Painted into a Corner:
Liberals Amid The Wreckage of the 2002 Elections

EXPLAINING THE MARGINALITY of the left is hard enough. How do we explain the Democratic Party's election collapse, too? Some people have no problem.

From The New York Times editorialists to writers for The Nation and The American Prospect, the answer is clear and the verdict is in: guilty by reason of identity theft. The Democrats lost Congress because they would not -- or could not -- campaign on their own core progressive values. Democrats were clueless about the economy and gutless on peace and war, a party lacking fiber, or certainly roughage. The public -- in the context of terror attacks and war threats -- saw no reason to embrace them.

Lack of vision in the face of warrior Bush, the tailing after Republican nostrums and the inability to stand up to the center-right Democratic Leadership Conference that's what done ‘em in, the best of the liberals writers say. Worse, the party's failure to stitch together even one electable Democratic idea will doom progressive Democrats to pariah status unless they can get the party to rally its base and fight back.

The explanation is tempting, and true as far as it goes. But it's not that simple.

Robert L. Borosage, writing in The Nation Online, is one of those who thinks the party can do better.

Contrary to the DLC, the Democratic Party is not a dirigible that can be repositioned to fit the passing winds. It is a party of working people against the Republican Party of corporations and wealth. It is a party of diversity against the whites-only Republican Party. It is a party of pro-choice women against the party of the radical right. It is a party of unions and of environmentalists against the party of Ken Lay and Dick Cheney. It won't ever be more muscular than Republicans on war abroad or guns at home. It will win elections by fighting for the causes of its base, while putting forth a bold, full-employment economic program and a real security agenda that challenges Bush for defining threats solely in military terms. The DLC may call that ‘too liberal.' For Democrats, it's just common sense.

Hold back for a moment about whether his take on the Democrats is descriptive or prescriptive, a fact or a wish. He calls the DLC, the organization of Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Joe Lieberman, "the corporate wing of the Democratic Party," a true enough statement, and wants the party to stand for something progressive. It doesn't now, he says. So it loses.

And when it runs left, his calculus holds, it wins.

John Nichols agrees. Writing in The Nation Online (12/9/02), he says that a shift back to traditional liberal principles was key to Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's successful re-election bid by winning black voters and urban white working-class households.

"Landrieu was no progressive before December 5, and she is no progressive now. But by putting some distance between herself and Bush, by reaching out to core Democratic constituencies, and by focusing in on local economic issues, she offered an alternative not just to [her opponent] but to the Bush administration and Republican policies."

He adds that her chameleon-like efforts to identify with Bush in the state primary -- a strategy she dropped along with her feckless out-of-state advisors -- explains why she had to face a runoff at all.

Michael Tomasky, writing in New York magazine, argues that Republican master mage and Bush operative Karl Rove hit upon a formula to put any Democratic genie back in the bottle by combining "Reagan's uncomplicated, cheery nature" with "Gingrich's ideological tenacity. Contemplate that for a minute: Gingrich's agenda and Reagan's disposition. And that's the formula."

Adds Tomasky: Now, "the Republicans are in complete control of the emotional terrain of politics (as well as, of course, having more money, stronger supporting institutions, and their own "news" network for message dissemination). The Democrats chase them around like a bunch of bumbling Clouseaus."

Democrats "need to make something happen," Tomasky concludes. "If not, they might be watching from the wings for a long time to come."

These writers are on to something. Running scared doesn't work. This was no election tsunami, no public shift toward reactionary policies, no mandate to rule from the right. A 51-49 deficit in the Senate and a handful of votes shy of a majority in the House is a good perch from which to launch an opposition, not run for cover. This election didn't cause the kind of fundamental realignment Walter Dean Burnham talked about in his classic study of critical elections, which he described minimally as intense, polarizing, and definitive high-turnout affairs. Except possibly in Georgia, where multiple amputee and war veteran Sen. Max Cleland lost his re-election bid because he wasn't seen as sufficiently bloody-minded, the state-by-state contests were uninspired.

CERTAINLY AS A SKETCH of what happened, all three writers are right. There was no fight. No policies aimed at addressing worsening economic and social indicators -- the low-hanging fruit of politics -- were introduced into the election. What wasn't raised in this campaign is a litany of what working families need and what the Democrats avoided.

What wasn't on the election radar? Here's a sampler.

