Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.- Otto von Bismarck
If you are an idealist, the world will eventually break your heart. Nowhere is this more certain than in the arena of politics. For those that thought a Democratic 110th Congress would end this Iraq War or instigate impeachment hearings against this administration, frustration is beginning to set in. But any journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. Different bloggers are showing their frustration in different ways: Matt Stoller reminds his readers, “keep in mind, the public hates George Bush, and the public hates this war”. That is true. And it means very little at the moment. Chris Bowers laments, “The New York Times reports what I knew since Thursday evening: progressive opposition to the supplemental is fading badly, and the current form of the bill is going to be the best we can do for now.” Bowers wonders if the Progressives might not be making the correct parliamentary move by caving (see: sausages, broken hearts). We need to take this opportunity to realize something. Stoller is right: “the public hates George Bush, and the public hates this war”. And that puts us in a favorable position. By ‘us’ I do not mean the Democrats on the Hill. I mean, ‘we’ the netroots, the proponents of ending this war as soon as possible.
In 1986, an organization called Americans for Tax Reform introduced the anti-tax pledge. Here is how they explain it.
Politicians often run for office saying they won’t raise taxes, but then quickly turn their backs on the taxpayer. The idea of the Pledge is simple enough: Make them put their no-new-taxes rhetoric in writing.
By signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, candidates and incumbents solemnly bind themselves to oppose any and all tax increases. While ATR has the role of promoting and monitoring the Pledge, the Taxpayer Protection Pledge is actually made to a candidate’s constituents, who are entitled to know where candidates stand before sending them to the capitol. Since the Pledge is a prerequisite for many voters, it is considered binding as long as an individual holds the office for which he or she signed the Pledge.
Since its rollout with the endorsement of President Reagan in 1986, the pledge has become de rigeur for Republicans seeking office, and is a necessity for Democrats running in Republican districts. Numbers in Congress are approaching 50% in each house. There are now only seven Senate and eight House Republicans who are not pledge signers.
Now, in a very generic sense, people do not like to pay taxes and almost never greet tax-hikes as a welcome event. But, it simply isn’t true that people think taxes should never be raised. In a time of war, people can support tax hikes. Many would prefer tax hikes to soaring deficits. Americans for Tax Reform didn’t care. They got organized and they punished anyone that refused to take the pledge and anyone that broke it. They didn’t set up a third party. In 1999, the Club for Growth was set up to challenge any Republicans that voted for tax hikes, or otherwise didn’t hew the party line. These anti-tax ideologues haven’t been good for the health of the Republican Party, but they have been effective in getting one of the major parties to adopt their agenda.
A similar result has come about through the tireless efforts of anti-choice activists. Outlawing abortion and restricting access to contraception and sex education has never polled particularly well. But that hasn’t stopped these zealots from taking over one of the two major parties. Gun rights activists have had their successes along these same lines. All of these groups provide a model for changing the character of one of the two major parties without resorting to self-defeating (at least in the short-term) third-party challenges. Here is how it works.
You create a party within the party. In this case, it would be a party within the Democratic Party. You raise money, come up with some policy positions, you keep track of how members vote, and you extract pledges from Democrats running for office. Those that displease the rump party or refuse to take the pledge are then targeted for primary challenges. The point is not to win a lot of races, although good strategic choices need to be made so that there are enough initial successes to keep the ball rolling. The point is to change the behavior of existing politicians.
This is really where the netroots should be headed. Perhaps the best place to start is with our existing DFA and Moveon.org organizations. We are already focusing on taking over local and state-wide organs of the Democratic Party, but we need to identify potential candidates in as many congressional districts as possible. And then we need to run them against recalcitrant Democrats that do not support ending this war or enforcing the rule of law on our executive branch.
The prerequisite for this is educating Democrats about the true nature of the bipartisan consensus for a robust American empire. Here is how Prof. Tony Smith put it today:
Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions…
Since 1992, the ascendant Democratic faction in foreign policy debates has been the thinkers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides damning Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, but it has never condemned the invasion. It has criticized Bush’s failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better.
This is the very heart of the problem. And we must educate Democrats that we will not solve our problems or prevent their recurrence unless and until we defeat both neoconservatism and neoliberalism (defined in this narrow sense). Ted Koppel appeared on Meet the Press yesterday and he spoke for the neoconservative/neoliberal consensus on foreign policy. I quote him at length, so you can get an idea about what’s at stake.
Koppel: I made a little note here of something that Ambassador Khalilzad said to you a moment ago. He said, “The region will not be stable until Iraq is stabilized.” It’s the one thing nobody talks about. Everyone is concerned about the United States being in the middle of a civil war inside Iraq. But they forget about the fact that if U.S. troops were to pull out of Iraq, that civil war could become a regional war between Sunnis and Shia. And the region, just in case anyone has forgotten, is the Persian Gulf, where we get most of our oil, and, I’ve talked about this before, natural gas. So, the idea of pulling out of there and letting the region, letting the national civil war expand into a regional civil war, something the United States cannot allow to happen.
