Democrats and Republicans: two parties, one class
Albert Einstein defined "insanity (as) doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result" each time. Yet for most self-styled "socialists" voting for the Democrats as "lesser evils" to the Republicans has become almost second nature by now, just as it is first nature for the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy and the middle class misleaders of the Black and womens movements they, in turn, look to for leadership. "We must stop the ultra-right at any cost" they cry every four years. Only unlike the John Sweeneys and Jesse Jacksons, many reformists fear that calling for a vote for the Democrats with a straight face will alienate the radicalizing youth that flocked to the anti-globalization and anti-war movements believing that "another world is possible" rather than in the "lesser of two evils." So instead they clamour for a vote against Bush, which, in effect, means the same thing.
Taken out of the lofty realms of cyberspace "chat rooms" to "the politics of the possible" that the reformists are so fond of, that means any Democrat, no matter how little they may differ from Bush, will do. And Kerry, in fact, differs very little, having supported the war on Iraq and continuing the occupation. He also backed the USA PATRIOT Act and favors more tax breaks for the rich. For the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a party of, by and for the ruling rich, connected to the corporate kingpins by the purse strings of their campaign contributions and common class interests. Both have the same program of picking the pockets and paychecks of the poor and needy in order to further feather the profits of the rich and greedy, whether it's by waging wars overseas or war on workers' living standards at home. The only "difference" is that the Democrats think they can do a better job of it than Bush has been doing since 2001, even though they've gone along with him every step of the way so far. No-one epitomizes Democratic complicity in the crimes of the Bush gang better than NY Senator Hillary Clinton. This arch-opportunist even turned up in Iraq, a day after Bush and his rubber turkey did, to lend support to the occupation just as she couldn't help but join in the standing ovations for Bush and his war during the President's State of the Union address.
"Progressive" pundits, at publications like The Nation, may shake their heads in disbelief at the "spinelessness" the Democrats display before Bush. Spineless as they are, this has little to do with the failings of any particular politician, and a lot to do with the profit perspectives of America's ruling rich. This is why no matter who gets elected little seems to change, except for the worse, insofar as working people are concerned. But how could it be otherwise? If none of the Democratic candidates have any solutions for the problems faced by working people and the poor, that's because they all support what causes them in the first place, capitalism. And under capitalist "democracy," the real decisions that affect the lives of working people are not ultimately decided in the Oval Office or in the halls of Congress but in the boardrooms of the biggest bankers and bosses on Wall Street, who then give their politician pals their marching orders.
From clean for Dean to merry for Kerry?
Not too long ago most of the mainstream "left" quickly went clean for Howard Dean, even though the latter was little more than another Bill Clinton-style "New" Democrat, who, in his own words "think(s) it's pathetic that (he was) considered the left-wing liberal." When Dean was way out in front, many a self-styled "progressive" thought they smelled a winner and got on board the "Dean Machine's" bandwagon. While Dean may have picked up the support of much of the anti-war rank-and-file early on, the favorite son of most of the "left" leadership was "populist" congressman Dennis Kucinich, who picked up the support of many of the musicians, movie stars and academic celebrities (i.e., liberals pissed off with Clinton for shattering their illusions in the Democratic party) who supported Ralph Nader in 2000 but are too timid to do so now for fear of tipping the scales in Bush's favor. While Kucinich was portrayed as the most "radical" of the alleged "anti-war" candidates, he not only supported the war in Afghanistan but refused to vote in Congress against a resolution in favor of "unequivocal support" for Bush at the start of the Iraq war for fear of being seen as not "supporting" the troops.
Nor did Kucinich favor unconditional withdrawal from Iraq. Instead he prefers a UN figleaf for continuing colonialism just as he advocated continuing the UN's starvation sanctions as an "alternative" to war in the first place. This is hardly surprising. In 1998 Kucinich voted for Clinton's "Iraq Liberation Act" which called for "regime change" in Baghdad and allocated millions of taxpayer dollars to crooks and quislings like Ahmed Chalibi to carry it out. Kucinich, of course, knew he had no chance of getting the nomination. What he was really after was getting the anti-war movement and as many of those as possible who voted for Nader in 2000 back into the Democratic fold, or, in his own words, "bring(ing) third party candidates into the (Democratic) Party." Many of those who fell for the bait thought that a strong showing for Kucinich in the primaries would push the Democrats to the left. Far from it, it only pushed the "left" more to the right. The left is not about to capture the Democratic party. It will only once again be captured by it just as it was every other time it went for the "lesser evil" and were taken in by the illusion that by making peace with the status quo they were achieving some kind of influence over it.
