The Democratic Party is a Walking Corpse

It’s time to let it die and replace it with an assertive, truly left populist New Deal-style political party

How did FDR manage to win four consecutive terms as president, and winning his fourth term with 432 electoral votes to 99 for Republican Wendell Willkie and the popular vote by 53.4%? The answer was his economic program in each campaign aimed at improving the lives of working people each. and delivering on that promise.

Jim Swift, a Substack contributing writer on a site called The Bulwark, wrote an interesting and thoughtful piece on Dec. 5 headlined “I Watched the Democratic Collapse in Florida. I Fear It’s Happening Nationally,” and I found myself thinking: Okay, but why “fear” a national collapse of the Democratic Party? Isn’t that a good thing, and way overdue?

For years the Democratic Party has been a desiccated husk of its former New Deal self. It started to die in 1944 when an ailing Franklin D Roosevelt found his preferred fourth term running-mate Henry A. Wallace pushed aside by a bloc of Southern and conservative northern Democratic delegates who replaced him with the racist “cracker” Senator from Arkansas. Harry Truman. He then went on to become president when FDR died on April 12, 1945, less than three months into his unprecedented fourth term. The drawn-out death of the party became truly evident when first Jimmy Carter and then Bill Clinton came along, pushing the idea of the Democratic Party as a “kinder and gentler” supporter of the rich and corporations.

Its slide was inevitable when Truman turned away from Roosevelt’s post-war plans to expand the New Deal to include universal health care and an expanded “Second Bill of Rights” that would have include housing and a living-wage job and a foreign policy based upon using at the new United Nations organization to keep the world at peace following the two catastrophic world wars that had dominated the first half of the 20th century.

Instead of that idyllic dream, we had first the Cold War enthusiast Truman, then two terms of terrifying and totally unnecessary nuclear Cold War with the Soviet Union under Republican President and former Five-Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower, followed by two Democrats, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who solidified the idea of the US as the dominant power in the world and its global cop.

As the US military under Eisenhower expanded into what he himself ended up belatedly condemning as a dangerous “military-industrial complex” of vast and unprecedented cost and political power, the social progress that had been made under the New Deal with its Social Security program, its Rural Electric program, it’s expanded public education, right through college, etc. began to be degraded and cut back. President Johnson tried to keep some of it going, notably pushing through Medicare for the elderly and disabled and Medicaid for at least some of the poor, and winning passage of a Civil Rights Act to bring Black Americans into full citizenship for the first time. But because he Johnson also expanded the Vietnam War and other launched other smaller US global military interventions, and did nothing to wind down the Cold War, he was unable to overcome the massive US spending on the military, which has continued to this day, sucking up all the available tax revenue and piling on more debt, preventing any major funding initiatives that would significantly better American lives.

Everyone pretty much knows that the Republican Party is the unapologetic advocate of capitalism and the rich. So when its candidates call for more tax breaks for the rich and corporations, the best they can dot sell such ideas is promise voters that they will benefit when companies do better and can hire more people, or pay their current workers more. It rarely if ever works out that way, of course and people mostly know it’s a con game, but what are the Democrats offering?

Let’s look at the collapse of the Democrats in Florida this year as described by Swift. Democrats once in years past had a good shot at winning both at the state level in that Southern state as well at the federal level with Democratic senators and Democratic presidential candidates. After all, with so many older Americans making it their retirement address because of the warmer climate, the party of Social Security and Medicare was the logical choice. Al Gore actually would have won Florida in 2000 had the Supreme Court not halted the counting of outstanding ballots. Obama then won the state twice in 2008 and 2012.

But what did the Democrats do with that advantage? They trashed it! Beginning under Clinton in the 1990, they had already begun to allow, or failed to fight to defend, the buying power of monthly benefit checks paid to retirees from the ravages of inflation. As a result, the checks that current Social Security recipients get each month have shrunk in terms of their buying power by 36% from what they were in 2000. (That’s more than the dire 25% cut that opponents of Social Security keep claiming benefits will “have to be cut” by come 2035 if changes in the system aren’t made soon.)

The elderly and disabled know this is happening. Virtually every year the annual inflation adjustment for Social Security is less than what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports is the increase in the cost of living. And no wonder — Congress continues to require the Social Security Administration to use in determining the nest year’s inflation adjustment for benefit checks, a Consumer Price Index for white-color urban office workers, not an index for the elderly!

Meanwhile Medicare keeps getting costlier for the elderly, who have to purchase private supplemental coverage to cover 20% of their hospital care costs as well as much of their drug costs, physician bills, etc. It’s a far cry from Medicare in Canada, which covers all costs for Canadians of all ages, or the British National Health System where all care is free to all citizens and even, as I am currently finding as a temporary resident at Cambridge University, to non-citizens who are properly in the country with a visa.

Democrats have also been pushing, along with Republicans, for the back-door privatization of Medicare in the form of a corrupt and hugely expensive program dubbed Medicare Advantage, where shameless aging celebrities hustle Medicare recipients on slick TV and magazine ads to give up their government Medicare and instead buy private “Medicare Advantage” plans the cover things that Medicare does not like full payment of doctor bills, drugs and even dental and eye care. It sounds good, but what they don’t explain in those ads (except in incomprehensible super fast talking auctioneer-style bursts), is that the plans limit the insured person to a limited number of participating physicians, require a nurse or GP’s approval for referral to a specialist and don’t always offer needed specialists in they system. Worse yet, Congress (Republicans and Democrats alike) have cravenly excluded Medicare advantage plans and even the Med-gap policy that you need to buy to supplement the missing coverage in the government Medicare program from the Affordable Care Acts’s ban on pre-existing condition exclusions of coverage.

