How Democrats Lost the Election: Part 1 of The Let Them Eat Cake Chronicles
“If Liberals are so f**king smart how come the lose so go***m always?” Will McAvoy
The DNC lost the election. Trump won with roughly as many votes as Romney. Eeking out a win when as many people like you as the last loser is not as Trump would say, “tremendous.” On the other hand, Hillary appears to have lost roughly four million Democratic voters since the last election. Even more surprisingly she lost 9 percentage points among people of color from Obama’s coalition, and she was running against a man endorsed by the KKK. Hillary was the chosen one of the Democratic establishment, and even the looming possibility of an abhorred Trump presidency couldn’t scare voters out to the polls. However, Democrats’ rejection of Hillary should come as no surprise. Democratic administrations have relentlessly abused their core constituencies and Hillary provided no credible deviation from this sordid past. In fact, the Democratic establishment has been screwing unionists, people of color, the working class, and the poor since the Carter administration nearly half a century ago. While there were certainly factors beyond
The first great Democrat salvo against traditional left wing bases of power was launched by the Carter administration. This salvo included sweeping actions against unionists and the appointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker who said, “the standard of living of the average American has to decline.”
Reagan is hailed as the great Union buster of the 20th century largely due to his firing of thousands of air traffic controllers during the strike of 1981. However, it was Carter who designed the plans for such an event. When the government’s contracts with the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) was nearing its expiration Carter started assembling teams designed to prepare for all contingencies. Reagan’s grand act of firing those union employees was simply an execution of the plans laid forth by his democratic predecessor. In addition to the PATCO plans the Carter administration presided over the passing of legislation that substantially deregulated rail lines and trucking, all leading to a profound drop in union participation, and a decline from which unions have never recovered.
Reagan’s administration also started off with an interest rate hike that crashed the economy, overwhelmingly hurt the poor, but secured the asset prices of the rich. This policy of interest rate hikes was in fact designed by the very same Paul Volcker that Carter appointed to the head of the federal reserve.
Next on the list of Democratic leaders who betrayed core left wing constituencies is Bill Clinton. Bill enjoys the bizarre moniker of “America’s first black president.” This nickname was given by Toni Morrison, and confirmed at the Congressional Black Caucus dinner in 2008. This title however in almost no way reflects how the Clinton Administration treated black people.
Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement act of 1994. Not only did he sign this bill into law, but it was proposed and passed by both a Democratic House and senate. This bill included more than $15 billion dollars in new funds to expand the prison industrial complex, an apparatus that has notoriously and unfairly disadvantaged people of color. The bill by the way was originally authored by Joe Biden who become the vice president of the next democrat in office.
On top of that Bill Clinton’s administration presided over a profound increase in the size and scope of the war on drugs. Once again Clinton expanded a federal program that has disproportionately hurt people of color. Furthermore his administration signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This law gutted the welfare system. This disproportionately impacted people of color for the worse. Bill Clinton even pushed through NAFTA, a trade agreement that eliminated hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in America, which screwed the working class and the poor.
The hits don’t end either. The 2007 banking crisis was in large part a manifestation of banks designing and selling duplicitous mortgages to the poor. This crisis was in large part enabled by the repeal of key banking regulation, most prominently the repeal Glass Steagall act. It was Clinton who presided over this wave of short sighted and ultimately catastrophic deregulation which doomed much of the world’s middle class and poor. This brings us to Obama.
To be sure, Obama represented a courteous half step towards the hopes of the America’s Unionists, it’s working class and poor people, and its people of color. Some of the good things he tried to accomplish were stymied at every turn by a Republican party that was more interested in inflicting political harm to Obama than effectively running the nation. Infrastructure programs were slashed, the ACA faced/faces a comical degree of resistance, and despite there being more embassy bombings and an equal number of American deaths (62 more deaths total) during the Bush administration, the Benghazi attack received 13 more investigations than all of the Bush Bombings combined. Bush by the way was investigated 0 times.
All of that said, there was a clear pattern of mistreating democratic power bases under the Obama administration, much of which was in policy realms congress had no or little authority over. The aforementioned banking crisis included banks fraudulently selling mortgages to the poor, widespread accounting control fraud, and ultimately led to the collapse of millions of jobs for middle and low income workers the world over. Did Obama show any reticence to sign onto the Troubled Asset Relief Program passed under the Bush administration? No (this was a good decision. Did the Obama administration seek criminal prosecutions against any bankers responsible for this economic collapse born of criminality and greed? No (this was not such a good decision). On top of that, during the Obama administration banks were caught laundering money for terrorists, laundering money for international drug cartels, providing the working framework for Bernie Madoff’s $64 Billion dollar Ponzi scheme, fixing international interest rates, and more. How many high level bankers did the Obama administration seek prosecutions for? Zero.
There was however a group of people that the Obama DOJ assaulted with a zeal unmatched by any, and indeed every, other presidential administration combined. Obama sought more prosecutions against whistleblowers and journalists under the Espionage Act than every other president combined. On top of that Obama argued vociferously for the right of the federal government to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of U.S. citizens. The takeaway from this is that the Obama administration saw robbing the poor as merely worthy of a slap on the wrist, while exercising the First Amendment and Habeas Corpus were for criminal scum.
To be sure issues of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and education played significant roles in the outcome of the most recent election. To bury one’s head in the sand about those issues that affect the American experience would be a tremendous disservice to one’s intellectual well being and a greater disservice to the millions of American’s who struggle with those issues on a daily basis. That being said, none of those factors made Trump a numerically more appealing candidate than Romney. Hillary, the face of the Democratic Establishment lost. She lost because the Democrats, often in consort with the Republicans, abandoned the principles and values which the party claims to uphold. If the Democrats want to make any serious gains as a political party they will have to reach out to the voters they abandoned or outright rejected, whether or not they learn that lesson is yet to be seen.
Next time on The Let Them Eat Cake Chronicles, Ken and Barbie. How Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton represent each party’s disconnect with voters and reality.
Photo in the public domain taken by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad McNeeley