Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
After at least a
year and a half of serious (more or less) Presidential campaigning — highlighted
in the final days when supporters of President Obama dredged up a comment Mitt
Romney had made in a Republican debate on June 14, 2011 suggesting that he
didn’t think disaster relief was a proper function of the federal government —
and an election season editor Dave Rolland of San Diego CityBeat called “cruelly, inhumanely, incomprehensibly,
irrationally long,” on November 6 the mountain labored and brought forth … more
of the same. Barack Obama remains President, the House of Representatives is
still controlled by Republicans, the Senate is still in Democratic hands and
the partisan gridlock voters on both sides complained about beforehand is all
too alive and well. Ironically, according to the Pennsylvania Weekly, more people voted for Democrats to represent them
in the House than for Republicans — 53,952,240 (50.25 percent) for Democrats
versus 53,402,643 (49.74 percent) for Republicans — but the GOP kept its
majority by gerrymandering election districts in states where they had control
of the governorship and the state legislature.
This year’s
election actually turned out pretty well for progressives nationwide, in
California and especially in San Diego County. Not only did Obama fend off
Romney’s challenge, but California voters passed Proposition 30, Governor Jerry
Brown’s package of temporary tax increases to ward off drastic education cuts.
They rejected Proposition 32, a cynical attack on organized labor’s ability to
fund political action disguised as a “campaign finance reform” measure; and also
Proposition 38, the rival tax-increase measure introduced by one-percenter
Molly Munger (half-brother of key Proposition 32 supporter Charles Munger, Jr.)
quite possibly as a stalking horse to defeat Proposition 30.
The statewide
vote had its disappointments. Californians responded to the siren song of
food-industry propaganda and rejected Proposition 37, which would have required
labeling of genetically modified foods. They also rejected Proposition 34,
which would have abolished the state’s death penalty and replaced it with life
imprisonment without parole. But even those initiatives lost by surprisingly
slender margins — a pleasant surprise, especially for Californians with long
enough memories to remember when any initiative to expand the death penalty
would pass by a 2-to-1 margin instead of the mere 5 percent by which 34 lost.
Locally, things
went even better for Democrats — who’d been scared in June when Republican
Scott Sherman won the San Diego City Council District 7 seat outright in the
primary and Councilmember Carl DeMaio’s Proposition B, eviscerating what’s left
of San Diego’s city employee pension system and imposing a five-year wage
freeze, passed with two-thirds of the vote. Not only did Obama become the
second Democratic Presidential candidate in history to carry San Diego County,
but Bob Filner won the Mayor’s race over DeMaio by a four-point margin.
Embattled Democratic Councilmember Sherri Lightner hung on to her seat — and to
the Democratic majority on the Council — by a substantial nine-point margin.
Dave Roberts became not only the first openly Queer person elected to the San
Diego County Board of Supervisors but the first Democrat on that board in 20
years. And Democrat Scott Peters won the county’s hardest-fought and
biggest-spending Congressional race over Republican incumbent Brian Bilbray.
The Right’s Ideas Still
Rule
But though in
many ways the November 2012 election looked good for Democrats — not just
moderates like Peters but strong progressives like Filner — the winning Democrats,
including Obama, will still be playing on largely Republican, corporate-Right
and Tea Party turf. The continued dominance of Right-wing ideology and the
corporate money behind it was exemplified by the issues that weren’t discussed in the election, particularly in the
Presidential campaign. Not once during any of the three debates between Obama
and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, nor during the vice-presidential
candidates’ debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, were the words “global
warming” or “climate change” spoken: not by the candidates, not by the
moderators, not by the carefully vetted “audience members” in the so-called
“town hall” format of the second debate.
