Introduction
The New Oxymoron: Progressive Democrats
March 10, 2008
I can’t write posts with anything like the regularity I used to, so when I do I try to concentrate on the issue with the highest priority. At this point, that issue is the morphing of the Democratic party into a corporate-friendly copy of the GOP, only slightly less lethal than the original. It seems to me that with very few reliable liberals and no reliable progressives anywhere near the centers of power, our voices are being threatened with wholesale political extinction. Virtually no one is representing us even though we are a majority of the population according to the polls.Last week I wrote such a post at Comments From Left Field, where I used to be one of the contributors. Entitled “Getting Suckered By Our Own Guys”, it argued that by becoming involved with a phony election, a sham of a meaningless kabuki, progressives are contributing to their own demise.
Our political system has devolved into a cross between a bad Don Rickles joke and a high school fire drill during freshman orientation. Obama is at best a hypocrite and at worst Hillary in drag, only with less heavy eye-liner. Hillary seems to be going for Nixon Redux, and McCain is Fright Nightwith the Kewl Kids at the National Review Dorm, surrounded by an army somebody gave them for Xmas to play Dungeons ‘n’ Dragons with.
***
I’ve given up the idea of getting anybody to pay attention to this because all the so-called “progressives” are all caught up in the Hillary v. Obama farce and will continue to track that ill-begotten game until it’s as stale as last week’s bread, pretending all the while that the primaries are “significant”. That they “matter”. That each candidate is “different” from the other.
Balderdash. We’ve been suckered into caring about this meaningless circus no less than conservatives have been suckered into believing there are radical Islamic terrorists hiding in their hydrangea bushes. I am ashamed of all of us. We have fallen for some of the oldest tricks in the book.
The upshot of writing that post was that self-styled “Executive Editor” Kyle Moore, after writing 3 nasty comments to it, emailed me to tell me I was no longer welcome to write there, apparently because a) he didn’t agree with what I wrote, especially about Obama, him being an Obama devotee, and b) I had the unmitigated gall to respond to his attack, giving him the excuse that “it’s for the best” that I go in order to prevent our exchanges from “escalating”.
Now, Kyle would be the first to tell you he’s not a progressive, per se. This response to my being “fired” from CFLF isn’t so much about the obtuse closed-mindedness of it so much as because it’s an example of what the future holds for anybody who contradicts the Donkey Party Line or suggests that the heir apparent, whoever that turns out to be, is less than they appear to be and/or would like us to believe they are: suppression.
What we have to look forward to, those of us who no longer believe the Democrats are significantly different from the Republicans, is vilification from both sides and a chorus of raised, angry voices telling us to shut up.
Already, this self-censorship is at work. Critics of the Democrats have been excoriated by powerful A-List bloggers like Markos and Duncan Black, and the response has been a gradual but unmistakable falling-into-line. Criticism of Obama is acceptable only to the Billary Camp, and criticism of Billary is acceptable only to Obama stalwarts like Moore (who writes - at the very least - 2 posts a day attacking Hillary). We’re splitting ourselves right down the middle, neither side able to see the justice of the other side’s critiques.
The fact of the matter is simple: everybody is right. Hillary and Obama are both lousy candidates, both moderate right-wing conservatives (especially when it comes to kowtowing to Big Business), both hawks, both anti-labor in practice if not oratory, and both fairly standard examples of 2-faced political hypocrites. It may be an Ugly Truth, but it’s a truth all the same.
The purpose of my pounding away at this is equally simple. We need to start thinking about what happens after election day when a Democrat is president and we find out - as we found out so painfully last year after working for and achieving a Democratic victory in both houses of Congress only to watch that victory turn to ashes as the Democratic Congress gave Bush and the Pubs everything they wanted - that NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE.
When it finally dawns on us that we’ve been suckered by our own guys, what do we do then?
I’ll be giving you my answers over the next several weeks and hoping for some feedback. Mr Moore’s answer - suppress the dissent, eliminate the voice - is the same as the GOP answer to the Left for 25 years. I don’t plan to go that easily.
1: Can the Democratic Party Be Rescued?
March 13, 2008
Glenn Greenwald is seeing “signs of life” in the House Democrats.
