Why the Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does
A book review of “The New Democrats and the Return to Power” by Al From
A book review of “The New Democrats and the Return to Power” by Al From
There is no end to the whining from Democratic activists after a rotten election, and no end to finger pointing after legislative defeats on contentious questions. his story in the Washington Post is the tell-all of the 2014 wipe-out, featuring the standard recriminations between the President and Congress.story in the Washington Post is the tell-all of the 2014 wipe-out, featuring the standard recriminations between the President and Congress. In it, the chief of staff of the Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, David Krone, attacks the White House. “We were never going to get on the same page… We were beating our heads against the wall.” The litany of excuses is long. Democratic candidates were arrogant. The White House failed to transfer money, or stump effectively. The GOP caught up in the technology race, or the GOP recruited excellent disciplined candidates.
Everything is put on the table, except the main course — policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are you as a political party credible when you say you’ll do something?
This question is never asked, because Democratic elites — ensconced in the law firms, foundations, banks, and media executive suites where the real decisions are made — basically agree with each other about organizing governance around the needs of high technology and high finance. The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders — why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas.
Still, you’d think that someone somewhere would have populist ideas. And a few — like Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren — do. But why does every other candidate not? I don’t actually know, but a book just came out that might answer this question. The theory in this book is simple. The current generation of Democratic policymakers were organized and put in power by people that don’t think that a renewed populist agenda centered on antagonism towards centralized economic power is a good idea.
The book, however, is not written by a populist liberal reformer. It’s written by one of the guys who put the current system in place. And it’s a really good and important story. The New Democrats and the Return to Power is the book, and Al From is the man who wrote it. From was one of the key organizers of this anti-populist movement, and he lays out his in detail his multi-decade organizing strategy and his reasons for what he did.
Now, of course it’s an exaggeration to say that Al From created the culture of the governing class in the modern Democratic Party. But not by much. Don’t take it from me, take it from Bill Clinton. In 2000, at Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hyde Park residence, Clinton said of From, “It would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From.” Clinton overdoes the rhetoric sometimes, but not in this case. From helped put Clinton in the White House.
So who is Al From?
Most people who consider themselves good Democrats don’t know the name Al From, though political insiders certainly do. He was never a cabinet member. He worked in the White House, but in the 1970s, for as a junior staffer for Jimmy Carter’s flailing campaign to stop inflation. He’s never written a famous tell-all book. He hasn’t ever held an elected office, his most high-profile role was as a manager of the domestic policy transition for the White House in 1992, which took just a few months. He doesn’t even have a graduate degree. From fits into that awkward space in American politics, of doer, organizer, activist, convener, a P.T. Barnum of wonks and hacks. Such are the vagaries of American political power, that those who are famous are not always those are the actual architects of power. Because From, a nice, genial, and idealistically business-friendly man, is the structural engineer behind today’s Democratic Party.
To give you a sense of how sprawling From’s legacy actually is, consider the following. Bill Clinton chaired the From’s organization, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and used it as a platform to ascend to the Presidency in 1992. His wife Hillary is a DLC proponent. Al Gore and Joe Biden were DLCers. Barack Obama is quietly an adherent to the “New Democrat” philosophy crafted by From, so are most of the people in his cabinet, and the bulk of the Senate Democrats and House Democratic leaders. From 2007–2011, the New Democrats were the swing bloc in the U.S. House of Representatives, authoring legislation on bailouts and financial regulation of derivatives. And given how Democrats still revere Clinton, so are most Democratic voters, at this point. The DLC no longer exists, but has been folded into the Clinton’s mega-foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, a convening point for the world’s global elite that wants to, or purports to want to, do good. In other words, it’s Al From’s Democratic Party, we just live here.
So From has done us all a favor by writing his memoirs. Unlike most political biopics, which are often of the ‘kiss and tell’ variety and designed to sell books and settle scores, this book seems written by a man who cares more about ideas than personalities. He doesn’t pull punches, because he’s not a particularly high profile figure. I spent some time with From, and while he still has strong feelings towards the Democratic Party, he seems to have no particular interest in the current President. In other words, the story he tells is believable. So if you want to know why America is governed the way it is, this story matters.
The book is loosely divided into three parts, which mirror the shift in the Democratic party itself as baby boomers gradually reorganized it into what it is today. The first was From’s formative political years, from the late 1960s civil rights era to the 1970s inflationary failure of liberal governance. It then moves into the Democrats in the 1980s, when the political eddies of baby boom youth leadership solidified into a clear set of policy elites bent on wielding power. And finally, Bill Clinton took office in 1992, and completed From’s revolution.
