Pwogwessive Democrats of America
Reposted - by Louis Proyect
This is the latest in a series of initiatives (http://www.pdamerica.org/ )
that attempts to breathe new life into the Democratic Party, which in my
eyes is akin to putting mascara on one of the corpses that dotted New
Orleans’s streets after Hurricane Katrina. Although PDA supposedly has an
“inside and outside” strategy for the DP, you can find about as much
reference to the “outside” as there is to Noam Chomsky on the Lehrer news
hour on an average night.
I was somewhat disappointed to see Cindy Sheehan on the advisory board but
I am inclined to forgive her since she is doing so much else to objectively
undermine this party of war and racism.
Medea Benjamin graces the advisory board, as one might expect. This person
should do everybody a favor and cut her ties to the Green Party, at least
for the purposes of political clarity. For crissake, doesn’t she know that
she is giving opportunism a bad name? You can also find Jeff Cohen, the
founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, there. In recent years he
has made a living as a full-time adviser for Democratic Party politicians,
who would seem to embody the very sins that he was anxious to root out in
the bourgeois media. I guess he needs the money or something.
Staff members include Tim Carpenter, the national director. Carpenter is a
long-time DP functionary, working for the DLC slug Bill Clinton in 1996 and
Kucinich last year. According to Carpenter, the pwogwessive forces in the
DP “went from being a pariah and marginal” at the 2004 convention to “being
in” after putting some inexorable pressure on the Kerry warmongering
campaign. What were the fruits of their victory, one wonders? Their
victory, it seems, was the adoption of this plank:
“As other nations, including Islamic nations, contribute troops, the U.S.
will be able to reduce its military presence in Iraq, and we intend to do
this when appropriate so that the military support needed by a sovereign
Iraqi government will no longer be seen as the direct continuation of an
American military presence.”
I guess that crumb from the master’s table is sufficient to keep people
like Carpenter, Cohen and Benjamin in the DP. Plus, the money is good.
The ubiquitous Williams River Pitt of truthout.org is their editorial
director. Our good friend and comrade Jacob Levich had an interesting
report on truthout.org a while back on Counterpunch that began as follows:
>>Truthout, an online newsletter and website boasting 250,000 subscribers,
wants to outflank the distortions of mainstream media by disseminating news
of interest to left-liberals. But its commitment to truth-telling seemingly
stops short when it comes to Palestine.
>>On May 7, the Truthout newsletter linked to an Associated Press story about
the Rishon Letzion suicide bombing. The AP report correctly refrained from
identifying a perpetrator. (The party responsible is still unknown,
although Hamas looks like the most likely culprit and the PA has since
arrested 15 Hamas members in response.)
>>But Truthout flagged the story with a headline spun out of thin air:
“Palestinian Authority Strikes Killing 15 Israelis.”
>>Worse was soon to come.
>>Truthout (http://www.truthout.org) is, or at any rate purports to be, one
of the hip new breed of independent news sources providing alternatives to
the biases of corporate media. (Of these, the Indymedia operation is
probably the most celebrated; the libertarian Antiwar.com is possibly the
most useful.)
>>
Truthout’s editor, Marc Ash, claims the publication has no organizational
affiliations and is entirely reader-supported — though five staffers, and
the server power necessary to support a quarter-million users, don’t come
cheap. Given its incessant showcasing of Beltway Democrats — even career
hacks like Daschle and Gephardt get flattering headlines whenever they say
anything remotely progressive — I’ve sometimes wondered whether it’s
actually a James Carville-style undercover operation, aimed at cajoling
Naderites back into the Democratic fold.
>>(Suggestively, of all the questions I asked Ash about Truthout’s history,
purpose, and funding, the only one he was willing to answer was whether the
publication is connected in some way with the Democratic Party. It is not,
he said, and I’ll take him at his word — though I suspect a list of
contributors might make interesting reading.)… …< <
Full article at http://www.counterpunch.org/levitch0514.html
Sounds like a perfect marriage between Pitt and the PDA, which also seems
“aimed at cajoling Naderites into the Democratic fold.”
I imagine that this outfit is being funded by George Soros and all the
other usual suspects, as Claude Rains said in “Casablanca”. Looks like we
have our work cut out for us in 2008.
m.c.:
One good reason for those on the left(including radicals) to sometimes hold their nose and flexibly use the Democratic Party as a tool is that with a majority in either house of Congress, people like Cynthia McKinney, Barbara Lee, and John Conyers; & Patrick Leahy, and Russ Feingold on the other side will have the Power of Subpoena. Without a majority(and Subpoena Power)even the truth is a remote and distant dream with Alberto Gonzales in charge of the Justice Dept.
