Older Depressing Piece I Wrote About Why the Democratic Party Doesn't Fight

Feb. 14

I wrote this about five years ago. It answers a question I've long had: why doesn't the Democratic Party fight for its base?

5-6-01

Months after the coup, I’m still debating the merits of the Ralph Nader presidential run. On the Ralph screwed us big time side is Katha Pollitt at the Nation and Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz at Dissent. On the other side supporting Saint Ralph is Mike Moore and Ellen Willis over at Dissent. (Dissent, allegedly a “left” outfit, makes it very difficult for me to link directly to the very fine Gitlin/Wilentz vs. Willis debate over there. So you have to go to the main page and search it out for yourselves.) Personally, I took a pragmatic view and voted for Gore, although I’m a huge Nader fan and in fact probably owe him my life in that I have survived a number of car crashes and breathe much better without second hand smoke.

After reading through all the briefs I have come to the conclusion that perhaps there was merit to the Nader run. Willis points out that as a leftist I’m playing a losing game that I have to watch being played in front of my horrified eyes. She makes the point that when the Republicans win, they fight relentlessly and ruthlessly for their loathsome, swinelike base. That, by the way, makes tactical sense. You want to give your base a reason to go to the polls. Where, during the long eight year reign of the DLC Clintonistas the left got nothing or we got stuff that we really didn’t want. He didn’t even do little things like fully funding public television. We got welfare reform, aspiring trillionaires and NAFTA, which might as well be called a corporation rights bill. I might add that all of these things undermine the Democratic Party base. Clinton didn’t even fight for the courts. We’ve seen where that led us. Tactically, this makes no sense. Why would you pursue policies that undermines your base? But there’s a point in the Willis argument that sheds some light on this where she states:

“Conservative Republicans hang together, stand up for their beliefs, and police the “moderates” in their ranks, while the Democrats’ every impulse is toward compromise and appeasement. If anything, their behavior suggests that they are threatened by the potential power of such mass constituencies as labor, blacks, and women, and would rather lose than risk unleashing it.”

This brings up a point that no one has thought about or at least brought up in public, but that someone should bring up: If you were a white man and you represented a party whose constituency represented parties that for better or worse believed in a future that lessens the power of the white man, would you enthusiastically support that party? Especially if it turns out that your opposition party foes are for the white man’s privilege, the whole white man’s privilege and nothing but the white man’s privilege. You might say that you’re open minded about sharing power consciously, but what about unconsciously? Maybe, secretly, you really want the other side to win.

Right now, the last remnants of the Great Society are in the hands of the 50 or so Dem senators, many of whom like Breaux and Miller seem to be Republicans in drag, in the US Senate. So far, they haven’t used the filibuster once. If the situation was reversed, the Republicans would be using their filibuster powers every, oh, four seconds or so. I can only conclude, being that they’ve totally “bought” into the Tony Coelho We Can Be Republicans To Big Money mantra, that they want the other side to win. Let’s give Bush a big tax cut. Let’s rollover on those judges. I think Willis uses the word “supine”. How appropriate. (Actually, the Dems haven’t rolled over just yet. I sure hope they get some spine…)

Yet another salient point that Willis brings up is that we’re kind of in a no-win situation. We lose slowly with Gore and quicker with Bush. And even though I agree with many of the practical points put forth by Gitlin/Wilentz everything revolves around globalization, which Gore supports. He would have been better than Bush on many issues, but economically those trade agreements undermine the union base, arguably the most powerful arm of the Dems, and everything else we stand for. Again, why do that unless you want the other side to win.

Just to add to that, I might point out that it’s the structure of the winner take all system that makes any kind of progressive change almost impossible. The lack of a progressive, left-wing media makes this difficult as well. Part of the problem revolves around the conundrum presented by the old Orwell quote: “They can’t be conscious until they’re free and they can’t be free until they’re conscious.” Likewise, we can’t have freedom until we have modern working democratic institutions, but you can’t have working democratic institutions until you have freedom. I don’t see how we win the puzzle.

Frankly, I don’t think the left will win in the United States. In fact, we might not even win on Earth. That’s why I think I’m the only leftist on Earth who is not only pro technology, but pro space exploration. Instead of playing this game on Earth, where the Casino has decided for us to lose, we should think about playing some new games here, in either artificially created nations like Sealand or offworld. My personal preference is Mars. More on this when I finally complete A Left Argument for Technology.

Feb. 9