REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL by Doug Henwood from Left Business Observer #95, November 2000 (c) Copyright 2000 by LBO. All rights reserved. This was originally going to be a bracing morning-after polemic. But days after the morning-after, there is still no president-elect, though it's looking like Bush will take the oath on January 20. Not a pretty prospect, but not the end of the world either. Before looking ahead, a few backward glances. Had this issue gone to press before November 7, it would have contained a Nader endorsement, something that would be deeply unpopular in some circles today. That endorsement would have come with a small truckload of reservations. The full catalog of reservations is available in a 1996 article on the LBO website; here's the one-paragraph version. Nader has no analysis of how normal capitalism works; he has only a vocabulary to describe the evils of monopoly and corporate welfare; competition he assumes to be good, as if it didn't take a toll on workers or human solidarity. He can be creepily nationalistic, denouncing the WTO as a threat to U.S. "sovereignty," as if the U.S. itself weren't the world's major abuser of the sovereignty of others. He seems inspired by litigation, an individualized substitute for politics. He's almost incapable of speaking about fundamental principles; most of what he says sounds like a legal brief. His fondness for unions is relatively recent; in the 1970s, his Raiders denounced them as monopolists, and in the early 1980s, he busted organizing attempts within his own enterprise. SHADES OF EVIL Next to Gore, though, these are quibbles. As happens every four years, liberals vehemently pronounced this the most important election in history; should Bush be inaugurated, Kluxers will join the Supreme Court and the national forests will be turned into particleboard. No doubt if Clinton hadn't won two terms, welfare would have been ended, record numbers of people would be behind bars, inequality would be at record levels, Alaska would have been opened to oil drilling, and a million Iraqis would have died from sanctions. Oh, right -- those things happened! It's true that Gore probably was the lesser evil; to say there are minimal differences between the parties isn't to say there are none. Gore would have been less likely than Bush to appoint cretinous judges, though Clinton's appointments have been uninspiring; more likely to protect abortion rights, even though he once was a devout right-to-lifer; more likely to protect the rights of gays and lesbians, though he once denounced homosexuality as "abnormal," voted against repealing DC's sodomy law while in the Senate, and buddied up to the evil Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps in 1988. Since Gore was the Clinton administration's most enthusiastic advocate for ending welfare, it's hard to argue he'd have been great for the poor. His "economic plan" consisted of little more than budget-balancing and largely symbolic tax breaks. Environmental reconstruction, infrastructure repair, income security, child care, national health insurance? Forget 'em! On foreign affairs, Gore sounded like more of an interventionist than Bush, and proposed twice the increase in military spending his Republican rival did. Still, despite all this, Gore is a bit less mean than Bush, a bit less stupid, a bit kinder to labor and to all those who aren't privileged straight white guys. But just how far right can the Democrats go without suffering any electoral punishment from their base? Pretty damned far, judging from the heated post-election rhetoric coming from the likes of The Nation's Eric Alterman (who took a more hostile position towards Nader than Business Week!). Every contest is always too important, and every Republican too terrifying to desert the Dems for -- even when the candidate is as charmless as Gore. But not everyone shared this limitless indulgence. If you read Nader's vote as Gore's margin of defeat -- though it was merely one factor among several -- then it's hard for conservative Democrats to argue that they'd run too far to the left. HOSTILE FIRE There's a lot of fire being directed at Nader and his supporters these days, as if Ralph were solely responsible for Gore's apparent loss. But that's to get Gore off the hook too easily. Had he managed the usually easy task of carrying his home state, he'd have won the presidency. More broadly, this election was Gore's to lose. The crackerjack proprietary LBO election model -- which has correctly "predicted" 11 of the last 13 elections, based on just two inputs, the president's approval rating and real after-tax income growth in the second quarter of the election year -- had Gore winning the popular vote by 7-8 percentage points. But he was clearly unable to trade on the economic good times. Half the electorate reported themselves better off than four years ago, but more than a third of those fortunates voted for Bush. Maybe party affiliation doesn't mean much anymore (Clinton, after all, triangulated the Congressional Democrats), or maybe people don't believe that Clinton had anything to do with the boom. One in