[Peace-discuss] State of the anti-war movement
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Mon May 26 23:21:32 CDT 2008
[This article is a mess -- poorly written and argued, with a number of
questionable assertions that perhaps could have been resolved by a determined
editor. But it gets at some of the problems besetting the announced subject.
Maybe the beginning of a discussion but certainly not the end. --CGE]
Published on Monday, May 26, 2008 by In These Times
Why Democrats Won’t Stop the War
by David Sirota
The nationwide opposition to the Iraq War is based on a host of populist
impulses. Some people hate it because they think lives are being sacrificed to
pursue the oil industry’s agenda. Some despise it because, without a military
draft, the U.S. casualties — 4,000-plus and counting — are disproportionately
working-class kids. Still others abhor the war because it drains scarce
resources away from pressing priorities at home. And yet, despite this
groundswell of antiwar sentiment, the campaign to stop the war is adrift and
dysfunctional.
On the one side are groups like United for Peace and Justice, that head what
progressive activist Matt Stoller has deemed “The Protest Industry” — a clan
“made up of those who decided that participation in the system was immoral”
because they “have seen ‘compromise’ many times before and think they know where
it leads.”
At Protest Industry rallies against the war in Iraq, you will find no effort to
hone a basic message. You will see a sea of signs demanding (1) the end to a war
with Iran that hasn’t happened, (2) the impeachment of President George W. Bush,
(3) the arrest of Vice President Dick Cheney, (4) the elimination of the death
penalty, or (5) the overthrow of the U.S. government by Maoists who reason that
the “world can’t wait to drive out the Bush regime.”
These demonstrations are boisterous but ephemeral displays whose chaos and lack
of message reinforce a self-defeating fringe image.
On the other side of the antiwar movement is a group of organizations and
apparatchiks that have launched an operation called Americans Against Escalation
in Iraq (AAEI) — a coalition of mainly Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups,
pooling cash and staff for “a major, multimillion dollar national campaign to
oppose the president’s ’surge’ proposal to escalate the war in Iraq,” as its
website says.
Within the uprising against the war in Iraq, AAEI and its allies are the
“professional” side of the antiwar effort. Consider them The Players.
The Players imagine that the war will end not after a massive investment in
long-term, on-the-ground local organizing against war, but by the short-term
coordination of a few elite actors — political consultants, donors, politicians
and maybe one or two organization heads — in front of a map of media markets and
congressional districts.
The Players make their moves with campaign contributions, TV spots and PR
campaigns — the conventional weapons in a media war — and they are playing their
game in Washington for Washington. In contrast to the Protest Industry, they
believe the only way to effect change is to play an inside game.
Hollywood for ugly people
Media coverage is currency in the nation’s capital. There, celebrities are
people like Washington Post columnist David Broder, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and
Time magazine’s Joe Klein — people known to almost no one in the country at large.
Within the Beltway, however, they are influential celebrities because they
appear on obscure chat shows, from C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to Fox News’
“Special Report” to MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
Our nation’s capital has become Hollywood for ugly people.
Washington’s self-absorbed fetishization of tiny-audience TV shows might be
funny — except that the Iraq War was largely started because of this
closed-circuit media obsession.
In the march to war, neoconservatives, like The Weekly Standard’s William
Kristol, staked out beachheads on Fox News sets, while so-called liberal hawks,
like The New Republic’s former editor Peter Beinart, dug trenches in CNN
studios. These pundits established support for the war as a criterion of
political respectability and a mark of worthiness for media access.
Now, out in the real world, beyond the confines of the TV studios, it’s all gone
to shit — all of it. The American public — which was ambivalent about supporting
the unilateral invasion — is now firmly opposed to continuing the conflict.
Many of Washington’s pro-war TV “celebrities” are trying to flee their
previously televised warmongering. Klein of Time magazine, for instance,
appeared on CNBC a month before the Iraq invasion to state, “War may well be the
right decision at this point — in fact, I think it probably is.” By 2007, he
claimed with a straight face, “I’ve been opposed to the Iraq War ever since 2002.”
In light of this, The Players believe that by funneling money into organizations
like AAEI, pulling PR stunts and putting attack ads on television against
pro-war legislators in Congress, they can make this antiwar uprising successful
without organizing millions of Americans into a cohesive long-term movement.
