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Friday, January 01, 2010

More, and Better, Democrats

Here in the United States the actually-existing alternative to enormously disappointing Democrats are enormously insane Republicans.

To be blunt, this means that those who are committed to the difficult work of ongoing democratization here must respond to our disappointment with Democrats by struggling to elect More, and Better, Democrats.

When you are feeling frustrated with Democrats this often feels like a deeply counter-intuitive policy, and it is always an emotionally draining one. For one thing, we feel personally let down or even insulted by failures of "our own" representatives, and when we take things personally we react more vociferously than we would otherwise. When Republicans behave even worse, the fact that they are behaving precisely as we expect them to do can actually blunt the intensity of our repudiations of them.

I've long noticed how commonplace it is for Democrats to respond to the delineation of some outrageous outlandish thing Republicans have done with a chorus of resigned or wry variations of "What did you expect?" "And your point is?" "What, are you surprised?" It is interesting to note how often the same people who roll their eyes at too predictable Republican outrages will then respond to the delineation of some terribly wrongheaded or disappointing thing Democrats have done with a chorus of incensed "A plague on both your houses!" "Obama is Bush's third term!" "Screw you guys, I'm going home!"

There are a couple of things to say about this odd state of affairs: First, both responses function substantially to empower Republican outrages (since predictable outrages are still outrageous and should provoke outrage and not a facilitative indifference, while to fail to support Democrats for whatever reason is also to enable Republicans). Second, taken together, these responses are weirdly inconsistent, the first assuming there is a definitive difference in our relation to the parties and hence in the parties themselves, while the second is premised on an evacuation of this difference (in ways that precipitate Republican victories over Democrats with consequences that immediately provide evidence to the contrary).

Now, I just said we should be outraged by the outrageousness of even predictable outrages, and this is surely as true of Democratic outrages as Republican, else I would be offering up my own corrupting double standards. Because any elected politician or party professional, of whatever party, is a human mammal you can be sure they are vulnerable to the errors and corruptions of their necessary collegiality with a group of people who by education, net-worth, and life-experiences are typically wildly unrepresentative of the people they presumably represent. They are embedded in an urgent race to raise funds for their next election bid. They are immersed in streams of spin and even misinformation from incumbent interests. They are in the weeds of policy sausage-making fraught with minute internecine squabbling with stakes that are not easily communicated to those who aren't actively participating in these struggles themselves. They tend to get insular and wary and defensive. Not to mention, of course, some are terribly corrupt or deluded or immoral or ideologically out of tune with contemporary secular-democratic majorities.

This means it really is important to educate, agitate, and organize democratizing campaigns, loudly to criticize errors and lapses in both Democratic and Republican figures, to pressure and shame all public officials who do the wrong thing, and so on.

I am a strong believer in the idea that Democrats should organize primary challenges against any Democrat whose voting record is to the right of the district she or he represents.

I also believe that Democrats should field candidates in every district, however conservative, in an effort to educate the citizens of that district about Democratic principles through the campaign process itself, and also in the interest of investing in long-term Democratic Party infrastructure building.

But it is simply wrong, in my view, to deny differences that make a difference between the two parties, however disappointing elected Democrats may be. It is simply wrong to think that it is better for Republicans to be in the Congressional majority or in the White than for Democrats to be in the Congressional majority or in the White House. It is simply wrong for concerned democratically-minded citizens in their disappointment with Democrats to facilitate Republican Congressional majorities or occupations of the White House. And it is also simply wrong to attribute to stealth Republican-equivalency disappointing outcomes that are in fact the consequence of monolithic Republican obstructionism and its empowerment of the selective obstructionism of the least progressive members on the margins of the Democratic caucus.

The principle we must have always in mind is: More, and Better, Democrats. If our response to a Republican outrage or Democratic disappointment leads us to divert our educational, agitational, organizational energies away from the principle of More, and Better Democrats, then we have always, always lost our way.

This is exactly equally true of those whose disappointment yields disengagement from the compromised work of ongoing democratization who agent, for better or for worse, happens to be the Democratic Party in the world we live or, or those whose disappointment yields engagement in quixotic Third Party efforts, whether Socialist or Green, when in the world we live in Third Parties are so utterly structurally marginalized. If supporting unelectable Greens or Socialists means diverting votes away from electable Democrats, it is, in my view, always a matter of effectively supporting Republicans and their authoritarian politics, especially inasmuch as any sensible Green or Socialist would have to caucus with the Democrats in any case to get anything done.

Under these circumstances, it seems to me a person (among whom I am one) whose convictions are to the left of the Democratic Party would do better to work to push the Democratic Party to the left -- always only in ways that do not endanger its retention of Congressional majorities and occupation of the White House -- than to try to create viability for a Third Party to the left. This is especially the case at an historical moment like this (given how truly laborious and long-ineffectual any actually realistic Third Party politics would have to be under prevailing structural condition) when the organized partisan Right is so institutionally entrenched while at once so dangerously extreme, defined by authoritarian fundamentalists of both the Christianist and Market-Ideologue varieties, and hence the demand for a United Front across the American left -- center-left, civil libertarian, fighting liberal, social democrat, democratic socialist, anarchist -- is so terribly urgent.

Again, the rule to remember is: More, and Better, Democrats.

The "More" is there to keep us pragmatic, to remind us that however disappointed we might be in Democrats, Republicans are the greater and more dangerous threat to Democracy.

The "Better" is there to keep us idealistic, to remind us to push always for more democratization, for more equity, for more diversity, for more peace, and never to become complacent or apologists for the status quo even when we are the ones most responsible for and to it.

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