ã ‚¬ ‚¬
"Graveyard of Progressive Ideals"
Progressives play no part in this paradigm. Dem leaders take progressive votes for granted, and admirable Democratic politicians like Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers serve mainly to herd progressive voters back into the party's fold in every presidential election. Despite the sincerest wishes of The Nation's editorial page, there's no hope for rehabilitation of the Democratic Party.
Ralph Nader wants to see a progressive face Mr. Obama in the race for the 2012 Democratic nomination. Progressive challengers from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich have competed since the 1980s, only to see the nod go to the corporate-dollar contender and any hint of progressivism jettisoned from the party platform.
The Democratic leadership holds the party's progressive base in contempt. Rahm Emanuel called those who complained about President Obama's broken promises of change "retards" and Vice President scolded them for whining.
Mr. Obama and other Dems condemned the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which knocked down limits to corporate spending on partisan political ads. But they won't escape its effect. The power of corporate elites to influence both parties' candidates and hijack the public debate on any given issue has expanded far beyond what we've imagined.
Most progressives have only been able to see as far as the next election. Sure, the prospect of another Republican White House is scary. Here's something a lot scarier: another century of public debates and elections limited to D vs. R. (For a sobering prognosis of America's future, if we remain stuck in the same political groove, see Alfred W. McCoy's "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025."
The rule of two parties under the influence of corporate money has already pushed the US into a condition called 'state monopoly capitalism', in which government serves the demands of a corporate oligarchy to the extent that the two estates become inseparable. Hence the shrinkage of the middle class and widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of us, regardless of which party holds power.
US politics can be compared to the swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock that keeps tilting further and further to the right. If it tilts any further, it may topple over.
Short of revolution, there's only one possible interruption to this dynamic: emergence of an alternative party that embraces progressive populist, anti-imperial, and ecological ideals and rejects corporate money and influence. That describes the Green Party.
Some progressives within the Democratic Party assert that "It's not the right time for the Green Party."
The GOP isn't going to disappear by magic, so it'll never be the "right time." With such arguments, progressive Dems make themselves unintentional apologists for the rightward-tilting status quo. Their relationship with their own party is like a soap opera: "If I only stay true to her, some day she'll stop cheating and be faithful again!"
The "One Nation, Working Together" rally at the Lincoln Memorial on October 2, 2010, offered no challenge to President Obama or Democrats in Congress. Except for entertainer Harry Belafonte, not one speaker suggested that, if President Obama ended all military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and called the troops home, we'd have enough in the federal budget to cover urgent human needs.
In his Black Agenda Report coverage of the event, Glen Ford wrote, "After spending millions to assemble a multitude, Big Labor, the NAACP and the usual Black entertainers -- Reverends Sharpton and Jesse Jackson -- could not fix their trembling lips to utter one demand to the Power in the White House, whose disfavor they fear even more than they dread the white nationalist hordes of the Tea Party." ("Ignominious Surrender On The Mall," October 6).
Progressive, antiwar, and ecologically minded voters who insist on exclusive loyalty to the Dems have acquiesced to their own demise as a political force. In his nomination speech, 2004 Green presidential candidate David Cobb called the Democratic Party "the graveyard of progressive ideals."
In a November 20 speech at the Harvard Kennedy School, James K. Galbraith, Vice President of Americans for Democratic Action, said, "The Democratic Party has become too associated with Wall Street. This is a fact. It is a structural problem. It seems to me that we as progressives need -- this is my personal position -- we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
8
7
4
