Speaker 0 00:00:10 I am confident that the democratic party will reunite on the basis of democratic principles and that together we will March or a democratic victory.
Speaker 1 00:00:22 I think the democratic leadership understands that we need to bring those people into the party. We need to transform the party. We need to make the democratic party, a democratic party with a small gate.
Speaker 0 00:00:35 The future of the party is working class. And I think that what I represent and, and perhaps, you know, Senator Sanders also Senator Warren, there's a lot of working class champions in the democratic party. And I do think that that's the future.
Speaker 2 00:00:50 Welcome to talking strategy, making history. I'm Dick flax activist, retired professor of sociology and a really old guy. And I'm <inaudible> hall, a slightly less
Speaker 3 00:01:06 Old guy and also an activist and political strategist. And this season on talking strategy, making history, we're going to be talking about one of the big questions for progressive strategy here in the United States, in what we're calling a Hitchhiker's guide to the democratic party.
Speaker 2 00:01:28 So one of the, uh, motives we've had for doing this podcast is our sense that a lot of people on the left who are concerned about the electoral process, think of the democratic party as enemy territory, they may use terminology like it's a capitalist party, but both capitalists parties or other ways of diagnosing the problem. But the notion that the democratic party is not the terrain under which progressives and especially people who define themselves as socialists can operate, uh, with integrity or with, uh, the hope of really making change. Even though in the present moment, the necessity of defeating Trump and the Republicans has led to this coalition within the party, uh, it's viewed as unfortunate in the long run, temporary, something that has to be abandoned as soon as we can. That's the kind of attitude isn't it director that we both share as something that we think is a wrong way of thinking about this. I think today, we want to confront this more directly than we have so far in our conversations. Am I on the right track?
Speaker 3 00:02:46 I think so. I think that that's a good way to, to describe a phenomenon that we've seen in the last few years, especially, you know, not just in response to Trump, but put more positively as a, as a response to this incredibly exciting, uh, campaign by Bernie Sanders that opened up so much possibility on the left in American politics that people responded to, to him running in the democratic primary by saying, okay, yeah, this seems like a pragmatic move. We should get involved in the democratic party so we can push socialists. But, but as you say, it's, it's a very begrudging kind of acceptance of this stretch of this strategy and what you hear all the time, uh, is that it's temporary or it's just until we can build a third party or a true workers' party. And the way that I've seen that operationalized is even like, as a party activist, watching a wave of, of, of great, you know, excited, motivated, uh, younger, new to politics. Activists come in, inspired by the Bernie campaign come into the party, but they came in almost with this attitude of everyone who's been here in the democratic party is wrong, is an enemy is suspect is suspicious, uh, is, is probably morally compromised. And that didn't really help them build a lot of coalitions or political power in the party.
Speaker 2 00:04:23 Right. And, uh, you know, in a way this is an attitude that's been ever since there was a left in this country, certainly in the late beginning of the late 19th century socialists were saying, we need our own party. You know, and in Europe, a good example would be the British labor party, the socialists kind of thinking, or, or, or forces in great Britain, created a party, which in fact took off and became one of the major governing parties, uh, in England. And I guess that same sort of scenario was one of those that people a hundred or more years ago on the left in this country thought was the right path that British labor party model never was achieved here. And as we've said a little bit in our previous discussions in the beginning of the thirties, a lot of people who were socialists then began to say, we've got to enter the democratic party, support the new deal, uh, under FDR and create space within democratic party for a more leftward, social democratic, uh, kind of politics.
Speaker 2 00:05:33 So people now, I think, think people on the left, some people that, that all failed as well. But I think one of my feelings is no, it was never tried strategically to take the democratic party as a whole, in a different direction, with respect to the kind of social democratic politics. We're talking about the past battles, the left versus the party establishment we've talked about already had to do with white supremacy as a force within the party, Getty, driving that out machine politics, driving that out. Those were have been successful, but they didn't lead to a real labor party or people's party, uh, as the outcome. That's what we're talking about now. That's why we want to do this podcast. But, um, so I would say one argument, namely that it's the efforts to change the party have failed. I don't give that credibility, although maybe some people believe that's the case. You're in many ways, much closer to the, to these, uh, debates and arguments and so forth than I am. So is that an idea that's widespread that people on the left tried to change the party and they failed. I mean, you're an expert on that.
