Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
A funny thing
happened in November 2015 on the way to the supposed self-destruction of the
Republican Party and the radical-Right ideology for which it stands. On
November 3, in a series of elections so obscure many progressive political
activists (including me) weren’t all that aware they were even happening, the
Right won sweeping victory after sweeping victory on a wide range of issues in
locations as diverse as Kentucky and San Francisco.
In the race for
governor of Kentucky, Tea Party Republican Matt Bevin crushed Democrat Jack
Conway by nearly 10 percent (511,771 votes to 426,944, or 52.5 to 43.8 percent),
despite pre-election polls that had Conway leading by as much as 11 points. In
Houston, a city that in its last election chose open Lesbian Annise Parker as
mayor, a Queer rights ordinance was repealed by the shockingly huge margin of
61 to 39 percent.
In Ohio, an
initiative to legalize marijuana went down to an equally crushing defeat, with
65 percent of voters opposed and only 35 percent in favor — despite polls
showing Ohioans broadly in favor of allowing marijuana use. And even in
supposedly progressive San Francisco, an initiative to regulate the
home-sharing service Airbnb lost, 55 to 45 percent.
Initiatives to
raise the minimum wage also fared poorly. After the city council of Portland,
Maine voted to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, “Fight for 15”
campaigners put an initiative on the ballot to take it up to $15. But Portland
voters decided $10.10 was enough and rejected the additional increase. In
Tacoma, Washington, there were dueling minimum-wage initiatives on the ballot —
one for $15 and one for $12 — and while both passed, the one for $12 got more
votes so it will be the one that takes effect.
And in Spokane,
Washington, a ballot measure to create a so-called “Workers’ Bill of Rights” —
a minimum-wage increase, equal pay for equal work, protections against wrongful
termination and preferences for workers’ over corporations’ rights — went down
to a sweeping defeat. Over 62 percent of Spokane voters opposed the measure,
and even Spokane’s labor unions offered it little support.
There were a few
bright spots in the overall gloomy picture for progressives on November 3.
Voters in Maine and the city of Seattle, Washington approved public financing
of political campaigns on the so-called “clean money” model, in which, once a
candidate gets a certain number of small donors, they qualify for public
support as long as they don’t take any more private money.
Ohio voters took
the power to draw legislative districts away from the legislature and set up a
process that no one party can dominate. And San Francisco voters passed a
crackdown on major corporations who set up so-called “Astroturf” campaigns —
phony citizens’ organizations or nonprofits through which to promote
corporate-friendly laws or policies — by requiring corporate funders of such groups
to disclose how much they’re giving them.
Overwhelmingly,
though, the election results of November 3, 2015 were a strong sweep for the
American Right. To progressives, they were a wake-up call that we still live in
a profoundly conservative country, one which overwhelmingly distrusts
government and believes the “free market,” not legislators or initiative
writers, should determine how much people should get paid for their work.
It was also a
reminder that despite a few defeats — notably the U.S. Supreme Court decision
enforcing marriage equality for same-sex couples nationwide — the so-called
“social” or “Christian” Right is still very much alive. The Queer-rights
initiative in Houston was crushed partly by the opposition of African-American
religious leaders, but mainly by an hysterical campaign that said that because
the ordinance included protections for Transgender people, men would dress up
as women and pose as Transgender just to get into women’s restrooms and eye
women’s private parts.
A rational observer
might read such an argument and think it said more about the sick concerns of
the people making it than anything that might really happen. But one of the
reasons the social Right has won so many battles against the Queer community
has been their skill at inventing these freaky straw men. In the 1990’s it was
stories about Gay soldiers and sailors ogling their straight comrades in
showers that led to President Clinton to retreat from his campaign pledge to
allow Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals to serve openly in the military and instead
sign into law the hateful “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
In 2008 it was
the hideous propaganda that persuaded a majority of Californians to pass
Proposition 8, which banned legal recognition of same-sex marriage and lasted
five years until the U.S. Supreme Court threw it out on a technicality.
Remember the ads about schoolchildren who’d supposedly be “forced” to listen to
their teachers talk about same-sex marriage? About the little girl who
breathlessly told us that if Prop. 8 failed, she could “marry a princess”?
About the claim — demonstrably false, but effective nonetheless — that churches
would be forced to perform same-sex weddings?
Well, the
radical Right has found a similar weapon to derail the quest for equal rights
not only for Transgender people but Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals as well: the
public restroom. That’s why I heaved a huge sigh of relief three years ago when
a Right-wing attempt to put SB 48, California’s pioneering law to protect the
rights of Transgender students in public schools, before voters barely missed
getting enough signatures to make it on the ballot.
