Should the Democratic Party Nominate a Presidential Candidate in 2004?
[This puts an interesting twist on the entire “Should the Greens run a candidate for President?” discussion. -Thomas]
Should the Democratic Party Nominate a Presidential Candidate in 2004?
Discussions of the 2004 presidential race often leave out the very important
question of whether or not it would be in the best interest of progressive
movements for the Democratic Party to run someone for president. I believe
that the Democratic Party should stand down in 2004. Here are 10 reasons
why.
Reason No. 1. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ELECTION OF
GEORGE W. BUSH IN THE 2000 ELECTION.
In the 2000 elections, the Green Party brought at least a million voters to
the polls who would have selected the Democratic Party candidate as their
second choice if they had been able to. For years, Greens have been
advocating “Instant Runoff Voting,” (IRV) which lets voters rank order
candidates and, if their first choice is not among the top contenders,
transfers their vote to another choice. Since the Democratic Party knew
that this system is used around the world and they knew that a Green votes
could be the difference in a close race, they knew that getting IRV in place
could be the difference between winning and losing the 2000 election. [1]
But the Democratic Party power brokers also knew that if voters were given
the option of expressing their preference for candidates, tens of millions
would have shown their disgust with Gore by ranking him below Nader. Thus,
they decided that they would rather risk losing the election than allow the
option of voting for “Nader first, Gore second.”
Democratic Party bosses concluded that they had far more in common with
George W. Bush than they did with Ralph Nader. They intentionally chose to
keep Nader out of the presidential debates, even if that meant more apathy
toward the elections and a lower voter turnout. They consciously decided
that putting George W. Bush in the White House was their “lesser evil.”
Reason No. 2. DEMOCRATIC PARTY BOSSES OPPOSE BUSH-AS-A-PERSON BUT DO NOT
OPPOSE BUSH-AS-A-POLITICAL-PROGRAM.
During the US slaughter in Vietnam, many commented that World War II brought
the defeat of Hitler and the victory of fascism. The 2004 Democratic
strategy is the same . They merely want to replace Bush, the personality.
But they could not care less if they nominate someone who continues Bush’s
policies.
The mantra “Anyone but Bush” is designed to blur and confuse these two
concepts. The average person thinks, “We need to stop the horrible things
Bush is doing and that means that anyone who replaces him will act
differently.” But smoke-filled Democratic Party plotting sessions will
select a candidate who can capitalize on anti-Bush sentiment and what he
would do in office would be irrelevant. In fact, “Anyone but Bush” ignores
that the Democratic Party is responsible for each and every one of the
atrocities associated with the one they demonize.
If the Democrats were against the Bush program, why would they wait until
the election to fight it? Why would they refuse to mobilize, as a party,
[not as individual people, but as a political party] to have demonstrations,
strikes or any other actions that would stop the Bush program now? Why
would they tell us “Wait until the 2004 elections” to stop the Bush program?
Democratic candidates inevitably pretend that they are less pro-war, more
pro-labor, and more human rights during the primary season, move to the
right to get the nomination, move further to the right to win the election,
and act the same in office. The only reason for the Democrats to nominate a
2004 presidential candidate is to dull voters into believing that they are
an alternative. Voters should have an honest choice in 2004, which means the
Democratic Party should stay out of the presidential race.
Reason No. 3. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING RICHARD NIXON
THE MOST PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENT IN THE LAST 30 YEARS.
The following occurred during the Nixon reign:
a. an end to the Vietnam War;
b. beginning of the Food Stamp program;
c. creation of the Environmental Protection Agency;
d. recognition of China;
e. passage of the Freedom of Information Act;
f. formal dismantling of the FBI’s COINTEL program;
g. decriminalization of abortion; and,
h. creation of Earned Income Tax Credits.
These did not occur because Nixon and Henry Kissinger went tiptoeing through
the tulips and concluded that warm fuzzy feelings were better than genocide
in Southeast Asia. They happened because the corporate heads and their
flunkies in government were terrified of the convergence of the anti-war and
Black power movements with the mushrooming women’s and environmental
movements and the potential for their having a massive impact on the labor
movement. The Nixon years prove beyond a doubt that mass movements can
force good things from horrible people in power. The Democratic Party
presidencies after Nixon prove that “good” people in power without mass
movements have no value whatsoever.
