Recently a friend posted this at another site:
Published a year ago, but as true as it ever was
How To Take Back America by Thom Hartmann
Read it and understand why I support the Democratic party.
I agree with the main point of the article, but I thought there were some things he didn't get quite right and others that could use elaboration. I responded there, but I think what I wrote (though long) might be of interest here.
Most of what's in the article is not only true, it's important. I'm going to comment on some things I don't think he got right, but that doesn't mean I'm attacking the basic premises.
So the conservatives decided not to get angry, but to get power.
Led by Joseph Coors and a handful of other ultra-rich funders, they decided the only way to seize control of the American political agenda was to infiltrate and take over one of the two national political parties, using their own think tanks like the Coors-funded Heritage Foundation to mold public opinion along the way.
Coors supplied the most money, but he was rather dumb and wasn't much of an organizer. The prime mover behind the resurgence of the Right was a more familiar face, though one who presents a more benign persona. It was William F. Buckley, Jr. who channeled Coors' money. It was Buckley more than anyone else who convinced conservative technicians to work with issue-fanatics, and it was Buckley who vetted those seeming fanatics to see which of them could stand the spotlight without revealing themselves to be fools.
And Reverend Moon took over The Washington Times newspaper and UPI.
Didn't Moon
found The Washington Times?
...as Democrat Harry Truman said, "When voters are given a choice between voting for a Republican, or a Democrat who acts like a Republican, they'll vote for the Republican every time." (And, history shows, voters are equally uninterested in Republicans who act like Democrats.)
For better or worse, Truman and Hartmann are just wrong about that. From an Anti-New-Dealer's perspective, Eisenhower and Nixon were Republicans who acted like Democrats and did just fine. Clinton, in 1996, was acting quite a bit like a Republican and also did just fine.
There's a long list of people who didn't like it - Teddy Roosevelt, H. Ross Perot, John Anderson, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader - but nonetheless the American constitution was written in a way that only allows for two political parties.
Actually, the duopoly could be gone without constitutional changes at all. If, for instance, all states had election laws like New York's, I don't think the duopoly would last another 20 years. The key feature of New York's law is that it allows candidates to accept the nominations of more than one party and to have the votes from the different lines totaled. That has allowed 'third' parties in New York to play a greater role than elsewhere, but because voters' national allegiances are still held by one of the two 'majors', the role for additional parties remains limited even in New York. Allow the same kind of multi-party endorsments nationally, and a thousand flowers (or at least a handful of parties) would bloom. However until and unless we elect politicians who will enact such new-party-friendly laws in other states, we have to use the duopoly to our advantage.
Whenever a third party emerges, it's guaranteed to harm the party most closely aligned to it.
That's a fine general truth, but overstated. Hartman refers to T.R. and Perot above, for instance. Roosevelt, had more in common with the Democrats than with the Taft/Hanna wing of the Republican Party. Yet, because Roosevelt was himself a Republican, his Progressive Party candidacy split the Republican vote and got Wilson elected. Perot, too, probably had more in common with the Democrats than the Republicans on the issues he most cared about. But by giving disenchanted Republicans a place to go, he helped Clinton get elected.
But Roosevelt was an exception because he had personal loyalty from many Republicans while being alienated from the direction the party was moving in. And centrists like Perot and Anderson, who positioned themselves between the two major parties, are not germane to a discussion about the effects of parties that are try to move the political debate from the outside. Hartmann's analysis does apply to candidacies like Nader's, and to any party which attacks both existing parties from the same direction (e.g. from the left).
I wish the analysis could stop there. It would be simpler to explain to people. But by being too categorical, Hartmann leaves himself open to historical counterexample. The Populists, Progressives, and Socialists of the 1890s-1930s did have a positive effect on the Democratic Party in the long run. Yes, they hurt its electoral chances, but they succeeded in bringing the party partially around to their way of thinking, and the governance of the country from 1932-1980 was profoundly affected by their platforms. And one of the strategies the Radical Right used to take over the Republican Party was to prevent the election of moderate Republicans, even when that meant the election of an even 'worse' Democrat.
So under some circumstances, if one is willing to make things even worse in the short run, rule-or-ruin strategies can work. The relevant questions are when can it work, and when are the short-term costs worth it. Actually, even though there are very good reasons why the short-term costs aren't worth it right now, that isn't truly relevant, because we're not in a situation where it could work even if we tried it.
