second thought is a 100% viewer funded operation if you'd like to help support the channel and get some great perks while you're at it consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/crashcourse really prefers it that [Music] way 2024 is an election year and unfortunately for Biden his approval rating is in the toilet I won't go through his whole track record but just to refresh your memory Biden promised a $15 minimum wage didn't deliver he promised to enshrine the federal right to abortion didn't do that either he promised to cancel about $10,000 of student debt per person and
ultimately came in way under that number and then of course you have the recent stuff with the southern border where Biden's being far more xenophobic and Draconian than most Republicans even after calling Trump out for the same thing and promising to put a stop to the border wall which he also didn't do you get the picture but politicians never keep their promises so no one's really surprised even now as we're hearing the Biden campaign make basically the same promises is because trust me this time is going to be totally different they just needed more time
now that he's on the campaign Trail Biden is mostly pinning the blame for this sort of stuff on Republicans it's time to Rally every last Democratic voter behind him and with a solidly republican house and a sort of blue Senate at the moment the reason things like that border Bill didn't get through was because it was blocked by a strong Republican opposition so it makes sense that Biden is really keen on making them look like obstructionists but that really doesn't explain all the broken promises [Music] for about 2 years Biden and the Democrats had all
the power you can get in American politics the presidency the Senate and the house everything swung blue in 2021 people elected Biden on a pretty tame set of progressive promises ostensibly gave him and the Dems all the levers of power to make them happen and a good chunk of time to deliver and instead we got years of disappointment watered down proposals and a we believe in climate change Democratic party that somehow still turning out alarming numbers of new fossil fuel permits and to explain all that we heard a very familiar excuse back in 2021 for
example Biden said this I hear all the folks on TV saying why doesn't Biden get this done well because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the house and a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends but we're not not giving up it's nothing we haven't heard before when Progressive bills die in the Senate the story is always more or less the same liberal outlets and Twitter accounts start blasting whoever it was that flipped the last vote whether that's a mansion or a
cinema Biden delivers a passionate somebody really should do something about this not me speech and that's either the last you ever hear about it or 10 months later the bill has a new name 10 billion in extra defense spending tacted on and hardly anything left from the original this sort of thing has been happening for a long time and it's not without consequence if you've been following politics for a bit longer you might remember guys like Joe liberman who like mantioned today sort of made being the Democratic party's rotating villain his whole personality he's dead
now if you don't remember him liberman was famous for a few things being aggressively pro-iraq War until the day he died and back in 2009 rejecting Obama's plan to include a public option in Obamacare the public option would have been a federal health insurance system that could compete against private insurance and drive prices down in very simple terms it would have made Healthcare cheaper and made private insurers lose money it's not quite abolishing private insurance the way Bernie's Medicare for all plan would have but still it was something anyway in 2009 the Democrats had the
votes in the Senate to pass the ACA with a public option provision included most democratic voters and most Americans were in favor and suddenly right before the vote in comes liberman vocally opposing the public option threatening a filibuster and because he was the deciding vote ultimately forcing the ACA to be drafted without it the public realized what was going on that even if liberman could block a vote by being a dissident and preventing the Democrats from having the 60 votes they needed like the Republicans under Bush the Democrats could use reconciliation to pass the ACA
with a public option with only 50 votes then once again out of the woodwork comes Jay Rockefeller another Democrat Allied Senator suddenly reversing months of his own pro-public option rhetoric and refusing to vote for it because well the timing isn't very good why wasn't the timing very good well because the timing allowed the Democrats to actually exercise power in a way that would have benefited their constituents typically that's good but for the Democrats these are very bad circumstances because they force them to either find people willing to go back on their word or actually follow
through on their promise so why does this happen why do we always seem to have these obstructionists within the country's major left party blocking even mild center-left policies on some level there's an obvious answer and like in most American politics that answer is lobbying take liberman over his career insurance companies had contributed nearly half a million dollars to his campaigns pharmaceutical companies almost certainly played a role too with liberman's wife having several jobs in lobbying firms known for being cozy with big Pharma and that would have benefited from liberman's obstruction the same goes obviously for
guys like Joe Mansion who is well known for being staunchly pro- fossil fuels and killing every bill that would lessen the US's Reliance on them between 2017 and 2022 he was the number one recipient of oil and gas and Auto industry money to the tune of several million dollar and you can say the same about Centrist Democrats in the house earlier this year eight house Democrats asked Biden to lift a pause on liquefied natural gas export permit approvals according to Jacobin four of them received more than $1.6 million in oil and gas donations and the
other four got more than 300,000 from the energy and natural resources industry this flies in the face of a Democratic party that is very publicly outspoken that climate change is an existential threat but those examples are all very direct somewhat out in the open campaign donations if receiving money from lobbying groups while in Government doesn't sound like enough of an incentive there's always the reassurance of the revolving door see being despised by your party might make your seat a little less stable might make your party more reluctant to select you for candidacy for your state
