Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 26, 1993 TAG: 9306280259
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JESSE SHARKEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For all that I object to the right-wingers platform of warmed-over pro-business platitudes and shrill moralism, I can hardly miss the conservatives' success in movement-based politics - while liberals seem to be floundering, losing political strength at the grass-roots level and consequently in statehouses around the country. One could hardly imagine a less successful strategy for reversing the political fortune of progressives than waiting for Clinton to come up with answers to problems - answers, we now have every reason to believe, he may never find.
Clinton's much-discussed "troubles" should have come as no surprise to civil-rights proponents, labor activists and other progressives who have been keeping their eyes open for the last 15 or so years. The record of the former governor of Arkansas showed plainly enough that he never possessed the political base (not to mention the stomach) to resist a nationwide political shift to the right. Was George Bush's favorite Democrat really going to resist, much less turn around, 15 years of falling wages, closing factories and government policies designed to ease the costs of social programs on business?
Now that Clinton resides in the White House, we can see clearly that the forces pulling our country's politics along are quite out of Clinton's control. Indeed, the president has proved unable to stand up to corporate interests and their lobby to push for even moderate income-redistribution or economic-rights plans. Witness the failure of the energy tax (now likely to tax gasoline while exempting aluminum and other industries), the failure of mining and grazing legislative reforms (the administration backed off a promise to end government subsidies for business-ranchers and Western mining companies.) Now, Clinton is shelving an increase in the minimum wage, and the list goes on.
Nor has Clinton been able to move ahead with policy reform, whether winning key civil-rights nominations or restoring the democratically elected Aristide in Haiti. Add these things together with Clinton's recent maneuvering to slash Medicare and Clinton starts to look more like a continuation of Reagan and Bush than a new hope for this country's progressives. Now that he's added Dave Gergen to his team, we lose even the novelty of seeing new faces behind old policies.
The reality is that we are in the midst of a political sea-change in this country. Bill Clinton's rocky presidency is only the latest indicator of how much things have changed from the boom years when many of our country's political progressives and trade unionists acquired their world-view. American mainstream politics, espoused by both Democrats and Republicans, rested on a booming economy: American dominance in world trade, a steady growth of world markets, and a high level of government "pump-priming," especially in the arms sector. Most important, the fast-running American economy was kept on an even keel by a far-reaching political deal (the New Deal) worked out between labor leaders and capitalists, which ensured a dedicated and peaceful work force in return for high wages and government-sponsored social programs.
But politics began a substantial shift in the mid-70s when the oil squeeze, foreign competition and growing concentrations of capital led to sluggish profit rates. In the United States, the political ramifications of these changes were huge. High wages and rising standards of living were called off as companies sought to cut costs. Bosses attacked unions with a ferocity not seen since the 1920s. Factories shut down and moved where work was cheaper. And the social programs that we could easily afford in the 1950s and 1960s were labeled as unacceptable costs.
The post-war deal is gone, just like high-paying industrial jobs and one-income families. The gains that average American people made during the post-war years are now rapidly eroding, and the world-leading living standard of American workers has been drained off into a river of profit. Despite our president's best (?) intentions, the very nature of his job requires that he administer policies forged by the economic necessity of key pressure groups - business owners, shareholders and their ilk. In the current world economy that will mean cutbacks for working people. To expect Clinton to stop this process is like expecting a puppet to turn around and control the puppeteer. For working people to expect Clinton to deliver reforms that business owners don't accept, including meaningful health-care reform, would be to gravely misread the nature of American politics.
What progressives need to realize is that a president in this situation will never be our ally. We will need to fight - for high-paying jobs, funding for social programs and schools, and many other rights that we once expected - against the policy-makers of this country. We should draw a lesson from the success of the conservatives, who never paused in forming independent political coalitions, even when Ronald Reagan was in Washington. People on the left need to stop deluding themselves about their friend in the White House. They should gear up to fight for economic and civil rights before the general population starts identifying our politics with an austerity-measure president who sounds an awful lot like his predecessors.
Jesse Sharkey is an organizer for the Steelworkers union in Roanoke.
by CNB