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The star power of Barack Obama and his new administration seem to be sucking the oxygen out of the political discourse. He is the news and every appointment he makes and every signal he sends has great import for the entire country.
This essay then is not about Barack Obama but rather an examination of a particular sub-segment of the political spectrum. I want to show that the activist left has a disproportionate relevance on the overall debate, especially in the historical context of the last eight years.
There is an informative milestone within these events where we can clearly identify this group and also understand its special significance. In the months after the September 11th attacks in 2001, George Bush’s approval ratings soared to 90%. That means that only ten percent of the population was cognizant and willing to speak out about the bad direction the country was taking.
Many people in hindsight express their reservations about what Bush and Cheney were doing and this is fine and completely understandable. But there needs to be some recognition of the particular loneliness of being a dissenting voice in those days when the Patriot Act was passed in a day with a single no vote; when the usefulness of torture was approvingly discussed in the media; when no-fly lists quickly included peace activists; when the Senate Judiciary committee was dumbstruck by John Ashcroft’s patriotic bluster; when detention without charge became acceptable; when the massive bombardment of an impoverished country was called a moral war. Ninety percent of the American people, whether enthusiastically or with reservation, signed off on this course.
Those who did not made every effort to be heard over the next several months. As centrist Democrats capitulated on the Iraq war resolution in an effort to hang onto power, the activist left, the ten percent, was arguing that defining a moral position against an illegal pre-emptive war was more important than winning an election. The Democrats ignored them and lost the Senate any way.
As the drumbeats for war increased, the demand by the left for principle over pragmatism also increased. By March of 2003 it had swelled to a worldwide movement. About half the country understood the principle and opposed the invasion. But the establishment in both the Democratic and Republican parties began working fiercely to discredit and silence this growing movement. There were bizarre and disappointing instances such as Terry Gross grilling the spokesperson for United for Peace and Justice about links to communists and the New Yorker magazine running a hatchet job on Noam Chomsky and his opposition to the invasion. Fox News openly derided anyone who wasn’t for the war and the Wall Street Journal editorial page spewed contempt at the slightest dissenting opinion. Scores of Democratic politicians were unequivocal in their support for the war.
In spite of the initial success of the invasion, the anti-war movement remained strong and coalesced around the candidacy of Howard Dean. Whatever the failings of his campaign, it has to be remembered that John Kerry co-opted Dean’s anti-war message and the grass-roots united behind him with the belief that he would carry that message forward. But in the general election Kerry never openly criticized the war and its rationales and attempted to outflank Bush on his right. More importantly, that great movement of people who had courageously opposed official policy silenced themselves in the belief that any demand for an adherence to principle would handicap the pragmatic pursuit of power. John Kerry lost and the peace movement never recovered its immediacy.
Nevertheless, over the next two years, the visionary truth that the ten percent was preaching in 2001 was becoming the accepted truth of the vast majority of Americans. Again in 2006 the centrist Democrats co-opted the message of opposition to the failed Iraq War and this time they didn’t abandon it until after they had won the election. Rahm Emanuel in particular made the pointed disavowal that any credit might be due to the leftist grass-roots movements. Instead he saw it as the vindication of centrist establishment pragmatism.
I review these events to re-enforce the identity of the activist left and to highlight the theme of how important it is that it make itself heard irregardless of the prevailing political atmosphere. In other words, we may be strident assholes but we have an incredibly vital role in moving the political debate forward.
We can’t look at this theme without also considering the moment when the left was most vocal and most demanding to be heard. This was in the 2000 election and the candidacy of Ralph Nader. This is a sore point for many and a fresh point of discord as Nader ran again this year and a core of the left was willing to support him anew.
Central to this bitterness is the belief, repeated by many, that if Nader hadn’t run in 2000, Gore would have been elected president. But I’d like to run this assertion through a kind of George Bailey test. What if Nader had never run? Because what people really mean is that if Nader had magically disappeared from the ballot on November 4th, then Gore would have won. What happened prior to that in the campaign was that Nader mounted the most exhilarating challenge to establishment power that had been seen in years, one that reminded a lot of people why they were progressives in the first place. Hundreds of thousands showed up at rallies to reaffirm the principles that differentiated them from the Republicans, principles largely abandoned by the establishment Democrats.
Gore, on the other hand, ran one of the most boring, depressing campaigns in history. Few people seem to remember now that he refused to offer universal healthcare as part of his platform. The words Global Warming almost never crossed his lips. Obeisance to corporate power was just as much a hallmark of the Democrats then as it is today. Most disappointingly, he failed to show any political agility to try to win even a handful of those Nader voters to a broader Democratic coalition. Any notion that they were too stubborn or purist to be swayed is patently false.
Without Nader in the race Gore would have been alone with his tepid agenda and no progressive enthusiasm coloring the day. I contend that Bush would have won such an election anyway, because as in any sporting matchup, the team that “wants it” most tends to win. That is what the Republicans proved in the post-election scramble- that they wanted power more. Gore gave a half-hearted fight for what was rightfully his. That would have been the case whether Nader ran or not.
One can challenge this view, but I am bringing home the point that none of us really knows what would have happened if particular events had been different. But to wish that Nader hadn’t run or that voters hadn’t been drawn to him is to wish that the activist left would just stay quiet and not rock the boat. It is a pointless and counter-productive fantasy.
For the experiment has to continue beyond the election of 2000. If one wishes for a docile and reticent left wing then what happens to the core ten percent that I spoke of in the beginning. There were plenty of loyal Democratic Gore-voters who made up that ten percent, but I think there were very few Nader supporters who were in the ninety percent who supported Bush in 2001. And without this core of vocal dissidents what might the next seven years have looked like?
We have to ask ourselves, how does the Democratic Party keep becoming more progressive in spite of itself. How did universal healthcare become so central to its mission in 2008 when in 2000 they claimed it wasn’t important? How did the rejection of the premise of the Iraq War become accepted wisdom when the Democrats had staked their credibility on that very premise? How did global climate change become central to the Democrats’ lexicon.
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