ten self-identified Democrats -- over 4% of the electorate -- voted for Bush, twice the rate of party defection suffered by the Republicans. Had Gore been able to hold onto half of them, he'd have won handily. HORRORS? But he didn't, and it looks like Bush will be president. There are many horrors to anticipate in a W presidency. His proposals on missile defense and Social Security privatization are scary, and the prospect of being governed by an arrogant moron is depressing. But there's not much point in getting too depressed. Despite all the dire imaginings that Bush Fils will be a rerun of the Reagan years, unlike the early 1980s, right-wing politics has largely lost its popular appeal. It may be hard for liberals to accept this, since whipping up fear of fundies and brownshirts has been a staple of their direct mail as well as their electoral campaigns. The first evidence of the right's weakness was the failure of Gingrich; the second, their loss on impeachment; third, Bush's "inclusiveness" from the Republican Convention onwards. Under the surface of the election, there's even more evidence that the right-wing ascendancy is over: the defeat of the school voucher initiatives in Michigan and California, the defeat of several notorious Congressional cretins, and the victory of several medical marijuana initiatives. And there looks to be something of a legitimation crisis underway. Bush himself is clearly a dimwit, and the butt of jokes at home and abroad. Even better, the structural flaws of U.S. democracy are prominently on display. The two candidates themselves, born into their positions, were so utterly lackluster that they attracted almost no passionate support. The counting crisis in Florida has turned a spotlight on the many corruptions of the electoral process, ranging from fixed ballots to cooked counts to the harassment of black voters. And the abomination known as the Electoral College, which will probably deliver into office the candidate who came in second in the popular vote, is under its most serious scrutiny in a century. Now if people would start viewing the thing not as some archaic holdover, but an integral part of the antidemocratic architecture of governance designed by our madly overpraised Founders, then we'd be making some real progress. Like the Senate, it's supposed to frustrate popular will. MOVING FORWARD Where to from here? Though Gore is awful, there would be some ways his presidency would offer a better environment for oppositional politics. With a Republican president, leftish types can fantasize about how much better things would be with a Democratic president. With a Democrat in the Oval Office, people can see that the ugliness of U.S. society is systemic. It's no accident that the movements that have developed in recent years, from the Seattle coalition to the campus anti-sweatshop movement, arose during the Clinton years. People started talking about "neoliberalism," even "capitalism," rather than The Right. With Bush, we're likely to be confronted with more bad performance art about Jesse Helms and jokes about W's dimness. Structural horrors will be overlooked, and campaigning for Democrats will claim attention. No doubt the art and jokes will be justified. And no doubt Bush will make many terrible appointments. But as the saying goes, that shouldn't be an occasion to mourn, but to organize. Abortion didn't get legalized because a bunch of judges suddenly had an epiphany; abortion got legalized because there was a feminist movement. Workers won't get organized because there are some half-decent appointments to the NLRB; they'll get organized if unions are imaginative and militant. Unfortunately, liberals seem to have little faith in mass mobilization; they prefer to lobby and litigate instead. The reproductive rights movement has done little to prop up sagging popular support for abortion; that's a terrible mistake. And there are many others like it. Which should provide rich possibilities for Greens and other malcontents to repair the damage within the small world known as the left. We should very visibly push for abortion access and racial justice, and fight electoral fraud, police brutality, mass incarceration, and gay-bashing. It's been odd to see liberals like Alterman and Todd Gitlin, who normally hate "identity" politics, criticizing Nader & Co. for weak support among blacks, feminists, and same-sexers. But there's enough truth to the claim to make it bite. Beyond that, there must be a persistent effort to draw the better parts of the labor movement away from the Democrats -- the part of the movement that isn't lost in fantasies about Gore in '04. If there's ever going to be a meaningful oppositional politics in the U.S., it has to broaden its support beyond its current modest base. It's rare that the right thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do, but right now, it is. >Left Business Observer >Village Station - PO Box 953 >New York NY 10014-0704 USA >+1-212-741-9852 voice +1-212-807-9152 fax >email: <mailto:dhenwood@panix.com> >web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
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