The choice in three types of Democrats: Which do you choose?

In a recent spat of different types of progressives, it's come to my attention that people are fighting very vocally about the type of democrat they want in office. Historically, strong sentiments of uprising within the working class have resulted in a strand of politician that works to their benefit. The stronger the coalition is, the more progressive the politician becomes. The weaker the coalition becomes, the more reactionary the politician.

This culminates within the Democratic Party with the result of three different Democrats: New Deal (FDR) Democrats, Great Society (JFK) Democrats, and Third Way (Reagan) Democrats.

Third Way Democrats are those that chose the path of Reagan and his neoliberal policies. To abbreviate them, you decimate workers while you save the rich with Third Way Democrats. Pelosi, Feinstein, Obama and Clinton are these types. As I'm sure a LOT of people understand them, I merely want to point them out for now.

The other two are far more important to scrutinize. Given the recent backlash I'm pretty sure people are squaring up to decide what they want. Of course, the strengths and weaknesses of each should be discussed. As it stands, the JFK liberal is the first one that we should be acquainted with. JFK was murdered in Dallas in 1963, and no president has been quite like him since. The shining example of his presidency was a sharp analysis of the military industrial complex and the push to destroy the CIA for their murder of his friend in Lamumba:

After Kennedy took office, he was unaware that the CIA, in accord with an OK from President Eisenhower and working with the Belgians, had overseen the gruesome torture and brutal murder of the Congo's popular first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

With Lumumba already dead a month and his body dissolved in sulphuric acid, Kennedy called for him to be reintegrated into the new nation's government. The CIA-- Allen Dulles, who JFK foolishly kept on as director-- hadn't told him that they had carried out Eisenhower 's orders to have him murdered as a commie dupe.

…If Allen had not yet confronted the implications of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had. In private he cursed "CIA bastards" for luring him into it, and wished he could "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

Foreign policy, which is the domain of the CIA, is what they would lose with regard to a powerful president dead set against them and their interferences since the end of WWII. Robert F Kennedy was also very strongly against the CIA which culminated in his murder as well. But the point should still stand: A sharp curbing of foreign wars which curbs the bureacracy of the CIA, FBI, and others. Domestic policies are very hit or miss. JFK and RFK had to deal with Southern Democrats and the movements of the time were very invested in foreign policy. The Civil Rights movement along with other movements were forcing more investment domestically, but the investment in Vietnam was sucking up any Great Society (LBJ) policies which should be a lesson for today.

The greatest criticism of MLK was the three evils of America: racism, militarism, and poverty and the sharpest criticism of America came from the JFK era, more so than the next one.

For FDR and New Deal Democrats, we got a very different government. A mandate was given to FDR to do something that 4 years of Hoover and (corporate) Republican sentiments had left hanging. Beginning in 1937, (FDR was elected in 1932 but listened to conservatives until he was pushed by communists, socialists, and unions) FDR pushed the New Deal and Third Way Democrats destroyed it.

Reforms according to Gerald Horne were a mixed bag:

You alluded to a number of the examples, that is to say, with regard to the Social Security program seeking to exclude categories of workers where Blacks tended to flock, such as agricultural labor in particular. I should also mention that with regard to housing programs, recent scholarship has suggested that New Deal housing programs did not erode Jim Crow neighborhoods. They helped to fortify Jim Crow neighborhoods.

However, before we go too far in that direction, I should also mention some of the positive benefits of the New Deal, particularly the so-called Wagner Act, the National Labor Relations Act, which was a kind of Magna Carta for the organizing of the industrial north and the industrial Midwest. This led to the formation of the United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers in particular and they tended to organize many Black workers within their ranks. Then, after those unions were organized, they were able to use the dues money of those workers to support anti-Jim Crow initiatives. In some ways, it’s fair to say that the New Deal was a mixed bag for African Americans.

The coalition of the parties is also just as important to consider:

GERALD HORNE: It’s complicated. Look at the party configuration coming out of the US Civil War, that is to say post-1865. You have the Republican Party, the party of abolition, the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass says is the ship and all else is the sea, and the Republican Party is basically comprised of Black male voters in Dixie and white middle-class and white elite forces in the north. Then you have the Democratic Party, which is basically comprised of white workers in the south and white workers in the north.

Obviously, that’s a screwy political configuration. Beginning in 1932, you began to see a mass defection of Black voters to the Democratic Party, driven by the Great Depression and the inertia of the Herbert Hoover administration that preceded the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Black workers started flooding into the Democratic Party in 1932 and 1936, they did not necessarily receive a warm greeting from their fellow white workers. In fact, one of the reasons why the New Deal programs were so stingy with regard to coverage of Black interests and coverage of Black workers was precisely because of this antipathy from the Dixiecrats.

The question is, could Franklin Delano Roosevelt have done more? I think that’s a fair question but I think that objectively speaking, like political leaders before and since, he was faced with a rock-solid granite wall of white supremacy within the ranks of his own party and that is a force that is very difficult to overcome.

So it's safe to say that FDR Democrats have a weakness on racial issues which were brought to the forefront in the time of JFK Dems in the Civil Rights Movement era...

Now who are some of the Dems that fit into these molds?

Bernie, as stated by Howard Dean in 2005, pointed out he's a socialist democrat or a socdem. An FDR Democrat.

Tulsi Gabbard is fitting the mold more and more as a JFK Democrat.

AOC, with her outburst about raising taxes, is focusing more on Great Society policies along with a Green New Deal, which people should remark as very similar to the New Deal. She's mixed.

Ilhan Omar, would be more in line as a JFK Democrat. Sharp critique of foreign policy, weaker on domestic policies (she gets a ding for supporting Nancy Pelosi's Paygo plan.

As shown, both have strengths and weaknesses with domestic policies being a bit stronger with FDR Dems while foreign policies being a bit stronger with JFK Dems. LBJ Dems are their own thing, but still get a recognition.

This is basically how Tulsi and Bernie should be viewed. Some people can see more viability with Bernie and his domestic policies. But they can also see that his foreign policies are a bit more hawkish as Chris Hedges pointed out

The Democratic establishment’s response to any internal insurgency is to crush it, co-opt it and rewrite the rules to make a future insurgency impossible. This was true in 1948 with Henry Wallace and in 1972 with George McGovern—two politicians who, unlike Sanders, took on the war industry—and in the 1984 and 1988 insurgencies led by Jackson.

...

He routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996—after Clinton had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare—and for John Kerry in 2004. He called on Ralph Nader in 2004 to abandon his presidential campaign. The Democrats recognize his value. They have long rewarded Sanders for his role as a sheepherder.

Tulsi, as it stands, has a lot more JFK and is calling out the military industrial complex similar to Smedley Butler or JFK as pointed out before.

So at the end of the day, consider these strengths and weaknesses of all three types of Dems. This is the choice we're considering as we prepare for the debates.