This revised and updated edition of The Democrats: A Critical History brings the analysis up to the eve of the 2012 presidential election season. Not only is the text revised in light of developments since 2008—most importantly, the financial and economic crisis that emerged full-blown during the 2008 presidential campaign—but it offers an unsparing look at the Obama administration’s domestic and foreign policies. The book explains why Obama and the Democrats dashed progressives’ hopes in 2006 and 2008.

“At a time when our political discourse has reached its basest depths and many are left scratching their heads as to why corporate America is stronger than ever while the rest of us reel in this recession, Lance Selfa’s timely book helps us understand clearly why the Democratic Party is its own worst enemy. With solid and meticulous research to back his claims, Selfa’s analysis is crucial to a progressive understanding of the state of American politics.”

—Sonali Kolhatkar, host of Uprising Radio, KPFK

“The Democratic Party, Lance Selfa demonstrates, is the graveyard of American social movements, its grassy knolls entombing the disappointed carcasses of Populism, Progressivism, Labor, and the Green movement. The Democrats should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand why Barack Obama turned out to be the undertaker of reform.”

—Roger D. Hodge, author of The Mendacity of Hope

“With a new, duly-deserved chapter on the Obama Era, Lance Selfa’s The Democrats reveals the many ways in which the establishment Democratic Party has not just dashed progressive hopes over the centuries but served as a distraction from the desperately needed business of making real change in this country. Writing dismal history like this is dirty work, but somebody’s got to do it and Selfa’s straight talk actually lifts one’s spirits.”

—Laura Flanders, host of The Laura Flanders Show

“The Democrats: A Critical History systematically debunks thenotion that the Democratic Party is a progressive force. . .”

—Robert W. McChesney

The Democrats: A Critical HistoryLance Selfa

Revised and Updated Edition

Revised and Updated EditionThe D

emocrats: A Critical History

Lance Selfa Lance Selfa has written extensively about U.S. politics and current affairs. He is the editor of The Struggle for Palestine, and his writing appears regularly in Socialist Worker newspaper and the International Socialist Review.

www.haymarketbooks.org

$16.00/$18.00 CAN ISBN 978-1-60846-192-9

Current Events/Political Science

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The DemocratsA Critical HistoryUpdated Edition

Lance Selfa

Haymarket BooksChicago, Illinois

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© 2008 by Lance Selfa

First published in 2008 by Haymarket Books.This edition published in 2012 by

Haymarket BooksP.O. Box 180165, Chicago, IL 60618

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ISBN 978-1-931859-55-4 (pbk.)1. Democratic Party (U.S.)--History. I. Title.

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ContentsIntroduction

What Happened to the New Era?1

Chapter One“History’s Second-Most Enthusiastic Capitalist Party”

9

Chapter TwoThe Party of Slavery Becomes the “Party of the People”

38

Chapter ThreeThe Rise of the New Democrats

63

Chapter FourFrom “Hope” to Hopeless: The Democrats in the Obama Era

86

Chapter FiveSocial Movements and the “Party of the People”

120

Chapter SixDefenders of the Empire

162

Chapter SevenCan the Left Take Over the Democratic Party?

199

Chapter EightWhy Is There No Alternative?

221

ConclusionIs the Lesser Evil Good Enough?

234

AppendixHal Draper: Who’s Going to Be the Lesser Evil in ’68?

245

Notes252

Index287

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As he geared up for his 2012 reelection campaign, President BarackObama roasted the Republicans who opposed the administration’s

plans to spend billions to hire workers to repair the nation’s crumblinginfrastructure. Appearing at the foot of the Brent Street Bridge inCincinnati, Obama decried a tax system tilted toward the rich.

“In the United States of America, a construction worker makingfifty thousand dollars shouldn’t pay higher taxes than somebodypulling in fifty million dollars,” he told a raucous crowd filled withunion members. “That’s not fair. It’s not right. And it has to change.”

“The Republicans in Congress call this class warfare,” Obama con-tinued. “Well, you know what? If asking a billionaire to pay the sametax rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a warrior for the middleclass, I’ll wear that charge as a badge of honor.

