Like it or Not, the Democratic Party is a Right-Wing Party
By: Eric Spencer
Despite being branded as the party of the American “left,” the Democratic Party is a corrupt, pro-war, pro-Wall Street, anti-worker, anti-environment, authoritarian party that uses censorship, neo-McCarthyite smears and a militarized police force to squash decent.
Even Bernie Sanders, and the small handful of other progressive voices within the party, would be considered centrists in most other industrialized democracies throughout the world.
The party’s gradual shifting to the right has left the Republican Party nowhere to go but so far right they are completely off the global political spectrum. This leaves liberal and progressive voters with, seemingly no other choice but to support a Democratic Party that is antithetical to many of their core beliefs.
The Pro-War Democratic Party
In September 2001, House Resolution 64 (the Authorization for Use of Military Force or AUMF) was adopted. This resolution effectively gives the president complete autonomy to deploy the military anywhere, anytime and without the congressional approval required by the constitution.
Our founding fathers warned that giving the executive branch the freedom to make a unilateral decision to take the country to war is extremely dangerous, as the executive is far more likely to take the country to war than any other branch of government.
House democrats voted 204-1 in favor of this resolution that makes it legal, under U.S. law, to violate international law and invade countries all over the world without provocation and without congressional approval.
This led directly to the invasion of Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003), as well as the occupation of the two countries for the last, nearly, two decades. Hundreds of thousands (some estimates say millions) have died in these two wars. As a U.S. Senator, Joe Biden continuously voiced support for both of these disastrous wars.
Despite running on promises to end the wars in 2008, Barrack Obama would continue them as president. At times, escalating them through troop surges as well as major increases in U.S. bombing campaigns. According to leaked internal government documents, the Obama administration lied for eight straight years about the progress (or lack thereof) being made in Afghanistan. In fact, the Taliban controls more territory in Afghanistan now than they did before the invasion.
Barak Obama, in his eight years in office, dropped more bombs than even George W. Bush did during his eight, and the Obama/Biden administration increased the number of countries the U.S. military was engaged in from two to seven.
While he continued our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his Democratic administration added Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Syria to the list of countries the U.S. would bomb.
Under Obama, the U.S. led N.A.T.O. invasion of Libya turned the richest country in Africa into a failed state with open air slave markets and a haven for ISIS. Obama is also responsible for a horrific campaign of drone attacks around the world. Ninety percent of the victims killed in these drone attacks are civilians.
The Obama/Biden administration also sold more weapons globally than any administration in history. These sales include advanced military equipment sent to Saudi Arabia. This equipment allowed the theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia to carry out a genocide in Yemen. The Obama administration also provided intelligence and mid-air refuels to Saudi bombers that would destroy Yemen and create the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Obama dropped so many bombs the military began to run out. All of these decisions made by this Democratic administration were a dream come true for the weapons manufacturers, who just so happened to have donated more to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign than they did to his Republican opponent John McCain. For the people around the world that ended up under U.S. made bombs, it was a nightmare many of them never woke up from.
Obama’s second Secretary of State, John Kerry, chuckled in 2016 as he discussed the possibility of overthrowing Syria to a congressional panel, saying that Arab states had told him “if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we’ve done it previously in other places, they [Arab states like Saudi Arabi] will carry that cost.”
This statement demonstrates the willingness of a Democratic administration to turn the American military into mercenaries, willing to destroy a country “the way we’ve done before” at the behest of some of the most brutal, theocratic dictatorships on the planet. If the price was right, anyway. Instead, the administration just decided to arm groups such as Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra to fight the Syrian regime on the ground, calling them “moderate rebels,”while U.S. bombers destroyed much of the country.
Trump is clearly not a dove. His administration has vastly expanded the murderous drone program and has pushed us to the brink of war with Iran. However, during the Trump administration, the Democrats have also been deplorable in their advocation for war. They overwhelmingly voted to inflate Trump’s military budget by $82 billion, bringing the Pentagon’s total budget to around $732 billion annually.
