Liberals, R.I.P.

The power of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was on display at a tiny little conference called by the Progressive Caucus during the Chicago convention. A handful of reporters and a few Democratic legislators, including liberal Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Lynn Woolsey of California, gathered in a hotel room to discuss the state of progressive politics.

Despite McKinney's upbeat introduction--"We're here to claim success"--it was clear from the turnout that this was hardly a show of force. The slim showing was a stark contrast to the raucous victory parties hosted by Christian evangelicals and rabid pro-lifers at the Republican convention.

The message from the Progressive Caucus, as from every quarter of the Democratic Party this fall, is: "Get in line behind the President."

"I know the President is counting on us to fill in the loopholes in the welfare bill," Woolsey announced, pardoning the President, as did every other liberal-to-leftwing Democrat at the convention, for signing the welfare-repeal law in the first place.

"A lot of soul-searching has taken place on the part of the Progressive Caucus," McKinney said. Liberal Democrats had to ask themselves, "What is it that unifies our party?" she told reporters.

The answer: "The notion that there must be a sense of fairness and, in a time of need, the government must be there to help people."

But the promise that government will help people in times of need is exactly what Clinton has repealed by signing the welfare bill. And, after selling out this one unifying principle, the President is not taking a lot of heat from the left wing of his party.

"If we were going to fall on our swords, this is where we would do it," said Woolsey. "But we know how important it is that we stay united and get our House and Senate back and get our President back."

So much for pressure from the left.

This weakness on the Democratic left is heartbreaking. And it's particularly distressing to hear progressive Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo give speeches invoking the party's populist tradition, from the New Deal to the Great Society to the civilrights movement, even as that tradition is dismantled.

The convention was a funeral for Democratic Party liberalism, and Jackson and Cuomo were sent up to give the eulogies for the old doctrine.

"Keep that faith," Jackson intoned in a characteristically moving address.

But short of a miracle, there is nothing on the horizon to make us believe the Democrats will do right by their traditional constituents--minorities, the poor, and the great majority of working people whose interests are not the same as the interests of corporations.

Both Jackson and Cuomo mentioned the welfare repeal, which they each opposed, only to say that they would agree to disagree with the President.

Referring to the terrible risk to poor children that the welfare repeal imposes, Cuomo in his very next sentence echoed Jackson's call to close ranks behind the President.

"We should all hope and pray" that the President can "avert this risk by further legislation before children are actually harmed," Cuomo said. And using Clinton's signing of the welfare bill as, perversely, yet another reason to vote for the Democrats, Cuomo added: "We cannot rely on the Republicans to cooperate with President Clinton to save our children. We need to give the President the strength of a Democratic Congress."

Cuomo even praised Clinton's crime policy, saying, "Who can argue today that the Democrats are soft on crime?" But Cuomo said nothing about Clinton's expansion of the death penalty--which Cuomo has spent a lifetime fighting--to include sixty new categories of federal crimes.

Both Cuomo and Jackson invoked labor. Jackson urged the delegates to "stand with the steelworkers," and Cuomo said, "Those middle-class workers, they are our workers. Those people anxious about their futures--they are our people."

Yet the Democratic Party no longer stands for economic policies designed to increase the standard of living for working people.

Thanks to NAFTA and GATT, American workers are now competing with workers in the Third World who labor for starvation wages. Striking workers face employers who can legally hire permanent scabs, and who are increasingly adopting this tactic as a way to break unions.

While President Clinton and the Democrats in Congress did pass marginal improvements in the Earned Income Tax Credit and the minimum wage, a far more significant move was the reappointment of Alan Greenspan, a tight-money man, as chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan does the bidding of the bankers and bondholders on Wall Street who worry about rising wages and even the hint of inflation.

And the Democrats have now signed on to the balanced-budget idea, which will tie the government's hands during an economic downturn and risk transforming a recession into a depression. The $260 billion Pentagon budget, meanwhile, remains virtually untouched, so that balancing the budget just means slashing social programs.

The Democrats are also going along with traditional Republican malarkey about lowering the capital-gains tax.

During the Presidential campaign, Clinton announced that he'd all but wipe out the capital-gains tax on home sales.

Any family could take up to $500,000 in profit tax-free when selling a house under the new Clinton proposal. So a couple that buys a house for $1 million and sells it for $1.5 million can make a killing. The effect of the tax cut is to redistribute tax money to the well-off and to real-estate speculators.

Working people in the United States have seen their real incomes decline by 5 percent since 1989, even as corporate profits have reached a forty-year high. We have both the Republicans and the Democrats to thank for that.

The differences between the two parties are little more than cosmetic. It's a shame that Democrats who have a greater vision than the Clinton Administration's policies reflect are so timid. They seem to think that by rolling over now they can keep some influence in a second Clinton term. But they are rolling over on a slippery slope.