[lbo-talk] Naomi Klein: ABB

Sun Aug 1 07:51:01 PDT 2004

snit snat wrote:

>Klein's argument is that supporting Kerry will mean we can move 
>forward and stop obsessing about a presdinet or even the neocon 
>cabal:
>
>
>Anybody but Bush - and then let's get back to work

I just posted this to the LBO website. Lots of links in the web version.

<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Election2004.html>

Ralph 'n' stuff
[by Doug Henwood, from LBO #107, April 2004]

Twice before, in 1996 and again in 2000, this mighty page endorsed 
Ralph Nader for president. Not this time. Nader risks inheriting the 
mantle of Harold Stassen, though he's probably too old to match 
Stassen's record of nine failed presidential campaigns.

The previous endorsements came with heavy reservations that are worth 
recalling here. Nader has a long history of operating alone, scornful 
of coalitions, a characteristic visible in his on-again, off-again 
relations with the Green Party. He's got a deep conservative streak. 
Skeptical of public agencies, he prefers litigation to regulation, 
which amounts to an individualist adversarial approach rather than 
collective political action. One of his first published articles was 
a 1962 piece in a libertarian journal, The Freeman, supporting the 
residents of his hometown in their resistance against federally 
funded public housing. In the 1970s, his Raiders often included 
unions among the monopolists that benefited from transport 
regulation, providing intellectual fuel for the deregulation 
movement. In the 1980s, he resisted unionization attempts in his own 
shop, redbaiting one of the organizers in the process. In the 2000 
campaign, he wooed David Brooks, then of The Weekly Standard, naming 
the many rightwingers he's worked well with in the past, among them 
such creeps as Bill Bennett, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer, and Grover 
Norquist, and still talks dreamily of drawing votes from the right. 
He shares the austere morality of Bennett and Co.; he seems to lack a 
libido, and hold in contempt those who like theirs and consider them 
politically important. His dislike of trade flirts with xenophobia; 
his people have discreetly worked with Pat Buchanan, though they 
don't like to talk about that. And he still talks delusionally about 
peeling off votes from the Republicans by appealing to "true" 
conservatives, who are distressed by Bush's alleged impurities; in a 
letter to disgruntled reactionaries, he actually praises the Texas 
GOP, one of the more frightening political formations in the 
hemisphere.

Good intentions. Of course, he says lots of good things about 
corporate power and the corruption of politics by money. But is it 
enough to say good things? It often seems as if American leftists 
think that all you need to do is get the right candidate with the 
right message and things will more or less take care of themselves. 
For example, one Nader enthusiast we know pointed to his promise to 
repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, a dreadful piece of legislation that 
hobbles organized labor. Fine - but if by some unimaginable fluke, 
Ralph were to get elected, how would he persuade Congress, the owning 
class, and the media to play along? What organization could he count 
on for support in what could be a fight to the death?

One of the major rationales for voting for Nader four and eight years 
ago was that it looked like a good way to build the Green Party. But 
even then he distanced himself from the party during the campaigns 
and did nothing to promote it in years not divisible by four - and 
now he's rejected their nomination.

Building a new party (and why limit ourselves to just one?) is the 
task of lifetimes, not months or years, and isn't a process that can 
be short-circuited by celebrity presidential runs. It was decades 
before the Swedish social democrats, for example, achieved national 
office. But they did more than run for office; they built 
cooperatives and social clubs, worked with unions, and made tactical 
alliances with existing parties, things that few of our independent 
politicians have showed much interest in doing. And Sweden is a 
parliamentary system, which makes it relatively easy for small 
parties to enter government. The U.S. federal system, with its 
winner-take-all elections and checking and balancingamong the levels 
and branches of government, was consciously designed to keep politics 
from becoming too radical. With all those structural obstacles in the 
way, voting for Nader is an empty gesture that may make the voter 
feel virtuous and pure, but which will have little good long-term 
effect except maybe to re-elect Bush.

Burying the lead. Readers who've made it this far might suspect that 
the previous 650 words were attempts at self-justification for what 
follows-an embrace of the very lesser-evilism that this newsletter 
denounced in its rude younger days. But there seems little 
alternative at the moment; the best we can do is hope for a Kerry 
victory, and that disillusionment will rapidly set in.