Speaker 3 00:06:51 I think that's right. That there is a, a sense or an argument out there that given the, the hegemony, you could say of more neoliberal, market-based thinking in the democratic party, given the, you know, the wide and widening gap between the rich and everyone else, given the, the lack of progress on racial equality, um, from certainly in comparison to where we'd like to be as a country, that, that all of that is evidence that whatever has been tried before is all a failure. And so, you know, any kind of engagement inside the democratic party must be a failure because we don't have socialism right now, which I think is kind of as you point out, not a, not a real fair rubric. And, and we really haven't had a long-term multi-year, multi-decade sort of stick to it strategy by socialists, social Democrats, progressives inside the party.
Speaker 3 00:07:50 What we have is, you know, waves of engagement, periods of engagement, not a lot of strategic thinking. And then, um, kind of sitting on the sidelines for a few years as things get worse. And then re-engagement, and I think one of the things that you hit on that so important is that, uh, that there is this expectation out there, I think has a legacy of, you know, certain kinds of Marxist thinking, uh, out in the, even in the American left that the, the goal should always be to have a pure party of pure ideology that would be never compromise, uh, unfairly, never give up on any of its goals. Um, and, uh, the Marxist piece of it is that that party would be quote unquote, working class in character, which is be, you know, this, this natural, organic expression of the radicalized working class, not the middle-class not, not, not the professional class, just the working class.
Speaker 3 00:08:52 And you heard that even in the, the, the 2016, uh, and, uh, 20, 20 democratic primary races or presidential primary races where, you know, people started to talk about Bernie Sanders is the only working class candidate that someone like Elizabeth Warren or Castro, or any of the other progressives in the race weren't really left, or weren't really progressive because they weren't quote unquote working class. And that's something I wanted to sort of tag and shake up a little bit, because if you look at the history of organized socialism in the world of, of socialist movements that have won power democratically and, and achieved things through, uh, through policy reform, all of them realized very quickly that you can't actually be a pure working class party and win elections.
Speaker 2 00:09:47 Yes. And, and even, even, um, what, how do you define the working class? So if it means people, workers in factory in the factories, yes. It's not, not a majority. Right. Um, and, but a lot of, you know, we're both sociologists, so we know that tremendous amount of literature on what is, what, how to define class. And, and is there a working class and one way of solving that is to say, yeah, the working class includes everyone who works for, uh, a salary or wage, uh, who, who, uh, is dependent on an employer for their livelihood. And that includes tremendous number of quote, unquote professionals, white collar people, uh, just within the idea of what is, what is working class work. Uh, there's a tremendous variety of conflicting sectors, right? I mean, you, I would imagine that private, uh, private sector workers, uh, have resented public employees who are also workers because their taxes go to the wages of the public employees.
Speaker 2 00:10:58 And if public employees have certain benefits and advantages over private sector workers, there's a basis of antagonism, even if they're all white and male, which they aren't. So that's the, that's the second point that sociology has been obsessed with. And now it's very much that obsession is part of the, the regular main discourse of politics is the fact that race and gender and religion, ethnicity, all of these are cleavages within the working class, always have been huge in this country. Um, and they also have those cleavages relate to the occupational differences that they mentioned at the outset. And I don't think there's any country in band's industrial country with the long history of those kinds of cleavages that, that compares with this country. Now, of course, in Europe, there are immigrant workers and, and various varieties of ethnicity in the working classes of Europe. But, uh, here we've had these ever since the beginning of any kind of working class consciousness and struggle. Part of that has always been racial antagonism, racial hostility, white workers, even, even minority white, ethnic groups becoming white, so to speak in order to protect themselves against the fears of immigrant entry. That's the, that's the history of America to a very great extent.