They believe, in short, that if a war can be started because of Washington’s
obsession with television, it can be ended because of that same obsession.
Washington’s rules
Both the Protest Industry chanting on the Mall and The Players scheming in their
downtown Washington offices are necessary parts of an effective antiwar
uprising. The outraged rabble provides the boots on the ground that can pressure
lawmakers in their local communities. And that popular ferment could be enhanced
by a professional presence playing the Beltway’s media game.
The crippling problem for The Players is the increasing difficulty of operating
in Washington without being corrupted by it. As blogger Chris Bowers says, “In
Washington, D.C., for those who run the government, the public is quite distant
and faceless.”
If the rules of Washington were written down, the first one would say: Anyone
wishing to play its games has to sign up big-name political consultants who are
perceived to have “influence.” That buys you instant credibility with
politicians and reporters there — “those folks who write the stories, and appear
on television and radio to talk about the state of play in Washington,” as the
Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza says. “Like it or not, the opinions expressed
by these people tend to set the parameters of the debate when an election year
rolls around.”
As a Washington pundit, Cillizza’s analysis inflates his own importance. But as
biased as he is — and as much as his statement reeks of elitism — inside the
Beltway his self-aggrandizement is a religious doctrine that creates a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
This poses a problem for even the best-intentioned advocacy organizations in
D.C. The same consultants they need to hire to play this Washington game and to
influence these people who “set the parameters of the debate,” are often
simultaneously paid by the very politicians who should be in their crosshairs.
The result is that ideological organizations become fused to the partisan
political structure they seek to pressure.
Hot Pocket politics
Take the leadership of AAEI. The group is guided by Hildebrand Tewes, a
consulting firm named for its original partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes
— both longtime Democratic Party operatives.
The firm is one of a new breed of companies that attempts to bring to uprising
politics the ease of microwave TV dinners. Don’t feel like making dinner? Throw
a Hot Pocket into the microwave. Don’t feel like doing the hard work of local
organizing to build a sustaining, durable movement that lasts beyond the issue
du jour? Put together a pile of money to hire a firm like Hildebrand Tewes and
you can have your instant “uprising” — one that provides about as much nutrition
to your cause as microwaved junk food provides to your body.
While the firm is supposedly leading an independent antiwar uprising by
pressuring politicians in both parties, about half its employees — including the
firm’s two principals — were staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee (DSCC), the re-election arm of the same Democratic U.S. senators that
the antiwar uprising now needs to pressure to end the war.
But the conflict of interest only starts there.
At the same time Hildebrand Tewes is working with AAEI, the firm is being paid
by various Democratic politicians for its services — Democratic politicians who
have a vested interest in avoiding attacks from the antiwar uprising.
The consequences of such incestuous overlaps between party and uprising are best
exemplified by Brad Woodhouse, the Hildebrand Tewes consultant leading AAEI. He
came directly to Hildebrand Tewes after years as the DSCC’s chief spokesperson
and a mouthpiece for Democratic candidates. This supposed antiwar champion is
the same guy who, as a campaign staffer, bragged to newspapers just before the
Iraq invasion that the Democratic U.S. candidate he was working for, Erskine
Bowles (N.C.), was more pro-war than the Republican candidate.
“No one has been stronger in this race [than Bowles] in supporting President
Bush in the war on terror and his efforts to affect a regime change in Iraq,”
Woodhouse fulminated in the Charlotte Observer in September 2002.
Woodhouse is no anomaly. His history closely mimics how many war-supporting
politicians suddenly changed their positions when the political winds shifted.
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), whose record on Iraq has been abysmal, has
undergone an improbable transformation into an antiwar candidate. And former
President Bill Clinton showed a special kind of retroactive courage when he
declared last November that he had opposed the war “from the beginning.” But it
is the partisan conflicts of interest, not the hypocrisy, that pose the real
problem.
You would think the central focus of any antiwar organization — whether inside
Washington or out — would be on forcing Democrats to use their constitutional
power to end the war to do just that: end the war. But you would be wrong.
