disgusted once again: Liberal Street Fighter
Once again, we’re faced with the prospect of the “opposition” party reaching its hands out in friendship toward a predatory regime beholden to big money and the religious right. Capitiulation masquerading as principle, betrayal masquerading as comity, a stance characterized by refusing to stand. Behavior that is celebrated by right-wing advocacy groups like Progress for America Voter Fund in a recent ad called Principle:
Announcer: “John Roberts. Overwhelmingly supported to be Chief Justice.
“Why did the process work?
“President Bush consulted with 70 Senators, from both parties, before choosing Roberts.
“After testifying for 22 hours, even Democratic Senators called Roberts “brilliant.”
“Many Democrats are putting principle above politics, voting for Roberts.
“Urge the Senate to continue putting partisan politics aside…
“…hold fair hearings and give the next nominee a fair up or down vote.”
Go HERE to see the ad. Watch the list of twenty-two Democrats scroll down the screen, celebrating their votes for Chief Justice Roberts.
Now another movement conservative, a deep-inside party functionary has been nominated for elevation to the Supreme Court, with laudatory words rising from the so-called leadership of the Democratic Party. This is bad, but only a symptom of a broader problem: the party of the “left” has left the principled left behind, bowing to the claim that this is a conservative country, that these outcomes are inevitable, that they are there for the rest of us to support as brakes on it getting completely out of control, rather than champions to fight against a corrosive poltical movement.
After all, the Vichy Dems in Washington cross the aisle to attack women’s freedoms. They sell-out working Americans by helping pass CAFTA. bankruptcy “reform”, Defense of Marriage Act, healthcare legislation, the environment, … the list goes on and on.
Time and again we’re told that what we get is the best we could do.
I think it’s time to face the fact that they don’t oppose because they are just fine with the creeping slide into feudalism. After all, like Daschle, they know that their friends on the other side will hook them up with lobbying jobs or a cozy chair on a corporate board or two. In a sense they AREN’T betraying us, because they aren’t ONE of us. Both parties are run by people of and for either the law enforcement complex, the military industrial complex or corporate governance/lobbying. Their kids go to the same schools. They use the same banks and stock brokers. They have dinner at the same places and worship at the same churches and temples.
Yes, there are principled members of both Houses, but I think it is time for them to face the fact that the Democratic Party is a rotten shell, and most-likely beyond recovery. The corruption runs deep, and corruption isn’t just about money and access. Corruption is also a loss of hope, a loss of connection, a sense of inevitablity to an established heirarchy, and those who’ve reached a certain level, even if it is only a place of token opposition, are loath to give up the perks. This is another form of corruption. They no longer look at politics as a tool for change, for community, for genuine experimentation and progress and growth. We are witnessing a wholesale abandonment of the Spirit of the Enlightenment on the part of the elites in this country. What is more corrupt than abandoning the entire principle upon which a society was founded?
Time to leave. As Shamanic blogging over on Shakespeare’s Sister put it:
Hasn’t politics in America devolved into a contest of which party can more slickly persuade the public that the other side is evil so that they can get back to handing out truckloads of taxpayer cash to corporate contributors? Didn’t the Senate just approve a movement conservative to the high court in the same week that the conservative movement was exposed as a gang of criminals who’ve taken over the country by breaking its laws?
So to this cross-blogosphere conversation, which I think is timely and important, I add these concepts: “anti-politics” and “to get away from power and let society transform itself”.
I think it’s time that we seriously considered the possibility that American politics are irrevocably broken. How will we, the progressives, the lefties, the liberals, the activists, the anti-war radicals, and all the other energized souls of America reshape this country in order to advance the progressive agenda from outside the body politic?
This is where we find ourselves.
Time to leave. Yes, still pull a D lever when you have the opportunity to support a real progressive. Vote in the primaries for progressives if they are available. But DON’T give any money to a party organ. Find groups, focused groups, that you identify with and work with and through them. Keep up the conversations online and at meetings and protests. Find ways to form bonds with other progressive groups. We all have basic values we can agree on: human rights and freedom for all, living wages, people before profits, a clean environment for our families. As FDR put it:
There came a growing feeling that government was conducted for the benefit of a few who thrived unduly at the expense of all. The people sought a balancing- a limiting force. There came gradually, through town councils, trade guilds, national parliaments, by constitution and by popular participation and control, limitations on arbitrary power.
He spoke of the time leading to the American Revolution, but the arbitrary King George has been replaced by a strange ruling class made up of the legal undead, the corporations, and the courtiers who serve them. He is describing OUR time as assuredly as he described the 18th Century colonies.
Time for the people’s actions to take place outside the sphere of poltics, in unions and social organizations and activists movements. Even the coordinated communications of those writing letters to the editor and to those who regularly betray us. Shamanic carries forward an idea he found through Cernig, that the American left would be well served to study the Solidarity movement in Poland. Perhaps once those lines of communication are strengthened, as a movement becomes more instinctively cooperative, then a move can be made to either take back the Democratic Party or, better yet, build a Progressive Party, to rebuild this country from the damage greed and superstion are inflicting on it.
In the meantime, (and this will take a long time), those true progressives in the Democratic Party now holding office need to seriously consider following the example Bernie Sanders and become Independents. I think Conyers is probably the most likely to be able to get away with it, and I think if ONE brave office holder would take that step more might follow.
The party is rotten, corrupt, bereft of principle, lacking in direction, willing to bow to the slightest pressure exerted by corporations or conventional wisdom. The “leadership” of the Democratic Party at the end of the 21st Century, on into this new one, will be looked back upon with the same contempt we feel when we gaze back at Quisling, at Petain, at Chamberlain and Benedict Arnold.
They bend knee to a movement that is destroying this country … it is time to abandon them.
photo from NY Times
