It certainly wasn't tolerance when President Bill Clinton sat on his hands as Republican operatives wielding baseball bats stopped votes from being counted in Florida in 2000.
It's the class war that has the potential to unite us. Hatred of George Bush has brought together a very broad coalition of unconscious class warriors. Now it's time for us to realize that hatred of Bush is really hatred of the ruthless corporate oligarchy he represents.
The good news is that the increasing economic insecurity of the middle class in this country is reaching a critical mass. As Princeton economist and Hamilton Project participant Alan Blinder puts it, "There's a whole class of people who are smart, well educated and articulate, and politically involved who will not just sit there and take it." I'd like to think I'm one of those people, and I know a lot of others who fit that description. We have an opening.
It will be an uphill battle. Centrist Democrats are working as hard as Republicans to protect free trade, while the deregulated corporate media continues to block most discussion of class inequality-and almost no one is pointing out the connections between culture war and class war inequality.
It's also likely that there are those Republicans who, having shot government in the head, would be quite content to see it flatline on a Democrat's watch. They're already getting the Dems in the new Congress to do their dirty work. While the GOP continue their insatiable shrieking for more and more corporate welfare, Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are returning to PAYGO standards-a move which would, without a return to fair taxation for the rich and big business, require that Democrats slash the remaining tatters of our social safety net.
No way. That's not winning. We need a complete turnaround, not a slight course correction. Roll back obscene corporate welfare. Pass universal health care. Drop out of NAFTA, sign Kyoto, withdraw from Iraq. Return to FCC fairness and equal-time rules, and begin enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act again, beginning with the big media monopolies. Real public financing of elections and paper ballots.
If grass- and netroots Democrats can re-ignite the class war, the culture war will lose its wallop, and we might just stand a chance of, at least, beginning to think about the problems that are threatening our very survival.
Patricia Goldsmith is a member of Long Island Media Watch, a grassroots free media and democracy watchdog group. She can be reached at plgoldsmith@optonline.net.
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