Fighting the Power: Should the Left Join the Right? by Ruth Conniff Thursday, April 13, 2000
If you want to see the nadir of progressive politics, just watch "West Wing," NBC's weekly drama about a kinder, better, less scandal-soaked Clinton administration. President Jedidiah Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, is a likable pater familias. He and the Democratic White House staff are clearly the good guys. Since the whole thing is fiction, of course, the writer (Aaron Sorkin) can let his imagination run wild. So what do our heroes in the White House do? In one recent episode, they quash legislation that would ban the import of products made using child labor. The child-labor requirement would get in the way of a larger trade bill, which the president supports, you see. Tough political decisions have to be made. Sadly, but firmly, Bartlett explains that his staff cannot pursue anti-child-labor regulation.
Is left-wing idealism so compromised, after two Clinton terms, that we can no longer imagine good guys who actually do good? Is accommodation and political cynicism the best we can hope for, even in Hollywood fantasyland?
The sleeping beast awakens
Fortunately, back in the real world, the answer is no. It's bracing, after eight years of sleep-walking through the Clinton era and the Wall Street boom, to see activists by the thousands descending on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings in Washington, D.C., this week.
The protesters, from a broad range of backgrounds, are sending a loud message about the difference between the interests of powerful corporations and the politicians who serve them, and the needs and rights of ordinary folks. Instead of accepting the idea that a small group of businessmen and political leaders should decide what's best for the world economy (a la Martin Sheen), they are insisting that workers, environmentalists and people who care about human rights be included. Should local environmental regulations be overturned because a foreign country deems them "barriers to trade"? Should poor people in Third World countries be forced to endure harsh austerity programs in order to pay off staggering IMF debt? Should we, in fact, insist that members of global trade agreements stop using child labor?
These are some of the issues the activists have forced onto the table.
Since the turn of the last century, progressives have opposed unfettered corporate power, whether in the form of the railroad trusts, Standard Oil or multinational corporations. But in the last decade or so, as the Democratic Party has become increasingly pro-corporate and less concerned about labor and civil rights, progressive activism has declined. Meanwhile, anti-corporate sentiment on the right has increased.
Margaret Talbot wrote about the phenomenon recently in a New York Times Magazine profile of a conservative, Christian family that dropped out of society. While the left-wing counterculture of the 1960s has all but dried up, an active, critical counterculture has arisen on the right, Talbot reports. Among the things this conservative counterculture objects to is the consumerism, materialism and the Hollywood-driven valuelessness of mainstream American life.
This creates a funny dilemma for left-wing activists, who sometimes find more allies on the right than the left.
The fruits of an unlikely alliance
Take the left-right alliance between consumer activist and Green Party presidential hopeful Ralph Nader and antifeminist, family-values crusader Phyllis Schlafly. Nader and Schlafly have been working together against Channel One, the corporation that broadcasts a daily current-events program into public schools and charges advertisers top dollar for access to a captive audience of impressionable kids. James Dobson of Focus on the Family has also joined Nader's anti-commercialism crusade.
Pat Buchanan is another right-winger who has made common cause with Nader, opposing NAFTA and attacking corporate welfare. And currently, Nader and other progressives find that if they want to work for reform of the IMF, their major allies are congressional Republicans.
If that makes his progressive allies nervous, Nader argues that getting people to work together in the public interest, regardless of ideological difference, is the essence of democracy.
"When you get down to basic consumer issues, people have the same concerns," he says. "The way the machinations of corporate control work is you create bipolar ideologies and have people fight people: 'I won't work with that right-wing conservative. I won't work with that wooly-headed liberal.' That's a high level of abstraction. But who wants to live next to a toxic dump? Who wants their kids exploited by commercial hucksters in school? That's very specific."
Essential Action's Robert Weissman, who works with Nader and has helped organize the D.C. protests of the IMF, agrees. "I see no problem joining with principled conservatives who put forth evidence-based criticisms of the IMF," he says. "Conservatives talk about IMF infringements on national sovereignty. They're right. We talk about the IMF assuming a colonial role to impose structural adjustment policies on developing countries. Conservatives point to the IMF's horrid record of promoting economic stagnation or contraction. They're right. We say the same thing."
At what cost?
But here the slope gets slippery. If "sovereignty" means an end to colonialism and justice for developing countries to Weissman, to some conservatives it means beating back the Yellow Peril.
When Buchanan shows up in Washington to give a speech during the protests this week, he will be representing "the most dangerous ideology of the Twentieth Century: nationalism," says Bill Mesler of The Nation. Nativism, immigrant-baiting and the kind of belligerent propaganda that can lead to war are among good reasons for progressives not to join with right-wing protectionists, who share some of the same concerns about the IMF.
Still, Buchanan will be in the minority among the college students, AFL-CIO members and environmentalists in Washington. "I don't know who he's speaking to," Weissman says . Meanwhile, the progressive activists and Republicans in Congress who support the cause agree on a few key issues: scaling back the power of the IMF and offering debt relief to the Third World.
"For now, we're so relatively powerless compared to these powerful institutions [the IMF and the World Bank], our primary mission is to restrain their power," Weissman says. "So it's less important to focus on the day when we run global institutions than on limiting the harm that they do."
If you want a script for the day when progressives are running things, don't look for Aaron Sorkin to write the script.
Ruth Conniff is the Washington editor of The Progressive magazine.