Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss

[progchat_action] Plutocracy and the "Party of the People"

4 views
Skip to first unread message

Steven L. Robinson

unread,
May 8, 2006, 11:50:12 AM5/8/06
to
Counterpunch Weekend Edition
May 6 / 7, 2006

Plutocracy and the "Party of the People"
Democratic Masqueraders

By JEFF TAYLOR

In 1908, three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan
asked the question, "Shall the people rule?" In 2004, John Forbes Kerry told
us, "Hope is on the way." Bryan's campaign slogan addressed the fundamental
issue of politics: Who rules? Kerry's vacuous slogan conveyed contentless
optimism. The Democratic Party of Kerry, Gore, and the Clintons does not
want to deal with the question of rule. An honest, detailed appraisal would
disturb the widely-held but very-mistaken impression that Democrats are "the
party of the people." You know-as opposed to those rich Republicans who put
the interests of their country club friends and big corporations above those
of average Americans. It's a comforting myth for loyal Democrats, but it has
not been true at the national level for almost 100 years.

As Governor Jerry Brown pointed out in the 1990s, Governor Clinton not only
golfed at a country club but did so at a whites-only country club, and
President Clinton was a faithful frontman for Wall Street during his eight
years in office. He was also the chairman, product, and sponsor of the
corporate-dominated Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). From start to
finish, Bill Clinton personified a politician of humble origins and
undeniable abilities who put his promise and talent in the service of
plutocracy. Democracy means rule by the common people. Plutocracy means rule
by the wealthy. It is ironic that the Democratic Party has become so
thoroughly plutocraticso much so that today the condition is taken for
granted and intraparty disputes-when they occur at all-center around
tertiary issues like how to market the party's abortion stance (the stance
itself cannot be debated). The plutocratic tendencies of the Democrats run
much deeper than particular party leaders, however. They are grounded in
ideology and history.

The primary founder of the Democratic Party was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson
was not perfect, but his thought was far more democratic and libertarian
than most of his contemporaries. This is especially true when you consider
that his peers were the Founding Fathers, most of whom were quite
comfortable with monarchy and aristocracy and openly hostile toward
democracy. Jefferson was not a pure democrat in the Athenian sense and his
status as a slaveowner taints his image in the eyes of modern liberals and
leftists. These are valid criticisms. However, true democracy was unheard-of
in the 1780s, aside from the pages of history books and its small-scale
practice in Switzerland and some New England towns. When it came to slavery,
Jefferson did not practice what he preached, but what he preached should not
be overlooked. He condemned slavery as a great evil deserving of divine
judgment, and asserted that all people are created equal and endowed with
unalienable rights.

Jefferson and his allies-notables like Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, John
Taylor, George Clinton, and John Randolph-created a political party far in
advance of most in the world, in terms of a forthright endorsement of
democratic-flavored republic, protection of civil liberties, economic
freedom, and aversion to war. In all of these things, it was the polar
opposite of the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Charles
Cotesworth Pinckney, and John Marshall. Despite personal inconsistencies and
political compromises, the ideology of Jefferson deserves some honor. Its
inclusiveness and populism were such that it reached beyond the
institutional-and un-Jeffersonian-racism of the Confederacy and Jim Crow to
eventually broaden the party with the addition of Fannie Lou Hamer, Hosea
Williams, and millions of others who responded not to the paternalism of the
welfare state or the condescending promises of limousine liberalism but to
the basic principles of human dignity, grassroots power, and equality of
opportunity.

The earliest struggles within the Democratic Party over political thought an
d practice set the stage for later divisions. The conflict between Virginia
party leader Jefferson and New York party leader Aaron Burr was perhaps more
about personal trustworthiness than ideological purity, although Burr did
receive the support of most Federalists in Congress during the 1800 election
deadlock and was close to Senator Jonathan Dayton (F-NJ). In contrast to
Jefferson's opposition to banking and incipient capitalism, Burr helped
found the Bank of the Manhattan, a company that would much later merge with
the Rockefellers' Chase National Bank. Burr was also a father of Tammany
Hall, the corrupt NYC Democratic machine. Whatever the truth concerning
election intrigue and treasonous conspiracy, the urban, pragmatic Burr was
rather unlike the agrarian, principled Jefferson. However, President
Jefferson was criticized for failing in office to live up to all of his
ideals. John Randolph of Roanoke, John Taylor of Caroline, and other Tertium
Quids were more Jeffersonian than Jefferson himself as they complained about
presidential compromises.