11 November 2005, 6:11 pmJeri:
I never post to blogs and have never posted here but had to comment on down home democrats, left oriented democrats as discussed in this post, and the Democratic Party. I spent my lunch today with some down home democrats, most of them vets and many of them parents of Iraq vets–or of soldiers deployed to Iraq. Larry Syverson, through a long chain of events that I won’t go into, who is from this neck of the woods originally, spoke at the county democratic party’s weekly “cornbread and beans” lunch. It was packed, and when they asked all the veterans to stand practically half the room stood up. They are opposed to the war and opposed to George Bush and all his other myriad policies. Unfortunately, because these are real yellow dogs, for most of the war these many grass roots activists here have just shut up, not wanting to talk about any unpopular issues such as the war in Iraq. I tried attending these lunches during the time my son Cody was in Iraq during the first year of the war, hoping to get some kind of support, but found that most of them just changed the subject when I tried to bring up Iraq. This continues to be the strategy of the party as a whole, but the on the ground activists that they depend on to get out and do their work are pretty restless here. They are real party people, but they are also people who take these issues to heart.
Now a few words about the left oriented democratic activists such as this PDA, which I will admit I have not paid that much attention to. There are a bunch of people like that around here too, unfortunately since the war began that is mostly what I have run across, and while if I looked at their ideas on paper separate from them as people perhaps there is not much difference in my own thinking–but that is not the real deal. As people, we really don’t have much in common. They say the words but they don’t really feel it in their heart. I remember speaking one time to a group at a Unitarian Church, talking about the changes in my son’s mentality, empathy and humanity he experienced while stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison, when lo and behold, some goober, who I’m sure was a fine upstanding leftist of some kind, pipes up with his theory that if there was a draft it would mean that some “good” people would be in the military rather than the killer low rent riff raff who are in the volunteer military–like my son. Aside from this, as far as I have been able to tell, these people certainly have no ability to reach out and moilize any one in Oklahoma outside their own little, safe comfortable group, where they can sit around and make jokes about the common people in Oklahoma and consider themselves more sophisticated and enlightened. So much for what I think about the PDA-ish people, here or otherwise. It is a problem I have always had with white left-oriented people, certainly not as individuals but en masse, I often just don’t feel any common human connection, but despite their alleged deep concern for the working people, poor people, soldiers, or whoever it is they are supposed to be concerned about at the time–it always seems to me a kind of social-workerish concern. For those families and vets who have decided to take the time to deal with these people, that it is worth their time, more power to them, I certainly can’t fault them for trying any strategy they can. Every day I wake up wishing that I had become a different person and feeling guilty that I am just unable to find a positive way to deal with these people, I am just too mean hearted.
Sure, the regular democrats played the star spangled banner before they started their meeting today while they all stood up with their hands on their hearts. I don’t agree with their views of the military, which I think are historically inaccurate. I don’t believe that US soldiers have historically defended the constitution or freedom while deployed around the world, even though most of them believe this in their hearts and believe that this is what the military is for. There is a real disconnect that the powers of the United States have taken advantage of between what people believe the military is for and what it was developed for. I hate the stupid Democratic Party and will not get out and help organize precincts for them. But you have to look deeper to what these beliefs mean to these grassroots activist, the regular old yellow dogs. While the PDAers and others fall into a category I can only call “not my people,” the people I had lunch with today are my people, literally. We share the same culture and history, spread out across the country by our families getting booted out of cotton fields and coal mines long ago.
So, while maybe I should take more interest in the “nice” white people like the PDAers who have the nice left viewpoints and all the pretty words, and are even willing to get arrested for their beliefs, as long as no one grinds their face in the dirt and holds a gun to their heads–which unfortunately has been my son, the Iraq vets, experience with the police along with many other people’s sons while all the nice liberal people turned their heads and worried about their personal safety while hoping no one noticed their lack of concern. Perhaps I should shun the suspect and perhaps more conservative down home democrats, who many would rather write off. But I’ll take the Vietnam Vet retired AF colonel with the Iraq vet son who saluted the flag today and then stood up and said he was grateful to Jane Fonda and didn’t understand why people in Oklahoma aren’t out on the streets (I think he really does understand) any, any day, because I know he has it in his heart.
So if people want to spend a lot of time wondering about the Green Party or the PDA and what they mean and what they are going to do, go ahead. I just want to know where it is going to lead.