Speaker 3 00:12:25 And a lot of the issues that you just raised are famous. Examples are famous reasons that the United States didn't develop a socialist labor movement in the way that other advanced industrialized countries did. But even in those more homogenous countries that cleavages in the working class that you talked about, whether it was around skill or region ideology, I mean, the fact is a bunch of factory workers despite hearing the socialist good news, voted, conservative, and vote conservative. And the fact is that in order to be a majority party, the labor parties and socialist parties of Europe and Latin America had to have a message for professional middle-class voters, eventually opening up to messages for women messages around eventually the environment messages around a whole bunch of issue frames in order to pull together a majority coalition. And that's obviously even more true for the democratic party in the United States because our electoral system means that we can't just get 30% and be the biggest party in govern. We have to win every individual election by, you know, we have to get a plurality in each individual district. We have to be a true 50% plus one party in order to govern often a 60% party. So what that means is this expectation that the democratic party would ever be a pure ideological socialist expression of perfect working class politics. Not only is that an unfair expectation of any electoral majority Marion movement in the world, it's especially ludicrous a bar to set for the democratic party in the United States.
Speaker 2 00:14:15 And, uh, you know, maybe another way of looking at the very same story is that the European parties that were more explicitly social democratic, I mean, the British labor party in its charter for most of its life had a clause that said their ultimate goal was public ownership of the means of production. Uh, they removed that precisely, uh, you know, not that long ago, they removed that in order to appeal to what were it being called middle-class voters, but they couldn't have a majority without trying to make that bridge. That's a big struggle in labor party. But the point I was getting at is all the parties, isn't it true. And you have close connection with the Scandinavian parties, which was one of the models that I know you have in your mind about things that we can learn from, but those parties have had internal battles. Haven't they about how leftward they could be, how socialistic they could be and struggling to maintain in some often they're majority voting base?
Speaker 3 00:15:23 Well, I think famously throughout the nineties, all over the world, social democratic socialists and labor parties were struggling to find purchase, uh, in a new political environment. And one of the strategies that a lot of them used was to move to the right or to the center, especially on economic questions. Uh, exactly as you say, to appeal to voters who might have a little more stake in capitalism, a little more stake in the market economy, but they were trying to appeal to them on the basis of, you know, the importance of the welfare state or, uh, uh, environmental issues or just issues of good governance. And, you know, I happen to think that was a, uh, a set of mistakes that those parties made. I think that they gave up a lot of really important policy and ideological tools for dealing with the inevitable crises of market economies and capitalist economies.
Speaker 3 00:16:20 But the point being the takeaway is that there's not any place in the world really where parties that engage in, in real democratic politics who are out there trying to either be part of, or lead or cobble together majorities, none of them are able to stay perfectly pure. All of them are locations of struggle between more left factions and more centrist factions and, and even more in more complicated way, not just left and right, but new groups of voters, new groups of citizens speaking up, trying to transform the politics into something that's more relevant to them, whether that's young people, environmentalist, immigrants, uh, queer folks, et cetera, the point being all parties, if they're big and they're meant to govern, they're meant to be majority Tarion, they're going to have internal struggle and they're not going to be pure. And so when, when leftists in the United States engage in the democratic party, I think it's more helpful to think of it as not a long-term struggle to make the perfect pure party, but in fact, the longterm struggle of politics in general, to move our agenda and know that there's going to be opponents in our own party outside of the party, et cetera.
Speaker 3 00:17:36 And that it's going to be a struggle.
Speaker 2 00:17:38 You're actually saying which to me is actually inspiring when you think about it is that that is what it means to be in, in politics is to be in debate in, in, uh, struggle, whatever terminology you want to use, even with people who are politically aligned with you to achieve both the strategies and the goals and policies that you're aiming for. And instead of thinking, you know, there is a final answer if only we could get there. Uh, we think of politics, always democratic politics as an ongoing, never stopping process of, uh, contention and coming together, uh, various kinds of coalition, various kinds of Alliance, uh, even within a single party. Not that that's a flaw, but that's actually part of what the central game is. If you want to use the word game, it's more serious than a game, but it is partly a game differences that make that you have a parliamentary system as in the European countries versus the kind of, uh, the kind of, uh, governing setup that we have in terms of this issue of party.
