When I was in high school, I worked in the local hardware store after school and on weekends. This was the late seventies, early eighties, so it was still a bit of the old-fashioned hardware store: big open bins of various fixtures, nails, joiners, pipes etc. Housewares upstairs.
I learned a lot there about how things work, though I’m a lousy handyman I do know at least a little about what goes into things. One of the coolest, and most clever, devices used in plumbing or any other piping system for fluids is the check valve. If you have a sump pump in your home, there is one (or should be one) on the pipe that takes the waste water away from the pump out to your drainage field. The check valve prevents back flow of the water that’s been pumped out. After all, what’s the use of removing something if it can flow back in?
Over the history of our country, various social movements, leaders and parties have slowly been building a reservoir of expanding liberties and opportunities for the citizenry of this country. What started out as a system primarily for wealthy white landowners has, through much struggle and a very bloody civil war, become one with many people having access to that reservoir.
There have always been people who’ve resisted this, of course. People who didn’t want to share, people who thought than only some are “worthy” of the rights we hold dear. They’ve bought politicians, unleashed Guardsmen and Pinkertons and lynch mobs … they’ve stolen, threatend, cajoled and lied to try to keep that bright blue lake reserved for a select few.
Perhaps the struggle to expand and open up this fountainhead reached it’s apex in the late sixties or early seventies, but throughout the struggle the right wing has been building the machinery to drain the pool of liberty once again. They’ve built their piping with hate, with lies, with bribes and corruption and vote suppression and the fomenting of fear, bigotry and theocracy. All they needed was a final piece, one last thing to make sure that what they were draining wouldn’t, and couldn’t, flow back in. They needed a check valve.
That check valve is the Clintonite/DLC right-of-center party heirarchy we confront now.
Some of them know what they are doing. The Zell Millers, Ben Nelsons and Joe Liebermans. The “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me” Reagan Democrats as well. Some, usually in the cause of “winning”, adopt right-wing talking points and policies, convinced that this is the country that right keeps insisting it is, a “conservative” country, as though we secretly want to return to those days when the lake was a small pond and it was gated and protected by armed men.
It’s not enough for us to destroy the pipes and pumps that the Right has built in order to reverse the slide of this country back to a darker time. We need to destroy the valve that keeps liberty from flowing back into our shared lake. We need to remove the check valve that is part of the problem. We need to replace the rightward wing of the Democratic Party.
The main tools that were used to expand the reservoir in the first place were the buckets we formed with our voices, our bodies and our votes. If the party forces another Republican trojan horse onto your local ballot, don’t reward them. You have a voice: support challengers to the zellouts, write letters to the editor and raise your voice in your community. When they ask you to help GOTV or man a phone line, refuse them if they insist on policies that work against your values. Offer your body instead to a local leader or cause you do support. As for your votes, only offer them if they have maintained an open and fair debate within the party, with truly open primary contests and with a leadership that doesn’t badmouth the liberal base of the party. If your local leadership won’t do so, withhold your vote from them. Fill the rest of the ballot with choices you support, but leave that line blank, or vote for a third party. To do otherwise only rewards and encourages continued cooperation with the anti-American right. In essence, do what the labor movement did: strike. This will be painful, like all strikes. More will be lost while you sit down and say no, but like all strikes there is no other course to take. Like most strikes, this may take a very long time, but without it we can be assured of more erosion of our hopes for a better, freer country.
We aren’t just fighting the plumbers draining our freedoms away, but also the plumbing they installed to help them accomplish their goal. The entrenched Democratic Party leadership is part of that plumbing. Time for it to be torn out.
…to make your excellent point.
Let me add another one, though without a photo. It’s the ratchet, something I’m sure you encountered in your hardware-store days. A ratchet is usually a composed of a lever-handle and a cogged wheel that together allow you to make incremental advances.
Say your ratchet is attached to an elevator platform. If something heavy is on the platform, it takes a lot of oomph on the ratchet lever to move the platform up one cog, say an inch. But once you do, you can rest because the cog keeps the lever (and thus the platform) from moving back down to the starting point. You can, over time, lift the platform several feet.
