> A Republican Proletariat
>
> BY TOM MERTES
> In Ohio, JoAnn Wypijewski has reported, the Democrats had serious
> organization in nine counties; the Republicans had it in all
> eighty-eight. Instead, Kerry’s ‘air war’ bombarded the electorate from
> 30,000 feet. America Coming Together, MoveOn.org and the other 527s
> bussed in white college kids and paid mercenaries to rust-belt towns
> with double-digit unemployment and high ex-convict levels, not to stay
> and help organize around community issues but to sign up votes for Kerry
> and get out. [14] By contrast, the gop has rebuilt itself nationally
> over the past decades and could mobilize nearly a million local party
> volunteers in 2004, with committees in over 3,000 us counties. Add to
> that the powerful conservative church organizations and it is easy to
> see why, with the electorate still more or less evenly divided, the
> Republicans can dominate all three branches of government.
I haven't yet read Frank's book, but I'm looking forward to it.
This isn't the only analysis that has pointed out the utter failure of the Democrats to organize on the local level. There was another article that talked about their disorganization in Florida. This information more or less should wake up liberals and progressives that they are throwing money away at a party that is totally incompetent. Not only does it run the wrong candidates (Gore, Kerry, Dukakis, Mondale. McGovern), but it can't even organize it's local partisans. You would think that the Democrats would have had this down solid, after four years of being pissed about the results of the 2000 elections.
I expect that the Democratic Party will remain a marginal political force for decades to come, if it doesn't die out completely. The information in this analysis points to the fact that the Republicans are better revolutionaries and electoral activists than liberals and progressives. The Democrats are still operating as if it were 1960, where you raise money to fuel your political machine. The old paradigm of your supporters throwing money at a party stuck in the old paradigm doesn't work. Look at the failure of the AFL-CIO to accomplish anything for the Democrats. The Republicans are better grassroots organizers than the so-called "organizers" in the biggest union.
The Republicans have moved to more assymetrical tactics. Not only are they organized locally, but they understand that they are fighting an ideological war. The Democrats play nice. The Republicans beat the Democraps with the Swift Boat Veterans for Whatever. The Democrats spend millions on TV advertising on a few channels for a few months of a campaign season. The Republicans operate a sophisticated right wing propaganda network which beams propaganda at its true believer 24/7/365 and every year. This system pins every worry and problem on the Democrats and is effective in motivating their grassroots. The liberals and progressives have lots of movie stars and critics of the media, but a pathetic media system. Air America and Michael Moore? It's going to take more than that!
> Frank has offered some pungent advice to the Democrats in the wake of
> this debacle. Let us hope the next book this fine writer gives us will
> be as uncompromising a portrait of its massive edifice of sleaze and
> hypocrisy as he has provided for latter-day Republicans, without resort
> to the weasel L-word that is America’s tarnished substitute for a Left.
> The two-fisted spirit of his feisty journal out of Chicago, the Baffler,
> is what a radical politics in the us most needs today.
The biggest mistake the progessive left can make in the near future is to waste time and resources in another doomed effort to save the Democrats. It would be smarter to emulate the right wing and focus more on building grassroots networks and organizations. Fight dirty. Build a progressive alternative to Fox News. The left also has to talk about how the Democrats are the same thing as the Republicans. The mistake in the election this year was for progressives to focus on Bush as being the evil warmonger. The problem is that both parties are the parties of war and war criminals.
I hope that things change soon, because I don't want to spend another Christmas watching my father give my sister Michael Savage books.
Chuck