and might generally attract a lot of hate you might not want to endure for decades for those who don't like being public targets there's always the option of bowing out and getting just a regular lobbying gig where the connections you made in Congress are incredibly valuable and sure enough roughly 6 % of retired lawmakers land in jobs where they end up influencing federal policy for significant salaries at least in the exiting class of 2019 that's the case for Joe Donnelly a conservative Democrat named as a partner in 2019 his Centrist friend Doug Jones and your
favorite Joe liberman who left office back in 2013 this possibility to cash out by staying cozy with corporate lobbyists matters to conservative Democrats how do we know that because none other than Joe Mansion told us so back in 2021 when he opposed the four the people act that would have slowed down this revolving door and made it harder for congress people to become Federal influences Mansion wrote his own version of the bill that cut that specific ethics provision and would set up him and his Centrist buddies for the foreseeable future but let's get back to
liberman for a second because the especially egregious cases of this lobbying influence are probably best represented by his group No Labels No Labels is a nonprofit it/ political party started in 2010 with the purpose of bringing together centrists and moderates in the US to grab seats from progressives their reric is predictably uninspired and mostly characterized by calling themselves representatives of the Common Sense majority while throwing everybody who doesn't work with them under the extreme header in a country with two nearly identical parties anyway no labels doesn't publicly reveal who its donors are as a nonprofit
that's technically allowed if a little weird but the problem for them is that that hasn't stopped journalists from figuring this stuff out and as you probably expect well it's a lot of classic Republican donors who would not be disappointed at all with having a few spoilers in the ranks of those who caucus with Democrats Lewis bacon a regular GOP donor gave No Labels about $1 million to elect more centrists for example James Murdoch former chief executive of 21st Century Fox the parent company of Fox News put in at least 500,000 Nelson pelt a big Trump
donor put nearly 9900k into the no Lael super pack I think you get the idea according to open Secrets No Labels has something like eight super packs playing with several million dollars and frankly those three names barely scratch the surface there's a lot of demand for people willing to act as spoilers to Aid the Republicans and centrists have a lot to gain from playing that role but if you're like me this explanation doesn't feel complete it's not that lobbying doesn't matter you can always find deep Wells of corporate money going to these Centrist and flipping
their votes but it's just not the full picture it doesn't explain what's in it for the Democratic party who by all accounts not only let this happen but actively play a role in keeping it going so why doesn't just pointing to lobbying feel like enough for starters conservative Democrats don't always get the most campaign donations from corporations or in general if the only explanation I gave you for why are they like this was money that little piece of evidence would pretty much Crush my whole argument there's other ways to make money than to be a
self-interested fence sitter and plenty of Democrats get just as healthy a check from being regular partisans often times though you'll hear that the explanation for rotating villains has something to do with the villain of the week's constituents if some Democrats are more conservative the conventional narrative is that they're probably just a better representative of a more conservative District or state but that's not what the voting record show take a look at glosen Camp Perez from Washington she's part of a group of conservative Democrats called the Blue Dog Coalition and Beyond how lame calling yourself a
blue dog is you might remember her from her time in the villain seat as a vocal opponent of student loan forgiveness quote she was one of just two Democrats to vote for a proposal that would have thrown out the entirety of President Joe Biden student debt relief plan and would have also retroactively reinstated interest payments and reinstated some already forgiven loans since joining Congress in January 2023 she's voted with Republicans more than most of her Democratic colleagues according to slate and especially surprising for a Democrat that included voting for a Republican ndaa bill that restricted
abortion access for those in the military and targeted Dei initiatives at the Pentagon now glosen Camp Perez flipped her seat from red to blue in 2022 sure but that does not make her District especially red among house Democrats nor can it explain these votes Mary pela a representative from Alaska for example ran in a state that Trump carried by 10 points last election double his lead in glosen Camp Perez's district and she never voted against either that student loan bill or the ndaa anti-abortion stuff because she didn't need to so if neither constituency nor lobbying
alone can explain these obstructionists what does the answer is the American political economic system its design and the power it gives corporations through a grid locked Congress we tend to think of congressional gridlock as the government not working gridlock obstructionism rotating villains they all give us the impression of a government that suddenly stops and locks up its proper function and indeed that's the core of the Democrats rhetoric Democrats campaign on being bipartisan and working across the aisle because it's necessary to overcome gridlock and return government to a proper State of Affairs but that's not the
case at least not according to Sheldon wolen in democracy Inc Woolen spells it out pretty clearly quote the true significance of near gridlock is not that it paralyzes governmental action but that it prevents majority rule sharp and nearly equal divisions the stuff of gridlock are in the interest of some powerful groups who would be less influential more threatened by majority rule what is made more difficult by the politics of stalemate is the capture of state power to advance the social interests of the many in other words in a gridlocked congress power does doesn't come from
an electoral majority or the interest of the majority of citizens power comes from the control of a small number of seats control that great sums of money purchase for maximum effect and can easily outweigh what little power a majority of Americans can have through voting according to wen achieving this state of gridlock is crucial to the interest of a party like the Democrats while the Republicans can be unabashedly Pro business as the party meant to represent the left the Democrats have to play a different game game while claiming to represent the interest of the majority