That’s more than the next 10 top military spending countries combined. In April 2018, Trump launched missile strikes against a Syrian air base that housed both Syrian and Russian military personnel. The Democrats’ response to Trump’s escalation of tensions with a nuclear power ranged from full support, to calls for an even more military action.
One should note that these attacks were in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Duma which, according to evidence gathered and analyzed at the scene by senior OPCW investigators, was an attack that never occurred.
In July 2020, the Senate voted on a bill that would “reduce the bloated Pentagon budget by 10% and invest that money in jobs, education, health care, and housing in communities in the United States.” Democrats voted it down by a margin of 138-92. Among the Democrats that voted down the bill was Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
This is the same Kamala Harris who has been labeled the “most liberal” member of the Senate. If the most liberal democratic senator in the United States is against reigning in our war machine, even a little, what does that say about the Democrats?
Also, in July 2020, the Democratically controlled House Armed Services Committee put roadblocks in the president’s ability to pull troops out of Afghanistan and other warzones. The committee set up a criteria that is impossible to fulfill and that must be met in order for the president to remove troops. Between this and the AUMF, the power to start or continue a war is given to whichever branch of the government is most favorable to said war.
If the president wants to invade any country in the world for any reason, the AUMF gives them the “right” to do so. If the president, the commander and chief of the military, wants to pull out of a war, the Congress can block them from doing so. A system has been set up that makes it easy for us to go to war and almost impossible for us to pull out of one.
Joe Biden has named Gen. Lloyd Austin to be his pick for Secretary of Defense. Austin currently sits on the board of Raytheon Technology. Raytheon is one of top weapons manufacturers in the country and therefore directly profits from the U.S. waging war throughout the world.
Thanks to Biden, the weapons manufacturer will now have one of their own choosing when, where and how their deadly products will be deployed. None of this would be possible without a pro-war Democratic Party that is clearly in the pocket of the “defense” industry.
The Pro-Wall Street/Anti-Worker Democratic Party
Democratic President Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is the single most devastating piece of legislation to working people in this country in modern times. The agreement, which went into effect in 1994, sent 700,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico, destroying all collective bargaining leverage held by workers in the U.S. It also led to stagnant wages and unemployment for almost three decades.
Barak Obama campaigned hard to push through yet another disastrous trade deal during the latter half of his time in office called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While Obama was attempting to garner support for the deal, he was also petitioning the Department of Labor Statistics to stop tracking U.S. job losses caused by trade deals, a metric the department had tracked for decades. Hilary Clinton also voiced support for the deal during her 2016 presidential campaign despite the proposal’s lack of support among voters.
This pro-Wall Street, anti-worker style of legislating was nothing new for Obama. In the midst of the Great Recession, Obama made the decision to bail out Wall Street as 5.2 million people were being kicked out of their homes due to the criminality of some of the largest banks in the country. As 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Andrew Yang put it:
“We had the fundamental choice to either recapitalize the banks or keep Americans in their homes, we chose the banks, we bailed out Wall Street to the tune of $4 trillion.”
While the bottom 90% of Americans were losing a third of their wealth due to the egregious criminality of the banks, the Obama/Biden Justice Department refused to prosecute any of the criminals responsible. Eric Holder — Obama’s Attorney General, as well as former and future Wall Street lawyer — famously said some banks are “too large to prosecute.”
Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris was the Attorney General of California during this period. Her office found over a thousand instances of criminality perpetrated by Steve Mnuchin’s One West Bank during the foreclose crisis. Harris decided not to prosecute him and Mnuchin would go on to become Donald Trump’s treasury secretary. By not punishing this extremely destructive criminal behavior perpetrated by Wall Street, the Democrats have ensured this will undoubtedly happen again.
None of this should be shocking to anyone that knows who bankrolls these politician’s campaigns. Kamala Harris was one of the few Democrats to which Steve Mnuchin donated money. Obama took vast sums of Wall Street money and then allowed one of the largest Wall Street banks, Citi Group, to pickvirtually his entire cabinet.
