The U.S. ‘Six Party System’ 3.0: Revising the Hypothesis Again
By Carl Davidson
Keep on Keepin’ On
“Successful strategic thinking starts with gaining knowledge, particular gaining adequate knowledge of the big picture; of all the political and economic forces involved…It’s not a one-shot deal. Since both Heaven and Earth are always changing, strategic thinking must always be kept up to date, reassessed and revised.”
May 30, 2018 - This statement above was part of the opening to a widely circulated article I wrote twice, about two and four years ago. With the upcoming November 2018 elections, it’s time to take my own advice again and do another update. The strategic terrain is always changing, and we don’t want to be stuck with old maps and faulty models.
In the earlier versions, I suggested setting aside the traditional ‘two-party system’ frame, which obscures far more than it reveals, and making use of a ‘six-party’ model instead. The new hypothesis, I suggested, had far more explanatory power regarding the events unfolding before us. Some critics have objected to my use of the term ‘party’ for what are really factional or interest group clusters. The point is taken, but I would also argue that US major parties, in general, are not ideological parties in the European sense, but constantly changing coalitions of these clusters with no firm commitment to program or discipline. So I will continue to use ‘parties,’ but with the objection noted. You can substitute ‘factions’ if you like. Or find us a better term.
For the most part, the strategic picture holds. The ‘six parties’, under two tents, were first labeled as the Tea Party and the Multinationalists under the GOP tent, and the Blue Dogs, the Third Way New Democrats, the Old New Dealers, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, under the Democratic tent. In the second version, we had three ‘parties’ under each.
First and most important for us on the left was the rise of Bernie Sanders, who showed far more strength than imagined. The second was the dramatic and unexpected flowering of Trump and rightwing populism on the right. Both of these, from different directions, challenged, narrowed and weakened the dominant neoliberal hegemonic bloc, which spanned both the GOP multinationals and the Third Way Democrats. It saw the Blue Dogs disappear and the Tea Party divide into Rightwing Populists and Christian Nationalists.
Now here’s the new snapshot of the range of forces for today, (including a graphic map). The two main changes are the re-emergence of the Blue Dogs, due to the recent three-way breakup of the Labor-Liberal center bloc, and the powerful growth of the Rightwing Populists under Trump. Starting from the left upper corner of the map:
The Rightwing Populists. This ‘party’ has mushroomed via the Trump candidacy and unexpected 2016 victory. Trump, an ‘outlier elite’ in his own right, is now directly connected to the Robert Mercer family fortune, the 4th ranking billionaire funding right causes. For example, the Mercers keep Breitbart News afloat and funded the career of Steve Bannon, former Trump ‘strategist’ that took him to victory in the last stretch. Now along with Breitbart, Fox news is the hourly mouthpiece for Trump’s war against the mainstream ‘fake news’ mass media.
Trump and his allies are waging political warfare against the ‘Deep State.’ This is actually a contest for a new ‘America First’ nationalist hegemony against the neoliberal globalists under both tents, the GOP Establishment and the Democrat’s Third Way. This also includes the ‘intelligence community,’ with a long list of Trump-targetted CIA and FBI ‘corrupt leaders’, of which FBI director James Comey was the first to fall. ‘Corruption’ was their refusal to pledge loyalty to Trump personally, like an old-style Mafia boss.
Trump also has a strong alliance with the Christian Nationalists (Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, et al), and the DeVos family (Amway fortune), which represents another billionaire donor to the GOP right. Devos’s brother, Erik Prince, has also massed billions from his Blackwater/Xe firms that train thousands of mercenaries to serve as ‘private contractors’ for US armed intervention anywhere.
Where these two blocs under the GOP tent grew in strength all during the campaign, the Establishment Neoliberals divided a dozen ways, and they were defeated with some humiliation one by one. After the primaries, they were much weaker and were left with the choice of surrender, voting for Hillary Clinton (HRC) or staying home.
Trump’s reach under the Dem tent to form an alliance with the Blue Dogs was more tactical. It stemmed from his appeals to ‘Rust Belt’ Democrats and some unions on trade and tariff issues, plus white identity resentment politics. The economic core of rightwing populism remains anti-global ‘producerism’ vs ‘parasitism’. Employed workers, business owners, real estate developers, small bankers are all ‘producers’, and they oppose parasite groups above and below, but mainly those of ‘the Other’ below them—the unemployed (Get a Job! as an epithet), the immigrants, poor people of color, Muslims, and more.
