A party without a people: Dems
stay loyal to fat-cat backers
By A. K. Gupta
Pundits, politicians, and spin doctors have diagnosed “lack
of message” as the disease the Democrats suffered in November’s
election. The criticism is misplaced. If the Democrats failed
to stand for anything in the mid-term elections, it is because
their corporate patrons are their only true constituents.
Absent an active social base pushing them to adopt progressive
legislation, they have shown themselves incapable of opposing
corporate cronyism and tax cuts for the rich.
How could the Democrats assail the Republican party for Enron
when they were also on the take? It’s like a $25 hooker
calling a $100 prostitute sleazy.
Opponents of the Republicans’ extreme agenda should instead
ponder the shift through the years from debating the contours
of the welfare state to arguing about the parameters of the
police state.
The GOP stranglehold on power has been decades in the making.
Starting in the 1960s with Richard Nixon’s “silent
majority” and cries of “law and order,” it solidified
with the “moral majority” and the 1980 victory of
Ronald Reagan.
While the Republicans have some inherent advantages, namely
as the party of capital and the military-security apparatus,
they have also mobilized social movements, white-flight suburbanites,
right-to-lifers and evangelicals, in favor of their authoritarian
agenda.
In contrast, the movements that used to hold the Democrats’
feet to the fire — labor, environmentalists, feminists,
blacks, Latinos — are in disarray. Unions are in perpetual
decline, unable to get legislation passed that would create
an environment more hospitable to organizing. The big environmental
groups are fundraising machines more comfortable lounging in
the halls of power than stirring up the grassroots. The feminist
agenda, at least nationally, is limited to abortion rights.
And while blacks and Latinos have made dramatic gains in political
power since the civil rights era, there are no prominent groups
or leaders pushing a visionary agenda.
The Republicans have a vision, albeit a creepy one: that of
a divinely ordained, free-market, iron-fisted paternalism; a
triumvirate of market, the military and God. It is the vision
that pits America as the force of righteousness in the global
crusade against terrorism and the evil hordes of Islam. Closer
to home, it is the vision that capitalizes on suburban fears
of poor, darker-skinned “others” by continuing a savage
and senseless drug war.
Progressive social movements have forgotten the importance
of vision. That is why Marxism-Leninism, perhaps terminally
sclerotic now, was such a powerful force for so long. It had
a transcendental view, historical materialism, with a historical
agent of change, the revolutionary proletariat.
What is needed are movements that once again speak the language
of a grand historical narrative, instead of being crippled by
postmodern subjectivity. There are glimmers of hope, in the
global justice movement, the Greens and the anti-war movement.
The latter displayed its new-found muscle in October, spurring
133 congressional Representatives to oppose the Iraq war resolution,
more than anyone predicted.
In fact, powerful social movements can even effect positive
change under a Republican president, as happened under Nixon
with the passage of landmark clean air and clean water legislation,
and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The wresting of power from the right won’t happen in an
election or two; that was the mistake of the Clinton era, when
progressives, in a desperate bid for power, willfully ignored
his corporate agenda. Change has to come from below in a vibrant
visionary form with wide appeal, not by pleading with the Democrats
to market themselves better.
Source: NYC Indypendent: <http://nyc.indymedia.org>
|