Even before serving as Vice President, Joe Biden had a long history of siding with banks and creditors over working people. In just one example, Senator Joe Biden sided with the credit card companies that donated to his campaign when he sided with republicans on the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005. This bill makes it harder for Americans to escape crippling debt owed to predatory creditors.
In case you were still wondering where Obama and Biden’s loyalties lie, remember that they permanently cemented tax cuts for the rich in 2012 and cut $8.7 billion to food stamps in 2014.
Finally, when Obama allowed the police to brutalize peaceful protestors at Occupy Wall Street and refused to support workers union strikes, including many teachers union strikes all over the country, it became crystal clear who democrats were working for. The Obama/Biden Administration presided over the largest transfer of wealth upwards in history.
Not much has changed since the Obama years. Democrats co-sponsored a banking deregulation bill in 2018 that will assuredly lead to the next crash. In the 2020 election, Democratic presidential and congressional candidates collected more Wall Street cash than their republican counterparts.
Given these facts, it should come as no surprise that during the pandemic Democrats and Republicans voted unanimously for the "CARES Act,” which some experts say was the single largest upwards transfer of wealth in human history. It gave literal crumbs to the poorest people in the country while giving trillions to its richest. Sixty percent of Covid-19 related business closings in the U.S. are now permanent, while retail monopolies like Amazon, Walmart and Target are recording record profits.
Even as 14 million people lose their healthcare due to job loss caused by the pandemic, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to bring Medicare for All up for a vote on the House floor. Pelosi refused to pass desperately needed stimulus to the American people, simply because she did not want to risk giving Donald Trump any perceived political victory before the election.
Pelosi would gladly see 19 million families kicked out of their homes and millions become food insecure in order, theoretically, to help her party’s chances in the election. The current stimulus bill being negotiated contains no direct payments to Americans. It’s a stimulus bill with no stimulus for working people.
The Authoritarian Democrats
Despite actively campaigning against the warrantless wiretapping of the Bush administration, Democratic President Barak Obama oversaw a radical expansion of the U.S. surveillance state. Obama’s National Intelligence Director James Clapper testified before congress that U.S. intelligence agencies do not collect the personal data of millions of Americans.
Just a few months later, classified, internal government documents brought forward by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden proved Clapper had lied. Not only was Obama’s NSA collecting the data of millions of Americans without a warrant, but it was also spying on the heads of state of some of our closest allies.
The Obama Administration also effectively suspended habeas corpus when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in late 2011. Habeas corpus has been one of the most basic principles of western legal ideology since the Magna Carta around 800 years ago.
It guarantees that those detained by the state have a right to appear before a judge. The NDAA also suspends the right guaranteed by the 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (the right to council and a speedy trial). In one his last acts as president, Obama signed Executive Order1233. This order expands the surveillance state even further, and gives the government the “right” to collect and share the data of Americans with an array of outside entities.
Obama’s Democratic administration also waged an historical war on truth-telling. Obama prosecuted more journalists and whistleblowers under the draconian 1917 Espionage Act than all other previous presidents combined. These prosecutions threaten the very fabric of our democracy in their attempt to make journalism and truth-telling a crime. As the U.S.’s corporate controlled government continues to roll back the freedoms of its citizens, those that best have the ability to sound the alarm were jailed in record numbers during the last Democratic administration.
Censorship has classically been a tool of the right, but calls for the limiting of free speech are now coming from the so-called American left. Earlier this year, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff sent a letter to Google, Twitter and YouTube requesting the tech giants censor their platforms and remove “misinformation.” Democrats are asking unelected, unaccountable Silicon Valley billionaires to be the arbiters of acceptable speech. Giving the power to determine who gets to engage in free speech and what speech is acceptable to these companies is fascism, plain and simple.