12 November 2005, 4:04 amStan:
I know and respect Larry Syverson and Jeri too. My issue is not with people who constitute the rank and file of the Democratic Party. It is with the party as an institution, that does not respond to the real needs of those folks, that exists as the lesser-evil and exclusive expression of political agency for them, and that moves to contain these people every time they start to aim their attention at the system. Jeri’s son is back from Iraq, too, like mine. This is not an abstract issue.
And she is right, too, to point to the class character of PDA, et all.
Jeri raises exctly the right question, imo. Where does it lead, our opposition to the DP. I hope we can have some of that discussion here.
Thanks Jeri, and my regards to Cody.
12 November 2005, 8:33 amRandy Morris:
All right. I am still formulating my mentality on all this, but I’ll weigh in on taking on the DP from a leftist viewpoint.
I’m IN the DP as a county party chairman. The party in our little rural Wyoming county was effectively dead when me, my father- and mother-in-law, and a few others showed up at the officers’ election meeting last year. There were maybe seven people at that table when I walked in five minutes late. I was told I had just been nominated for Chairman. After a LOT of arguing and qualifying on my part, I finally acquiesced to go down to the courthouse and register as a Dem (I had previously ALWAYS been independent). I warned them that I was much farther left in my politics than the DP, and that one of my goals would be to try to move the party in that direction over time. They still wanted me.
As it now stands approximately nine months later, I have learned that there are lots of people who share my feelings about the problems in our society, but may never be capable of shifting paradigm on the politics necessary to achieve a real change. Everyone who is amenable to my rantings seems to be at the bottom of the politics-pyramid, while the farther up the chain you go (party officers, operatives, etc.) the less likely they are to even hear the words when you speak them. There truly is some linguistic disconnect that occurs based on a person’s worldview.
So here I am, IN the system and trying to use my position as a bully-pulpit to crack the armor, move the minority party of power just a little bit toward what we need rather than what we have. There are a few of us, but more fall off the bandwagon every day to do something that feels productive rather than beat their heads against the DP wall over and over and over…
I hear the words that Stan uses. Is it going to take a complete breaking of the system? If that ends up the case, I don’t see peaceful resolution in this nation. The people invested in the viability of the DP, I think, are the same people who are invested in the RP. Are the Corporate Masters willing to allow another “New Deal”-scale project to head off the storm of blood and fire that revolution brings?
I don’t know. I’m IN until we throw Barbara Cubin out of her perennial seat in ‘06. Then I’m out, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be completely politically stir-crazy by then and ready to do something real.
12 November 2005, 1:26 pmRandy Morris:
Sorry about all the italics. Stoopid html.
12 November 2005, 1:30 pmLinda Jansen:
I actively campaigned for Ralph Nader in Seattle and Washington state. Seeing the way that rank and file Democrats either actively or passively supported the Party’s (il)legal maneuverings to keep Nader off the ballot across the country, it’s a little hard for me to trust them at all. But then again, Democracy Rising, Nader, Kevin Zeese and Virginia Rodino’s website has been posting articles by the likes of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy about exit strategies, e.g., in an effort (as explained by an acquaintance who also has been published there) to show that the Dems are showing “movement” on the occupation. It’s dismaying to realize that this was what Ralph was about all along–simply trying to drag the Dems to the left–that Nader’s third party impulses where pretty soft.
12 November 2005, 1:35 pmMy dream fantasy is that people will heed the call of Bruce Dixon, Assoc Editor of Black Commentator. “There is only one place America’s next progressive mass movement can come from. There is only one identifiable constituency with a bedrock majority of its citizens in long term historical opposition to our nation’s imperial adventures overseas. This is America’s black one-eighth. While majorities of all Americans do believe in universal health care, the right to organize unions, high quality public education, a living wage, and that retirement security available to everyone ought to be government policy, and many even believe America is locking up too many people for too long, support for these propositions is virtually unanimous among African Americans.” Would this be the basis of an alternative to the Dems? I would hope so knowing that the historical role of the Democratic Party has been to co-opt and quash opposition to corporate rule.
Short of that, I guess we have to keep focusing our organizing on getting US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and cross-networking as much as possible.
Linda Jansen:
Apologies. The link to the Dixon article I quoted above is http://www.blackcommentator.com/144/144_cover_movement.html. It was published in June 2005.
12 November 2005, 2:15 pmjay taber:
Mess with these people, Stan, and they’ll burn a question mark in your lawn.
