Is a Jackson revival under way? I'm referring not to the late King of Pop but to the 19th century populist president whom his opponents called "King Andrew." According to Michael Barone, in the 2010 elections Republicans have a chance to knock Democrats out of as many as three dozen insecure congressional seats in "Jacksonian districts."
By itself, this would merely reinforce the identification of the Party Formerly Known as Lincoln's with the white South. But in a time of popular anger over banker bonuses and lobby-hobbled government, the themes of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism have appeal far beyond the Scots-Irish enclaves of the Appalachians and Ozarks. Witness the calls from Democrats as well as Republicans for President Obama to oust Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and pay more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street.
In itself, American populism is neither left nor right. Translated into economics, Jacksonian populism spells producerism. For generations, Jacksonian populists have believed that the hardworking majority of small producers is threatened from above and below by two classes of drones: unproductive capitalists and unproductive paupers. While government promotion of public goods like defense, infrastructure and utilities that benefit all citizens is acceptable, Jacksonomics is suspicious of crony capitalists who owe their fortunes to political connections (can you spell B-A-I-L-O-U-T?). And Jacksonian producerism naturally is haunted by the nightmare of a class of the idle poor, who are capable of working but instead live off the labors of others and lack an ownership stake in the community.
Reform movements have succeeded in the United States only when their programs resonated with populist and producerist values. Lincoln's antislavery Republicans succeeded where the earlier Whigs had failed because the Republicans persuaded Jacksonian farmers that snobbish, parasitic Southern Democratic slave owners were a greater threat to white farmers and white workers in the Midwest than rich Republican bankers and industrialists in the Northeast. Lincoln's Hamiltonian program of aid to railroads and national banking had to be sweetened with the offer of Western homesteads for yeoman farmers before former Jacksonian Democrats would join his coalition.
In the 20th century, the most popular and enduring legacies of the New Deal have been the programs compatible with small-d Jacksonian democracy -- public spending on infrastructure like dams and electric grids and highways, the promotion of single-family home ownership, federal aid to education and Social Security and Medicare, two entitlements tied to individual work by means of the payroll tax. In contrast, welfare for the nonworking poor was always unpopular with most New Deal Democratic voters, who preferred public works programs like the WPA, CCC and CETA to relief payments for the poor and unemployed. Although he broke with the New Deal tradition in other ways, President Bill Clinton was true to its spirit when he collaborated with the Republicans in converting "welfare" from an unpopular federal entitlement to state-based workfare programs.
All too often in American politics the populist distinction between producers and parasites has been mapped onto the racial division between whites and nonwhites. But the Jacksonian republican concern about freeloaders is not, in itself, racist. And it has frequently manifested itself in anger at the freeloading rich as well as the freeloading poor. At the moment, populist anxieties about the nonworking poor or illegal immigrants receiving medical coverage are eclipsed by populist anger at federal bailouts for well-connected Wall Street bankers who pay themselves titanic bonuses for unproductive gambling with other people's money.
Here, one might think, would be an opening for the center-left. And yet the Obama Democrats, unlike the Roosevelt Democrats, cannot take advantage of the popular backlash against Wall Street. Why?
One reason is that the attempt of the "New Democrats" like Clinton, Al Gore and Obama to win Wall Street campaign donations has been all too successful. As Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin helped complete the conversion of the Democrats from a party of unions and populists into a party of financial elites and college-educated professionals. Subsequently Obama raised more money from Wall Street than his Democratic primary rivals and John McCain. On becoming president, he turned over economic policymaking to Rubin's protégé Larry Summers and others like Timothy Geithner from the Wall Street Democratic network.