Almost all of AAEI’s “multimillion dollar national campaign” is being spent on
TV ads or publicity stunts attacking pro-war Republican politicians up for
reelection in 2008 — people like Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), John Sununu
(N.H.), Norm Coleman (Minn.) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the minority leader who
Woodhouse spent years attacking at the DSCC.
These are Republicans who Democrats (and thus Democratic consulting firms like
Hildebrand Tewes) want to defeat in order to retain control of the Senate,
regardless of whether the war ends.
Relatively few AAEI resources, by contrast, will be spent on ads attacking
Democratic House and Senate lawmakers who have either repeatedly provided the
critical votes to continue the war indefinitely, or who have refused to use all
of Congress’s power to end the war.
Beyond its mission statement, AAEI does not even try to hide its partisan
biases. In one classic display, Woodhouse used his AAEI position to defend
Democrats when they refused to stop a war funding bill.
“We’re disappointed the war drags on with no end in sight,” he told Reuters in
June of 2007, “but realize Democratic leaders can only accomplish what they have
the votes for.”
No mention of Democrats’ ability to use their majority to vote down war spending
bills or to stop any funding bills from moving forward so as to cut off money
for the war.
If you believe this ultrapartisan allocation of resources has nothing to do with
the fact that the people guiding the spending decisions are former employees of
— and are still being paid by — Democratic politicians, then I’m sure George W.
Bush has another war to sell you.
As antiwar Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) has said, the battle to end the war is
“us versus them” — not in terms of Republican versus Democrat, but in terms of
the uprising versus the “Washington inside crowd that sets the parameters of
this debate.”
In February 2007, Feingold told reporters, “The Washington consultants —
especially those that were part of the previous Democratic administration — come
into a room with Democratic congressional leadership and tell them, ‘Look, if
you propose a timeline or you try to cut off the funding, the Republicans will
tear you apart.’ ” But, Feingold continued, “The power structure in Washington
[is] desperately trying to figure out how to explain why they made one of the
biggest mistakes in the history of our country. And that’s why you gotta go
right at them.”
But you can’t “go right at them” if your uprising is led by a tightly knit
consultant class that has dual loyalties and has been part of the problem from
the outset.
The McGovern Fable
Conservatives have extrapolated President Nixon’s “silent majority” demonization
of Sen. George McGovern and cultural critique of the anti-Vietnam War movement
into a fantasy that supposedly explains every Republican victory in the last 30
years.
This McGovern Fable posits that the Left’s open confrontation with the
Democratic Party may have helped end the Vietnam War, but it also resulted in
the 1972 presidential nomination of McGovern, whose landslide loss in the
general election supposedly gave Democrats a “national security gap” in public
opinion polls. According to the Fable, this gap is singularly responsible for
giving America 20 out of 28 years of Republican presidents, and came about not
because Nixon ran a smarter race or because McGovern’s campaign tactically
stumbled, but because McGovern opposed the Vietnam War.
But as scholar Mark Schmitt has noted, the McGovern Fable is a sham.
“The real reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and
splintered the liberal consensus was because — let’s not be afraid to admit it —
Democrats started that war,” Schmitt wrote on his blog in 2006. “Opposition to
the war didn’t unify or define the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968
election because [Hubert] Humphrey was associated with the war [and] couldn’t
split with [Lyndon B. Johnson].”
In fact, Schmitt pointed out that in the 1974 mid-term election following that
1972 campaign, the 75 Democrats who won congressional seats were overwhelmingly
antiwar.
Few debate that making the war into a campaign issue was critical to the
Democrats winning Congress in 2006. However, the consensus in Washington is that
all the American casualties and the killing of hundreds of thousands of
civilians in Iraq would be acceptable had Bush just been a better military
strategist. Some Democratic lawmakers seem to be saying this overtly.
With no ideologically antiwar voice in Washington, these Democrats are demanding
that their party become ideologically “pro-war” — that is in favor of violent
conflicts as a standing principle, as long as the violence is managed properly.
“If we become the antiwar party, that’s not beneficial to Democrats in 2008,”
Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.) told reporters in July 2007, despite polls showing
that two-thirds of Americans want the White House to start withdrawing troops
from Iraq. Said Davis: “The kind of pro-war Democrat that we ought to be [is the
one that supports] the war that we fight wisely, the ones that we engage in wisely.”
