Vol. 81/No. 4      January 23, 2017

 

US rulers groomed Bill Clinton to lead Democrats
to ‘center’

{From the pages of The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record}

 
Below is an excerpt from The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People, by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. It is from the chapter “Roots of the 2008 World Financial Crisis,” written in May of that year. Barnes describes the grooming of Bill Clinton as a “new” Democrat to shift the party to the “center.” Copyright © 2016 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES  
Prior to Clinton’s election to the presidency in 1992, dominant sectors of the US ruling class had molded him to lead Democratic Party liberals rightward, to the “center.”

Since the mid-1970s, when capitalism was hit with its first worldwide recession since World War II, the employing class has had diminishing room for substantial economic and social concessions to working people. Clinton’s job was to distance the Democratic Party from the “New Deal”-style social welfare programs many workers identified with that party. It had claimed credit for them ever since rising labor battles in the 1930s wrenched concessions from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration during the Great Depression. From the New Deal through Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” in the mid-1960s, those programs had been the glue that held together the diverse Democratic Party coalition.

While draping itself in the Democrats’ “progressive” mantle, the Clinton administration set out to change the party’s complexion to such a degree that what had previously been its “moderate center” would become its broad majority and redefine what a liberal Democrat is. His apprenticeship included officiating twelve years as governor of Arkansas, as well as chairing the National Governors Association in 1986-87 and then, in 1991, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which had been founded six years earlier to help push the party in that direction.

Two years into Clinton’s presidency, in November 1994, a Republican majority was elected in the House of Representatives, and a bipartisan convergence quickened. In 1996 alone “welfare as we know it” was wiped off the books; the “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” was adopted; and the “Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” was enacted, the biggest assault on the rights of the foreign-born since the end of World War II.

The Clinton administration also accelerated steps by the US rulers to try to counteract the declining rate of profit and the employers’ “inadequate” returns on capital expenditures. The goal was to “encourage” the capitalists to expand industrial plant and equipment and employ growing numbers of workers in production. To that end, the administration and Congress adopted legislation that, along with other White House measures, helped the employing class erect the enormous edifice of household, real estate, corporate, and government debt, and its accompanying array of derivatives, that began to unravel with the first signs of a world financial crisis in 2007 and its acceleration early this year.
 
 
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