[Dryerase] A Party Without A People: Dems Stay Loyal to Fat-Cat Backers

[annie v]

A Party Without A People: Dems Stay Loyal to Fat-Cat
Backers 
by A. K. Gupta  

Pundits, politicians and spin doctors have diagnosed
“lack of message” as the disease the Democrats
suffered in November’s election. The criticism is
misplaced. If the Democrats failed to stand for
anything in the mid-term elections, it is because
their corporate patrons are their only true
constituents. 

Absent an active social base pushing them to adopt
progressive legislation, they have shown themselves
incapable of opposing corporate cronyism and tax cuts
for the rich. 

How could the Democrats assail the Republican party
for Enron when they were also on the take? It’s like a
$25 hooker calling a $100 prostitute sleazy. 

Opponents of the Republicans’ extreme agenda should
instead ponder the shift through the years from
debating the contours of the welfare state to arguing
about the parameters of the police state. 

The G.O.P. stranglehold on power has been decades in
the making. Starting in the 1960s with Richard Nixon’s
“silent majority” and cries of “law and order,” it
solidified with the “moral majority” and the 1980
victory of Ronald Reagan. 

While the Republicans have some inherent advantages,
namely as the party of capital and the
military-security apparatus, they have also mobilized
social movements, white-flight suburbanites,
right-to-lifers and evangelicals, in favor of their
authoritarian agenda. 

In contrast, the movements that used to hold the
Democrats’ feet to the fire — labor,
environmentalists, feminists, blacks, Latinos — are in
disarray. Unions are in perpetual decline, unable to
get legislation passed that would make organizing more
hospitable. The big environmental groups are
fundraising machines more comfortable lounging in the
halls of power than stirring up the grassroots. The
feminist agenda, at least nationally, is limited to
abortion rights. And while blacks and Latinos have
made dramatic gains in political power since the civil
rights era, there are no prominent groups or leaders
pushing a visionary agenda. 

The Republicans have a vision, albeit a creepy one:
that of a divinely ordained, free-market, iron-fisted
paternalism; a triumvirate of market, the military and
God. It is the vision that pits America as the force
of righteousness in the global crusade against
terrorism and the evil hordes of Islam. Closer to
home, it is the vision that capitalizes on suburban
fears of poor, darker-skinned “others” by continuing a
savage and senseless drug war. 

Progressive social movements have forgotten the
importance of vision. That is why Marxism-Leninism,
perhaps terminally sclerotic now, was such a powerful
force for so long. It had a transcendental view,
historical materialism, with a historical agent of
change, the revolutionary proletariat. 

What is needed are movements that once again speak the
language of a grand historical narrative, instead of
being cri-pled by postmodern subjectivity. There are
glimmers of hope, in the global justice movement, the
Greens and the anti-war movement. The latter displayed
its new-found muscle in October, spurring 133
congressional Representatives to oppose the Iraq war
resolution, more than anyone predicted. 

In fact, powerful social movements can even effect
positive change under a Republican president, as
happened under Nixon with the passage of landmark
clean air and clean water legislation, and the
establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration and the Environmental Protection
Agency. 

The wresting of power from the right won’t happen in
an election or two; that was the mistake of the
Clinton era, when progressives, in a desperate bid for
power, willfully ignored his corporate agenda. Change
has to come from below in a vibrant visionary form
with wide appeal, not by pleading with the Democrats
to market themselves better.

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