Wayne O'Leary

Democratic Devolution

When I was growing up in a Massachusetts city more years ago than I care to contemplate, my father related a story about class and politics. It had taken place in 1952 on the eve of the first Eisenhower-Stevenson election, when he was employed as chauffeur to a rich Republican business executive. While transporting the magnate and an equally privileged friend to some exclusive social function, my father overheard the following remark emanate from the rear seat: “Wait until Ike gets in; then we’ll put the working class back in its place.”

This, remember, was at the conclusion of “20 years of treason” (Sen. Joe McCarthy’s phrase) supposedly imposed on the nation by FDR, Truman and the Democratic Party through their advocacy and enactment of un-American liberal policies — or so the upper classes believed.

Nostalgic Republicans were probably disappointed in Eisenhower; he didn’t repeal the New Deal or banish labor unions. But he did institute a businessman’s government — his cabinet was dubbed “eight millionaires and a plumber” (the Labor secretary) — and he ended the frontal assault on big money by an activist federal government. Our family was disappointed as well, but for a different reason; we were working-class Democrats who revered FDR and mourned the passing of his economic populism.

Fast forward to October 2021. Here’s the current president, Joe Biden, also a Democrat: “I don’t want to punish anyone’s success; I’m a capitalist.” No hostility expressed there towards the individuals Roosevelt referred to as economic royalists (and Bernie Sanders called one-percenters). Biden’s is a comment that speaks volumes about the modern Democratic Party and its troubled relationship with the American working class.

Joe Biden regards himself as a champion of the working middle class, a union guy, as he often says; it’s his self-proclaimed political brand. At the same time, his efforts on behalf of the working class have thus far been mostly rhetorical. There’s no strong evidence that card-check unionization, labor’s top priority during the Obama years, was ever really pushed hard by Biden as vice president. Likewise the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, labor’s priority under the current administration, which has disappeared without a trace, none of its features finding their way into the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) as laborites had hoped.

The president seems much more concerned with burnishing his pro-business bona fides than crusading for a left-leaning labor-liberal agenda. That priority, or bias if you like, appeared early on in his run for the White House, when he went out of his way to ridicule the Medicare-for-All and wealth-tax concepts advanced by progressive rivals and geared his fundraising to business PACs and wealthy donors.

Earlier this year, the Center for Responsive Politics (since renamed Open Secrets) reported that Everyman Joe took in close to $202 million from corporate PACs and donors associated with the financial, insurance and real-estate industries, nine times what he received from labor unions. Nothing illegal here, mind you, but also nothing that shouts “working class!”

The business-friendly posture of the president and, by extension, his party’s establishment is on display in their “transformational” BBBA. In order to satisfy the demands of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to lower the BBBA’s price tag, Democrats had to shrink or eliminate integral parts of it along the way. How this was done is instructive.

First, as outlined in my previous column (“How Corporate America Won Reconciliation,” 12/15/21 TPP), cuts were made in such a way as to protect corporate priorities, which were oftentimes the same as those of Manchin and Sinema, both of whom have been major recipients of corporate campaign money from the pharmaceutical, energy and financial-services industries.

Secondly, program cuts or deletions were not made with the concerns of the American working class foremost in mind. The parts of the bill most popular with the working class writ large, as opposed to Democratic interest groups (Medicare enhancements, drug-price negotiations, free community college, paid family leave), were among the first to go or be radically reduced in scope. Most stunning was abandonment of any serious effort to roll back the 2017 Trump tax cuts.

That raid on the Treasury cost the government $1.9 trillion (more than the BBBA), and most of it went to wealthy individuals and corporations — fully 86% to the top 1%. Prior to recent times, no self-respecting Democratic administration and Congress would have abided this circumstance, but in 2021, things are different. Interviewed by Business Insider in October during BBBA negotiations, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) made the following observation: “Boy, oh boy, that would be a great irony — if a Democratic president, House and Senate embraced the 2017 tax cuts.” Welcome to your new party, Mark.

Actually, the repositioning of the Democratic Party formulating the BBBA is the culmination of a decades-long evolution that began in the Clinton era. Slowly but surely, the Democrats are becoming the party of the comfortable upper and upper-middle classes, prompting the non-minority working class to decamp to the GOP. In a country where the median household income is barely $67,000, the recent declaration by administration budgeteers that household incomes as high as $400,000 were, in effect, middle class and therefore wouldn’t face additional BBBA assessments said it all.

Consider that, as David Bromwich reported in The Nation (9/6/21) using IRS data, 65% of households earning more than $500,000 per year are in Democratic congressional districts, while 74% of those earning less than $100,000 per year are in Republican districts. Consider further that those Democratic districts include the 10 richest in the country — reasons why, Bromwich adds, Democrats are closer policywise to Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood than to Main Street.

A startling factoid released by the Pew Research Center this past September reinforces the Bromwich findings. Since 2019, the number of Republicans who say large corporations benefit the country has declined by 44%, whereas the number of Democrats saying so has increased by 30%. Democrats also view financial institutions more positively than Republicans by a similarly increased margin.

These figures help explain a number of recent developments: the preferred focus of Democrats on identity politics rather than class politics, the noblesse oblige nature of the surviving BBBA initiatives (i.e. helping “the poor”), and the lingering counterintuitive appeal of Donald Trump.

My Democratic forebears would be perplexed.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2022

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