While The Agitator holds no brief for the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, this point is beyond dispute:
The notion of “American exceptionalism” became widely applied in the context of efforts to account for the weakness of working-class radicalism in the United States. The major question subsumed in the concept became why the United States is the only industrialized country which does not have a significant socialist movement or Labor party. That riddle has bedeviled socialist theorists since the late nineteenth century. Lipset
With the lack of a meaningful Labor or Socialist Party, the political representation of America’s working class has for generations fallen by default to America’s party of “everyone else”, the Democrats. From the time of the New Deal, the “liberal” wing of the Democratic party acquired some small tinges of a social democratic program, forged on the basis of an alliance with the once-powerful business unions of the AFL-CIO. As the place of the AFL-CIO in American society and its workforce has waned, so has the influence of working class interests. This month marks something in a watershed in the decline of working class influence in America. Two deals, secretly negotiated with the leadership of Democratic liberals who once epitomized that small social democratic influence, saw the interests of American workers sold short. The liberal lions have emerged in their new majority as staunch neoliberals.
“I’d ignore a lot of people that really was just wasting my time…”
Thus spake Congressman Charles Rangel, the Democrat who has represented Harlem in the US House for nearly 35 years, of the labor, small business, justice and environmental groups that had sought his assistance in blocking a proposed set of “free trade” agreements:
Rangel was the lead Democratic negotiator in talks with the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers aimed at clearing the way for approval of free trade pacts with Peru and Panama and easing the path for pacts with Colombia and South Korea.
Rangel has stressed his desire to restore bipartisan support for trade through an “American” trade policy, rather than a Republican or Democratic one.
In the interview, Rangel offered no apology for the deal that was struck and said the only thing he would do differently was to reach it “much faster. I’d ignore a lot of people that really was just wasting my time, and didn’t intend to support it all.” Alertnet
