From Creating a Bogeyman to Digging Your Grave
11.14.2024 / Op-Ed/ Daisy Dale
The reactions by the Democratic establishment to this election are predictable. The Harris campaign, despite the reality of its hollow solutions attempting to appease business interests, was really pushing “too far left” in their view. “Too far left” carries a vague implication of any series of social and economic concerns, and was the exact same excuse used in 2016. Make no mistake, the 2024 election revealed a vast amount of unexplained phenomena affecting voters, but when Morning Joe decides to blame trans people for the Harris defeat, there isn’t a moment we should spare in pushing against this repetitive narrative by Joe Scarborough and other pundits.
Democrats and a larger swath have long used the right-wing as an excuse to push the party to the center. Rather than investing in a political project to mobilize ordinary people, they have only tried appealing to non-existent centrist voters while ostensibly blackmailing their own base into loyalty. This doesn’t give voters anything to be uniquely excited about for the party, it hasn’t proven what democrats can do with power, and has now culminated into our single biggest threat.
Hearing from Scarborough about the Harris campaign being “too far left” is telling, both because his show has had a role in President Biden’s decision-making and because of his own role in the Republican party as a congressman. When first elected in 1994 he was a part of a change of newly-elected Republicans that effectively ended a fifty-year period of Democratic control of the House. When Gingrich became a spearhead in the conservative movement, which at the time led to his party’s first congressional majority in fifty years, Clintonian Democrats were able to mark him as their bogeyman and allow themselves to position the party closer to the center than to the Rooseveltian influence they had going for them in previous decades.
Politics in the ’90s was far from being a show about nothing. For one, there was an emergent far-right seen in such candidates as Pat Buchanan and David Duke. Writer John Ganz contributes this “crack-up” in conservative ideology to the end of the Cold War, resulting in their sacred communist threat disappearing and new Republican in-fighting beginning. But also, even within the centrist policy seen in the Clinton presidency, an unseen and unholy alliance was made between Clinton and Newt Gingrich, who sat in private meetings to attempt a privatization of Social Security.
Gingrich was simultaneously able to help Clinton with campaign fundraising, just by being the bogeyman he could point to, and also an excuse for Democrats to push away from their traditional stances. According to historian Thomas Frank: “Liberals saw the Republican Gingrich back then as Clinton’s unappeasable nemesis-as a berserk hater- but in fact the two men came from similar class and generational backgrounds and saw eye to eye on a number of things: NAFTA, deficit reduction, welfare reform, and the great overarching sophistries about ‘change’ and the ‘New Economy.'”1 Gingrich wasn’t nearly as crass as what we come to expect today, though it was a shock to the state of politics at that point.
Funny enough, with all of the talk today about Republicans wanting to cut Social Security, Clinton worked with Gingrich to attempt just that.2 Coincidentally, the Monica Lewinsky scandal happened at the same time as they were in talks, and other than the impeachment of Clinton the impropriety did happen to save our third rail. Erskine Bowles, who briefly served as Clinton’s Chief of Staff during the scandal, spoke out years later on the matter:
“Bowles was crushed by the alleged charges, which he assumed were untrue. Whether true or not, he understood the political implications: all of their hard work in building the alliance with Gingrich had been destroyed. ‘It was game over,’ he recalled. Bowles believes that the Lewinsky affair ‘was one of the seminal events in American history.’ There was no doubt in his mind that Clinton and Gingrich would have created a plan for reforming both Social Security and Medicare that year and, perhaps, set the stage for a new period of bipartisanship. ‘Gingrich wanted to do it; Clinton wanted to do it. It was a real missed opportunity,’ he said.”3
We have to wonder, when democrats say they are powerless, which admittedly they often are without a House majority, are they ever just carrying out deals like these? This goes past the kind of bipartisanship that makes both sides content, but instead has the purpose of pushing us to a right-wing direction. Not only have they continued to push to the right-of-center, but they have explicitly avoided tapping into the kind of populist rage that would result in single-payer healthcare, an increased minimum wage, or wealth redistribution, while the GOP in America has chosen the demagogue route with their own base for the last decade. The change that the Obama administration campaigned on during the ’08 recession never manifested, and much like the Clinton administration made more promises on social reforms without having economic change tied to it.
While never meaningfully mobilizing popular ideas, they also propped up the far-right. In 2016, as well as the 2022 midterms, democrats used a “pied piper” strategy by actually funding far-right candidates in their primaries, believing they could easily beat them. They naively believed that by having their most extremist opponents revealed to the broad electorate, they could easily win without putting any effort into presenting a platform. It could be argued that 2024 was different, and the concept of economic populism wasn’t lost on party strategists, but it only ever amounted to the hollow political messaging of “freedom” and “reclaiming patriotism” without a concrete healthcare plan. If having UAW’s Shawn Fain speak at the DNC had pushed the needle any, the past few decades of failed policy made such efforts too late.
Really, we are nowhere near being able to tell what went wrong in 2024. The explanation laid out above doesn’t account for the millions of fewer votes cast from 2020, despite what looked like a very high *early* voter turnout throughout the country. This doesn’t explain whether those millions of Americans who sat out this election believe voting is meaningless all of a sudden. And all of this doesn’t even say that populism wasn’t used as a strategy for the Harris campaign. What we know is what’s been happening for decades prior to 2024, solidifying our political era as being run by a conspiracist conman and open fascist.
Notes
1. Frank, Thomas. Listen, Liberal, or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books. 2016) pg. 107.
2. Gillon, M. Steven. The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the rivalry that defined a generation. (Oxford University Press. 2008) chapter 5; Frank, pg. 71-90.
3. Gillion, pg. 224.