The financial industry is now to the Obama Democrats what the AFL-CIO was to the Roosevelt-to-Johnson Democrats. It is touching to watch progressives lament that "their" president has the wrong advisors. "We trust the czar, we simply dislike his ministers." Obama owed his meteoric rise from obscurity to the presidency not to any bold progressive ideas -- he didn't have any -- but rather to a combination of his appealing life story with the big money that allowed him to abandon campaign finance limits. According to one Obama supporter I know, the Obama campaign pressured its Wall Street donors to make their contributions in the form of many small checks, in order to create the illusion that the campaign was more dependent on small contributors than it was in fact. Even now President Obama continues to raise money on Wall Street, while his administration says no to every progressive proposal for significant structural reform of the financial industry.
There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama's White House -- and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires' club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives to channel popular outrage? Unfortunately, progressivism in the form in which it has evolved in the last generation does not resonate with populist producerism.
To begin with, most of the moral fervor of the contemporary center-left has been diverted from the issue of fair rewards for labor to the environmental movement. In theory, environmentalism ought to fit the populist narrative of defending shared goods against special interests. Indeed, clean air and water legislation and public parks and wilderness areas are broadly popular with working-class Americans, not least hunters and fishers. But many environmentalists insist that global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately "densified" cities with mass transit. Whether environmentalists propose to engineer this utopian social transformation by tax incentives or coercive laws, the campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.
Even if it had not been eclipsed by moralistic lifestyle environmentalism, contemporary economic progressivism would be crippled by its own priorities. New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. Post-New Deal progressivism is primarily about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. This inversion of priorities is underlined by the agenda of the Democrats since the last election -- universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.
It is only in the post-New Deal era that universal healthcare has become the Holy Grail of the American center-left, rather than, say, full employment or a living wage. Sure, Democrats from Truman to Johnson sought universal healthcare, and Medicare for the elderly was a down payment for that goal. But the main concern of the New Dealers was providing economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have the bargaining power to obtain their fair share of the new wealth in the form of wages, you don't need a vastly bigger welfare state. Having forgotten the New Deal's emphasis on high-wage work, all too many of today's progressives seem to have internalized the right's caricature of FDR-to-LBJ liberalism as being primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor.
This shift in emphasis is connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor. And progressive redistributionism also reflects the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base. Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on the populist values of the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism tends to define center-left politics not as self-help on the part of citizens but rather as charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.
At a recent event in Washington, I was surprised when a Democratic senator said, "The major threat facing America today is the class divide." The speaker was Jim Webb of Virginia, the self-conscious heir to Scots-Irish Jacksonian populism. He went on to attack the inhumane treatment of prisoners in American jails and the avoidance of military service by the American elite.
Populists like Webb are rare in today's Democratic Party, while the Republicans, for all their folksy rhetoric, offer nothing but the economic program of their Wall Street Journal/Club for Growth wing. If mass unemployment and slow growth persist for years, some sort of third-party, "Middle American" populist movement in 2012 seems possible. (Lou Dobbs: tanned, rested and ready?)
Could a new wave of populist independents be steered into the Democratic Party? Alas, that seems unlikely, if Democrats are viewed as the compromised, establishmentarian governing party. Moreover, the Republican Party benefited from the last two populist upheavals. Richard Nixon built the generation-long hegemony of the Republicans on the anger of George Wallace voters, and, following the campaign of Ross Perot in 1992, Newt Gingrich captured anti-system reformism to build a Republican congressional majority for most of the period between 1994 and 2006.
In each case, liberals and progressives indiscriminately rejected the populist voters. The Wallace voters, most of whom were New Deal Democrats, were dismissed by most liberals as though they were motivated by nothing but opposition to racial integration. In 1992 the New Republic published an idiotic cover with Perot dressed as Mussolini, implying that he and his supporters were crypto-fascists. Today ridicule of the bombastic Sarah Palin shades all too easily into loathing for the lower middle class.
It would be much easier for the Republicans to rebuild the conservative-populist coalition that dominated American politics from 1968 to 2006 than it would be for the Democrats to rebuild the kind of liberal-populist coalition of the New Deal era from 1932 to 1968. Will the Democrats be marginalized a third time rather than empowered by anti-system populism? In the next few election cycles we may find out.