• Unemployment. Nationally the private sector lost 2 million jobs under Bush. Of 39 cities with labor forces of 200,000 or more in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found 25 topping the national unemployment rate of 6 percent. Hardest hit were not just the industrial towns Cleveland, Detroit and Oakland, but also the most populous cities, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. Almost every big city with the exception of Boston and Minneapolis showed high rates of unemployment. Even once-booming Las Vegas was within one tenth of a percentage point of the national unemployment average.

• Budget cuts. California's state budget gap stands at $21 billion. In New York State, faced with a likely multi-billion budget deficit, gubernatorial hopeful Carl McCall ran a thin, issue-less campaign.

• Global markets and job exports. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), a plain-language look on the world economy, made the case for a repudiation of actually-existing globalism. It's a connect-the-dots textbook ready to be translated into election discourse. There were no takers

• Prescription drugs. Polls show widespread support for inexpensive prescription medication for seniors. Not only were the Democrats outmaneuvered on this issue legislatively, there was little effort to blame the Republican's for the congressional failure.

Not an echo of these was in any campaign. In the absence of a real challenge, Republicans embraced war and security, their natural issues. The wonder is the Democrats fared as well as they did.

The party's friendly critics are good, principled writers. They are not moving inexorably right, making peace with a corrupted system or relishing a Middle East war. Hunger, want, despair and vast inequalities still outrage them, and they see politics and an activist, interventionist state -- the trappings of classic social democratic theory -- as a means to change things.

Borosage in particular is no political slouch. He has become a one-man band sounding the dangers of centrism -- only in part because he's working the same side of the street as are the DLC suits -- as co- director of the Campaign for America's Future, an advocacy group contending to the left of the DLC.

He will be an important asset in efforts to counteract those like John Catsimatidis, chairman of Red Apple Companies and a deep-pockets New York Democratic contributor, who is already talking about moving the party to the political center.

"We have to decide whether the Democratic Party is putting out the right message people want to hear," Mr. Catsimatidis says. "If that's not the right message, what is?" (Crain's NY Business, 11/26/02).

They also don't paint Republican Karl Rove as the Svengali who makes all bad things happen, as Jack Beatty does in The Atlantic (August 2000). Beatty, like many others, demonizes the presidential consiglieri for "ma(king) U.S. economic policy hostage to politics," as though Bush were the first chief executive to have a political advisor dominate policy: James Farley, Sherman Adams, Kevin O'Donnell, and George Stephanopoulos also come to mind. Rove is just better at it, the Democrats are worse, or at least people have forgotten just how pivotal Farley was to FDR's agenda.

They are certainly preferable to those loitering waiting for sun-up and the Republican vampires to be re- interred. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, in their The Emerging Democratic Majority, end an otherwise descriptively important book on a quietistic, non-political, even non-sensual note, endorsing what can be called "the inevitability of progressive centrism." For them, in the wake of demographic and cultural changes favoring liberal policies and Republican implosion through over-reaching, its nach Bush uns. Even their argument for an organically developing and more liberal electorate is no gimme. Pre-election polling in October by the National Journal's Charles Cook showed black support for Bush hovering around 27 percent, too high to boost Democrats over the top in close races.

Socialists can quibble about liberal programs. Too accommodating in abandoning affirmative action and rejecting any race-based remedies; not insistent on a thoroughgoing democratic foreign policy; ready to concede that welfare reform may have been a good idea after all. But those are not the problems.

On issues from health and housing policy to union democracy and income distribution, liberals and traditional leftists agree. Unless you look for narcissistic differences à la the French style of political engagement, those like Borosage, Tomasky and Nichols stand on much the same ground as do the Democratic Party's radical critics. They may even agree on the need for a non-corporate party, not just on building a section of one that won't give business a free ride. They also know better than most the right answer to Wobbly Ralph Chaplin's pertinent question: "Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite?"

The problem is that even the best of the liberals paint themselves into a corner. Like early Christian dissenters, they fear salvation outside of Holy Mother Church is impossible.

What is more problematic is their assumption that the Democratic Party can change, not just by adopting a marketing strategy of running to the left, but at becoming itself an instrumentality for social change.

So when Stanley Aronowitz, as the 2002 New York State Green Party gubernatorial candidate, went hat in hand for backing to union friends he had known and worked with for some four decades as a strategist, organizer, publicist, educator and stump speaker -- often at a moment's notice -- the response was "Stanley who?"

