Democratic sheepdogging: A long tradition

And, a long tradition of its defenders

So-called “third” parties have been around in the United States for a long time. One of them, the Republican Party, of course eventually became one of the two “duopoly” parties due to the country’s political cracks widening in the run-up to the Civil War.

After the Civil War, as the Gilded Age took root, and took root for the most part in both Republican and Democratic parties, a new third-party tradition started. The Greenback Labor Party lasted but briefly, but its presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, gathered its threads again in the 1890s into the Populist Party, or People’s Party, something different from Nick Brana’s creature.

And, as it grew, so did the first Democratic sheepdogger arise: William Jennings Bryan. The Populists swallowed hard and co-nominated him in 1896, after the “Boy Orator of the Platte,” at the tender age of 36, stampeded the Democratic Party into nominating him.

I’m writing about and this in a different takeoff angle on an in-depth bio of Bryan from about 15 years ago, “A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan” by Michael Kazin. An extended versoin of my Goodreads review is on Blogger.

My takeoff from that is primarily what’s in the subtitle, and about Michael Kazin by name, and the idea from history as well. Kazin himself is a Democratic Socialist of America member, or a “DSA Rosey,” as I call them. The DSA is strictly a movement within the Democratic Party and NOT a third-party movement, and let’s start there.

As I said at the start of my review:

I was on about page 120, the run-up to the 1904 Democratic convention, when the light bulb turned on:

William Jennings Bryan was the 120-years-earlier predecessor to Bernie Sanders, on the legend even more than the reality, and related to that, the degree to which many peddled the Kool-aid or drank it for themselves, often long after the reality differed clearly. This includes the two protagonists.

In other words, Bryan was not really that far outside of fair chunks of the Democratic establishment, and neither is Sanders. I think Kazin knows that, even if he doesn’t want to admit it for the public record.

As for Kazin’s own sheepdogging? I quote most of the last paragraph of his Wiki bio:

In an article for the Fall 2019 issue of Dissent magazine, Kazin argues that strategic collaboration between liberals and leftists is essential for the realization of a progressive political program. He wrote that "no Democrat will win the presidency in 2020 unless she or he can mobilize a broad coalition in which socialists would still be a distinct minority. In the United States, a strategic alliance between liberals and leftists is the only way durable changes have ever been won ... Abolitionists who joined the Republican Party drove Radical Reconstruction; union activists with socialist convictions helped make the Democrats a semblance of a labor party in big industrial states; the black freedom movement worked with white liberals to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Such coalitions were short-lived and frustrated radicals who wanted more far-reaching results. But when liberals and leftists remained at odds, as during the final decades of the past century, they made it easier for the right to triumph."

And, though he doesn’t expressly say so, on his Twitter page, there’s more amplification of the idea that leftists need to surrender their Green, Socialist Party USA or further left arms and just come back to the welcoming embrace of the Democratic Party, trust that all will be well, and work to reform it from within.

Problem? Current neoliberal Democrats have shown even less inclination to “move,” at least at the national level, than Woodrow Wilson did in 1912 or FDR did in 1932. And, Kazin knows that, too.

Problem No. 2 is that Kazin’s quote speaks only of domestic policy issues. This leftist, on Israel-Palestine, on Cold War 2.0 and the current Russia-Ukraine war and more, has other reasons not to follow a 30-years-and-growing rightward movement of a Democratic Overton Window. Look at Clinton and the Oslo Accords. Mondoweiss just said that Oslo was never meant to create a viable independent Palestine.

And, while Bernie Sanders still talks about how “I didn’t vote for the Iraq War,” he continues to cut blank checks to the Beltway world on this issue and the Cold War 2.0. And Kazin knows that as well.

That ties us back to our “Godly Hero.” Bryan told Democrats to support William McKinley’s Spanish-American War treaty with Spain, essentially to pickup Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” in the Philippines but do it better than Republicans, to read between Kazin’s lines. He did honorably resign as Wilson’s Secretary of State due to Wilson’s anti-German belligerence over the Lusitania, but for two years before that, put his conscience, or what remained of it, in his pocket over Haiti, the Domican Republic and Mexico. And, other than resign over the Lusitania? He took a pass on sailing on Henry Ford’s peace ship. He didn’t speak further about Wilson’s actions. And he refused to entertain either a Democratic or third-party challenge to him in 1916.

In the 1916 election, the Progressive Party’s top slot was open after Theodore Roosevelt declined it. Especially with Eugene Debs not on the Socialist ballot in 1916, a party that was against the possibility of entering World War I more firmly than either Democrats or Republicans, but otherwise perceived as less radical than Socialists, had a chance.

Kazin’s book is problematic in other ways, I suspect driven in large part by that Dissent comment above.

I single out Kazin, because of the Bryan-Sanders paralles and related issues. But, I could point to Doug Henwood, John Nichols at The Nation and many others if I wanted.

Back to the parallels to wrap this up. Sanders may not have a Chatauqua circuit to hit, but there are TED and TEDx talks. He may not write quite as many books as Bryan, but write them he does, especially in the service of sheepdogging.

Let me know when Democrats have officially, by actions, moved left, especially at the national level. Then we’ll talk.