Among The Players inside Establishment Washington, nobody — not AAEI, not the
much-vaunted “liberal” think tanks — is making the opposite case, that Democrats
have a moral and (as the insurgent campaign of Connecticut’s Ned Lamont showed)
political imperative to be the antiwar party, not just the sort-of anti-Iraq War
party.
The Players have opposed the escalation of the war in Iraq, but there has been
no antiwar drumbeat — no larger argument made against wars as a concept or
against the danger of the growing military-industrial complex. This means the
next time a president wants to start an absurdly stupid war, he or she faces no
ongoing antiwar uprising and just needs to do what Bush didn’t do — dot the
“i”s, cross the “t”s and follow proper procedure. Put another way, favoring a
narrow criticism of just the Iraq War over an attack on Washington’s more
general prioritization of war as a foreign policy tool has laid the groundwork
for neoconservatives’ next harebrained military fantasy.
As media critic Glenn Greenwald wrote at Salon.com in August 2007, “The Grand
Beltway Consensus, one that encompasses both parties, is that War is how we rule
the world. … The only debates allowed are how many [wars] we should fight, where
we should fight them, and how ‘wisely’ we prosecute them.”
Say what you will about the anti-Cheney zealots, the pro-impeachment activists
and other assorted Protest Industry followers, they may be utterly disorganized
and lack real-world political strategies, but at least their activism is about
more than a sporting event. They aren’t just demonstrating to help one set of
politicians defeat another set of politicians. And as importantly, they don’t
dream of stopping just one war because that’s what is considered politically
expedient.
They dream of changing society’s long-term outlook on war itself.
Making them work for us
Like an exotic species at the zoo, true campaign junkies exhibit the same
special markings: bags under eyes, graying hair, half-shaven beards (among the
males) and expressions of permanent fatigue, like they could fall asleep at any
moment because they need to catch up on shut-eye from 25 years of late-night
envelope-stuffing sessions.
Steve Rosenthal exhibits all of these telltale signs.
Rosenthal heads They Work for Us, a group whose mission is to pressure elected
Democrats to uphold the uprising’s antiwar and economic agenda.
“There’s a lot of swirling mass communications going on right now,” he says
between gulps of coffee as we eat breakfast at a hotel restaurant in downtown
D.C. “But it really isn’t personalized or organized, and it isn’t particularly
effective.”
He is a rare hybrid of an insider and an uprising guy who got his start (like
many 50-ish movement activists) first as a volunteer for George McGovern’s 1972
campaign, then as staffer for Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential bid. Today,
Rosenthal is fed up with the substitution of Washington games for real
grassroots organizing.
“It’s the same thing I used to say about mail when we did a lot of mail in the
labor movement,” he says. “What happened over the years was that mail became a
lazy way to communicate with people. It’s much easier to hire a mail vendor and
send out a lot of mail to union members than it is to organize people going
workplace to workplace and setting up systems to deliver flyers and organize
weekend walks. That’s really hard stuff, and people now avoid doing it because
it’s hard.”
He fills me in on all the different Democratic incumbents his group is looking
at trying to unseat in primaries, and how he wants to “make them sweat and bleed
and raise money so they have to think differently about things.”
But beneath the strategy talk, he is worried. He fears that even on an issue as
pressing as the war, partisan loyalties are going to trump everything. That’s
not just because of the intertwined Washington culture or the McGovern Fable, he
says, but because a lot of the people in the uprising today don’t really
comprehend how power works.
“What many people don’t understand is that these politicians carry more water
for you as a result of being frightened,” he says. “In other words, what are
these politicians going to do in the face of a primary challenge? Say, ‘Go fuck
you guys because you might come after me’? No, it’s going to be the other way
around — they’ll try to appease us by being better, which is the point.”
But, the flip side is also true.
If Democratic office holders know that no functional antiwar uprising is ready
to punish them for their war support, then they will just preserve the status
quo — regardless of the TV ads against Republicans; regardless of the Protest
Industry theatrics at rallies; regardless of The Players’ appearances on obscure
shows like “Hardball”; and — worst of all — regardless of American troops dying
in Iraq.
David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose
newest book, “The Uprising,” will be released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at
the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States
Network-both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at
http://www.credoaction.com/sirota.
© 2008 In These Times
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