Progressives in America have been subject to Neo-McCarthyite smears over the last three to four years by the authoritarian-leaning Democratic Party. Simply supporting Bernie Sanders, or even just supporting progressive policies can leave you open to being called a puppet of Putin. Bernie Sanders himself was subjected these types of smears during the 2020 presidential primaries.
This climate is similar to that of the U.S, circa 1954, when Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy held congressional hearings to accuse politicians, academics and artists of being communists working for the Soviet Union. These hearings are a fully maligned chapter in American history, but for some reason most can’t draw the parallels to what’s happening today.
Claiming someone is a tool of a foreign enemy because they disagree with your political ideology is an outdated and comical authoritarian attack, and it would make me laugh, if so many did not take it so seriously.
The militarized police in the U.S. are killing more of its own citizens than any other wealthy country in the world. In 2018, police in the U.S. killed 1,099 people. Of all other wealthy democracies, Canada’s police killed the second most. Their police killed 36 in that same year.
The militarization of police ramped up during the George W. Bush administration, but under Obama, the militarization of the police was taken to a whole new level. The Obama/Biden administration would sell 24 times as much military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies as his Republican predecessor.
The images of tanks in the streets of American cities, journalists prosecuted for doing journalism and truth-tellers who expose criminality within our government being tortured should be a wake-up call to the public. Authoritarianism is here.
In New York City, under the leadership of Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, the NYPD’s budget is $6 billion. That’s more than the city spends on the department of health, homeless services, youth services, and workforce development combined.
Little hope for reform is on the horizon with the election of Joe Biden. Biden has made a career out of being “tough on crime.” He authored the 1994 Crime Bill, signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton.
This bill exploded the prison population to inexcusable levels, locking up a radically disproportionate number of people of color. Biden’s pick for vice-president, Kamala Harris, while serving as California’s Attorney General, argued against the release of non-violent offenders on the grounds that it would upset the prison labor system. The prison slave labor industry is worth over $1 billion per year.
The “Environmentalist” Democrats
Simply acknowledging the existence of climate change does not put the Democratic Party on the left side of the public political spectrum. The Republican party is clearly an existential threat to organized human life on earth with its complete denial of climate science, but is just acknowledging the problem enough?
Many have heard about Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreements that were entered into by the Obama/Biden administration. Not as many are aware that these agreements were nowhere close to what is desperately needed to mitigate the most damaging effects of man-made climate change.
In fact, some of the biggest polluters, including the oil, gas, coal and agricultural industries, infiltrated the talks, and of course, ended up being some of the most influential voices allowed at the table. The signing of the Paris Climate Agreements is hardly a ringing endorsement for the Democratic Party’s commitment to this planet.
In Obama’s first term, 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico after a British Petroleum deep water oil drilling platform exploded. For a solid month the company was unable to figure out how to stop the underwater oil well from spewing into the Gulf. It was the largest oil spill in history.
It destroyed the ecosystems and ravaged the economies of communities throughout the Gulf. The Obama/Biden administration reacted to the public’s outrage over this horrific disaster by putting a six-month moratorium on deep water drilling. After that, drilling resumed.
Just five years later the administration would seek to expand offshore drilling. Obama green-lit plans to explore for oil in the Atlantic. Just this single exploration process alone was estimated to kill 138,000 dolphins and whales and affect countless other ecosystems in the Atlantic. Around that same time his Democratic administration also unveiled plans to lease 14 new offshore sites along the United States’ coast, including Alaska, to oil companies.
Under the Obama/Biden administration thousands of miles of oil pipelines were built. These pipelines include the Express Pipeline, the Keystone Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Enbridge Bakken Pipeline. Pipelines now crisscross the entire country. These pipelines, that carry millions of gallons of oil per day, are all at an extremely high risk of leaking. In fact, for these pipelines, leaks are inevitable.
