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Today's
Stories
March 22, 2005
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Democracy--or is it the US Military--on the March
Greg Moses
A Palm Sunday Chat with Sis Levin
John Farley
Bush's Culture of Life: Let the
Insurance Companies Pull the Plug When the Sick Cost Too Much
Ron Jacobs
Halt
the Anniversary Rallies and Stop the Damn War
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
An
Immoral and Illegal War: Destroying Iraq Isn't Enough for Them
Dave Lindorff
"Saving" Schiavo; Killing the News
James Petras
Fateful
Quadrangle: Cuba and Venezuela Face Off Against the US and Colombia
March 21, 2005
John Walsh
In
the Bars on the Road to Fayettevile: War Support Paper Thin
Werther
The
Legacy of George Kennan, Chief Architect of the Cold War
Mike Stark
Where is the "Culture of Life" in Maryland? Time is
Running Out for Vernon Evans
David Swanson
Feeding
Tubes for the Third World: Put the Hungry into Comas, Then Feed
Them!
James T. Phillips
Happy Meals: Behind the Grill at a Baltimore Diner
Mike Ferner
Serving,
Refusing, Impeaching
Robert Jensen
The World Waits for an Answer
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Threat Greater Than Terrorism
Stew Albert
Vegetable Nation
Website of
the Day
American Press Blotter: Jacko, Terry and Steroids vs. the World
March 19, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Three-Card
Monte and the One-Party State
Tom Reeves
Exposing the Coming Draft: a Draft by Any Other Name is Still
Wrong
Saul Landau
The Grandchildren of Roy Cohn: the Politics of the Repressed
Alan Maass
Making Bankruptcy a Life Sentence
Ron Jacobs
Submit or Else: the Nuclear Demon that Won't Go Awayy
David Green
The Holocaust Industry Comes to the University of Illinois
John Blair
Hey, Dick! I'm Still Free: a Blow for Freedom of Speech in Indiana
Steve Greenfield
The Decline of the Green Party: the Numbers are In
Ben Tripp
Nature isn't Real
Mike Roselle
A History of White People in the Conservation Movement
Joshua Frank
Hope in Red State America: Lessons from the Big Sky Country
Mark Weisbrot
The World Bank: a Bigger Problem Than Wolfowitz
Dave Lindorff
Congress on Steroids
Sarah Schaffer
Lula's Nukes: Bush Bullies Iran, Ignores Brazil's Nuclear Ambitions
Warren Hastings
Why the Queen Should Chop Off Tony Blair's Head for Treason
Poets' Basement
Lodge, Albert. Landau, Engel, Davies, Capaccio
March 18, 2005
Dave Zirin
The
Congressional Urine Testers: Baseball's Theater of the Absurd
Richard Thieme
The
Church Committee Candidate: I was a Victim of the KGB
John Walsh
Misdirecting the Anti-War Movement
David Swanson
Hunger
Striking for a Living Wage at Georgetown
Ben Terrall
In
the Spirit of Rachel Corrie: Confronting Caterpillar in San Leandro
David Boyle
Just Say "No" to Harvard
Dorreen Yellow Bird
Coping with Teen Suicide on the Standing Rock Reservation
Mokhiber /
Weissman
Global Bully Goes to Guatemala
Greg Moses
They
Don't Shoot Donkeys...Do They?
Website of
the Day
800
Protests: Find One Near You
March 17, 2005
Christopher
Brauchli
Rendered
Unto Caesar: the Etymology of Torture
Bill Quigley
The St. Patrick's Four and the Resistance to the War in Iraq
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Herds: Willing to Kick Anyone in the Face
Gary Bass / Adam Hughes
Inside the Bush Budget: Rhetoric vs. Reality
Dave Lindorff
The Incredible Shrinking Coalition
Jude Wanniski
Wolfowitz at the World Bank: a Perfect Fit
Alexander Billet
Irish Republicanism at the Crossroads
John Ross
Wal-Mart
Invades Mexico
Website of the Day
Campus Resistance
March 16, 2005
Ralph Nader
Filling
the Congressional Cop-Out Gap: an Idea for Local Peace Activists
William Cook
Resurrecting the Neo-Con Failures
Kevin Zeese
Two
Years of Occupation: Both US and Iraq are Worse Off
Jackie Corr
Why is Dick Cheney Laughing? The New Tax Cut Patriotism
Alan Maass
Bush's Class War Budget
David R. Kolker
Jailed Without Charges in Haiti
Cindy Ellen
Hill
Speculative Policing in Northern Ireland
Paul Craig
Roberts
America's
Has-Been Economy
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March 22, 2005
Aiding and Abetting
How
the Democratic Party Fosters Conservatism
By
M. JUNAID ALAM
The blurring of political distinctions
between America's two major political parties, achieved through
Democratic acquiescence to Republican ideas on every major national
question, has prompted some progressives to conclude that Democrats
and Republicans are now essentially identical. This conflation
is a dangerous error: it is too kind an evaluation of the Democratic
Party. For to view Democrats as mere Republican clones is to
discount the far more pernicious role they play in encouraging
a politically conservative framework that traps and demoralizes
many Americans into adopting right-wing positions in the first
place.