12 November 2005, 2:19 pmTimothy R. Anderson:
Two things I never tire of arguing about.
( 1 ) The annoying role of Pentagon-awarded, US-taxpayer-funded private security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan . HOOOOOO-WEEEEEEEE does their sh*t stink. Erinys. Blackwater USA . Triple Canopy. Dyn Corp. Felons all. And with each day that passes, they get richer. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Richer. Richer. With Republicans in Congress saying ( nothing ) about it. With Democrats in Congress saying (nothing) about it. Period. Actually, one more thing, J.C. Mellencamp did a song called “Jackie Brown ” where it goes something like ” What UGLY TRUTHS freedom brings, and it hasn’t been very kind to you. ” If that don’t say it all.
( 2 ) Condoleezza Rice. I could talk about her for hours. Please be advised that November 14 is her birthday. Scary how much power she has. Scarier how she uses the power she has. Switching gears………. Every day that Condoleezza Rice has been Secretary of State is a day when Rumsfeld has been Secretary of Defense . Which is my roundabout way of bringing up the FACT that very few
young Americans WANT to be in the current US military. That may be the case for DECADES
into the future.
Timothy R. Anderson
12 November 2005, 2:54 pmNovember 12, 2005
http://www.operationtruth.com
Robin Hering:
Absolutely, you’re exactly on target.
Pitt planted the first seeds of “ABB” in Boulder County and the Denver Metro area. I attended one of his cross-country tour stops/book signings at a church - well before Nader announced -and the betrayal was palpable, coursed through me like electricity.
When Nader announced Feb 2003 I had an email exchange with Pitt. It was like talking to the hard-core Christian right about war or Islam. Truthout not only blocked Nader’s voice, but helped perpetuate the disinformation about Nader’s campaign. Truthout is in no way an advocacy for democracy. Or would Truthout like to publish an apology?
MoJo, Goodman, most of the so-called progressive, “alternative” media, are no different than State Media when it comes to censoring. So you can only conclude they’re co-opted, unwittingly or not.
But then, I was in fear for my life in Boulder County with a Nader bumper sticker. No kidding. Every “progressive” within miles behaved like a frightened “Republican”. One who’s face was red as a beet, saliva spraying on my eyelashes, at a League of Women Voter’s event in a local high school. Not to mention all the protest email and messages on my answering machine (my userid and tel # were available on the VoteNader Colorado page).
The Dem Party operators had citizen Dems incredibly stirred up. As an elector for Nader in CO, I received legal counsel from Nader’s D.C. office which included warnings about strangers at my door. And there were incidents across the country. Dem Party operators are no different than the Mob. God forbid that a third party candidate ever gets a toe-hold on ballot access. It took all our campaign funding to oppose them in court, and citizens were so frightened, they actually thought this was a good idea, for third party candidates to permanently lose access.
All a real eye-opener but worth every minute. I doubt I’ve lost perspective… Dem operators have found a way to manage alternative media. It’s an imperative now, considering this restive nation.
To Pitt’s credit, in The Worst Sedition is Silence, he covers 9-11 and makes the case for LIHOP, Let it Happen on Purpose. And Truthout does a decent job of educating on social justice issues, if ony by degree. Just never puts a finger directly on the root cause of the problem.
13 November 2005, 12:37 amJeri:
I do think that many, many people in America still think that the leaders of the Democratic Party, or any other professional politicians for that matter, sit around and discuss issues and have deep convictions. This is a bunch of crap. It is all far sleazier than any sordid yet fictional exposes could ever dream up. The whole system depends on millions and millions of people believing this fiction, that there are great and wise leaders who sit around pondering the issues and worrying about the welfare of the American people. Well, they do believe it. Ever wonder about the popularity of West Wing? It has all become a big game, and probably always was. It’s like people believing that soldiers go over seas to defend our rights, to defend the Constitution, and preserve our freedom of speech. Can’t be done, not true, but the whole power structure depends on that belief.