No presidency since Nixon has reaped so many progressive results. This is
largely because the Democratic Party has played its traditional role of
defusing mass movements and channeling them into dead-end politics.
Reason No. 4. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NON-STOP ATTACK
ON LABOR.
Under the reign of Lyndon Johnson the Democrats had the presidency and a
majority in both houses of congress. For years they had whined that this
was what they needed to repeal the odious anti-labor provisions of the
Taft-Hartley Act; yet they did nothing when they had the chance.
Throughout its history, labor struggles have been lead by rank and file
activists who support “social unionism,” or unions’ taking a major role in
fighting racism, sexism, war and environmental destruction. Workplace
victories have often been co-opted by thugs advocating “business unionism,”
or the attitude that unions should be blind to society and restrict
themselves to wages, working conditions, pensions and health plans.
For over a century, the Democratic Party has cultivated the business
unionists, helped them destroy rank and file movements, and worked to
extinguish any vision of social reorganization that might make its way into
the minds of labor organizers. Backward union bureaucrats have collaborated
with the Democratic Party in creating fake corporate “unions” in the third
world that help to imprison, torture and kill any social unionists that
rival them.
A symbiotic relationship has evolved between the Democratic and Republican
parties. When in power, the Democrats strengthen the labor bureaucracy,
thereby helping to undermine the will of the rank and file to organize and
resist. When the Republicans are in power, they reap the benefits of the
Democrats’ work by attacking and crushing the weakened unions. Then
business unionists tell their members that Republicans are responsible for
the sad state of labor and they must vote Democratic. The cycle repeats and
union membership goes down.
Reason No. 5. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR CUTBACKS IN SOCIAL
SERVICES AT THE FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL LEVELS.
Cutbacks began during the final years of the Jimmy Carter presidency, not
during the first year of Reagan, as is often claimed. The Democratic Party
is responsible for decades of designing, voting for and implementing
cutbacks that destroy jobs, pensions, medical coverage, public
transportation and schools.
In St. Louis, the public school system is under attack by a Democratic Party
school board in a city with a Democratic mayor and a Board of Alderman where
27 of 28 members are Democrats. The Democratic Party machine is responsible
for closing 16 schools (14 of which are in predominantly Black portions of
the City), firing custodians, secretaries, half of all teachers aides,
eliminating bus routes, packing up to 50 students in a classroom, attempting
to raid the teachers’ pension fund, and paying over $6 million to management
firms from outside of St. Louis to carry out the attack.
Many people with the best of intentions work with the Democratic Party and
some get elected to local office and state legislatures. The Democratic
Party sucks these organizers into first accepting that “there are not as
many funds as there used to be” and then participating in decisions
concerning which social services will be eliminated. The Democratic Party
does not lead communities in linking up with others to demand an end to the
destruction of essential services. Its role is to persuade local leaders to
look out for their own neighborhood, ignore the needs of other communities,
and ignore the plight of the rest of the world by supporting candidates of
war and plunder.
Reason No. 6. DEMOCRATICS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ATTACKS ON CIVIL LIBERTIES
SUCH AS THE PATRIOT ACT.
They wrote it. They voted for it. The PATRIOT Act was a bipartisan attack
on civil liberties fully supported by the Democratic Party. Though it was a
continuation of legislation from the Clinton years, its history goes much
further back.
The Democratic Party has been involved in undermining civil liberties from
Woodrow Wilson’s attack on the Wobblies through LBJ’s COINTEL PRO campaign
against Martin Luther King. During the Clinton-Gore regime, more Black men
were incarcerated in Florida than it would have taken for Gore to win the
vote.
In the early 20th century, the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow.
In the early 21st century, the Democratic Party is the party of prisons and
the death penalty. Everyone who pulls a lever for the Democratic Party
pulls a lever to execute someone for not having enough money to afford good
lawyer.
Reason No. 7. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS THE PARTY OF ENVIRONMENTAL
DESTRUCTION.
