by Lance Selfa
We typically expect this kind of callous indifference to the everyday questions of life from the Republican Party, but what about the Democrats, the party that presents itself as representing the interests of ordinary people?
Since the shock of the election, the Democratic Party has blamed its losses on Fox News, the FBI and Clinton’s emails, Trump’s race-baiting, bad campaign messaging, and the Russians. We cannot say with any certainty that none of these issues factored into the outcome of the election, but what can be said is that the Democratic Party’s singular obsession with these other factors has allowed it to ignore the deep and profound political crisis within the party. There is absolutely no reckoning with how this party that purports to be a “party of the people” consistently fails to deliver actual change for the ordinary people it claims to represent.
For example, the presidency of Barack Obama is deemed a success simply because of the absence of any real scandal that marred his presidency. This measure of “success” for the Obama administration is a lesson in how the performance and appearance of “civility” often passes as political accomplishment or legitimacy in this country. While Obama could be complimented for his good manners and wholesome disposition, we can understand the election results in part because of the former president’s inability to challenge the political and economic status quo for millions of people. For the political and economic elite, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, the absence of scandal or catastrophe registered as success. This was not like the administration of George W. Bush that took the country into an illegal and immoral war with Iraq. This was not the Bush administration’s collective shrug in the face of the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This was not Bush crashing the American economy in 2007 and 2008.
But for millions of people in this country, it is the status quo that is increasingly intolerable. It gnaws away at the millions of tiny threads that ordinary people are barely hanging onto in their daily struggles to make ends meet. For those who pine for the good old days of Obama or who wistfully long for what could have been with Hillary Clinton as president, it is only because the unspectacular and unglamorous struggles of ordinary people in their daily lives have been rendered invisible. We live in a celebrity culture that glorifies the rich and the famous while ignoring the quotidian and mundane struggles of ordinary people. Imagine if we had a press, a popular culture, or political class that was curious about the lives of working-class people. If we did, what would they find? What is the status quo?
The status quo can be found in the continuing crisis of opioid and narcotic addiction in the country. There are two million people addicted to opioids in the United States, a disproportionate number of whom are white. Half of those people are addicted to heroin. From 2009 to 2014, almost half a million people died from opioid overdoses—a fourfold increase since 1999. In March, in a town in Ohio, a cold-storage trailer was needed to hold dead bodies from suicides and drug overdoses caused by opioid abuse because the morgue was already full from heroin overdoses. In this state, which Trump won, there has been a 775 percent increase in opioid-related deaths in the last thirteen years.
The status quo can be found in the briefly reported story about the reported decline in life expectancy for working-class white women. It is unprecedented for life expectancy to reverse in a so-called first-world country. In the United States’ peer countries, life expectancy is actually growing. Why is life expectancy for working-class white women in decline? Drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol abuse. Indeed, a recent study has found that the life spans of working-class whites and working-class Blacks are merging as working-class and poor whites more generally are dying from suicide and alcohol abuse. The United States is projected to have a life-expectancy rate on par with Mexico and Croatia by the year 2030.
The status quo over the last several years is found in the quiet deportation and removal of 2.5 million undocumented people during the tenure of Barack Obama. In 2012 alone, more than 400,000 undocumented individuals—women, children, men, families—were detained, held in private detention centers with few rights recognized by their captors, until they were forcibly returned to the countries they had fled. We can all look in horror at the indiscriminate way that Trump has empowered ICE agents to swoop into immigrant communities and round people up, but we must acknowledge that Obama’s administration greased the wheels to this machinery of injustice long ago.
The status quo in Chicago has been the rise in shootings and murders in the city’s working-class Black neighborhoods. In 2016, there were 4,379 people shot and 797 people killed in the city. The overwhelming majority of both groups were African American. The news media offers nonsensical explanations for the violence, including gang retaliation and revenge, but its nonsense is matched by the nonsense offered by elected officials that blames the absence of role models and poor parenting. What is almost never offered, as at least part of the answer, is how Chicago has the highest Black unemployment rate of the nation’s five largest cities, at 25 percent; that nearly half of Black men aged twenty to twenty-four in Chicago are neither in school nor employed; or that Chicago has the third-highest poverty rate of large cities, and that it is the most segregated city in the United States.
Finally, there is the status quo of the “shrinking middle class.” In the 1970s, 61 percent of Americans fell into that vague but stable category of “middle class.” Today that number has fallen to 50 percent. It is driven by the growing wealth inequality that exists in the country. In the last year alone, the “1 percent” saw their income rise by 7 percent, and the “0.1 percent” saw their income rise by 9 percent. In general, the richest 20 percent of households in the United States own 84 percent of the wealth in the country, while the bottom 40 percent own less than 1 percent. The media would have us believe that this is a story primarily about the Rust Belt and disgruntled white workers. In fact, it is also a story about the 240,000 Black homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure in the last eight years. It is about urban school closures and the decimation of employment for Black educators. Thousands of Black teachers have been fired in the last decade, as school districts retract in size and opt to hire cheaper and whiter replacements for charters that are being used to replace public education.
