Voting is a bitch. John Kerry will get my vote in the November elections, and I’ll give it with the same grudging, wintry discontent that I did in the last two presidential elections, when I backed Ralph Nader. In those races, I made statements. Now I want to beat Bush.
But that’s not what this piece is about. It’s not why a vote for Kerry is inevitable in a year when Bush is vulnerable. It’s about how liberals and leftists on both sides of the Kerry -Nader divide get rabidly exercised about other people’s campaign choices, when they both know that power does not come out of an election booth. It comes out of the economic and social movements poised to hold officeholders accountable. It’s about never forgetting that the leftthe only hope for humanity (and do I exaggerate?)--
isn't built by electoral struggle but by building the social movements, before, during and after elections. It is the weakness of the social movements that forces poor choices on us. Beyond the facility of corporate Democrats to co-opt movement leaders into precinct captains or the fecklessness of radicals to form lasting electoral alternatives, a centrist Democrat is sadly our last best shot for ending the White House occupation because no social movements are strong enough to move the country left.
That hasn’t stopped sides from forming up for color war, with the loudest drumming from the punditry. When Nader announced his third run , the usually measured Michael Tomasky, for one, counseled Democrat candidates to a man, to “attack Nader right now, and with Lupine ferocity.” He told The American Prospect readers how Nader was “a megalomaniac whose tenuous purchase on present-day reality threatens to cancel out every good thing he's done in his life,” which, if true, would be a cancellation on the order of the original Star Trek.
There was more passion on view in Tomasky’s tough love for Nader than in his eight years of covering Giuliani, the race-baiting, city-service privatizing, real-estate creature and poster boy for megalomania whom he characterized in New York magazine as someone who ran for office “to the right of how he ruled.”
Making the case for Kerry is no slamdunk. Problems with the Washington fixture are palpable; they can be lined up and bowled over like candlepins. But even if Kerry were the political bastard his left detractors say he is, he is ---as FDR said of the senior Somozaour bastard, at least until Nov. 4. Until then, the anti-Bush effort is well worth building in its own right, if only as realpolitik. It needn’t be dressed up by pounding the iron necessity of beating Bush into a tin- plated virtue. We don’t have to say the ridiculous or the indefensible on his behalf.
Of course, some critics of the Democratic candidate do offer a real- world model for Tomasky’s ravening beasts. John Pilger’s New Statesman screed (March 4) widely clipped and distributed over the Internet and on Web sites including ZNet, came illustrated in the original London version with a split screen of Bush and Kerry melded into one face, sharing a lipless sneer. Same man and same agenda.
Pilger says pointing to differences between Bush and Kerry is “a big lie, ” that distinctions between the two do not “go beyond the use of euphemisms,” and that the real objection to Bush by Democrats is to his outspokenness, to his administration’s “crude honesty,” and not to any policy differences.
“The Democratic Party has left a longer trail of blood, theft and subjugation than the Republicans [which] is heresy to the liberal crusaders, whose murderous history always requires, it seems, a noble mantle,” Pilger writes. But what reader of Democratic Left doubts that the trail was blazed in a fit of bipartisanship, along with opposition throughout ever sector of society, including the two parties.
What does any of Pilger’s biliousness tell us about politics and political choices? Nothing. It’s catharsis. Much of the same runs in Counterpunch, where Alex Cockburn and friends equate Kerry bashing with political comment, or in one small left wing paper that urges readers to “get off the Democratic Party train now,” in order to “fight for a new political party,” presumably one devoid of those pesky misleaders who seem to muck things up. This without explaining how a second Bush administration could possibly bring that goal of better trains and better leaders nearer.
At least the Greens bring some humor to the table, as when St. Louis Green Party organizer Don Fitz turns the question around, asking “Should the Democrats Run a Candidate for President in 2004?” and says, with some justification, “If the Democrats were against the Bush program, why would they wait for the election to fight it?”
Let’s shovel away the accumulated sludge. Nader’s take on corporate power is terrific, as far at it goes. “Crashing the Party,” his account of the 2000 race, is a good statement of first principles as well as a fair treatment of how hard it is to raise political issues in a national campaign, especially absent a social movement running interference for you.
Nader also has every right to run for president, and leftists who know that defeating Bush is all-important have every right to say “Ralph. Don’t Run.” But we have no right to chant, “unclean; unclean” or vilify his supporters.
The problem I have with Nader’s run is not bad faith or a belief in the worse, the better. It’s how his brand of anti-corporatism won’t mesh with a political campaign. While he can run a brilliant position-paper operation that spotlights big business domination of political and economic life, don’t expect him to target the real dissatisfaction voters have with the Iraq occupation, even its corporate analog, or offer voters an alternative.
Everything Nader says will resonate as a critique of a bought and paid-for two party system, not a bash at Bush or even a synthetic look at what got bought. If he were instead to frame Bush as an acknowledged corporate tool, he’d play a hero’s role in bringing Bush down. But that would detract from building a 3rd party, his acknowledged goal.
Now I want a left-of-center political party, too, one that can harness and represent working class politics in a way the Democratic Party in its big tent, corporate-dominated incarnation cannot. But the time and place to build that isn’t eight months from November and on the national level, especially when you don’t have 50-state ballot access or even a Green Party skeletal apparatus to run with. If the pro-Kerry folk tend to be unreflective or even somnolent about how bad the situation is: that in 2004, amidst war, joblessness and poverty, we soldier on and hopefully elect another centrist Democrat, then the self- styled revolutionary Left’s sin is to act like lemmings, as though the sea were not instant death and Bush or Kerry do not matter. The candidate of one socialist groupuscule says he is running as “a voice for the international working class in the 2004 US elections.” Even bullfrogs don’t puff themselves up that much.
Differences like these won’t get resolved by talking or fighting from now until November. Instead of an arctic night of long knives, I’d rather DSA activists work our own sides of the street. That could mean stumping for Kerry, or insistingas DSA doesthat the social movements have a voice and face in the campaign and room to grow. It could mean running the ground war in markets where the emphasis by the party pros will be on television saturation in the 17 battleground states. It could mean focusing on local races, where a few dedicated campaigners can make a difference in swinging control of state houses or Congress.
In New York City, for example, that means working in the long-shot Frank Barbaro campaign in Brooklyn-Staten Island against a hard-core right winger who holds office in a district that boasts the highest union- household density in the nation.
Or it could mean backing independent candidates with a chance of winning and who deserve to win, like Matt Gonzalez in San Francisco last year After November, the left is going to need each other, unmaimed. If nothing else, we can at least dial it down and get to work.
Michael Hirsch is a member of the DSA National Political Committee and an editor of New Politics and Democratic Left. He ran as a Dennis Kucinich delegate in the March primary, outpolling the Ohio congressman in New York’s 14th C.D. by some 200 votes. “Dennis ran on my coattails,” Hirsch says.