Conservative Revolutionary American Party III: Going camping

'Camp democracy' looks to bring reality to Washington DC

Along with a staggering array of national progressive organizers, commentators, congresspeople, and agitators, I'll be speaking at Camp Democracy next week. The camp, on the Mall in Washington D.C., will run from Sep. 5-20 as an outgrowth of Cindy Sheehan's Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas. A number of other national groups are helping sponsor it. As our unelected leader returns to Washington from his usual long vacation, activists will set up shop with more than two weeks of talks, workshops, concerts, and in general plotting for our badly needed grass roots revolution.

It couldn't come at a better time. Two summers ago, Sheehan's original Crawford confrontation with George W. seized the imagination of the media and much of the American public, and gave a badly needed boost to the movement against the war in Iraq. But Sheehan's appeal was broader than opposition to an ill-considered, illegal war. It also invoked a far more universal demand: for accountability. Cindy, futilely demanding to meet with George Bush for a few minutes at a time when he was spending hours each day on a bicycle, showed for all to see the adamant refusal of the Bush administration, ensconced in the bubble of their own surreal world, to be troubled by an exposure, however brief, to reality -- in the form of a mother grieving for a son killed due to a Bush decision.

Now, finally, reality -- Iraq, Katrina, economic woes, a government run by and for cronies -- is catching up with the Bush administration, and the strains are showing. In two separate (but surely coordinated) speeches before a national American Legion convention this week, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice gave different but equally alarming speeches: Rumsfeld bitterly berating the nearly two-thirds of Americans now opposed to the war in Iraq, and Rice offering a preposterous vision of the so-called "global war on terror" as a resounding success.

Rice, who obviously knows better, is simply lying to the American public. As for Rumsfeld, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC fired off a blistering on-air response this week that, among many other things, suggested that the "new kind of fascism" Rumsfeld claimed America was threatened by was the Bush administration itself. Such comments on a mainstream media outlet would have been unthinkable two summers ago, although they were just as true then. That they can be aired on a major cable network now shows just how far public opinion on the Bush administration has shifted since 2004.

The electoral expression of that shift is coming on November 7, a day of electoral reckoning for the Bush cabal and for the Republican-controlled Congress that has helped enable them. The Bush administration is doing everything possible to avoid that fate, including, now, offering fantasy versions of the outcomes of their policies and actively insulting a landslide majority of voters. By November, expect other buttons to be pushed: vote suppression and theft, declining gas prices, and/or a new national security crisis via a terror plot foiled (or not foiled) or a manufactured crisis with Iran.

It won't work. With two years still left on Bush's execrable second term, the gig is up. Credibility, once surrendered, is nearly impossible to regain, and this administration has lost credibility as comprehensively as any political force in American history since at least the Great Depression, and perhaps since the collapse of the Confederacy. Were the consequences of their past, present, and (for two more years) future decisions not so disastrously destructive, the Bush presidency would be a cruel joke. As is, nobody's laughing. (Except the rich, who will continue to benefit for years from Bush's publicly funded largesse.)

That's why Camp Democracy is so well-timed. It's not just a matter of accountability, although having reality's representatives camped outside the south windows of this White House for two weeks can be nothing but beneficial. Sheehan's original point -- that this administration acts contemptuously toward and in a different world from the people it was elected to serve, namely the American public -- is now accepted wisdom. The question is now, what to do about it?

That's why Camp Democracy is primarily about organizing for the future, and why the emphasis is on not just speakers and entertainment (as at the usual large D.C. march or rally), but on analysis, skill sharing, networking, and planning. As I outlined on Wednesday, winning back Democratic control of the House and/or Senate in November will help, a lot, but it by no means guarantees that the Democratic leadership, come 2007, will be much better on a host of issues: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, deficit spending, free trade, energy policy, another possible Supreme Court appointment, and so on.

On all these issues and more, congressional Democratic leadership either has had positions not much different from Bush or has generally been unwilling to confront Bush's radical policies and appointments. On these and a host of other issues –- health care, the environment, election reform, and privatization of government programs and personnel (including large segments of the military), to name four –- the concerns and views of a majority of the American public are not well-represented by either party in Washington.

The challenge, then, is literally to bring democracy to Washington: to make the backlash –- electorally, now and in 2008, and in terms of grass roots political pressure, from today forward –- so unmistakable and so sizable that elected officials of both parties are forced to be accountable to it. That is our task. Democracy is, after all, all about accountability. We have a lot of work to do.

I'll be helping lead a workshop at Camp Democracy on the morning of Sep. 6, next Wednesday, but I'll be around most of the opening week. See ya there.