On the lower rungs of power, progressive Democrats are tolerated by their party's leadership because they help to propagate the illusion that progressives have a voice in the national Democratic Party's agenda. As long as progressives don't rock the boat, turn a blind eye to the corruption and hypocrisy of their colleagues, and refrain from challenging the corporatist-militarist bipartisan consensus, they remain useful to their party as tokens who can be used to reassure the base that the Democrats are "the party of the people" and that they can "take back the party" as easily as the Republican Party was "taken over" by its conservative base. This pretense quickly crumbles when progressive Democrats step outside their assigned role: the Democratic leadership's machinations to exclude Dennis Kucinich from primary debates in 2008 is just one example of many.
At the grassroots level where most of us abide, the favored tactic of progressive Democrats is the primary challenge. This strategy is based on the assumption that ideas, not advertising budgets and political cronyism, determine the winners of Democratic primaries. Realistically, corporatist Democrats have a huge advantage over progressive challengers in terms of financial and party support. While progressives may challenge a handful of the worst Democrats in each cycle only to see the party leaders rally behind the likes of Blanche Lincoln and Arlen Specter the majority of corporatist Democrats cruise to primary wins and easy election in gerrymandered districts. Progressives' participation in Democratic primaries, though rarely successful, still serves to legitimize a process that by its very structure is heavily stacked in favor of the corporatist agenda.
When progressive Democrat primary challenges succeed, what do progressive Democrats accomplish once in power?
The congressional progressive caucus, though it has 83 nominal members, has resolutely failed to advance a progressive agenda. Like so many progressive Democratic voters, progressive Democratic legislators can always be counted on to put party before principle. For example, during the healthcare debate, liberal Democratic groups asked members of the CPC to pledge that they would only vote for a health care bill that included a public option. Many took the pledge, and if they had held their ground, any health care bill with a chance of passing would have to include the popular public option. However, after it became clear that the Democratic leadership had bargained away the public option behind closed doors, the same Democratic groups began pressuring Democratic legislators to support the president's bill an unpopular "compromise" bill that gave away the farm to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, despite the fact that the bill did not need a single Republican vote to pass. The lone Democrat who attempted to salvage progressive influence by sticking to the public option pledge was assailed by his own party and abandoned by self-styled progressive Democrats.
At a point when Democratic control in Washington was at its high water mark, "progressive" Democrats in Congress not only gave away all their power to influence the health care bill, they showed how easily they will roll over for the Democratic Party leadership in the future.
A less publicized but no less salient example of the failure of "progressive" Democrats in Congress to advance the progressive agenda came in 2009, when the House of Representatives had a chance to cut off funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 51 Democrats in the House voted against a $97 billion war supplemental bill that was expected to pass easily. Yet when the bill came back with $5 billion tacked on for the International Monetary Fund and Republicans decided to vote against the bill in symbolic opposition, progressive Democrats suddenly had a chance to actually defeat the bill and cut off war funding. When the bill actually had a chance of failing, only 32 House Democrats voted against it; the rest changed their votes to ensure that the war machine kept rolling.
As Glenn Greenwald ably described in his absolute-must-read article "The Democratic Party's Deceitful Game", the modern Democratic Party consistently pretends to support any progressive legislation that its voters want, until they have the opportunity to actually pass such legislation. When that time comes, the Democrats always resort to a litany of tricks and excuses to convince progressive voters that they tried their best, while they quietly continue the agenda of their corporatist and militarist funders uninterrupted.
While progressive Democratic politicians can be counted on for lip service to progressive ideals, they have a tendency to fall in line behind their leaders' corporatist, militarist agenda while failing to achieve all but the tiniest crumbs of progress which are often tacked on to bills sending billions in taxpayer funds to the economic and military elites. The function, if not necessarily the intent, of the progressive Democrat movement has been to keep progressives pouring their energy and resources into a party that has become fundamentally opposed to their worldview. At this point, voting for Democrats as the "lesser evil" only enables them to keep moving rightward with impunity, and ultimately only reinforces an increasingly unacceptable system. Voting for the lesser evil again and again out of fear has brought us exactly what we feared.
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