The Democrats’ Great Debates

There are now two parallel debates about the role and future of the Democratic Party. One has to do with how fiercely and by what means Democrats should resist Trump. The other is about what Democrats should stand for going forward.
For a time, the accommodationists in the party had a modicum of credibility. Maybe there were areas of common ground?
That posture was undermined by Trump’s increasing destructiveness and his habit of making a deal and then demanding more. Advocates of having the Democrats stand back and let Trump destroy himself, such as James Carville, now look silly.
The coup de grâce was the extraordinary April 27 speech by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a man known more as a liberal than a radical but now sounding like Bernie Sanders on steroids. Space precludes my quoting the entire speech, but you owe it to yourself to watch it. In part, Pritzker said:
I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now. But despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford in the times upon which history turns. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.
These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.
Cowardice can be contagious. But so too can courage.
After that speech, I don’t know how any self-respecting Democrat can say we need to seek common ground, or argue as Carville does that Democrats should just get out of the way and wait for Trump to fail.
The other great debate among Democrats is over what Democrats should stand for affirmatively. And that ideological debate is substantially a proxy for the fight over how much influence Wall Street Democrats should have in dictating the party program.
The ideology of neoliberalism—deregulation of finance, globalization on corporate terms, fiscal conservatism—ruined the Democrats as a credible tribune of working people and set us on the road to Trump. There was a real-time test of neoliberalism as economic policy for all but the rich, and it failed. But neoliberalism is the zombie that won’t die.
We see that on an intellectual level with forays like that of Jason Furman, the sidekick of Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, with a widely quoted piece in Foreign Affairs magazine attacking Biden’s industrial policy as ineffective and inflationary. The piece, which could win some kind of award for sheer intellectual dishonesty, was demolished by several point-by-point rebuttals, most effectively by Jared Bernstein.
The New York Times, in an appalling roundtable piece titled “How Four Democrats Who Saved the Party Before Would Do It Again,” gave space to four architects of the Clinton neoliberal strategy to argue that the road back to power for the Democrats was to learn from Clinton’s “New Democrat” success. Please. Clinton, in the words of the title of a definitive book co-authored by Nelson Lichtenstein was a “Fabulous Failure.” Aided by Rubin and Summers, Clinton brought us financial deregulation, which in turn brought us the 2008 financial collapse.
And then Obama, having fatally brought back the Rubin-Summers-Furman economic team, understimulated a deeply depressed economy, bailed out the banks rather than cleaning them out, pivoted to deficit reduction in 2009 long before the economy was back to full employment, and tried to double down on corporate free trade. Obama was admirable in many ways, but his economic program was not one of them. And the economic wreckage for regular people led directly to Trump.
The kindest thing this crew could do would be to just shut up. But of course they are not going away. For them, Biden’s interventionist program was a temporary anomaly, and the task is to get back to the true path of neoliberalism.
Of course, that sort of program will not inspire voters. It would have little credibility, except for the fact that it serves the interests of immensely powerful people. And behind the ostensible battle of ideas is a raw battle of power—how much sway will Wall Street Democrats have in defining what the party of the people stands for?
The curtain was pulled back on the real debate last week on a shameful bipartisan bill called the GENIUS Act, giving even more license to crypto. This piece by our colleague David Dayen tells the full story. Several Democrats have signed on to the crypto bill, not out of principle but because the crypto industry has spread around so much money to so many legislators of both parties. The bill was greased for quick passage in the Senate.
But then Trump, with unerring timing, unveiled his latest stablecoin, called USD1, a grotesque example of the conflicts of interest that permeate the crypto industry. And so several embarrassed Democrats, with a helpful push by Dayen’s investigative reporting, got off the bill, which is stalled—but only for the moment. It is likely to pass, with Democrats only getting an amendment on stopping Trump’s corruption that is designed to fail.
Unfortunately, this useful and instructive fiasco is the exception. Corporate influence on Democrats remains widespread and substantially hidden.
If the party of the people is to regain credibility with the people, it needs to escape this corporate captivity. Democrats need to sponsor policies that are more persuasive as measures to improve the lives of regular people than Trump’s policies. Should that be so hard?