Lance Selfa of the Socialist Worker writes another insightful piece on how “grassroots” organizations that support Democrats end up having their agenda handed to them by the Democratic Party. There are two places to get the article.

“United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther, who once confessed that the UAW could have taken over the Michigan Democratic Party, but refrained from doing so because it wanted to keep the party’s middle-class and business supporters. So for years, labor remained the Democrats’ most loyal backers, but got little of its agenda—from national health care to repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act—considered.

No one can realistically compare today’s PDA with the CIO of the 1930s and ’40s. But that’s precisely the point. If the most powerful working-class movement in U.S. history couldn’t transform the Democratic Party, how can a few thousand liberal activists—whose preferred 2004 presidential candidates (Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean) couldn’t win a Democratic primary—hope to?”

This past weekend, the second anniversary of the British and American invasion and occupation of Iraq, anti-war protests around the world went well. There was lots of participation and much discussion about the war but not in the corporate media which is hardly surprising (this lack of coverage being another instance of an unbroken line of remarkable misreporting or non-coverage of anti-war activities—coverage typically overstates violence or the there is no coverage at all). I am glad to see the marches and gatherings go on because they were sorely needed (there is widespread agreement that the anti-war movement had died or needed some kind of restart). But I’m not so sure that all the questions which needed to be asked were asked, and I would hate to see the same short-sighted disingenuous introspection that recently plagued the Democrats (after which Donna Brazile, Democratic Party organizer, declared in a forum broadcast by C-SPAN, that “the time for introspection is over”) will plague the anti-war movement as well. The anti-war movement should not be yet another front for the Democratic Party.

But if all the questions aren’t asked, education suffers. When debate is stifled, education suffers. One of the main functions of the anti-war movement ought to be to teach others how to value dissent and value working to dissolve the structural reinforcements which corporations in power over citizens (which inherently requires critiquing one’s own society).

Along that line, I think one question that needs to be asked is what the anti-war movement learned from backing a pro-war candidate for US president. Follow-up questions include: What was gained and what was lost? What were the expectations if Kerry had taken the presidency? Were they realistic? How did Kerry come to be the anti-war movement’s choice? Is it reasonable to prejudice the debate over the US presidency by framing one candidate as “viable” (thus inferring, if not outright stating, that his opponents are not viable)? Does this actually work to get you the kind of vibrant social debate you want?

I return to these questions often and with interest because Americans don’t participate in political matters except for presidential elections. During a presidential election, Americans are most likely to find ordinary people engaging in political discussion. Other times, not so much. This is sad and, to some degree, self-imposed because the midterm elections and local elections are quite important, yet we see little participation at the ballot box (far less than half of registered voters in the US vote in mid-term elections).

Then there’s the anti-war movement’s debate regarding when to bring soldiers home, despite the latest Harris poll indicating 59% of the US who want to bring the US soldiers home immediately. Why has the anti-war movement shifted away from their previous message (which was basically, “support the troops—bring them home now”)?

A friend of mine (who will soon get a blog) dismisses the interest as though there are other more compelling questions to ask instead, but I think he will be shown wrong when we return to these issues again in about a year and a half.

This is the time when it is most comfortable for those who did not get what they wanted from the 2004 US presidential election to recognize a flawed strategy for what it is. Relish this time, it will go away soon.

More recommended reading from Counterpunch: Alexander Cockburn’s article on how the Democrats and Republicans work together to further disenfranchise the entire country. Illinois residents and Democratic party supporters will want to take note of another vote Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made:

“Near the end of February many Democrats in the House okayed a Republican bill to transfer large class action suits from state to federal courts. It’s the state courts that have awarded the big settlements against the tobacco and asbestos companies. Federal judges have consistently cut back the big awards. Transfer of the suits is a huge victory for the business lobby. Earlier in February the Senate passed the same bill 72 to 26. Among Democrats voting for a bill written by the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers were such supposed bright hopes as Obama of Illinois, Salazar of Colorado, Bayh of Indiana, along with possible aspirants for the 2008 nomination as Dodd of Connecticut.”

John Walsh on the “progressives” backing Democrats hits many issues the Left needs to discuss (but won’t). To this, I’d only add that the “anti-war” movement has a lot to answer for: No justification of voting pro-war (particularly for the majority who didn’t need to—I’ve expounded on this many times before), no marches of any national significance in many months, no criticism of same allowed in discussions (what Walsh describes with MoveOn.org is rampant amongst self-identified anti-war proponents). Sometimes you have to draw the line between those that support the agenda they claim and those that are just Democratic party partisan hacks.

Norman Solomon has a good point in showing how the anti-war message needs to be clearly championed among those that want to truly oppose this president. But Solomon has not consistently supported that message even in recent months. He too was one of the signatories of the Vote2StopBush.org campaign which meant supporting a pro-war candidate, not challenging his take on any issue, and not acknowledging that some people simply cannot vote to “stop Bush” due to the way votes are counted in the US electoral vote system. Given this, I’m not convinced that if Kerry had become US President that we’d see a much different war stance than we’re seeing right now. As you read Solomon’s article, and I hope you will, keep in mind what he put his name to when it counted.