If it had
succeeded, Queer rights advocates in California would have had to face the same
ugly, but devastatingly effective, propaganda about potential rapists donning
dresses and haunting women’s restrooms that worked so well in Houston. And our
cause in Houston wasn’t helped by a typically wimpy campaign defending the
Queer rights ordinance which made the same mistakes made by the marriage equality
movement until it found its groove in 2012: trotting out celebrities and making
abstract arguments about “equality” instead of communicating to voters the real
pain suffered by Queer victims of discrimination.
A
Right-Wing Country
But it would be
a mistake to look for local reasons for the progressive defeats of November 3,
2015 and over-analyze the election results based on them. The fact is the
results indicate just how conservative a nation the United States of America is
politically — and has been at least since 1968, when Republican Richard Nixon
and American Independent George Wallace took a combined 57 percent of the
Presidential vote to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. The Right didn’t
solidify its electoral triumph until Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980,
but the 1968 results showed an ongoing realignment in the American electorate
that ended the New Deal coalition and ushered in a period of Right-wing
dominance that, despite occasional hiccups, has continued to this day.
Though Nixon’s
and Democrat-turned-independent-turned Republican South Carolina Senator Strom
Thurmond’s “Southern strategy” in the 1968 campaign was originally planned as a
one-time response to the threat of Wallace’s independent campaign, it ensured
Republican dominance of Presidential politics for the next three decades. It
flipped the two major parties’ historical positions on civil rights and racial
equality. The Democrats, once the party of Jefferson Davis and then of the Ku
Klux Klan, became associated with the African-American struggle for equality.
Meanwhile, the Republicans, once the “Party of Lincoln” ideologically as well
as historically, assumed the Democrats’ former mantle as defenders of white
supremacy masquerading as “states’ rights.”
The result was a
long-term switch in the “Solid South” from once solidly Democratic to now
solidly Republican. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in
1964, he told his aide Richard Goodwin, “I’ve just handed the South to the
Republicans for the next 15 years.” It’s turned out to be a lot longer than
that. The three Democrats who have won Presidential elections since 1968 have
done so only because they had special characteristics that partially
neutralized the Republicans’ structural advantages in the South. Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton did it by being white Southerners themselves, and Barack Obama
did it by mobilizing such a heavy African-American vote it made up for his
piss-poor showing among working-class whites in the South.
And not just in
the South, either. In 1964 George Wallace mounted an exploratory campaign
against Lyndon Johnson in Wisconsin and did so well commentators coined the
phrase “white backlash” to describe it. Though Wallace had mounted his campaign
as a nominal Democrat, Republicans looked at his success and realized it
offered them a recipe for pulling working-class whites away from the Democratic
Party and thereby shattering the New Deal coalition that had allowed the
Democrats to win seven of the nine Presidential elections between 1932 and
1964.
They were helped
by another development of the 1960’s: the rise of the so-called
“counterculture.” Working-class whites who had risen from poverty largely due
to the efforts of organized labor — and the laws passed by Democrats that made
it possible to form unions in big manufacturing industries — saw their sons and
daughters grow their hair long, listen to loud, obnoxious music, do drugs and
trash the colleges and universities their parents had worked their asses off to
raise the money to send them to.
The result was
an overwhelming backlash that continues today. It has cost the Democrats any
chance at winning a majority of white male votes in a Presidential election,
and forced them to rely on the votes of women and people of color to get
elected to virtually anything. What’s
more, it’s given the Republican Party and its sympathetic media outlets — talk
radio and Fox News — a raw, roaring energy that motivates its voters to go to
the polls far more often.
Republican
voters are motivated because they think that they’re being overtaxed and
discriminated against to support people they believe inferior — people of
color, undocumented immigrants, Queers and other counterculturalists. All too
often, Democrats and progressives in general either tune out electoral politics
as a distraction, actively reject them or just don’t bother to vote. The
oft-repeated truisms that turnout in mid-term elections is low, and low
turnouts benefit the Republicans and the Right in general, are not
explanations. They are EXCUSES.
We
Sleep — They Live
In 1988 John
Carpenter made a science-fiction film called They Live, which was based on the premise that the entire
Right-wing political movement had been started by space aliens who had
infiltrated Earth by disguising themselves as ordinary humans. They had largely
taken over Earth’s politics — in the theatrical and DVD version (though not the
one released to TV) there’s a funny scene that revealed that Ronald Reagan was
a disguised alien — and their goal was to set up untrammeled lassiez-faire capitalism worldwide so Earth’s environment would be
polluted, and when it was so filthy it resembled the aliens’ home world they
would come in en masse and take
over.
