Saturday, May 17, 2008

The Lessons of History and the Myth of the "Powerless" Democrats

In the 2006 mid-term elections, many Americans, largely because they were fed up with the Iraq war, voted Democrats into Congress in districts with Republican incumbents. There was a widespread idea that the Democrats would end the war and hold the president and his administration accountable, if only they had a majority. Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Once they had the majority, Speaker Pelosi (more recently reported to have known about US waterboarding and not objected) immediately took impeachment off the table and, among other things, the Democrats have voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act and passed billions in war appropriations. The Democrats say that they do not have a large enough majority to end the war.

As Matt Gonzalez described, speaking about Senator Obama's website:

Now, this is an American senator who's telling you, even though we're in the majority party, we don't have the votes to end the war, and we need your help to get 16 Republicans either out of office or behind us. Well, what's wrong with this?

It is so fundamentally--shows such either duplicity or inexperience on his part, because you don't need a super majority, two-thirds of the senate, to end this war. You need two-thirds of the senate to override a veto by the president. But how do you stop a war? Well to fund a war you've gotta have war appropriations, if you don't want war appropriations, what do you do? You vote against the war appropriation, you are the majority party and vote it down.

Now if some of your Democratic colleagues, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe a handful of them don't want to do that, you know what you do? It's called filibustering. Because you, in other words, don't allow the measure to be voted on and then the president doesn't have money to spend on the war. How do you do that? How many votes do you think you need to filibuster? ...if the Democrats can put together 41 out of their 50 or 51 votes in the senate, guess what? Not a single war appropriation could be passed.[1, emphasis added]

The Democrats and Republicans seem to have quite a nice system worked out for themselves. I can't say that it was intentional, perhaps they just stumbled into it despite their incompetence--how to betray the interests of your constituents and get away with it without being held accountable? Blame it on the other guy--"He did it, but don't blame me, I just helped. And by the way, look how much worse he is than me, you don't want more of him, do you? So work with me." It's almost like a really awful Good Cop/Bad Cop routine.

Yesterday, someone refused to sign my Nader/Gonzalez ballot access petition because he was "too afraid it could result in McCain." I think it's been established that he is not alone in this view, and in a number of posts I've already addressed topics such as the myth of the "spoiler" and what's really at stake in this election. There are some things that need to be demanded regardless of how likely people think it is they will be achieved--I certainly don't hear anyone today faulting the 19th-century Liberty Party for pushing the anti-slavery issue by refusing to support the least-worst presidential candidate between the Whigs and Democrats.[2]

Many people defend their least-worst vote by saying that if it was not clear in 2000, it is now apparent that there is in fact a difference between the corporate candidates. I've mentioned before that they rarely discuss the differences between the corporate candidates and their own interests, but they also rarely stop to consider how such differences came about--are they different because the Democrats (for example) became better, or is it because while they've both become worse, the Republicans have even more so?

The fact is that both of them have become worse (read: more beholden to corporate interests with less regard for the well-being of Americans) and continue to do so. As Ralph Nader has pointed out in this video:

And guess what? Even Richard Nixon signed bill after bill that [we?] got through Congress: the EPA bill, the OSHA bill for job safety and health, he signed into law the great air and water pollution legislation, he signed into law the product safety commission bill--he didn't believe in any of these bills, but he had a flourishing statement of enthusiasm behind each bill and a ceremony at the White House. Now why did he sign bills he didn't believe in? Well, one answer is he was the last Republican president who was afraid of liberals. He signed these bills into law because he heard the rumble of the people from the 60s and he was afraid of the rumble of the people. And as the years passed the rumble of the people was reduced and became less and less audible. Half of democracy is showing up.[3, emphasis added]

So how is it that they aren't held accountable?

If you have a low expectation level of politicians, then they're going to oblige you. --Ralph Nader[4]

All they really need from us is our votes and then they're pretty free to do the corporations' bidding. Millions of Americans vote for one party over the other because they're the least-worst, sending candidates the message that our only demand in exchange for this and other votes is that they stay less horrible than the other guy. If the other guy becomes even more bad, they're free to become more bad too. Even though both of them get worse and worse with each election cycle, as long as the Republicans are more in-your-face about being horrible, the Democrats get away with being their accomplices.

How many times do they have to betray us, before we learn they are not an opposition party? How many times before we learn the lessons of history? The lesson that we won't get better unless we demand better.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oJAluM1v5w
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_%28United_States%29#Notable
_third-party_Presidential_candidates
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXxQT-L40Lc&feature=user
[4] http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jonathan_080514_nader_calls
_u__s___22c.htm