Speaker 3 00:19:03 Well, I think it, the big difference that it makes is you see that the struggle happens in either context, right? But you see this internal factional struggle happening in, in different ways in a parliamentary system versus a presidential system. Our first past the post congressional system like we have. So these coalitions get built to coalitions that have to be built between, you know, left-leaning liberals and democratic socialists and feminists and environmentalist and so forth to cobble together. A majority that happens in our system through primaries, it happens before elections. It happens in who, which groups come together around which candidates in a parliamentary system. It can happen in a more explicit way, in a more formal way. After elections, you have more coherent, ideological parties, parties that can be successful, not ever dreaming or caring or wanting to get 50% of the vote. They can get 10% of the vote and have an influence.
Speaker 3 00:20:07 And so you, you see very often in parliamentary systems, uh, coalition government that comes out of an election where people went to the polls, they said, I want an environmental party, uh, to have lots of seats in parliament. Other people said, I want a labor party to have lots of seats in parliament, and then the labor party and the environmental party and the liberal party, and whoever have to figure out how do you, how do you get that to 50% plus one, to have a government beyond the bureaucratic formal mechanisms of that. You also have this very important difference of thought between the two systems about what role the parties themselves are supposed to play. And there's an expectation in a parliamentary system that parties should be fairly coherent and specific in their messaging, whereas in the United States, because the same organization is trying to, you know, when candidates to the Santa Cruz city council and also get Biden, a bunch of votes to win the electoral college votes from Ohio. It's much harder to say exactly the same thing to those two different groups of voters, much harder,
Speaker 2 00:21:27 Although that's something that we, um, I'm, I'm certain that we're going to be getting into, uh, as we proceed with our discussions, uh, during this podcast series, because there are ideas that, uh, for policy directions that could unify even across what seemed to be now a major barriers that's right, because there are some common interests that can be bridged by, by the right kind of, um, you know, agenda setting and, and policy, uh, you know, like, like the green new deal is intended to be, it's tended to be, I think, a framework for environmental, uh, transformation that is also broadly appealing to people who are really hoping for jobs, jobs that, that are decent for them selves and hoping for, uh, you know, rising living standards. And it could well be that that's one clear way. One, one key way for a bridging of the kind that you're, that is so difficult.
Speaker 3 00:22:38 It's right. It's a key way of bridging it and also for transforming the center of the democratic party and moving it to the left. And that to me is the, the strategic difference here, or the strategic question is like AOC all the time. Whenever she's talking about the new, the green new deal or, uh, which candidates she's supporting in primaries, she uses the term we to talk about Democrats and she makes a, uh, an appeal that the democratic party, we us, we should be more progressive, more left, more social democratic. And she's absolutely unafraid of talking about the socialist tradition and socialist politics in articulating what that vision should be for, for the democratic party. And so that project is about moving the democratic party to being a more social democratic party, but understanding that it's going to be messy around its edges, and it's never going to be like an ideologically pure and disciplined party.
Speaker 3 00:23:40 And that's a very different project. I think then what you hear from folks who talk about the so-called dirty break, which is the idea of coming into the democratic party, winning some elections, getting people elected, and then at a certain time when somebody blows the whistle, like that group will leave the democratic party and be some kind of new, I think obviously much smaller party out of broken out of the Democrats because it's more important. I think in that strategic framework, it's more important to be a pure smaller party than to move the big behemoth, the big messy, giant majority Tarion party. And that's where looking at Europe, I think, and looking at Latin America, looking at other electoral systems is so important because when American progressives look abroad, you got to ask yourselves, what are they in Amert of? What do they admire about more progressive political environments? And it seems like there are some folks on the left in the United States when they look to Europe, their model is the small, more left wing parties to the left of the social Democrats, to the left of the labor parties that are very pure and exciting and radical. But that seems like a weird thing.