“I’m a warrior for the middle class; I’m happy to fight for workingpeople,” Obama shouted to the cheers of the crowd. “Because the onlyclass warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against the mid-dle class in this country for a decade.”1

Obama’s speech tapped the wellspring of Democratic Party sup-port—the notion that the Democrats represent “the people,” while theRepublican Party represents big business and the rich. At the beginningof what looked to be difficult reelection effort, it was easy to forget that

Chapter One

“History’s Second-MostEnthusiastic Capitalist Party”

9

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Obama—not his 2008 Republican opponent, Arizona Senator JohnMcCain—raked in the lion’s share of corporate, business, and wealthyindividuals’ contributions in 2008. Officially, Obama raised more thanthree quarters of a billion dollars—doubling McCain’s haul. Obamabested McCain by factors of two, three, and four to one from industriesas diverse as lawyers and lobbyists; communications/electronics, fi-nance, insurance and real estate (a.k.a. Wall Street), and defense. Andwhile he received overwhelming support from labor organizations,Obama’s total from the labor sector amounted to $585,000, comparedto forty-two million dollars from Wall Street. 2

As this chapter and the next two will show, the contradiction be-tween Obama’s “class warrior” rhetoric and his corporate backing is noaccident. The Democratic Party is one of the two major political par-ties that have shared in governing the United States at all levels of gov-ernment since the Civil War. The Democrats’ reputation as the “partyof the people” follows largely from the party’s “Golden Age,” the NewDeal period (1933–1945), in which Democratic president FranklinDelano Roosevelt enacted a number of important social reforms. The1960s “Great Society,” under which Democratic administrations inau-gurated Medicare and the “War on Poverty,” solidified the identifica-tion of the Democratic Party with the downtrodden.

Yet, viewed with a wider lens, this history of Democratic reform onbehalf of “the people” spans only about forty of the 150 years since theCivil War era. Even in the last generation, when working-class livingstandards have been cut, unions have been destroyed, and the majorityof American workers have lost their belief that their children will have abetter life then they did, the Democrats have done little to stem that tide.Since 1973, when the median wage in real terms peaked, the Democratshave held the White House for half as long as the Republicans have, butthey have held the majority in Congress and the state legislatures formost of that time. Yet they did little to reverse the conservative-inspiredoffensive against working people’s living standards. Kevin Phillips, a for-mer Republican operative who turned against the dominant conser-vatism of the Reagan era, explained the persistence of the assault onworking people in 1990:

Much of the new emphasis in the 1980s on tax reduction and the aggressiveaccumulation of wealth reflected the Republican Party’s long record of supportfor unabashed capitalism. It was no fluke that three important Republican

The Democrats10

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supremacies coincided with and helped generate the Gilded Age, the RoaringTwenties and the Reagan-Bush years.

Part of the reason survival-of-the-fittest periods are so relentless, how-ever, rests on the performance of the Democrats as history’s second-mostenthusiastic capitalist party. They do not interfere with capitalist momentum,but wait for excesses and the inevitable popular reaction.

In the United States, elections arguably play a more important culturaland economic role than in other lands. Because we lack a hereditary aristoc-racy or Establishment, our leadership elites and the alignment of wealth aremore the product of political cycles than they are elsewhere. Capitalism ismaneuvered more easily in the United States, pushed in new regional and sec-toral directions. As a result, the genius of American politics—failing only inthe Civil War—has been to manage through ballot boxes the problems thatless fluid societies resolve with barricades and with party structures geared toclass warfare.3

So despite their (at times) populist rhetoric and support for socialreform legislation, the Democrats are at their core an elite party con-cerned with sharing the responsibility of ruling the United States withthe GOP. The differences that separate the Democrats and Republicansare minor in comparison to the fundamental commitments that unitethem. To be sure, if there weren’t differences between the two parties,there would be no justification for a two-party system. But for corpo-rate America, which generally supports the Republicans more fer-vently than the Democrats, the two-party system plays an essentialrole. If one party falls out of favor with the voters, there’s always theother one—with predictable policies—waiting in the wings. Even asthe New Deal rearranged mainstream American politics, a well-knownradical social commentator, Ferdinand Lundberg, stressed that the un-derlying nature of U.S. politics hadn’t changed: “The United States canbe looked upon as having, in effect, a single party: the Property Party.This party can be looked upon as having two subdivisions: The Re-publican Party, hostile to accommodating adjustments (hence dubbed‘Conservative’) and the Democratic Party, of recent decades favoringsuch adjustments (hence dubbed ‘Liberal’).”4

A Bosses’ Party: What Does This Mean?

Although the Democratic Party is one of the longest-existing mainstreamparties in the world, it doesn’t really compare to many of the world’spolitical parties on the most basic levels. It has no fixed membership or

“History’s Second-Most Enthusiastic Capitalist Party” 11

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