Senate Democrats on Sunday sparred with each other over how to fix the nation's troubled health care system, the moderates threatening to scuttle legislation if their demands weren't met and the more liberal members warning their party leaders not to bend.
The dispute among Democrats foretells of a rowdy floor debate next month on legislation that would extend health care coverage to roughly 31 million Americans. Republicans have already made clear they aren't supporting the bill.
Final passage is in jeopardy, even after the chamber's historic 60-39 vote Saturday night to begin debate.
"I don't want a big-government, Washington-run operation that would undermine the ... private insurance that 200 million Americans now have," said Sen. Ben Nelson, a conservative Nebraska Democrat.
Nelson and three other moderates -- Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman -- agreed to open debate despite expressing reservations on the measure. Each of them has warned that they might not support the final bill.
One major sticking point is a provision that would allow Americans to buy a federal-run insurance plan if their state allows it. Moderates say they worry the so-called public option will become a huge and costly entitlement program and that other requirements in the bill could cripple businesses.
"I don't want to fix the problems in our health care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis," said Lieberman.
The sway held by such a small group of senators has annoyed their more liberal colleagues, who could vote against a final bill if it becomes too watered down.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said he didn't think rank-and-file Democrats would feel compelled to go that far. At the same time, Brown warned Democratic leaders not to make too many concessions.
"I don't want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the rest of the country -- when the public option has this much support -- that (a public option is) not going to be in it," said Brown.
The Senate bill would require most Americans to carry insurance and provide subsidies to those who couldn't afford it. Large companies could incur costs if they did not provide coverage to their work force. The insurance industry would come under significant new regulation under the bill, which would first ease and then ban the practice of denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.
Congressional budget analysts put the legislation's cost at $979 billion over a decade and say it would reduce deficits over the same period while extending coverage to 94 percent of the eligible population.
The House approved its version of the bill earlier this month on a near party-line vote of 220-215.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said the health care bill must be passed by the end of the year so that President Barack Obama and Congress can to shift their attention to the economy and improving employment rates.
Such a timeline also would enable Obama to claim victory on a major domestic priority when he delivers his State of the Union speech in January. With one-third of Senate seats up for election in 2010, politics will factor heavily into the outcome of the debate over health care.
Sen. Michael Bennet, a junior Democrat who will be seeking his first full term next year in Colorado, where many districts lean conservative, said he would support the health care overhaul even if doing so means losing his seat.
"The thing that our working families need more than anything else is to end these double-digit cost increases that they're having every single year with health insurance," Bennet said.
Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said he believes there are enough votes to include a public insurance option in the bill as long as states were allowed to opt out. To do so, all 58 Democrats and independent Sens. Lieberman and Bernie Sanders of Vermont would have to support it.
Lieberman and Nelson have said they object to the public option. On Sunday, Nelson said he is open to negotiating the provision; he said he would prefer allowing states to opt into the program, instead of having to remove themselves.
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said the lingering reservations by moderate Democrats indicate that the party's leaders have gone too far. On Saturday, no Republican voted to begin debate on the bill, which they said would cripple industry and drive up costs for the average American.
"I believe there are a number of Democratic senators who do care what the American people think and are not interested in this sort of arrogant approach that everybody sort of shut up and sit down, get out of the way, we know what's best for you," said McConnell.
Brown, Bennet and McConnell appeared on CNN's "State of the Union." Lieberman appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press." Nelson appeared on ABC's "This Week."
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Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor and Philip Elliott contributed to this report.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can rest at least a little bit easier tonight. As he heads into the first vote in his chamber on Democrats' healthcare reform bill, he knows he has at least one senator who was wavering on his side.
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said Friday that he will vote with his fellow Democrats Saturday night on a cloture motion that will allow the Senate to begin debating the legislation.