Fully recognizing it may not last any longer than a couple of weeks, it’s actually necessary to give some credit where it’s due — to the House Democratic leadership. Nobody expected that they would ever allow the Protect America Act to expire, yet they did. And nobody expected, especially after the meek and incoherent appearance of Silvestre Reyes on CNN last weekend, that they would ignore the barrage of Terrorist-Lover accusations from the President and unveil yet another bill that is actually decent and refuses to bestow lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty, but they now have.
Add to that the fact that they actually seem serious about pursuing a court battle to force Josh Bolton and Harriet Miers to comply with their Subpoenas, and one detects a possible change in their approach. There is perhaps a stirring of recognition among House Democrats that there is no political cost to standing against this President on vital matters — even ones involving the magic Terrorism word — and there might even be real political benefit.
(emphasis added)
His skepticism about the abbreviated length, not to mention depth, of Democratic political courage is of course justified. Time and again in the past year-and-a-half we have seen this same scenario played out: House Dems take a tough stand; Senate Dems revolt, demanding concessions identical to the ones Bush and the Republicans want; House makes a lot of noise, threatens to stall negotiations and/or hold firm; Dem leadership has meeting after which Speaker Pelosi forces House Dems to concede.
It’s important to note two things here with regard to my thesis that the Dems are no longer worth supporting - that they aren’t on our side and won’t be again any time soon.
The first is that I think the House Democrats who consistently defy the White House and the Senate are sincere. It isn’t a dumbshow or a trick or mere kabuki. They mean it, by and large, and they fight pretty hard to get their point across.
The second is that IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT THEY DO as long as they’re unwilling to defy their own DLC-sponsored leadership with the same fervor which characterizes their defiance of the President. The Democratic Kabuki we’ve all come to know and loathe is the result of a tussle between the House Dems and the Senate Blue Dog/DLC Cabal in which the House tries to fight for justice and the Senate BD’s fight for the GOP. The DLC leadership, clearly in the GOP camp, has to keep its renegade House in the fold so they pretend to back them and blame the Senate Pubs when nothing happens.
I explained some time ago that this is an old tactic used with great effect in Massachusetts by long-time Mass Senate Pres Billy Bulger.
I don’t know if the technique was developed here is Massachusetts (wouldn’t surprise me if it was) but I’ve watched it play out for a couple of decades now, and for the last few years I’ve seen it taking hold in the national party. It’s a concept of “party discipline” that allows individual pols to vote in ways that will make their constituencies happy on issues important to them as long as those votes don’t harm or deviate from the overall strategies and goals of the dominant party mechanism. When there are too many votes in favor of something the party leadership is against, they twist just enough arms to ensure that the issue/bill/amendment/whatever will be defeated.
So it didn’t surprise me that the House Dems stood their ground for a while. The question is, what will happen when the Senate BD’s press hard for immunity and dropping the contempt charges in the name of “bi-partisanship”, as Obama calls it. (Others of us call it “surrendering to the GOP”.) At this point it seems safe to say the House will most likely give in when Nancy explains to them, once again, that they don’t have the votes in the Senate to avoid another make-believe Republican filibuster.
But it’s important to remember that there is a third element to the Kabuki: it throws us off-balance by fostering the impression that the Democrats are going to do things they aren’t actually going to do. That keeps us hanging on with hope, clinging to a belief that One Day the Dems will be Democrats again. And that in turn keeps us working for them when, in truth, we get almost nothing from our support.
It’s a savage strategy, but it’s working. We get behind them, tell ourselves we’ll take what we can get, that they’re better than the GOP. We fight for what we believe is right and in the end are disappointed time and again when, after the dust from the Kabuki clears, the GOP has once more gotten exactly what it wanted.
So let’s dispel the fog and cut to the chase. For those of you who insist on believing the Democratic party can be rescued from the BD/DLC Alliance, here’s what you have to do:
Break the power of the DLC.
If you can’t, NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE.
Dump the Dems 2: Are 3rd Parties Really Hopeless?
March 19, 2008
There isn’t much difference any more between the Democrats and the Republicans. When, in 2000, Ralph coined the term “Republicrats”, he was roundly criticized for supposedly missing or at least minimizing the significant dissimularities between George Bush and Al Gore. But his critics, afraid of his being a spoiler, were the ones who, in retrospect, missed the point.