That means if your Medicare advantage plan denies you coverage for some serious health condition, you cannot just shift over to the government Medicare plan because you’ll end up stuck for 20% of your hospital and physician and drug treatment costs — enough so that even a relatively short stay in the hospital or operation could end up leaving you bankrupt.

Since Social Security and Medicare are so critically important to Florida’s huge percentage of voters, you’d think that Democratic candidates campaigning there would be howling about this scandal, but it is rarely if even mentioned.

The same can be said about the minimum wage, at which many of Florida’s elderly whose Social Security benefits are too low to pay all their bills, have to work, and at which younger Floridians who are under 62 and not yet eligible to receive Social Security benefits, also work. The Republican-run state has been gradually raising its minimum wage, which is currently $12 per hour, up significantly from the $7.25 it was at in 2009, and it will reach $15 an hour in 2026. But of course that’s not as dramatic an increase as it might appear, since prices will have gone up by a cumulative 65% or more over that 17-year period. In other words, all that is happening is that minimum wage workers’ pay in Florida will only be just catching up with inflation in 2026. Meanwhile the 90,000 federal workers in Florida who are receiving a minimum federal wage will still be just earning $7.25 as they are all across the country and in 11 states (including one of the largest: Texas) that set their state minimum wage at the federal level. Another two states (Georgia and Wyoming) have a minimum wage of $5.15 and four (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina ) don’t even have a state minimum wage.

Given that 11 states have been following the federal government in setting a minimum wage at the pathetic level of $7.25 an hour, which works out to $290 a week or $15,000 a year before state, local and Social Security and Medicare taxes for a 40-hour week (if you can get one), It might seem logical that a candidate running for state or federal office on the ticket of the self-described “working people’s” party, the Democrats, would be hammering on the need to guarantee all workers a living wage as FDR had planned to do in his fourth term. But with the exception of Bernie Sanders and a handful of outspoken left liberal members of the Democrats’ Progressive Caucus, calls fo a living wage, or for an already too low $15/hour federal minimum wage have been at best throw-away lines amid the special interest appeals to various demographic and politically focussed interest groups. That is true of the party’s belated standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, who rarely made increasing the minimum wage part of her campaign spiel.

No wonder Harris and the rest the the Democratic Party ticket failed so miserably in Florida, Texas, the erstwhile “Blue Wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the other once reliably Democratic or swing states ;like Nevada (a heavily unionized state) Georgia and North Carolina which all went for Trump often also to down-ballot Republican candidates.

My question at this point is why Swift and other critics of the Democratic Party’s pathetic showing against the convicted criminal, grifter, sexual predator and seriously narcissistic Donald Trump are afraid of the Party’s “collapse” on a national scale.

First of all, that collapse has already happened. The final blow was when the neoliberals and the billionaire corporate funders who have taken full control of the party sabotaged the campaign of Bernie Sanders during the primary season in 2020, handing the nomination to Joe Biden, who was already showing signs of mental and physical decline, was a solid backer of US military might, US empire and unlimited military spending, and is an opponent of major improvements in US social programs like universal Medicare or a major jobs program.

Basically, unwilling and uninterested in trying to return the party to its New Deal roots, the Democratic Party and its presidential ticket of Harris and Tim Walz ran a reactive campaign of being anti-Trump, not an economic left populist campaign built around improving the lives of working class people of all races,.

I know a number of people who voted for Trump, mostly middle-age workers struggling to support their families. They mostly conceded they knew “Trump is not a nice or even a good person” and that he might not even “care about working people,” but they all said that the Democrats had “done nothing” for them and that their lives were harder than they had been four years ago, which is all unarguable.

Their thinking in voting for Trump — and a few said it openly — was to “shake” or “blow things up,” which is what they’ve done by re-electing Trump, who envisions an autocracy with a subservient oligarchy of billionaires cozying up to him at Mar-a-Lago.

I confess while I was loathe to back Biden, whose fulsome support of Israeli genocide in Gaza makes him as guilty of that crime against humanity as is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and who has been pushing ever harder against Russia in a mad game of nuclear chicken that could easily blow us all up, but I felt that with Trump vowing to set up a Mussolini-style fascist state in the US that a run-of-the-mill candidate like Harris, who at least in an earlier iteration of herself seemed to have more progressive instincts, might once in the White House, seek a negotiated end to the dangerous conflict in Ukraine, and might stand more firmly against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. I admit it was a stretch, but the fascist threat posed by Trump was then and is now real and looking increasingly likely.

But that said, where for some time now people have been talking about the self-destruction of the Republican Party by Trump and his cult of feckless supporters in Congress, it appears that it’s Democratic Party too that has been fully destroyed by its total domination by neoliberal corporatists and globalist militarists. Democrats will probably never win another national election because they have lost the working class — even the rank and file trade unionists.

If one thinks about it, this is the ideal time to for the left to begin organizing a new mass party based upon labor unions and all working people. By the time the next presidential election comes around in four years, or maybe as soon as the next mid-term elections for the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, the workers who turned to Trump will be seeing clearly how little he cares about them and how he has screwed everything up domestically, offering so much more power to his super rich backers.

Those millions of betrayed Trump voters would be easy to win over to a FDR-type candidate calling for a nationwide mandated living wage, government-funded health care for all, the right to a home, a social security system that offers everyone a reliable and comfortable old age pension, not a paupers’ pension, and that would reduce the US military budget to what would legitimately be required to protect this country from invasion or attack, which would mean a cut in military spending of at least 75% — enough to fund all of that. And the rest of the country’s working class and lower-to-middle class voters would nearly all join them.