[Peace-discuss] James Ridgeway in Village Voice

[David Green]

Published on Tuesday, November 12, 2002 by the Village
Voice  
Attention, Small-D Democrats: The Party's Over  
by James Ridgeway 
  
Since last week's election, liberals have been
melodramatically wringing their hands, while the
pundits have rushed to expound upon the deeper meaning
of the Republican sweep. The Democrats lost, they say,
because they no longer stand for anything. From the
pundits' portentous tones, you'd never guess that they
were beating a horse that's been dead for more than 30
years. 

In fact, this party has been disintegrating since it
nominated Hubert Humphrey in the bloody streets of
Chicago in 1968. The Democrats haven't had a shred of
original ideology since the New Deal, or a spark of
fire in their bellies since the nominally liberal
momentum of the Kennedy-Johnson years ran aground on
the party's cowardly refusal to oppose the Vietnam
War. 

And it was Jimmy Carter who provided the spark that
fired up the right wing. His decision to abandon the
Panama Canal helped result in the founding of the New
Right. That, in turn, went hand in hand with Ronald
Reagan's march to power. Flailing wildly, Carter tried
to beat the right by co-opting its economic plan,
doing such things as embracing deregulation of the
energy industry and other businesses. Charting new
ground with an allegedly centrist support base,
Clinton tried to outfox conservatives by adopting
halfhearted versions of their own plans. Clinton put
the final nail in the New Deal's coffin—embracing
welfare "reform," screwing up and then abandoning
health care, even letting it be known that his
administration would look kindly on experiments to
reform Social Security by handing partial control to
Wall Street brokerages. He managed to leave his
greatest mark on history by giving the Republicans an
opportunity to impeach him because of an ill-timed
blowjob. 

Today's Democratic Party is less a party than an
entrenched Washington apparatus, which operates as a
sort of simulacrum of itself, bellowing the names of
past icons, while it carries on the business of
responding to the interests of one lobby group or
another. It is what William Greider calls a
"managerial" party, exemplified by the technocratic
fussbudgets in the Democratic Leadership Council. 

Now, some say, there may be a real shakeup in the
party in the wake of the midterm defeat, the failed
Dick Gephardt stepping down as minority leader, and
the Democrats turning to new leadership in the form of
California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. But this is
sham. Gephardt is not quitting as a failure, but to
prepare for a presidential run in 2004. As of late,
Pelosi is best known for her role as senior House
Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, where with the
rest of this deadbeat crew she ignored or covered up
the U.S. intelligence fiascoes that led to 9-11.
Pelosi hails from a Baltimore Democratic political
family and says she traces her roots to FDR. Currently
she's known as the mother of documentary filmmaker
Alexandra Pelosi, who traveled with George Bush during
his campaign, and whose filmmaking, among other
things, apparently spurred the two families to meet
for lunch. 

The Republicans, on the other hand, have, since the
days of Barry Goldwater, articulated a clear ideology.
Beginning with the Nixon campaign of 1968, they have
carried out an elaborate plan of action to muster the
"silent majority" and bring what was a splintered and
broken party to power. They have successfully
positioned themselves as the party of conservative
"principle," with a mission to roll back the ever
encroaching federal government—shutting down agencies
and privatizing others, returning power to the states,
crushing the New Deal welfare state—while restoring
old-fashioned Christian morality to civil society. 

There is some substance to these political claims, but
not much. Right now, the Republican majority is using
its power to expand, not contract, the role of the
government, replacing the welfare state with a far
more costly and intrusive police state, with an
economic program based on Keynesian pump-priming for
the defense industries. 

Power may be wielded to advance ideology, but more
often, ideology is a front for the simple protection
of power. Bush may pose as a Texas wildcatter, a
Bible-thumping Christian zealot, a war-ready patriot,
and a champion of the common man. But in reality, he's
a blue-blooded New England Methodist who dodged the
draft by joining the National Guard and pledged for
Skull and Bones at Yale. And he's never had anything
remotely like an ideology, with the possible exception
of the 12-Step Program. If Bush succeeds in spite of
an elitist pedigree, it's because he heads—and
epitomizes—today's Republican Party. This is a party
that wields the money and power of Big Business,
shrewdly woven into a populist, patriotic ideology
designed to appeal to a country so desperate for
passionate ideals that in return it will give them the
license to rob their pensions and send their children
to war. 

Those who fail to fall for all this are left feeling
powerless and depressed, wondering where to go next.
The answer is not terribly hopeful, but it is very
simple—and it has nothing whatsoever to do with party
politics. Take every opportunity to oppose the power
structure: March on Washington, go on strike, organize
a boycott, start a resistance radio station, take to
the streets with the anarchists. If you are looking
for models, they are all over the rest of the world:
the East German Christian opposition to the Honecker
police state that led to the toppling of the Berlin
Wall, the massive Czech uprising, the South African
overthrow of apartheid, the protests in Seattle. Don't
wait for the Democrats to do it. Do it yourself. Stand
for something. 

© 2002 The Village Voice

 


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