Walter C. Uhler, www.walter-c-uhler.com: In fact, if Professor Lukacs is correct, I should drop the references to Fascism and focus, instead, on the similarities to be found when comparing America's National Socialism under Bush with Germany's National Socialism under Hitler (never forgetting, of course, that Bush's naked aggression comes nowhere near Hitler's psychopathic willingness to exterminate or enslave entire populations)…
In fact, according to Lukacs, President Bush has depended on nationalism more than Hitler: "President Bush and his advisers chose to provoke a war in Iraq well before the election of 2004, for the main purpose of being popular. This was something new in American history… Not even Hitler chose war in 1939 to enhance or reaffirm his popularity with the German people, not at all." [p. 211]
Nevertheless, Lukacs refuses to predict that the "new barbarism all around us…will inevitably overwhelm us." [p. 242] When in despair, he recalls Edmund Burke, who said: "He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one." [pp. 242-243] Thus, he concludes, "Hitler and Stalin are gone, and George W. Bush will soon be gone, too; but then so are their German National Socialism and their Communism and so will be his 'conservatism.'" [p. 243]
Yet, the question remains: "How much more damage will Bush's National Socialism inflict on America and the world before it is tossed on the trash heap of history?"
City Pages: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?
Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name.
And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.
CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?
Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't.
Paul Krugman, NY Times: Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself...
Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs.
And it won't stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation…
But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer…
America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.
Editorial, The Nation: Apologists for these egregious compromises would have us believe that Democrats, as a minority party, have little leverage. But the Social Security debate belies such claims; with Democrats sticking together against privatization, it is the Republicans who have found themselves under pressure to compromise. The same goes for the Democratic refusal to give ground on ethics issues, which has done so much to increase pressure on scandal-plagued House majority leader Tom DeLay. Unfortunately, shows of solidarity on Social Security and ethics issues represent the exception rather than the rule when it comes to checking and balancing the White House and its Congressional allies. Again and again Democrats have failed the basic tests of an opposition party. They couldn't muster the forty votes needed to mount a Senate filibuster against Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General, only twelve Democrats opposed the nomination of Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State and none opposed the nomination of Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security, despite concerns about Rice and Chertoff that were as troubling as those regarding Gonzales's role in approving torture.
House Democrats have been even less effective in their opposition than their Senate colleagues... Despite polls showing that the vast majority of Americans opposed federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, only fifty-three Democrats opposed DeLay's move to override Florida state law and judicial rulings in a rush to satisfy the demands of the GOP's most extreme constituencies. Only thirty-six opposed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which Representative Jan Schakowsky correctly identified as a move to "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is free speech." And just thirty-nine rejected the Administration's demand for another $81.4 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and related military misadventures.
Death of the Republic?
March 24, 2005
Bush's America: Not Fascist, but National Socialist
By Walter C. Uhler
Having enthusiastically embraced a grad school seminar on the "Origins of World War II," I've long since assumed that I understood the distinction between Italian "Fascism" and German "National Socialism." Unfortunately, having just read John Lukacs' provocative new book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, it appears that my assumption was incorrect.
No, I'm not referring to my occasional exaggerated use of "Fascist" as an epithet, as in "Every free country is entitled to one Fascist TV network, talk show and newspaper. And, God help us, America already has Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Times." Such usage simply stoops to the level of those three fonts of right-wing propaganda.
Instead, I'm talking about the serious warnings I commenced sending to editors of a few newspapers in late 2002, in which I mistakenly conflated fears about America (under President George W. Bush) becoming Fascist with comparisons of Bush and Adolf Hitler. Of special concern was Bush's propaganda about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda (both of which proved to be false). Like Hitler's equally false propaganda about Polish mistreatment of Germans living in Danzig, it was used to justify an immoral, illegal invasion of another sovereign state—the highest of war crimes. As with Hitler then, much of the world now wonders whether the Bush administration's naked aggression will ever end.
