Turning Congress & the New Silent Majority

I came of age politically when Richard Nixon was President, and dissent against the Vietnam war and his Presidency was noisy and noticed. Nixon spoke of the "Silent Majority" of Americans who were not outspoken and remained at home, presumably supporting his policies. Noise is more apt to draw attention, and one could sense Nixon's petulant indignation that these objectors got all the press, while regular folk went about their business unnoticed.

The conservative movement which has been building since that time learned that lesson, and has been all about creating noise of a different sort. Like the antiwar movement of the 60's, this one represents a minority, but unlike that movement, the conservatives have their base already entrenched in the power elite. There is some new noise on the left, but the "new silent majority" is one of cynical distrust of all politicians. It is an ideologically mixed majority, but if the question was the generic one of trusting politicians, the answer would be pretty overwhelming.

I'm not much interested in silent majorities. They prove nothing about what is right or wrong - but it is worth noting their presence when electoral results are used to prove a point about what "most people" believe. I'm much more interested in honoring the few committed individuals who act on their conscience to make real differences that silent majorities don't care to make. But we live in a nation where political power is real and does make a difference. So it makes a difference to me who wins these contests, even if it means supporting the campaign of someone I may view as "the lesser of two evils."

Which brings me to Congress - turning Congress, that is. There are those who just want to "throw the bums out", and they can make a compelling argument that if incumbents became an endangered species due to the distrust of voters, that in itself would engender real reform. But they stand no chance of convincing me that voting against my Democratic Congressman is any way to make a positive difference. Right now we are stuck with two parties in national elections, and there is a difference. While there are flaws all around, the Republicans in power are a scary breed - not as individuals, but as a group and as a force for maintaining the current imbalance of power and wealth.

I don't buy the suggestion that putting the Democrats in power would represent no change. Even to the extent that Democratic politicians are also beholden to the money that puts them there, there is not the same strict allegiance to a corporate agenda which pays only lip service to the public good while being truly committed only to a program of, by, and for the established plutocracy. Some readers who have been peppered with the language of the failure of socialism, will roll their eyes at this suggestion, but the evidence seems clear enough to me. It's as if those in power use Marxist critique as a script for their behavior so that anyone who calls them on their misbehavior will sound like a Marxist, and thus be discredited. My own belief that the personal incentives inherent in capitalism lead to productivity and innovation which tends to be absent in a strictly controlled egalitarian economy, doesn't mean that Marx did not correctly identify some of the ills of Capitalism. Western liberalism, while not perfect, represents a better method of addressing some of those ills than Marxist revolution.

At least the Democrats are obliged to act like they represent common folk, even when we know it's often not true. The Republicans' focus on being steadfastly opposed to any hint of liberalism or mandated controls on business assures that the economic interests of common folk will be subjugated to the almighty power of the boardroom. Common sense balance is discarded in favor of ideological purity.

The rules of Congress give so little power to the minority party, that Republican control of the House has become the primary roadblock to any chance of economic justice for the growing population living in poverty in the United States. It is why at this point in time I would vote for any Democrat over any Republican in any Congressional race, regardless of my opinion of the individuals involved.

There has been a lot of attention lately to the possibility that the House could change hands this year. Even many Republican strategists are conceding the possibility, though there remain many reasons to doubt it will happen. It's not a very sexy issue, but it is very substantive, and if the right set of progressives get energized around the effort, there is potential for a very real stanching of the growing power of the corporate elite. Turning Congress is not enough -- progressive vigilance will need to follow -- but moving the leadership of the House to the Democrats represents a huge step in the right direction.

Schadenfreude, Fitzmas, & Plamegate Frenzy

It would have been so much cleaner if America (or that critical 10%) had woken up one year earlier and decisively changed regimes at the ballot box.

While much of the left awaits in excited anticipation of what indictments may be handed down, I share Jack Whelan's trepidation about what that will actually mean for our nation's future.

I'm worried. It just seems that the country is particularly vulnerable right now, that things are being held together with paper clips and duct tape. If these guys go down, they are not going down without a fight. Things could get pretty messy.

Americans convinced themselves in electing this administration they were putting the grownups back into power, but they're discovering now that instead they put in a callow frat-boy who might be the only one left standing when all the dust settles. I don't know about you, but that makes me pretty nervous. He's got three more years. It's one thing to pop the country's balloon about what they really have in this man, but once the balloon is popped, there he is. ...

When abstractly considered, being rid of Cheney and Rove would seem to be a good thing. But their boy in the oval office is in over his head in the best of circumstances. How confident do you feel about his stability and his capability to deal with the kind of firestorm it looks like his administration is about to face?

When I gave my speech to my County's Democratic Convention 18 months ago, friends had advised me to cut the line about "blowing the cover of CIA operatives for political payback" as news that was 'too old'. But it seemed central to me as a cornerstone of this administration's shameless mendacity. Suddenly that old news is revived, and everyone is on pins and needles. Well it's 12 months too late.

