing to
‘reason, diplomacy and conciliation’, not brute
force and wars. They upheld the sovereignty of
other nations and eschewed militarism and armed
intervention.
Progressives proposed a vision of their fellow
citizens pursuing incremental evolution toward
the ‘good society’, free from the foreign
entanglements, which had entrapped the people in
unjust wars.
Progressives in Historical Perspective
In the
early part of the 20th century, progressives
favored political equality while opposing
extra-parliamentary social transformations. They
supported gender equality and environmental
preservation while failing to give prominence to
the struggles of workers and African Americans.
They
denounced militarism ‘in general’ but
supported a series of ‘wars to end all wars’.
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied
the dual policies of promoting peace at home
and bloody imperial wars overseas. By the middle
of the 20th century, different strands emerged
under the progressive umbrella. Progressives
split between traditional good
government advocates and modernists who
backed socio-economic reforms, civil liberties
and rights.
Progressives supported legislation to regulate
monopolies, encouraged collective bargaining and
defended the Bill of Rights.
Progressives opposed wars and militarism in
theory… until their government went to war.
Lacking an
effective third political party, progressives
came to see themselves as the ‘left wing’
of the Democratic Party, allies of labor and
civil rights movements and defenders of civil
liberties.
Progressives joined civil rights leaders in
marches, but mostly relied on legal and
electoral means to advance African
American rights.
Progressives played a pivotal role in fighting
McCarthyism, though ultimately it was the
Secretary of the Army and the military high
command that brought Senator McCarthy to his
knees.
Progressives provided legal defense when the
social movements disrupted the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee.
They
popularized the legislative arguments that
eventually outlawed segregation, but it was
courageous Afro-American leaders heading mass
movements that won the struggle for integration
and civil rights.
In many
ways the Progressives complemented
the mass struggles, but their limits were
defined by the constraints of their membership
in the Democratic Party.
The
alliance between Progressives and social
movements peaked in the late sixties to
mid-1970’s when the Progressives followed the
lead of dynamic and advancing social movements
and community organizers especially in
opposition to the wars in Indochina and the
military draft.
The
Retreat of the Progressives
By the
late 1970’s the Progressives had cut their
anchor to the social movements, as the anti-war,
civil rights and labor movements lost their
impetus (and direction).
The
numbers of progressives within the left wing of
the Democratic Party increased through
recruitment from earlier social movements.
Paradoxically, while their ‘numbers’ were up,
their caliber had declined, as they sought to
‘fit in’ with the pro-business, pro-war agenda
of their President’s party.
Without
the pressure of the ‘populist street’ the
‘Progressives-turned-Democrats’ adapted to
the corporate culture in the Party. The
Progressives signed off on a fatal compromise:
The corporate elite secured the electoral party
while the Progressives were allowed to write
enlightened manifestos about the candidates and
their programs . . . which were quickly
dismissed once the Democrats took office. Yet
the ability to influence the ‘electoral
rhetoric’ was seen by the Progressives as a
sufficient justification for remaining inside
the Democratic Party.
Moreover
the Progressives argued that by strengthening
their presence in the Democratic Party, (their
self-proclaimed ‘boring from within’
strategy), they would capture the party
membership, neutralize the pro-corporation,
militarist elements that nominated the president
and peacefully transform the party into a
‘vehicle for progressive changes’.
Upon their
successful ‘deep penetration’ the Progressives,
now cut off from the increasingly disorganized
mass social movements, coopted and bought out
many prominent black, labor and civil liberty
activists and leaders, while collaborating with
what they dubbed the more malleable
‘centrist’ Democrats. These mythical
creatures were really pro-corporate Democrats
who condescended to occasionally converse with
the Progressives while working
for the Wall Street and Pentagon elite.
The
Retreat of the Progressives: The Clinton Decade
Progressives adapted the ‘crab strategy’: Moving
side-ways and then backwards but never forward.
Progressives mounted candidates in the
Presidential primaries, which were predictably
defeated by the corporate Party apparatus, and
then submitted immediately to
the outcome. The election of President ‘Bill’
Clinton launched a period of unrestrained
financial plunder, major wars of aggression in
Europe (Yugoslavia) and the Middle East (Iraq),
a military intervention in Somalia and secured
Israel’s victory over any remnant of a secular
Palestinian leadership as well as its
destruction of Lebanon!
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants
-
This
Is
Independent
Media
|
Like a
huge collective ‘Monica Lewinsky’ robot, the
Progressives in the Democratic Party bent over
and swallowed Clinton’s vicious 1999 savaging of
the venerable Glass Steagall Act, thereby
opening the floodgates for massive speculation
on Wall Street through the previously regulated
banking sector. When President Clinton gutted
welfare programs, forcing single mothers to take
minimum-wage jobs without provision for safe
childcare, millions of poor white and minority
women were forced to abandon their children to
dangerous makeshift arrangements in order to
retain any residual public support and access to
minimal health care. Progressives looked the
other way.