The whole party system in this country is completely corrupt and this is a crisis situation. In my life, I ended up dealing deeply with the Democratic Party through my involvement in the Washington movement in Chicago from the late 1970s to the early 1990s when everything we built there fell apart. Although I was really reluctant due to the fact that at heart I really really have never believed that reform of this failing system was possible and thought that I was working with people who shared this belief, wrong, many of them ultimately were true reformers at heart. I am really glad to have been a part of the Washington movement, it was really tough, it gave people in Chicago a lot of hope and staved off the worse effects of gentrification, mainly the young people out shooting eachother with little purpose, at least for a few years. But the movement ultimately failed, as far as I’m concerned, because many of the key people in leadership got so sucked into the Democratic Party they couldn’t get out. I do believe in the ballot or the bullet, but I only believe in using the ballot if you are trying to win something real, not to educate, or provide an alternative, or to work within the existing party structure to make a change. Yuck. It’s only for winning. It’s ok to play with the Democrats, and you can make them play with you even if they don’t want to, because Democrats like to win, too. They didn’t want to play with us, many of the people at the core of the Washington movement were affiliated with the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and other groups so influenced, and they didn’t like to play with us but they liked to win anyway. So they played. But to play, you have to have some chips. Anybody got some chips out there? I don’t think so. Any chips anybody ever had are long gone. It takes a really long time and a lot of people and a lot of organization, not to mention the money involved, to ever get any chips. I don’t see anyone in the position to do this, I think it is a really bad situation.
People who believe that they should deal directly with the Democratic Party structure and think they can appeal to the leadership are buying into the same fiction. The Democratic Party does not play fair, they don’t care about fair. You have to have something to hold over their heads. They don’t care about our kids, they don’t care about the people in Iraq. I can’t blame people for trying whatever it is they can find and hoping for a good outcome, but this is pretty futile. I find it very upsetting, and this is speaking mainly about people who I have direct contact with concerning the war in Iraq, but it seems that people think they have some inside track and know the rules. It just makes me sad. It’s fine to go talk to congresspeople, it’s fine to go through all of these motions, but I don’t see it going anywhere so far. And this is speaking about the PDA and the other left liberal groups that believe that they should deal with the Democrats to make a change.
Besides all of that, if you want to deal with one of the established parties, why pick the Democrats? They have had a losing strategy and they ain’t changing it, they’re just piling on more of the same. Shoot, go to the Republicans, work within their party, it’s all a game and they do have the winning strategy at this point. I sat and listened to a really old lady who is one of the DNC reps from Oklahoma give her report a couple of weeks ago. If you think she mentioned any discussion of issues at the latest DNC meeting, you would be wrong. She personally expressed her concern for the troops, but this is not what they talked about in Scottsdale. They talked about Howard Dean’s new strategy for getting votes, which seems to have been pretty removed from the real issues that have people all riled up, like Iraq for instance. I went up to her afterwards and thanked her for her concern for the troops, but told her I had to let her know how hard it was for me to vote for the Democratic candidates in the last election, and that for a long time I thought the Democratic candidate for senator was actually the Republican. She clearly did not want to get into a conversation about this.
Dean’s whole strategy, and it actually seems like a good strategy as strategies go, is to build a block by block national precinct organization, to actually have people talking to eachother on a local level, instead of just running a bunch of crappy TV ads. They are eager to recruit volunteers to take a precinct to organize. But the purpose of this is to get people to register Democratic and to vote Democratic. I have been honest and told them that I can’t do this, that I would be willing to work for candidates that I actually supported but not the party itself. I really don’t know if I’m right, but I would feel wrong lying to them, and would not be able to lie to other people about the Democratic Party anyway. I continue to go to their meetings for the people, not the party. Frankly there is nothing else here. There is actually a lot of dissent, and I do talk to people who agree with me, despite the fact that they keep working for the party anyway.
I don’t see any point in active opposition to the Democratic Party, I am not sure what you are looking for, because I think for anyone to be in a position to actively and successfully oppose the Democratic Party, first you would have to be in a position to get them to play with you, to take you seriously, to see you as people who could hold things over their heads and make them do tricks. When you oppose someone they must see you as a threat, otherwise it just looks foolish. And I’m just not seeing this. What is the point of spending time opposing the Democrats? You have to have a movement first, and I’m not seeing one. Maybe the first glimmerings, but I’m not convinced that things are even headed in that direction.
13 November 2005, 1:01 amStan:
Here’s where we diverge a bit. I don’t believe the way to break with the DP is either to get them to play with us or (as others suggest) to make it a hard and fast rule never to vote for any of them… in ultra-left idealist fashion, not to ever vote at all, in any election at any level, as if reality were somehow static, and some abstract principle outweighs tactical flexibility.