If Democrats simply paralleled
Republicans, they would be politically redundant. But the Democrats
are not duplicative - they are duplicitous. Peddling slightly
less reactionary programs and packaging them in more appealing
rhetoric, they soften up, placate and paralyze possible popular
opposition to right-wing attacks. This creates the groundwork
for future assaults by the Right. The Republican agenda, ugly,
brutal, and brazen as it is, could not possibly pierce the public
on its own - but the sordid record of Democratic appeasement
has locked, loaded, and enabled right-wing advances.
How does this happen? To illustrate
the process, it is first necessary to outline its general features
in broad terms, and then show it in motion by examining Democratic
capitulations to the Right on prominent issues: Iraq, abortion,
gay marriage, social security and the conservative backlash.
Broadly speaking, there exists
a clear common pattern underlying the dynamic by which the Left
continuously loses ground to the Right. The Republican Party
seizes the initiative by actively mobilizing its assets, ideas,
and ideology to work toward its radical goals. Meanwhile, the
Democratic Party does not pull in the opposite direction. It
does not mobilize aggressively for its own goals. Nor does it
defend vigorously against right-wing designs. This passiveness
takes on major significance precisely because the party poses
as a friend of ordinary people. In this context its inaction
becomes action a tacit acceptance and approval of
right-wing maneuvers. The Democratic Party's role as the legitimizing
agent of right-wing stances allows and locks into place political
boundaries in which only right-wing ideas can prevail. This initial
acquiescence constitutes phase (a) of Democratic Party cultivation
of conservatism.
What makes this process so
poisonous is a unique combination of American pragmatism and
American political structure. American pragmatism, or the popular
public understanding of politics, dictates that at the end of
the day there must be an end to bickering and some sort of bipartisan
compromise - a 'fair middle between extremes,' like the philosophy
behind Aristotle's Golden Mean. American political structure,
or the structure of two dominant parties, fosters the assumption
that each party exists in opposition to one another, creating
a kind of symmetrical polarization. Pragmatism and politics,
then, should neatly overlap: the political center should lie
between the two parties.
But real-life Democratic passivity
in the face of Republican onslaughts vitiates this assumption
of parties as polar opposites. A 'middle ground,' when chosen,
ends up not between two extremes, but rather between the right-wing
extreme of the Republicans and the 'slightly-to-the-left-of-that-same-extreme'
Democrats. Whatever lies on the real left end on the spectrum
is therefore thrown out of the picture entirely. As time passes,
the right-wing Republican-Democratic snippet from the old spectrum
becomes the basis for the new spectrum. And from this new more
rightist-oriented spectrum, the process will repeat itself, producing
an even more right-wing 'middle ground.' The ongoing result
is an ever-increasing expansion of the conservative viewpoint
at the expense of a quickly-diminishing progressive viewpoint.
This distortion of the spectrum comprises phase (b) of the conservative-creating
dynamic.
The process is only deepened
when a Democrat captures power at any level. He will have been
elected because his slightly left-wing rhetoric appeals to people.
But because this rhetoric is belied by a fundamentally right-wing
basis which bars all possibility of meaningful change, disaster
results. For the voters who elected the Democrat to solve a given
social or economic issue, upon seeing it unsolved or worsen after
the application of some hollowed-out 'leftist' program, will
cast blame upon the general progressive ideas and concepts which
never drove that program in the first place.
Blame turns into hatred and
contempt once the Republican arrives on the scene. Because of
the nature of the two-party dynamic, the Democrat's failure means
the ball of public trust rolls into the Republican's court
and the Republican plays the game well. For to secure and advance
his party's agenda he attacks not only the Democrat, but the
leftist ideas people associate with the Democrat an association
fostered by the false belief of parties as polar opposites and
the Democrat's propping up of that belief for his
own public relations purposes. This discrediting of leftist ideas
through fakery is the final phase (c) of the dynamic.
