On Thu, 25 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:
quoting Jon Flanders
> Another point. The Yokich statement on the UAW's considering support for
> Nader illuminates another side of this question. Labor officials are
> confronting like never before their essential lack of political clout in
> the "New" Democratic party. Rank and file workers really are scratching
> their heads over the support for Gore, given the big campaign labor
> organized around the China-WTO.
> It's not the way I thought things would happen, but the fact is the issue
> of plant closings and globalization is driving workers away from supporting
> Democrats, not a vast strike wave crashing against walls of corporate
> power.
It's a bit more complicated than that, since House Democrats voted
overwhelmingly against the China deal, with only 73 out of 211 Dems voting
for PNTR. It was House Republicans who were the real margin of victory
for PNTR, voting 164 to 57 for the deal. As significantly, the House Dem
leadership, folks like Dick Gephardt, David Bonior and Nancy Pelosi lined
up solidly with labor on this issue, while the House GOP leadership was
pushing passage of the PNTR vote hard. Notably, over 100 Dems voted for
NAFTA, showing a shift in Dem votes towards labor's position on trade in
the 1990s.
The paradox is that labor has substantial power over the Congressional
wing of the party, where union money and volunteers are often decisive in
Dem primaries and in electing such folks, but pretty marginal at the
Presidential level where large amounts of corporate soft-money and media
saturation weakens labor power to control the Presidential wing of the
party.
Those who see an immanenent labor break with the Dems over this issue are
too fixated on Presidential politics - a disease of American political
discussion in general admittedly. Ultimately, it is important to abandon
simplistic discussions of the "Democratic Party" as if there is such a
single organization. The Democratic National Committee essentially
represents the presidential wing of the party, while there are completely
separate organizational and funraising networks for the House and Senate
wings of the party. In addition, there are the numerous local and
national networks of party activists that exist outside the DNC, DCCC,
and DSCC.
Given that 138 Dem House members voted solidly with the labor position on
PNTR, talking causally of a labor break with the Dems misses the
complications of politics in our essentially "non-party" system of
multiple fundraising centers and open primary fights.
-- Nathan Newman