It is important at this stage of germinal social movement development (there IS a movement against the war right now) to attack the right-opportunism we see with groups like PDA who position themselves to the slight left of the main DP in order to put the brakes on the leftward movement of the antiwar movement. It is important for truth-telling at a minimum, and to knock their foot off the brakes. The reason this kind of activity exists is precisely to prevent the left gaining any political strength. So this represents a direct political struggle. The measure of the progress of that struggle is not some decisive victory over the DP in the next year, but the increasing ability to eventually disrupt the DP’s power with the development of an increasingly conscious left pole in American politics that does not limit itself to electoralism, but that builds its own institutions, consolidates local organizing bases, continues to challenge media representations, and increases the level of militancy in key struggles as they gain the recognition and approval of larger and larger sections of society.
(I have argued, eg, that “occupations to end the occupation” - that is, protracted sit-ins conducted in local Congressional offices and risking arrest to demand a promise to stop funding the war - would challenge the gradualism of the Dems (PDA included, tho they’d feel obliged to participate at some point), and would NOT alienate the broad antiwar movement. It would be seen as a moral action, not unlike the Civil Rights struggle. We have to increase militancy not with the peurile idea that the more provocative our actions, the more effective they’ll be, but of taking the masses as far as they have gone, and then one step further.)
The first decisive challenge to the DP must come in an electoral form, not by competing with them in an uneven head-to-head confrontation for elected office (except at the local level), but by openly and actively denying them electoral victories by shaving off the margins they need to win against Republicans. This is a risky strategy, but absolutely necessary… and one that is advanced in conjunction with increasingly militant non-electoral strategies. If all it does is strengthen Republicans, then it will be a Pyrrhic victory. Dragging down the DP must be part of a larger strategy of throwing the entire political system into crisis.
We are actually seeing the beginnings of this from internal contradictions now with the crisis of legitimacy created by the Republicans’ slash and burn methods. It will be the Democrats who rush in at some point to try and rescue the establishment from this crisis.
The Greens were actually gaining some strength; but they had some key weaknesses. One, they got caught up in presidential politics before they’d built strong local bases. Two, they were too white and too caught up in counter-cultural crap ( a class issue). Three, their lack of development of political consciousness among their membership led droves of them to lose heart and rush back to cling to the trousers of the DP with the Cobb faction in 2004.
Obviously, the critical defection for the DP will be when African America strikes out on a more independent political course. Socialists are a far smaller, but important bloc to leave the DP, and they carry a lot of weight in particular organizing initiatives in many sectors on many issues. And, imho, anyone who has the least idea how terrifying the environemental crisis is right now needs to understand that capitalism itself forecloses — by its very nature — any green market remedies, and that the earth itself requires a revolution. So one might envision a core alliance of red, black, and green at some point, that becomes a pole of attraction for the grwoing legions of disaffected Dems.
None of this is even possible if we don’t publicly oppose the DP, and expose it for what it is (as an institution). It is an essential part of a ruling class political edifice.
13 November 2005, 5:20 amjay taber:
Recall the founding philosophy of progressivism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a belief in the perfectibility of mankind; a faith in universal social evolution, the apex of which–for all people of the world–was Western, Chirstian civilization. To say the least, an odd label to choose to represent one’s core values in the twenty-first century.
13 November 2005, 2:50 pmm.c.:
To Timothy: Condi does scare me. She is equal parts obedient servant & power hungry tyrant. Look carefully at her photos. The wolfish grin. Not much in-between. Exactly not the qualities you look for in the top diplomat unless its von Ribbentrop.
I like the Greens but its a matter of logistics. If they could win a statewide race in say Vermont or Oregon or Hawaii. Not neccesarily the governor’s race. secretary of state, labor comm., state treasurer, etc… They would make me pay serious attention. For Ralph Nader or anyone else to run for President without broad class support; i.e. John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot, even Pat Buchanan on some economic issues, almost earns(not quite) some of the scorn they receive from the MSM. When Ron Wyden joins Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Jeff Bingaman in voting for CAFTA with the rest of the DLC, I know that the greens in WA, OR, CA, & NM don’t have the power to elect a small-town mayor much less Ralph Nader. It just comes down to $$$ & #’s. You wouldn’t go to Vegas and bet your home mortgage at the Blackjack table would you? It’s like playing a few rounds of golf on the weekends and then betting your life that you can beat Tiger Woods or Anikka Soranstam at 18 holes at pebble beach. We make fun of George Soros & it makes us feel good but he helps the Michael Moore’s & Naomi Klein’s carry their message to us.
13 November 2005, 7:24 pmI’m waiting for somebody with a better/new idea and I don’t claim to have too many of the answers(I lost track when Reagan got elected president) but life is a contact sport and sometimes the biggest team just runs over everybody else and they don’t care if the umpire blows their whstle.
