RAT It's your party and you can cry if you want to]

[Mary Ann McGivern <mmcgivern@stlnet.com>]

>
> It's your party and you can cry if you want to
> Will Gore lose Florida? Who cares. The Democrats are beyond redemption.
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
> By Andrew O'Hehir, Salon 
>
> Nov. 22, 2000 | Here's a memo to all the whiny, sore-loser Democrats (or
> sore-winner Democrats, as the case may be) who are trying to blame Ralph
> Nader and the Green Party for your predicament: Get over it. I and the
> 2.7 million other Americans who voted for Nader are not your wayward
> children who stayed out past curfew. We are, by definition, your
> political opponents. We didn't vote for your party because we think it
> stinks, and we don't care all that much whether you won or lost. Is that
> clear enough? Now can we just pick a president by reading the entrails
> of a pregnant chad or something and move on?
>
> Check your civics textbooks and the Constitution; does it say anywhere
> that the two-party system was ordained by the Creator, or that the
> Democratic Party has an eternal right to the votes of progressives and
> leftists, no matter how mealy-mouthed and corrupt the party gets? It's
> undoubtedly true that many Green voters would prefer Al Gore to George
> W. Bush, on balance. There's no contradiction involved there; most of
> Pat Buchanan's voters (outside Palm Beach County, anyway) would
> presumably prefer Bush to Gore.
>
> But Nader voters -- and Buchanan voters, albeit in smaller numbers --
> made a principled decision. Revolutionary, I know, but stick with me on
> this. They decided it was more important to try to build a genuinely
> independent political movement than to participate in the profoundly
> undemocratic choice between two Ivy League daddy's boys suckled on the
> soft-money teat, about whom the public seems equally ambivalent.
>
> Is building such a movement within the profoundly flawed universe of
> American electoral politics even possible? Maybe, maybe not. But for
> many people on the left, the Nader campaign felt like the first genuine
> injection of positive energy in mainstream politics since Jesse Jackson
> in the 1980s. We're sick of sitting up late nights like an abandoned
> wife with a candle in the window, pining for a Democratic Party that ran
> out on us years ago yet still expects us to show up on Election Day.
>
> Clearly, liberals and activists who still see hope for the Democrats
> will disagree. But the exaggerated anti-Nader venom, such as that found
> in an entertaining Salon article by my colleague Charles Taylor, strikes
> me as an advanced case of kill-the-messenger syndrome. The Democratic
> Party's injuries are self-inflicted; they can't be blamed on a geeky
> consumer advocate and his tiny, poorly organized third party.
>
> First off, let's get rid of one canard. Even if Bush wins, we'll never
> know whether Nader "cost" Gore the election; exit polls suggest that
> many Nader voters wouldn't have voted at all in a straight Gush-Bore
> matchup. (And for whatever it's worth, Bush attracted about twice as
> many registered Democrats as Nader did.) But Nader's very presence in
> the race, and the enthusiasm his candidacy generated among students,
> environmentalists and other progressive activists, indicates that cracks
> are showing in the politics of fear that have held the amorphous
> Democratic coalition together in recent years.
>
> Ever since the disastrous defeat of George McGovern by Richard Nixon in
> 1972, the Democratic Party has had two unwritten rules for dealing with
> its own left wing. Rule 1: There is no left. Rule 2: If there is a left,
> it must be destroyed or at least silenced. As the party slid toward the
> mushy center, essentially morphing into the Republican Party of the
> Eisenhower era (while the Republican Party itself was morphing into, I
> don't know, the Brown Shirts), it left its
> progressive-environmentalist-feminist wing increasingly homeless. Some
> people on this wing played along, believing that even the centrist New
> Democrats were preferable to
> the post-Reagan GOP; others abandoned electoral politics for academics,
> community activism or gardening.
>
> Let's note an important historical contrast here: In 1964, the
> Republican Party was transformed by a wave of grass-roots activism, and
> nominated a true believer (Barry Goldwater) who galvanized the activist
> core but got slaughtered in the general election by a popular incumbent
> president. A generation later, these activists conquered not just their
> own party but the entire country, sweeping Ronald Reagan to power on an
> unprecedented conservative tide.
>
> The McGovern campaign represented a parallel upsurge of activism within
> the Democratic Party, and produced the same short-term result. But union
> leaders, big-city mayors, tort lawyers, Southern congressmen and other
> entrenched forces essentially united to purge the activists, who
> terrified them politically and threatened their power. In the long run,
> this created a party without a grass-roots base, whose only electoral
> strategy was to study the polls and bend with the wind, to "triangulate"
> (in the loathsome phrase of the loathsome Dick Morris) a middle road
> between liberals and conservatives.
