I suppose many Americans would find this statement shocking, even weird. "Democracy"dead?" people might wonder. "Here?!" But perhaps Hedges is right. Maybe a lot of Americans are indeed losing confidence in the whole idea of democracy in our country. Maybe it's getting harder and harder to believe that working people--the vast majority of Americans--have any meaningful say-so in their own government. And this crisis of confidence is beginning to go mainstream. What middle-class liberal would have taken the words "socialism" and "revolution" seriously even ten years ago?
Hedges has had a big influence on my own thinking these last few years and I'm inclined to agree with him on almost everything. He argues positions that are generally a good deal more progressive than what most Left-liberals will hold out for. Having been a foreign correspondent for the newspaper of record for several years, he brings a scope to his work that most U.S. journalists can't match.
Yet ultimately I have to disagree with Hedges that civil disobedience is the only weapon we have left. I do think we are close to the tragic culmination that he sees, but we're not there yet. That's my judgment for the excellent reason that I don't think we've given electoral democracy a fair shot yet.
Of course I'm not talking about the "democracy" offered by the two major parties. Plainly, that kind of democracy is a joke. The two-party system as it exists today is not just inadequate--it's a menace. I believe the only thing that can even start to get rid of it is a strong, combative, independent political party of working people. I'm not romanticizing here. What I've got in mind is a movement not of saints but of honest, intelligent people--thousands and thousands of them--invading town councils and state legislatures and Congress and doing it primarily as a survival mechanism for the human species. Such behavior might not even be entirely self-conscious and might be a manifestation of what Bernard Shaw once called the "evolutionary appetite," a force that sometimes drives people to make sacrifices they don't especially want to make but which they end up making anyhow. It's not so much an idealistic passion as it is a practical solution to a difficult problem.
Hedges may be right, of course. It may already be too late to revive democracy in America. If he is right, then I am plainly doing something terribly irresponsible. By urging people to try a political solution--a new party--I may be wasting everyone's time when we in fact have very little time left. Yet I wouldn't be putting the proposal out there unless I had a pretty strong hunch that it could work and even begin to turn things around fairly quickly.
5) We establish a new, independent political party of working people" (etc.)
A new, truly independent party is long overdue for a try-out. But even now, in advance of giving it a try, I have the strong feeling it's probably the only thing that's going to work. It hasn't really been tried before, not in a consistent, stick-to-it kind of way. Several times over the history of our country, the idea has gained traction and caused excitement, and then at the crucial moment--again, for example, in the case of the Greens in 2004--the people carrying the ball dropped it and ran away. The same thing happened with the Populists in 1896. There are surely other examples, but the point is that the idea of a really independent progressive party--a real People's Party, not some phony talk-the-talk group that ends up letting itself be funneled back into the Democratic Party--a real independent party has never made a serious, prolonged, determined push into the end zone. Yes, there have been some sublime moments and some Herculean efforts by a number of activists among the Greens and other organizations--but they have always been held back by other individuals, many of them in leadership positions, who work tirelessly to keep the rebels in line and to drag them back into the ranks of the rotten old system of the two corrupt Big Business parties. It does not have to be that way anymore.
Electoral democracy, for all its problems, has generally been very effective, over the long term, at making life better for most people, at least compared to the rule of military dictators, kings, plutocrats, or central committees. Representative government has deteriorated in the U.S. not only because the very wealthy have stolen so much money and power from working people, but also because working people have not taken politics into their own hands. They have mostly turned it over to political professionals--some of whom are honest and well-intentioned, most of whom are not. These flunkies for rich people often pose as champions of lower-income and middle-income folks, but always seem to find a way to pass laws that are good for very rich people and bad for everybody else. Our dilemma is finding a way to take back the state power that has been stolen from us. The solution? Replace the corrupt members of state legislatures and Congress, both Democrat and Republican, by way of the democratic process itself. Without those little corporate puppets standing guard over the government, the power of the puppeteers would crumble into dust in their hands.
The big strength of such a new party is self-reliance. The volunteers, the active members, and above all, the candidates must rely on themselves to learn about the issues and how to make their cases to the voters. They will learn campaigning from the ground up, and much more thoroughly than most major party people ever learn it. Another big advantage is that each member will have more power in deciding on the platform and the overall strategy of their own party. Finally, members of a new independent party of working people will have the virtue of doing more than simply "speaking truth to power"--they will be attempting to take power by open, lawful, and democratic means. There is nothing wrong, of course, with protest. But we need to go beyond that. We need to elect people outside of the phony two-party system. To employ a phrase Ralph Nader used in 2000, we need to "take it to the next level."
Politics is one of those few areas in life where you're free to be yourself. Most of us have jobs where we are sometimes required to do things we don't believe are right. We go along because we need to pay the rent or the mortgage and other bills. But our own political party can be a refuge, a sanctuary, a safe place where we can collectively pursue the goals that really mean something to us. That feature alone could be a source of stupendous power. That kind of exhilarating freedom could propel us to achieve much more than we're accustomed to settling for.
Such a new, independent party, as I picture it, would belong to the members, not to corporate lobbyists and super-rich kingmakers, as is the case with the two major parties. I also see it declaring for independence right from the start, even to the point of making that founding principle irrevocable.
How about candidates? Consider this: There are about 250 million adults in the United States. A mere 1 percent of 1 percent of those folks would amount to 25,000 candidates. Can't we recruit 25,000 smart, articulate, fed-up people to run for county board of supervisors or city council or state assembly in districts all over the country? Of course we can.
I'm confident about this, in part, because I've run for public office myself. I never won more than 20 percent of the vote, but then I have no impressive credentials or big fundraising base or name recognition. But imagine the possibilities for someone who does hold some of those cards! Aren't there 435 honest, progressive-minded individuals with a couple of aces in their hands distributed throughout the 435 U.S. congressional districts, men and women who are too self-respecting to run for Congress as Democrats or Republicans? Of course there are.
This has to be a kind of rebellion--not an armed rebellion but a rebellion at the ballot box. It cannot be effective with just a few candidates here and there. It will take an army of candidates an army of volunteers.
A few months ago, Mikhail Gorbachev published an article recommending that Putin and Trump, Russia and America, join in reciting Ronald Reagan's oft-repeated maxim: "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." That one short sentence is, of course, a bit at odds with many of Reagan's other statements and actions during his first term, but perhaps for that very reason I was always glad to hear him say it frequently during his second. That term began in 1985, which (luckily for all of us) was the same year Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. It was very wise of Gorbachev to reintroduce that simple saying back into the international dialogue earlier this year. Some might complain that it's just talk, not action. That's true. But that's really what politics is about. We talk and talk and talk"and we thereby force ourselves to confront problems that at first seem just too damn big for us. All that talk helps us think things through, so that we can end up not just taking action, but intelligent action.
I cite Reagan's and Gorbachev's simple formulation as an example of how mere words can sometimes have a profound (and healthy) effect on people's actions. No domestic politics and no undeclared war in the Middle East can justify the deployment by the West of first-strike weapons near the Russian border. Nothing can excuse moronic threats against tiny North Korea, when talks at the negotiating table are much more likely to settle the dispute in terms of everyone's best interests. Once again, we're getting down to basic questions of the survival of "intelligent" life on Earth. A species as complex and promising as ours may be more rare in the universe than many of us once thought. Hence each of us has a duty to help ensure that we avoid stumbling into what really would be the war to end all wars.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
3