That, in a way, is what American reformers have done throughout our history. While we might slip a cog or two in our upward progress, the ratchet kept us generally moving in the right direction, though punctuated with long stretches of status quo. As you note, the ’60s and ’70s marked a time when the ratchet was being cranked pretty hard.
But now we’ve got certain people actively trying to snap off various cogs – the social safety net, reproductive rights, international law, separation of church and state – and at some point, if enough cogs are broken off, we could see a plummeting of the platform that we and our progressive ancestors put so much tears, sweat and blood into ratcheting ever higher.
that’s a good one too! Dueling simple devices!
Actually, you make a really good point, and I sincerely hope that we can start lifting that platform again soon. In order to do that, we’re going to have to make some noise, and another version of a ratchet could help us raise the volume!
We need a
and a
I have some creative ideas already but I assume it has an official purpose…
The Pokey Thing is called a “Peavey” or a “Cant Dog” and is used by loggers to gain leverage and fulcrum over logs.
By stabbing the spike into the ground or into a neigboring log, and by using the hooked, swinging arm to grab the offending log, one can exert tremendous torque by pulling or pushing on the handle.
I’ve used them extensively (mostly as a teen and 20-something while logging with my father), and I could maneuver a 36″, 24-foot long oak bolt into place with 10 minutes of appropriate effort.
They are also excellent when confronting hostile political foes and social enemies, for fairly obvious reasons!
Interesting metaphor – although I don’t necessarily think I’d say the DLC is the key feature here. I’m not sure the difficulties lie within a party domain. Rather, I think the “device” preventing erosion of our rights, our safety net, our historic, incremental progression of trying to match our country’s reality to its myth, should be the checks & balances written into the Constitution. What is seriously in danger now is the function of the judiciary as any sort of reasonable vehicle for stopping the backflow, (or the loss of cogs) when the other two branches are firmly headed downstream.
The difficulty, of course, is that getting back some degree of balance in the judiciary, will take longer than one or two more election cycles.
well, a check valve isn’t an essential part of the system, and easily replaced. The piping, pumps … all that stuff is much more important. I think the right has used more than the rightist dems … they’ve also built an incredible media network that makes it hard to reverse the flow as well.
The system of checks and balances, the entire Constitutional system, was rather ingeniously designed to expand the pool of liberty, and you’re right that the undermining of the judiciary is a very serious danger.
Singling out one faction of the Democratic Party (the DLC), while ignoring the long history of exactly that behavior by even the liberal luminaries, heroes, and elder statesmen (and some women) of that part, is to ignore a problem that has been endemic for many, many years…
This article, by Hal Draper was written in 1967.
I have long, passionate, heated arguments with my ISO friends about this issue…I disagree with their stance on the subject, not with respect to the overall picture, but with respect to “What is to be done”…
I think that joining the Democratic party at the local level, and suborning the structure, taking over the positions, directing the flows of influence, forcing the issues on the table, and working to get more like-minded people engaged within the “name-branded” infrastructure is the way to go.
I might be wrong, but absent a revolution, a massive political overturn, a populist resurgence, the Greens, the Socialists, the DSA, the PDA…simply do not offer an alternative that people will even hear about, much less vote for in any significant numbers.
Holy shit.
Well, that article was informative.
you are being snarky – I certainly thought the article was informative, as well.
If you liked the old version, check out the take on Denis Kucinich from the same source.
Faced with a choice between sane politics and backing the party, even the most arguably “leftist” Democrat chooses the party and acts to bring the fringe into line behind the mainstream candidate…some argue that the entire reason for a Kucinich run was to fulfill that function.
Now, where do I stand?
Here is the quandary: Do we on the Left continue to form a multiplicity of small parties, attempt to back 3rd parties on an irregular basis, get a chance to act as (and suffer the consequences) spoilers in regional or even national elections – whether or not the charge is fair, it is the “conventional wisdom” and that charge hurts the left immeasurably by turning off potential allies and supporters….
Do we capitulate and bite our tongues, get in line and watch the continued betrayal of all that we stand for?
Or do we enter the party at the grass roots, make ourselves known, useful, and effective at the local and regional level, and slowly, surely, and quietly take over the structure as far as we can?