Randy Morris:
To Jeri and others:
It seems I’m the resident “insider” to the DP on these boards, but there are a couple of us who are using our positions for very specific purpose. Your review of the DP mechanism is spot-on from my pov.
I will, however, argue that a rare progressive voice willing to speak out from within the bowels of the DP is a boon to the movement rather than (necessarily) a sellout. There are a LOT more people who are trapped within the dominant paradigm who will NEVER be amenable to the socialiological esoterica that is found on websites like this one. And if a social/political revolution is preferrable to one involving blood and fire, then it is in everyone’s interests to bring as many of these people out of the “Matrix” as possible.
Three things need to occur in this country to break the Corporate stranglehold over politics and society, which in turn is the prerequisite for peaceful social reform:
1. We must rivive face-to-face community using any common-ground available (so long as it isn’t racist or anti-humanitarian);
2. there must be a nationwide economic relocalization;
3. the Democratic Party MUST be moved to the left.
These are the goals I am striving to introduce into a VERY conservative local body of political activists. I and others in the state are also fighting the inertia of the established Party rule at every step, introducing issues at meetings, arguing that the Party needs to take the RIGHT stand on Iraq (I advocate total withdrawal right now) as a step toward claiming real high-ground over the Republicans.
I feel like I have an opportunity in the next year to introduce, circumspectly, some of the issues and ideas that are usually found only in forums like this one. Maybe then, when the DP is faced with some epic policy decision in the future, the balance will tilt in favor of The People instead of The Money.
And, just maybe, this is an excercise in hubris and futility on my part. At least I can tell my kids I tried a little of everything before it all came crashing down.
353 days and a wake-up.
14 November 2005, 2:00 pmJon Flanders:
“None of this is even possible if we don’t publicly oppose the DP, and expose it for what it is (as an institution). It is an essential part of a ruling class political edifice.”
Comment by Stan — 11/13/2005 @ 5:20 am
Ok, how to do the exposing?
What strategies and tactics will expose the true role of the Democratic Party to it’s base?
Looking back at recent history, I would argue that eight years of Clinton in power greatly stimulated the break to the left by the Nader campaign in 2000. Left Liberals fell overthemselves to appear at Nader’s huge rallies.
Then after four years of Bush, the same Left Liberals fell over their own feet rushing back into the Democratic camp.
So we could say that a prerequisite for exposing the Democrats is to have them in power, instead of opposition. From this observation of course it could be said that therefore we should campaign for the Democrats to be in power, thus putting us in the contradictory and dishonest position of campaigning for a party we want to see eliminated politically. This would seem on the face of it pretty unpalatable.
So we have to look a little deeper at the lurching back and forth that goes on between elections, a little deeper into the behavior of the various class forces supportive of the Democratic Party, I think that it is fair to say that while the Left Liberals veered left and then right around Nader, the black community and the labor movement held steadfastly to their allegiance to the Democrats. Why? What are they getting out of this abusive relationship? What will it take to get them to make the break? This is the 64k question.
My own two cents on this? First it is a question of fear. For a worker, or someone in the black community, it comes down to how to survive at the edge of the abyss. Is it better to have someone pounding on your fingers with a sledge hammer while you hang on to the edge of the cliff, or have someone simply prying a bit with a yardstick? Right now that is the way the heart of the Democratic base looks at the situation.
It is also a question of self-confidence and belief that you will be listened to. I would like to have a dollar for every time a co-worker has told me that they agree with me, but demonstrating is useless.
It is a learned tradition of relying on the union or the ward leader to take care of it for you. You pay your dues, you vote for the slate and you can go about your life.
Given this reality of working class consciousness, what can be done? I think that we have to look for the opportunities that now are more frequently coming up as the crisis of capitalism deepens to the point that fear, lack of confidence and passivity are shrugged off. Opportunities like the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina as it devastated the black community. Opportunities like the crisis at General Motors and Delphi, where workers face devastating blows to their standard of living.
In such situations, the need for self organization becomes overwhelming. New organizing springs from the people themselves, as they meet together to confront their situation. Here is where the Democratic Party can be exposed, because the palliatives of warmed over New Dealism won’t cut it. The war in Iraq means that FEMA has no money and that there will be no massive public works projects rebuilding affordable housing. The corporate ties to GM mean that the DP can’t demand nationalization of GM, and the war in Iraq means there is no money for national health insurance. But the workers and the black community will make demands anyway.
We need a regroupment of independent leftists, socialist grouplets and advanced workers provide leadership for these new opportunities.