Rather than disabuse me of my mistaken conflation, however, I received either no response or answers such as this one (on January 13, 2004) from The Philadelphia Inquirer's Commentary Page Editor, John Timpane: "The use of Hitler in rhetoric is jejune, shallow, facile, inaccurate, and self-undermining." One might imagine how Mr. Timpane would respond today, given that two prominent and highly respected historians, John Lukacs and Fritz Stern, have issued harsher and more informed warnings than mine.
In fact, if Professor Lukacs is correct, I should drop the references to Fascism and focus, instead, on the similarities to be found when comparing America's National Socialism under Bush with Germany's National Socialism under Hitler (never forgetting, of course, that Bush's naked aggression comes nowhere near Hitler's psychopathic willingness to exterminate or enslave entire populations).
As an epithet, "Fascist," probably has its origins in the Soviet Union, where Stalin sought to distance his highly nationalistic socialism (remember his emphasis on building "socialism in one country?") from Hitler's National Socialism. But, according to Lukacs, there are two reasons why Fascism doesn't apply to Bush's America.
First, Fascists believed in the "primary importance of the state." [p.119] Thus, "in the Fascist Manifesto of 1932, Mussolini proclaimed: 'It is not the people who make the state but the state that makes the people.'" [pp.119-120] Few of America's conservatives or Republicans would make such a statement today. Second, after 1938, "Fascism had become absorbed by and subservient to National Socialism, nearly everywhere." [p. 124]
Unlike Mussolini, Hitler asserted that the "Volk" preceded the "Reich," and "religions are more stable than forms of states." [p. 120] Hitler's populism propelled him to power. And, as Lukacs notes, with the eventual expansion of democracy (and, thus, the welfare state) to the working classes, "we are, at least in one sense, all national socialists now." [p.41] But with Hitler's National Socialism, as with George Bush's today, "nationalism was a more important factor of his people's loyalty to him than were the various social improvements and institutions [of the Third Reich]." [p.131]
In fact, according to Lukacs, President Bush has depended on nationalism more than Hitler: "President Bush and his advisers chose to provoke a war in Iraq well before the election of 2004, for the main purpose of being popular. This was something new in American history… Not even Hitler chose war in 1939 to enhance or reaffirm his popularity with the German people, not at all." [p. 211]
But, perhaps most ominous is the similar role that religion formerly played in Hitler's National Socialist regime and currently plays in Bush's. According to Lukacs, "what is more significant—and worrisome—is how nationalism, including Hitlerian nationalism, coexisted with religion in the minds of many people; and in that coexistence their nationalism was, ever so often, stronger and deeper than was their religion." [p. 131]
Fritz Stern's recent speech about Nazism (at the 10th Annual Dinner of the Leo Baeck Institute) contains passages that eerily capture recent American right-wing political behavior. He notes, for example, "a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture." Sound familiar?
And although he didn't have the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh to assist him, Hitler was "a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany's savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader charged with executing a divine mission." [Nov. 14, 2004 Speech at Leo Baeck Institute] Do not our president and many of his supporters believe the very same thing?
And like Bush's supporters today, Stern notes, "people were enthralled by the Nazis' cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared: 'The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.'" [Nov. 14, 2004 Speech at Leo Baeck Institute]
According to Lukacs, "the predominance of nationalism and socialism has governed American politics during the entire [twentieth] century." [p. 139]. The Republican Party is more nationalist than socialist, the Democrats are more socialist than nationalist.
Nationalism, however, is distinct from patriotism. Patriotism is defensive, associated with love of one's land and traditions. Nationalism is aggressive and associated with the myth of the people, the Volk. A populist "is always a nationalist of sorts." Liberals can be patriots, but almost never nationalists. Which explains why, in Lukacs' view, liberals are losing their electoral appeal.
What's worse, in Lukacs' view, is the recent tendency of Republican electoral majorities to weaken American democracy and strengthen populism by simply ignoring the legal assurances of minority rights. "Majority rule is tempered by the legal assurance of the rights of minorities, and of individual men and women. And when this temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing more (or else) than populism." [p.5]
Thus as America's republic devolved into a democracy now threatened by populism, officials who formerly gained office due to their popularity now gain office by publicity. The Republican's post-World War II anti-Communism and McCarthyism, whatever their actual merits, were conscious publicity campaigns designed to manipulate and capture the xenophobic hate of populist nationalists.
