The progressive movement of this country is in a bit of a funk. We've got a majority of support on all of our issues, and yet we win none of them. Most Americans
- support keeping abortion safe and legal
- support same-sex civil unions or marriage
- want to preserve Social Security and Medicare
- want to protect our environment and preserve our national parks
- are opposed to the Republicans' never-ending stream of tax-cuts for the rich
- are getting screwed by the increasing disparity between rich and poor
- think Iraq was sold to us dishonestly, and don't approve of how it's being fought
Why then did American voters just reelect Bush, who is the antithesis-incarnate to each one of these majorities? I hope to explain the outlook of moderate conservatives to a liberal audience, as well as offer a prescription for progressive change.
The Culture War
Our majorities of support are being successfully divided and conquered by the partisan fighters of the Culture War, whose tactics ensure that they can get a candidate elected who is wrong on everything. Stop me if any of this comes as a surprise. I'd wager dollars to donuts that half of Bush-voters had major misgivings about voting for him, but felt they had to because of a single-issue on which they agreed with him. We voted for Kerry because, barring smaller disagreements on specific policy, he was right on every issue, and we had no qualms about supporting him.
And it's not just Bush. The party that's wrong on everything strengthened their majority in both houses of Congress and is moving to consolidate its power. Soon they'll have the last arm of our government goose-stepping in line with them. State governments don't look any better. The problem with the Republicans controlling everything isn't that they are merely wrong on social issues, it's that they're dishonest. They're crooks! Now, I have a great respect for a very small handful of Republican legislators (or at least I did, until they whored for Bush and toed the party line), but the vast majority of their policy decisions are made by dishonest, untrustworthy, drunk-on-power, secretive, anti-democratic empire-builders. The honorable men that can't figure out how their party changed on them in the last thirty years are left voting for policies that they would decry as fascist and totalitarian... if they weren't being written by their own party! In this one instance, progressives are in the minority: we know what's happening in Congress.
Kerry lost the election by such a close margin that if any number of a list of campaign-issues had gone the other way, he would have won. No specific issue cost him the election, but not winning any of them did. Topping this list is fraud, but even fraud could have been overcome if the single-issue abortion voters in Ohio or Florida had voted Kerry instead. If there is a corrupt Republican who is pro-life running against an honest Democrat who is pro-choice, the single-issue of abortion will often decide the outcome of the race. Abortion is a wedge issue, the chief battleground of the Culture War, and the chief weapon of corrupt politicians to ensure that they stay in power.
This is the logical result of the two-party system. If you're "red" on abortion, the choice given to you is between corruption and life, or honesty and murder. That is how the issue is framed, that is the poison pill Americans are forced to swallow. That is the Culture War.
But there are no winners of the Culture War. To paraphrase Orwell, it's not meant to be won or lost, only to be continuous. It is the exploitation of cultural issues that are very closely divided in this country in order for a cadre of rulers to remain in power. They are democratically-unresponsive and corrupt, and they know there are no checks on their power, as long as they are on the same side as their constituents on one issue. They are the true winners of the Culture War, like the arms-dealers that sell weapons to both sides of a conflict. The losers of the Culture War are the fighters, the people that use those weapons to kill each other, and be killed by each other. Our great Democracy begins to resemble the ravaged, bombed-out empty shells of war-torn cities that we see so often on the news. We cannot afford this fight.
"Now wait just a minute!" I hear the ideology-machine winding up. "Are you saying the Democrats should move right?"
No, I'm saying we should keep our beliefs but stop fighting on some social issues, but not on economic issues, and only temporarily.
"Fascist! Homophobe! If the Dems change on their core issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, I'll vote Green!"
Yes, that is a risk. But do the Democrats really have as many single-issue abortion voters as the Republicans? I thought we viewed single-issue voters as naive for "voting against themselves". Would you be willing to vote against yourself by helping Republicans win more elections? And as far as "core" issues go, did you know there's a war going on in Iraq? Why sacrifice the life of thousands of our poor servicemen and women and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians fighting for domestic issues we've already lost?
Yes, we've lost. This is why we cannot fight. Bush and the Republicans are firmly in power. Between two and four vacancies on the Supreme Court will be filled by Bush nominees. If Roe v. Wade doesn't get overturned, it will be because the Republicans don't want it overturned. Remember Sen. Specter's (R-PA) comment the day after the election, that no one wanting to overturn Roe would be likely to make it to the Court? Let's be realistic; crooks who are wrong on every important issue are not going to be able to remain in power if they give away the biggest wedge issue they've got, the best weapon in their Culture War arsenal. If they could not guarantee that single-issue anti-abortion voters would vote Republican, they could not stay in office. So they will do their utmost to ensure that they always have the anti-abortion vote, and that means leaving Roe in place and blaming Democrats and "bad Republicans" for it.