After 1,200 days of the George W. Bush presidency, it's difficult to 
say there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. 
Sure there are plenty of similarities-deep agreement on the beauties 
of capitalism and the rightness of U.S. power in the world. But, as 
Noam Chomsky puts it, to the distress of many of his fans, given the 
magnitude of U.S. power, "small differences can translate into large 
outcomes." That's probably truer of domestic than foreign policy. 
We're more likely to see the privatization of Social Security and 
Medicare under a second Bush administration, more likely to see the 
public schools further privatized, more likely to see troglodytes 
appointed to the NLRB or the federal courts, more attacks on civil 
liberties, andad nauseam. Abroad, a Kerry administration is likely to 
be marginally less aggressive, less likely to talk of pre-emptive war 
or the right to use nuclear weapons, and more likely to be respectful 
of international institutions (such as they are).

There are also intangibles, like a better discursive and organizing 
environment. It's better for radicals when politics is about the guys 
in power not doing enough than when it's about defending the social 
gains of the 20th century. No matter how conservative a Democratic 
administration would like to be, it still has to respond to some of 
the party's core constituencies-like environmentalists, 
African-Americans, feminists, and civil libertarians, a sharp 
contrast with creationists and oilmen. Life is better when the air 
isn't filled with stupidity, arrogance, anti-intellectualism, and 
covert or overt appeals to bigotry coming from the top. It's good 
when the president isn't an ignoramus who thinks he's on a divine 
appointment and the attorney general doesn't hold prayer meetings and 
assemble anti-porn strike forces.

Bush, subverter? There is the paradox that Bush has done more to 
undermine the legitimacy of U.S. dominance of the global system than 
anyone who's occupied the office. The Pentagon is the ultimate 
guarantor of American power, but the empire can't operate mainly by 
force; subordinate countries have to feel they're getting something 
out of the deal. Those who profit the most out of the deal, Canada 
and the richer countries of Asia and Europe, get a stable global 
economic and political environment without having to spend much on 
arms or getting deeply involved in the dirty work of empire 
maintenance. Poorer countries get a rawer deal, but they're in a weak 
bargaining position. But it's best if the global hierarchy operates 
at the level of things we don't talk about. By pushing American 
dominance so hard, Bush has undermined the bargain. The U.S. is now 
more hated than it's been in decades, maybe ever.

Kerry would probably work to repair this. A Democratic administration 
would also police more vigilantly the departures from neoliberalism 
discussed in the last issue, like Argentina's admirable stiffing of 
its private bondholders. It'd be a return to empire as usual, which 
on balance would be a refreshing thing. The U.S. has never been known 
for a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," but the 
administration has carried the rudeness to appalling levels.

Presumably the chaophilic wing of anarchism could want more rudeness 
and further discrediting of the U.S. But it's probably better if the 
hierarchy is overturned from below rather than undone by a bunch of 
heavily armed fanatics at the top. And several billion people around 
the world probably agree.

Disappointment, please. No less serious a radical than Tariq Ali has 
said that "the defeat of Bush would be viewed globally as a victory." 
He's also denied that by saying so he's urging anyone to vote for 
Kerry, though it's hard to see how anyone else could defeat Bush. 
Ali's squeamishness is understandable; for this newsletter, which has 
from the beginning viewed the Democratic Party as an obstacle to 
human progress, this is a difficult endorsement to make. Making it 
easier is the knowledge that were Kerry to win, he'd become the enemy 
on November 3.

He is also likely to be disappointing in many ways (disappointing to 
already low expectations), which is a comfort. He's already made a 
healthy downpayment on that disappointment, and the campaign has 
hardly begun. He proposed a corporate tax reform that was the triumph 
of wonkishness over any discernible political or economic 
strategy-"revenue-neutral," of course, but defying any interesting 
paraphrase. And, more repulsively, he endorsed Bush's endorsement of 
Ariel Sharon's "peace" plan-assassinations, wall-building, and making 
most settlements in the Occupied Territories permanent. Awful stuff, 
and it's only April. Come November, it's going to require a giant 
clothespin to enter a polling booth.

LBO has quoted several times Garry Wills' explanation of why the 
1960s exploded: after years of liberals' saying things would improve 
when Ike was replaced, when things didn't get much better under JFK, 
a lot of people decided the System was the problem, not party or 
personnel. Some similar disillusionment with Clinton probably helped 
spark Seattle. It could happen again. Let's hope it does.