You’d never
guess from the campaign that there’s a case that climate change is the issue — one which, if the scientific consensus that
it’s happening is correct, will force major changes in the economy and society
if the human race is to survive at all. Since the election, Obama has made two
fleeting references to it, one in his victory speech and one in a few public
comments on Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the East Coast during the closing
weeks of the campaign. But these comments — including Obama’s promise that
nothing his administration does about global warming will get in the way of
improving the economy and creating jobs — only underscored the silence with
which it had been greeted (save for Romney’s sneering attacks on Obama as the
candidate who had supposedly promised he’d stop the oceans) throughout the
campaign. Indeed, Obama’s framing of the issue bought into the Right-wing line
that protecting the environment in general, and dealing with climate change in
particular, is somehow opposed to job creation and economic growth — which is
nonsense, but it’s what the radical Right and its corporate funders want you to believe.
Nor did you hear
much in the Presidential campaign about the growing inequality of wealth and
income in the U.S. Though the American political process is not as totally controlled by corporations and super-rich people as
many on the Left believe — there’s enough residual resentment of the 1 percent,
and especially the 0.01 percent, that Romney’s status as not only rich but
super-duper-ice-cream-scooper-rich probably hurt him — it’s clear that the
priorities of the corporate elite shape and dictate the limits of American
political discourse. Curbing the power of private insurers over health care,
breaking up the big banks through antitrust suits, prosecuting the titans of
finance who ran the American economy into the ground, protecting the rights of
private-sector workers to organize unions and bargain collectively, and
amending the U.S. Constitution to end the sham of “corporate personhood”
weren’t about to be advanced by any candidate or campaign with any hope of
actually winning the presidency or any other major office.
Which isn’t to
say that elections don’t matter. When Zenger’s endorsed Ralph Nader for President in 2000 over George W. Bush and Al
Gore (and I caught hell from my friends in the Democratic Party for doing so)
it was reasonable to argue that there was no substantial difference between the
Republican and Democratic parties. Twelve years later, the difference has
become a yawning gap — not because the Democrats have moved to the Left but
because the Republicans have become so hard-line Right they’ve repudiated much
of what they used to stand for. The aggressive Right that started in the
1930’s, in response to Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal and the huge Left-wing
movement outside the electoral system
that pressured the Democrats into far more radical programs than they would
have adopted on their own, has proven over the decades that it’s a resilient,
committed movement that has steadily grown in influence and power despite
several reverses.
The modern Right
survived World War II, when many of its early leaders were accused (with
reason) of sedition for either passively supporting or actively opposing
America’s involvement in the struggle against fascism. It survived the disgrace
of its first major elected official, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), in
the 1950’s. It survived the landslide defeat of its first Presidential nominee,
Barry Goldwater, in 1964. The electoral coalition between economic libertarians
committed to lassiez-faire capitalism —
“freeing” the rich from all restrictions and regulations on their ability to
make money, no matter how many people below them economically suffer lost jobs,
decimated social safety nets, deprivation of health care and a ruined
environment as a result — along with religious social conservatives and
out-and-out racists came together in 1968, when Richard Nixon and George
Wallace between them won 57 percent of the Presidential vote to Hubert
Humphrey’s 43 percent. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 — which also gave
Republicans an outright majority in the Senate and, in alliance with
conservative Democrats, a working majority in the House — completed the
reshaping of American politics in the Right-wing image that has dominated ever
since.
Since 1968 the
Republicans have won seven Presidential elections to the Democrats’ five, but
if anything this statistic underestimates
the long-term influence the Republicans, and particularly their libertarian and
social-conservative Right wings, have had over national politics. The extent to
which the Republicans have been able, by holding this seemingly unlikely
coalition together (if it had an honest slogan, it would be, “Get government
out of the boardrooms — and into the bedrooms, where it belongs!”), to dominate
American politics and push it ever farther Rightward is shown by Obama’s health
care and climate-change initiatives. Obama adopted as his own a health
insurance reform plan first concocted by the Right-wing Heritage Foundation and
first implemented in Massachusetts by his 2012 election opponent, Mitt Romney —
and he couldn’t get a single Republican to vote for the Republicans’ health
care plan. He also adopted the unwieldy “cap-and-trade” alternative to a
straight-out tax on carbon as a response to climate change — and he couldn’t
even get enough Democrats on board to overwhelm the solid Republican opposition
to what had originally been a Republican idea.