And notwithstanding his electoral success in 2004, Bush may have reached a new moral low in presidential politics when he started a war in Iraq to ensure his reelection. After all, to generate the hatred and evil accompanying a war of choice is a moral weakness that ill becomes a truly great nation. Moreover, as Lukas notes, hatred was Hitler's "main characteristic." [p. 208]
After considering how many Americans infuse their nationalism with religion, xenophobic hatred, and Abraham Lincoln's belief the we are "the last best hope of mankind," Lukacs fears that "the fate of mankind indeed seems catastrophic if Americans do not free themselves from the hope that they are THE last hope on earth." [p. 145] Yet, his argument here would have been stronger and more ominous, had Lukacs paid greater attention to what Andrew Bacevich calls "the new American militarism."
Nevertheless, Lukacs refuses to predict that the "new barbarism all around us…will inevitably overwhelm us." [p. 242] When in despair, he recalls Edmund Burke, who said: "He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one." [pp. 242-243] Thus, he concludes, "Hitler and Stalin are gone, and George W. Bush will soon be gone, too; but then so are their German National Socialism and their Communism and so will be his 'conservatism.'" [p. 243]
Yet, the question remains: "How much more damage will Bush's National Socialism inflict on America and the world before it is tossed on the trash heap of history?"
Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The San Francisco Chronicle and Philadelphia Inquirer, among numerous other periodicals. His article, "Democracy or dominion?" will be republished in Annual Editions: World Politics 05/06 (McGraw Hill) scheduled for publication in April. He is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association.
waltuhler@aol.com
http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/bush_america.html
• • Vol 26 • Issue 1268 • PUBLISHED 3/23/2005
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/26/1268/article13085.asp
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The Undoing of America
Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free elections, and the late, great U.S. Constitution.
by Steve Perry
For the past 40 years or so of Gore Vidal's prolific 59-year literary career, his great project has been the telling of the American story from the country's inception to the present day, unencumbered by the court historian's task of making America's leaders look like good guys at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal's series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC in 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and through his ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across the years. Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own annual State of the Union message, in magazines and on the talk circuit. His words were always well-chosen, provocative, and contentious: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved," he told an interviewer in 1972, "if people would simply do as I advise."
Though it's a dim memory now, Vidal and commentators of a similarly outspoken bent used to be regulars on television news shows. Vidal's most famous TV moment came during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when ABC paired him with William F. Buckley on live television. On the next to last night of the convention, the dialogue turned to the question of some student war protesters raising a Vietcong flag. The following exchange ensued:
Vidal: "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of proto- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I'll only say that we can't have--"
Buckley: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."
That was TV in the pre-Information Age for you. These days Vidal, who put his Italian villa on the market a few months ago and moved full-time to his home in Los Angeles, speaks mostly through his essay writing about the foreign and stateside adventures of the Bush administration. In the past five years he has published one major nonfiction collection, The Last Empire, and a book about the founding fathers called Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. But mainly he has stayed busy producing what he calls his "political pamphlets," a series of short essay collections called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (2002), Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2003), and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004). Last month at Duke University, he produced a short run of On the March to the Sea, an older play about the Civil War that he has rewritten entirely.
I spoke to Vidal, who will turn 80 this October, by phone from his home in Los Angeles on March 9.
City Pages: I'll start with the broadest of questions: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?
Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name.
And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.
CP: You've observed many times in your writing that the United States has elections but has no politics. Could you talk about what you mean by that, and about how so many people have come to accept a purely spectatorial relationship to politics, more like fans (or non-fans) than citizens?
Gore Vidal: Well, you cannot have a political party that is not based upon a class interest. It has been part of the American propaganda machine that we have no class system. Yes, there are rich people; some are richer than others. But there is no class system. We're classless. You could be president tomorrow. So could Michael Jackson, or this one or that one. This isn't true. We have a very strong, very rigid class structure which goes back to the beginning of the country. I will not go into the details of that, but there it is. Whether it's good or bad is something else.