Why didn't Justices O'Connor and Rehnquist - 74 and 80 years old, respectively - step down during Bush's first term so they could be replaced by judges that share their conservative ideologies? They are both well past the retirement age of 65, and Rehnquist has been secretly living with cancer for quite some time. It defies logic that they would rather remain in office until a new election - raising the possibility that they would be replaced by a president with a more liberal disposition than the man they hand-picked for the job in 2000 - unless either:
they were scared of what far-right ideologue Bush might replace them with (Ted Rall's theory of "buyer's remorse") and they wanted Kerry to win, or
they were well aware that the replacement of Supreme Court Justices, and specifically the subsequent effect on Roe v. Wade, would be just as important to the political calculus for the election of a Republican president in 2004 as it was in 2000.
Get it? The Supreme Court was willing to be used as a weapon in the Culture War, to guarantee that abortion voters would once again go for the Republican candidate, despite voters' Democratic-leaning positions on other issues. This situation is damning for Democrats. They can (perhaps with Specter's help) attempt to block anti-abortion nominees to the Supreme Court, ensuring that the wedge issue of abortion will be used against them again in 2006 and 2008. Republicans can tell their conservative constitutents, "We tried, we really did, but it's those pesky Democrats. And Specter. We'll just have to wait for him to get out in 2010. Keep electing us, and eventually we'll get abortion outlawed." And they'll keep winning elections. Or the Democrats can approve anti-abortion nominees, driving the single-issue abortion voters on the left, who are just as passionate and ideologically-stubborn as their counterparts on the right, away from the party and to vote Green, instead. The Democrats will split their votes, and Republicans will keep winning elections.
Pretty tricksy. You don't get to head up the Republicans' attack strategy by being dumb. They are the generals riding safely behind a huge army of social conservatives, rifles pointed at the opposing army of progressives. That's the Culture War. Our problem is this: as long as we're shooting at them, they're going to be shooting at us, but if we could find the ideological equivalent of putting flowers down their rifle-barrels, we might stop the fighting long enough for them to realize they're getting screwed by their leaders, and turn those barrels around on their real enemy.
Welcome to voting reform
The reason the Culture War works for the Republicans is that everyone is required to pick one of the two sides. For the conservative Christians joining the fray, one side is promising them support with fingers-crossed. The other side is shooting at them. Not a great place to be a conservative Christian. But imagine if no one was shooting at anyone, peace had been declared, and socially-conservative economic populists were free to give their support to the candidate who represented them best. They'd be anti-abortion, opposed to same-sex marriage, anti-war, and anti-corruption. They'd look a lot like John McCain. Imagine that progressives were allowed to choose their favorite candidate, instead of the one "most likely to beat Bush". They'd be an outspoken defender of the environment and the social contract, of civil rights for all Americans and a woman's right to make her own medical decisions. They'd be an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq and American empire, of the attack on civil liberties, on secrecy in government. They'd look a lot like Howard Dean. Imagine we had a voting system in place that didn't force voters to pick an army on a battlefield, but to choose any candidate they wanted to be their President or representative, and then ensure that the best compromise between these different candidates was chosen. The Culture War would be over.
Don't get me wrong, there would still be debate on abortion. Conservative Christians would still be voting for anti-abortion representatives, and still be battling to change our minds. But we could debate them on that issue by itself, where we have a majority that believes abortion should remain legal, without letting that debate get anti-abortion neocon empire-builders elected to office. The "War" would be over; no one would be getting rich by selling weapons. Crooks wouldn't be able to get elected by exploiting divisions in social values. The most honest candidate who held your views on the social issues would get your vote; voters would not have to choose between honesty and abortion. Politics would become responsive again, and this country might get back to the serious business of solving some of its problems without going and starting new ones.
Oh, if only there was a magical voting system that could accomplish this, end the war, and save our Democracy!
The Condorcet Method
Brother, have I got some good news for you...
It's time for every progressive activist to become intimately familiar with the Condorcet ranked-voting system (also called the "Instant Round-Robin" system). Play around with it online. It must become every activist group's #2 issue - right after whatever issue they are activist about. We must also support the instant-runoff voting movement - a ranked-voting system that is mathematically inferior but an excellent stepping-stone strategic-initiative. If we want our majorities to be able to win elections, we need a voting system that stops single-issue voting minorities from throwing the race to the most extreme ideologue that no one wants. If progressives continue to concentrate on individual elections and candidates under a broken system, we will never figure out how we're getting beaten. We must instead realize that, if we can fix the system, we can then elect candidates that are truly representative of the majority. Anything less is not democracy.