Why can't Democrats be anti-war?
Sun Dec 11, 2005 at 02:33:34 AM PDT
Why can't the Democratic Party ever represent a true anti-war position?
The base of the party is largely anti-war, and has had strong tendencies that way ever since the Democratic Party emerged as the liberal party in America. But when it comes time to nominate someone to stand for election, to the House, even more to the Senate, and especially to the White House, a true anti-war candidate has no more chance in the Democratic Party.
Our two party system, that practically makes third parties irrelevant, then, shuts out the possibility of a clean anti-war voice.
What passes for anti-war in the Democratic Party is usually a very muddy ambivalent position, doing its best to suck in people who desperately want change but also desperately want to go on with their private lives rather than engaging in the sacrifice that anti-war political activism requires. Pro-war activism entails no such sacrifice, because it makes it easier to climb the corporate ladder, or otherwise advance in society.
Democratic Party leadership appeals to its anti-war base by saying things like, "We would have waged this war differently." They accept the basic premise of the endless series of unjust wars and covert war-like actions that our country engages in. World War II was against fascism, but our overthrow of Mossadek, our contra wars against the people of Nicaragua, our support of terrorism and torture in El Salvador and Nicaragua and Chile and the Philippines, on and on, are about securing control of other countries' resources for the benefit of a very narrow sector of the U. S. population.
Listening to the LBJ tapes, and the Nixon tapes, it is not hard to tell the difference between them. You learn a lot. Nixon was a very smart guy in many ways, foolish and blundering as he often was in front of the camera. But he was devious way beyond watergate. LBJ is not only very smart, but a kind responsible man who took the weight of the world on his shoulders. And clearly he knew that the war in Vietnam was wrong. But as clever as he was in domestic policy with a strong agenda of moderating the worst racially based human rights abuses in this country, he seemed powerless to get out of Vietnam.
I remember the hope I felt, as a child, with JFK's election, and the disillusionment when he proved himself to be a violent hawk.
I remember the Democratic Party's bitter fight to keep George McGovern from being elected, and the intra party sabotage that guaranteed him a landslide loss, but even worse, I remember the vigorous backpedalling of McGovern himself after he won the nomination after so much grief. Only at the very end of the general election campaign did he return to the clean antiwar position that had made him popular with the party's antiwar base. But it was too late.
That was a rerun of four years earlier, when Humphrey alienated the party's base all through the general election campaign, was clearly headed to landslide defeat, and then at the very end came back to them with a vow to get out of Vietnam, with the result that he came within a whisker of winning the election.
Jimmy Carter sure seems like an absolute hero when you compare him to W, with his kindly demeanor, his sense of humor and his willingness to be outspoken. But he was plenty hawkish, bears a great deal of responsibility (with Zbig, who has also been saying deep and admirable things these days) for the rise of Islamic extremism, which Carter and Zbiggy cultivated to bring down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, with the belief that Islamic extremists would never get it together to cause us serious trouble. Gee, they were wrong.
Walter Mondale was a sad sick joke, as was Michael Dukakis. Their positions were almost as Republican as Lieberman's. They triangulated big time. Throughout the contra wars, Reagan's gang of thugs, which has led pretty directly to the W gang of thugs, sold a line of lies that were outrageously obvious. They were selling something, and some people were buying. And the Democratic Party's response to US terrorism in central America was to propose to trim funding requests for that terrorism. Trim. I remember Lieberman was a very strong contra supporter - he might have been against even the trimming. In any case there were Democrats, including him, who strongly supported the concept of arming gangsters and sending them in to terrorize, rape and murder peasants.
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld was sent by Ronald Reagan as a special envoy to Saddam Hussein, bringing him presents, shielding him from international condemnation, because of the perceived US interest in setting Iraq and Iran against each other (at the cost of millions of lives on both sides, a very large portion of these the lives of children). The Democratic Party made no fuss.
Now we have a Democratic leadership which still tends to attack this destructive war on management grounds - buying into the purpose, but arguing over logistics.
People who just plain oppose the war are portrayed, by those with the podium, as unrealistic. Meanwhile, untold thousands of Iraqi children have died terrible deaths. Shades of 1982, but now we are having Saddam tried for the crimes our government excused him for two decades ago. The Democratic Party is not educating the people. I have talked with liberal senators and have learned that at least some of them manage not to know these things. They are way smarter than I am, and have way more resources at their control, so it has to be a wilful ignorance.
Howard Dean was not a likely candidate for a straight talker, I might have thought, but there he was, in 2003, laying it out for all, a genuine antiwar position and saying he could not see how any Democrat would support this war at all. For this he was punished by the Democrat leadership, and Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt ganged up on him. Al Sharpton, who charmed me with his great speeches that were so on target, joined in on the pecking party, and I am sure he got some reward for that. I despise Sharpton for that, not because I think that Howard Dean is the greatest leader ever, but because he was expressing the truth that so many of us saw, and that was consistent with what Sharpton was saying, but (in my mind no doubt for some personal advantage) Sharpton joined in the attack.
Why won't the Democratic Party let antiwar positions be expressed? In so many of these wars our country is on the wrong side. It seems clear to me that the reason is that there are huge piles of money available to people who are willing to sell themselves. Our electoral system is used to winnow out people who speak for the true common interest, in favor of those who sell themselves, allowing concentrations of wealth to limit the public debate.
In this way, the things people really want - for example, peace - are taken off the agenda.
So?
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