"Throughout my Senate career I have consistently rejected efforts to obstruct," Nelson said in a statement. "That's what the vote on the motion to proceed is all about. It is not for or against the new Senate health care bill released Wednesday .... If you don't like a bill why block your own opportunity to amend it?"
Another key vote, though, remains uncommitted. Majority Whip Dick Durbin had said Friday that Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., had told Reid how she'll vote, implying that she, too, was a yes. He's since walked that back, however, and Lincoln remains publicly uncommitted. So does Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.
Elsewhere on Salon today, there's a great piece from Joe Conason on Lincoln and her vote. You can read it here.
There's still quite a bit of time left before voters go to the ballot box for the midterm elections next year. But two recent polls are giving them reason to be nervous -- and there's a chance they could affect the Democratic agenda over the next year, too.
Gallup recently ran a poll in which it asked respondents whether, if the election were held right now -- and without knowing the identity of the candidates in their district -- they'd vote for the Democrat or the Republican. (This is known as a "generic ballot" poll.) Turns out the Republicans have a four percentage point advantage -- quite a different result from when Democrats were leading by six points back in July. The margin of error is plus or minus four percentage points, however, so Democrats might be rightfully tempted to dismiss that result.
What they can't ignore, though, is what Gallup found about the GOP's lead among independents. Among that segment of the population, Republicans lead on the generic ballot by a fairly stunning 22 points, up from just one point in July.
There are reasons that Democrats shouldn't be panicking over these results, at least not yet. Polls are snapshots, pictures of a moment in time, rather than being truly predictive, for one thing. Plus, as Gallup itself points out, "Though the registered-voter results reported here speak to the preferences of all eligible voters, voter turnout is crucial in determining the final outcome of midterm elections."
Problem is, there's another new poll out, this one from Pew, that shows Republicans and those who lean Republican are much more enthusiastic about voting next year than Democrats are. That's not surprising, considering the makeup of the government right now, but it is worth remembering the impact that voter enthusiasm can have on a race -- one need look no further than President Obama's own election to see that.
The other thing that should probably concern progressives about these polling numbers is the potential response from elected Democrats. If they're already nervous about independents turning against them, some -- especially those in more conservative areas -- might decide it's too risky to back all or part of their party's agenda, especially healthcare reform.
WASHINGTON -- Bill Clinton had a pretty simple message for Senate Democrats on Tuesday: don't screw this healthcare stuff up.
"The worst thing to do is nothing," Clinton said he told the party's weekly lunch meeting. "It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act, to move to start the ball rolling, to claim the evident advantages that all these plans agree with. And whatever they can get the votes for, I'm going to support."
That kind of bluntness was probably what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, was going for when he asked the former president a few days ago to speak to the lunch. Democrats are struggling to hold their members in line so they have the 60 votes needed to block likely GOP attempts to filibuster the legislation. The healthcare bill the House passed Saturday night didn't entirely set conservative Senate Democrats' minds at ease. So Clinton came in to tell the caucus they had to act, even if they didn't love whatever the legislative process produced. And they have to act fast, he said -- by next year, President Obama will have to focus more on the economy to help it recover, and it'll be too late for healthcare.
Clinton, obviously, was the last Democratic president to try to fix the country's healthcare system. Senators said he didn't spend much time dwelling on how the process did or didn't work in 1993 and 1994, but he did remind them that opportunities for reform don't come up that often.
Democrats are still grappling with questions about what kind of public option the Senate's healthcare bill should have, how to handle the abortion restrictions the House put into its bill and how to pay for some of the costs of the legislation. But Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told Salon Clinton didn't get into any of that, preferring to focus on the big picture. Though Clinton took a few questions from senators after speaking, none of them dealt with healthcare, Cardin said.
The former president's Secret Service detail, and the Capitol Police, blocked off several hallways as Clinton left the lunch, but that didn't stop a large crowd from gathering on the second floor, hoping to get a glimpse of, or catch a few words from, him. Clinton obliged, staying for about 10 minutes to take questions from reporters and generally bask in the attention before aides shuttled him out of the building.
