Why the AFL-CIO's convention could be the DLC's worst nightmare.
I'm not a compulsive DLC-hater (hell, I even think Joe Lieberman has redeeming merits), but one thing that hasn't gotten much play in the most recent blogosphere anti-DLC dustup is the org's unfortunate decision on host its 2005 National Conversation at the same time as the AFL-CIO's 50th Anniversary Convention, especially knowing how momentous this particular convention was likely to be for the future of organized labour in the US. In asking major Dems who might have designs on the 2008 nomination (speakers included Hillary Clinton, Tom Vilsack the new DLC Chair, Mark Warner, and Evan Bayh) to attend their confab, the DLC were implicitly asking those Dems to prioritize a visit to Columbus over a visit to Chicago (where Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Edwards, Dick Durbin, Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama all paid their respects, stressing the Democrats' affinity with the cause of organized labour in whatever form it ends up taking.)
This may have been an innocent mistake on the DLC's part and I'm too lazy and too busy to try and track down whether that's the case (though a search on the DLC site for "AFL-CIO" and "John Sweeney" turned up no record of a statement from the group on the current labour standoff.) But it looks an awful lot like the sort of thing the DLC would do to stake out its turf. The DLC loves conflict, and that -- not its policy prescriptions or even its fundraising practices (though cozying the Dems up to business has a mixed blessing and certainly went waaayyy too far in the 90s) -- is its biggest problem. Taking shots at Markos Moulitsas is just dumb (though notably less offensive than Bull Moose's more recent snotty, facile comparison of petty self-hating labour with that mature, solidarity-lovin' DLC). Lecturing liberals about how we just haven't gotten over Vietnam and ought to stop obsessing over Abu Ghraib is also dumb, not to mention predictable and silly (as Digby explains). Tactics like this are bound to backfire, just as they did in vaulting the DLC's poorly-chosen nemisis, Howard Dean, into the Party Chair. But it's like the DLC just can't help itself.
Reading Kenneth Baer's Reinventing Democrats as I currently am just drives the point home further. Baer is a good writer and, I assume, a good Democrat. But his history of the DLC is a chronicle of the org's constant embattlement and alleged tenacity in the face of a parade of snarling rivals on the left, of an endless standoff with the party's "liberals" and even with the DNC itself. There's also a pervasive sense of affront and give-as-good-as-we-get running through the work -- for instance in Baer's recounting of Jesse Jackson's speech at the 1990 New Orleans DLC confab when he mocked the DLC by declaring himself "delighted [the Dems] are so united" on the sort of fundamental issues the DLC very much wanted not to be united with Jackson on. This led Al From to blackball Jackson from the DLC's 1991 convention, which in turn provoked charges of racism from Jackson, which Baer relates in appalled tones.
This isn't to argue that the DLC had no point to make in challenging the McGovern-Mondale model(s) of Democratic politics; or that New South convervative Democrats like Sam Nunn, Lloyd Bentson and Martin Frost didn't need an organization to collectively bargain for their place, and their voters' place, within the party; or that the DLC is just a bunch of fake Republicans putting a pro-choice face on corporatism. It's not even to argue that they didn't need to symbolically distance themselves from figures like Jesse Jackson and to challenge a few comfy leftist assumptions. But the truth is that the DLC's pervasive southern conservative identity politics looms as painfully large in Baer's account as does Jackson's "progressive" identity politics. And, while the DLC is decidedly less southern-oriented now, its reliance on anti-liberal identity politics doesn't seem to have diminished much with time. In other words, the DLC might preach the need for a positive message, but its philosophy has always been, and is now, very -- ridiculously -- zero-sum.
The implicit disrespect for the AFL-CIO at its most fateful of gatherings is just one more bit of evidence of the DLC's essential worldview. It's ironic too. If labour splinters and the Change to Win unions take their $35 million in annual dues away from the AFL-CIO's political coffers, that's voter-information and GOTV money the Dems just lose. As Steven Greenhouse pointed out in today's NYT, "In last year's campaign, unions mailed out more than 30 million pieces of literature and ran 257 phone banks with 2,322 lines in 16 states." If the unions scale back their political action in order to save themselves, someone's going to have to make up the difference in time and money to keep the party competitive. And if big donors don't flock back to Dean's DNC in the quantities they flocked to McAuliffe's DNC (and, actually, even if they do), the Dems will become even more reliant on the liberal network strung around the DLC's other current nemises: MoveOn.org, the Pheonix Group, the "netroots" at Daily Kos, and the ministrations of wildly-popular-with-the-base pop-cultural liberals like Michael Moore -- which is to say exactly the "upscale white liberals" (or more accurately upscale left-libertarian activists for whom the "small donor" status of giving several hundred dollars to the party during election season is not a great sacrifice) that Marshall has recently been bemoaning as the greatest current threat to the DLC brand of electable politics.
