Today’s DN! (34m04s into the show) features an interview with Howard Zinn, famed historian, civil rights activist, author of the excellent “A People’s History of the United States” and the companion book “Voices of a People’s History of the United States”, also worth reading (and probably more accessible to a casual read). I was given copies of both of them by two thoughtful relatives (thanks N&L), so I know first-hand that they are worth reading.

Late in the interview, you can hear Zinn say (54m03s):

AMY GOODMAN: Were your surprised by the election of President Bush, November 2004?

HOWARD ZINN: A little. A little. That is, I thought that maybe by then, perhaps there would be enough understanding about the deception, the hypocrisy of the US government, just enough to dethrone Bush, but I say only a little surprised, because on the other hand, I knew that John Kerry was not the candidate to represent the feelings of the American people. By then, by the time of the election, at least half of the American people were already against the war. Now they faced an election where 100% of the candidates were for the war. So, they had nobody to vote for. […]

But Zinn had signed a letter which aimed to discourage people from voting for one such candidate, Ralph Nader, and may have helped to disincentivize people from even discussing his campaign with like-minded people on the Progressive Left.

[…] And so I — with nobody to vote for, with no real alternative, of course, 40% of the voting population did not vote. And people ought to remember this. You know, Bush did not win overwhelmingly. You know, he won by one or two percentage points. And if you consider how many people voted for him against the voting population, you know, he got, you know, maybe 30% of the voting population. But it was a commentary on the pitiful showing of the Democratic Party, its failure to be a true opposition party in this country, and I think maybe a wake-up call to Americans to try to create a new political alternative to a political system that is really a one-party system, and it is quite corrupt.

Who has been saying this for the past three terms, at least? Ralph Nader, former Green party candidate and independent candidate for US President, and virtually every other so-called third party presidential candidate. They’ve been saying it for years, probably decades if one goes back far enough. I’m glad to hear more people recognize the effect of our first-past-the-post election system, debate lockouts, and years of corporate funding of both major parties.

But this would ring more true coming from someone who hadn’t spent the last election pushing people away from one candidate who shares these views.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see that movement developing now? Outside of the two parties?

HOWARD ZINN: I hope so.

AMY GOODMAN: Or within one of the parties?

HOWARD ZINN: Well, there is some movement within the Democratic Party. And I think it will take work within and work without. That is, it will take people in the Democratic Party to demand a change in the Democratic Party. I notice that the Democratic Party in California has just had a convention in which they voted for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. And this is a good sign, and if Democratic Party groups around the country would demand that the National Democratic Party call for an end to this war and an end to the occupation, that would be a sign that the Democratic Party is changing and moving in the right direction. But it will not do that, I think, unless there are groups outside of the Democratic Party that create a movement that puts pressure on the Democratic Party.

Within the Democratic Party, there is no such movement in this direction that I know of. I only know of the “National Security Democrats” who are, among other things, helping to try and eradicate all anti-war sentiment from the Democratic Party so they can more efficiently pursue their corporate masters’ interests.

Outside the Democratic Party, Nader is one candidate who has consistently been applying pressure specifically aimed at the Democratic Party, pointing out their foibles (and they are numerous and important). The Socialists too have been doing this work, and they get far too little recognition even from sympathetic leftists.

I hope that Zinn can remember talk like this come election time when it will count for something most people can appreciate in their own lives. If voting is most Americans’ most overtly political act, it matters who they vote for or if they don’t vote at all. We should care more about the quality of the choices and we should care why so many Americans don’t vote. If people can be motivated to divorce themselves from the political process by not voting, can they be motivated to give their vote to someone who could use it to help justify political moves to the left?

And I hope Amy Goodman can bring some challenging questions to leftists during the time in between elections so that we’re reminded how self-defeatingly inconsistent (or is that “diverse”?) the Progressive Left is. The cycle of settling for the least worst is self-perpetuating; it always produces choices which are so bad that some will get caught in the trap of seeing the worst without noticing how the trend tends toward what most Americans don’t want. If anyone can appreciate the value of recalling history to avoid repeating it, it’s a historian.

Elizabeth Schulte writes about the Democrats on the right and the progressives who championed the Democratic Party’s cause during the most recent election.

It will happen again in 2007 during the run-up to the 2008 election. The Democrats are starting early, telling anti-war advocates to be silent, but the progressives will join them when the pressure is put on them.

I think the time has come where I’ll have to add the Socialist Worker to my short list of things I read regularly.

Common Dreams is pretty worked up about the recent bankruptcy bill and about the “73 Democrats Who Sold Out Consumers”.

Please don’t forget to chastise Common Dreams when the Democrats are running for office and Common Dreams carries article after article on how we should let the Democrats run without asking them any tough questions or taking them to task for their voting record or campaign funding.

The Democrats are trying to bring in anti-abortion supporters, get the anti-war supporters to either shut up or leave, and somehow they think they’ll win elections? Or is it that it really doesn’t matter if they win elections because they can just wait for voters to become pissed off at Republicans and vote Democrat out of spite?