Trump entered politics by declaring Obama to be an illegal alien and an illegitimate office holder (a parasite above), but quickly shifted to Mexicans and Muslims and anyone associated with ‘Black Lives Matter.’ This was aimed at pulling the fascist and white supremacist groups of the ‘Alt Right,’ using Breitbart and worse to widen their circles, close to Trump’s core. With these as ready reserves, Trump reached farther into Blue Dog territory and its workers, retirees, and business owners conflicted with white identity issues—immigration, Islamophobia, misogyny, and more.
Trump’s outlook has deep roots in American history, from the anti-Indian ethnic cleansing of President Andrew Jackson to the nativism of the Know Nothings, to the lynch terror of the KKK, to the anti-elitism of George Wallace and the Dixiecrats. Internationally, he combines aggressive jingoism, threats of trade wars, and an isolationist ‘economic nationalism’ aimed at getting others abroad to fight your battles for you, while you pick up the loot (we should have seized and kept the oil!).
All this has set up the Rightwing Populists, aligned with Christian Nationalists, in a bid for hegemony over Establishment Neoliberals. So far, Trump is making gains, and the November midterms will bright to light the new balance. Trump’s successes, however, also contain his internal weaknesses: the support of distressed white workers. At present, they are forming a key social base of his victories, assuming they will get lush jobs or rising 401Ks of the ‘Make America Great Again!’ promises. The problem, however, is that Trump has not implemented any substantive programs apart from tax cuts. These mainly benefit the top 10% and create an unstable class contradiction in his operation, one bound to surface as promises are unfulfilled. His white supremacist demagogy and misogyny has also united a wide array of all nationalities of color and many women and youth against him.
The Christian Nationalists. This is a subset of the former Tea Party made up of several Christian rightist trends, that has gained more coherence with the election of Mike Pence. It’s made up of many who are simply conservative evangelicals. A good number, however, are theocracy-minded fundamentalists, especially the ‘Dominionist’ sects in which Ted Cruz’s father is active. They present themselves as the only true, ‘values-centered’ (Biblical) conservatives. They argue against any kind of compromise with the globalist ‘liberal-socialist bloc’, which ranges, in their view, from the GOP’s Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders. They are more akin to classical liberalism than neoliberalism in economic policy, and thus stress abandoning nearly all regulations, much of the safety net, overturning Roe v. Wade, getting rid of marriage equality (in the name of ‘religious liberty’) and abolishing the IRS and any progressive taxation in favor of a single flat tax.
This is a key reason they attract money from the Koch Brothers, while the Kochs hold Trump and his populists in some contempt. As mentioned above, they also have some access to the Devos fortunes.
Effectively, Christian nationalist ‘prosperity economics’ amounts to affirmative action for the better off, where the rise of the rich is supposed to pull everyone else upwards, so long as those below also pay their tithes and pull upward on their ‘bootstraps.’ They do argue for neo-isolationism on some matters, but favor an all-out holy war on ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ to the point of ‘making the sand glow.’ They pushed for moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ripping up the Iran nuclear deal. All this is aimed at greasing the skids for the ‘End Times,’ the ‘Rapture, ‘and the ‘Second Coming’ in the Middle East. With Cruz, Pence and Devos as leaders, they have become the second most powerful grouping under the GOP tent, and the one with the most reactionary platform and outlook, even more so than Trump.
The Establishment Neoliberals. This is the name now widely used in the media for what we previously labeled the Multinationalists. It’s mainly the upper crust and neoliberal business elites that have owned and run the GOP for years, including the quasi-libertarian House ‘Freedom Caucus,’ the smaller group of NeoCons on foreign policy (John Bolton and John McCain), and the shrinking number of RINO (Republican In Name Only) moderates. The Establishment also favors a globalist, US hegemonist and even, at times, unilateralist approach abroad, with some still defending the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq. Their candidates were Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, but when both of these collapsed under fire from Donald Trump, their voice was reduced to that of John Kasich, governor of Ohio. Kasich presents himself as a pragmatic, pro-worker neoliberal, a difficult circle to square. But he had the NSA/CIA’s Michael Hayden and many from the ‘Intelligence Community’ in his camp near the end. When Kasich was defeated, some went over to Clinton. Under Mitch McConnell’s smothering wings, most are riding out the Trump vs ‘Deep State’ storms in silence, as best as they can.