Like the DLC, I don't see this as a particularly good potential development for the party or for liberal politics in general; I'm not sure the "netroots" (granted, an amorphous term encompassing many very capable party activists) have either the power nor the ideological message to start delivering elections to Democrats. But if I were the DLC, I'd be thinking about what the options really are here. And I'd be paying a lot more attention to and showing a lot more rhetorical solidarity with the fractious, Old-Democratic unions in Chicago and engaging in a lot less hollow self-praise for my remarkable "solidarity".
This may have been an innocent mistake on the DLC's part and I'm too lazy and too busy to try and track down whether that's the case (though a search on the DLC site for "AFL-CIO" and "John Sweeney" turned up no record of a statement from the group on the current labour standoff.) But it looks an awful lot like the sort of thing the DLC would do to stake out its turf. The DLC loves conflict, and that -- not its policy prescriptions or even its fundraising practices (though cozying the Dems up to business has a mixed blessing and certainly went waaayyy too far in the 90s) -- is its biggest problem. Taking shots at Markos Moulitsas is just dumb (though notably less offensive than Bull Moose's more recent snotty, facile comparison of petty self-hating labour with that mature, solidarity-lovin' DLC). Lecturing liberals about how we just haven't gotten over Vietnam and ought to stop obsessing over Abu Ghraib is also dumb, not to mention predictable and silly (as Digby explains). Tactics like this are bound to backfire, just as they did in vaulting the DLC's poorly-chosen nemisis, Howard Dean, into the Party Chair. But it's like the DLC just can't help itself.
Reading Kenneth Baer's Reinventing Democrats as I currently am just drives the point home further. Baer is a good writer and, I assume, a good Democrat. But his history of the DLC is a chronicle of the org's constant embattlement and alleged tenacity in the face of a parade of snarling rivals on the left, of an endless standoff with the party's "liberals" and even with the DNC itself. There's also a pervasive sense of affront and give-as-good-as-we-get running through the work -- for instance in Baer's recounting of Jesse Jackson's speech at the 1990 New Orleans DLC confab when he mocked the DLC by declaring himself "delighted [the Dems] are so united" on the sort of fundamental issues the DLC very much wanted not to be united with Jackson on. This led Al From to blackball Jackson from the DLC's 1991 convention, which in turn provoked charges of racism from Jackson, which Baer relates in appalled tones.
This isn't to argue that the DLC had no point to make in challenging the McGovern-Mondale model(s) of Democratic politics; or that New South convervative Democrats like Sam Nunn, Lloyd Bentson and Martin Frost didn't need an organization to collectively bargain for their place, and their voters' place, within the party; or that the DLC is just a bunch of fake Republicans putting a pro-choice face on corporatism. It's not even to argue that they didn't need to symbolically distance themselves from figures like Jesse Jackson and to challenge a few comfy leftist assumptions. But the truth is that the DLC's pervasive southern conservative identity politics looms as painfully large in Baer's account as does Jackson's "progressive" identity politics. And, while the DLC is decidedly less southern-oriented now, its reliance on anti-liberal identity politics doesn't seem to have diminished much with time. In other words, the DLC might preach the need for a positive message, but its philosophy has always been, and is now, very -- ridiculously -- zero-sum.
The implicit disrespect for the AFL-CIO at its most fateful of gatherings is just one more bit of evidence of the DLC's essential worldview. It's ironic too. If labour splinters and the Change to Win unions take their $35 million in annual dues away from the AFL-CIO's political coffers, that's voter-information and GOTV money the Dems just lose. As Steven Greenhouse pointed out in today's NYT, "In last year's campaign, unions mailed out more than 30 million pieces of literature and ran 257 phone banks with 2,322 lines in 16 states." If the unions scale back their political action in order to save themselves, someone's going to have to make up the difference in time and money to keep the party competitive. And if big donors don't flock back to Dean's DNC in the quantities they flocked to McAuliffe's DNC (and, actually, even if they do), the Dems will become even more reliant on the liberal network strung around the DLC's other current nemises: MoveOn.org, the Pheonix Group, the "netroots" at Daily Kos, and the ministrations of wildly-popular-with-the-base pop-cultural liberals like Michael Moore -- which is to say exactly the "upscale white liberals" (or more accurately upscale left-libertarian activists for whom the "small donor" status of giving several hundred dollars to the party during election season is not a great sacrifice) that Marshall has recently been bemoaning as the greatest current threat to the DLC brand of electable politics.
Like the DLC, I don't see this as a particularly good potential development for the party or for liberal politics in general; I'm not sure the "netroots" (granted, an amorphous term encompassing many very capable party activists) have either the power nor the ideological message to start delivering elections to Democrats. But if I were the DLC, I'd be thinking about what the options really are here. And I'd be paying a lot more attention to and showing a lot more rhetorical solidarity with the fractious, Old-Democratic unions in Chicago and engaging in a lot less hollow self-praise for my remarkable "solidarity".
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