The protagonist
of They Live stumbled on a resistance
movement when he picked up a special pair of sunglasses that enabled him to see
what was really going on, including the subliminal messages — “Obey,” “Stay
Asleep,” “No Imagination,” “Submit to Authority” and the like — the aliens were
transmitting to ordinary people through the media. The members of the
resistance were trying to get the masses to wake up to what was really going
on, and their slogan was, “We sleep — they live.” (The premise was similar to
that of the later Matrix films,
but Carpenter did a lot more with it.)
The difference
between Right-wing and Left-wing America can be summed up in the same four
words by which the resistance movement in Carpenter’s film attempted to wake up
the people: “We sleep — they live.” Over the last 50 years, ever since Barry
Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign set the template for the Tea Party (read
Norman Mailer’s description of a Goldwater rally in his book Cannibals and
Christians and you’ll be struck by its
similarity to a Tea Party event today) and later Right-wing candidacies, the
Right has shown remarkable perseverance and constructed a level of organization
that has enabled them to move from victory to victory, and to come back
stronger from seemingly devastating defeats.
Meanwhile, the
U.S. Left has carefully and meticulously followed a series of insane policies
that well earn the description Vladimir Lenin applied to the ultra-Leftists of
his place and time: “an infantile disorder.” If the Left in this country had
deliberately tried to reduce themselves
to irrelevance, they couldn’t have done a better job. So what has the Right
done right and the Left done wrong?
Electoral
politics and direct action. The American
Right has realized that you do not achieve dramatic social change in the U.S.
(or anywhere else, for that matter) exclusively through electoral
politics. Nor do you achieve it exclusively by street activism —
demonstrations, protests, civil disobedience, strikes. It takes both. This simple fact was something the American Left
knew and put into effect in the 1890’s, the 1930’s and the 1960’s. Today we’ve
forgotten it.
Instead, all too
many American Leftists regard electoral politics and direct action as two
opposed alternatives, and think they have to choose one or the other. Often
activists who have chosen direct action look down on and even ridicule those
who work in the electoral system as “sell-outs” or Leftists in name only. In
turn, progressives involved in electoral politics tend to fear the
direct-action activists and worry that they’ll do something “extreme” to
jeopardize their hard-won positions within the system.
The Right’s
electoral activists and direct activists work together to build their influence
both within the political system and outside of it. The Tea Party started
almost as soon as President Obama took office and parlayed public rage against
his administration in general and his health-care plan in particular into a
political force that has virtually taken over the U.S. Congress. Tea
Party-identified candidates like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are among the leading
contenders for the Republican Presidential nomination.
By contrast, the
closest equivalent on the U.S. Left, Occupy, didn’t start until more
than 2 ½ years after Obama took office, explicitly disclaimed any interest in
electoral politics, made an initial splash and didn’t have a Plan B once city
police closed down their highly publicized encampments. “We don’t want to be a
Tea Party of the Left,” several Occupiers told me during their movement’s brief
heyday — making my heart sink because a Tea Party of the Left is exactly what
we need and what I was hoping Occupy would turn into.
Bernie Sanders
gets it. The Vermont Senator who, after a political lifetime as an independent,
joined the Democratic Party to run for President this year (see “The
will-o’-the-wisp of ‘third parties’,” below), has been ridiculed by the
mainstream media because of his call for a “political revolution.” But what he
actually means by that — hundreds of thousands of people in the streets
demanding radical change — is essential for achieving the progressive agenda.
What all too many progressive and Left Americans don’t realize is electing
candidates who are at least persuadable on their key issues is also essential.
The
will-o’-the-wisp of “third parties.” One
thing the American Right has done right — and the American Left has done wrong
— is avoided the tempting trap of organizing or supporting alternative
political parties. Instead the Right has focused its electoral involvements
almost exclusively within the Republican Party. There have been a few
Right-wingers who’ve worked inside the Democratic Party, but the mass
Right-wing movements like the Tea Party have concentrated on working with the
Republicans in order to take them over; instead of forming the Tea Party Party,
they have sought — largely successfully — to remake the Republicans in the Tea
Party’s image.
By contrast, all
too many progressives and Leftists I know not only avoid working within the
Democratic Party but take active pride in having rejected it. Most people I
know who’s registered with the Green or Peace and Freedom Party can vividly
remember the last Democratic President they ever voted for — and what they did
in office that disillusioned them and caused them to reject the Democratic
Party and its candidates forever. It’s quite similar to listening to born-again
Christians talk about the experience that led them to find Jesus and abandon
their former secular lives — and, like being born again, it’s an experience
that’s more about personal transformation than political reality.