Like most great political operatives, From is an idealist, and his formative experience as a young man, like most of the baby boomers he helped boost to power, was the civil rights movement in the South. His view of government comes from his experience working in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, programs that inspired him to reject New Deal policies (while retaining what he saw as its spirit of innovation) and reorganize the Democratic Party. It is surprising, and perhaps not believable in today’s Piketty-infused political economy, that business-friendly Democrats were descendants of the civil rights struggle. But it’s true. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign absorbed Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” model of multi-cultural organizing, and was the first Presidential candidate to talk to gay rights in serious way. Clinton himself notes in the forward to the book that the founding of From’s organization, the DLC, happened in 1985 because of “young Democrats” who were both “inspired by the Civil Rights Movement.” Drawn into politics through the Great Society and the 1972 McGovern campaign, these officials had experienced the campaigns of 1972, 1980, and 1984, Presidential elections in which Democrats lost 49 states. The combination of the campaigns for desegregation, and the brutal electoral shellacking of the political party associated with them, birthed this New Democrat philosophy.
In his first job in 1966, From himself worked for Sargent Shriver in the Office of Economic Opportunity program in the Deep South, the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. Of his early lessons in welfare, From wrote, “Contrary to the conventional wisdom today, the War on Poverty was not a big welfare program. Just the opposite: it was an empowerment program. We hated welfare. In the Deep South, welfare was the tool of a controlling and detested white power structure.” For From, welfare, and eventually most government spending, meant injustice and dependency on the government dole. He relays examples, like Sunflower County, Mississippi, where he was supposed to investigate two competing Head Start programs. From reported back to his boss Shriver that the one with Federal funding was controlled by the white power structure, while the other was run on a volunteer basis by local blacks led by Fannie Lou Hamer. Shriver merged the two programs, forever changing the balance of power in that county. In Lowndes County, Alabama, From witnessed how anti-poverty programs created political power for blacks. He told a story of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee leader John Hulett being elected sheriff of the county just three years later after the Great Society came to their county, and how even George Wallace then courted him.
The anti-racist origins of the New Democrat philosophy matter because of what happened later. One of the key enemies of From’s rise in the 1980s was Jesse Jackson, and the DLC was often castigated as a Southern white men’s caucus because of their use of code words like ‘special interests’ when reflecting on party factions. But the stories From tells about the civil rights era have to do with the rise of black economic and political power as exemplified through a new class of black elected officials. His political organization in the 1980s included African-American politicians like Mississippi Congressman Mike Espy, who became the Secretary of Agriculture under Clinton, and Barbara Jordan, who had become famous for her work investigating Nixon. From told me that Barack Obama was identified early in his state legislative career as a rising star, though his record, From said, was that of a cipher. All of which is to say that the civil rights era birthed modern neoliberalism, not in the sense that it was an inevitable succession to it but in that those who run our neoliberal institutions got their inspiration from it. Clinton’s welfare reform in the 1990s was not a rejection of the civil rights movement, or at least Clinton and From don’t see it that way. It was a continuation of it.
This formative experience as a government-paid social organizer in the late 1960s then transitioned into the 1970s, and then into a confusing decade of policy experiments. From joined the staff of Senator Ed Muskie, the VP candidate in 1968 and a failed Presidential candidate in 1972. Muskie, From argues persuasively, was the political progenitor of Bill Clinton. In 1975, Muskie delivered a harsh rebuke to liberals, saying that “to preserve progressive governance, we had to reform liberalism.” Or less gently, “what’s do damn liberal about wasting money?” For three years, From worked for Muskie as he presented three key legislative proposals that became “important underpinnings of the New Democrat movement.”
The first was the Budget Act, which created the modern way that Congress spends money. Prior to the Budget Act, the Appropriations Committees simply spent a bunch of money, and the revenue committees (Ways and Means in the House, Finance in the Senate) brought in a bunch of tax revenue, with no overall planning to match up the two numbers or set priorities. The Budget Act created a Budget Committee, which forced the two committees to work together under broad government-wide caps. This institutional change made it harder to spend money on social programs, and has been used to implemented austerity policies for decades. Muskie reformed the process by which the government spent money, and in doing so, plugged up the mechanism that had been used by liberals to finance their government programs. It was a straight anti-New Deal institutional innovation.
The second and third bills, though politically significant, never became law. These were the Sunset Act, which would have forced every government program to end after four years unless Congress affirmatively renewed it, and the Countercyclical Revenue Sharing. This act would have automatically sent money to cities in times of recession, and automatically cut it in boom times. It was similar to the Federal Reserve in moving fiscal policy out of the realm of politics, though not as drastically. Both suggested aspects of what was to come — a government which would have to justify every penny of spending, and power moved out of democratic and into the technocratic realms.