In the 1890-1932 period, there was both a massive influx of socialist-leaning immigrants and a radicalization of small farmers who were squeezed by deteriorating soil and the usual manipulation by large corporations. So there really was a populist move to the left, which would have eventually been picked up on by one party or the other. Debs' Socialists, combined with the Depression-induced fear of revolution, accelerated the pace at which the Democrats backed a very weak form of Social Democracy, but without the demographically based groundswell, it wouldn't have happened.
And in the 1960s-1980s, there was a frightened backlash against the continuing work of racial emancipation and against the sexual revolution. Both racial and sexual issues made many who had concerned themselves mostly with economic issues now become fervid social conservatives. So once again, there was an actual populist (repugnant though it was) change for the movement conservatives to use.
Unfortunately, there is no such sea change for the Greens, Nader, or anyone else now to use. There is a change in the relationship of the populace to the parties, but it's because the public's perception of the parties is catching up with reality, not because the population itself is moving. To see how the perception of the parties got so out of whack, we have to go back to two epochal battles that were lost in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the first battle, we liberals lost control over our own definition. Liberalism is driven by a sense of justice; a belief that everyone deserves a share of the country's success and that if raw capitalism prevents those who would work hard from attaining a share, than government must tweak the system so that all can have a stake in our society. In order to build an electoral coalition based on such principles, one must include those who will benefit from the policies that logically follow from the principles. That has always left us theoretically vulnerable to charges that we were simply a collection of greedy special interests. The generation of liberal leadership active in the 1950s and 1960s was able to put forward our case using moral terms, and the smears of the right didn't stick. The generation that came next was not up to the challenge. And so, though the corporate influence that Hartmann talks about was certainly also a large factor, the drift of the Democratic Party came about largely because those who stuck to principles (but were mostly unable to articulate those principles) were consistently losing elections.
Perhaps the promotion of a leadership corps that was so oratorically weak was itself a result of the way money was being raised in the 1960s, when the failed generation was establishing itself. Maybe it was a maladaptation to TV. We seem to be getting somewhat better in this regard, but a better understanding of how we failed would be useful in attracting good candidates in the future.
In any case, the liberal-is-a-dirty-word meme is losing steam. It's not that we've reclaimed our definition; we haven't. It's that we've been marginalized for so long that we have barely any definition at all. The generation of Whites most offended by integration in the South and most traumatized by the riots in the North is dying off. The last non-church cohort that thinks it's society's business what people do in their bedrooms is not far behind. There is now more room for candidates to reclaim a moral liberalism than there has been since before Ted Kennedy stopped drinking.
Since there is room to do so, the itch to do so is even stronger than usual. And it's an itch that should be scratched. But don't assume that just because we can do so now, it would have been just as possible over the last 25 years. For most of the surviving Democrats, their timidity was learned the hard way, as a necessary adaptation to keep their offices away from those who were far, far worse.
The other battle that we lost, the one which wasn't really our fight, was the Republican Party's march to the right. And, more importantly, its ability to continue to portray itself as mainstream, even as it nominated candidates that Democrats used to hope they would nominate because those candidates were 'too conservative to win'.
That success was largely attributable to one personality: Ronald Reagan. It's easy to blame the media, but that doesn't hold up. Through the campaign and the first several months of his administration, Reagan's stupidities and mistakes/lies/imaginings were widely reported on TV. The public just didn't care. Reagan stayed popular while people got angrier and angrier at the media for harping on "irrelevant details". So the media shut up. It was an astonishingly sick time, but that's the way it was.
No matter how unpopular the Democratic Party and liberalism was at the time, most Republicans couldn't have gotten away with it. Reagan was no strategist, but in my 30+ years of following politics, I've never seen anyone who could match him in giving off an aura of sincerity and having his heart in the right place. In other words, he was an actor who was perfect for the part. And by being such an effective actor, he established his extreme (relative to popular opinion) positions as seeming to be reasonable, in a way that neither Goldwater on one side nor McGovern on the other could even come close to.
Then came the conservative punditocracy. We can't blame Reagan's initial success on them, because they were in their infancy when he came to power. But they have been getting steadily more air to spread their spin ever since. They locked in the Radical Right's claim on normalcy by treating any conservative position capable of getting about 20% support as a something worthy of serious consideration, while requiring that anything coming from the left have about 48% support before it would get anything other than a condescending mention. And who among the handicappers was to argue? We kept seeing outlandish reactionary positions become law while liberal positions languished, so it must be that reaction was where the action was and that liberalism was a zeitgeist backwater that could be safely ignored.