The bare-bones
reality is that, with exceedingly rare exceptions, only Republicans and
Democrats are allowed to govern America. Joining any other party means
consigning yourself to political oblivion. It made sense to organize the Green
Party in the country where the movement was founded, Germany, because their
electoral laws guarantee that if you get five percent or more of the vote
nationwide, you get that percentage of seats in their legislature even if you
didn’t win a plurality in any one district. It did not make sense to organize a Green Party in the U.S.,
with its system of winner-take-all districts, its long tradition of two and only two important parties, and the power the two
established parties have to write the electoral laws to keep both Left and
Right rivals out.
Treating
electoral strategy as pragmatic, not “moral.” One reason there are so many American Leftists who self-righteously —
and self-defeatingly — reject working in the Democratic Party is they feel that
making that compromise would literally be “immoral.” Politics is not an arena
in which to find “morality” — if that’s what you want, join a church instead.
Politics, both in and out of the electoral system, is a series of strategies and
tactics to be used or abandoned according to whether or not they work to put
your ideas into practice and enact them into public policy. It is not an arena
for personal growth or expressing your “morality.”
Closely allied
is the delusion many American Leftists have talked themselves into that there
is “no difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties. Anyone who’s
watched any of this year’s Presidential debates would be quickly disabused of
that notion. It’s true that both the Republican and Democratic parties are
committed to the defense of the modern capitalist economic system, and it’s
also true that they’re both funded by wealthy individuals and (to the extent
the law allows) corporations. It’s true that they largely represent the ruling
class and are committed to maintaining capitalism.
But the
Republican and Democratic parties still differ profoundly in how they propose to maintain capitalism, and those
differences are important in terms of where and how effectively both Right and
Left activists should work to pursue their political agendas. As weakened as
these commitments have become over time, the Democratic Party still believes
that government has a right — and, at least in some instances, a duty — to
intervene in the economy and put brakes on the ability of corporations to
exploit their workers and seek profits, no matter what.
The Republicans,
by contrast, blame almost everything wrong on government. Their solution to
virtually every social problem is to increase the share of wealth and income
going to the rich, “free” corporations from all remaining restrictions on their
ability to exploit their workers, jeopardize their health and safety, and
despoil the environment. They want to destroy the few remaining avenues for
workers to organize into unions and bargain collectively with their employers.
They want to abolish Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation and
every other part of America’s tattered social safety net.
The modern-day
Republican Party believes in an extreme libertarian ideology that regards all
taxation of the rich to benefit the not-so-rich as “theft” and “slavery.” Its
policies would produce a massive shift of social risk from institutions to
individuals. If you got old, you lost your job, got sick, if an accident and
hadn’t (or hadn’t been able to) put money aside to pay for those eventualities,
tough luck. You’d be on your own and government would be specifically forbidden
to do anything about it. They would expect you to ask your local church for
help instead, and hope they were both
able and willing to help you.
In other words,
despite the deficiencies of the Democratic Party, it’s still the only game in
town for Americans who reject the extreme libertarianism of the Republican
Party and believe in a society whose members accept the existence of a mutual
obligation for people to act together collectively to ensure their future. I
recently received an e-mail from the Green Party denouncing Democratic
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and saying, “A dollar for Bernie Sanders
is a dollar for Hillary Clinton.” Well, a vote — or a dollar — for the Green
Party’s likely presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, is a vote or a dollar
for Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio or whoever survives the demolition
derby the Republican Presidential nomination has become.
“Internal
democracy.” One of the most staggeringly
awful decisions American progressives and Leftists have made in the last 40
years is to impose a regime of so-called “internal democracy” on their organizations
that makes it utterly impossible for them to do anything. “Internal democracy”
was a shibboleth seized on by Leftists who were horrified at the authoritarian
dictatorships Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba had turned into,
and it was a way of ensuring that no movement led by them would ever establish
a dictatorship once it took power. Unfortunately, it worked by ensuring that
the Left would become so chronically disorganized and impotent it would never
get anywhere near taking power anywhere at any time.
Every successful
Left-wing movement — “successful” meaning that it either launched a revolution
that actually took power or built a network of institutions (like labor unions
and civil-rights organizations) with long-term impact — has been run in a
top-down hierarchical manner. And every Left movement that has attempted to
govern itself according to the principles of “internal democracy,” from the
Paris Commune of 1870 to Occupy in 2011, has failed. And they’ve all failed for
the same reason: they didn’t have the organizational strength to withstand and
survive the authorities’ repression.