Eight years later, when we put these conditions of the status quo together, they tell a complete story of deprivation and desperation that exists all over this country. They tell the story of the millions of people left behind. This is the status quo. This is life in the United States without some spectacular catastrophe. This is the so-called lesser evil.
It is the inability of this political and economic system to change this dynamic, and thus deliver actual changes for the better in people’s lives, that lead so many people to ignore elections. When people believed that electing Obama would transform the country and their lives, they voted in historic numbers. With big expectations and big hope vested in Obama came even bigger disappointment when he failed to deliver. It is also true that the Republicans were obstinate, recalcitrant, racist, and opposed to giving Obama an inch as president. It speaks to the complete dysfunction of our political system. But it is not only the obstinacy of the Republicans that was the problem. The narrow and limited vision of Obama’s political agenda and the Democratic Party in general is what drives the apathy surrounding the party.
Hillary Clinton also ignored the everyday conditions experienced by ordinary people. She ran a campaign where her main slogan was “America is already great.” She ran a campaign focused on the abhorrent behavior of Trump, instead of articulating how the Democratic Party could actually transform the hardship experienced by millions of people. Clinton promised to be the third term of Obama, failing to realize that for millions of voters, two terms was enough.
It is easy to understand why Clinton stuck to this message. The Democratic Party is committed to the economic status quo represented by free-market capitalism. It is free-market capitalism’s champion. The Democratic Party
has also championed the political ethos of what some refer to as “neoliberalism,” or the idea that the market is the best way to deliver public services and that competition is what drives efficiency. But if the market is predicated on the idea that there are winners and losers then this, of course, is a terrible way to run a government. It is a terrible way to deliver education, water, housing, food, healthcare, justice, and other vital necessities that any civilization is dependent upon. When this is the root of your political commitment, as I would argue it is for the Democratic Party, then it necessarily limits the range of political change you can advance.
It was impossible for Clinton to argue that her party would deliver change and break the grip of a political order that privileges the rich and powerful, when the Democrats have been in power for the last eight years supporting policies that have maintained the division between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. In other words, we cannot understand the rise of Trump and Trumpism by only looking at what he and the Republicans have done; we must also understand it in terms of what the American center-left party—the Democrats—have not done.
Bernie Sanders recognized this. He ran a campaign in the primaries that tapped into the realization that for most ordinary people, things are getting worse. He recognized it is the responsibility of government to alleviate deprivation through provision. And, with no money, almost no name recognition, and with the entire Democratic Party establishment trained against him, he nearly won the party’s nomination for president. If you want to understand the depth of suffering in this country, know that thirteen million people cast their vote for an open socialist here. You need some appreciation of American history to grasp the unprecedented aspect of this. In the 1950s, during the Cold War, the United States was the epicenter of the Red Scare and the witch hunts of Communists. In a moment of macabre illustration, in 1953, the United States executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg under the pretext of their being Russian spies. It did not hurt if people believed that they were executed because of their membership in the Communist Party. The insurgent campaign of Sanders can be read as an indictment of an economic system that has failed repeatedly to deliver a better way for most people in this country. During the Democratic Party primaries, 44 percent of Black voters aged eighteen to thirty voted for Sanders, compared with the 32 percent of young, Black voters who voted for Clinton—even as the news media, led by the Clinton campaign, continued to refer to Black voters as a “firewall” for Clinton. And today, among nonwhite voters, Sanders has a 72 percent approval rating, which is higher than his 52 percent approval rating among whites. And yet, the leadership of the Democratic Party continues to ignore Sanders’s political agenda of massive economic redistribution, because the party has spent a generation trying to distance itself from the reputation that it is the party of social welfare and “big government.”
While the Democratic Party continues to insist that it is a party of the mainstream, a growing number of polls indicate that large majorities of Americans actually want a party of “big government.” There is massive discontent and bitterness in the United States, but it has no political home. Consider the following poll results: 58 percent of Americans think Obamacare should be replaced with federally funded healthcare for all; most Americans support raising the minimum wage; 61 percent support a minimum wage of at least ten dollars per hour; 59 percent support a minimum wage of twelve dollars per hour; 48 percent support fifteen dollars per hour, a proposal that has been demonized by Dems and Republicans alike; 61 percent of Americans say the rich pay too little in taxes, up from 52 percent a year ago; 69 percent of Americans believe that providing affordable housing is important; 63 pecent of Americans say money and wealth distribution is unfair; 53 percent of whites think the country still has work to do for Blacks to achieve equal rights with whites; 50 percent of whites say Blacks are treated less fairly by the police than whites; 64 percent of white Democrats support Black Lives Matter, 29 percent of whom say they “strongly support” the movement. Even 20 percent of Republicans think the movement will help achieve racial equality in the United States.
The Sanders phenomenon was not an accident, but he tapped into the sentiment reflected in these poll results.