Now that the more "electable" John Kerry has secured the nomination, the any Dem will do crowd finds itself stuck with some-one who voted for the USA PATRIOT Act and the war on Iraq and boasts that he "voted for the largest defense budgets in the history of our country." He also voted for Clinton's Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism acts. In spite of his occasional bouts of liberal rhetoric, Kerry is as much in hock to the "special interests" he vows to "take on" as Bush is. In addition to having supportied NAFTA, Kerry has received more money from lobbyists than any other serving senator. At the same time, Kerry, the richest member of Congress, voted for Clinton's welfare repeal he lectured the poor about how their "indulgence and dependence" led to "public abdication and chaos." Nor does he advocate economic policies that will actually create a single job. And this is the man the "left" will be portraying as the alternative to Bush come November.
The New Democrats "Southern Strategy"
With Kerry, another DLC stalwart, in the saddle, the Democratic drift to the right, which began with Jimmy Carter and took off big-time with Bill Clinton, continues. Agressive imperial expansion abroad and economic austerity at home to pay for it, remain the only game in town insofar as the ruling rich are concerned and the Democrats are as comitted to pursuing that agenda as the GOP is. Within the current context, any return to "New Deal" or "Great Society" social reforms would get them tarred with the brush of "class warfare" by the Republicans which is the last thing the "New Democrats" have in mind. For the only way that the Democrats can win, within the accepted framework of "interest-group" politics that both parties play by, is by out-bidding Bush from the right for the white "middle-class" vote, particularly in areas like the South and the Midwest, which Bush won in 2000. This means paying little more than lip service to those on its "left." In other words, continuing to ignore the interests of so-called "special interest" groups like workers, minorities and women by once again taking their votes for granted, since, once again, the organizations claiming to represent them came out for the Democrats early on. By giving their support to the Democrats in advance, the left is doing its small part to ensure that the Democrats continue to pursue that strategy. Thus the winning ad in MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest focused on the traditional middle class nightmare of deficit spending, rather than on the war, racism, repression and poverty that the Bush regime has hit working people with. While groups like MoveOn.org calls themselves "Democracy in Action," in reality they are little more than action for the Democrats instead.
Kerry on Bush: not pro-war enough
While the mainstream media made Dean into an "anti-war" candidate in order to co-opt the anti-war movement into the safe confines of the Democratic party, Dean stated from the get-go that he would have supported invading Iraq if the U.S. had gotten the UN's blessing for it. He also supported "bring(ing) in 40,000 to 50,000 other troops...now that they're there." In other words, now that the US has got the oil that they went to war for in the first place, they sure as hell aren't about to give it back under a Democratic administration anymore than under Bush. However all of the Democratic candidates in Congress, who had to put their money where their mouths were, voted to give Bush a blank check to wage war where-ever and when-ever he wanted to as well as for the patriot Act and Homeland Security. So Dean had to do as the "insurgent" stand-in even if was no more "anti-establishment" than any other multi-millionaire Wall Street scion might be. When the anti-war movement receded, the media turned on Dean in order to boost the fortunes of more "mainstream," i.e, pro-war candidates. Kerry, who voted for the war on Iraq, only turned "against" the occupation when Bush "fucked it up," and accuses the latter of "cutting and running" from the scene of the crime rather than sticking it out. Kerry aspires to "work to expand participation and share responsibility with other countries in the military operations in Iraq" and "increase the size of the U.S. Army in order to meet the needs of a new century and the new global war on terror." In other words, supporting the global war of terror that "meets the needs" of the same "new (American) century" that the Bush gang started, only in a more cost-efficient fashion. As if to distance himself from his supporters on the left who still haven't gotten it yet, Kerry let it be known that he doesn't "fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror as some do (but) believe(s) he's done too little."
