[Peace-discuss] Ron Paul etc.

[C. G. Estabrook]

I think that this would be true only if one had already decided, for 
whatever reason, that the anti-war movement has to be contained within 
the Democratic party.  But since an antiwar electorate gave control of 
the Congress to the Democrats, the Democrats have done all in their 
power to neutralize and co-opt antiwar sentiment.

And that's not just another example of how both semi-official political 
parties are well to the right of the electorate (also the case regarding 
health care, housing, education, income supports, etc.).  It's a bromide 
in the US that "politics stops at the water's edge" -- the Democrats 
agree on matters of overall foreign policy with the Republicans 
(including the neocons).  The real danger is that the public is slipping 
away, and it's the Democrats' task to bring them back.

The Congressional Democrats have confined their objections (all verbal, 
rather than effective) to the administration's *failures* in the war, 
not to the policy that led to the decision to invade; in fact, liberal 
Democrats (like the top-tier candidates) argue that the real objection 
to Iraq war is that it's harmed that policy (the "war on terror"). 
That's why they immediately put impeachment and defunding off the table, 
because those moves could call the policy into question.  (Impeachment 
would raise the question of the legality of the war; defunding would 
reverse the course of the war, rather than just modifying it).

The Democrats do think that they can gain some factional advantage (like 
electing a president) out of Bush's failure to subjugate occupied Iraq. 
  But they have to find a way to do it that also contains a recalcitrant 
public within the overall policy.  As a result, the campaign features 
remarkably irrelevant green-eggs-and-ham debates (would you meet with 
foreign leaders?) and swearings of fealty to the Grand Design (as in 
statements on Israel, or any speech by Obama, like Aug. 1).

As one Clinton think-tanker put it last month, "Once we get past the 
election and reach the governing phase, I believe there will be 
substantial consensus around many issues including our alliances, the 
need for a strong military, and importance of backing up diplomacy with 
military force."

Meanwhile, a large majority of Americans tell pollsters that (a) the war 
is by far the most important issue facing the country, and (b) they want 
it to end.  If the US were in fact a democracy, it's obvious that the 
president elected in fifteen months would hold those views.  But we all 
know that the chances of that are very small.  The democratic forms in 
America are so controlled and guided that presidential elections are 
exercises in minimal product-differentiation and marketing.  Most 
Americans realize that and so treat them with the skepticism appropriate 
to any other advertising campaign.  Three out of four of the eligible 
voters will not vote for the eventual winner.

Under these circumstances, the election is largely irrelevant to the 
anti-war movement, the instruments of which are as Ricky says "agitation 
and eduction," no matter who's in office.  (The Vietnam War was not 
ended by throwing the rascals out but -- among other things -- by 
convincing the rascals who were always in that the U.S. would be 
increasingly ungovernable if the war continued.)  But precisely because 
a presidential campaign is primarily an exercise in establishing the 
limits of allowable debate, it can also be an occasion to expose and 
criticize those limits.

I see Dennis Kucinich's campaigns, in years past and this, as examples 
of what's been called repressive tolerance.  He's grudgingly given a 
place at the end of the debate line-up, and the media talk about how 
short he is, but the Democrats can always point to him to show that 
"extreme" views really are presented in the party.  His campaigns are 
like the fenced "free-speech zones" set up outside the 2004 political 
conventions.  They're safely contained, exist as an answer to an 
objection, but can't become effective.

Perhaps just the same can be said of Ron Paul's campaign, but I have the 
impression that it is supported by people who fairly recently would have 
rejected "protesters" (like Kucinich) with contempt.  Someone is voting 
for him in straw-polls and telling pollsters that he has their support, 
and I think it's not so much people suddenly converted to Libertarian 
economics as those who saw their anti-war vote traduced by the Democrats 
thru the last nine months (also a principal reason that Congress' 
approval rating is lower than Bush's).

But it's certainly a prudential judgment, which campaign will be more 
effective in bringing anti-war pressure on the eventual candidates. 
Chomsky points out that one of the signs of the low state of American 
democratic forms is that in presidential elections the real issues are 
set aside by the candidates' insistence that the campaign is about 
"religiosity and guns" (domestic ones, that is).  It would be a shame to 
aid in that distraction by supporting Kucinich because of his position 
on abortion if it really is the case that a Paul candidacy would do more 
to make effective the anti-war sentiment of the majority.

Robert Naiman wrote:
> you would think, on a list like this, that the debate would be whether
> we should be supporting Kucinich, the peace candidate, or making a
> more pragmatic choice like Edwards, as the best progressive shot at
> defeating Hillary, and that the Kucinich forces would have the upper
> hand.
> 
> But Dennis is now 100% pro-choice, and I suppose some people hold that
> against him.
>