Our Shrunken Democratic Party Ambition

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Michael Lind defined the future of our party politics.

No matter who wins the New York primaries on Tuesday or which candidates end up as the presidential nominees of the two major parties, one thing is already clear: Trumpism represents the future of the Republicans and Clintonism the future of the Democrats.

Defining Clintonism, Lind noted,“the centrality of identity politics, rather than progressive economics.”

It now appears that the identity politics of Clintonism was the winning formula for the 2016 Democratic nomination. But Frank Bruni distills the irony of the present moment perfectly.

The surreal twists of the Republican race and its domination by two politicians whom most party traditionalists find odious have obscured the trouble that the Democratic Party is in, by which I mean the strained, increasingly fragile alliance of the idealistic progressives whom Sanders has emboldened and the pragmatic technocrats who, with the help of both Clintons, have defined Democratic politics for the last few decades.

The hostility that so many of Sanders’s supporters feel toward Clinton is a rejection of that kind of politics, and that hostility is where the fiercest energy in the party resides right now.

Democrats must understand that the party is in crisis, despite the seemingly ridiculous state of Hillary’s Republican opposition. Obama’s attempt to be a “post-partisan” President has failed the Democratic Party, as the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin points out.

It may be churlish to question the political acumen of the first African-American to be elected (and reëlected) President, but it is true that Obama’s tenure has been disastrous for Democrats. The Party has gone from a Senate caucus of sixty members to forty-six, and from a substantial majority in the House of Representatives to a seemingly permanent minority. In the states, Democrats have lost ten governorships and nine hundred and ten legislative seats.

It may be that the most important task Hillary Clinton has in front of her is to bridge the Democratic Party divide between Clintonism and Progressivism. It is this divide that is the source of the crisis.To do that she will have to potentially rethink her policy on two issues.

1. Has business garnered too much power over government?
2. Should America be the unpaid policeman of the world?

To be honest Bernie has tried to exploit the first issue, but only with reference to the banks. He has not talked about the growing monopoly-like consolidation of industries like telecommunications, Internet search & advertising, social network, online video, airlines, oil services, soft drinks, online commerce and many more. Although Hillary partisan Paul Krugman has written eleoquently on the new Robber Barons, neither Bernie nor Hillary have really addressed this issue.

On the question of whether America should remain the world’s cop, Sanders and Clinton have both refused to take on the Military Industrial Complex and its $700 billion annual budget.

So my question is, “If Hillary is going to lead the progressive party, why are her ambitions so narrow and incremental?” Clinton has, for instance, framed most of Bernie Sanders’ ambitious domestic progressive agenda as a kind of moral failing.

“I don’t think it’s right to look a person in the eye who’s hurting and needs help and tell them that if they vote for you, you’ll get $5,000 of health care and only have to pay for $500 for it,” Clinton said at Texas Southern University. “You shouldn’t say that unless you can really deliver it.”

“If the numbers don’t add up, it’s wrong to make those promises,” she said at the campaign rally, which drew about 2,000 people. “Because it’s not just about math, it’s about people’s lives.”

Contrast this with Franklin Roosevelt’s admonition, “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” And contrast Clinton’s shrunken ambition with that of Republican anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who noted “I want to shrink government to the size that I can drown it in the bathtub.” I think Norquist is a libertarian fool, but I don’t doubt his ambition.

It may very well be that Clinton is the right candidate to take on Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. It may also be true that Bernie Sanders was an imperfect messenger for a kind of Democratic Reform politics that Elizabeth Warren best represented. Certainly Warren would have had no trouble replying to the New York Daily News editorial board question of “just how would you break up JP Morgan Chase?” She would have simply stated that it would be split into an investment bank, JP Morgan and a commercial bank, Chase. That simple.

But my concern is not to relitigate the 2016 Democratic Primary race, but rather to ask the question, why are the Democratic Party ambitions so modest? Clinton has made it clear that she would love a single payer health care system, but she sees no way to pay for it. Clinton has made it clear that she would love to subsidize the college education of poor and middle class kids so they don’t start their working life with $100,000 of debt. Clinton has made it clear that she believes public sector investment in our crumbling infrastructure would be critical to reviving our economy. What she cannot envision is a way to pay for these ambitious programs. And even Sanders was not totally forthcoming about how he would pay for his program.

What neither of them were willing to talk about is the fact that we spend in excess of $600 billion a year on our military (and +$40 billion for Homeland Security and $68 billion for National Intelligence), which prevents us from providing health care and free college to our citizens like every other developed country in the world. Here is how we spend our discretionary budget.

And here is how our military budget compares to every other major country.

So let us be clear. The choice to remain the world’s unpaid policeman is just that. A choice. It is a choice made by our grandparents that has been unquestioned for 70 years. Since 1953 when two senior partners of a Wall Street law firm, the brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles began running American foreign (and often domestic) policy, an establishment view, through Democratic and Republican presidencies alike, has been the norm. As Stephen Kinzer (in his book The Brothers)has written about the Dulles brothers, “Their life’s work was turning American money and power into global money and power. They deeply believed, or made themselves believe, that what benefited them and their clients would benefit everyone.” They created a world in which the Wall Street elites at first set our foreign policy and eventually (under Ronald Reagan) came to dominate domestic and tax policy — all to the benefit of themselves and their clients.

What was the establishment priority that moved inexorably forward in both Republican and Democratic administrations? It was a robust and aggressive foreign policy. As Kinzer writes of the Dulles brothers, “Exceptionalism — the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations — was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics.”

