Visiting our local politics bulletin board, I spent a minute responding to one of the board's more irritating posters, but even the ravings of a clown can have a value for political debate. (Think "infinite monkeys" - though a warehouse full of primates would have a better rate of turning out at least Ionesco-level work than these guys have in making coherent points).
In any case, a comparison was made between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, and it occured to me that while praising Reagan and demeaning Carter does show a sort of unique set of priorities, there was a significant shift to be found after their two presidencies that has an impact on our current political conditions, a shift which had nothing to do with Reagan's mythical "effectiveness."
Until Carter's era and the rise of post-Vietnam liberalism, the "military industrial complex" was a machine that made an enormous difference in protecting the once-"permanent" Democratic dominance of Congress and the White House. What Reagan and his staff (the present-day neo-conservatives) did to tilt the political dynamic towards the Republican Party was to jump at the chance to become the benefactors of this particular interest group. Once Reagan proved his willingness to sign off on the most insanely ludicrous military proposals imaginable to show his party's subservience to the defense industry, the Democrats lost these supporters (as with Southern whites after 1964) "for a generation." One could say that just as the evangelical right has
Roe v Wade as their litmus test, the pipe dream for the defense industry is
Star Wars, with Bush Jr. signing on very early in his presidential career.
For me, this puts the actions of Dems like Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman - and even, to a degree, John Kerry - into perspective, because a brief history of 20th century liberalism shows that making friends with the defense industry can help keep a movement in power, while making enemies with the defense industry can cripple a national campaign. Clinton wants to make friends, while Kerry wanted to at least stay on their good side.
This is obviously pretty depressing. Get on the war gravy train, or get used to our status as a minority party? Hmm. Doesn's sound so great.
But there are a few important things happening right now that we should keep in mind. It hasn't been sold as such by Democrats in the media, but what's happening with Mitchell Wade, Duke Cunningham, and everyone tied into this issue (including Katherine Harris and the band of endangered GOP congressmen from California) is a more serious threat to the military-industrial complex than Iran-Contra, or than anything that's happened since the Vietnam War. Some party leaders may want to back off of keeping this business in the news, hoping to find themselves the beneficiaries of the Republican Party's political bungling. But after years of the "K Street Project", and the defense industry's expansion into fields like government data-mining and domestic spying, there is no benefit to our principles, politics, or even our bottom line by cozying up to them.
People who care about peace or about domestic freedom should use this moment to beat the GOP at exactly the point where they meet the defense industry as severely as possible, and shake every Republican who would sell our domestic priorities short for their own wealth and incumbency out of public office post haste. Keeping domestic spying, Mitchell Wade, and (as as TPM mentions) Wilkes and Kontogiannis in the news – and criticizing not just their corruption, but the values they represent and the programs they're selling to undermine our freedom at every possible opportunity – should be a key concern for any progressive activist who wants to see peace again in their lifetime.
And this is why the Feingold censure bill is important, and (in my view) why it wasn't sold to party leaders in advance of its introduction. Because there is a real split in the Democratic Party about how we should rebuild our movement, and leaders like Russ and Hillary are clearly on different sides of the debate.
Backing the Feingold measure is a way of furthering a movement that doesn't include the spending priorities of the defense industry as a key plank - without running negative against other Dems who still need to be convinced that we have a viable movement without war money. We should promote this and other efforts to refocus the American public on how the conservative movement and the defense industry are undermining everything we believe in, and we should get used to describing in positive terms the legacy of post-Vietnam liberal movement, from Carter to Clinton, and from Dean to Feingold, as a way to move our values forward in 2006 and beyond.
(PS: And as for Reagan? Apart from the military money, he's the man who brought private radicalism and public, well, lying to the modern Republican Party, so his legacy depends on whether or not that strategy can keep winning elections for the GOP. He'll probably never be on Mount Rushmore, but we can do our part to bring down his legacy by pinning the spying, the useless war, and the bankrupting of the treasury on the movement he's credited with leading. It's the least we can do for the man.)
+ + + + + + + + + +
Cross-posted to my mostly-local-politics blog, Blue Santa Clarita.