>
> Could the McGovern radicals ever have triumphed on a national scale the
> way the Goldwater radicals did? I don't know, but that's not the point.
> The Republican shift to the right was motivated by the personal
> convictions of millions of party activists; the Democratic shift to the
> center was motivated not by principle but by Morris-style strategic
> thinking. Some people, like President Clinton and Gore, may have
> believed wholeheartedly in this new direction. But its only real purpose
> was to gain power. From that moment forward the Democratic Party became
> a reactionary force whose core values were never certain. In short, it
> sold its
> soul.
>
> Of course, the Democrats could afford to do that because they still had
> large groups of loyal voters they could take almost entirely for
> granted, even if they no longer had any activist base outside a few
> Washington think tanks. African-Americans, Latinos, feminists,
> environmentalists and the progressive wing of the labor movement had no
> place else to go, in terms of electoral politics. Many were
> understandably terrified of the newly energized GOP, which seemed to
> want to lock women in the kitchen, sell Yellowstone to the highest
> bidder and get the poor off welfare and into prison.
>
> The Republicans, in fact, provided the cudgel the Democratic leadership
> used to batter renegade movements like Jackson's Rainbow Coalition --
> which strove to reconnect the party with a multiracial, working-class
> base -- back into line. If you think we're bad, went the Democratic
> theme song, wait till you see the other guys. It worked, for a while.
> During the Clinton years, the party did the minimum necessary to hang on
> to poor, dark-skinned and liberal voters, while doing the maximum
> possible to pry affluent suburbanites loose from the Republicans.
>
> But the triangulation strategy can only continue to work if no one
> presents a genuine, grass-roots challenge for those abandoned and
> dispirited left-leaning voters. Even a marginal (and marginally
> successful) effort to do so, like that of Nader and the Greens, must be
> savaged and, if possible, discredited. This horror of being attacked at
> the Democratic Party's most vulnerable point accounts, I believe, for
> the near-hysterical pitch of much of the Nader-bashing, which simply
> repeats the same old tune: We may suck but the Republicans suck worse.
>
> This is what I mean by the politics of fear. Democratic loyalists, from
> Congress to the academy to the editorial page of the New York Times, are
> trying to terrorize Green voters into repentance with horror stories: We
> have delivered the country into the hands of Trent Lott and Tom DeLay;
> we're ensuring that right-wing wacko judges get appointed to the Supreme
> Court; we're a bunch of effete white intellectuals who won't suffer the
> likely consequences of our actions. But the real fear at issue here is
> the fear of
> the Democratic apparatchiks themselves, at the prospect of their
> soulless, sclerotic party being undermined by the forces of genuine
> democracy.
>
> In the interests of civil discourse, I'm going to skip over the ad
> hominem, and thoroughly irrelevant, attacks on Nader's personality and
> manner that form a distinct subset of Nader-bashing. Suffice it to say
> that Nader is an imperfect candidate on many levels, but he's also a man
> of real integrity and accomplishment who has worked for the good of
> American citizens his entire life and never panders to his audience.
> Besides, anyone who voted for Gore, for any reason, has permanently lost
> the right to complain about boring, irritating and pedantic politicians.
>
> In fact, the relentless negativity and fear-mongering of the
> Green-baiters only makes it clear that they don't have anything good to
> say about their own candidate or their own party. This spectacle of
> intelligent and well-meaning people struggling to defend a crippled
> institution they don't really like is more than a little sad. Many of
> them, I am convinced, realize that the difference between Democratic and
> Republican fiscal policy these days, as Michael M. Thomas of the New
> York Observer has put it, is mainly the question of which of Alan
> Greenspan's butt cheeks to lick first.
>
> These Democratic loyalists are too smart not to realize that their
> candidate this year was a smug oligarch only slightly less noxious than
> the one he opposed. (The streets of hell will be closed for a snow day
> before either Gore or Bush shuts off the soft-money spigot that has
> thoroughly corrupted national politics.) Or that Gore's vaunted
> intelligence consists mostly of half-digested fragments cribbed from New
> Age management-guru bestsellers. Or that his running mate was an
> intolerant, sanctimonious prick who would absolutely, positively be a
> Republican if he didn't adhere to a minority religion.
