Locked-in tight?

Writing for TalkLeft, BigTentDemocrat (hereafter BTD) claims that:

The Left Flank of American politics is always destined to "lose" in the conventional sense. The Left does not "win" elections.

Let me begin by recognizing that the statements quoted above are probably true. Surely they accurately depict the recent past in the United States. The evidence suggests as much:

• The New Deal is dead in spirit and dying in practice;
  
• the Great Society now provides "modern" America only with an exemplary case of political failure;
  
• organized labor remains ineffectual, all but dead as a movement and credible political power;
  
• the Republican Party tacked hard to the right after Gerald Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter, thereby dragging the center of America's political culture along with it;
  
• the Democratic Leadership Council, the spiritual force in the Democratic Party today, made it a point to neutralize Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition he led, thus undermining the Party's leftwing while conforming to the hard right drift of the Republican Party;
  
• Bill Clinton, the echt New Democrat and proponent of triangulation, signed regressive legislation like: George H.W. Bush's North American Free Trade Agreement, The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and
  The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act;
  
• and, last but not least, a corporatist and imperialist operative like Barack Obama courted his Party's leftwing when campaigning for the presidency but then smoothly and remorselessly distanced himself from the Party's left political faction when it no longer served his ends, stacked his administration with Clinton-era insiders, quickly escalated the Afghanistan war, abandoned the rule of law and those who would affirm it by supporting past and future torture and illegal detentions, conducted secret negotiations with corporate health care interests, embraced a part of the Republican Party and its ideas while also threatening to put Social Security on the block (see this and this) after his pro-corporate health care initiative produced a law.
  

To my mind the record is clear enough, but it always bears repeating that the Democratic Party in no way opposes the Republican Party on key economic and security issues. At best, it provides the GOP with an electoral opponent committed to the status quo, not with an opposition party possessing a programmatic alternative to modern Republicanism. Together they form a political duopoly.

Given these facts, why would a sensible person consider BTD's belief false? Does the passage quoted above not capture the moment well? Is his belief not one of the most plausible judgments one may draw from observing the prejudices and workings, the prehistory and trajectory of the Obama administration? Are both parties not opposed to the emergence of a viable left politics? Sadly, the answers to the questions are obvious. There is, therefore, no reason to consider his claims false when every feature of the present moment affirms them while also suggesting that the future we will likely have will not differ from the past in a way that would favor the left.

The upshot: The left was and remains a marker of an alien and anti-American political culture.

Yet his belief, rooted deeply in America's political history as well as in contemporary experience, may serve, at best, as an obstruction to reform in the future. Why is this so?

A belief in an inevitable failure may become an obstruction because believing it true — which is to say, believing it to be a reflection of the world supported by evidence — provides a well-equipped platform for realizing a self-fulfilling prophecy. The circularity which marks a self-fulfilling prophecy issues from the fact that a belief is also an attitude, a biased attitude, toward the world. It is, in other words, a way of prejudging what exists and what could exist. It is, then, a constraint the imagination places on itself and thus, indirectly, on the world itself. It marks the improbable as irrelevant. Practically speaking, why should anyone seek the nearly impossible? Why suffer the mortification which irrelevance confers on those who embrace it? Why bear a stigma?

The left fails to win elections because it, along with everyone else, expects electoral losses. To expect a left victory entails appearing daft. The prejudgment becomes a fact in the world when many believe it and when the left fails to increase and mobilize its people. Leftists cannot win. They will not win because they fail to attract followers and they fail to attract followers because non-leftists believe they cannot win. Losing elections merely confirms that leftists are losers. Finally, they fail to attract followers because too few human beings would choose to be an alien and a loser.

Unfortunately, the practical failure of the left in the United States serves to undermine any threat it might pose to the party duopoly which dominates electoral politics in the country. Its electoral failure turns the duopoly into the only game worth playing for those who prefer to win.

I hope that it is obvious that I believe BTD's belief to express a constipated and crabbed sense of America's potential and thus of its possible futures. It is, to extend the point by restating it in slightly more concrete terms, an attitude which promotes empire abroad and dedemocratization and social ill-being at home.