Similar to labor, the Democratic Party co-opts movements by cultivating
Washington DC-based bureaucrats more interested in their own salaries than
in mass actions to stop environmental destruction. Whether Clinton’s
“salvage logging” or efforts of politicians to fawn over genetic engineering
or support nuclear plants, nuclear transportation and nuclear weapons, it is
impossible to discern any meaningful distinction between Democrats and
Republicans.
In 1992 Al Gore promised that, if Clinton and he were elected, he would stop
the East Liverpool incinerator, whose poisonous fumes blew directly into an
Ohio working class elementary school. They won the election and the promise
was history.
In the 1980s, a flood washed dioxin-laced oil onto the working class town of
Times Beach, Missouri. It was the second dioxin poisoning for those who had
handled Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. It was the third dioxin
poisoning for many who had worked in industrial settings. Democratic
President Clinton, Democratic Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, and Democratic
County Executive Buzz Westfall joined efforts to ensure that they would be
poisoned a fourth time by a dioxin incinerator. The Democratic dream was
fulfilled in the late 1990s.
Stories of the Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator pushed by Democratic New York
Governor Cuomo and Democratic New York Mayor Dinkins and similar episodes
elsewhere could fill volumes. The Democratic Party seeks to turn the globe
into a toxic wasteland.
Reason No. 8. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS THE GRAND CHEF, THE BIG CHEESE, THE
GLORY HOG OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE DEALS.
In the early 1990s, George Bush Sr. was not able to get the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through congress. So big business decided that
a back-stabbing Democrat would serve its interests better than an
iron-fisted Republican. Enough money poured into Democratic Party coffers
to make Bill Clinton president.
Dick Gephardt of St. Louis supposedly lead efforts to stop it from getting
through congress. I wrote an article documenting that when Gephardt spoke
in Monterrey, Mexico, he said that he would help get NAFTA approved. It was
a pleasant surprise when the Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis corporate paper,
published it. I awaited a denunciation from Gephardt or someone on his
staff. It never came. To this day, Gephardt has not refuted the
documentation that he merely feigned to lead the resistance because of his
union base in St. Louis. [2]
In the areas of labor, environment, civil liberties and cutbacks the
Democratic Party spins the mythology that, compared to the wicked
Republicans, it is the “lesser evil.” This is more than a little bizarre
since no one doubts that Democrats have the main “credit” for international
trade deals such as NAFTA, GATT and WTO and the whole point of such deals is
to undermine labor, the environment and civil liberties.
The Clinton regime was so incredibly successful at pushing trade deals to
subjugate the global South to the greed of the US, EU and Japan that its
negotiations rushed ahead of its mechanisms of violence to enforce those
deals. Bush’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq are a warning to the rest of
the world that the US will back up its control of trade and economics with
violence to force subjugation.
The brutal assaults of the Republican Bush are the natural outgrowth of the
slick deals of the Democrat Clinton. It is utterly false to claim that
George W. Bush represents a qualitative break with what preceded him or that
his presidency is somehow uniquely dangerous. One can only believe that
falsity by ignoring what has gone on during Democratic administrations.
Reason No. 9. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS THE PARTY OF WAR.
Just as the Democratic Party is the “worse evil” regarding international
trade deals, the Democrats are more likely to lead the US into war than
Republicans.
Those who imagine that a Democrat would be less of a war monger would do
well to remember that it was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who won reelection with
the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then promptly went to war and jailed
anyone who didn’t like it. They should remember that the only leader of any
nation who ever ordered the dropping of a nuclear bomb was Democrat Harry
Truman. That Democrat dropped the bomb after ignoring attempts to surrender
and then, just to see if fusion worked as well as fission, ordered the
deployment of a second nuclear bomb.
Any who hallucinate that “progressive” Democrats are peaceful should
remember that Democrat John Kennedy risked global nuclear war over Russian
missiles in Cuba that were further from the US than US missiles in Turkey
were from the USSR. They should remember that Democrat Lyndon Johnson won
reelection ridiculing Barry Goldwater’s promise to bomb Vietnam back to the
stone age and then tried to carry out Goldwater’s program.
The dream of the peace-loving Democratic is based on an extremely short
memory which fails to recall that the Clinton-Gore regime was responsible
for the murder of 5000 Iraqi children per month by sanctions. As hideous as
the current administration is, Clinton-Gore’s silent slaughter exceeded the
number of deaths caused by Bush.