It does not require much investigation
to note how gravely this dynamic has disfigured and deformed
the American political scene. All three of its phases (a)
acceptance of rightist advances, (b) acquiescence to increasingly
right-wing 'middle grounds' resulting from these advances, and
(c) backlash caused by 'leftist' programs rendered toothless
by these distorted 'middle grounds' - have severely fractured
the potential for achieving a better world at every turn.
Now, we turn to specific examples.
The amazingly destructive power
of all three phases comes into full view when considering the
war in Iraq. First, what options did the Democratic Party make
available to those Americans who never wanted war? None. It maintained
a cowardly silence when the Right launched a campaign of blatant
lies and fear-mongering to whip up a case for war that was neither
substantiated by the evidence nor necessitated by reality. In
so doing, the party not only failed those Americans who never
even desired war and there were many but it also
allowed the right-wing propaganda machine to inculcate hatred
and brainwash many Americans into becoming pro-war. That
is phase (a), acquiescence, in action.
Second, what options did the
Democratic Party provide to those Americans who saw the justifications
for war slip, change, and fail, who learned of the miserable
lack of post-war planning, who noticed the intensified Iraqi
armed resistance, and who felt the constant flow of American
casualties, making them increasingly skeptical of and opposed
to the war? The party told them to shut up and sit down
quite literally in the case of the DNC in Boston, where even
though most delegates were anti-war, expression of anti-war sentiment
was forbidden. More broadly, the party adopted the position that
since the invasion already happened, it was now necessary to
deepen the war effort. In other words, it succumbed to right-wing
momentum which dictated that anti-war politics was no longer
respectable. Taking their cue, Democrats discarded those politics,
acceding to the right-ward shift in the political spectrum that
characterizes phase (b).
Most embarrassing and insulting,
however, was an aborted attempt at phase (c), when the Democratic
Party built up a candidate by touting his war record and then
tasked him with appearing slightly to the left of Bush on militarism.
This was a bit like ordering an elephant to perform ballet in
a china shop. The result was the awesome spectacle of a highly
decorated war veteran being torn down, ridiculed, and emasculated
as a "flip-flopper" on the war by an opponent whose
own record of military service could generously be described
as pathetic. In this case the slightly left-wing rhetoric appeared
so incongruous with the reactionary policy basis that it backfired
before electoral victory could be achieved; in the right-wing
framework of belligerence, aggression, and warmongering, a tough-sounding
weakling came out stronger than a ponderous warrior.
The admittedly pitiful fate
of John Kerry, however, is hardly the main point. By adopting
the right-wing framework, the Democratic Party destroyed a chance
to develop and deepen anti-war sentiment, and instead demoralized
and frustrated those who were looking for a real alternative
and a way to end the war. Kerry's awkward attempts to criticize
details of the war while sometimes demanding more warlike measures
than Bush made a mockery of genuine anti-war politics and tarnished
the image of the real anti-war movement.
Let us also take a look at
Democratic complicity in the outpouring of moral effluvia over
abortion and gay marriage. Much ink has been wasted about the
supposed emergence of "moral values" as a new reality
around which Democrats must solemnly redraw their battle lines
and retreat even further to the right. Anyone interested in defending
the leftist position would refuse to acquiesce to the pretentious
pseudo-morality undergirding Republican "values." He
or she would ask why the "culture of life" does not
extend to people who are actually living, like American
children and mothers in poverty, or Iraqi civilians under bombs,
and why the "sanctity of marriage" is to be decided
not by the actual people wanting marriage, but by the federal
government.
But the Democratic Party has
other plans. Its leadership has already declared more "nuanced"
positions on abortion and steered clear of defending gay marriage
on principle. This retreat, undeniably manifest in recent months
but already present in its embryonic stages years ago, quite
literally activated the conservative agenda: the vast majority
of those millions of Christian evangelists who turned out for
Bush in the last election had never even been politically active
in the past. They were mobilized by the expansion of the right-wing
(and shrinking of the left-wing) presence on the political spectrum,
a reality typified by phase (b) of the conservative-creating
dynamic. That the Democrats are technically less "reactionary"
on abortion and gay marriage is therefore totally irrelevant;
they are contributing de facto to the ideological atmosphere
that will ultimately end up destroying support for these causes.
Indeed, the basis for the broader
phenomenon referred to as the "white backlash" or "silent
majority" which forms the backbone of conservative working-class
support today is an outcome of the Democrats' conservative-friendly
politics. Democratic abandonment of core working-class economic
interests, a trend detailed in Thomas Frank's What's The Matter
With Kansas, has made possible Bush's assault on the
New Deal legacy and his attempt to forge an "ownership society"
ideology. As the Democrats have allowed the safety net underpinning
American society to crumble under the pressure of a more naked
capitalism, the ideology behind the safety net is coming under
sustained attack. In an expression of phase (c), the Republicans
are trying to further "starve the beast" of social
security, as economist Paul Krugman calls it and then point
to the weakness of "the beast" as a sign it has failed
to solve the problems it is capable of alleviating when properly
fed.