This is a big change. Previously dominant in the GOP and anchored on Wall Street, the Establishment forces were seriously weakened by both the Rightwing Populists and the Christian Nationalists. It’s possible they could be pushed out entirely, but a lot will depend on the results of Robert Mueller’s investigations and the outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections. They could purge a weakened Trump and rebuild. They could try to form a new party with neoliberal Dems. Or they could join the Dems and try to push out or smother those to the left of HRC’s grouping.
Now let’s turn to the Dem tent, starting at the top of the graphic.
The Blue Dogs. This ‘party’, while still small, has grown and gained some energy. This is largely because the United Steel Workers and a few craft unions decided to ‘work with’ Trump on tariffs and trade. The USW got firmly behind Connor Lamb for Congress. Lamb’s narrow victory was won in a Western PA CD in a rural and conservative area, but with a good number of USW miners. Now that the earlier gerrymandered lines have changed, however, Lamb has to run again in the new 17th CD, which is Beaver County and part of Pittsburgh itself, where Trump has less support. Support for ‘Medicare for All’ is strong in this area. Lamb claims to favor it but claims it’s unaffordable for now. This is a sore point for a good number of left progressive Democrats. They’re likely to vote for him, but put their energies into working for better candidates running for legislative seats in Harrisburg.
The Blue Dog resurgence may not last. On one hand, the DNC Third Way gang currently loves people like Lamb, and want to see more candidates leaning to the center and even the right. On the other hand, Trump is unstable on tariffs. If he doesn’t follow through on those he has put out as proposals, and folds up on major infrastructure plans save for ‘building The Wall, the unions involved may turn against him.
The Third Way New Democrats. Formed by the Clintons, with an international assist from Tony Blair and others, this dominant ‘party’ was funded by Wall Street finance capitalists. The founding idea was to move toward neoliberalism by ‘creating distance’ between themselves and the traditional Left-Labor-Liberal bloc, i.e., the traditional unions and civil rights groups still connected to the New Deal legacy. Another part of the ‘Third Way’ thinking was to shift the key social base away from the core of the working class toward college-educated suburban voters, but keeping alliances with Black and women’s groups still functional.
Thus the Third Way tries to temper the harsher neoliberalism of the GOP by ‘triangulating’ with neo-Keynesian and left-Keynesian policies. But the overall effect is to move Democrats and their platform generally rightward. This had been Hillary Clinton’s starting point in her campaign. But caught off guard by the Sanders insurgency, she adopted some positions, at least for the sake of campaigning, from both the former Liberal-Labor bloc and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She kept her ‘Rainbow’ allies with her this way.
Now that HRC was narrowly defeated, the Third Way’s power in the party has diminished somewhat. Its labor alliances have weakened, with unions now going in three directions. In terms of the current relation of forces in the party apparatus, the Third Way about 60% of the positions but still controls the major money. In California, for example, the Regulars kept control of the state party committee only with extremely narrow margins over Bernie supporters. The key test is the November midterms: Who will inspire and mobilize the much-needed ‘Blue Wave’, give it focus and put the right numbers in the right places? The measured moderates? Or the insurgent left? This brings us to the last of the six ‘parties.’
The Social Democrats. This is a better description than simply calling it the Congressional Progressive Caucus, as in the first version. I’ve also taken off ‘Rainbow’ from the second version because this term is more fairly shared with the Third Way, which has kept the older and more pragmatic voters of the rainbow groupings under its centrist influence. And as before, the ‘Social Democrat’ title doesn’t mean each leader active here is in a social-democrat group. It means the core of the CPC, PDA, WFP and Our Revolution platforms are roughly similar to the left social democrat groupings in Europe.
This is made even more evident with Bernie’s self-description as a ‘democratic socialist’ in the primaries, where it only seemed to help. It must be noted, however, that the platform is not socialism itself, but best described as a common front vs finance capital, war, and the white supremacist right. This is true of groups like Die Linke (‘The Left’) in Germany as well.
