From “Socialist Worker”: The Democrats Don’t Deserve Our Support
The Democrats Don’t Deserve Our Support
By Sharon Smith
(Socialist Worker, Sept. 19) — After the 2000 election,
Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader was
roundly denounced by Democrats as a “spoiler” who
helped George Bush defeat Al Gore (ignoring the U.S.
Supreme Court’s decisive role during the Florida debacle
in stealing the election for Bush).
As the 2004 election approaches, the vast majority
of the left — including many who campaigned for Nader in
2000 — has made defeating Bush (by implication, with a
Democrat) its number one priority.
The Green Party itself is considering a “safe states”
strategy — campaigning for a Green candidate only in
states where Democrats or Republicans hold an
uncontested majority, effectively an endorsement of
the Democrats.
As left-wing journalist Norman Solomon wrote
recently, “The Bush team has neared some elements
of fascism,” while Z Magazine’s MichaelAlbert argued,
“However bad his replacement may turn out, replacing
Bush will improve the subsequent mood of the world
and its prospects for survival.”
These are widely accepted justifications for rallying
behind the Democrats as “the lesser of two evils.” By
this “lesser evil” logic, many progressives now attracted
to Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich because of their
opposition to the Iraq war will ultimately end up
supporting a mainstream Democrat who seeks to win
swing votes from the Republicans. Dean himself — who
boasts, “I was a triangulator before Clinton was a
triangulator” — might well fit the bill.
Out of sheer hatred for Bush, progressives can
agree that the war party in power should be brought
down. But the Democratic Party is a war party in
waiting.
“Lesser evil” support for the Democrats has been
repeated by sections of the left every four years
since the Great Depression. But far from broadening
the scope of left-wing politics, it has stunted the
development of a radical social movement in the U.S.
For this reason, it is necessary to view the role of
“lesser evil” politics historically.
The term “fascist” has also been applied to
conservative Republicans Barry Goldwater in 1964,
Richard Nixon in the 1970s, as well as Ronald Reagan
and George Bush Sr. in the 1980s, to express the
urgency of voting Democrat on election Day. To be
sure, this Bush administration, dominated by
neo-conservatives, models itself on Reagan’s.
And there are differences between the Democratic
and Republican Parties on issues such as abortion
rights. But the two parties, each funded and controlled
by corporate donors, agree on fundamental aims, if not
on the strategies to achieve them.
Both are pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist –
dedicated to furthering the interests of the U.S. ruling
class at home and expanding U.S. power globally.
Bloody wars and political repression are neither unique
to this Bush administration nor to Republicans.
Democrat Harry Truman’s first presidential act was
to order two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lyndon Johnson, the
Democratic Party’s “peace candidate” in 1964, had by
1965 massively escalated the Vietnam War — a war that
killed 1.3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 U.S. soldiers.
Nor is Bush’s USA PATRIOT Act the first time that
the party in power has used large-scale repression at
home. Democrat Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage
Act of 1917, banning protest against U.S. participation
in the First World War, and his administration detained
and deported thousands of immigrants. In 1942,
Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt forcibly “relocated”
the entire Japanese-American population on the West
Coast into concentration camps for the rest of the
Second World War.
The Democratic Party’s reputation as a liberal
alternative to the Republicans is greatly exaggerated –
mainly by its liberal supporters. One need look no
further back than the Clinton administration.
As a candidate in 1992, Clinton promised to “put
people first,” but instead of advancing liberal principles,
Clinton stole the Republican’s agenda on key issues.
The hallmark of Clinton’s presidency was ending
“welfare as we know it” in 1996 — dismantling 60-year-
old New Deal legislation obliging the government to
provide income support to the poor.
Clinton also helped to pave the way for Bush’s
USA PATRIOT Act when he signed the 1996 Anti-
Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Also in
1996, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act,
banning gay marriage, and under his tenure, the U.S.
prison population nearly doubled in size.
There is no reason to assume, as many do, that
a Gore presidency would have avoided war after
September 11. Clinton oversaw UN-sponsored
sanctions against Iraq that led to the deaths of more
than 1 million Iraqis, and U.S. warplanes dropped bombs
on Iraq almost daily during his time in office. And
Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, calling
for the U.S. “to seek to remove the regime headed by
Saddam Hussein.”
Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
admits in a recent Foreign Affairs article, “I personally
felt [Bush’s new Iraq] war was justified on the basis
of Saddam’s decade-long refusal to comply with UN
Security Council resolutions on weapons of mass
destruction.”
There is another reason why supporting the
Democrats as a “lesser evil” is a mistake. For nearly
a century, this logic has blocked the possibility for
building an alternative to the left of the Democrats.
Every four years, leftists must betray their principles
simply to keep a Republican out of office.
In 1964, anti-war activists adopted the slogan
“Half the way with LBJ,” only to see Johnson
escalate the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, liberals
scurried to provide cover for Clinton’s welfare repeal.
As former Health and Human Services official Peter
Edelman noted, “So many of those who would have
shouted from the rooftops if a Republican president
had done this were boxed in by their desire to see
the president re-elected.”
Largely because the left and the labor movement
have remained tied to the coattails of the Democratic
Party since the 1930s, the U.S. remains the only
advanced industrial society without a labor or social
democratic party funded by unions instead of big
business.
If the left is to move forward, its collective
memory must stretch further back than the last
Republican administration — and it must set its
sights much higher than promoting the current
crop of Democratic Party contenders.
As social activist Howard Zinn argued in the
pages of this newspaper, “[T]he really critical thing
isn’t who is sitting in the White House but who is
sitting in — in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the
halls of government, in the factories. Who is
protesting, who is occupying offices and
demonstrating — those are the things that
determine what happens.”
The course of the struggle, not the outcome
of the 2004 elections, will shape the future of the
left — and experience has shown that endorsing
the Democratic Party pulls the left into its fold,
not the other way around.