Progressives followed Clinton’s deep throated
thrust toward the far right, as he outsourced
manufacturing jobs to Mexico (NAFTA) and
re-appointed Federal Reserve’s free market, Ayn
Rand-fanatic, Alan Greenspan.
Progressives repeatedly kneeled before President
Clinton marking their submission to the
Democrats’ ‘hard right’ policies.
The
election of Republican President G. W. Bush
(2001-2009) permitted Progressive’s to
temporarily trot out and burnish their anti-war,
anti-Wall Street credentials. Out in the street,
they protested Bush’s savage invasion of Iraq
(but not the destruction of Afghanistan). They
protested the media reports of torture in Abu
Ghraib under Bush, but not the massive bombing
and starvation of millions of Iraqis that had
occurred under Clinton. Progressives protested
the expulsion of immigrants from Mexico and
Central America, but were silent over the brutal
uprooting of refugees resulting from US wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, or the systematic
destruction of their nations’ infrastructure.
Progressives embraced Israel’s bombing, jailing
and torture of Palestinians by voting
unanimously in favor of increasing the annual $3
billion dollar military handouts to the brutal
Jewish State. They supported Israel’s bombing
and slaughter in Lebanon.
Progressives were in retreat, but retained a
muffled voice and inconsequential vote in favor
of peace, justice and civil liberties. They kept
a certain distance from the worst of the police
state decrees by the Republican
Administration.
Progressives and Obama: From Retreat to
Surrender
While
Progressives maintained their tepid commitment
to civil liberties, and their highly ‘leveraged’
hopes for peace in the Middle East, they jumped
uncritically into the highly choreographed
Democratic Party campaign for Barack Obama,
‘Wall Street’s First Black President’.
Progressives had given up their quest to
‘realign’ the Democratic Party ‘from
within’: they turned from serious tourism
to permanent residency. Progressives provided
the foot soldiers for the election and
re-election of the warmongering ‘Peace
Candidate’ Obama. After the election,
Progressives rushed to join the lower echelons
of his Administration. Black and white politicos
joined hands in their heroic struggle to erase
the last vestiges of the Progressives’
historical legacy.
Obama
increased the number of Bush-era imperial wars
to attacking seven weak nations under American’s
‘First Black’ President’s bombardment, while the
Progressives ensured that the streets were quiet
and empty.
When Obama
provided trillions of dollars of public money to
rescue Wall Street and the bankers, while
sacrificing two million poor and middle class
mortgage holders, the Progressives only
criticized the bankers who received the bailout,
but not Obama’s Presidential decision to protect
and reward the mega-swindlers.
Under the
Obama regime social inequalities within the
United States grew at an unprecedented rate. The
Police State Patriot Act was massively extended
to give President Obama the power to order the
assassination of US citizens abroad without
judicial process. The Progressives did not
resign when Obama’s ‘kill orders’ extended to
the ‘mistaken’ murder of his target’s children
and other family member, as well as unidentified
bystanders. The icon carriers still paraded
their banner of the ‘first black American
President’ when tens of thousands of black
Libyans and immigrant workers were slaughtered
in his regime-change war against President
Gadhafi.
Obama
surpassed the record of all previous Republican
office holders in terms of the massive numbers
of immigrant workers arrested and expelled – 2
million. Progressives applauded the Latino
protestors while supporting the policies of
their ‘first black President’.
Progressive accepted that multiple wars, Wall
Street bailouts and the extended police state
were now the price they would pay to remain part
of the “Democratic coalition’ (sic).
The deeper
the Progressives swilled at the Democratic Party
trough, the more they embraced the Obama’s free
market agenda and the more they ignored the
increasing impoverishment, exploitation and
medical industry-led opioid addiction of
American workers that was shortening their
lives. Under Obama, the Progressives totally
abandoned the historic American working class,
accepting their degradation into what Madam
Hillary Clinton curtly dismissed as the
‘deplorables’.
With the
Obama Presidency, the Progressive retreat turned
into a rout, surrendering with one flaccid
caveat: the Democratic Party ‘Socialist’ Bernie
Sanders, who had voted 90% of the time with the
Corporate Party, had revived a bastardized
military-welfare state agenda.
Sander’s
Progressive demagogy shouted and rasped on the
campaign trail, beguiling the young electorate.