As Malcolm
Gladwell, in his article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”
(The New Yorker, October 4, 2010), put
it, “If you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment, you have to be
a hierarchy.” Gladwell cited the early actions of the African-American civil
rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and the Greensboro,
North Carolina sit-ins of 1960, and noted that they were organized with what
even their enemies, the White Citizens’ Councils, said was “military
precision.”
Gladwell quoted
movement historian Aldon D. Morris, who argued that the hierarchical structure
of the civil rights movement came from the Black church. “Each group was
task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,”
Morris wrote in the passage Gladwell quoted. “Individuals were held accountable
for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister,
who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”
Likewise, anyone
who reads Stephen Spender’s biography of Mahatma Gandhi — the book on which
Richard Attenborough based his multi-Academy Award-winning biopic — will note
the military precision with which he led his civil disobedience campaigns. In
particular, Gandhi was as obsessed as any military commander with surprise;
though his “attacks” were nonviolent, like any good general he wanted them to
startle and keep his adversaries, the British, off balance, never knowing what
he was going to do next.
By contrast,
Occupy was organized as what Gladwell called a “network,” in which the
decision-making process was kept as loose and open as possible. Occupy made its
decisions — to the extent it ever did — in “general assemblies” of whoever
showed up, which could be as few as 10 people or more than 100. Though Gladwell
wrote a year before Occupy, he uncannily predicted its failure: “Because
networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of
authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They
can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error.
How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction
when everyone has an equal say?”
Talking the
people’s language. The American Right’s
orators and propagandists speak in simple, direct language, expressing and
appealing to the fears and obsessions of its audience. The American Left speaks
in academic jargon that doesn’t particularly appeal to anybody outside the
choir. I suspect this is a hangover from the days in the 1970’s, when the
Leftist movements that had arisen in the 1960’s in support of civil rights and
against the Viet Nam war were being violently suppressed by the U.S. government
— and many Leftists survived the purge by hiding out in the halls of academe.
Of course, the
Left’s association with the academic world — and the Right’s savaging of them
for that — long predates the 1970’s. Many of the original progressives of the
turn of the last century came from college campuses and sought to remake
society by taking over government, purging it of the corruption from big-city
political machines and corporate donors, and reorganizing it along “scientific”
principles worked out in college political science, economics and public
administration departments.
In the 1930’s —
a period in which the economic collapse of American capitalism actually
benefited the Left (today, by contrast, it seems to be paving the way for a
sweep to power by the Republican Party and the political Right) — Franklin
Roosevelt’s administration was filled with recent college graduates, as well as
some of their professors. They became known as the “Brain Trust,” and their academic
backgrounds became a favored target of their opponents on the Right.
By the 1950’s,
the Right’s attacks on political intellectuals precisely because they were intellectuals had reached such a fever
pitch that political scientist Richard Hofstadter actually wrote a book called Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life. One of Senator Joe
McCarthy’s favorite attack lines against the (alleged) Communists in the U.S.
government was that they had all gone to prestigious colleges and learned to be
Communists from their equally anti-American professors. In the 1960’s, the
availability of student deferments from the Viet Nam-era draft attracted a lot
of Leftists to colleges, where if they kept their grades up they could avoid
having to fight in the war.
So American Leftists
became increasingly reliant on the academic world, first to avoid getting
drafted (if they were men), then to avoid the political repression of the
1970’s and finally to find long-term, relatively secure employment. They also
used the colleges to recruit other Leftists, and as a result American Leftist
discourse became increasingly academic, abstruse and distant from the real
world. I remember one article that noted that campus Leftists were wearing
buttons and T-shirts that said, “Subvert the dominant paradigm” — and the
author joked, “That’ll really inspire
them on the barricades.”
And as the Left
became more academic, that played into the Right’s strategy of attacking the Left for being academic and making arguments
that sounded good to professors and students but didn’t mean jack to anyone in
the “real” world. Sarah Palin was neither the first nor the last Right-wing
spokesperson to make invidious comparisons between the academic ideas of the
Left and the “common sense” of the Right. I remember when John McCain picked
Sarah Palin as his running mate, I startled a lot of my long-time political
friends by saying, “I love Sarah Palin!” I quickly added that I hated, loathed
and despised everything she stood for, but I admired her ability to speak the language
of working-class America and wished more people on our side could do that as well.