American women will pay the price for the Democratic dithering that allowed Saturday's passage of the Stupak-Pitts amendment, a worm virus inserted into the House healthcare reform bill with surgical precision. But the Democratic Party will suffer collateral damage.
Stupak-Pitts isn't just "the biggest restriction on women's right to choose in our generation," as Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado puts it; it's also evidence that on abortion the Democratic Party is now captive, just like the GOP, to Christian conservatism. Of course, Republicans traded away their party's moderate wing for real electoral gains, a base that propelled them to power for decades. The Democrats, already in power, sucker-punched themselves, and all they have to show for it is a big fat shiner in the shape of Bart Stupak's knuckles.
But if Stupak, a former state trooper from Michigan, provided the muscle, his partner, Joe Pitts -- a Pennsylvania Republican with decades in the trenches of the antiabortion battle -- may have brought the brains, and more, a new Christian right coalition custom tailored for the Democratic Party's growing religious conservatism. Stupak is Roman Catholic; Pitts is evangelical. Both are members of the predominantly evangelical organization called the Family; Stupak lives in its C Street house. Together, they're poster boys for the evangelical/conservative Catholic alliance known as "co-belligerency," a culture war strategy designed to take territory within the Democratic Party as well the GOP.
Stupak, the Democratic co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, insists that his amendment does nothing more than ensure that the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of federal funds for abortions, is carried over into healthcare reform. Even some of Stupak's angriest critics within the party concede that Stupak might actually believe that -- nobody has ever accused him of being a subtle legislator. (Though Stupak himself, long known for his amiability, now boasts that he was hiding his "wolfiness" all along.) But the facts are plain: Stupak-Pitts will use the Hyde Amendment as a lever with which to radically roll back abortion rights, effectively strong-arming private insurers -- most of which will be enmeshed with the federal government now -- into abandoning coverage for abortions.
Much is being made in the media about the role played by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, which lobbied hard for the amendment. "We just have to accept this as a Catholic thing," goes the new conventional wisdom. Leaving aside the fact that a strong majority of American Catholics are pro-choice, that story line obscures the increasingly significant role played by evangelical conservatives within the Democratic Party.
Start with Stupak and Pitts themselves. Although Stupak is a Catholic, he's lived since at least 2002 in the C Street house run by the Family, which cultivates political leaders on behalf of a long-term vision of what Joe Pitts, speaking at last year's National Prayer Breakfast (the group's only public event), called "God-led government." After the summer sex scandals of Sen. John Ensign, Gov. Mark Sanford and former Rep. Chip Pickering, C Streeters all, made the Capitol Hill address infamous, Stupak denied any knowledge about the house he lives in. "I don't know what you're talking about," Stupak told Michigan reporters when asked about his residence in the house, where he's been enjoying below-market rent for the last seven years, courtesy of C Street's tax-exempt status as a church. But when the Los Angeles Times asked Stupak about his role there in 2002, he pleaded secrecy instead of ignorance: "We sort of don't talk to the press about the house."
That's putting it mildly. In its internal documents, the Family refers to itself as an "invisible organization" and the "prayer cells" into which it organizes politicians as "invisible ‘believing groups.'" That doesn't make it a conspiracy. Rather, the Family represents the soft-sell side of conservative evangelicalism, a social movement that goes beyond -- or maybe beneath -- pulpit pounding and political purity in pursuit of ideological influence on both sides of the aisle. Longtime Family leader Doug Coe, dubbed the "stealth persuader" on Time magazine's list of the 25 most influential evangelicals, declares in a sermon delivered to evangelical leaders that "the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have."
