The Four Year Farce

“Methinks the Democrat doth protest too much”

By Matt Siegfried

Every four years we suffer through a farce of a national election. The current caucuses and primaries to determine the candidates of the two (though Bush is unopposed) perennial parties in the United States have long ceased to be places of democratic selection. These primaries have become institutionalized venues to discard candidates of an independent base (like Dean) or ideas contrary to the party leaderships’ (like Kucinich and Sharpton) and the business interests that back them.

This is done through a partnership with the media where candidates are divided, at every opportunity, between “serious” candidates and “issue” candidates. By this they mean that candidates with “issues” do not seek to win themselves, but that they wish the serious candidates to take on their issues. By “serious” candidates they mean those that have proven their allegiance to the policies of the ruling elite of their respective party. It is not the candidate that is serious, but the party bureaucracy that is serious about the candidate.

Ideas are secondary to who the party leadership thinks can win. Those who the party thinks can win are determined not by their ability to mobilize and expand their constituency, but by abandoning their constituency in an appeal to the “undecided,” “middle America” and the “centrist majority” (read white, well paid workers and the white middle class). It is testimony to the remarkable lack of difference between the two parties that the folks in the so-called middle are so readily appealed to by either party.

The Occupation of Iraq and the War on Terrorism

• The leading candidates are enthusiastic supporters of the unending “War on Terrorism.” They supported the invasion and continued occupation of Afghanistan and support the “right” to use force of prevention (semantically different from “preemption”) against future “terrorist attacks.”
• The leading Democratic candidates voted for the Patriot Act and its equally draconian successors. Though some have expressed concerns after the fact, they are directly complicit in the erosion of civil rights.
• The leading Democrats saw intelligence with Bush on Iraq and voted for the war. They are directly complicit in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, Americans and others. All based on the lie of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
• All candidates would like the United Nations to give cover to America by shifting the responsibility from the US. The political reconstruction of Iraq would fall to the UN while keeping, indeed expanding, the illegal occupation forces and economic penetration of Iraq by the United States. No genuinely anti-occupation nominee is possible from the patriotic swindlers of the two parties.
• The biggest complaint is not the war itself, but that the Bush administration was so inept in diplomacy that they couldn’t convince other countries to join, and give cover, to the criminal American assault on Iraq. Thus making the US look bad and making further adventures more difficult.

• The Democrats have been more stable supporters of Israel than the Republicans have. Kerry has waxed poetic over Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East where “the interests of Israel are the interests of the United States.” If by that he means that they are both interested in crushing Palestinian resistance and thwarting Arab self-determination than he is correct. On this, though for different reason, the two parties are in absolute accord.
• Whoever is elected billions will continue to flow to Israel while they engage in a protracted genocide. Humanity, collectively wringing its hands, wishes for “peace.”

• There is no difference between the two parties in their majorities. The right of the republicans, representing certain agricultural sectors favors nationalist protectionism. The “left” of the Democratic Party representing the labor bueracracy and certain small businesses favors…. nationalist protectionism. Both parties in their majority support NAFTA, the FTAA, GATT and neo-liberalism in its myriad of forms and institutions.
• Both parties have refused to repeal the reactionary anti-union Taft-Hartley Act. In the name of “Anybody But Bush” the AFL-CIO has endorsed John Kerry: vociferous champion of NAFTA, the FTAA and neo-liberal “free trade” that have decimated the very unions supporting him. Truly, labor needs its own voice, its own party.

• Both parties oppose gay marriage, a fundamental right of equality. Bush will use the issue to gay bash, energizing his evangelical base. The Democratic establishment will not support full rights or marriage but will find meaningless phrases of tolerance to deflect criticisms of their own gay bashing.
• Black people, in their majority, have historically voted for Democrats. The deserved reputation of the Republicans for open racism and the lack of a viable working class or community based alternative has allowed the Democrats to do absolutely nothing for black folks, taking their support entirely for granted. The profound respect they show the African American community can be summed up as: “Hey, it could be worse!”
• There is a clear difference between the two parties over the right to an abortion, which must weigh heavily on all of us. Though the Democrats, through devolving the issue to states, attacking welfare and medical coverage have done enormous damage to the ability of women to control their own bodies. This is an essential right of women’s equality and emancipation. Any return to the days before legality would be an enormous retreat for women in this country, as for all those opposed to the moralism of priests combined with the fist of the law. But right without access is meaningless and for this universal, socialized health care is necessary to ensure all women have access to health care. No candidate, of course, proposes that.
• The differences on the environment are not fundamental. A dramatic change in the way we produce, distribute and consume goods is required to even come to grips with the scale of the environmental crisis. The “solutions” offered by both parties ensure further environmental degradation. A real ecological plan is utterly at odds with the “free market.” Environmental sustainability, necessarily planned, cooperative and long term is incompatible with capitalism’s extremely shortsighted anarchic drive for profit. At their best, both parties seek to rely on “market forces” to protect the environment (!).

Never was a genuine alternative to the politics of the status quo so needed. Layoffs and war, health care for profit, racial injustice, and the anti-women, anti-gay assaults are not the property of a single party. The mad dash to the bottom of the social ladder in the name of “free trade” is systematically destroying the living standards of a whole layer of American workers.

America is now a country where 98% of all incumbent politicians are reelected, most unopposed. Our elections turn out and rates of return would make most despots blush.

The history of struggles around these and other issues of importance to workers and women, gays, African Americans, Latinos and other minorities proves that rights were never won or secured through elections alone. By ceding the struggle to those who do not share our commitments we settle for their commitments. Is it really better to vote for what you do not want and to get it?

Those of us in the United States who are serious about beating the Bush agenda should recognize that the surest, not the quickest, not the easiest, but the surest way is to build an independent political movement. One that comprises the emerging and growing social movements with at its base a deep and lasting social and political force; the American working class in all its diversity, potential militancy and democratic traditions. A political party that identifies with and has as its base the working class majority of this country is not just a desire of many leftists, but an essential tool in the organization of the working class in it’s own interests. How this will come about is for the future to decide. It is for us to decide now to continue that process

Whoever seeks to administer a system of exploitation and war does not seek to fundamentally alter that system. The real question is; can we build an alternative to that system? Can we put aside secondary difference and unite around the urgent needs of our time: against war, support of workers organization, for social health care, against racism, for women and gays and opposition to an economic system whose logic is profit, not human need.

We are in real need of a genuine democracy, one practiced from the ground up with economic democracy at its core. Socialism is routinely dismissed in the most ardent terms by the hacks of both parties and beyond time. Socialism, the democratic, planned and free association of those who produce the wealth the capitalists horde and the politicians throw away on illegal wars, has for 150 years and more, continued to be a solution that has and can capture the imagination of our and successive generations.

Matt Siegfried is a trade unionist living in Ypsilanti, Michigan. An anti-war activist and troublemaker, he writes occasionally for the Irish journal Fourthwrite, as well as other reputable voices of dissent and revolt.