None of this is to imply or say that it is inconsequential that Trump is now president. He is dangerous. But he is also hobbled by reality. Even though he was adept at identifying and exploiting the fears and anxieties of millions of white Americans and hand-fuls of other people who also voted for him, he cannot deliver on his promise to make America great again. It’s a promise based on a foundation of lies that misidentify the problems afflicting the United States. Trump and his white supremacist advisers say that the United States is suffering from an influx of immigrants, “radical Islamic terrorism,” crime, and violence. Much of this is racist drivel intended to stoke fear and promote scapegoating to blame the most vulnerable among us. We are told that undocumented Mexican immigrants are to blame for unemployment. We are told that Black criminals are to blame for poverty. We are told that Muslim terrorists are to blame for shifting billions of dollars from domestic spending to foreign policy. In effect, we are told that the least powerful and influential among us are the problem, while the millionaires and billionaires who are literally running the government are innocent bystanders.
It can almost be guaranteed that when Trump is unable to deliver on his promises to make America great again, he and his administration will double down on racism and disorder. They will use that as a pretext to justify repression. We can already see this taking shape. The executive orders dealing with immigration and law enforcement are designed to stoke fear while rapidly expanding the powers of all police and law enforcement agents. Trump wants to give local police the power of immigration control agents, not necessarily to deport the eleven million people living in this country without papers, but to stoke fear and suspicion, to turn neighbor against neighbor, classmate against classmate, worker against worker.
But it is not just immigration control. It is not a coincidence that the attempts to expand police powers (including the signaling from the misnamed Department of Justice that police departments will face no scrutiny) coincide with what will be an austere, cruel budget that casts poor and working-class people to fend for themselves. Policing in this context will be the public policy of last resort, intended to contain crime to certain neighborhoods, not actually stop it. In a country where both political parties ignore structural factors in the perpetuation of poverty, both parties are then hostile to the kinds of social and public programs necessary to keep people out of poverty. For the Republicans this is obvious, but we should not forget that 2016 marked the twentieth-year anniversary of the Democratic Party’s crusade to end welfare as an entitlement to poor people. In other words, these are bipartisan attacks on programming intended to raise the quality of life for ordinary people. And when federal, state, and city leaders have no intention of creating or funding programs necessary to keep people out of poverty, the police are dispatched to manage the crisis. Police violence, brutality, and murder are built into a system that has no answers to the poverty and inequality that it constantly generates. This is why police reform is so hard. We should not be naïve to believe that a country that can put a man on the moon cannot rein in its own police forces. But the reason why mayors and councilpersons regularly turn a blind eye to brutal policing is because it is simply the cost of doing business. And the cost of doing business is quite high.
In Chicago alone, the city has spent $500 million over the last ten years to settle or pay out lawsuits against the city for police brutality and wrongful death suits. The NYPD has averaged $100 million in settlements for police brutality and wrongful death lawsuits a year, since 2007, adding up to $1 billion. The ten cities with the largest police departments paid out $248 million last year in settlements and court judgments in police misconduct cases, up 48 percent from 2010. In the last five years, those same ten cities have paid out $1.2 billion. Any other public
institution that incurs this kind of expense has its budgets and services shrunken, or the institution is shut down. When, in 2013, the Chicago Board of Education claimed it was running a billion-dollar deficit, it simply closed fifty-two public schools and never looked back.
The expansion of policing powers of the state is also intended to lay the foundation for the repression of the growing resistance movement. The Trump administration is well aware of the opposition and resistance it has provoked. They have been met with unprecedented protests. The day after Trump was inaugurated, an estimated four million people participated in protests directed at his administration. In the aftermath of his illegal Muslim travel ban, dozens of spontaneous protests erupted at the nation’s airports, involving tens of thousands of ordinary people—many of whom were not directly affected by the ban itself. There is organizing happening in every corner of the United States. Some of it is brand new. Some of it is building on campaigns that have been under way for years now. Despite whatever delusions the Trump administration engages in in repeating the lie that it has massive public support, it knows that its political agenda will continue to inspire protest, and so it wants to create the conditions to help repress the social movements. Indeed, Republican governors and supporters of Trump in five states have proposed legislation to ban or curtail protests.
This is not a call for retreat, but the suggestion that we must retool. To begin with, it means that we need larger and more effective protests. Some have asked whether or not protests and demonstrations matter. What can protests do? Black Lives Matter is only one example to look to when understanding the importance of protests themselves. Police brutality was not a new issue in 2014. It is a very old issue in African American life in this country. But the rebellion in Ferguson, when Mike Brown was killed in August 2014, drew national attention to the phenomenon of police murder and judicial misconduct. It also provided a model for communities to know how to respond to police violence—through protest, activism, and organizing. At a time when the political establishment, led by Barack Obama, believed that it could get the movement off the streets by seducing activists with roundtable meetings and seats on commissions, protests and rebellion in Baltimore eight months later reminded the political establishment, and indeed the world, that the entire Black movement would not be bought off with cheap flattery and the appearance of reform. Protests force the mass media, and then the public, to have a deeper engagement with issues that elected officials would like to sweep away or minimize. The Black Lives Matter movement changed the conversation about police brutality in the United States. It provided language for people to articulate their frustrations with police violence and abuse. It provided an analysis for why this violence was happening.