That point has been driven home with brutal regularity since Nov ‘06 when the Democrats were elected to stop the war, the torture, and the wholesale spying of the Bush Administration and then handed Bush everything he wanted on a plate with salad dressing and parsley. It is winding up with two corporate-friendly Dem candidates in the ‘08 election, one who says the Iraq war isn’t a mistake and she won’t end it, and the other who says he’ll withdraw troops but leave a “residual force”; one who’s a backer of NAFTA and similar corporate rip-offs, and the other who has supported horrendous trade deals, including the deal turning Panama into a corporate tax haven and legal limbo where Big Business can’t be held accountable for any crime it chooses to commit.
But for all their chummy protect-the-corporations votes, it means something that both have stolen a good deal of John Edwards’ populist approach during his run at the White House. They’ve adopted his policies, his initiatives, and some of his rhetoric (though they’re careful to play down the anti-corporate and class warfare stuff for fear of alienating corporate money). In fact, it may be fair to say that Edwards’ platform is enjoying far greater success since he quit than it did when he was an active candidate.
This means something because it’s a carbon copy of the effect third parties often have, especially populist parties: even when they lose elections, they may still control the discussion and the issues around which those elections are fought. Look at the populist parties of the 1920’s and 30’s. They rarely won seats but in the end FDR had to absorb most of their issues and solutions in order to win the ‘32 election, and it was their issues and solutions around which he built the Democratic coalition that governed effectively for most of the next 40 yrs.
The fact is that without the pressure on the Democrats brought by the populists, we wouldn’t have had Social Security, economic stability, food stamps, HUD, Medicare, or any of dozens of programs that have fed and housed the hungry, brought medical care to sick kids, or made the middle class of the post-WW II generation the strongest, healthiest in history. The fear of seeing the Democrats splinter into a dozen ineffective little parties with no power or influence forced FDR and a reluctant Dem party hierarchy to dump Republican solutions and fight for their own.
So, contrary to the conventional wisdom that third parties are poison pills and don’t work because they can’t win, history says quite the opposite. If you look beyond the lost elections to the larger picture of political accomplishments, third parties have a pretty fair history of success. In that case, what’s the problem?
eRobin of Fact-esque as usual sums it up in a couple of pithy sentences.
One [a third party] may be able to get traction in the coming ruins of the U.S. economy. Of course, it may look more like the Minute Men and the less totally awesome aspects of Ron Paul than anything you’d probably want to see come along. Devil you know??
IOW, isn’t it more likely, given the temper of the American people - and their distaste for complex problems and even more complex solutions - that even if we managed to form a successful third party it would be worse than what it replaced?
Not necessarily. While the example of John Edwards is two-edged certainly, there’s nevertheless a fairly vibrant lesson or two to be learned from his campaign and from the way his issues so smoothly and seamlessly became immediately central to his opponents’ campaigns.
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The corporate media will try to drown you in minutiae if you bring it up.
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There are several issues hitting home hard that many - if not most - of us have in common, threads that will draw us together.
A third party that can solve the first and build on the second has a real chance of success.
Dump the Dems 3a: The Conundrum
March 24, 2008
The post is titled “Why We’re Liberals” because that’s the name of Alterman’s new book, but it’s also the central question Nephew finds himself asking after a question about impeachment draws this response from Eric.
In the question and answer session, Alterman was asked about impeachment — and he kind of went off on the guy, comparing impeachment advocates to Nader supporters in 2000, allegedly blind to the consequences of their actions, indirectly complicit in the disasters that followed.
So I joined the short line of questioners, and wound up being the last one. I asked where he saw the rule of law and adherence to the Constitution in his definition of liberalism; in the tension between adhering to principles and focusing on winning the next election, where were the bright lines Alterman was willing to draw to say “this far and no further”, regardless of the cost?
Alterman, as Thomas pointed out later in response to a comment, is “an ally who is great at skewering the right” and has “earned a lot of respect over the years.” The fact that he has accepted the wholesale Democratic surrender of the last few years and defends it despite its manifest abandonment of core liberal values is precisely the dilemma that faces us. How can liberals continue, as Alterman does, to support a political party that no longer seems at all interested in liberal values?