Every pipeline has or will spring leaks. These leaks threaten water sources and ecosystems across the country. In 2016, Indigenous water protectors protested against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), saying that the pipeline threatened lakes, rivers and even one of the largest underground aquifers in the world, the Ogallala Aquifer. The inevitability of these pipes rupturing is far from the only risk to the environment. They move crude oil that, if refined and burned, will push our climate off a cliff.
During the standoff over DAPL, federal law enforcement agencies were infiltrating the camps of protestors, and the police along with corporate private security, were brutalizing them at the protests themselves. While all this was going on, Obama’s position was that he was “gonna let it play out.”
For how friendly Obama was to the oil and gas industry, it should come as no surprise that he was rewarded for his loyalty when he was paid $400,000 to speak at an event hosted by the Carlyle Group in 2017, shortly after he left office. Just a few years earlier, the Carlyle Group successfully lobbied the Obama/Biden administration to loosen EPA protections for two of its oil refineries.
The Democratic Party’s stance on Hydraulic Fracturing, or fracking, is yet another example their anti-environmental ideology. This process blasts millions of gallons of a toxic chemical cocktail into the ground in order to crack open natural gas deposits. This process contaminates underground water sources and disrupts tectonic plates, causing earth quakes. Obama’s Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, traveled the world in an effort to secure fracking rights for American oil companies on foreign soil. President-elect Joe Biden stated during his 2020 campaign:
“I am not banning fracking! Let me say that again. I am not banning fracking!”
In 2018, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, appointed Joe Manchin to the Democrats’ top spot on the Senate Energy Commission. Manchin has been one the biggest coal advocates in the U.S. Senate since his arrival in 2010. In one of his 2018 campaign adds, Manchin is shown shooting climate protection legislation with a rifle.
On Sept. 24, 2020, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed HR 4447, the Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act. A truly Orwellian name for a bill that actually boosts oil drilling in the U.S. Among those lobbying for this bill’s passage was Biden donor, Larry Linden. Linden was formally managing director of Goldman Sachs. Of the 233 Democrats in the House, only 18 voted against the bill.
If you are still associating the Democratic Party with the Green New Deal, just stop. Only 35 out of the 233 Democratic members of the House support the legislation. The two most powerful people in the Democratic Party, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President-elect Joe Biden, both oppose the Green New Deal. Pelosi famously called it the “Green Dream.” With straight faces these politicians tell us that there is no way to pay for the future existence of mankind (the Green New Deal) while at the same time giving $4 trillion to the richest oligarchs in the country and approving a $722 billion military budget.
But if you asked the Democrats, we’re doing just fine. In May of 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom was asked by an 11-year-old bay area boy if he would support a statewide Green New Deal. Newsom responded by telling the boy that California is doing enough on climate. If this is what we get from a Democratic governor in a state with a Democratic super- majority, then what hope is there for this party to address the largest scale problem in the history of the human race?
Where do Peaceful, Democracy Loving, Working People go From Here?
By continuing to vote “blue no matter who,” those on the left will ensure that they will be completely ignored by the Democratic Party. That’s how politics work. The Democrats take progressive voters for granted because there is seemingly no other place for these voters to go.
We have to show them that we are capable of not voting for them if we hope to have any chance of influencing them. Supporting a third party and calling your local representatives and asking them to support ranked choice voting and a bill to get money out of politics is a measly first step.
But in reality, change will certainly not come from within the Democratic or Republican Parties. Change won’t come from within any part of the political system for that matter. Change must come from the outside. Since power concedes nothing, we must force change upon it.
Workers have the real power in this country, and a general strike is the best way to flex that power. Workers in India are currently staging the largest general strike in history with 250 million workers all refusing to show up to their jobs. If anything, even close to that size happened here, workers would gain the ability to demand pretty much anything.
A general strike should be accompanied by massive protests and direct action that opposes: free speech restrictions, war, environmental degradation, police brutality, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, homelessness and income inequality. Within the two-party duopoly there is no chance of stopping any of it. We have to force it to stop from the outside. We must put our bodies and our futures on the line, because in reality — they already are.