Still, a greater danger was to the "right" of Jefferson. The
Democratic-Republicans-as members of Jefferson's party came to be called by
historians-who were the purest expositors of the 12 tenets of
Jeffersonianism were those who had been Anti-Federalists in 1787-88. They
opposed adoption of the new Constitution because they saw it as
counterrevolutionary with its strong executive, aristocratic judiciary, and
push for centralization. From Paris, Jefferson favored the Constitution but
was concerned about its lack of a bill of rights and its failure to limit
presidential terms. James Madison was a much more enthusiastic supporter.
While Federalist Papers co-authors Hamilton and John Jay went on to co-found
the electoral Federalist Party, Madison joined his friend Jefferson in
founding the rival party. Despite their personal closeness, there was always
a substantial ideological distance between the two men. As historian Richard
K. Matthews has pointed out, Madison was far more Hobbesian and aristocratic
than Jefferson. To use a modern term, he was an elitist. Seeds of corruption
were present in the Democratic Party from its earliest days: the pragmatism
of Burr, the elitism of Madison, the unaddressed issue of the enslavement of
human beings, and the compromises that come from human nature and the allure
of power. If Jefferson had not swept out Federalist policies during his
terms to the satisfaction of the Quids, this was even more true of his
successors, Madison and James Monroe. The "Era of Good Feelings" that
characterized Monroe's last term was a period in which party rivalry was
dead. The Federalist Party disappeared because its overt elitism was
unpopular and Democratic-Republicans essentially adopted the Federalist
program. During his twilight years, Jefferson condemned this amalgamation of
parties: "The Federalists...have given up their name...and have taken
shelter among us and under our name, but they have only changed the point of
attack." It was a dangerous and undesirable development, in his opinion.

Popular leader Andrew Jackson and party manager Martin Van Buren revived a
purer form of Jeffersonian ideology in the 1820s. This cleaning of the house
created a rival faction (New Republicans) and, eventually, a rival party
(Whig). Jackson was Jeffersonian in most, but not all, of his policies. He
lacked Jefferson's sense of ethnic inclusiveness, suspicion of executive
power, and respect for the "Quaker doctrine" of peace. Weaknesses
notwithstanding, the three presidential terms of Old Hickory and Old
Kinderhook were characterized by expansion of popular sovereignty and
opposition to the monied interests. But it was a short-lived revival of
early American liberalism. By the mid 1840s, plutocracy, slavocracy, and
career-minded professional politicians had a stranglehold on the national
party. August Belmont of New York City was the U.S. representative of the
Frankfurt-based Rothschild banking house. He became a leading influence
within the party through his financing of Presidents Franklin Pierce and
James Buchanan. Pierce and Buchanan were pro-slavery northerners. Belmont
himself was linked to the slaveholding aristocracy through his wife's uncle,
Senator John Slidell (D-LA). Belmont was chairman of the Democratic National
Committee from 1860 to 1872 and was a sponsor of presidential candidates
Stephen Douglas, Thomas Bayard, and Grover Cleveland. Cleveland's two terms
in the White House interrupted Republican presidents but did not interrupt
Republican policies (for the most part). President Cleveland had
particularly close ties to a rising wielder of financial and industrial
power: J.P. Morgan & Co. One of Cleveland's closest political associates,
William C. Whitney, was a business partner of a new magnate: John D.
Rockefeller of Standard Oil.

Following in the footsteps of Jefferson and Jackson, and aligning himself
with the growing People's (Populist) Party, little-known Congressman William
Jennings Bryan of Nebraska sought and gained the 1896 Democratic
presidential nomination. It was a repudiation of Cleveland and the party
establishment, members of which either "sat on their hands" or openly
supported opposition candidates in the general election, thus contributing
to Bryan's defeat. Gathering like-minded liberals around him, Bryan
more-or-less led the national party from 1896 to 1912. Historian Carroll
Quigley refers to Bryan's ascendancy to party leadership in his classic
treatment of twentieth-century power, Tragedy and Hope: "The inability of
plutocracy to control the Democratic Party as it had demonstrated it could
control the Republican Party, made it advisable for them to adopt a
one-party outlook on political affairs, although they continued to some
extent to contribute to both parties and did not cease their efforts to
control both." Like the vast majority of his contemporaries, Bryan took
white supremacy for granted. In almost every other way, however, Bryan was a
progressive force who represented the best of Jefferson's thought. His 1896,
1900, and 1908 campaigns were ultimately unsuccessful but he reached
millions with his message of democracy and peace, and he sponsored many
liberals who had previously been shut out of party leadership by plutocracy
and professionalism. Bryan almost singlehandedly turned imperialism into a
serious political issue of the day as he made his opposition to overseas
conquest the centerpiece of his second campaign.