Joe Pitts can testify to that. It's a safe bet that until Stupak-Pitts, few Americans beyond Pennsylvania Amish country had even heard of the avuncular Republican, a former gym teacher who rarely attaches his name to legislation. And yet he's been a driving force in the antiabortion fight for more than three decades. It was Pitts, a "core" member of the Family, who helped bring antiabortion politics into the organization back in the early 1980s. The Family's focus has always tended toward foreign affairs and economics; Pitts merged the two with the red-hot politics of the abortion wars, quietly exporting free-market fundamentalism and draconian social policy overseas. Pitts and Stupak have joined forces on that front before, teaming up to try to turn President Bush's underfunded but laudable President's Emergency Relief for AIDS initiative into an antiabortion crusade. What they couldn't achieve abroad, they've now brought back home, and then some.
They had plenty of help, starting at the Family's C Street House. It's home not just to Stupak but also to antiabortion Democrats Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania and Heath Shuler of North Carolina, and two of the Senate's fiercest abortion foes, Oklahoma's Tom Coburn -- an obstetrician who once mused on applying the death penalty to abortion providers -- and South Carolina's Jim DeMint, famous for pledging to make healthcare reform Obama's Waterloo. Other Family associates lining up behind Stupak-Pitts include evangelicals Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., John Tanner, D-Tenn., and Lincoln Davis, a Democrat from Tennessee who once proclaimed that no Republican could "outgun, out-pray, or out-family me."
These Family ties don't mean that Stupak-Pitts is a plot hatched at C Street. The Family offers politicians a "worldview," not a vote machine. In the documents stored at the archive of the Fellowship Foundation -- one of the Family's multiple nonprofit entities -- at evangelical Wheaton College, congressional briefings typically lead off with reminders that the Family's prayer groups don't take direct action but rather facilitate the behind-the-scenes relationships that lead to action. "One person grows desirous of pursuing an action," Sen. Sam Brownback, a Family man and former C Street resident, explained the process to me, "and others pull in behind."
Which raises the question: Who's pulling whom? Did backbencher Bart Stupak really come up with the bluff that led pro-choice Democrats to abandon not one but two compromises, one of which Stupak himself seemed to be signing off on earlier this summer? Or was it Pitts, an abortion-wars warrior since the 1970s, and a longtime leader of the House Values Action Team -- an off-the-record caucus of religious right organizations and members of Congress -- who drew up the blueprint?
Neither Stupak nor Pitts is talking. Of course, if they just keep quiet, the press will pin it on the bishops -- who, to be fair, are more than happy to take credit. That version of events neglects the role of relationships forged within the evangelical context of the Family -- a group founded in the spirit of virulent anti-Catholicism, and which maintains to this day that being Catholic brings you no closer to Christ than being Jewish or a Muslim -- and the growing evangelical movement within the Democratic Party. A source close to the Faith Table, a gathering of ostensibly progressive Christians helmed by evangelical leader Jim Wallis, notes that the group has been agitating for Stupak-Pitts for months, with Wallis declaring Stupak-Pitts the most important vote of the year.
He may have been right about that. Right now, even the diluted healthcare reform bill that's limping toward more mauling in the Senate looks like the result of a historic vote. But as a weather vane, Stupak-Pitts tells us which way the wind is blowing. Last time the Democrats possessed this much power in Washington, the Dixiecrats tried to hold the party hostage. Now, it's the faith-based Democrats. Dixiecrats were racists, plain and simple; the faith-based Democrats are a more complicated bunch, a mix of genuinely moral conservatives, many of them to the left on economic issues, political cowards, and default Blue Dogs. They're anti-choice and anti-gay but, by God, they're about love, not hate, a gentler fundamentalism, a faith based in the conflation of Christianity and the Constitution, not the substitution of one for the other. So that's progress, right?
"Sure," says the Faith Table dissident who reports that the council of "progressive Christians" was not willing to even consider any deal that didn't leap past the Hyde Amendment into a new country -- or maybe it's old -- of abortion restrictions. "If you're playing horseshoes with James Dobson."
Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.
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