The late Jim Chapin was irritatingly typical. A Democratic Socialists of America founder and leader, a longtime advisor to New York's Mark Green, he was until his untimely death this year a risible, pungent and always informed political correspondent for United Press International. Chapin could deconstruct the corporate connects of a thousand politicians and link them back to their business- patron roots. But he always ended by reflexively arguing that the peculiarities of America's two- party hegemony -- specifically its first-past-the-post, winner-take-all election process -- guaranteed that the existing two mass parties could be the only locus of possible reform politics. Any exit strategy was utopian.

Or Dennis Rivera, leader of the giant 1199-Service Employees International Union in New York. Tired of waiting for lefty, likely irritated that his long stewardship as state vice chair of New York's Democratic Party organization resulted in so little, and having won something tangible from the Republican governor in the form of more than $1 billion in state dollars originally targeted to healthcare for the uninsured but rerouted to wages for his members, he walked. His swan song featured not only a full-throttle endorsement for incumbent Republican George Pataki, but statewide stumping for him by his politically savvy union. He repeatedly explained this odd-couple tango by saying unions "have no permanent alliances, only permanent interests."

BUT THE REAL QUESTION IS: Can the Democratic Party ever be anything more?* Strategically the question has to be asked: can this party do what its liberal supporters say it can. Can it mobilize? Can it take on the corporations? Can it oppose and stop fast track trade legislation? Can it carry any larger ideas and a deeper sensibility than the baseline "abortion-rights-good, guns-bad, don't mention social class and we'll get back to you on replacement workers, death penalty and prison reform?"

Can anyone reasonably expect those young people now marching in anti-globalization and anti-war protests, and who have no electoral face or strategy, to be won to such a party as activists? Can the Democrats not so much market themselves by running to the left -- a possibility -- as govern from the left?

Will the monied classes, or those among them who underwrite the Democrats, contribute to a party that doesn't hug the center? Would even the AFL-CIO do so? If not, who would fund such a rejiggered organization? Clearly, even just to survive institutionally, a left-of-center party would have to be mass-based, and one that looks and acts nothing like the present, inertial coalition of county organizations, hired operatives and electeds.

Can this melange ever really go beyond Republican lite, when, the late Paul Wellstone to the contrary, there is no Democrat heavy; only variations on thin lager and near beers. It's the same sad song in France and the UK, where "third force" professional politicians war on unions, and where Tony Blair has become Rudy Giuliani with a human face.

For years, the radical left painted the two parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum caricatures. A better cultural simile would be Sidney Falco and J.J. Hunsecker, the symbiotic protagonists in the 1957 noir classic "Sweet Smell of Success." Here, the grasping, unctuous publicity agent Falco (Tony Curtis) is too declassed and broke ever to leave a gratuity at a nightclub, while the viperous gossip columnist Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) is too powerful and loathsome to stoop to gratify anyone.

With these sad choices, no wonder some institutional leaders found themselves trying to make their support for Pataki seem like independent political action.

*Posing it this way does not contradict working in mainstream efforts and calling in the chips later, the thin meat of politicking. Speaking ex cathedra, I believe that working for some major party candidates in discrete electoral campaigns is a tactical question, no more and no less. I even have my favorite pols, and I tell my children that so long as Democratic state Sen. Liz Krueger represents the East Side of Manhattan, they can sleep safely in their beds. These are notions shamans of independent politics war against. But I also know that, strategically, working to elect even the best liberals is a holding action, if even that. Institutions such as public sector unions and community-based housing groups, heavily and inevitably reliant on public dollars, may be compelled to endorse and stump for major-party candidates, but other activists are not. As the cuckolded husband in the vaudeville joke says to his wife's lover, "I may have to, but you?" Strong opinions on individuals taking part in mainstream election campaigns, pro or con, run along the same lines as opinions on gum chewing, a harmless pastime Trotsky disliked, but about which deeply held feelings are pointless. The tough questions: what kind of electoral politics; when, how, and if ever, to back Democrats strategically; how to build an alternative, anti-corporate political center; and what role electoral politics plays in building that alternative -- the real questions of moment -- aren't answered by pointing out either the merits of Democratic Party electoral abstinence or criticizing Pavlovian get-out-the-vote efforts. return

Contents of No. 34

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