quote the poor minorities the working class anti- corporatists pro- environmentalists and anti-imperialists they also know that in a two-party system these people don't have any other powerful representation there is no viable third party for those who reject putting corporate profits first and that means the Democrats can simultaneously use the rhetoric of progress while remaining competitive by catering to the interest of Corporations who fund them just as much as their opposition Democrats always need to remain a pro bus party if they want to stay in power they also need to be seen by enough of the
voting population as the only home for Progressive politics to square that Circle the Democrats need to have politicians who allow them to profess their supposed progressiveness without actually needing to deliver on it as a result every election becomes about winning this majority through mobilizing voters with Progressive rhetoric and once the seats have been earned the extent of political participation for most people is now reduced to being upset about corporate Democrats and the lobbyists behind them and waiting for the next election quote gridlock establishes the conditions of electoral politics in elections the party set out to
mobilize the citizen as voter to Define political obligation as fulfilled by the casting of a vote afterwards post-election politics of lobbying repaying donors and promoting corporate interests the real players takes over the effect is to demobilize the citizenry to to teach them not to be involved or to ponder matters that are either settled or beyond their efficacy wolen calls this state of affairs managed democracy it's a system in which rather than being dominated by the tyrannical majority the founding fathers whed about a careful set of controls is put in place to empower a corporate minority
and block any form of majority rule that doesn't align with its preferences so under this system winning for the Democrats doesn't mean getting enough seats to do whatever they want they win the game of politics when they can get just enough seats to do the bare minimum and keep voters coming back without seriously upsetting the corporate backers whose influence is much more important and who they actually need to care about now weakening popular majorities was always built into the structure of American government with its Electoral College byic Camal legislature and unequal term lengths between the
more popular house and the more aristocratic Senate but the rotating villain strategy specifically lets the Democrats sit back and retain enough legitimacy by letting just a a few of their colleagues take the heat for voting against policies they don't want to see happen and to make this strategy work Democratic Leadership is highly involved in the process of sidelining progressives and keeping their numbers to a minimum while throwing their support behind Centrist they'll get to scold down the line for example it was recently revealed in the American prospect that four former directors of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee the official campaign arm of the Democrats in the house have been working against Progressive incumbents to get conservative centr Democrats elected Instead This is the same organization that four years ago while many of these directors worked there had an official policy against using party resources to attack incumbents but the difference was that in 2020 the incumbents were the centrists and now they're the progressives so attacking them is totally fine but those are former directors the fact that they aren't really official Democrats anymore might be enough to dismiss them for some people much harder
to dismiss though are the current Democratic leaders in the house throwing all their weight behind centrists that regularly vote against the party back in March sludge revealed that quote the house Democratic Leadership Super PAC donated more than $1.1 million to a lobbyist run Centrist group that has worked to undermine the Biden administration's agenda on lowering drug prices regulating the finance industry and put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind obstructionists if the party wanted to actually do stuff when in power its leaders wouldn't throw so much money at the corporate Darlings it knows will block every
bill that would fulfill a campaign promise case in point Hillary Clinton just endorsed George ladimer against the more Progressive Challenger Jamal Bowman in the primary race in New York who's George ladimer well according to Clinton a quote strong principal Democrat who will fight for President Biden's agenda according to Latimer's own track record though he's a Centrist who refuses to raise taxes on the wealthy and will stand behind Israel no matter what that race by the way has become the most expensive house primary ever in large part because United democracy project and APAC Affiliated Super PAC
pumped in more than $14 million in ads for the Centrist candidate and it's not the first time we've seen Democratic Leadership do this 3 years ago once again in New York the chairman of the state's Democratic party Jay Jacobs ran the same smear campaign against a progressive to defend the party's Centrist option one of the highest ranking bipartisan house members Carolyn Maloney but don't misunderstand me here at the end of the day what the rotating villain Trope shows isn't that there are good and bad Democrats that's not the point just about any Democrat can take
on the role of an obstructionist it's nothing exceptional and many do Cinema used to be a radical Progressive running with the green party that never stopped her from becoming a huge obstacle to Progressive policies the point is that for every somewhat left-wing Democrat opening up space for workingclass politics there is a party apparatus a governmental structure Ure and a corporate strangle hold on politics ready to unravel their efforts for every Progressive campaign promise you can always keep in your head a little asterisk that says if we feel like it won't hurt our finances too much
and while a few Democrats take the heat for being the flipped vote the party and dozens of regular Rank and file elected officials get all the benefits of opposing Progressive politics without actually having to admit it the truth is that the Democrats will never be a forc for radical change in this country radical change comes from the organized masses and that is not who the Democrats [Music] represent I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that this channel is entirely Grassroots funded since sponsors don't want to touch videos like these we have to rely on
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