Loving and
hating America. It also doesn’t help the
cause of the Left that the Right has been able to grab hold of the great
symbols of America’s history and heritage, while the Left has thrown them away.
The Right tells the American people they have a history they can be proud of,
while Leftist scolds like the late Howard Zinn tell them they should be deeply
ashamed of their past. I don’t know how many articles I’ve read and statements
I’ve heard by American Leftists that the entire economic success of the U.S.
was founded on its genocide against its Native population and the exploitation
of African slaves.
That’s
defensible as historical analysis, but it’s lousy politics. Given a choice
between a political tendency that tells them they live in the greatest country
on earth and they should be proud of their heritage, and one that tells them
they should be deeply ashamed of it, it’s not surprising that the American people
would pick the one that gives them a sense of pride.
As the late
democratic socialist Michael Harrington put it in his 1972 book Fragments of
the Century, “If the American Left wants to
change America because it hates it, the people will reject it and the people
will be right.” Harrington called on the Left not to ignore the less savory
aspects of America’s past, but to see “the seed beneath the snow” and celebrate
the activism that expanded the definition of “we, the people” in the U.S.
Constitution from what it originally meant — “We, the white male landowners” —
to encompass people of color, women and working people.
Commitment
and perseverance. But the most important
ingredient in the American Right’s recipe for success is simply a level of
commitment and perseverance that far outstrips anything on the Left. The modern
U.S. “conservative” movement (and I put “conservative” in quotes because it
seeks a radical reshaping of U.S. politics, economics and social policy, while
genuine conservatism usually seeks to preserve existing
institutions instead of destroying them) began in the 1930’s as a reaction to
the New Deal — and it has survived a series of losses and blows that would have
finished off any political movement that didn’t have its incredible tenacity.
The modern
American Right survived the exposure of many of its leaders as enemy
sympathizers and unregistered foreign agents during World War II. It survived
the disgrace and downfall of its first national figure to hold elective office,
U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), in the 1950’s. It survived and even
prospered from the landslide defeat of its first Presidential candidate, Barry
Goldwater, in 1964.
It survived when
President Richard Nixon was driven from office in disgrace over the Watergate
scandal in 1974. And it not only survived, it ultimately benefited from, the
near-total collapse of the American economy in 2008 and the election of Barack
Obama as President — which they were able to turn from a crushing defeat into
merely a temporary setback on their way to total dominance of American
politics.
As much as I
hate the politics of Right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg, his analysis of the
so-called “Obama Coalition” is absolutely correct. As Goldberg has documented,
the “Obama Coalition” has been able to elect only one person — Obama himself.
Otherwise, the Obama years have been one political disaster for the Democratic
Party after another. The Obama Presidency saw the rise of the Tea Party and its
crushing triumphs in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014.
In a recent
column, Goldberg snidely noted (being snide comes as naturally to Right-wingers
as being academic and abstruse does to Leftists) that of the four most
prominent Democrats in national politics right now — Barack Obama, Joe Biden,
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — Obama is the only one who isn’t old enough
to collect Social Security. One reason there are so many more Republicans than
Democrats running for President right now is that the Democratic “bench” — the
hotshot younger candidates who could have provided the party badly needed new
blood — were wiped out en masse by the
crushing midterm losses of 2010 and 2014. They were beaten by hotshot young Republicans like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who have emerged as
major Presidential candidates.
For at least the
last two decades — and probably longer — there has been an abysmal “intensity
gap” between the commitment, dedication and fervor of America’s Right-wing
activists and the relative dispirit and apathetic resignation of its Left.
Thomas Frank noticed that when he went to his home state of Kansas to research
his book What’s the Matter with Kansas,
visited the organizers and shock troops of the anti-choice Operation Rescue —
and came away deeply impressed with the intensity of their willingness to
sacrifice for their principles. He found himself admiring their dedication even
while loathing their cause.
Online
commentators on the 2015 elections picked up on the same theme: the dedication,
intensity and commitment of the Right versus the relative disinterest of the
Left. On November 4 a Daily Kos poster calling him/her/itself “Midwesterners”
put up an article called “No, Virginia, the Republican Party is (unfortunately)
NOT in Shambles!” (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/04/1444590/-No-Virginia-the-Republican-Party-is-unfortunately-NOT-in-Shambles?detail=email)
that showed just what we’re up against in winning back the hearts and minds of
the American people:
The bottom line is that a growing number of voters
throughout America in 2015 have become increasingly more Republican. They
will vote for any candidate with an “R” after its name — plain and simple.