The Great Commoner was not afraid to confront Hamiltonian conservatives
within his own party. Until the day he died, he named names and used his
influence to try to prevent the nomination of plutocrats (usually
unsuccessfully). Referring to former President Cleveland, Bryan wrote, "He
secured his nomination in 1892 by a secret bargain with the financiers; his
committee collected from the corporations and spent the largest campaign
fund the party ever hadHaving debauched his party he was offended by its
effort to reform and gave comfort to the enemy." He opposed the influence of
August Belmont's sons, Perry Belmont and August P. Belmont. Refusing to meet
with Perry in 1899 to reconcile the Bryan and Cleveland wings, he told him,
"No party advantage is to be derived from political communion between
Jeffersonian Democrats who stand on the Chicago [1896] platform and the
Republican allies who masquerade as democrats between campaigns in order to
give more potency to their betrayal of democratic principles on election
day." In 1912, Bryan introduced a resolution at the Democratic national
convention opposing the nomination of any presidential candidate linked to
August Belmont Jr., John Pierpont Morgan, Thomas Fortune Ryan, or any other
"member of the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class" and demanding
withdrawal from the convention of any delegates "constituting or
representing the above-named interests." Ironically, at that same
convention, Bryan inadvertently allowed leadership of the party to slip into
plutocratic hands through his support for Governor Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was a Hamiltonian elitist known to be an enemy of Bryanism until he
successfully masqueraded as a democrat in 1912. Bryan was fooled. President
Wilson paid public honor to Bryan by appointing him as Secretary of State,
but he made an end-run around the cabinet officer by using State Department
Counselor Robert Lansing to pursue his important objectives. Bryan resigned
in protest when Wilson's pro-war aims became apparent in 1915 and he later
criticized Wilson for stacking the new Federal Reserve Board with
plutocratic members. Wilson's embrace of a warfare-welfare state and his
open alliance with Wall Street during World War I became the model pursued
by Franklin Delano Roosevelt two decades later. Bryan continued to oppose
Big Money domination of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, but his
criticisms of James Cox, John W. Davis, Al Smith, and FDR tended to fall on
deaf ears. Roosevelt was an anti-Bryan Democrat from his earliest years as a
politician. FDR was beloved and respected by millions of average Americans
in life and death because of his Jeffersonian reputation, not his
Hamiltonian record. In fact, Roosevelt repudiated almost every single tenet
of Thomas Jefferson's thought. He stood for armed empire abroad and
centralized government at home. A practitioner of the corporate state, he
flaunted the partnership between big government and big business. This is
the FDR legacy and every Democratic nominee since 1948 has been in the FDR
traditionnot the Jefferson, Jackson, and Bryan tradition.

Referring to the post-New Deal era, historian Quigley notes, " [The] Eastern
Establishment was really above parties and was much more concerned with
policies than with party victories. They had been the dominant element in
both parties since 1900" (excluding the Bryan interregnum). Harry Truman
governed the country with the assistance of a small group of Wall Street
"wise men" such as Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and Averell
Harriman. Two-time Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson was a corporate
attorney and a director of the elite Council on Foreign Relations. Quigley
points out that John Kennedy, with his Harvard connections and support for
Britain in the late 1930s, belonged to the Anglo-American Establishment
despite his Irish Catholicism. Lyndon Johnson had a
folksy-to-the-point-of-crude personal demeanor, but he was in the southern
Bourbon tradition not the southern Populist tradition. He was Corporate
America's best friend in the mid 1960s. Jimmy Carter was groomed by David
Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and the Trilateral Commission to be the
1976 nominee of the party.

There were genuine, unequivocably liberal Jeffersonians in positions of
lesser power during these years. Today, they are obscure figures but they
are worth noting to establish that there was an alternative, albeit
much-weakened, tradition within the middle ranks of the party. During the
New Deal and Fair Deal years, there were Governors William Murray (OK) and
Charles Bryan (NE), Senators Thomas Gore (OK), Burton Wheeler (MT), David
Walsh (MA), Bennett Champ Clark (MO), Edwin Johnson (CO), and Glen Taylor
(ID), and Congressman Jerry Voorhis (CA). Novelist Gore Vidal is the
namesake and grandson of Senator Gore, who began his career as a Texas
Populist, became a supporter of Bryan in Oklahoma, and ended up on FDR's
enemies list.