Speaker 2 00:25:05 But wait a second. Yeah, I know. But I used to, I thought that about, we're talking about Cerisa in Greece, we're talking about Podemos in Spain, the left party in Germany. These are good examples of what you're referring to and, and those two parties, first of all, so Risa, so they had a chance to take over the government and then disappointed people on the you're calling pure left because they moved to a much more accommodationist, um, centrist stance once they, uh, were faced with actually governing and the crisis that Greece was facing. I don't know too much about that. I know less about Podemos, but I think similar, they were very split party, even though they're not very huge because of these very same, you know, ideological deviations and conflicts that are going on there. So I would like to know of any case in any part of the history, uh, and any part of the planet of a party that was aiming to have majority support that remained, you know, as you're saying pure and purely principled in its operation, that a party in itself could be the vehicle of social transformation may not be possible under any circumstances.
Speaker 2 00:26:32 It's a terrain. That's how I look at it. It's a framework for achieving certain key goals in the process of change, but it's going to be the vehicle that people on the left at the, you know, a hundred years ago thought they could build. And I think the evidence of history is you can't a party, can't be that way. Uh, and we sociologists have some knowledge about that because we were schooled by great theorists like max WebVR in particular, who said that once you create a party, then you are creating a bureaucracy, inevitably that has its own interests, which are not necessarily the interests of, uh, the goals that they claim to be working for. That's like built into the idea of building party. Uh, and, um, there may be, you know, that's may be another topic we'll come back to as in, in future conversations.
Speaker 2 00:27:36 But I think that contradiction, which isn't really discussed by old Carl Marks, but WebVR challenged marks in a way by saying, but wait a minute, um, you're forgetting power as an end in itself, not just class representing class interests, but power as an end in itself that people who have it, you can count on them, not wanting to give it up at Mark's thought power in, in industrial society was to be used for class interests and WebVR responded. Yes, but it's also an end in itself. People have power, no matter what their ideology is, they may typically be expected to protect their power, uh, and not, uh, and, and therefore resist change. And there were other sociologists Michelle's, I don't want to get into too academic framework here, but the academic, this is a case where academic theory is really of use for, for political activists.
Speaker 2 00:28:40 So one way to avoid, uh, a bureaucratic party is to have a party that's so small and ineffectual that it doesn't, uh, you know, it doesn't function as a bureaucratic party. And that's what, in a way we can say a lot of social movement groups are effective because they don't expect to represent majorities of people, uh, or, uh, but, but acting in ways other than the electoral arena. And I think that's one way of understanding what's happened to parties in Europe, even when they're ideologically, uh, seeming to be coherent and explicit. Uh, so what we've said so far to kind of summarize it, I think is that, um, in the world of majority Marian politics where you're running and you're, you're trying to build a party that reaches and capable of winning the support of the majority of people. That majority is so diverse and with conflicting interests, even if they're all defined as working class, those conflicting interests mean that you can't have a pure ideologically pure, totally coherent leftward politics. If you want to win elections, especially national elections. But the second point is parties with their or internal organization become end in the ends in themselves rather than actually continuously struggling to reach the goals they claim to want to reach. And I
Speaker 3 00:30:20 Are inevitable. There's no way to avoid them in democratic politics. So that's right. It's not just that, okay, parties have this built in bureaucratic tendency. It's also that you need a bureaucracy and you need organizations and you need mechanisms for dealing with internal conflict and you need a level of professionalism and you need all of those things in order to contest power in a demo, in a democracy. And in order to wield it,
Speaker 4 00:30:54 Hi, everyone. This is pear the producer of talking strategy, making history. That was part one of our show. And we'll continue next time with our guest David <inaudible>. You can support us and stay in touch on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, and
[email protected] slash T S M H that's Patrion slash T S M H. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 0 00:31:35 Working class hero is something to be looking is something to be.
