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Now
In the final countdown to the November
7 election, Democrats.com has already begun celebrating. Calling
for candle light vigils outside polling stations across the nation
on election night, the website's blue-clad supporters will bear
moral witness against voting fraud during the historic moment
when the Democrats are expected to retake Congress (well, at
least the House of Representatives), with the Republican Revolution
finally unraveling after 12 long years.
"Let's imagine a Blue
Revolution," the website's writers chirped, "every
bit as joyous and historic as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine,
the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia,
and the other democratic revolutions of recent years--right here
in the United States of America."
Meanwhile, the sometimes-antiwar
liberal Todd Gitlin anticipated a post-election "rebirth
of liberalism" on the Guardian website, predicting
that the Republican Party's misfortunes will allow "American
liberals" to "dare lift their heads and contemplate
long-unimagined possibilities."
A "revolution"
without struggle?
To be sure, the Democrats are
likely to benefit from mass discontent against the Bush administration.
But if the Democratic Party does finally manage to eke out a
Congressional majority from the scandal-ridden Bush regime, Democrats
should not congratulate themselves prematurely. The Republican
Party is imploding due to its own outrageous "stupidity"
and "arrogance", as senior U.S. diplomat Alberto Fernandez
recently described in an interview with Al-Jazeera television.
This election has been declared
a referendum on the Iraq war. But no Democratic congressional
leader has called for a fixed deadline for troop withdrawal.
And the Democratic Party has refused to articulate a coherent
alternative to the over-riding aims of the Bush administration,
merely continuing its long-standing and calculated orientation
to the swing-voting "center"-while disparaging its
own antiwar voting base. This has resulted in continuing the
rightward shift in mainstream U.S. politics rather than challenging
it.
James M. Lindsay, a former
national security official in the Clinton administration, justified
Democrats' reluctance to call for withdrawal. "The problem
is you also have to win the general election," he argued.
"You don't need to appeal to people who have made up their
mind and had a bumper sticker on the back of their car for the
last four years."
The Democratic establishment
rolled out its spin-doctors to lower expectations a week before
the election, explaining in advance why they will accomplish
little of significance even with a congressional majority. Bipartisanship
is the watchword of the Democratic Party in this election. Liberal
New York Rep. Charles Rangel told reporters, "God knows,
the Democratic leadership will
be reaching across the aisle [W]e will never have the margins--even
if we did do it--to get anything done."
New York Sen. Charles Schumer,
leading the Democrats' election year strategy in the Senate,
summarized the only principles at stake: "The days of Democrats'
having to check 28 boxes before they run are over," Schumer
says. "We want to win."
As the San Francisco Chronicle
noted on October 29, "The new Democratic majority, should
it occur, will consist of a fresh crop of moderate and conservative
members whose elections will have been won in part by distancing
themselves from the party's progressive wing."
These Democratic Party upstarts
include a set of social conservatives opposed to abortion and
gay marriage, hand-picked by party powerbrokers:
Abortion opponent Bob Casey
Jr., challenging Republican Rick Santorum for his Pennsylvania
Senate seat;
Indiana sheriff Brad Ellsworth,
running for the House, who opposes abortion rights and same-sex
marriage;
Black evangelical Christian
Harold Ford, running for a Tennessee Senate seat, who names Ronald
Reagan as one of his heroes. Ann Coulter, in turn, called him
"one of my favorite Democrats."
White evangelical Christian
Heath Shuler, who opposes abortion, running for House representative
in North Carolina.
Liberalism,
then and now
The only Democrats expressing
a desire to "fight" are those galloping to the right.
California Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher of California, co-chairwoman
of the House's centrist New Democrat Coalition, made clear that
the Democrats' current embrace of social conservatism is not
meant to be temporary: "I think there's tremendous agreement
and awareness that getting the majority and running over the
left cliff is what our Republican opponents would dearly love,"
Tauscher said. This is something "we've got to fight,"
she added.
As the New York Times
reported on October 30, "Asked if he could envision a Democratic
Party with, say, an anti-abortion platform, Mr. Shuler did not
hesitate. 'I'm pro-life and I'm part of the Democratic Party,
so I hope it's part of the platform,' he said. 'Someone needs
to lead.'"
Democratic Party liberals,
in contrast, remain tied to chasing the coattails of a party
that has long since abandoned them. The mid-1970s marks a crucial
turning point, when Democrats joined Republicans in a bipartisan
project to launch a sustained ideological attack on liberal principles
in order to lower U.S. workers' living standards while re-building
the might of U.S. imperialism after its defeat in Vietnam.
Liberalism has been in decline
ever since. Today's Democrats stand to the right of 1970s Republicans
on key social issues. A case in point: George H.W. Bush, who
was an ardent proponent of birth control clinics for women in
the late 1960s-and committed to legal abortion- until he experienced
an apparent "crisis of conscience" upon becoming Ronald
Reagan's running mate in 1980.
Bush Sr. could not have dreamed
of launching the attack on gay marriage spearheaded by the Clinton
administration's 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Thus far, bipartisanship
has achieved only Democrats' accommodation to the right, and
liberalism has long since lost its way.
Gitlin, a 1960s leader of the
antiwar Students for a Democratic Society, now brandishes his
pro-war credentials in the American Prospect online, declaring
(along with co-author Bruce Ackerman), "We supported the
use of American force, together with our allies, in Bosnia, Kosovo,
and Afghanistan."
Gitlin's American Prospect
article was intended to rebut Tony Judt's recent London Review
of Books article deriding U.S. liberals, entitled "Bush's
Useful Idiots: the Strange Death of Liberal America."
Judt states simply, "In
today's America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies
for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really
is no other difference between them But the United States now
has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America's liberal intellectuals
overwhelmingly support it."
Gitlin's response merely illustrates
Judt's point. In his Guardian article, Gitlin warns liberals
with lofty expectations from a Democratic-controlled congress,
"To accomplish the mission of expanding their power, liberals
will require an iron discipline of the sort that the Republican
right has found it easier to muster in recent years. Bush and
the Republican leadership made the Christian right wait its turn
while it was busy servicing the pro-business right. On the left,
too, bitter pills will sometimes have to be swallowed."
"On the other hand,"
he adds, "liberals will have to articulate and fight for
principle"-as if these two goals do not stand in complete
contradiction.
The prospects for real change
Barely noticed by the mainstream
media in this election season is the real story: massive voter
discontent. How else to explain the eleventh hour surge of the
Green Party's unknown Illinois gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney,
reaching 14 percent in an October 23 opinion poll by Survey USA.
Among independent voters, Whitney is polling evenly (at 29 percent)
with Republican Judy Baar Topinka (31 percent) and incumbent
(and scandal-ridden) Democrat Rod Blagojevich (27 percent).
A week ahead of the election,
the Aurora Beacon-News headline read, "Neither of
the above," based on a poll by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and KMOV-TV. The poll indicated 58 percent of Illinois voters
view Topinka unfavorably, matched by the 57 percent who disapprove
of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan,
who helped focus the sentiments of the antiwar majority more
than a year ago, has shown the courage to endorse New York's
antiwar Green candidate Howie Hawkins, running against prowar
Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate.
Mainstream liberals solely
focused on the "blue revolution" from above could well
be missing the real rebellion brewing below. Setbacks for the
Republican Party do not automatically translate into gains for
the political left-not without a fight. The world's future lies
at stake.
CounterPunch
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CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
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