Thomas put the question on himself.
Because, I told him, his answer to the first questioner had me thinking, ‘maybe I’m not a liberal after all.’
But Eric’s answer makes it perfectly plain that Thomas has the question backwards: it isn’t he who isn’t the liberal, it’s the Democratic Party.
So…he sort of squared up and said that to him principles were a form of moral vanity….
(emphasis added)
Principles are a form of vanity?? Really, Eric?
That is precisely the kind of so-called “pragmatic” sophistry that’s been running the Dems since Carter lost to Reagan. Whether he knows it or not, Alterman is aligning himself with the very people who have dumped overboard everything he claims to believe in, and that’s OK with him if it means winning. Anything else is “vanity”.
This actually supports my notion that the Democrats have been so infected by the GOP’s conservative propaganda that they actually believe most of it, making them, as I’ve said many times, little better than Republicans-Lite. If someone as “acute an observer” as him can be buffaloed into abandoning all his principles in favor of a conservative-skewed New Dem “pragmatism”, what can be left of the party we used to know?
Thomas puts it beautifully:
That’s funny, though, because to me that particular principle — rule of law, or “playing by the rules” in 90s Democratic vernacular – is a core liberal value and is not some kind of luxury item we can do without in tough times. Without it, the little guy has no recourse against the high and mighty, whether they’re government officials or CEOs. To me liberalism, plainly put, is saying the little guy should always have a chance to get his grievance heard and to be made whole, and that there’s a public sphere where the big guy with lawyers, guns and money can’t expect to win.
And it seems self-evident to me that that credo starts at the top; the measure of a country isn’t just how it treats its weakest members, but the standards it applies to its most powerful ones. We are plainly failing both tests; I think it’s a single test, and that those failures go hand in hand.
***
[The Democratic Party] has to all appearances been running a two year stall, a political “four corners” drill running out the clock to an anticipated win in 2008 — a strategy that may not be as clever as its authors thought. Late feints notwithstanding, it has effectively stood by — both before and after 2006 — and let the corruption of the Justice Department go unpunished; it has allowed the Bush administration to play semantic games about the meaning of torture and whether waterboarding fits the definition; it’s doing its level best to find as much as possible about warrantless surveillance to be legal after all — and it’s done nothing meaningful whatsoever to get out of a war built on lies that a majority of us (and a vast majority of self-described liberals) considers to be a disastrous mistake. If that’s liberalism, I want off.
(emphasis added)
So wouldn’t we all. But it isn’t liberalism, that’s the point I’ve been trying to make for months. Thomas is making it for me through classic liberal Alterman: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS NOT LIBERAL. It doesn’t support liberal beliefs or fight for liberal causes, so how can liberals support it?
Dump the Dems 3b: Conviction v. Pragmatism
March 26, 2008
Put another way, when does the need to be elected in order to pursue your agenda cross the line into cowardice and/or philosophical emptiness? When does pragmatism turn into win-at-any-cost vapidness? IOW, where exactly is the dividing line between a Paul Wellstone and a Mitt Romney? And is there any room at all for principles? Alterman - and a great many other so-called liberals in the Democratic party - think not.
You know I have a lot of trouble thinking of any principles that I hold more dearly than defeating George Bush in 2000 (2008?) , in the election … [audience laughter] seriously! I think that principles are a form of vanity. Of moral vanity. I think principles are a very useful teaching method for children. I think… but… I have two problems with principles. One is that whatever principle you have I have a competing principle for the same situation. So when you say I’m doing this on principle I can tell you “but there’s another principle that’s at work in the same situation and you’re violating that principle.” So I think principles are what people do instead of making difficult decisions.
(emphasis in the original)
Maybe. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe pragmatism is a way to avoid the certain pain of sticking to difficult principles, principles you believe in but which may make being elected problematic.
I’m not going to discount the nerve, even the courage it takes for a committed believer to compromise his/her beliefs in order to affect a world which will leave him/her out if s/he doesn’t. But otoh, we’re now looking at a situation in the Democratic party where compromise - some say “surrender” - has gone so far that it’s hard to say what the Donkeys stand for any more or even if - like Romney - they can be said to stand for anything at all.