Finally, we are starting to see cracks in the Republican self-defining propaganda. They are suffering from their own success. In order to keep making progress, they must continue to reveal the excesses of their agenda, which conflicts with the friendly image they always try to portray. And since their low-hanging fruit has already been picked, more and more of their remaining issues must reveal their true, ugly nature. There is only so far one can shift the tax burden to the working class, for instance, before you lose the `Reagan Democrats'.
The gap between what most Americans say they want when polled on issues on the one hand, and the politicians who've been getting elected on the other, has sometimes made those on the left forget that in order to win, we actually need to convince moderate voters to support our positions. We don't own the media. We aren't going to have a quarter century of success by hiding who we are. And most of the voters, so far, don't agree with us on nearly as many things as they would if they took more time to understand how things actually work. Instead, the average voter would happily vote for who the Republicans pretend to be. That's why the thugs win when they successfully disguise themselves.
That's not to say there's no hope. Our core values - essentially that all people have value, regardless of economic status, gender, whatever - are shared, I would guess, by most women and nearly half the men in this country. From that starting point, I think it requires only an open mind and a desire to learn to get to the point where the question is not whether Kerry or Dean is to liberal, but rather whether Kucinich is liberal enough. But that is a case we have so far failed to make in minds of most Americans. Until we do, we have no business expecting the Democratic Party to commit suicide, waiting for a crop of voters in ground that has barely been watered and not plowed since Saul Alinsky was alive.
Where the party has failed us in the last 15 years, is not in the positions it holds or would like to hold, but in its inability to join the public debate and make the case for those positions. Partly that was because of the conservative ownership of the media. Partly it was because of shell-shock acquired through so many defeats. But more than anything else, it's because so many people who should have been part-time political activists felt that politics and its compromises were beneath them. If you don't hear the right arguments being made for an anti-water-pollution bill, for instance, than it's up to you to make those arguments, and to do so in a public forum. A forum, furthermore, where you'll either be talking with those who aren't already convinced, or one that includes others who are ready, willing, and able to take you arguments to the undecideds.
Fortunately, inspired by the Bush Administration's outrages, the organizing efforts of the organizations like Move On and of the Dean campaign, and in some cases by the community of the blogosphere, more people are getting involved than at any time since the Vietnam War. If we remember that politics is the art of the possible, we may be in for a very refreshing decade or so.
After writing the first draft of this article, just as the first 2003 attack of Baghdad began, I thought about how the Democratic Party could change if most of the protesters in the streets were to join the Democratic Party and run for leadership positions in their local town or county. In short order, it could become a powerful force for progressive principles and democracy in America and the world, maybe even in time to influence the 2004 election.
...
So-called 'conservatives' are turning our government inside out, trying, as they say, 'to drown it in the bathtub,' killing off regulatory agencies, ripping up the Constitution, cutting funding to social services, and turning pollution controls over to industry. Government expenses in the trillions of dollars are being shifted from us, today, to the shoulders of our children, who will certainly have to repay the deficits Bush's so-called 'tax cuts' (which are really tax deferrals) are racking up. War is being waged in our name and without our consent.
And, most disconcerting, the leadership of this administration is made up of blatantly profiteering CEOs, former defense industry lobbyists, and failed hack politicians so outside the mainstream that one - Ashcroft - even lost an election in his home state against a dead guy.
...given that the rich, the polluters, the paranoid, and the zealot war-mongers got to the Republicans first, we have no choice but to take back the Democratic Party, reinvigorate it, reorient it, and lead it to success in 2004.
...
But what, some have said in response, about the corporate-controlled media?
That was the same problem faced by the Christian Right 25 years ago, when the coverage they could get was of Tammy Faye Bakker scandals. But once they'd taken over the Republican Party, the press could no longer ignore them, and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are now regulars on network TV.
Another person answered my now-form-email by saying, "I want to participate in producing a detailed plan for the future of America, rather than just joining a corrupt and tired-out political party."
My response was that if there were enough of us in the Democratic Party, it could become a cleaned-up and powerful activist force. It's possible: just look at how the anti-abortion and gun-nut folks took over the once-moribund Republican Party.
Another said, "But what about their rigged computer-controlled voting machines?"
My answer is that only a political party as large and resourceful as the Democrats could have the power to re-institute exit polling, and catch scams like the voter-list purges Jeb Bush used to steal the 2000 and 2002 elections for himself and his brother.
And the Democratic Party can only do it if we, in massive numbers, join it, embrace it, and ultimately gain a powerful and decisive voice in its policy-making and selection of candidates.
Amen!