We have not had a political party since that, really, of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the highest class, an aristocrat who had made common cause with the people, who were in the midst of depression, not to mention the Dust Bowl, which had taken so many farms in the '30s. We were a country in deep trouble, and he represented those in deep trouble. He got together great majorities and was elected four times to the presidency. And launched us on empire--somewhat consciously, too. He saw to it that the European colonial empires would break up, and that we would inherit bits and pieces, which we have done.
If we don't have class interests officially, then therefore we have no political parties. What is the Republican Party? Well, it used to be the party of the small-town businessman, generally in the Middle West, generally sort of out of the mainstream. Very conservative. It now represents nothing but the gas and oil business. They own it. And the people who go to Congress are simply bought. They are lawyers who are paid to represent Halliburton, big oil, big banking. So the very rich corporate America has a party for itself, the Republican Party. The Democrats don't have much of anything but a kind of wistful style. They just want everyone to be happy, and politically correct at all times. Do not hurt other people's feelings. They spend so much time on political correctness that they haven't thought of what to do politically about anything. Like say "no" to these preemptive wars, which are against not only the whole world's take on war and peace, but against United States history.
This is something new under the sun--that a president, just because he feels like it, can declare war on anybody. And Congress will go along with him, and the courts will support him. The founding fathers would be mortified if they saw what had happened to their handiwork, which wasn't very great to begin with but is now done for. When you have preemptive wars, and you have ambitious companies like Bechtel who will build up what, let us say, General Electric has helped to destroy with its weaponry--these interests are well-represented.
There is no people's party, and you can't even use the word. "Liberal" has been demonized. A liberal is a commie who's also a pedophile. Being a communist and a pedophile, he's so busy that he hasn't got time to win an election and is odious to boot. So there is no Democratic Party. We hope that something might happen with the governor of Vermont, and maybe something will or maybe it won't. But we are totally censored, and the press just follows this. It observes what those in power want it to observe, and turns the other way when things get dark. Then, when it's too late sometimes, you get some very good reporting. But by then, somebody's playing taps.
CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process?
Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't.
CP: You wrote at the end of a 2002 essay that so-called inalienable rights, once alienated, are often lost forever. Can you describe what's changed about America during the Bush years that represent permanent, or at least long-term, legacies that will survive Bush?
Vidal: Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has ceded its power to declare war. That is written in the Constitution. It's the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately. And having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever he finds terrorism. Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it doesn't mean anything. It's an abstract noun. You can't have a war against an abstract noun; it's like having a war against dandruff. It's meaningless.
But you can terrify people. The art of government now, the art of control as practiced by the current junta, is: Keep the people frightened. It's exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did. Keep them frightened: The Russians are coming. The Poles are killing Germans who live within the borders of Poland. The Czechs are doing the same thing in the Sudetenland. These are evil people. We must go after them. We must save our kin.
Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the more they'll believe it. There's nothing the average American now believes (because he's been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true. Now how do you undo so much disinformation? Well, you have to have truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day. And we don't have them.
CP: I'd like to ask you to sketch our political arc from Reagan down to Bush II. It seemed to me that Reagan took a big step down the road to Bush when he was so successful in selling the ideology of the market, the idea that whatever the interests of money and markets dictated was the proper and even the most patriotic course--which was hardly a new idea, but one that had never been embraced openly as a first principle of politics. Is that a fair assessment?
Published on Friday, March 25, 2005 by The Nation
Democrats: MIA
Editorial
from the April 11, 2005 issue of The Nation
After giving George W. Bush far too easy a ride in his first term, the Democratic leadership in Congress promised that the second term was going to be different. "This is not a dictatorship," announced Senate minority leader Harry Reid. The new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, declared, "The President neither has the mandate he thinks he has nor a majority to make policy." But three months of watching the Democrats' stumbling, often incoherent responses to Administration appointments and initiatives shows clearly that the party is making the same mistakes that cost it so dearly in the 2002 and 2004 elections.