Finally, there is the dramatic growth of the Democratic Socialists of America due to their wise tactics in the Bernie campaign. They went all in for Bernie but also lost no opening to make themselves visible. Now with over 32.000 members which chapters in every state, they are winning a few local and statehouse races. They are now a player in their own right.
This is all to the good. The common front approach can unite more than a militant minority of actual socialists. Instead, it’s a platform that can also unite a progressive majority around both immediate needs and structural reforms, including both socialists and non-socialists. Apart from winning many state primaries and 46% of the Convention delegates with a positive, high road approach, this party is now noted for two things: first, the huge, elemental outpourings of young people, mainly women, students and the young workers of the distressed ‘precariat’ sector of the class, in elemental risings of millions after Trump took office. Second, its organized character, with groups like Our Revolution, Indivisible, and the Working Families Party added to this dynamic and growing cluster.
What Does It All Mean?
With this brief descriptive and analytical mapping of the upper crust of American politics, many things are falling into place. The formerly subaltern groupings in the GOP have risen in revolt against the Neoliberal Establishment of the Romneys and the Bushes. Now they want hegemony. On the other hand, the Third Wayer are seeking a ‘restoration’ of the Obama coalition, with its alliances with the Keynesian Labor Liberals, while co-opting and controlling the Social Democrats as energetic but critical secondary ally. The Sanders forces have few illusions about this and don’t want to be anyone’s subaltern. So they continue to press all their issues and policies of a common front vs finance capital, war, and the white supremacist right, building more organization and more clout as they go.
This ‘big picture’ also reveals much about the current budget debates, which are shown to be three-sided–the extreme austerity neoliberalism of all three parties under the GOP tent, , the 'austerity lite’ budget of the Third Way-dominated Senate Democrats, and the left Keynesian, progressive and social democratic 'Back to Work’ budget of the Social Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The 'Keynesian Labor Liberals’ are divided, though they often holding decent programs as positions. But looking for side deals with Trump at the same time may not turn out too well.
We have to keep in mind, however, that 'shifting the balance of forces’ is mainly an indirect and somewhat ephemeral gain. It does 'open up space’, but for what? Progressive initiatives matter for sure, but much more is required strategically. We are interested in pushing the popular front vs. finance capital to its limits, and within that effort, developing a 21st-century socialist bloc. If that comes to scale in the context of a defeat of the right, the 'Democratic Tent’ is also likely to collapse and implode, given the sharper class contractions and other fault lines that lie within it, much as the Whigs did in the 19th Century. That demands an ability to regroup all the progressive forces there and on the outside into a new 'First Party’ alliance, one that also includes a militant minority of socialists, which will be able to contend for power.
An old classic formula summing up the strategic thinking of the united front is appropriate here: 'Unite and develop the progressive forces, win over the middle forces, isolate and divide the backward forces, then crush our adversaries one by one.’ In short, we have to have a policy and set of tactics for each one of these elements, as well as a strategy for dealing with them overall. Moreover, take note of warning from the futurist Alvin Toffler: 'If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.’ Then finally, as to tactics, ‘wage struggle on just grounds, to our advantage and with restraint.’
To conclude, we still need to start with a realistic view of ourselves as an organized socialist left. Save for DSA, we are quite small as organizations, but now we can see we are swimming in a sea of millions open to socialism. What can we do now? If you can see yourself or your group honestly working to achieve DSA’s stated program, by all means, join and make them larger. Or set up Jacobin / In These Times Reading Groups in your living rooms and unite socialists with them. Join or start PDA or WFP chapters everywhere, use base organizations and broad 'Third Reconstruction’ alliances and popular rainbow assemblies to build mass mobilizations and defeat the GOP in November.
With both socialists and Rainbow progressives, start at the base, focus on city and state governments, and expand the Congressional Progressive Caucus. You rarely gain victories at the top that have not been won and consolidated earlier at the base. Most of all, in order to form broader and winning coalitions, you need organizations of your own to form coalitions and alliances WITH! Seize the time and Git ‘er done!
Carl Davidson is a national committee member of the Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a DSA member in the Steel Valley, an activist with Progressive Democrats of American in Western PA’s 17th CD, and a LeftRoots Compa. The views expressed here are his own.
