[Peace-discuss] Inclusive Presidential Debates

[C. G. Estabrook]

A serious question, for which it seems to me there are two great difficulties:

	[1] Determining what the positions of McCain and Obama actually are.

	They are both adept at obfuscation, reversing field, and straddling a 
contentious issue.  In fact, Obama's manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, is a 
straddle throughout, in that he offers his talents to the ruling class to 
convince the rest of us that their goals and ours are the same, when in fact he 
knows that they are radically opposed.  McCain is not so sophisticated, but he 
represents a party not so obviously involved in betraying the public: the 
Democrats were given control of Congress in 2006 to end the war, and their 
excuses for doing otherwise are wearing thin. Congress' (i.e., the Democrats') 
approval rating stands at 9%.
	But we might also ask if McCain and Obama's positions will in fact make any 
difference. You mentioned Bush's attack on "nation-building" in the 2000 
campaign: there are a lot of dead Iraqis [among others] who would wish he'd 
meant it. There's no reason to believe M or O will be any more honest.

	[2] Finding a consistent use for the terms "Left" and "Right."

	This is not quite the same question as that of the usage of the terms "liberal" 
and "conservative" (material for at least another post), altho' they're 
obviously related. Perhaps I may be forgiven for quoting myself on the matter, 
from a piece I wrote on a contentious issue some time ago ("Abortion and the 
Left" <http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook01172003.html>):

	It's a commonplace that the distinction between Left and Right is fraught with 
ambiguity. (When the Democratic party is spoken of as on the Left, it's gotten 
pretty silly.) And it's also generally accepted that the terminology arose from 
the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly of 1789.
	But if we want a consistent usage for the Left/Right distinction, we might 
think of political parties ranged along a line according to how authoritarian or 
democratic they are. The further Right one goes, the more authoritarian the 
parties, and the further Left, the more democratic. (At the far Left end are the 
socialists, who want not just a democratic polity but a democratic economy as 
well -- investment decisions made not by corporations but by elections.)
	Lenin's Bolsheviks, then, must be seen as a right-wing Marxist party, as must 
all twentieth century communist parties in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, owing 
to their authoritarianism. And they were indeed so described by left-wing 
Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek.

Now I contend that this usage is consistent, but it's clearly not what's been 
said commonly. Since roughly the Great Depression (which produced our modern 
political groupings, at least until recently), the Left meant Communists and the 
Right, Fascists.  But that's incoherent, as I suggest: both are authoritarian, 
so believers in democracy (political and/or economic) were the enemy of both.

In fact the major industrial economies of the 1930s -- Russia, Germany and the 
US -- produced remarkably similar political formations out of the Great 
Depression, although they called then by different names.  Each protected the 
profits of the few (nomenklatura, party, owners), drawn from waged labor, by 
active intervention in the economy; each was presided over by a Leader (Stalin, 
Hitler, Roosevelt) who was understood to transcend class; and each ruled in the 
name of a higher unity, the nation.  The Left/Right language (i.e., 
democrat/authoritarian) that had lasted from the French Revolution to the 
Russian had collapsed -- and so was available for re-assignment, as it were. The 
Left was now Stalinism and the Right Fascism -- said the partisans of the 
Center, corporate America.

	"If we go back a century, we can find that various 'organic structures,' as 
they were sometimes called, were being developed and accorded rights over and 
above people. Something like that had been true under feudal systems, but now we 
had new ones. There were basically three kinds gaining prominence in the early 
20th century: one was Fascism, a second was Bolshevism, and a third was private 
corporations -- corporatism. They were similar, in that they demanded and 
received -- more or less by force -- rights that are independent of the rights 
of people. They had their own rights, as entities. In the United States it was 
done mostly by radical judicial activism. Two of the systems have collapsed. The 
third remains, more powerful than ever" (Chomsky).

Being a conservative (sorry), I suggest we go back to the old-fashioned usage: 
the Left position is what people want, the Right position is what the rulers 
want, and in our society the rulers are the corporate elite -- whose interests, 
as mentioned, are radically at variance with those of the vast majority.

Take some examples.  On healthcare, more than three-quarters want the government 
to pay, as in all other industrial economies (and not just require the purchase 
of insurance policies). On the Middle East war, a large majority want it ended 
and the US troops home.  "Huge majorities think that their tax dollars ought to 
go first for healthcare, education, and Social Security — not the military. An
overwhelming majority oppose the use of military force unless we are under
attack or under imminent threat of attack. A majority of Americans are in favor
of signing the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change and subjecting the U.S. to the
International Criminal Court. The large majority think that the UN, not the
United States, ought to take the lead on international crises. In fact, the
majority even support giving up the U.S.’s veto power in the UN Security
Council, so that the U.S. will have to go along with the opinions of the 
majority" (Chomsky).

There are two things to note about these positions.  First, they are Left 
positions by my nomenclature, not just because they're overwhelmingly popular 
but because they are truly in the interest of the many and not of the few. 
(Naturally populations can be misled and deluded, especially when there are 
careful campaigns to do so: as an Illinois politician put it, "You can fool all 
of the people some of the time...")

Second, none of these position is held by M and/or O, who are auditioning for a 
job in the gift of authority, but which must appear to be conferred by 
democracy.  The presidency, after all, was established by a document designed to 
"protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," as one of its 
principal framers, James Madison, put it. And any concessions to democracy 
  in two centuries have been made grudgingly.

Both in theory and practice then, M/O are well to the Right of the populace, if 
what I suggest as a consistent usage of the term be employed.  But it's more 
important to give a good account of the situation than to insist on the language 
that account is couched in.

Regards, CGE


E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> ... * Carl, Please explain how you classify M/O as being well to the right. I
>  see both of them as being mid-left to left. Please advise how you reached 
> your assessment. * I consider myself to be an anti-war conservative 
> (libertarian) constitutionalist Republican who has little in common with the 
> Republican party as it exists today. Whether McCain does have any ideology at
> all is up for question but I would classify McCain as Moderate to Liberal, 
> Authoritarian/Statist, Interventionist/Warmonger,  a Neo-con, and way to the 
> left of me. I don't equate being to the right with warmongering. Of course 
> the lines are blurred.  About 75% of those polled recently by the Chicago 
> Tribune favored the supreme court interpretation of the 2nd amendment, which 
> I suppose is a right-wing position, and both McCain and Obama are rated badly
> by the pro-gun groups, with McCain getting an F-minus rating, which would put
> M/O to the left of the population on that issue. Conversely, I suppose that
> readers of the Tribune average fairly far to the left, since it is a Chicago
> paper. I support the 2nd amendment as the right of an individual to take up
> arms (any sort of arms one can afford including but not limited to fire-arms,
> anything from a pitchfork [a very poor weapon actually] to a bazooka) against
> fellow man if it becomes necessary in the defence of liberty, particularly
> against an abusive government when necessary as is implied by the historical
> context, but I dont own a gun and dont like either the police or the military
> very much.  All who use arms or direct the use of such force will of course
> be accountable for their actions.
> 
> C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> In fact the official candidates (M & O) are well to the right of what 
>> people say  in polls that they want.  But they're told that only official 
>> candidates can win.  So they don't vote (50%) or vote for the lesser evil 
>> from those candidates who "can win."
>> 
>> The result is a system that's not supported by the populace, whatever the 
>> media say.  In the "Reagan landslide," 3 out of 4 eligible voters didn't 
>> vote for him.
>> 
>> It certainly wasn't that "their message didn't resonate w/ voters as a 
>> whole." --CGE ...