Ruling
Class Isn’t a Monolith
Leftists tend to
write about the “ruling class” or the “corporate elite” or some such term as if
it were a monolith. It isn’t. Its members may be united on the need to preserve
capitalism in general and their fortunes in particular, and beginning in the
early 1970’s they moved pretty much in lock-step away from the relative class
peace of the 1940’s and 1950’s towards a more aggressive stance to drive down
wages, eliminate “burdensome” government regulations and drive organized labor
out of existence. But there’s a world of difference between relatively
enlightened capitalists like Warren Buffett and George Soros on one side and
libertarian maniacs like the Koch brothers on the other. Indeed, one of the
most dramatic developments in the ruling class in the last two decades has been
the emergence of people like the Kochs who have read Ayn Rand’s Atlas
Shrugged (a Right-wing novel in which the
world’s capitalists disappear and hide out in a mountain redoubt in Colorado
until the world realizes it can’t do without them) and believe it.
There used to be
a lot of people in the ruling class who tolerated politically populist rhetoric
from politicians as long as they could be assured that the politicians who
screamed “change!” the loudest on the stump wouldn’t bring it about once in
office. No more. As Richard Eskow wrote in a September 19 blog post on
ourfuture.org, not only do the Right-wing radicals in the ruling class want
even more of the nation’s wealth and income than they have now, “they want adoration.
From the looks of it, nothing short of an Roman Imperial cult — complete with
their apotheosis as state deities upon their death — would satisfy them.
Obama’s corporate-friendly policies, which have protected their wealth and
protected them from judgment, aren’t enough. They want him to pledge his fealty
on the White House steps — or they’ll destroy him.”
And if that seems like hyperbolic exaggeration from a
Left-wing blogger, let’s hear it from one of the super-rich: private equity
(read: “hedge fund”) manager Bob Israel. In a November 2 Los Angeles Times article, Israel explained that the reason Wall Street’s
campaign donations were going overwhelmingly to Romney despite all Obama had
done for them (keeping the big banks big, bailing them out with billions in
taxpayers’ money, refusing to prosecute any of their executives, and not restoring
any of the New Deal-era financial regulations that kept American capitalism
relatively honest and healthy between the 1930’s and the 1970’s) was that Obama
“has really been harassing businesses” — not in actual policy, but on the
campaign trail. “The history of our country is not to hold up wealthy people as
villains,” Israel said, “but as beacons, as magnets, as examples you’d want to
emulate.”
Israel is a lousy historian — check out the late 19th
century cartoons of Thomas Nast (whose last name contributed the word “nasty”
to the English language) and his vicious caricatures of the robber barons of
the time — but his attitudes, and those of the people who attended Mitt
Romney’s now-notorious May 17 fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida, are indicative
of many of today’s elite capitalists. The sneering contempt with which Romney
attacked the “47 percent who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has
a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health
care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That — that’s an entitlement. And
the government should give it to them,” is a good indication of the attitude of
much of America’s modern-day ruling class.
GOP to
People of Color and Youth: Don’t Vote!
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the mainstream media
about the Republicans’ supposed dilemma after the 2012 campaign. Most of the
explanations of Romney’s loss center around two facts: the demographic shifts
in the American population — we’re now a younger and considerably less white
country than we used to be, and in demonizing people of color in general and
Latinos in particular the Republicans have allegedly shot themselves in the
foot with growing segments of the electorate — and also that Obama’s people had
a better “ground game”: that they worked harder and got more people knocking on
doors to bring out their potential voters. So far the Republican response has
been to do more of what they tried to do before the 2012 election: strike back
at the growing number of younger and darker voters by preventing them from
voting at all.