Don't get me wrong - I'll take the scandal and hope it finally destroys their credibility as Watergate did for the much tamer Nixon - but I have no illusions that the scars left behind won't be painful.

Picking at Nits While Ignoring the Elephant

Rove and DeLay are the whipping boys for Democratic outrage these days. Were identities leaked inappropriately? Were trips paid for by lobbyists? These peccadillos are serious enough and likely to be breaches of the law, but the truly odious behavior is the whole gestalt of power abuse and slander which is not necessarily illegal, but has become standard operating procedure in the halls of power. [Continue reading]

It's rather analogous (at a lower order of magnitude, of course) to the attempt to ding Saddam Hussein for maybe being out of compliance with his weapons development, when his indisputable history of genocide, torture, and oppression should be fully sufficient for the world community to demand his -bloodless- removal from power. The same is true for the scores of tyrannical despots still in power around the world - but I digress.

Must the opponents of treachery wait around for the perpetrators to slip up on the petty stuff in order to bring a halt to their treachery?

This elevation of the nits to public prominence in lieu of the overarching generalizations, however obvious they may seem to some observers, is nothing new and operates on all sides and from local politics to global diplomacy. I'll even concede that it is not all bad, as often the nits represent specifics which are less deniable than the more general observations which may spring unfairly from ideological bias. But it is important to understand the nits in context to the whole, lest the casual reader misconstrue the debate as defined wholly by how a particular conversation between Karl Rove and Matt Cooper started and proceeded, or whether Tom DeLay knew that his golf trip in the Marianas was being funded illegally by lobbyists.

Now it may be true that Karl Rove as he wanders the halls of the White House humming "Onward Christian Soldiers" believes that he is doing the Lord's work; but only by applying a "means justifies the ends" type of logic which I grew up associating with Marxism. The likelihood that his revelations to reporters (that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA operative) was designed more to smear Wilson than to save the reporters from the embarrassment can be guessed at by Rove's historical track record of slander and innuendo. Frank Rich in his recent NYT Follow the Uranium (subscription required) op-ed piece is right on target when he writes:

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

Similarly, in the case of Tom DeLay, it is laughable that the big news is that lobbyists might have paid for any number of his international jaunts. No, what is odious is that DeLay secures for the powerful business interests in the Marianas "protection" from American labor laws which might throw a wrench in their ability to exploit foreign workers in sickeningly inhumane fashion, while still being able to carry a "Made in America" label.

None of this was a secret back home in the U.S. In 1998, ABC, CNN, the BBC and the New York Times each confirmed reports of forced labor, sex slaves and domestic forced servitude among the Marianas' so-called "guest workers."

What is outrageous is that DeLay carries the power (apparently legally!) to prevent a measure holding Marianas manufacturers to these labor laws from even coming to a vote on the floor of the house in spite of widespread bipartisan support. He used the same power nearly two years ago in preventing a measure limiting media consolidation from coming to a vote, even though it would have won easily due to wide popular support. It is small wonder that our corporate controlled media did little to cover the story.

I believe that DeLay will get his comeuppance yet, as the TRMPAC scandal from several years back appears destined to expose plenty of illegality. It is sad, however, that we seem unable to derail the structure of power that allows one man elected from a single district to hold so much sway over our nation's laws.

Instead of insisting on decent public behavior from our officials, we are reduced to picking at the nits, which are easily cast as not so odious as a sitting president allowing his prestige and rank to afford him gratuitous sexual favors from a lowly intern. And make no mistake, I believe that too was a despicable abuse of rank. Clinton's behavior was clearly worse than allowing a lobbyist to pay for a trip, but not nearly as condemnable as leveraging one's power to perpetuate virtual slave labor abroad.

Ironically this administration's dishonesty with respect to "fixing the intelligence and facts around their policy" can be partly attributed to the tendency of the community of nations to pay more attention to nits than the big picture. As I stated earlier, Saddam's unfitness to rule any nation was starkly obvious to any observer, and yet for official steps to be taken it was necessary for him to violate particular rules which he could just avoid violating. The same can be said of dozens of other tyrants whose nations are officially represented at the United Nations. It is easy to understand conservatives' problems with taking the UN seriously when we are required to engage in diplomacy with the representives of thugs in order to accomplish baby steps in reining in the abuses of despots. But in spite of the necessary hypocrisies, the method of nations acting in concert to make demands of other nations, is far preferable to any one nation's unilateral military action.

Saddam was a particularly thorny problem because of the decades of Baathist rule which had allowed him to create layers of protection, and a whole class of people dependent on his despotism for their standard of living. Dethroning him and his party in a bloodless fashion was sure to be problematic in the extreme, while doing so militarily was bound to produce the type of fallout we're seeing today. Acting with the blessing of a much larger world community, and without the type of retributive actions as were undertaken in Fallujah would have certainly helped, though.

