Today in TomDispatch, Steve Fraser considers whether the election last November was a turning point, the way the elections in which Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan were elected were turning points. It makes for an interesting read, and allows one to gaze upon long-term political trends, instead of focusing on day-to-day battles with the Republicans and DLC Dems.
Of course, as the examples of those other elections suggest, turning-point elections are usually presidential elections. So if 2006 was a turning point, perhaps that turning point is not over, and will only be completed with the 2008 election. Perhaps that partly explains why Hillary Clinton raises so much animosity from progressives. As Fraser points out, in the same way that Eisenhower did not challenge the New Deal, Bill Clinton continued the pro-big business, anti-New Deal policies of Reagan. Similarly, a Hillary presidency would not involve a real change in direction. That is why what is strategically critical about the 2008 election is not simply winning the White House and keeping control of Congress, but getting a Democrat into Congress who will have the resourcefulness to abandon the failed policies that his country has been following since Reagan—that is, getting a Democrat into the White House other than Hillary Clinton.
A turning-point election is something special indeed. Everything about the country’s political chemistry changes as its geopolitical make-up is reshuffled, as cities, towns, and whole regions start voting in a new way. Suddenly, the normal fault lines in political demography no longer apply as ethnic, racial, gender, and socio-economic groups simply stop voting the way everyone expects them to.
Turning-point elections can inaugurate new distributions of wealth and power. Social classes and elites accustomed to rule find themselves struggling to hold on to, or compelled to share power, they once felt entitled to wield unilaterally. The whole political economy becomes subject to serious reordering. With so much at stake, such elections can ultimately be the occasions for revolutions in the country’s moral tone, its basic cultural and ideological orientation…
As late as the 1929 crash and Great Depression, free market ideology, social Darwinian morality, and the political and social preeminence of the country’s business elite made up the legitimate foundations of the Republic. Within the historical blinking of an eye, however, that legitimacy vaporized in the presidential election of 1932 — replaced by the regulatory and social-welfare state of the New Deal with its ethos of social obligation, economic security, and industrial democracy…
An exhausted political order does not … fall apart and exit the scene simply by virtue of its own downward momentum and social stupidity. Alternatives, embryonic but visible, usually gestate within the old political organism even before its weaknesses become disabling. Before one of the two major political parties emerges to represent a new political dispensation — we are, after all, talking about the United States where generally everything happens within the claustrophobic confines of the two-party system — battles rage internally for the soul of the party…
Despite serious doubts about the deeper significance of the 2006 election, there is, in fact, a good case to be made that it may turn out to be one of those rare turning points, or at least a signal that one is looming on the near horizon…
Perhaps the better question, then, is: Will the presidential election of 2008 turn out to be a turning-point election of historic proportions. The greatest unknown is whether or not the status quo is headed for a breakdown crisis severe enough to clear the ground for such a transformative moment…
The question of the moment is not: Will 2008 be a turning-point election, but rather can it be one? Here, everything depends not on what the old order does on its own behalf, no matter how bone-headed, but on how the gathering forces of opposition respond to the system’s crisis. Is there a willingness to build a clear, programmatic alternative inside the Democratic Party? It is, after all, an institution deeply infected with free market/free trade ideology and most of the imperial presumptions of the conservative counter-revolution.
Is there a readiness to mobilize around non-market solutions to the general crisis: To fight openly for the re-regulation of the economy and its planned re-industrialization; for its re-unionization; for redistributive policies to supplant the idée fixe of economic growth; for the dismantling of the petro-industrial complex and its replacement by a new, non-fossil-fuel system of energy production; for a global assault on the global sweatshop?
Will there be a new era of polarization rather than centrism, partisanship rather than bi-partisanship, a head-on confrontation with the Democratic Leadership Council, like the guerilla wars once waged against the John Jacob Raskob and Al Smith elite of the pre-New Deal Democratic Party or the one waged by the Goldwater legions against the silk-stocking Rockefeller Republicans? Once upon a time, someone as mild-mannered as Franklin Delano Roosevelt found it within himself to “welcome the hatred” of those he labeled “economic royalists.” Might there be someone equally unafraid waiting in the wings today?
Is there a new order being born, ready to challenge the old one where it is both weakest and also strongest: namely, in the imperial arena? Not only has global aggression proved deadly to all, depraved in its moral consequences, and life-threatening to basic democratic principles and institutions at home, but it has also been the most fruitful, life-giving incubator of the conservative cultural populism which the old order has relied on for a generation. Anti-World War I intellectual Randolph Bourne’s prophetic aperçu — “War is the health of the State” — needs to be made even more embracing: War has become the health of a whole political culture, not to mention the vast, hard-wired military-industrial apparatus with which it lives in symbiotic bliss. Is there a will to take on that system of cherished phobias, delusional consolations, and implacable interests?
Finally, there is the X factor, most unknowable of all, but also most critical in converting a mere election into something more transformative. Might a social movement or movements emerge from outside the boundaries of conventional politics, catalytic enough to fundamentally alter the prevailing metabolism of political life? Might the mass demonstrations of immigrants portend something of that kind? Might the anti-war movement soon enter a period of more sustained and varied opposition in the face of this administration’s barbaric obtuseness? Straws in the wind as we race toward 2008.
Tomgram: Fraser, Did the Political World Change in November?
Evidently, Fraser asks more questions than he answers. But this essay is very helpful for not losing sight of our larger goals. And if there is an immediate lesson from it, I would suggest it is this: that progressives must not allow themselves to make the same mistake that they made with Kerry in 2004. We must understand that if Hillary gets the Democratic nomination, then we will have already lost: not when Hillary loses in November.
We need a new order, and Hillary most definitely stands for the old one.