This Bush assault, however,
is merely an extension of an existing backlash against welfare
and social programs enacted by Kennedy and Johnson under pressure
from Civil Rights period. Conservative mythology posits these
government programs as promoting laziness and producing only
welfare queens, pointing to the persistence of black poverty,
crime, and unemployment as evidence of leftist bankruptcy. But
the empirical evidence, as detailed in Michael Harrington's The
New American Poverty and Jill Quadagno's The Color of
Welfare, illustrates these programs were in fact starved
of funding, crippled politically, or aborted altogether because
the Democratic Party failed to challenge entrenched economic
interests, confront white racism, or extricate itself from Vietnam.
This sabotaging of America's last real attempt at social change
has fostered the notion that solutions to social problems are
themselves the problem. Resentment fed by this misconception
has set into motion the forces now fueling America's ascendant
right wing.
By now the internal dynamics
of the overall process by which Democrats serve as a segue for
conservatism should be clear. Precisely why this takes
place, however why it is not Republicans who segue into
Democrats, or why the two do not simply exist in equilibrium
- is a much more complicated question that cannot be adequately
addressed in the scope of this piece. It is possible here only
to point to two potential factors driving Democratic acquiescence:
the absence of socialist pressure due to the collapse
of the Soviet experiment, and the presence of capitalist
pressure brought upon by the relative decline of the US economy
compared to China and the European Union. This pincer movement
of ideological triumphalism and economic straitjacketing may
be severely limiting the basis for even modest genuine Democratic
progressivism.
But regardless of the precise
reasons behind this phenomenon, the lessons to be drawn from
its ultimate results remain absolutely the same: the Democratic
Party is inimical to any struggle for serious social change.
At every level, it throws up massive barriers to progressive
ideas, actions, and principles. The party's most basic modus
operandi is enmeshed with all three phases of the conservative-creating
process, and contributes to weakening the Left in grave ways.
It snuffs out hope for a better world among ordinary people,
activates the right-wing framework which leads many toward reactionary
positions, and discredits authentic leftist ideas before they
can even be presented by those committed to actually seeing them
through.
Given this immovable reality,
we must ask ourselves: what is to be done? First, it must be
said with blunt honesty that it is suicidal to work with forces
organizationally and financially tied to the Democratic Party
at leadership levels. It is necessary, in a word, to make a
clean break from the Democratic Party. The recent betrayal
of the anti-war movement by MoveOn should serve as a clear
reminder to serious progressives of the need to make this clean
break, and of Upton Sinclair's matchless insight that "It
is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it."
One thing we have already seen
beyond any doubt: to debate whether Democrats are "better"
than Republicans in some moral or metaphysical sense is an absolutely
meaningless and puerile exercise. Together, Democrats and Republicans
make for an absolutely lethal combination and that is all
that matters. To work within the overall process in which both
parties are cultivating and contributing to conservative interests
is to court disaster.
Our task, then, is not to worry
over where to line up among the ranks of Republicans or Democrats.
Rather, it is to throw ourselves on the side of those who have
been under relentless attack by these parties: the great
majority of the American people. A ceaseless onslaught of sharp
assaults, repeated betrayals, endless deceptions, and enormous
lies all of which have gone unchallenged and unchecked
for far too long - have been hammering away at ordinary Americans.
It is these ranks which we must join, and, given the low
level of current struggle, it is these ranks which we must help
energize and mobilize.
Some will protest that this
is too bold a declaration that the road ahead is too hard.
It should be readily conceded that the road is hard - indeed,
we should go a step further and say the road has yet to be built,
and furthermore, that this is a great relief - for history shows
us precious few examples of roads to justice that were laid down
in advance by some deity from above; it also shows us that roads
glittering with gold or adorned with riches are traveled by masters,
paved by slaves, and lead straight to hell.
The road to justice,
on the other hand, must be created by the people themselves,
because it is their own collective future that is at stake. It
is precisely the task of our times to work side by side with
those millions of Americans victimized by modern capitalism -
workers, women, veterans, people of color, and immigrants
and join them in carving out the path that will lead all of us
toward a more secure and humane future.
M. Junaid Alam is co-editor
of the leftist youth journal Left Hook (http://www.lefthook.org),
and a student at Northeastern University in Boston. He can be
reached at alam@lefthook.org
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