First they would need to co-opt and then distort the egalitarian rhetoric and policies of FDR's New Deal by conflating representative democracy with consumer capitalism. This new definition wholeheartedly adopted Reagan's "government is the problem" dog-whistled means to demonize the poor and minorities while downplaying the cruel agenda with their own meaningless platitudes about acceptance and inclusivity.
The DLC Agenda would not be so crass as to openly pummel the poor and minorities while they were down, or call single Black mothers "Cadillac welfare queens." It would instead offer the down-and-out a series of gentle shaming kicks and shoves in order to get them scrambling up invisible ladders of self-help and opportunity.
Joe Biden, the current alleged Democratic front-runner, was not only one of the original founding members of the DLC, he was also one of its very first presidential recruits. As Goldwater-style movement conservatism was gaining traction during the 1970s, Democratic leaders looked at this new rising star and realized how well he could co-opt his own working class background and put some of his down-home rhetoric into the service of the corporations. Biden was considered a natural to pander to the blue-collar white voters who had fled to the Republican Party in droves, thanks largely to Reagan's fear-mongering on race. That populist mystique still clings to him, despite the harsh reality of every reactionary thing he has accomplished politically in the last nearly half-century.
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| Say Uncle, Or Bust! |
Back in the 80s, the three most common "colorblind" euphemisms for the "N" word being utilized by Biden and both establishment political parties were Welfare, Drugs, and Crime.
Reagan himself not so subtly railed against welfare queens and "young bucks" on food stamps in such blatantly symbolic places as Mississippi. But the Democrats, who still needed the support of black and brown people in the South, had to be a tad more politically correct.
Mere months after Reagan took office, DLC architect Al From recalls, the House's then-named New Democratic Caucus was absolutely thrilled when on April 9, 1981, the New York Times published, verbatim, his entire "movement manifesto" of economic principles.
This nearly 40-year-old document has become the Bible of every conservative Democratic administration since Clinton, seamlessly morphing into Obama acting as the other heel of the Bush Jr sandwich filling... and just wait till next year - or so From's neoliberal centrist wing of the party hopes - to get Joe Biden for dessert, the goofy guy whom conservative Democrats have been hankering for as their president since 1972, when he was still only a 29-year-old senator (D-Capitol One) from Delaware, LLC/USA.
The first DLC (later renamed the "New Democrats" in the age of Obama) principle, after they get the requisite gushing over the New Deal out of the way, is austerity, or deficit reduction, even when times are bad, as a guard against inflation. Inflation hasn't been a problem since the 70s, but once they get all ballooned up with their addictive hot air, the Inflationistas and Deficit Hawks never die. The difference is that when Republicans cycle into power, deficits don't matter when it comes to giving tax breaks to the rich. And when it's the Democrats' turn, all programs benefiting regular people must be "paid for" by cutting other programs benefiting regular people. Both parties always exempt the permanent war machine from any of their inflation fear-mongering.
A related founding principle, a/k/a shameless propaganda, of the DLC is that since "people" (the rich) demand austerity and spending cuts, the New Democrats must always try to placate (the rich and) Republicans as a show of their good faith. But to prove that they really also care about the working and poor people who actually vote them into office, the Democrats will quickly add that the wealthy should (it's just a suggestion) equally share the burden of sacrifice.
Here's the clunky concluding chunk of the first Official DLC Manifesto reprinted verbatim for your reading pleasure. I have bolded all the neoliberal keywords, which have survived for four decades to poison our minds and our spirits and our lives to this very day. These principles remain at the rotten core of the Joe Biden agenda. They were baked into his political psyche from the very beginning of his career... which, by the way, more or less coincided with the beginning of Donald Trump's own career:
In controlling Federal spending, we intend to abide by the following guidelines:
-We will seek out and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse. We will provide the resources to prosecute those taking advantage of government benefits to which they are not entitled, whether wealthy tax evaders, illegal monopolies or participants in welfare fraud.
- We will promote the work ethic by encouraging recipients of government assistance to work and resisting cuts that would throw people out of work and onto welfare.
- We will help those who cannot work, particularly the disabled, the sick and the elderly. A society cannot remain health and self-respecting while ignoring those who are poor and helpless through no fault of their own.
- We will strengthen our defense force, in cooperation with our allies, to ensure world peace. We will increase military capability and readiness, eliminate Pentagon waste and renew the search for mutual arms control agreements.
- We will promote cooperation rather than conflict among the levels of government. We must recognize local strengths, local initiative and regional differences in the country as we decide the structure and number of Federal programs. We will not purposely add unnecessary tax and regulatory burdens to state and local governments.
We will examine indirect spending through the tax code with the same critical eye we focus on direct spending. Wasteful and unfair tax loopholes will be closed.
- We will upgrade our efforts in the area of law enforcement to intercept the flow of illegal drugs across our borders, stem the tide of illegal immigration, introduce efficiencies into our criminal justice system, and work in partnership with state and local governments to combat crime.
- In short, we pledge to develop a lean Federal budget, which puts us on the path of balancing the budget and provides for the human needs of our people.Translating the above into normal person-speak:
-- A poor single mother on food stamps is the same kind of villain as Donald Trump. We will demonize and even jail the poor mother while comparing her to Donald Trump, whom we never prosecuted or imprisoned. Not only that, we'll even promote him to our friends in corporate media as our Pied Piper GOP nominee, just to make DLC original founding member Hillary Clinton look better.