That isn’t a question Alterman or those like him want to discuss. Here’s Paul from Nephew’s comments section:
Thomas, I think you’ve happened upon the tension that occurs between the idealist and the pragmatist.
Alterman is a political opportunist. He’s more concerned with helping his Party obtain more power and influence than achieving goals based on ideals or principles. You may find he and his kind distasteful (as do I on more than a few occasions), but they are a necessary component of the system.
You are an idealist, who believes that the Party should use its power to push through social justice programs for the betterment of the country.
Nell disagrees.
Paul, you’re oversimplifying to the point of condescension about idealists and pragmatists. And you’re also underestimating Thomas’ pragmatism, which his response and many past posts demonstrate.
Exactly. Mr Nephew has been far more willing to compromise than I have been and I’m nothing if not a pragmatist. The difference between the Alterman/Paul school and the Nephew/Nell school is the difference between a group for whom, just as Eric said, defeating George Bush is more important than anything else, and a group that believes it’s just as and perhaps far more important to prosecute accountability in order to prevent a repitition of the Bush/Cheney lawlessness.
But it goes beyond that, even. Defeating Bush is all very well and certainly important for the country. Yet as critical as that victory is, its importance does not allow us to duck the prime question:
And replace him with…what?
Even if we accept the connected propositions that a) defeating Bush is the Prime Directive and b) defeating Bush requires adopting GOP initiatives - which I hasten to say I don’t accept and neither does Thomas or Glenn Greenwald or any number of other lefties who’ve spoken up since the ‘06 election who think exactly the opposite - even if you accept that duality, you’re forced to ask what difference it really makes if his replacement is just going to go on pursuing the Bush Agenda or, at a maximum, refuse to undo the damage that has been done so far.
Democrats and liberals have all too plainly been counting on a win in 2008, and have dealt away much of their honor and self-respect in the process of waiting for that blessed event — which may not come. But even if there is a President Obama or a President Clinton next January 10, the value of that victory has already been tarnished by their party’s — and its apologists — craven refusal to hold the most powerful lawbreaker and political criminal in the land to account.
Mr Nephew is convinced - he and Paul have at least this in common - that the Democratic refusal to stop the war, the spying, the torture, and the destruction of the economy that have been hallmarks of the Bush Regime is some sort of campaign strategy that they will jettison once the election is over and the White House is theirs. Far from being too idealistic, Mr Nephew is arguing that the Democrats are chasing the wrong strategy, that unprincipled surrender is a losing strategy.
In point of fact, it’s much more likely that the Democratic refusal to oppiose George Bush has much less to do with winning the election (as Greenwald pointed out months ago, the numbers suggest their willingness to roll over for the Bushies has badly hurt them in opinion polls, thus actually making it harder for them to win the longer they are seen as Bush enablers) than it has with the strong and demonstrable possibility that the Democratic party has been so focused on its need to WIN that it has become poisoned by its own obsession, infected by Republican success with the They’re Right/We’re Wrong Virus. If that’s the case, then they have chosen deflect a base uncomfortable with their new “principles” by using the win-at-any-cost excuse.
And much of the base is buying it.
There’s a legitimate argument here but those of us willing to have it must be just as willing to go all the way to the ultimate questions:
What has the Democratic party become since it was taken over by the neo-liberal New Democrats in the late 80’s?
and
Do they deserve to win? Are we really going to be any better off with a party that has grown used to making excuses for torture, supporting govt spying, prosecuting an illegal war, and abetting the growth of imperial powers in the presidency as if they aren’t worth worrying about?
Dump the Dems 4: What Would It Take to Rescue the Democratic Party?
April 2, 2008
$$$
Whichever side of this debate they come down on, I think everyone agrees that the core of the problem is $$$.
The stranglehold maintained by the relative minority of Democrats in the Democratic Leadership Council and the Blue Dog Alliance is made possible primarily by the overwhelming superiority of the GOP $$$campaign donor$$$ advantage over the past 25 years. The GOP, which represents and is employed by Corporate America, has enjoyed a 3 or 4-1 advantage in fund-raising for national and state-wide campaigns. A LOT of that money has gone into Rovian attack ads against Democratic candidates, as well as into outright efforts to sabotage likely Democratic voters and to steal close elections. For example, the paid Republican mob in Florida that intimidated Dade County election officials into cutting short their vote count were bought and brought there with RNC funds donated by corporations.
