FLOTSAM & JETSAM

Bush lost but we haven't won

Sam Smith,(editor of The Progressive Review--prorev.com)

I woke up the morning after the election feeling surprisingly glum. It
took me awhile to figure out what was wrong. It certainly wasn't that
Bush had lost. That was wonderful. Then it hit me. The trouble was that
we hadn't won.

An improvement, yes, but nowhere near the sort of improvement that
brings real joy. Then thoughts of the Clinton years came back, when the
capital city turned myopically smug and anything not on the agenda was
off the table. If you weren't with the program you were only slightly
better than a Republican.

The fact that all sorts of issues were ignored, that the social
democracy of the New Deal and Great Society was being deliberately
undermined and that the country was moving steadily to the right were
not meant to be mentioned. The capital had turned into another football
stadium.

I wrote about it in my memoirs:
||| I realized later that I had stumbled upon the outlines of a new
American political fault line. It was so new that it lacked a name,
stereotypes, cliches, experts and prophets. In many ways it seemed more
a refugee camp than a voluntary assembly, yet, as I thought about it,
the more its logic seemed only concealed rather than lacking.
On one side were libertarians, blacks, greens, populists, free thinkers,
the alienated apathetic, the rural abandoned, the apolitical young, as
well as others convinced America was losing its democracy, its
sovereignty and its decency. On the other side was a technocratic,
media, legal, business and cultural elite centered in New York and
Washington. At times it felt as if all of America outside of these two
centers had turned into a gigantic, chaotic salon des refuses.
Another thing I noticed was that this was about far more than politics.
A cultural and class coup was underway, of which the Clinton
administration was a part, one that was creating a gated economy and
transforming those outside the barriers into pliant, homogenized,
multi-nationalized consumers for whom freedom, choice and democracy
would atrophy into symbols of only virtual meaning. People like me were
traitors to the cause. . .
Increasingly, the words of encouragement that I received came from
somewhere other than my home town, a place whose conventional thinking I
had happily challenged for nearly thirty years. In the 1960s and 1970s
it had been no problem; there had always been plenty of similar voices
and I never felt alone. Washington -- like Madison or Berkeley --
possessed a vigorous counterculture ready to strike out, provoke, and
outrage and to enjoy every minute of it. Although by the 1980s the
voices of protest had greatly dulled, dissent was still fair game as
long as one's targets were Reagan or Bush.
In the 1990s, however, the Washington establishment simply closed down
the marketplace of ideas. This involved not merely Democratic
lawyer-lobbyists now pursuing openly the cynical abuse of government
they had discreetly enjoyed during the Republican years. It included not
merely journalists whose sycophancy towards the powerful was now
promiscuously out of the closet. It also included the professional
liberal establishment of Washington -- labor, feminist, and
environmental leaders whose heady new access to government blinded them
to how distant what they had once advocated was from what they were now
willing to accept over -- or even in return for -- lunch.
For mainstream Washington, there was no longer any politics, only deals.
No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology; only brand loyalty.
No conservative and liberal, only Coke and Pepsi. . . |||
To be sure, it is different this time. The White House is still clearly
the enemy and the Congress has some, like John Conyers, Bernie Sanders
and Russ Feingold, who may be granted some long overdue respect. But the
bulk of the Democratic Party remains aground on the reefs of myopic
centrism where they were lured by their campaign contributors.
Dean Baker of the Prospect gives some of the flavor: "One of the items
on the Democrats' '100 hours' agenda is reforming the Medicare
prescription drug bill. The bill passed by the Republican Congress
prohibited Medicare from offering its own plan. This denied seniors the
benefits of Medicare's lower administrative costs and it means that
drugs cost almost twice as much as if Medicare bargained directly with
the industry and secured the same prices as the Veterans Administration
or the Canadian government. The Republicans also added a seemingly
gratuitous clause that explicitly prohibited Medicare from negotiating
prices with the industry.
"During the campaign, the Democrats had promised that they would reform
the drug bill to allow Medicare to offer its own drug plan. On NPR this
morning, it was reported that the Democrats now are just planning to
remove the gratuitous clause prohibiting Medicare from negotiating
prices with the drug industry, while not allowing Medicare to offer its
own plan.

"Removing this prohibition by itself will mean nothing. What would
Medicare negotiate over, if it doesn't offer its own plan? This could
lead cynics to believe that the Democrats are trying to pull in some of
the campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance
industries which have disproportionately gone to Republicans in recent
election cycles. Fixing the prescription drug benefit to save seniors
and taxpayers money was one of the main promises made by the Democratic
Party during the campaign. If they instead pursue a purely symbolic
measure, with no practical significance, millions of people who voted
for them on Tuesday will rightfully feel betrayed."

What is important at a time like this is that those who truly want a
democratic, decent and progressive America have to clearly differentiate
themselves from both parties. There needs to be a loud third voice - not
so much a political one as a moral and pragmatic one - constantly
reminding the political leeches on both sides of the real issues, the
real reforms, the real problems. One of the reasons Bush won office
originally was because too many members of this third voice - including
women's, civil liberties, and environmental groups - had indentured
themselves to the Clinton machine and the sound of progress had gone
voluntarily silent.

Now is the time not for silence but for the third voice of American
politics to become far louder and to be constantly holding a light on a
better path than is likely to followed by the new Congress. There must
be a clearly visible alternative for everything the cowardly and corrupt
center does or refuses to do. Phrases like 'universal healthcare' can
not be politely avoided nor can the fact that those who fund both
parties are destroying our planet.

We must always remember that while Bush and his capos lost this time we
have yet to win.

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