--The DLC, under Bill Clinton, soon got its dream fulfilled when millions of poor mothers got thrown off welfare in the 90s, only to be thrown into low-wage or non-existent jobs without the promised child care aid. At the same time, Donald Trump kept "losing" billions of dollars on paper, which allowed him to pay zero income taxes for possibly more than a decade, as he importuned crooked banks to fraudulently bankroll his real estate empire, which ultimately landed this self-made grifter his own hit TV show on NBC. So as you can see, the DLC's work ethic sermon of a manifesto worked exactly as intended. The New Dems helped to inspire Trump (a registered Democrat) to keep struggling against all odds. Even better, his ladder of opportunity turned out to be an elevator of opportunity!
--There are the deserving poor. and then there are the undeserving poor. The different groups of Poors must be divided, and taught to resent one another so that they will be less apt to resent the rich racketeers of the ruling class, including Donald Trump. Ex-GOP Speaker Paul Ryan is unfairly often blamed by Democrats for coming up with this poor vs. poor crap all on his own. But, as self-avowed New Democrat Obama used to gently chide his Old GOP bro Mitt Romney: "You didn't succeed all on your own, Governor. You didn't build this all by yourself!"
- Calling Mr. Orwell. We will arm ourselves to the gills to promote world peace, love and understanding. We will impose sanctions on Iraq and the deaths of 500,000 children as a result will have been "worth it." Later in the War Is Peace endeavor, lethal Predator drone assassinations will become therapeutic "surgical strikes," and the "externalities" of thousands of innocent dead will never be divulged and their names never revealed.
--Regulations on capital and greed are bad. As a result, Bill Clinton and his bipartisan Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and other anti-graft legislation from the New Deal era. As a result of that repeal, the financial system crashed in 2008, just in time for Obama to win the White House and the Democrats to win the whole Congress and stuff the new ruling administration with the same deregulation-happy culprits, like Larry Summers, who caused the whole mess in the first place. And the regular people struggled on for eight more years until 2016, just in time for Trump and the Republicans to complete the inevitable cycle.
--Mexicans were bringing drugs across the border decades and decades ago! Blacks and Browns were committing all the crimes! Stop them, police them, jail them, and begin a new Jim Crow era and conduct a virtual slow genocide - but be sure to call your institutional bigoted practices "efficiencies." Then slap a slick "War on Drugs" label on it so you don't sound racist. Decades later, act all shocked and appalled when Donald Trump unleashes his racist rhetoric and tragically rips the whole happy-face mask right off your long-standing official DLC manifesto.
As Al From wrote in 2013's "The New Democrats and the Return to Power," the original 1981 manifesto was the absolute catalyst for "vibrant economic growth in the private sector of the economy.... It was the right first battle for us to take on. It left a good impression and gave us running room for later reform efforts.... It allowed us to establish our new themes without fear of being crushed by the old bulls.... That the New York Times chose to print it in full was icing on the cake."
This manifesto set the Democrats on their relentless, 40-year trajectory to the right, moving the GOP even further to the right as a result.
From adds that as disappointed as DLC conservatives were when, in 1984, Biden "had the good sense to put a stop to our nonsense" of trying to oust Reagan challenger Walter Mondale and replace him with the reactionary Biden, they were confident that the younger man's zealous contributions to their right-wing platform would ultimately prevail. "Developing a winning message" was their ultimate goal then, and it's their ever more feeble ultimate goal now.
Their 1986 midterm message was "Defending America," which according to From, sent the Reaganites into conniption fits of jealousy for out-flanking them from the right.
From also brags that it was the core DLC membership who, in 1981, came up with the anti-democratic superdelegate system to ensure that the right-wing faction of the party would always prevail against any potential lefty upstarts.
This is also when the whole "electability" canard that the pundits can't stop talking about these days first took shape. "If the elected officials whose outlooks were moderated by actually having to be elected took a bigger role in the conventions, making them superdelegates would give them that role." he wrote.
Remember, the "reform" that bars superdelegates from voting in the first ballot at a contested convention is tailor-made so that a vast field of contenders, none of them with a clear majority, will cancel each other out, ensuring that only the conservative party machine will have the final say and coronation privileges.
From actually credits Hillary Clinton with spreading the New Democrat ideology far and wide throughout the world during her stint as Obama's secretary of state. He doesn't mention the subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarianism in the same countries that Hillary so ingeniously inspired.
And in his own introduction to From's book, written just three years before Donald Trump was elected, Bill Clinton gushes that despite all the pain and destruction and death that it wrought, he is still a true believer in the DLC message of mass austerity, endless war, the continuous growth of capitalism, the expansion of globalism, "reform" of welfare and the fight against "crime". There is nary a word about the climate catastrophe.
Joe Biden himself is not putting the climate catastrophe anywhere near the top of his DLC-inspired agenda. Forget the U.N. report revealing that millions of plant and animal species will go extinct because of the crisis. Not content to be a do-nothing vice president, in 2011 he proclaimed that he was "the new sheriff in town" who would ruthlessly cut all the "waste, fraud and abuse" displayed by living beings protected by the big, bad guvmint. He was the anointed Anti-Waste Czar, whose first accomplishment would be to strike pictures and stories about endangered species from government websites.
War is not only Peace, but Public Ignorance is Strength, and therefore Biden announced:
Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?And I bet you didn't know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we can't afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.
That’s why President Obama asked me to head up the Campaign to Cut Waste—a new effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in The Federal Government.
Fast forward to 2019, and his fellow well-protected old New Dems Bill and Hillary Clinton have also sadly devolved into aging (if not quite extinct) vaudevillians, touring cities and speaking to half-empty auditoriums, where ticket prices have been drastically reduced for lack of interest. Hillary just confided to one friendly interviewer that the biggest thing the next Democratic president has to fear is not the climate catastrophe, but (drum-roll, please) - Vladimir Putin!
The crowds are roaring. But probably not in the adulatory fashion that the Clintons would prefer.