>
> Now that the Republicans have emulated the Democrats and handed back
> their party's reins from the activist fringe to the corporate center,
> this year's presidential election will matter slightly less, in the
> world-historical scheme of things, than the battle between Coke and
> Pepsi. At least people actually like Coke and Pepsi; this has been more
> like Dr. Pepper vs. Mr. Pibb. I suppose if I really had to choose
> between being ruled by law firms and high-tech zillionaires (the
> Democrats) on one hand and oil and pharmaceutical tycoons (the
> Republicans) on the other, I'd pick the lawyers. But the Nader campaign,
> as modest and provisional as it was in the end, was an attempt to argue
> that the choice doesn't have to be that narrow.
>
> All right, the Democratic hit squads say, that's very high-minded. Then
> they start flogging us with DeLay and Lott again. What about the poor
> women who'll bleed to death from botched coat-hanger abortions after Roe
> vs. Wade is overturned, and inner-city schoolchildren who'll go without
> books and lunches when their budget is vouchered out to suburban
> religious academies?
>
> This is, of course, the politics of fear at its highest and most
> effective pitch. I don't doubt that the Bush administration (version
> 2.0) will be capable of doing some real harm, and I can't question the
> motives of anyone who felt they had to vote for Gore on that basis. But
> if it is Bush who takes office on Jan. 20, he will be one of the most
> weakened presidents in American history. He's unlikely to try and enact
> the agenda of the radical right, which feels lukewarm about him in any
> case. If he does, he's simply gift-wrapping both houses of Congress for
> the Democrats in 2002.
>
> Of course, even a weak president with 51 senators on his side can
> install some egregious Neanderthal on the Supreme Court for life. Bush
> won't repeat the mistake his father made with closet liberal David
> Souter; it's safe to assume any W. appointments will be true-blue
> conservatives in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. This
> fear of a Bush court was clearly the Democrats' most potent weapon, and
> the reason why many potential Nader votes probably went to Gore at the
> last minute. Those of us who stuck with Ralph believed, however, that
> the best vote for civil rights and civil liberties was a vote for the
> long-term rejuvenation of democracy, not another vote for a party that
> doesn't stand for anything.
>
> As for the not-so-subtle charges of elitism and racism against Nader and
> the Greens, it strikes me that those who have run out of legitimate
> arguments resort in the end to ugly innuendo. It's true that the Green
> movement, based in environmentalist and college-activist circles that
> tend to be mostly white, has done a piss-poor job of reaching people of
> color. Out of both tradition and pragmatism, minority voters, especially
> African-Americans, remain as a whole fiercely loyal to the Democrats.
> But whether the Green Party succeeds or not, how long will blacks and
> other minorities continue to tolerate the party that has eagerly
> collaborated
> in the war on drugs, the militarization of the inner city, the
> tremendous expansion of the prison-industrial complex, the racist
> application of the death penalty and the evisceration of the welfare
> system?
>
> The 2000 presidential campaign will end someday, thank God, but the
> Nader-bashing is essentially the prelude to the next one, in which the
> Democrats will be desperate to fortify their voter base against further
> Green erosion. Beneath the Democratic fury at defectors is a clear
> subtext: If you're really sorry and come home and stay very quiet, this
> will all be forgiven in time. In Taylor's eloquent, enraged article, he
> argues that the Democratic Party remains the traditional home for
> liberals and progressives in American politics, and we should be
> fighting to reform and renew it, rather than abandoning it.
>
> As Nader said repeatedly during the campaign, it wasn't the Greens who
> abandoned the Democrats but the other way around. The Greens face long
> and perhaps insuperable odds in trying to build a viable third party.
> But it feels good, finally, to have done something out of principle. It
> feels good to be free of the party that now seems unreformable and
> unrenewable. The party that rolled over for Newt Gingrich on welfare
> reform, that set back the cause of national healthcare by decades, that
> sold off the national forests in unprecedented quantities for nickels on
> the dollar, that waffled fatally on the rights of gays and lesbians,
> that
> presided over the most unequal economic boom in American history. Maybe
> we should be grateful for the presidential sex scandal that stopped the
> government dead for two years.
>
> If anything, Nader voters should take heart from the bashing. It means
> that we made enough of a difference that they're scared of us and want
> to destroy us. It means we have a chance. It means we've reached the
> second, and nearly the third, stage in Gandhi's legendary formula for
> revolutionary change: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
> Then they fight you. Then you win."
>
>
> salon.com
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
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