{"id":4620,"date":"2021-11-12T11:46:34","date_gmt":"2021-11-12T16:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4620"},"modified":"2021-11-17T23:12:54","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T04:12:54","slug":"welcome-to-the-quagmire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/11\/welcome-to-the-quagmire\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the quagmire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of years, social democrats and liberals have turned into contortionists trying to explain why the U.S. Left is already on the winning path. More of the same has followed the November 2021 elections.<\/p>\n

In an especially disappointing article<\/a>, baldly titled, \u201cLast Week\u2019s Elections Were Not a Repudiation of the Left\u201d Jacobin\u2019s Branko Marcetic resorts to rhetorical tricks. In this imaginary New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy\u201425 years Goldman Sachs alum, and former finance chair to the Democratic National Committee, and Ambassador to Germany\u2014gets painted as a \u201cprogressive\u201d and a friend of the socialist Left. And the fact that 23 of 33 candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won election last week is held up as further evidence, without much thought to either the politics of these candidates, their endorsement, or their ultimate accountability to DSA and the Left.<\/p>\n

In this context, Tempest welcomes the post-election analysis by Kim Moody<\/strong>, author of the forthcoming Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action & The New Socialist Movement in the United States<\/a> from Haymarket Books<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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T<\/span>he recent Democratic defeat in Virginia, near defeat in New Jersey, and losses elsewhere underline a problem about which social democratic and progressive Democrats in Congress seem unaware. They are right that coming out of the worst of the pandemic, working-class people want economic relief, better jobs, and genuine advances on income (as the \u201cquit\u201d rate and strike uptick<\/a> indicate), healthcare, good schools, housing, and more. Yet Democratic Congressional self-styled progressives (from the Squad to much of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)) have abandoned any hope of their original goals such as the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-All, serious taxes on the rich, etc. Rather, they have settled on the Biden agenda (the Build Back Better budget bill) as the \u201cleft-wing of the possible” in terms of legislation.<\/p>\n

In so doing, this Democratic Party left has engaged with more determination than most of their fellow Democrats who are actually more favorable to the Biden agenda. They have signed up to save the Democrats from themselves. Faced with stubborn resistance from the party\u2019s right to a big \u201ctax and spend\u201d budget (the reconciliation bill), the Congressional left has borrowed the minority obstructionist tactics of the Manchin-Sinema-Blue Dog right. In this case, the progressives refused to pass the infrastructure bill they know the right desperately wants for its \u201cpork\u201d benefits until the budget reconciliation bill\u2014that contains such social benefits as there are in the Biden agenda\u2014is passed. Chair of the CPC Pramila Jayapal has stood firm, although she has brought only about half of the CPC\u2019s 95 members with her in this tactic. Nonetheless, as parliamentary maneuvers go, this no doubt seemed pretty shrewd.<\/p>\n

The problem is: what works for the right doesn\u2019t necessarily work for the left\u2014not for the liberal-progressive legislative left and its tiny socialist minority. The miscalculation in this tactic is that the right knows they will eventually get the infrastructure bill because the progressives and the Biden Administration, not to mention important sections of capital, need it as well. The Manchin-Sinema-Blue Dog Senate-House mafia could wait a while for this year\u2019s pulled pork. They demanded more and more concessions, certain in the knowledge that the Biden administration cannot afford a government shut-down later this year given its already plunging approval ratings and need to hold onto its slim majority in 2022. And, of course, that is what happened<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Blue Dog Cosplay? Protest at Blue Cross\/Anthem Corporate Offices in San Francisco on Feb 25, 2010. Photo<\/a> by Auntie Ruth 2009.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thus, the real leverage here was always with the right. So, they held out consistently and forced the centrist Democrats to whittle down the budget and its social benefits. The social-democratic left has put itself in the position of being the staunchest defenders of the Biden (wholly inadequate) \u201cframework\u201d and program even as its melts away before their eyes because Biden, the Pelosi leadership (which was supported by this same left) with approval of the centrists of the New Democrat Coalition and the moderates in the CPC cave in one step at a time. So, the budget has gone from Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders’ original $6 trillion to $3.5 trillion, and now down to $1.7 trillion.<\/p>\n

Since all of this drawn-out maneuvering and its general ineffectiveness in moving the right has been well-publicized in the media, what the voting public sees in the Democratic Congress and the Biden administration is not the relief they crave or at least hoped for, but endless, increasingly bitter squabbles between members of the governing Democratic Party. While the Republicans oppose all the even remotely progressive aspects of the reconciliation bill, they have had the luxury of sitting, hands folded and watching the Democratic center and right do their work for them\u2014with, of course, the occasional vicious racist attack, such as that on Rashida Tlaib for opposing the Iron Dome missile gift to Israel. (Some Democrats joined the attack, while not one Democrat stood to defend her. An almost insignificant eight Democrats voted against Iron Dome, and two\u2014AOC and Henry Johnson of Georgia\u2014vainly sought political safety in voting \u201cpresent.\u201d While nominal DSA member, Jamaal Bowman, voted in favor<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party\u2019s Congressional left\u2018s tactic, its right\u2019s intransigence, and its center\u2019s predictable spinelessness is to political quagmire what Vietnam and Afghanistan were to military quagmires\u2014though, of course, even with COVID-19 deaths and the deprivation that will result from legislative retreat the human cost of those two \u201cendless wars” was far greater.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the consequence of this Congressional quagmire is a contribution not only to the recently lost elections in which young (disillusioned?) Democratic voters failed to turn out, Biden\u2019s approval rating dove \u201cunderwater\u201d<\/a> (51.6 percent disapprove to 42.5 percent approve, as of November 11), and the almost certain loss of a Congressional majority in 2022. Not surprisingly, people who have emerged from a deadly, disorienting health and economic crisis that turned millions of lives upside down are not impressed by Byzantine maneuvers, parliamentary squabbles, and disappearing political promises.<\/p>\n