Koppel: It could go on, I mean, Gen. Abizaid with whom I spoke talked into terms of generations. And, if you think about two things, that’s not so hard to imagine. Number one, the Cold War after all, lasted 50 years. Uh, we didn’t know it when we began it. We didn’t know it, we didn’t know how long it was going to be when we were in the middle of it. But, it lasted half a century.
If you look back at the elements of the war against terrorism, that war was going on, and has been going on for the past 24 years. We just didn’t connect the dots. 24 years ago, the precursors of Hezbollah blew up the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. That was 1983, 241 Americans killed. In the interim between then and now you had two attacks on the World Trade Center, you had the blowing up of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, you had the attempt to blow up the U.S.S. Cole, you had the bombing of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa. This war’s already been going on for 24 years; we were just a little bit slow to recognize it.
Koppel has some good points but there is a better way to look at this. Terrorism directed against the United States from Islamic radicals is a reaction to American hegemony. In a very real way, it is a cost of doing business. And, as terrorists gain access to more potent weapons and better tactics, the cost of doing business has grown impossibly high. Therefore, the rational response is to change how we do business. And the first step in changing how we do business is to do a fundamental reassessment of how we have been doing business over the last 24 years. Actually, I’d go back at least as far as 1979, and we really should question elements of our Cold War strategy in the Middle East going back to the beginning. Some of our policies are undoubtedly best considered water under the bridge. There is no going back to undo the 1953 coup in Iran or our miitary support for Israel in the 1973 war. We should make sure the American people are more aware of these events and how they color the perception of America’s presence in the region, but we need not obsess over them.
What is important to realize is that we will face the threat of terrorism so long as we continue our aggressive basing policies in the region and as long as our allies (Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan) are run by unpopular governments.
At present, the United States has a tremendous amount of assets in the region. We have military bases in Eritrea, Kenya, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrghystan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. We also have many obligations for supplying weapons systems, miltary and intelligence training, providing security, maintaining shipping lanes, and much, much, more. It’s impossible to underestimate the importance to Israel’s security of America’s presence, our negotiated settlements between Israel and Egypt/Jordan, and our support in the United Nations. Our close relationship with NATO member Turkey is extremely valuable and important.
All of these things are put at risk by the turmoil in Iraq and the potential fallout from an American withdrawal. Any comprehensive plan to roll back our unilateral role in the region will involve tremendous risks and require extensive diplomacy and planning.
Ted Koppel spoke to this when he said:
And the region, just in case anyone has forgotten, is the Persian Gulf, where we get most of our oil, and, I’ve talked about this before, natural gas. So, the idea of pulling out of there and letting the region, letting the national civil war expand into a regional civil war, is something the United States cannot allow to happen.
But Koppel left a lot of things unspoken. And that is where a progressive party within the Democratic Party needs to pick up the slack. We need a commitment to changing the status quo in the region. Our number one goal needs to be protecting our assets and, insofar as possible, honoring our commitments, while removing our troops and bases from as much of the Middle East as is feasible. Our number two goal should be to delegate more responsibility for regional stability to the international community. As part of this process we need to work very hard on two other things. First, we need to secure Israel’s future, with the knowledge that we will have a much reduced role in the region. This makes a peace agreement with Syria of paramount importance. It also requires a reinvigorated Palestinian government that can take over governance of their territories. A commitment to work on a fundamental settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute should be a very high priority. The second thing we need to do is a matter of risk management. We need to work with the industrialized nations of the world to mitigate the risks of energy disruptions from the region. We need to work on alternative fuels and energy conservation.
Only when we have spread out the responsibility for regional stability and negotiated a settlement to the Middle East peace process can we expect a serious diminution of terrorist threats. This process could indeed, as Koppel predicts, take another 50 years. But we cannot make it our fight alone. It is not financially sustainable, and it involves too many risks to our civil liberties, not to mention our security.
A progressive party within the Democratic Party would define the mission of winning the war on terror somewhat as I have laid out above. It would also appeal to the populist aspirations of the American people. And an economic platform will have to be the subject of another diary (best left to someone other than me).
Any progressive party within the Democratic Party that followed this path would have a lot in common with the Libertarian Party and might be able to make some common cause with both them and Libertarian members of the GOP, like presidential contender, Rep. Ron Paul.
In my opinion, this is the direction the netroots needs to go. We can serve no useful purpose by getting behind the Presidential campaign of neoliberals. We helped turn the Congress blue, but we did so by electing a host of Rahm Emanuel approved neoliberals. That fight is over. The Republicans are in the minority now. Our fight must move to reshaping the national discourse in our media, and in turning the Democratic Party into a party that will show wisdom and leadership in transforming our role from unilateral hegemon to sustainable world leader within a multilateral system of like-minded democracies.