The ‘Bernie’ eventually ‘sheep-dogged’
his supporters into the pro-war Democratic Party
corral. Sanders revived an illusion of the
pre-1990 progressive agenda, promising
resistance while demanding voter submission to
Wall Street warlord Hillary Clinton. After
Sanders’ round up of the motley progressive
herd, he staked them tightly to the far-right
Wall Street war mongering Hillary Clinton. The
Progressives not only embraced Madame Secretary
Clinton’s nuclear option and virulent
anti-working class agenda, they embellished it
by focusing on Republican billionaire Trump’s
demagogic, nationalist, working class rhetoric
which was designed to agitate ‘the
deplorables’. They even turned on the
working class voters, dismissing them as
‘irredeemable’ racists and illiterates or
‘white trash’ when they turned to support Trump
in massive numbers in the ‘fly-over’ states of
the central US.
Progressives, allied with the police state, the
mass media and the war machine worked to defeat
and impeach Trump. Progressives surrendered
completely to the Democratic Party and started
to advocate its far right agenda. Hysterical
McCarthyism against anyone who questioned the
Democrats’ promotion of war with Russia, mass
media lies and manipulation of street protest
against Republican elected officials became the
centerpieces of the Progressive agenda. The
working class and farmers had disappeared from
their bastardized ‘identity-centered’ ideology.
Guilt by
association spread throughout Progressive
politics. Progressives embraced J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI tactics: “Have you ever met or
talked to any Russian official or relative of
any Russian banker, or any Russian or even read
Gogol, now or in the past?” For
progressives, ‘Russia-gate’ defined the real
focus of contemporary political struggle in this
huge, complex, nuclear-armed superpower.
Progressives joined the FBI/CIA’s ‘Russian Bear’
conspiracy: “Russia intervened and decided
the Presidential election” – no matter that
millions of workers and rural Americans had
voted against Hillary Clinton, Wall Street’s
candidate and no matter that no evidence of
direct interference was ever presented.
Progressives could not accept that ‘their
constituents’, the masses, had rejected Madame
Clinton and preferred ‘the Donald’. They
attacked a shifty-eyed caricature of the
repeatedly elected Russian President Putin as a
subterfuge for attacking the disobedient ‘white
trash’ electorate of ‘Deploralandia’.
Progressive demagogues embraced the coifed and
manicured former ‘Director Comey’ of the FBI,
and the Mr. Potato-headed Capo of the CIA and
their forty thugs in making accusations without
finger or footprints.
The
Progressives’ far right- turn earned
them hours and space on the mass media as long
as they breathlessly savaged and insulted
President Trump and his family members. When
they managed to provoke him into a blind rage .
. . they added the newly invented charge of
‘psychologically unfit to lead’ –
presenting cheap psychobabble as grounds for
impeachment. Finally! American Progressives were
on their way to achieving their first and only
political transformation: a Presidential coup
d’état on behalf of the Far Right!
Progressives loudly condemned Trump’s overtures
for peace with Russia, denouncing it as
appeasement and betrayal!
In return,
President Trump began to ‘out-militarize’ the
Progressives by escalating US involvement in the
Middle East and South China Sea. They swooned
with joy when Trump ordered a missile strike
against the Syrian government as Damascus
engaged in a life and death struggle against
mercenary terrorists. They dubbed the petulant
release of Patriot missiles ‘Presidential’.
Then
Progressives turned increasingly Orwellian:
Ignoring Obama’s actual expulsion of over 2
million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump
for promising to eventually expel 5
million more!
Progressives, under Obama, supported seven
brutal illegal wars and pressed for more, but
complained when Trump continued the same wars
and proposed adding a few new ones. At the same
time, progressives out-militarized Trump by
accusing him of being ‘weak’ on Russia, Iran,
North Korea and China. They chided him for his
lack support for Israel’s suppression of the
Palestinians. They lauded Trump’s embrace of the
Saudi war against Yemen as a stepping-stone for
an assault against Iran, even as millions of
destitute Yemenis were exposed to cholera. The
Progressives had finally embraced a
biological weapon of mass destruction, when
US-supplied missiles destroyed the water systems
of Yemen!
Conclusion
Progressives turned full circle from supporting
welfare to embracing Wall Street; from preaching
peaceful co-existence to demanding a dozen wars;
from recognizing the humanity and rights of
undocumented immigrants to their expulsion under
their ‘First Black’ President; from thoughtful
mass media critics to servile media megaphones;
from defenders of civil liberties to boosters
for the police state; from staunch opponents of
J. Edgar Hoover and his ‘dirty tricks’ to camp
followers for the ‘intelligence community’ in
its deep state campaign to overturn a national
election.
Progressives moved from fighting and resisting
the Right to submitting and retreating; from
retreating to surrendering and finally embracing
the far right.
Doing all
that and more within the Democratic Party,
Progressives retain and deepen their ties with
the mass media, the security apparatus and the
military machine, while occasionally digging up
some Bernie Sanders-type demagogue to arouse an
army of voters away from effective resistance to
mindless collaboration.
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of
Sociology at Binghamton University, New York.
http://petras.lahaine.org
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.