The bottom line is that there remains as little difference between the Republicans and Democrats today as there was in 2000. Only after four years of Bush, the "left" is so desperate that any Democrat will do. Ressurecting the old "Popular Front" Stalinist shibboleth about "progressive" vs. "reactionary" capitalists and Social Democrat Karl Kautsky's pre-WWI claim that imperialism is bad business for capitalism, ex-sixties radicals now claim that Bush and the "neo-cons" are the exclusive representatives of the "war party" in Washington. This serves to justify pulling down the lever for the "lesser evil" once again. From within ruling class circles liberals like Teddy Kennedy complain how the Democrats were "fooled" by Bush's lies into supporting the war in Iraq. Yet who's the bigger fool, the one who leads or the one who follows? Kennedy "forgets" how he and the rest of the Democrats in the House were also "fooled" by both of his brothers' and LBJ's lies about Vietnam and Cuba back in the sixties. None of them, however, were fooled. They all fell in line behind the interests of the empire...which is what they are in office to do in the first place even if a few naive nitwits and limpwrist liberals and "leftists" have yet to figure that out yet. Imperialism is a system, not a policy, which both bosses' parties are sworn to uphold.
When you put the Democrats first, the Democrats put you last.
Four years ago the lack of any real differences between both bosses parties made it all the easier for Bush to steal the elections. For many, Gore's refusing to contest the GOP's Jim Crowing thousands of Black people out of their votes was, on the surface, the first of many capitulations the Democrats would make to Bush. However, Clinton and Gore had already spent their eight years in office capitulating to the Republican's right wing agenda on everything from "ending welfare as we know it" to bombing and starving Iraq (and Yugoslavia) to waging the "war on drugs" on Black and Latino youth to curtailing civil liberties with the "Effective Death Penalty" and "Anti-Terrorism" Acts, supported by "liberals" like John Kerry in the Senate. Today when the "progressive" milleau thinks that turning the clock back to the Clinton years would represent a step forward, it is more important than ever to remember that the same Democrats who went along with all the lies of the Iraq war couldn't even oppose Bush's coup for fear of questioning the legitimacy of a system, which they stand for every bit as much as the GOP does. Their return to the White House would just represent more of the same.
With all of the ruling rich agreed upon a common program of pillage and plunder, where are there any evils that are any "lesser" than any of the others to be found amongst both bosses' parties? Of course, the lesser evilists would be as hard-pressed to answer that question as they would be to explain how telling working people to vote for the political representatives of the bosses in every election is supposed to advance their struggles against those same bosses. Afterall, would they tell workers to elect their bosses as their union representatives? And just as workers need to be economically organized as a class in trade unions to take on the bosses economically, they need to be organized as a class in a party to do the same politically. However, the pro-Democrat AFL-CIO leadership devoted far more time, energy and resources fighting against Ralph Nader and the Greens in the eight days before the 2000 election than they did fighting Clinton's endless attacks on their members' living standards over the preceding eight years. And for the past four years the lesser-evil liberals haven't stopped fighting...against any possible break with the Democrats in 2004. One can't help but recall what Malcolm X said about the relationship between Black voters and the Democrats back in the sixties, "you put the Democrats first, the Democrats put you last." Only it applies to all working people regardless of race.
Without struggle there is no progress, with the Democrats there is neither
In 1992, 1996 and 2000, the leaders of the main "mass movements," held back struggle after struggle in order to get the Democrats in and then did more of the same to keep them there even when they were carrying out policies identical to those of the Republicans. Now they advocate the same thing within the anti-war movement under the guise of "beating back Bush." Yet it was only through militant mass action that organized labor, Blacks, women and gays ever achieved anything to begin with. Indeed, last year's anti-war movement proved that millions of working people were prepared to take to the streets and engage in political activisim in a way that they would not have considered before. The task of the "left" is to continue to promote that kind of activism and to create an electoral alternative for them, not stampede them back into the dead-end of the Democratic party, the graveyard of every mass movement from the labor movement of the 1930s to the civil rights, antiwar and womens movements of the 1960s and '70s.
For the only way to really "fight the right" is to build the left! That remains as true today as it was four years ago and Ralph Nader's campaign, in spite of the shortcomings that stem from Nader's middle-class populism and economic nationalism, is a good place to start. As the only anti-war and anti-corporate candidate, Nader, again poses the necessary break from the Democrats. Or as Mumia Abu Jamal put it at the time of the 2000 elections, "it's past time to build a people's movement, a worker's movement, a radical and revolutionary movement that changes this sad state of affairs. Let us begin. Now" Unlike the middle-class muddleheads desperately seeking Democrats, Mumia recently wrote that "the solution ain't voting for some loser to betray you after election day; it's to organize, to rebuild unions, and make them truly international entities, to protect the interests of labor - globally!" Or as Frederick Douglas once said, "without struggle, there is no progress." Sticking with the Democrats only ensures that there will be neither!