Middle-Class Dreams
Stanley Greenberg
Random House, $25.00
STANLEY GREENBERG’S Middle-Class Dreams is an explanation of “the Clinton solution” and a screed for the President’s re-election. Greenberg makes the case for Bill Clinton by virtually ignoring his performance as President, blaming Lyndon Johnson for “betraying” White Democrats, scoffing at the need for campaign finance reform, and failing to identify the seizure of control of the Democratic Party by major corporations and the very rich as the chief cause of its present disgrace and ruin.
Precisely because it is so perverse, Stanley Greenberg’s apology for the Clinton presidency is of substantial interest. Although Bill Clinton is insulated from the derails of this book simply because he is not its author, the President encouraged Greenberg to write it and kept him on as a top White House pollster and strategist despite the Democrats’ loss of the House and Senate lase year. The writer still is a White House insider who works closely with Clinton. His hype for his boss’ re-election includes flattery, campaign doggerel, a hagiographic 49-page fairy tale about Clinton’s career, and incantations of “the Clinton solution.” So the book provides a window on the cock-eyed rationalizations of those stars and operatives at Democrat Central who have turned what was once the party of the common man into the party of the corporate manikins.
Stanley Greenberg was not always a pollster and political insider. In several vigorously researched and useful books, Professor Greenberg investigated racism, class, work, and social change in the United States, Israel, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. His analytical thinking, he wrote, was “situated in the mainstream of positivist and Marxist social science” and “the materialist analysis,” as against “the tenor of liberal thought.” In his Rau and State in Capitalist Development (1980)—which cited work by Hobsbawm, G. D. H. Cole, Du Bois, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Schumpeter, the Webbs, Gramsci, Weber, and James Q. Wilson, for example—Greenberg concluded that, in his research, “capitalist development . . . both preserves and remakes the racial order, extending and reinforcing racial barriers,” but also causes tendencies coward the dismantling of those barriers. “Each of the dominant class actors—commercial farmers, businessmen, and trade unionists— . . . in his own way lends legitimacy to . . . racial domination.” More importantly, Greenberg argued that “Racial domination . . . is essentially a class phenomenon” that changes as material conditions change, although racism, in its own right, is stubbornly rooted in pre-industrial evolutionary conditions.
Greenberg’s transformation from academic to pollster-politician has been stark. Shifts in his nomenclature were foretold in his 1987 book on South Africa by his use of the term “economic growth” for “capitalist development.” His present role with Clinton seems to have transformed his concerns about racism and racial domination, as he shows when, in Middle-Class Dreams, he sets himself two implausible tasks.
First, concerned to promote the theory that universally applicable social programs are the best way to help the underprivileged, he seeks to glorify “the middle class” and Clinton as its champion whole opposing “targeted” programs for the poor or racial minorities. In a sobering flight of classism (that is, the notion that persons of one class, as persons, are superior or inferior to those of another class), Greenberg says that members of the American middle class are “the hardest working and most virtuous citizens, yet the least honored.” They feel that “a collapsing class structure . . . placed all of society’s burdens on them.” They solicit, then—do they not?—our almost unlimited pity. Clinton and Greenberg, by buying and selling this kind of sentimentality for their tactically favored class of victims, in effect tell us that it’s the middle class and implicitly that it’s not the poor and the discriminated-against who deserve our compassion.
Second, startlingly, Greenberg seeks to establish that Lyndon Johnson “betrayed” the White Democrats, not in Vietnam, but by shepherding into law the great civil rights legislation of the 60s and crafting the Great Society to help the poor. These efforts were a betrayal, Greenberg says, because they alienated White-racist Democrats who had expected Johnson to preserve White domination as most Democratic leaders had done.
In a discussion of “Race and the End of Democratic Populism,” Greenberg writes: “The Democrats had fashioned a party of the people . . . within a national political space that was largely and artificially white.” In evidence, Greenberg recalls that William Jennings Bryan stayed silent as Jim Crow was established in the South; Woodrow Wilson segregated the civil service and Washington, DC; Roosevelt refused co back any civil rights legislation (Truman and Humphrey were brave exceptions among Democratic leaders); Adlai Stevenson warned against going coo fast on civil rights; and John Kennedy avoided the question until the Civil Rights movement and the White South’s violent reactions forced his hand. Then came the Vietnam War, true, but mainly, Greenberg contends, then came Johnson and “civil rights, riots, and the Great Society.” Greenberg concludes: “For white middle-class America, this tumult represented a broken contract”: thus, “the betrayal.”
This is just a trick. Democrats in large numbers feel betrayed. You can’t persuade them to give up this feeling. So how do you appear to agree with them while denying that you’re to blame? Greenberg’s sleazy solution is to adopt Republican scapegoating as the correct interpretation: the betrayers are not the corporations and the rich whose money has rotted out the Democratic Party, or chose leaders and insiders at Democrat Central who accommodated them; the betrayer is Lyndon Johnson for aligning the party with the Blacks and the poor. This switch of villains is the ultimate betrayal of the Democratic Party by those who presume to run it from the center. It’s a decision to court White racists rather than to screw up some courage and go after corporations and the “major donors” that are providing all that sweet, sweet money. It’s so base you almost miss it.
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