Arianna Huffington tells us that “Andy Stern, the groundbreaking president of the Service Employees International Union” is the next great progressive hope. She pitches for him mightily and compares him to the Democratic Party who she is currently displeased with:

“Compare that with the pale rhetoric and feeble resistance being offered by Democratic leaders in Washington these days. Sure, they’ve landed some heavy blows playing defense on the president’s proposal to overhaul Social Security. But is this the only issue they are able to wrap their minds around? Are they just too exhausted to use their political muscle and imagination for anything else–including what should be the great political debate of our time, Iraq and the war on terror?”

But how surprising is this? The Democrats favored the invasion of Iraq, the Presidential power to supersede Congress when deciding whether to go to war (and where to go to war), and the Democrats have no problem adopting the “can’t cut and run” line when the topic comes around to getting out of Iraq. This all happened before the November 2004 election. So it seems a bit disingenuous to complain about that behavior now as though it is not just an unbroken line of behaving in a way which is eminently compatible with the corporatists in the Republican party.

I won’t be surprised to learn that a majority of Democrats agree with Illinois Senator Barack Obama and favor bombing Iran. The darling of the progressives and the Democratic party knows that he’s got to go along to get along with the warriors. There’s nothing but silence from progressives as he makes one bad high office appointment after another.

And there’s considerable support for these stances from the populace when it comes down to brass tacks: a lot of Illinois voters voted for Kerry even though they didn’t have to, a lot of Illinois voters voted for Obama even though they didn’t have to. The progressives applied a half-baked logic to the 2004 US election and urged progressives to vote for Kerry to oust Bush in the gerrymandered (“safe”) states. It’s as if the progressives don’t see how this damages their anti-war credentials. Perhaps there will simply be enough of them to shout down anyone who questions whether the safe-state Kerry voters are genuinely interested in taking opportunities to advocate against war. I look forward to seeing this debate happen, should there be another anti-war march of significance (which looks less likely with each passing month).

I realize that almost half of those who could vote in US national elections don’t and local elections have lower participation rates. But those who don’t vote are too ambiguous for me to read something into clearly and definitively. They could dislike the fake dichotomy of Bush v. Kerry, they could dislike being railroaded into supporting Obama, they could be too busy working a sub-living wage job to take the time to vote and stand in long waiting lines. It could be something else entirely.

I want to take progressives more seriously on these life and death issues because I think there is a fake debate going on where no progressive voices are heard (particularly in mass media which goes out of their way to find inarticulate progressives to champion their views at protests and never invites in progressive leaders into the studio to talk). I’d like the debate to include someone who could point out what standing up against recent US invasions and occupations (not just Iraq) really means. And it bothers me when people set up a good argument with bad actions like voting contrary to one’s politics when one has a choice to vote one’s conscience.

Today, on Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine. There was not one question about vanden Heuvel’s blind support of Kerry’s pro-war candidacy (even in heavily-gerrymandered states, like Illinois, where entire counties could have voted anti-war and not changed the ultimate recipient of Illinois’ electoral votes).

Ironically, vanden Heuvel covered “nuclear terrorism, Washington’s stance on Iran” (citing DN!’s website), Iran being the apparent next target of American wrath.

Perhaps liberals & progressives have a long memory for the political missteps of their opponents, like talking about who stumped for Bush during the 2004 election, but they take a considered silence when talking about who stumped for Kerry when they didn’t need to, who unquestioningly supported Barack Obama (calling his election #4 of the “Good Things in Bad Times”), and who chides Nader for running (#7).

In order to prevent settling for the least-worst, you have to analyze the record of your candidates and make demands on them. Kerry’s campaign ran with no demands from the Left. Obama’s Senate record is horrible, supporting candidates for high office that he should know better not to support, but the Left is silent.

On a similar note, I had to miss Medea Benjamin’s visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this past Tuesday because I was preparing for my radio show Digital Citizen (which I plan to set up a website for so you can hear archived episodes of the show). Benjamin was one of the people who endorsed the letter denouncing Nader’s run for office; the same letter that made no demands of Kerry and said nothing of who to support in the so-called “safe” states. There were plenty of candidates to recommend for one’s consideration: the Green, Socialist, Constitution, and Libertarian parties all had candidates who were against the war. I’m guessing that the friendly audiences she speaks in front of weren’t so impertinant as to remind her that Nader’s candidacy was far more progressive than Kerry’s, would have cost progressive safe-state voters nothing to support, and was expected to not be as popular nationally as he was in 2000 (yet that didn’t stop Democrats and progressives from spending much time and money trying to keep him down) so even by ridiculous support-Democrats-in-the-clutch logic, voting anti-war would have done nothing to adversely affect Kerry’s campaign.