Democratic mavericks from the 1950s through the 1970s included Senators
Wayne Morse (OR), Ernest Gruening (AK), William Proxmire (WI), Harold Hughes
(IA), and James Abourezk (SD), and House members Bella Abzug (NY) and Wright
Patman (TX). In 1964, Morse and Gruening cast the only two votes against the
Vietnam War-endorsing Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Proxmire embodied the full
range of Jeffersonian ideology, including frugal government. Hughes was a
truck driver who entered politics and ended up as both an evangelical
Christian and liberal Democrat (his near-pacifism precluded him from running
for president in 1972). Abourezk was so good that he was a true Senate
radical. Abzug, with her ever-present hat, was a plainspoken crusader for
justice. Patman was in Congress from the 1920s to the 1970s and was the only
House Banking Committee chairman in history to object to Wall Street control
of the Federal Reserve System. Fannie Lou Hamer was not a professional
politician, but she stands as a shining example of courage as leader of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In James Forman's book The Making of
Black Revolutionaries, you can read how the MFDP was sold down the river at
the 1964 national convention by Humphrey, Mondale, and a group of
LBJ-fawning hacks who favored instead a delegation of segregationists.

The extent of the populism and independence of Senators Eugene McCarthy and
George McGovern is questionable. They were mavericks to a degree throughout
their careers, but they were also, for the most part, in the mainstream FDR
tradition. McCarthy was a longtime ally of Hubert Humphrey and a friend and
supporter of Lyndon Johnson for most of the '60s. He opposed the Vietnam War
relatively late. McGovern was a Kennedy Democrat, not an agrarian populist
or left-wing radical. In some ways, their 1968 and 1972 campaigns
represented co-optation of the Jeffersonian-oriented New Left and
Counterculture movements. Advocates of black power, women's liberation, and
peace were channeled into electoral politics and made use of by professional
politicians. The early support of McGovern '72 by such stalwarts of the
Vital Center as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith suggest
that the campaign was not as radical as it appeared from a distance. Jesse
Jackson's 1984 and 1988 campaigns followed this same pattern. Still, the
themes expressed by these efforts were enough to draw disfavor from the
powers-that-be. Party leaders crushed the populist-sounding insurrections
and formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the Democratic
Leadership Council to keep the McCarthy-McGovern-Jackson wing of the party
in its placeone of virtual powerlessness.

Howard Dean, a mainstream politician with no claim to being truly populist
or anti-war, sparked a similar reaction among the Clinton crowd in 2004 with
his grassroots fundraising and shoot-from-the-hip style. Jackson and Dean
eventually cut deals with the very power structure that helped to destroy
their campaigns. They were willing to sell out their supporters for a seat
at the table of power. This was not the case with McCarthy and McGovern.
Perhaps it was McCarthy's erudition or Catholicism that made him an odd duck
after 1968, but for whatever reason, he never returned to the safety of
politics-as-usual. McGovern's populist father and upbringing in South Dakota
may have kept him slightly off-beat compared to the Washington norm.
Although he did not end up as "eccentric" as McCarthy, he is still the most
radical Democratic nominee of the past 50 years. Bill Kauffman's recent
article about George McGovern is interesting:
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_01_30/article.html .

Today, few nationally-known Democrats are willing to step outside the
Clinton/DLC fence of propriety. Jerry Brown has mellowed or changed during
his years as Oakland mayor. Despite saying some excellent things, Al
Sharpton seems to be a graduate of the Jesse Jackson school of
self-promotion. Congresswoman Barbara Lee cast a courageous lone vote
against the open-ended War on Terror but she is not widely known.
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was deposed by party leaders in a 2002
primary because she was simply too astute and honest, she returned a couple
years later with her integrity intact, and she is now known primarily as the
woman who hit a Capitol Hill policeman because he didn't recognize her new
hairdo. Senator Russ Feingold may well seek the 2008 nomination. Will he
win? Not likely! He is a great senator who often stands alone. He openly
criticizes the DLC and defies party leaders. He would probably make an
outstanding president. But regardless of grassroots Jeffersonian sentiment,
Feingold is swimming upstream in a party dominated by Hamiltonian plutocrats
and imperialists. We all heard their deafening silence in response to his
proposal to censure Bush for breaking the law on domestic wiretapping. These
are the same leaders who ignored John Murtha's Iraq-withdrawal proposal,
voted to extend the Patriot Act, and knifed Paul Hackett of Ohio.