In other words, the Republicans have won
the Culture Wars they started four or five decades ago. For a growing
percentage of people, the Democratic Party has become synonymous with “Guvment”
— and that is all that matters. (This is especially true of white voters, but
it is by no means inclusive of only them.)
For many voters, “Guvment” equals folks who want to take
away their guns, or give everyone in America a free abortion, or let Gay folks
marry one another in public places, or whatever updated issue you want to put
in the blanks here. Furthermore, with such a large number of Americans
obtaining their version of “reality” from “Faux News,” it does not appear as if
things are going to turn around for a long time now. Why not? Because these are
the folks who get out and vote. The Republican Party figured out long ago that
if you gin up people with enough fear, hatred, paranoia, or whatever, that they
will somehow make it to the ballot box. [Emphasis in original.]
Another Daily
Kos poster, Chris Reeves, put up an article on November 4 (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/04/1444472/-It-s-Time-for-Some-Real-Talk-How-Republicans-Grab-Statehouses?detail=email)
that noted that Democrats seem to think that political power flows from
the top down — that if they elect a decent or halfway decent President with a
“D” on the end of his or her name, the power of the presidency will flow
downward and the Democrats will be able to accomplish a progressive agenda. The
Republicans, by contrast, know that political power flows from the bottom up.
Decades ago, the
Republicans launched their own version of what former Democratic Party chair
Howard Dean called “the 50-state strategy,” determined to recruit candidates
for the lowest levels of public office — school boards, water districts and
other positions so obscure many Democrats don’t even know they exist — not only
to build support for their candidates and issues but to develop a pool of
people they could advance up the political ladder to higher and higher offices.
“In 2001, ‘Conservative Networks’ were formed in several states which were
designed to look at a long-term way to capture, control and handle
statehouses,” Reeves wrote.
Reeves quoted a
Republican candidate from 2002 (he didn’t say what name, what office or where)
who noted that “Democrats are good about picking up the phone and saying they
will vote and not showing up. They keep waiting for their ship to come in, and
it never does.” He also quoted a Democratic campaign manager as saying,
“Republican voters would walk across broken glass and burning coals to vote for
their candidates. Democrats gripe about ‘pinching their nose’ and they turn up
to vote as an inconvenience when they have the time and good TV isn’t on.”
“Simply put,”
Reeves commented, “Republicans fall in line. Democrats either fall in love or
are unmotivated early. … Republicans put their focus on long-term trends at the
state level, and how the Republicans work at the state level has worked to
permanently change election results.” As a result, 25 state governments are
under complete Republican control — the governorship and both houses of the
state legislature — while only seven states are fully governed by Democrats.
This means that through much of the U.S. Republicans control the process by
which Congressional and legislative districts are drawn — which gives them a
lock on a majority in the House of Representatives even if, as happened in
2012, more people vote for Democrats than Republicans to represent them in the
House.
It also gives
the Republicans power to shrink the electorate — to purge it of people who
aren’t likely to vote for them — because it’s the states that control who can
vote and how easy — or hard — it is to register. When the U.S. Constitution was
enacted, it assumed that state governments had absolute control over who could
vote and under what circumstances. The great Constitutional amendments that
have extended the franchise — the 15th, which (at least
theoretically) gave it to people of color; the 19th, which gave it
to women; the 24th, which abolished the poll tax; and the 26th,
which set the legal voting age at 18 — all began,” The right of citizens of the
United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or
by any State on the basis of … ” — which meant that the amendments were framed
as limits on the otherwise absolute power of state legislatures to determine
who could and couldn’t vote.
That’s why the
Republicans are not worried about the much talked-about demographic changes in
the U.S. population that many analysts think will favor the Democrats. With
their power in state governments, they are answering the challenge of potential
voters who might vote against them — young people, poor people, people of color
— by making it difficult or impossible for them to vote at all. The U.S.
Supreme Court’s evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was just one battle
in an ongoing campaign by Republicans and Right-wingers to make it harder for
theoretically qualified voters to exercise the franchise.
Some of these
measures are direct attacks on the ability of people to vote: opening more
polling places in affluent areas and closing them in less affluent areas;
requiring photo ID’s to vote (especially hard on rural people who live miles
from state offices that issue ID’s and don’t have any way to get there);
eliminating same-day voter registration; cutting hours polling places are open;
and the neat one the Texas legislature came up with in which a student ID isn’t
considered an acceptable form of identification to vote, but a permit to carry
a gun is.
Others are more
subtle. Much of the Republican campaign of obstruction against the Obama
administration was directed specifically at the sense of hope Obama’s election
had entailed. Every time Republican legislators or judges block something a
Democratic president or governor wants to do to advance the progressive agenda,
it makes the people who worked so hard to elect the Democrat feel hopeless.