It's easy simply to blame the GOP majorities in the Senate and House when bad legislation passes those chambers. But too frequently it has been Democratic disorder rather than Republican treachery that has made possible the Bush White House's legislative victories. That's what happened with the mid-March Senate vote on a budget amendment that would have protected the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Seven Republican senators voted to protect ANWR from oil drilling. Had the Democratic caucus simply held firm in support of the amendment, it would have won by a 52-to-48 margin. But three Democrats--Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana--broke ranks to back the Administration. All three had their excuses, and if this had been the only bill on which Democrats failed to hold together, it might not be a cause for serious concern. But this is hardly an isolated example of Democrats doing the bidding of the President and the special interests that support him.
Consider the February Senate vote on tort "reform," another issue on which Democrats are supposed to be the defenders of the common good against the rapacious Republicans. The battle lines could not have been clearer: Bush and his allies wanted to limit sharply the ability of citizens to file class-action lawsuits against corporations that injure or defraud them. A united Democratic opposition in the Senate could have mounted a populist challenge that might well have won GOP allies for a fight to preserve the sovereignty of state courts, which will be lost under the legislation. Instead, Democrats helped give Bush the first major legislative victory of his second term. Only twenty-six Senate Democrats opposed the proposal, while eighteen--including serial compromisers Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh and some who ought to know better, like Charles Schumer and Jay Rockefeller--sided with the GOP. It was just as bad in the House, where fifty Democrats--including Rahm ("no mandate") Emanuel--backed the bill, handing Bush an easy win that provides momentum for an agenda that includes proposals to restrict asbestos litigation and curb medical malpractice suits.
Even more disappointing was the mid-March vote on legislation designed to make it harder for middle-class and poor Americans to declare personal bankruptcy, leaving crooked companies like Enron free to declare bankruptcy themselves and thus be protected from claims like those by employees who lost their pensions. The vote on the measure, which had been blocked for years by such progressive Democrats as the late Paul Wellstone and a timely veto from then-President Bill Clinton, passed by an overwhelming 74-to-25 vote. Eighteen Democrats--including Reid and key players like Joseph Biden of Delaware and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico--aligned themselves with the President and the credit card companies that wrote and promoted the bill.
Apologists for these egregious compromises would have us believe that Democrats, as a minority party, have little leverage. But the Social Security debate belies such claims; with Democrats sticking together against privatization, it is the Republicans who have found themselves under pressure to compromise. The same goes for the Democratic refusal to give ground on ethics issues, which has done so much to increase pressure on scandal-plagued House majority leader Tom DeLay. Unfortunately, shows of solidarity on Social Security and ethics issues represent the exception rather than the rule when it comes to checking and balancing the White House and its Congressional allies. Again and again Democrats have failed the basic tests of an opposition party. They couldn't muster the forty votes needed to mount a Senate filibuster against Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General, only twelve Democrats opposed the nomination of Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State and none opposed the nomination of Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security, despite concerns about Rice and Chertoff that were as troubling as those regarding Gonzales's role in approving torture.
House Democrats have been even less effective in their opposition than their Senate colleagues. Despite polls showing that the vast majority of Americans opposed federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, only fifty-three Democrats opposed DeLay's move to override Florida state law and judicial rulings in a rush to satisfy the demands of the GOP's most extreme constituencies. Only thirty-six opposed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which Representative Jan Schakowsky correctly identified as a move to "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is free speech." And just thirty-nine rejected the Administration's demand for another $81.4 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and related military misadventures.
In 2002 and 2003 the Democrats tried the strategy of giving the President blank checks for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and then criticizing how the President spent them. That strategy cost the Democrats any chance to frame the debate about the war and ultimately cost them at the polls. But while some individual Democrats, like California Representative Henry Waxman, have come to recognize the folly of such an approach, the party as a whole continues to cede too much ground to the President--on Iraq and on most other issues.
Perhaps being shamed publicly, and being pressured by the grassroots, will help Congressional Democrats get their act together. Toward that end, we've initiated a biweekly "Minority/Majority" feature that identifies--by name--Democrats who give succor to the GOP. (It also praises those who've helped the cause of Democrats becoming the majority party again.) If Democrats don't define themselves as an effective opposition soon, they could end up being an ineffective one for a long time to come.
© 2005 The Nation
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