In Bryan's day, J.P. Morgan, T.F. Ryan, and the Belmont brothers were
usually calling the tune because they were paying the piper. During the past
20 years, it has been people like Pamela Harriman, Felix Rohatyn, Dwayne
Andreas, Robert Rubin, Nathan Landow, Steven Rattner, and George Soros. The
end result is the same: we hear a musical echo of Republican politics when
we listen to the Democratic bigwigs. When voting for president, I prefer a
choice, not an echo. I haven't completely given up on the Democratic Party,
but my faint hope is tempered with much realism. What are the odds that the
party will nominate a Jeffersonian for the White House when an unambiguously
pro-People, anti-Power Elite candidate has not been selected since 1908?
100-to-1? Year upon year of elitist ideology, layer upon layer of party
bureaucracy, dollar upon dollar of corrupt cash, name upon name of false
heroes would have to be undone for such an eventuality to occur. This is
what leads some to join the Green Party and other parties, or to drop out of
the system entirely.

Electoral politics is not the only way, and sometimes it's not even the best
way, to change the world. We would all do well to possess at least a small
measure of anarchism. Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Watchman Nee, George
Orwell, Dwight Macdonald, and Dorothy Day can teach us something valuable.
This is not to say that we should never enlist in political campaigns at
whatever level. But when working within either major party, we should be
realistic about our hopes. Was there ever any reason to think that Dennis
Kucinich was going to end up in the White House? No. Who rules? It's not
Kucinich-friendly types. To loyal Democrats who wish to "recapture" their
party, I say this: It is not enough to go back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
for inspiration. He was part of the problem, not part of the solution. Go
back to William Jennings Bryan. I'm speaking of a Bryan leavened with the
social egalitarianism of Hamer. FDR led to the Vital Center of Schlesinger,
Truman, and Humphrey. Humphrey was a father of neoconservatism. Strange as
it may sound, George W. Bush is in some ways an ideological descendent of
Hubert H. Humphrey. That's true for Bush's budget-busting statism and it's
true for his Wilsonian foreign policy. Who do you think the neocons are
exactly? They're Hubert Humphrey-Henry Jackson Democrats with some
Trotskyite seasoning on top. Meanwhile, DLC leaders are spouting the exact
same line: They evoke the "muscular internationalism" of Truman, Humphrey,
and Jackson. Their favorite senators are Lieberman and Clinton. That's our
supposed choice. Humphrey Democrats or ex-Humphrey Democrats.

Despite their elitism, DLC leaders are smart enough to recognize that Bryan
populism is a double-edged sword in today's political context. In his
Washington Monthly review of A Godly Hero (Michael Kazin's interesting new
biography of Bryan), DLC policy vice president Ed Kilgore notes, "The common
neopopulist prescription of using economic 'populism' to trump cultural
'populism' sets one aspect of Bryanism-and the weaker aspect at that-against
the other. Telling working people who care about cultural issues that they
are expressing displaced anger over their legitimate economic grievances is
condescending at best and insulting at worst and is entirely alien to
Bryan's kind of populism. Moreover, it's an odd kind of populism that cannot
accept 'the people' as they actually are: complicated creatures with a mix
of 'correct' and 'incorrect' views" This is insightful and honest criticism
of the perspective of both Kazin and Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with
Kansas?).

The DLC's response to the dilemma is to reject both kinds of populism. Its
leaders want neither a single-payer healthcare system nor protection of the
unborn, neither a political system free of corporate control nor an
educational system free of the exclusive teaching of atheistic evolution.
Liberals who admire Ralph Nader emphasize economic populism. Conservatives
who admire Pat Buchanan emphasize cultural populism. The populism of Bryan
was complete. It included support for grassroots democracy, opposition to
corporate monopoly, skepticism of entangling alliances, and belief in
traditional Christianity. It may be that this robust populism is too strong
of a drink for modern populists to swallow. Regardless, it remains a flavor
pleasing to a majority of Americans. At the very least, this fact is worth
considering by those of us who still find something of value in the
political process.

Jeff Taylor is a political scientist in Minnesota. His book, Where Did the
Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian
Legacy, is being published by University of Missouri Press in July 2006. For
details, see: http://popcorn78.blogspot.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor05062006.html

This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
You can search right from your browser? It?s easy and it?s free. See how.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/_7bhrC/NGxNAA/yQLSAA/XgSolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->


Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/progchat_action/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
progchat_acti...@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

0 new messages