They end up convinced that political activity is a waste of time, and therefore
they don’t vote. And every potential Democratic, progressive or Leftist voter who
doesn’t vote is another vote for the Republicans — as is every progressive or
Leftist who throws their vote away on a Green, Peace and Freedom or
“independent” candidate.
Fighting
the Greater Evil
Ignore a lot of
the nonsense that’s been written about the Republican Party being in
“disarray.” The plethora of Republicans running for President and the
difficulty they had recently in agreeing on a Republican Congressmember to be
Speaker of the House are only bits of an unseemly battle over the spoils of a revolution
they’re on the brink of winning but haven’t won yet.
The Republican
Party is agreed on virtually all the major issues — they all want to see Social
Security and Medicare privatized or eliminated, all or almost all government
regulation of the economy or the environment abolished, organized labor
consigned to the scrap heap of history, racial and gender discrimination made
legal again, women driven back to the kitchen and Queers back to the closet.
The only
difference — and what’s motivating a lot of the internal battles within the
Republican Party — is over how fast to
pursue these goals, and how far they want to take the clock back. During the
Reagan years, progressives often accused the Republicans of trying to take the
U.S. back to the 1950’s — which may have been true then. However, once the
Republicans realized that the 1950’s had been the decade during which income
taxes on the rich and the percentage of workers organized into unions had both
been the highest ever in U.S. history, they started talking about going even
further back.
Though they may
not be conscious of it, most Tea Party members want to take the U.S. back at
least to the 1880’s, when the power of corporations and wealthy individuals to
buy elections was literally unlimited and there was no income tax. Tea Partiers
often target three specific Constitutional amendments — the 14th,
which provided that all people born in the U.S. are citizens (and also provided
the basis for virtually all laws banning discrimination); the 16th,
which allowed the U.S. income tax; and the 17th, which said U.S.
Senators would be elected by popular vote instead of state legislatures — as
ones they’d like to eliminate.
And some people
want to take American politics even further back, to the 1820’s, when the
franchise was restricted to white men with “property” — i.e., land. In 2014,
when he wasn’t comparing the Occupy movement to the Nazis, 82-year-old venture
capitalist Tom Perkins was calling for a rewrite of the American electoral
system so the number of votes you had in an election would depend on the amount
of taxes you paid. “The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you
pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins said during an event hosted by Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky.
“But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million
dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?” (Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/14/tom-perkins-votes_n_4788086.html.)
The Republican Party is not only seeking a far-reaching
revolution in American politics — one which would march us back to the late 19th
century, when exploitative and greedy corporate leaders regularly ran the
economy into the ground and created “Panics” (19th-century speak for
“depressions”) that devastated the lives of ordinary people and left them
destitute and scrambling to survive any way they could. Our environment would
become a soup of toxic gases; our inner cities would be war zones; and the
already growing inequality of wealth and income in this country would grow to
Marie Antoinette-era levels.
What’s even more amazing, they’ve managed to convince
nearly half the American people that the policies that would bring about this
outcome would be good things. One of
the Republicans’ strongest bases is the white working class — the people who’ve
been the most devastated by the closure of America’s factories and the
outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to countries with cheaper labor and
dictatorial governments that enforce sweatshop conditions. Even with 2012
Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney on record that this was the sort of
future he wanted — one in which individuals were left on their own and
government didn’t “give” them things — 47 percent of the American electorate
still voted for him.
The Republican Party already controls three-fourths of the
federal government. They own the House of Representatives (and, due to
gerrymandering, are likely to continue to do so for at least the next 15 years,
maybe longer), they own the Senate and they own the Supreme Court. All they
need to complete their Right-wing revolution is the presidency. And if they win
the 2016 Presidential election and keep control of both houses of Congress,
they will enact a sweeping program to dismantle public education, the welfare
state, all regulation of corporations and all protections for workers’ rights
and the environment — just as they did in Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and
other states in which they won complete control of the government in the last
three election cycles.
Progressives and Leftists who see political activism in the
phony “moral” terms I criticized earlier in this article often ridicule calls
to vote for Democrats over Republicans as choosing “the lesser of two evils.”
But sometimes the greater evil is so evil, voting for the “lesser of two evils” is a matter of
self-preservation. That was the case in Germany in the early 1930’s, when the
Social Democrats and the Communists fought a ruinous and destructive war
against each other that allowed the real
greater evil — Hitler and the Nazis — to take power. And that is also the case in
the U.S. in 2016.