Reason No. 10. THOUGH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY MATCHES THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IN
TREASON, IT EXCEEDS IT IN COWARDICE.
Any who find it severe to charge the Democrats and Republicans with
“treason” should ponder the fact that international trade deals allow secret
tribunals of bureaucrats to trump US laws. Though “treason” usually refers
to service to a foreign enemy, it makes sense to apply it to those who seek
to destroy their country by making its air to foul too breathe, poisoning
its land so crops will not grow, making the world’s waters too contaminated
to support fish and producing enough nuclear material to create genetic
diseases for eternity.
When these are combined with increasing extinction of species, accelerated
global warming and explosion of genetic pollution of animals as well as
plants, it is clear that, at some point, the world will not support human
life.
Republicans may well eliminate humanity in 10 to 30 years. The Democrats
claim that they are far more reasonable, which means that their policies
might result in human life limping along for 50 to 100 years. This is what
we are supposed to be excited about.
The Democratic Party warns that we must not campaign on the massive changes
in corporate power and control that are needed to reverse the path of
biodevastation. They precaution that putting forth a Green program will
“scare people” and get Republicans elected. Their basic idea is that we
should accept destruction of the planet as a given and just try to make sure
it doesn’t happen until we are all dead and gone. That can be called the
Democratic Party “brief program.”
According to Democratic bosses, rather than try to save the planet at the
risk of a Republican wiping things out quicker, go for certain extermination
with the promise that you won’t have to experience it, but that you will
leave it for your children or grandchildren. That is the Ultimate Cowardice
of the Democratic Party.
CONCLUSION
The task of progressives is not to quibble over whether the world should
have 10, 50 or 100 years before it can no longer sustain life. Our job is
to make fundamental changes so that extinction does not happen in our
lifetime, or in the lifetimes of our children or grandchildren. The huge
social changes that are necessary will not happen because people select the
lesser of two evils whose careers depend on begging for financial
contributions from the very corporations that profit from planetary
destruction.
A political party is more than the sum of individuals it nominates for
public office. A party is its political program: both the formal program
written on paper; and, the informal program which consists of relationships
it has with economic classes and social groups. The Democratic Party is a
wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America.
One or two maverick Democrats who campaign for the presidential nomination
do not alter the fundamental nature of that Party. It is, in fact, possible
for one to get the nomination - if the country is desperate and if the
candidate is sufficiently astute at mouthing left while leaning right. But
if the mavericks do not get the nomination, their role will be to draw in
local organizers who will be committed to proving their sincerity by
supporting the Democratic Party nominee in the general election.
If we are to achieve the changes necessary to preserve human and other life,
we must begin by building our own counter-institutions to replace corporate
control. This includes building an electoral party outside of the parties
of big business. It means linking many movements against oppression with a
vision of a new society. Elections are but one of many ways to mobilize
people and can only be successful if candidates come from progressive
movements and are accountable to them.
The Democratic Party is not a vehicle for ending corporate control of our
lives. It is a fool’s fantasy and an obstacle to building a new society.
This is based on presentations given by Don Fitz, Green Party of St. Louis,
at the New York Law School on November 8, 2003 and at Genesis House in St.
Louis on December 3, 2003.
Notes
1. The implication by Democratic Party apologists that all 2000 votes for
Ralph Nader would have gone to Al Gore is dishonest in the extreme. Exit
polls showed that if Nader had not been in the race, then of the almost 3
million who voted for him, 25% would have voted for Bush, 38% for Gore, and
37% would not have voted. Two things are clear: [a] the net gain from Nader
voters for Gore would have been 13% (=38% - 25%), not 100%; and [b] Nader
brought at least a million voters to the polls who Gore could not bring out
and whose votes the Gore machine threw away by not endorsing IRV.
2. Given the mythology that Dick Gephardt “opposed” NAFTA, one can only
wonder how many other “progressive” Democrats pretend to support labor,
pretend to support the environment, or pretend to oppose cutbacks in order
to save their skins at election time and are allowed by party bosses to do
so because they know that enough votes already lined up to win a victory for
big business.
