Anthony --
On Tue, 12 Nov 2002 15:00:42
Chuck0 wrote:
>Published on Tuesday, November 12, 2002 by the Village Voice
>
>Attention, Small-D Democrats: The Party's Over
>
>by James Ridgeway
>
>Since last week's election, liberals have been melodramatically wringing
>their hands, while the pundits have rushed to expound upon the deeper meaning
>of the Republican sweep. The Democrats lost, they say, because they no longer
>stand for anything. From the pundits' portentous tones, you'd never guess
>that they were beating a horse that's been dead for more than 30 years.
>
>In fact, this party has been disintegrating since it nominated Hubert
>Humphrey in the bloody streets of Chicago in 1968. The Democrats haven't had
>a shred of original ideology since the New Deal, or a spark of fire in their
>bellies since the nominally liberal momentum of the Kennedy-Johnson years ran
>aground on the party's cowardly refusal to oppose the Vietnam War.
>
>And it was Jimmy Carter who provided the spark that fired up the right wing.
>His decision to abandon the Panama Canal helped result in the founding of the
>New Right. That, in turn, went hand in hand with Ronald Reagan's march to
>power. Flailing wildly, Carter tried to beat the right by co-opting its
>economic plan, doing such things as embracing deregulation of the energy
>industry and other businesses. Charting new ground with an allegedly centrist
>support base, Clinton tried to outfox conservatives by adopting halfhearted
>versions of their own plans. Clinton put the final nail in the New Deal's
>coffin—embracing welfare "reform," screwing up and then abandoning health
>care, even letting it be known that his administration would look kindly on
>experiments to reform Social Security by handing partial control to Wall
>Street brokerages. He managed to leave his greatest mark on history by giving
>the Republicans an opportunity to impeach him because of an ill-timed blowjob.
>
>Today's Democratic Party is less a party than an entrenched Washington
>apparatus, which operates as a sort of simulacrum of itself, bellowing the
>names of past icons, while it carries on the business of responding to the
>interests of one lobby group or another. It is what William Greider calls a
>"managerial" party, exemplified by the technocratic fussbudgets in the
>Democratic Leadership Council.
>
>Now, some say, there may be a real shakeup in the party in the wake of the
>midterm defeat, the failed Dick Gephardt stepping down as minority leader,
>and the Democrats turning to new leadership in the form of California
>Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. But this is sham. Gephardt is not quitting as a
>failure, but to prepare for a presidential run in 2004. As of late, Pelosi is
>best known for her role as senior House Democrat on the Intelligence
>Committee, where with the rest of this deadbeat crew she ignored or covered
>up the U.S. intelligence fiascoes that led to 9-11. Pelosi hails from a
>Baltimore Democratic political family and says she traces her roots to FDR.
>Currently she's known as the mother of documentary filmmaker Alexandra
>Pelosi, who traveled with George Bush during his campaign, and whose
>filmmaking, among other things, apparently spurred the two families to meet
>for lunch.
>
>The Republicans, on the other hand, have, since the days of Barry Goldwater,
>articulated a clear ideology. Beginning with the Nixon campaign of 1968, they
>have carried out an elaborate plan of action to muster the "silent majority"
>and bring what was a splintered and broken party to power. They have
>successfully positioned themselves as the party of conservative "principle,"
>with a mission to roll back the ever encroaching federal government—shutting
>down agencies and privatizing others, returning power to the states, crushing
>the New Deal welfare state—while restoring old-fashioned Christian morality
>to civil society.
>
>There is some substance to these political claims, but not much. Right now,
>the Republican majority is using its power to expand, not contract, the role
>of the government, replacing the welfare state with a far more costly and
>intrusive police state, with an economic program based on Keynesian
>pump-priming for the defense industries.
>
>Power may be wielded to advance ideology, but more often, ideology is a front
>for the simple protection of power. Bush may pose as a Texas wildcatter, a
>Bible-thumping Christian zealot, a war-ready patriot, and a champion of the
>common man. But in reality, he's a blue-blooded New England Methodist who
>dodged the draft by joining the National Guard and pledged for Skull and
>Bones at Yale. And he's never had anything remotely like an ideology, with
>the possible exception of the 12-Step Program. If Bush succeeds in spite of
>an elitist pedigree, it's because he heads—and epitomizes—today's Republican
>Party. This is a party that wields the money and power of Big Business,
>shrewdly woven into a populist, patriotic ideology designed to appeal to a
>country so desperate for passionate ideals that in return it will give them
>the license to rob their pensions and send their children to war.
>
>Those who fail to fall for all this are left feeling powerless and depressed,
>wondering where to go next. The answer is not terribly hopeful, but it is
>very simple—and it has nothing whatsoever to do with party politics. Take
>every opportunity to oppose the power structure: March on Washington, go on
>strike, organize a boycott, start a resistance radio station, take to the
>streets with the anarchists. If you are looking for models, they are all over
>the rest of the world: the East German Christian opposition to the Honecker
>police state that led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall, the massive Czech
>uprising, the South African overthrow of apartheid, the protests in Seattle.
>Don't wait for the Democrats to do it. Do it yourself. Stand for something.
>
>© 2002 The Village Voice
>
>###
>
>
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