We have lived with this notion of American Exceptionalism for 70 years and it resides inside the campaign strategies of most of the 2016 candidates. Yes, Donald Trump often questions whether we are being played for “Uncle Sucker” by other countries, but in the same breath he mentions he is going to “rebuild the military.” And Bernie Sanders occaisionally mentions that we spend a trillion dollars rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, but won’t spend any money rebuilding our broken cities. But Sanders, when questioned where he would find an extra $100 million a year for his ambitious programs never said, “take it out of the defense budget.” Why?

The easiest answer would be to read the warning that President Dwight Eisenhower gave to the nation in his farewell address.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

One would only have to look at the development of the $1.5 trillion F-35 attack jet program to see what Eisenhower was talking about. Due to start as the primary jet for all services in 2010, the Pentagon now estimates the jet will not be ready for combat until 2022. Even now as they begin testing the weapons systems, they must constantly lower the test threshold for the jet to get a passing grade.

Twelve were completed, but 11 of them required the developmental testers to intervene — and in some cases weaken the test rules to “less challenging” ones — to help the plane do things like acquire and identify the target so it could succeed in firing a weapon. Given these heavy interventions, DOT&E found that in its current configuration the combat effectiveness of the Marine Corps’ F-35Bs “will depend in part on the degree to which the enemy’s capabilities exceed the constraints of these narrow scenarios.” So the F-35 will win only if the enemy decides not to exceed the F-35’s limited capabilities.

As William Hartung has pointed out, the Military Industrial Complex has been able to fool both Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

The most outrageous spending choice of the 1990s was undoubtedly the Clinton administration’s decision to subsidize the mergers of major defense firms. As Lockheed (yet again!) and Martin Marietta merged, Northrop teamed with Grumman, and Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas, the Pentagon provided funding to pay for everything from closing down factories to subsidizing golden parachutes for displaced executives and board members. At the time, Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders aptly dubbed the process “payoffs for layoffs,” as executives of defense firms received healthy payouts while laid-off workers were largely left to fend for themselves.

The Pentagon’s rationale for giving hundreds of millions of dollars to these emerging defense behemoths was laughable. The claim — absurd on the face of it — was that the new, larger companies would provide the Pentagon with lower prices once they had eliminated unnecessary overhead. Former Pentagon official Lawrence Korb, who opposed the subsidies at the time, noted the obvious: There was no evidence that weapons programs grew any cheaper, cost overruns any less, or wastage any smaller thanks to government-subsidized mergers.

As in fact became clear in the world of the weapons giants that followed, the increased bargaining power of companies like Lockheed Martin in a significantly less competitive market undoubtedly resulted in higher weapons costs.

But I think to just put all the emphasis on Eisenhower’s “unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex” would be a mistake. I think the Democratic Party is caught in a 1980’s time warp — always afraid of being called “soft on defense”. The military needs to fight ISIS in 2016 are clearly much more modest than the military needs to fight a nuclear armed Soviet Union in 1980. Of course there are lots of corporate forces that would like to keep the military gravy train running, but the Trump campaign proves that that is not actually moving voters. If an aggressive defense posture was a winning strategy, Marco Rubio would be the Republican nominee.

On the Democratic side, I would argue that Hillary Clinton’s relatively hawkish stance has hurt her campaign for the nomination. But aside from challenging Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War, and occaisional references to her preference for “regime change”, Sanders never really questioned the bedrock assumptions of Clinton’s national security program. Polls taken after the ISIS attack on Paris show that even in the face of threats, Democrats and Independants are not anxious to go to war.

A chronicle of American Exceptionalism — our attempt to impose our will on other countries — would have to acknowledge a 70 year catalog of failure. The Korean War — 60 years later we still have 50,000 troops there. The 1953 Iranian Coup D’Etat engineered by the CIA, which eventually led to the Iranian Revolution. The 1954 Guatemalan Coup D’Etat by the CIA which led to the current failed state and the refugee influx on our southern border. The Vietnam War. The support of the Afghanistan Mujahideen, which led to the formation of Al Qaeda. The Black Hawk Down Somalia disaster.The Afghanistan War. The Iraq War which led to the formation of ISIS. The Libyan Coup D’Etat. The list goes on.

In his new book,“Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era,” Michael Mandelbaum distinguishes between the earlier cold war battles in Korea and Vietnam and our current “nation building” stance: “In the Cold War the United States aimed at containment; in the post-Cold War [the thrust] was transformation. The Cold War involved the defense of the West; post-Cold War foreign policy aspired to the political and ideological extension of the West. These missions all aimed to convert not simply individuals but entire countries. And they all failed.”

At some point in the not too distant future the Democratic Party will find a message that will resonate with a broad swath of the American public. I believe a Democratic message that would resonate would combine the economic populism of Elizabeth Warren with a hard-headed foreign policy realism that believed that military force should be used only when America’s national security was truly threatened. The belief that Syria or Libya are directly threatening U.S. national security is a fantasy only someone like Cruz advisor Frank Gaffney could believe.

The progressive community believed we were electing in 2008, a candidate who would combine the willingness to take on Wall Street and reign in the nation-building foreign policy of the Bush era. His name was Barack Obama. But within a month of his election when the cabinet of hawks like Bob Gates and Hillary Cinton and Wall Street toadies like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers was announced, we understood that Obama was a creature of the same Establishment that gave us the Dulles Brothers and our Democratic Reform movement would be postponed.

And now of course it will be postponed again with the probable election of Hillary Clinton. Unless of course Mrs Clinton goes through the kind Post election transformation that so affected Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. Roosevelt had campaigned on a platform to balance the budget and regulate the economy with a light hand. But as the depression deepened between November of 1932 and his inaugural address on March 4, 1933 where he totally abandoned his balanced budget plan and aggresively took on Wall Street.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.

So maybe Hillary will have the kind of realization FDR experienced on the way to his inauguration. Like 1933, the times will demand bold experimentation.