Just three days after the election the U.S. Supreme Court
announced it’s going to take a case on whether Section 5 of the 1965 Voting
Rights Act is constitutional. Section 5 identifies 18 states with particularly
strong histories of disenfranchising African-American voters and requires them
to “pre-clear” any changes in their election laws with the federal government
to make sure they don’t have a racially discriminatory effect. It was under
this law that a court set aside the Virginia legislature’s attempt to impose a
photo ID requirement on its voters — and that decision quite likely enabled
Obama to carry Virginia in 2012. In the run-up to 2012 the Republican governors
and state legislators passed photo-ID requirements, cut back on early
registration and voting, and passed other laws designed to hamper youths,
low-income people and non-whites from voting at all. One Republican State
Senator in Pennsylvania openly boasted that the photo ID bill he introduced
would enable Mitt Romney to carry the state — and it might have if a judge
hadn’t temporarily set it aside.
It’s clear that for some Republicans — including the
five-justice Republican majority on the current Supreme Court — the long-term,
or at least medium-term, solution to the changing demographics of the U.S.
electorate is to make it as hard as possible, preferably altogether impossible, for those younger, poorer and darker people to
vote at all. And even if they do vote
and Democrats get elected, decades of Republican ideological hegemony and the
enormous power of Big Money in our elections process — made even worse by the
2010 Citizens United decision and the
crushing weight of the mega-rich through super-PAC’s and so-called “social
welfare” organizations that don’t even have to disclose their donors — ensure
that they won’t be able to do much of anything.
Left Wills
Itself Into Impotence
It also doesn’t help that the American Left has been
reduced to a pitiful remnant of its former self. In the 1890’s, the 1930’s and
the 1960’s there were mass Left movements that put pressure on Democrats and
Republicans alike and pushed them to places they otherwise wouldn’t have gone: antitrust
legislation to break up the huge concentrations of corporate power; Social
Security and minimum-wage legislation; acceptance of the right of workers to
organize into unions and bargain collectively; effective controls on the
ability of banks and other financial institutions to speculate with the 99
percent’s money; an end to racial segregation and at least the beginnings of
legal and social equality for people of color, women and Queers. Now, however,
the “Left” in the U.S. is a series of tiny debating societies, cut off from its
roots among working-class people and centered around academe.
What’s more, it’s willed itself into impotence by
consciously rejecting any effective
involvement in electoral politics (which means, in the U.S. political system,
participating in the Democratic Party) and adopting an insane way of governing
itself based on so-called “internal democracy” and “consensus,”
“non-hierarchical” or “horizontal” decision-making. This is the big reason why
the big mass protest movement that arose from the economic collapse of the
2000’s was from the Right — the Tea
Party — and the Occupy movement became yet another of the Left’s occasional
missed opportunities that fizzled out and had virtually no long-term effect on
U.S. politics at all. Unless the Left does some fundamental rethinking of these
boneheaded strategic and tactical decisions — and abandons the delusion that
choices of political strategy and tactics are issues of profound morality,
which has led many U.S. Leftists to reject either the Democratic Party or
involvement in electoral politics at all — there will never be the kind of mass
U.S. Left that helped push progressive reforms through unwilling legislatures
in the 1890’s, the 1930’s and the 1960’s.
This only adds to the bind America faces as it comes to
grips with the decline of its imperial ambitions at the hands of both nature
(the ultra-wasteful fossil-fuel economy on which the U.S. built its economic
and industrial supremacy is no longer sustainable) and money (as the U.S. becomes
ever more reliant on foreign borrowing to keep its ultra-rich ultra-rich).
Despite Obama’s two Presidential victories, America remains under the thumb of
a Right-wing ideology that regards environmental protection as a luxury we
can’t afford; vast inequalities of wealth and income as either the impersonal
workings of “The Market” or no less than what the rich deserve; organized labor
as a 20th century idea whose time has come and gone; and access to
health care as a privilege, not a right. The real takeaway of 2012 is how far Right the U.S. has moved
long-term — to the point where the relatively progressive platforms of Theodore
Roosevelt in 1912 and even Richard Nixon in 1968 are far to the Left of
anything any major-party Presidential
candidate would dare advocate today.