At a certain point, if such a leadership can be organized, the Democrats will be exposed, and superseded.
As to the PDA’s? I would expect that once the workers and the black community abandoned the Democrats, the best of them would follow. They are not truly independent actors. They need some class power to cling to.
17 November 2005, 10:37 pmStan:
Definitely Katrina. I also think that one of the main struggles inside this country — not a sexy issue, but critical — is gentrification.
One good way to start would be to build a mass movement in support of Palestine’s self-determination, that campaigns for divestment from Israel. That would fuck the DP up.
Just a modest proposal.
And people already know where I stand on gender issues. I don’t care for one second that Republicans will use support of gay marriage, et al, to stampede Dems to the right. We need to quit being AWOL on gender, and let the Democratic Party rot in hell.
I’m also all for refoundation-regroupment… but that’s going to involve a fearless critique of all our most cherished notions about certain dead communists issuing holy writs that are timeless in their prescriptions, and our ideas of what democratic centralism means.
Thanks for the drop-by, Jon. I been runnin.
18 November 2005, 3:19 pmLee:
The role of the PDA is to seduce those who dissent back into the fold of the power structure, the vile, two-headed beast which is the Republicratic party. We saw in 2004 that even when they were positioned to demand concessions from the mainstream Democratic Party, the PDA caved and meekly let the war machine roll onward.
The tragedy of the Greens in the last election is that a handfull of influential turncoats forced a “safe-states” platform of non-competition with Killer Kerry. Thus, they mounted a grotesque, non-campaign with Cobb as the laughing-stock non-candidate (I’m Green,and pro-peace, but don’t vote for me, vote for Kerry, he stands for nothing which the Greens support!) This will hang around the necks of the Greens like a stinking albatross for years to come- the Greens as servants of the corporate democrats. I have been a registered, active Green for years, but in 2004 I cast my vote for Nader. He wasnt perfect, but he was actually running, unlike Cobb.
Like another poster to this thread, my support for Nader and scorn for Kerry and the safe-states sellouts won me grief from namby-pamby anti-war liberals. I was bombarded with e-mails telling me I was a traitor to the cause, a supporter of fascism, and that “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.” Explaining that votes are not tallied that way and that a vote for Nader is actually just a vote for Nader did not help.
14 December 2005, 5:37 pmGary Goodman:
HOW TO MOVE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY TO THE LEFT
http://struggle.net/Ben/2003/0305-way-fwd.htm?ben-ad
Such a course of action by the anti-war movement (ie: an orientation toward the masses and away from all bourgeois politicians) will certainly piss-off the entire strata of liberal-labor Democratic Party politicians who will argue that the “smart thing” is to work within the system and seek alliances with powerful saviors within the establishment (ie: Jim McDermott, Dennis Kucinich, etc.)
According to this argument, we should focus our precious time and energy on attempting to move the Democratic Party (an imperialist party, owned and controlled by the same big corporations that control the Republican Party) to the left.
But if we want a section of Democratic Party politicians to move to the left–the most effective way to accomplish this–is to turn our backs to them–and make clear that we recognize them as the flunkies of the rich that they are. As the anti-war movement abandons illusions in saviors from within the establishment–the bourgeoisie (which keeps these “saviors” on a leash) will be forced to give them permission to move to the left in order to better maintain the illusion that the system of bourgeois democracy can be made to work in the interests of the masses.
In this way the anti-war movement can help to transform the current political climate and greatly complicate the plans of the warmakers.
Further, by developing in the direction of independence from bourgeois influence, the anti-war movement will better prepare itself for the day when, as the bombs begin to fall, the “saviors” within the establishment attempt to pour cold water on the idea of militant mass actions.
15 January 2006, 5:20 am——
radical site with some radical, honest ideas
please do a word search for “left ecosystem” and ck the drawing
——
http://struggle.net/ben/2005/cartoon.htm
Gary Goodman:
ONE MORE THING
links btw “Left” and tax-free warmonger foundations
http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/
Sorry for shouting!
I heard Wm Rivers Pitt speak spookily at a Kent State Peace and Memorial Rally about the “culture of fear” being spread by Ashcroft, seemingly wanting liberals to agree that this was not fair at all.
Following him, Kent resident radical stood up and stated “Richard Nixon and Gov. Rhodes are finally together again — burning in hell.” So much for the “culture of fear.” and turned his paper over to begin his talk about getting shot at Kent State campus, why he was there opposing the War. Pretty electrifying — and a good lesson.
15 January 2006, 5:52 am