November 9, 2000
WHY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS SHRINKING
By David Bacon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
SAN FRANCISCO (11/9/00) - Their hands sewed the
clothes you're wearing, and the ones in your closet. They
picked the vegetables on your plate and cut the meat in your
refrigerator. These hands stuffed chips into the motherboard
of your computer, washed the dishes after your restaurant
meal, and steadied your mom when she went to the bathroom
in her convalescent home.
But on Tuesday, there's one thing these hands didn't
do. They didn't punch the wrong hole on a presidential ballot
in West Palm Beach. In fact, they didn't punch any hole, in
Florida or anywhere else.
These hands didn't vote.
Voting is a rare activity in communities of
low-income and immigrant workers. "Mainstream national
politics basically ignores our needs," says Stacy Kono,
youth organizer for Asian Immigrant Women Advocates in
Oakland, California.
Kono is too kind. Immigrants and low-wage workers do
figure into national politics, but not as voters. Nationally,
less than half of the eligible population voted in this
election, a pool that gets comparatively smaller every
decade. And demographically, it gets older, whiter, and
its median income goes up.
This is fine for Republicans, traditionally the
party of employers and the better-off. But for Democrats,
it's been the root of an historic choice over the last eight
years of the Clinton administration. And the results are
coming home to roost.
The choice is simple: expand the electorate to
include the people on the bottom, or move the party to the
center to compete for the votes of the smaller pool. And
behind a rhetoric of populism, national Democratic Party
strategists, like the Democratic Leadership Council, made
the second choice.
When President Clinton, coming into office, had to
choose between an all-out fight with the insurance industry
and giving up on national healthcare (which would have
benefited the poor more than anyone), he gave up. In
1996, he did more than surrender. Fighting with a revived
Republican Party over a small pool of conservative suburban
voters, he decided to outdo it in advocacy on its own issues.
A welfare reform bill pushed the poor off social
benefits into the low-wage workforce, often without child-
care and at the cost of an even smaller family income.
Immigration reform cut immigrants from social benefits,
shoving them further into the shadows. In the face of
rising police crimes, like the rape of Haitian immigrant
Abner Louima and the shooting of Guinean Amadou Diallo,
the administration did nothing for fear of losing its
carefully-cultivated anti-crime image.
Administration trade policy closed doors too - an
expanding economy of low-wage, temporary contingent jobs
replaced millions of stable, high-paid union ones.
It's a truism of American politics that voting
percentages are low in poor communities of immigrants and
people of color. The DLC targeted those communities, and
not for votes.
Even with this record, two key constituencies stuck
with Al Gore. African-Americans, even in poor communities,
voted large numbers. They recognized George Bush for the
southern conservative he is, and rejected the overt racism
of candidates like (now) ex-Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri.
And the AFL-CIO mobilized its members to an
unprecedented degree to vote for a candidate who, despite
opposing unions on some of the decade's most basic economic
questions, they still viewed as preferable to the alternative.
In states where union density is still high, like
Michigan, that effort proved decisive. But nationally the
labor movement now represents only 13% of the workforce, and
a growing part of that consists of disenfranchised immigrants.
Mobilized union families cannot make up for the exclusion of
low income people from the political process. And without
new poltical coalitions between African-Americans and
immigrants, the vote in African-American communities
is not enough either.
A party and its national candidates who cannot, or
will not, fight for the issues of low income communities of
immigrants and people of color, even at the risk of losing
support on the right, can't attract them to the polls. A
party which uses them as political scapegoats doesn't even
stand a chance.
To end the exclusion, a party would have to do more
than just support issues. It would have to spend resources,
both political and financial, to bring those potential
voters into the electorate.
Democratic national strategists aren't moving in
this direction.
An immigration amnesty, for instance, would open the
door to legal status, and eventual citizenship (and voting
power) for millions of undocumented immigrants. This year
the AFL-CIO even came out in support of it. But instead of
campaigning to win amnesty, the administration appealed for
Latino votes by supporting much more limited immigration
reforms. It even backed away from those in fear of attack
from the Republican right.
National Democratic and Republican strategists could
agree on one thing, however. They both supported expanding
contract labor programs for industry, giving employers a
vulnerable labor supply while avoiding legalizing the
immigrants already here and guaranteeing their
workplace rights.
"Industry and its ties with government are too
strong," Kono concludes. She points to the racist barriers
keeping unorganized immigrant women employed as garment
workers, in an industry which traditionally supports
Democrats. They're excluded both from mainstream politics
and the mainstream workforce, she says. At the same time,
Espirit clothing magnate Suzie Tompkins raised $400,000
for Hilary Clinton's Senate campaign this year alone.
Kono raises the other key problem. The old
Democratic Party strategy of building a coalition crossing
class lines is dissolving. While the party still depends
on AFL-CIO votes, it can't move to enfranchise millions
of people at the bottom without sacrificing the support of
funders at the top, who are often even employers of those
down below.
And blaming Ralph Nader for pointing out this
contradiction is not going to make it disappear.
Copyight (c) 2000 David Bacon. All Rights Reserved.
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