The real solution: let third parties and independents run, get on the ballot, and debate in real debates with their corporate-funded duopolistic competitors. Also, we need to get a ranked voting system (feel free to haggle over which method is appropriate: instant run-off, some Condorcet method, etc.) so we can get away from “a vote for X is a for for Y” (where X and Y are candidates of the Democrats and Republicans in the same race). The goal is to shift focus from personalities and on to policies.

Kevin Zeese offers a must-read (Counterpunch mirror) for any self-respecting progressive who is not just a Democratic Party hack pretending to be anti-war. Here’s a sample:

“Hopefully the peace movement also learned a lesson: Democrats need to be opposed for engaging in war just as pro-war Republicans need to be opposed. The anti-Vietnam War movement removed LBJ from office because of his support for the Vietnam War. Today, pro-war Democrats should be removed from office for supporting the Iraq War. We need to stand firm on our principles especially when it comes to the illegal war in Iraq that is destroying or damaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killing or maiming tens of thousands of Americans, torturing prisoners by rendition or in Guantanemo Bay, Afghanistan or Iraq, isolating the U.S. from the world and making us less safe from terrorism.

The anti-war movement is only one example. Labor, civil rights, civil liberties, anti-corporate globalization, fair taxes, women’s rights — indeed every progressive movement is taken for granted by the Democrats. Why? Because progressives let them.”

The question is whether progressives have the guts to stand up for their principles at election time, when it counts.

Election 2004: The Nation joins the Democratic Party sycophants and tells people to shun Nader’s campaign. Everyone knew his campaign wouldn’t get the votes he got in 2000 and would likely be a non-entity insofar as being an effective so-called “spoiler” (even without getting into the prejudice of the term “spoiler”). But many billable hours were spent trying to keep Nader off the ballot even in gerrymandered states that would have gone Democrat no matter what (like Illinois).

Now: The Nation is telling us curious things like:

“Perhaps being shamed publicly, and being pressured by the grassroots, will help Congressional Democrats get their act together. Toward that end, we’ve initiated a biweekly “Minority/Majority” feature that identifies—by name—Democrats who give succor to the GOP. (It also praises those who’ve helped the cause of Democrats becoming the majority party again.) If Democrats don’t define themselves as an effective opposition soon, they could end up being an ineffective one for a long time to come.”

Perhaps being shamed publicly about their lack of support for genuinely progressive candidates will get the Nation to support such candidates when they run. If Democrats can be “ineffective […] for a long time to come” something is wrong with the system. They shouldn’t have so much power that they can stick around for “a long time” and remain “ineffective” yet stop other candidates with far more impressive public service records from being heard.

You can still catch reruns of the recent teach-in on C-SPAN. The teach-in was organized by some of the self-described anti-war groups. The teach-in dates back to the Vietnam war. There, the anti-war movement taught anyone who wanted to come in and learn effective strategies for opposing the Vietnam war. You’d find stimulating discussion which encouraged the audience to participate by contributing challenging questions and statements, the entire group was free to argue productively, and learn why the US went to Vietnam at all.

Very little of this has apparently survived to the current day.

I watched the teach-in live on C-SPAN Thursday night. I saw nobody ask challenging questions. I saw very little input from the audience, it was mostly a staged affair for the speakers. Nobody who spoke had anything to say about voting pro-war for Kerry (let alone distinguishing between those who could vote for Kerry to get Bush out of office and those who should have voted their consciences instead). Naomi Klein said that she blamed Kerry for his weak stance—not opposing the war—but where were the anti-war movement demands for Kerry? How can anyone blame Kerry for not taking the anti-war supporters seriously if they ask for nothing of him?

Nobody asked about practical recommendations for what one could do in the next day, during the next week, or during the next month to oppose the continuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know what recommendations those would be, but I’m not up there leading a teach-in either. Nobody challenged the lack of marches for so many months that the anti-war movement had made itself even more invisible in the eyes of the general public.

Nobody questioned the validity of the fervor to get the troops home by asking how to get the troops home. It was more like a meeting to agree to meet again in the indeterminate future. A lot of vague philosophy was shared, which can be okay so long as it is paired with something you can use.

It was also very civil, which seemed oddly inappropriate to me. I expected a heated (and thus, educational as well as interesting) exchange of views from a variety of positions within the anti-war movement. Instead, I got the anti-war movement version of the US presidential debates. Stilted, long-running, and little real input from anyone not on the panel.

Will members of the anti-war movement behave in line with their alleged ethics (by voting for anti-war candidates)? When the time comes for them to vote will they cave and vote Democratic Party instead? Will anti-war participants do what they can to dismiss voting as not a big deal (now they can afford to play this game because any election they care about is over a year away)?

Speaking of ignored elections, we’ve got one coming up. Ironically, people have more power during these elections because so few people vote in them. Will anyone from the anti-war movement champion voting for anti-war candidates? I doubt it. I’m betting that they’ll either ignore the election or cave and vote for pro-war Democrats.

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?”