Thomas Frank It's Clinton Who Wrecked the Democratic Party

7:01PM Feb 9, 2021

Speakers:

Keywords:

nafta

remember

democrats

insult

clinton

democratic party

blue collar workers

economists

democratic

henceforth

deregulated

strategy

economic

recovery

congress

ensure

assured

obstruction

study

greatest ally

It is not a coincidence that all the economic gains have this recovery, presided over by a democratic president who we are constantly assured as the most liberal of all possible presidents, that all the gains of this recovery have gone to the already wealthy. And this is not or I should say, not merely because sinister Republicans have consistently thwarted the righteous liberal will Yes, I know that Republicans are awful, and that they play the game in this sort of extraordinary way. Right, that they are very, very good at obstruction. That's what they do. But what we're what I'm describing here, and this issue with the banks is a straight up democratic failure. Obama, I mean, there's no other conclusion that it's possible that's possible to draw, Obama played this issue the way he did, because that's how he wanted to play it. Now, I call this a failure. But you know what the right word for it is, and that word is betrayal. And the history of this betrayal goes back a long way. When I was when I was young, back in the 70s, and the 80s, the Democratic Party, if you remember, back then was forever grappling with its identity, the right fighting with all the democrats were forever fighting with one another with one another over who they were, and what they stood for. And this went on for year after year after year. And they're all of these different factions within the Democratic Party. And I can describe them for you in detail it later, if you want, where you can, you can read the book, and it's kind of fun to remember all this stuff. But they, they fought like cats and dogs on nearly everything. But they agreed on one thing, there was one thing that all of these different factions within the Democratic Party agreed on, and that was that Democrats had to turn away from the legacy of the New Deal with its fixation on working class people, right. So they disagreed on everything else. But that was one thing that they all came together on. And the man who brought closure to that long democratic Civil War was President Bill Clinton, who brought a kind of new new style of democratic administration to Washington. And if we want to understand how we got to where we are today, it's his administration that we have to study in some detail, consider what he did. You know, when he became president, rather than paying homage to the politics of Franklin Roosevelt, as all Democrats, this is sort of the ritual that Democrats had always done before him. Clinton did the opposite. He did these kind of singular favors for Roosevelt's enemies for the banks, the radio networks, the power companies, basically the bosses, he deregulated Wall Street, and not just once, it wasn't just one or two measures, it was consistently through his administration, deregulated Wall Street ensured that derivative securities would henceforth be traded without any kind of federal supervision, deregulated radio and telecoms, and basically put an end to the federal welfare system. Remember the in the famous Welfare Reform Act of 96. Now again, I'm I'm talking about the clinton era, because I think this is really the critical time for understanding what what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party. He had a Clinton had a strategy that he would use as a as a candidate, where he would y'all remember this, he would go out of his way to insult or distance himself from some representative of a traditional democratic constituency, thus assuring the public that he was his own man. The most famous example of this was Jesse Jackson, whom Clinton contrived to insult before the cameras of the nation. It was called the sister souljah moment, and people don't really remember the particulars of it, but they remember that he did this, that he managed to insult Jackson to his face. And you know, the theory behind all this was very simple. You heard it all the time back in the clinton year, I mean, what are these people gonna do, they got nowhere else to go. Remember that. They got nowhere else to go. And he would use this against all sorts of different groups. And what's funny is,

If you study the history of the Clinton Administration, you notice that this, this campaign strategy eventually became a full blown strategy--a philosophy of governance, right? Body slamming the people who had just got you elected. The classic example here is the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA--which remember, it had been negotiated by George Bush Senior but he couldn't get it through Congress, a Republican, you know, because Congress was, of course, filled with Democrats at the time. You know, that sort of old school kind of Democrat, but Clinton got it done. He got NAFTA pass through Congress, and when he did, he wasn't merely--and this is important--he wasn't merely insulting his friends in organized labor who had fought this thing tooth and nail, right? He wasn't just insulting these guys, he was conniving in their ruin, okay? He was assisting in the diminishing of their economic power. He was doing his part to undermine his own party's greatest ally, to ensure that henceforth in any kind of negotiation with, with workers, with labor, that management would always have the upper hand over them, because they can always say, you know, we're going to move the plant to Mexico. And it turns out, they actually use this threat all the time. It's very, very common; sometimes they even followed through on it.

But the point that I'm making here is that in getting NAFTA passed, Clinton made the problems, the real-world problems of working people, materially worse. And NAFTA is fascinating for all sorts of reasons. You know, it's a wonderful thing to go back and study because it's as straight excuse me, it's as close to a straight up class issue, as you ever come across, in, in our modern day politics. And it gives us an idea of who our modern day democrats mean to please, if you go back and look at who is in favor of NAFTA and who is opposed to IT professionals and the wealthy were very deeply in favor of NAFTA, you know, right, because it was something that you learned on your first day and in economics, right. econ 101, you're supposed to learn about you know, about the about trade, and, you know, it's basic stuff. And there was this moment where you had 283, professional economists signed a statement declaring that the treaty will be a net positive for the US in terms of employment creation, and economic growth, that sort of thing. And on the other side, of course, you had blue collar workers, most of whom, by definition, hadn't gone to college at all, and they're, they're against it. Now. Ironically,

the predictions of the unlettered blue collar workers turned out to be far closer to what eventually came to pass. Then did the rosy scenarios of the all those economists and the Rhodes scholar in the White House