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I had posted on this not too long ago, keying off a Cleveland reference by Louis. Note: 1) The phrase "Bourbon Democrats" refers to a late 19th century Federal level coalition of "Redeemer" Southern landowners existing off the rents gotten from Jim Crow structured share cropping, and a sector of the New York bourgeoisie representing "old" mercantile and allied banking and urban landlord money - who had long had ties to the previous Slavocracy, as well as Tammany Hall - the New York Bourbons factionally opposed to and being eclipsed by the "new money" financial-industrial combines being organized by such as JP Morgan and centered in the Republican Party. These latter finally triumphed in 1896 as the Bourbon position in the Democratic Party collapsed with the nomination of William Jennings Bryan. 2) The closer analogy of Obama/Clinton is to Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner transplanted to the Northeast who began his political career as a New York Bourbon Democrat, but who obviously made a certain metamorphosis as Wilson clearly ended up not opposed to "inflation, imperialism and subsidies to business" in the shape of the First World War. The key is the so-called "Progressive movement" that gave its name to that era. Wilson had one foot firmly planted in the camp of finance, unified and modernized by the creation of the Federal Reserve system, but the other was less steadily planted upon a sector of bourgeois "progressives" such as Walther Lippmann who had gone into the Democratic Party with the general Progressive exodus from the Republicans via Theodore Roosevelt's' Bull Moose party in 1912. Likewise Obama, in his ascending phase had one foot in finance capital, and the other on the backs of progressive Democrats. We see here how American progressives have ever been the useful idiots of U.S. capitalist politics in both the case of Wilson and Obama. But there the analogy ends: whereas Wilson in turning sharply Right could use the world war (and Red Scare) to bind the progressives to himself, Obama (like the later Clinton) tends to find his left foot dangling in midair, a condition much less stable that that of the New Deal Democrats, a capitalist coalition of industrial capital and landed property, with finance in subordination. The New Deal therefore is an exceptional episode in the history of a Democratic Party that now seeks (in vain, I believe) to return to its origins. Anybody read "The Democrats, a critical history", by Lance Selfa? -Matt ----------------------------------------------------------- I have been thinking about presidential comparisons with Obama. The closest I could imagine was Grover Cleveland's second administration. Cleveland was the leader of the pro-business Bourbon Democrats who opposed high tariffs, free silver, inflation, imperialism and subsidies to business, farmers or veterans. His battles for political reform and fiscal conservatism made him an icon for American conservatives. Cleveland was tight with the bankers and the railroad. Maybe he was not so much in love with them as Obama, but it is still pretty disgusting. Here are my notes from Matthew Josephson's The Politicos: read more at: http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/grover-cleveland-obamas-percursor/ ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