The DLC/BD Alliance has successfully made the argument to recalcitrant Dems that if they don’t want to go back to losing election after election, they have to be able to compete with the GOP monetarily. To do that, they have to present an agenda that is not unfriendly to potential corporate donors, and to do that, they have to dump their traditional concerns over labor rights, environmental issues, worker safety, and a host of other issues that had alienated corporate donors in the past.
The result of the Clinton success in the 90’s was to cement the power of the DLC/BDA in the party, pushing it further and further to the right until we now have a party that is, a majority of the time, philosophiocally indistinguishable from the GOP. It pushes the same agenda, it just doesn’t go as far as the Pubs are willing to go. The GOP is willing to dive off the cliff blindfolded; the Dems are only willing to push to the edge of the cliff, hoping it won’t collapse beneath them but otherwise doing nothing to move away from it or shore it up.
To rescue the Donkey party, therefore, first requires an all-out assault on the corporate-owned campaign financing system. In order for the Dems to return to who they used to be, there has to be a level campaign playing field, and as long as the rich own the Pubs, there won’t be…unless…we can manage to force public financing of campaigns on an unwilling and reluctant pair of political parties.
The most intensive of these efforts so far came in the 90’s with McCain-Feingold, but through compromise, tricks, and lengthy negotiation, the legislation was riddled with so many loopholes, exceptions, ifs, ands, and buts that by the time the vote came it was all but worthless. In the ensuing years, both parties, especially the GOP, simply ignored it or used one of its multiple loopholes to get around it.
If the Dems are ever to be Dems again, public financing of campaigns must become a reality and a strict limit placed on the raising of outside money by either party. I’m not going to go into the manifest benefits of forcing the parties to work with equal amounts of money, they’ve been repeated often enough that most of us know them by rote. Nor am I going to play devil’s advocate and repeat the myriad problems with enforcing such a law should we ever get one passed. Those are also too well known to need repetition.
What I am suggesting is that if we can’t pass and enforce a tough campaign finance reform law, there is ZERO chance that either party will EVER be anything other than a corporate subsidiary. With corporate $$$ dominating the campaigns and therefore the candidates and their campaign agendas, both will have to bow to corporate demands. To claim anything else is either hopelessly naive, naively impractical, or the result of blind denial of modern political reality.
The DLC/BD Alliance
When our liberal/progressive movement has succeeded in breaking the hold of corporate money on the election system, we’ll still be faced with breaking the hold of the DLC/BDA on the party. They aren’t going to go quietly. They have determined the course of the party for almost 2 decades from positions of power. They’re not going to let loose of that kind of power just because we don’t need them any more.
It will be necessary for us to work against the worst offenders - the Clintons, Rahm Emanuel, Harry Reid, Silvestre Reyes, Jay Rockefeller, et al - possibly to the extent of supporting Republican challengers if Democratic challengers lose in the primaries. We MUST be prepared to take it that far and they must KNOW we will take it that far. Otherwise the DLC/BDA will simply undercut the efforts by insisting, as they have in the past and are doing right this minute, that we can be taken for granted because, you know, we have nowhere else to go.
This is a powerful argument. It tells lazy, cowardly politicians (and most who aren’t one are the other; many are both at once) that they don’t actually have to change anything they’re doing because there’s no real threat to their incumbency; that we are so anti-GOP that we won’t vote for a Pub against a Dem no matter how often that Dem votes with Pubs. Joe Lieberman is the Poster-Boy for that snake oil even as we speak. As long as that is what the Dems believe, it is the corporationsn they rush to placate, not us.
Unity
In order for any of this to happen, we will first have to forge a coherent strategy and an alliance of our own wherein liberal and progressive activists agree to put aside their differences and - most importantly - agree to concentrate, for the good of the country, on recognizing and supporting priorities that may result in the sidelining of their pet projects.
The Democrats simply will not respond to a demand for change from the left unless a formidable organization is behind it, ready to work against and vote against any Democrat who doesn’t support the Main Principles of the New Movement.
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