I say the latter.
I could be wrong…but are there other options?
the multiplicity of small parties (see the various farmers, labor and socialist parties in the midwest) made the New Deal possible before they were folded into the Democratic Party.
The were important components…I agree.
I think a more important component was the rising threat posed by the Communists coupled with the power of the IWW during that period (Coal field wars, sit down strikes in the industrial North, colorado mine strikes, and so on).
The combination of the growth of the smaller parties you named with the growing power of the radical labor and communist groupings forced the entire spectrum to the Left…
which proves my point … we may have to leave or withhold votes to move the party left.
I disagree, as you know, and think that it is still possible to chivvy the local party chapters to the left. If enough of that low-level shifting happens in enough places in a short enough period of time, then there is the potential for a “progressive pulse” to propagate through that system.
It is not very satisfying, it is not instant, it is not revolutionary…but in the absence of a viable, vibrant, revolutionary movement or consciousness, in the face of Labor doldrums and Left discombobulation…what else is there?
What else is there?
The chance to look yourself in the mirror and not be ashamed of your part in war and torture, financial ruin, and loss of women’s rights.
The chance to look into your grandchildren’s eyes and let them know that you refused to play a part in this destruction.
Bushco has destroyed most else, with the complicity of some dems.
choosing one, I would suggest being clear what the goal is.
If the goal is to have people seized and tortured, maimed and exterminated under the auspices of a “party” with a different name than the one presently doing it, with, of course a little more skill in presentation, prettier words for “operations” and whatnot, as the teeming underclass in the US itself continues to burgeon, then doing your part to maintain the status quo with one of the new moisturizing lipsticks designed for the way modern pigs live today should work out very well for you.
However, if the goal is to have the US become a legitimate state, a responsible member of the community of nations, and possibly even move toward democracy, then neither furk of the warlord cartel is going to be any help to you, on the contrary, they are quite liable to seize and torture and maim and exterminate you.
The window for a political solution has closed, but once again, that old saying, when one door closes, another opens.
🙂
First, the snark:
It all depends on who is being seized, “questioned,” “educated,” and “neutralized” – if it is the likes of Dobson, Cheney, Coburn…cool!
</snark>
The two prongs of the warlord cartel have different support bases. One of those prongs is uncomfortably seated upon a base that is not very happy with the WC. Energizing and redirecting that base, shedding the poorly grafted WC “head” is possible and could be productive.
of exercising the right enshrined in Mr.Danger’s toilet paper to change their government.
Or more accurately, in the current situation, to create one.
When US policies offend the values and desires of the US voting class, it will indeed be televised. There will be no questions, no hopeful little posts on message boards about job approval ratings, and no earnest operative blather about going along to get along and holding one’s nose.
In the same vein, if the US ever gets a “left,” that will also make itself quite evident.
It is a frustrating time right now. Things have to get pretty bad before an underclass-driven correction occurs. Right now we are in that maddening phase of almost almost, too late to turn back, yet not quite soup yet.
I would keep a close eye on the approaching Medicare donut death wave….
“The worse it gets the better it will be” – at least as Gramsci formulated the idea – has never been particularly effective or successful in terms of producing real revolutionary change.
Rather, it produced two world wars, the Stalinist and Maoist nightmares, and engendered the collapse of numerous progressive, revolutionary, and reformist groupings.
Revolutionary success has always been built upon progress, and “waiting for collapse” is is “actually a version of liberalism that “assumed motives of mean and usurious self-interest”, an idea that was disseminated as “superstition” to produce what he dismissively called “economism”.”
I do not entirely agree with Gramsci’s portrayal of Luxemburg’s arguments as “spontaneous and mystical” – I actually think that Gramsci and Luxemburg would agree that appeals to “spontaneity” and “economism” are generally disastrous for organization and success.
that corrections do not usher in Utopia.
It is unfortunate that US did not make different choices.
No, they don’t…and yes, it most certainly is.
It was very informative. I have been doing some reading about 1968 lately and that together with this has been… well.
I’m a little put out! Nobody told me it happened like that.