That said, we must also remember that those conditions that would enable the left flank of American politics to modify Democratic Party political positions and actions, a goal which characterizes the hopes of the Party's left-wing, would also enable the broader left to form a third party meant to challenge the Democratic and Republican Parties at the polls. Both possibilities are important because a movement such as this would generate a credible threat with which the Democratic Party must contend. A party thus threatened would no longer have the security provided by a reliable base.

The crucial issue in this matter: Can most American citizens jettison a belief in the current iteration of the American Creed by embracing a stronger variant of Social Democracy than the kind of Social Democracy found in, say, The Great Society programs of the 1960s? This issue would affect the "inside the Democratic Party" and "outside the Democratic Party" paths to power. If this claim is true, as I believe it to be, then the left in the United States need not bloody its hands by participating in a party which affirms America's empire and the militarism which defines imperial governance.

Last modified on 4.12.2010 at 4:45 PM

Lest we forget….

While we once more recall the deeds of the Bush-Cheney regime, actions which permit critical observers to brand them as criminals, Jeremy Scahill wishes to recall an important truth which the center-left needs to always keep in mind when considering Washington and its ways.

Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the "secret" CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program — and the media descriptions of it — sounds a lot like the assassination policy implemented by President Bill Clinton, particularly during his second term in office.

Scahill believes the Democrats are simply disingenuous: "Partisan politics often require selective amnesia." Consequently, their outrage should be judged a dissembling trick:

Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President Bush's most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats. It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and — particularly these days — Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty. The fact is that many of Bush's worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping.

Scahill is right, of course; he uses the rest of his article to document some of America's pre-Bush-Cheney era assassination efforts. Neither Party has clean hands. The "glass house" proverb thus applies to this situation, I would say.

How we fucked up the world

David Michael Green calls out the "Me Generation"

His properly incensed essay can be read here.

Some crisis links (10.31.2008)

"Obamacons" to the rescue

Once again, Obama bears to the right: An AP report at TPM has Obama asking Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) to become his first Chief of Staff.

Emanuel is a veteran of President Clinton's White House, and has made a rapid ascent of the House leadership ladder since his election to Congress. He was chairman of the Democratic campaign committee two years ago when the party won a majority for the first time in more than a decade, and he cemented his reputation as a prodigious fundraiser and strong-willed political strategist.

This tack is unsurprising (see this, this, this). Paul Volker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman who ushered in the neo-liberal era and tamed the 1970s stagflation economy, had already joined Obama, as the Washington Independent reminds its readers. So too the self-styled Eisenhower Republican, Bill Clinton, who recently made peace with Obama (see this) after race-baiting the Senator in the spring! Scott McConnell, Editor of the American Conservative, will vote for Obama, rightly identifying the Senator as a first-rate Clintonista. Across the Atlantic, the Economist discusses what it terms the "Obamacon" phenomenon and wonders if this group, when coupled to President Obama's conservative governance, will produce the next great electoral realignment in the United States.

On a more hopeful note, Glen Ford suggests that finance capital's recent and radical troubles could provide the urban poor with an opportunity to oppose the ethnic cleansing (gentrification) of America's great cities. Perhaps a resistance effort of this kind would compel Slick Willie to take his office from Harlem and move it to the increasingly inviting spaces in SoHo!

Ohio: Soon to be the land of lawsuits, according to the New York Times. "If the outcome of next week's presidential election is close, this precariously balanced state could be the place where the two parties begin filing the inevitable lawsuits over voting irregularities, experts say."

Clinton reminisces

Looking at the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in the rearview mirror

Might the President feel any remorse about what he helped bring about?

One policy Clinton said he doesn't regret is his 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which, for the first time since the Depression, allowed commercial banks to engage in investment banking activities. Clinton said the commercial banks were an important moderating force on the risk-taking of the big investment firms that collapsed this week. "In the case of the current crisis, I believe the bill I signed allowed Bank of America to take over Merrill Lynch," he said [link added].

Nah!