We’re going to repeat this in 2 and a half years or so. And meanwhile, the anti-war crowd is making a mockery of themselves by holding no major marches in recent memory and not explaining how many of them can vote pro-war from safe states and consider themselves bonafide advocates against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Update: Sharon Smith’s article in Counterpunch is well worth reading, particularly Smith’s take on a quote from Medea Benjamin. Speaking of Medea Benjamin, a few years ago DN! played a clip of her at an anti-war march saying something to the effect of “I’ve got a message for the women in the audience” and then going on about how the world’s leaders (the vast majority of whom are men) were (exact quote) “testosterone poisoned”. Nobody on DN! remarked how sexist that comment was and how no man could get away with saying how women are ‘estrogen poisoned’. Benjamin said this during an anti-war march in Washington or New York, I’ll try to find a recording of the clip so you can hear it for yourself (I once had a clip of it, excerpted from a DN! episode but that CD has been scratched and become unreadable). archive.org has a copy of the DN! show but that particular episode is unavailable right now. I’ll update this blog entry when I get a copy of the show.

According to United for Peace of Pierce County:

“On Friday evening in Olympia, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter appeared with journalist Dahr Jamail. — Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has “signed off” on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq….”

If the anti-war marches will rev up again over this, the question must be asked: how many of them voted for a pro-war candidate from a safe state? What explanation will they provide to clarify the obvious confusion resulting from that mixed message?

Nicole Colson writes about the Democrats taking a less-than-pro-choice stance on abortion. Take her article at face value and accept its defense of a Democratic Party slide at first blush. Then, ask yourself, why is this happening?

I figure it happens because Democratic Party supporters have no where else to go. They’ve alienated the Greens, and Nader’s progressive independent campaign—both campaigns that might have taken their concerns seriously and worked with them. They ignore the Socialists, and other alternative parties don’t support their pro-choice stance on abortion (Constitution Party, for instance). So, they’ve pinned themselves into a corner.

When one pledges undying loyalty to a political party, one is giving that party permission to work against those values which ostensibly drove one to support the party in the first place. Two and a half years from now, we all know that pro-choice supporters will vote Democrat. Thus, the Democrats can afford to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the lies that go with that, running poor people out of personal welfare (AFDC) but continuing billions of dollars in corporate welfare, champion the death penalty (which also adversely affects the poor more than the rich), support stopping universal single-payer health care, and a host of other corporate-friendly ideas the Democrats back. The Democrats can afford to test the waters and see how much further they can distance themselves from a pro-choice abortion stance.

A comparable pickle exists for some of these voters right now: I hear that the so-called “anti-war” crowd is organizing another national march somewhere in the US. It’s bad enough that there have been no such marches in recent memory—the last big one was well before the election and their thunder has almost entirely been forgotten. I figure that a majority of the marchers voted from what are called “safe” states—states which have heavily gerrymandered districts making it possible to know how their electoral votes will be cast before the election. The majority of voters vote from “safe” states. Voting from a “safe” state gives one freedom to vote one’s conscience; anti-war safe state voters had no excuse to vote for Bush or Kerry (virtually every alternative party candidate was anti-war, so there’s plenty of room to be compatible with one’s economic sentiments and still vote against the war).

Given all this freedom to vote one’s values, what are we to make of a majority of anti-war marchers who voted for a pro-war candidate (either Bush or Kerry)? I look forward to the excuses which will attempt to explain how one’s anti-war sentiment can be put on the shelf when one goes to vote and then picked up again when one is comfortably away from the election.

Update: Ralph Nader takes progressive columnists to task for comparable reasons in this essay.

“It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can’t vote and doesn’t vote.”

—Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), in an interview on Meet the Press

He wasn’t talking about the recent American “elections” where roughly half of the country doesn’t vote, a major chunk of those who are ostensibly registered to vote cannot vote, and the rest are gerrymandered into a false dichotomy. He was talking about the Iraqi “elections” which are differently horrible.

TimesCommunity.com reports on Prof. Colleen Shogun’s research:

It used to be that having 50 competitive races in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives was low, but that number has now fallen into the low teens, noted Colleen Shogun, associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University.

Under the current system, incumbents are likely to face a real challenge only from within their own party, according to Shogun, and most likely by someone with an even more extreme political view than their own.

“What you get are not only incumbents who sit on their seats but more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans because where these races are won and lost is at the primaries. And who comes out for the primaries? The hard-core partisans,” Shogun said during an interview last week with Times editors and reporters.

What are some of the prospects for change? Not good, says Professors Shogun and Rozell:

Mark Rozell, a fellow professor of public policy at GMU, suggested that states adopt a more independent process of redrawing the districts every 10 years following the census. But he and Shogun acknowledged change is not likely to happen when there is no incentive for politicians to do it.

“You’d have to have a suicidal politician,” Shogun said. “Anyone who pushes for this risks alienating their own party, and they may get what they ask for with a bad reallocation.”

What advice does Shogun offer for the Democrats?

Shogun said that, for Democrats to be competitive in future presidential races, the party is either going to have to turn its back on its liberal heritage in a ploy to reach out to Southern voters or shift its focus to the Midwest and Southwest where wins in states like Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada can overcome losses in Florida and Ohio.

You don’t need to be Carnac the Magnificent to know which strategy will look appealing to the Democrats in three years. Or sooner.