“Even as the political center of the Democratic Party has been pulled ever so slowly to the left in recent decades, the Clinton-era thirst for triangulation still burns bright in the souls of the party’s tottering old leaders.” So writes Hamilton Nolan.
We see this in the Democratic leadership’s response to the calls for defunding the police, an unfortunate slogan but in its particulars a good idea. (More on that below.)
“Triangulation” is what Bill Clinton called his moves to the right during his presidency. Clinton described his approach as avoiding the left and the right and establishing a third point above these two “extremes,” and thus the triangle.
He claimed to be taking the best of left and right; however he moved the party leadership to the right. But this was by design.
Some of Clinton’s policies hurt a lot of Americans. As a result, many abandoned the Democratic Party.
This fact is not discussed with any regularity. Consequently, Bill Clinton is not usually blamed for some of his actions. Thus, the moniker “Teflon Bill.”
Clinton’s vehicle was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in 1985 by Democratic operatives Al From and Will Marshall, and such Democratic leaders as Governors Chuck Robb (Virginia), Bruce Babbit (Arizona), and Lawton Chiles (Florida), and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia.
Bill Clinton became chair of the DLC in 1989. Among its founding arguments was that the Democratic Party should shift away from its liberal orientation formed in the 1960s and 1970s. To do that, the DLC wrested control of the Democratic Party and pushed aside liberal leaders such as Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson.
Elected president in 1992, Clinton proceeded to govern from a more conservative position than the Democrats had followed in many years. His “triangulation” approach was the political strategy defined as when the politician does not take a role on the left or the right, liberal or conservative. Instead, they stand between or above these two positions and take from either, depending upon the circumstances. In practice, many of the positions taken are conservative.
Bill Clinton had run for the presidency on an anti-welfare platform and had praised Charles Murray’s radically racist ideas. In the book, The Bell Curve, Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued that social welfare programs do not work because minorities have low IQs and cannot be helped to improve.
In 1996, Charles Murray’s decade-plus campaign to end welfare for single mothers paid off when President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, essentially killing traditional welfare programs with a specific emphasis on cutting welfare for low-income families with children. As a result, today, single mothers in America have the least social welfare support in the developed world. Also, extreme poverty doubled in the next 15 years.
Bill Clinton caused the most significant increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Although he did not declare war on crime or drugs, he escalated each beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible.
In 1994, Clinton signed his now infamous $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders. In addition, he authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. As a result, when Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Clinton’s crime bill was a massive error. Not only did it not work, but it also made matters worse.
And now activists are calling for a reorientation of police work. They call it “defunding the police,” which means taking some of the funds used to militarize the police and providing these funds for social services, drug treatment, and other programs that address some of the causes of problems like crime.
Rather than follow rational ideas about policing, Democratic leaders agree with the right that defunding the police is a bad idea that Republicans support—triangulating but taking the conservative position of being against structural police reform.
As reported by Hamilton Nolan, the major problem here is that “police violence, mass incarceration, and the devastating, racist, and destructive War on Crime are all structural problems.”
Structural problems require structural solutions, not conservative tinkering.