It is a sad testament to the disconnect between America's ideals and her foreign policy, that Saddam owed much of his ability over the past several decades to consolidate his iron grip to U.S. policy. It is a further irony that in attempting to reverse (selectively) our support of tyranny abroad, the current President has not taken seriously the need to curb our own excesses and fully honor longstanding Geneva protocols, leading to justifiable perceptions that we are the bullies on the world stage.

This is why much of the world, including plenty of Americans of diverse ideological stripes, stand in slack-jawed wonder at the willingness of a populace steeped in a democratic tradition, to reelect this administration.

Comparative Outrage

This won't be tidy. I just have some open questions, both to myself and to others old enough to compare.

Anyone in a position of power, no matter how benign or well-intended, will make decisions which are bound to result in justifiable outrage from some quarters. In a country as powerful as ours there will be some whoppers. Reagan and this Bush are the two Presidents who have most stoked my indignation, as I was still acquiring my political sensibilities during Vietnam and Watergate.

Finding myself nodding as I saw the "Worst President Ever" posters being held along the inaugural route as the event was piped into my kitchen today, got me to thinking about comparing outrages. I understand why many, even with a long political pedigree might justly so judge Bush 43. But the charge is not without some irony. To be sure, the sheer audacity of fabricating stories, or at the least shading the truth , to justify a military conquest of a sovereign state was unprecedented. But when one compares Saddam's regime or the Taliban to the Sandinistas, or Ho Chi Minh, or certainly Allende's democratically elected government, there's a pretty simple case to be made that at least Bush is ousting among the most illiberal tyrants imaginable. The factor going against Bush aside from audaciousness, is the likely foolishness of the enterprise from a purely nationalistic standpoint. This, rather than moral outrage, is the source of the trepidation coming from pundits on the right such as Buchanan or the center (I'd say leaning right) Friedman.

On the domestic front, the unabashed favoritism of big business over environment or the poor, is very comparable to what we had under Reagan. Indeed I'd say that perhaps the only reason Reagan wasn't much worse than Bush was that he had to work with the Democratic Congress. Bush has actually increased funding to every area of government, albeit much of that money has been piped through the hands of corporate interests to whom he is indebted. At least if one is to believe Jim Hightower, and his research, while likely cherry-picked, seems pretty solid to me.

On the secrecy front, Helen Thomas will tell us that Bush outdoes Nixon. Those whose indignation is stoked on entirely different fronts, will see Clinton, Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, or Roosevelt as more outrageous. Comparing such outrages may be like comparing apples and oranges, but still comparisons can be made, and I'd love to hear some of yours. (I know Blogger has this annoying trait of wanting you to create a blog to respond with a name, but you can circumvent that by clicking the Anonymous button, and then signing your name if you want to.)

I survived revisionist week in America

The last eleven days passed by without the veins popping out on my neck as I listened to yet another conservative wax nostalgically about America's great loss. The liberals were there too, noting that "in spite of ... [questionable Reagan policy of choice] ... optimism ... [likable personal attribute of choice] ..."

It's not that I don't still believe that Reagan's tax policies led to a huge reversal back toward the economic injustice that reigned at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Nor that I've come to believe that many third world innocents weren't royally screwed and often killed (or worse that they somehow deserved it) if those who represented their cause happened to have the 'wrong' economic ideology.

But in the eighties I was an angry young liberal, who when I saw an unquestionable wrong, inferred that those contributing to it necessarily were motivated by pure evil. Many of my friends at the time were inclined to believe that Reagan himself was just dumb and duped, but I correctly observed that he was actually quite intelligent, and so concluded that he must therefore be immoral. I see now, that though my leanings haven't changed, there is an awful truth that many Presidential decisions carry horrific implications regardless of the path chosen. To his credit, I think that Reagan actually did realize this, but once he decided on a course knew how to put a happy face on it and ignore the downside, causing many of his detractors to think he was just stupid.

There is an interesting parallel today, in that many are convinced of Bush's stupidity in his dogged pursuit of failed policies. An intellectual he is not, but he still must be smarter than the average Joe. I suspect (though I certainly can't claim to know it) that the younger Bush lacks the FULL appreciation of the true gravity of his responsibility, which most former Presidents including Reagan have had. It's hard to conceive that any President would not be burdened by their awesome responsibility. Reagan and Clinton both had the acting ability to hide that burden from the public. Nixon and Carter did not.

As some try to paint the Bush presidency as the extension of Reagan's legacy, much to the chagrin of Ron Reagan, Jr, liberals will usually try to deny the comparison, often avoiding emphasis on their own disagreement with Reagan, with an exception here or there.

At the end of the day, as a voter, it's not really necessary for me to know what's in Bush's brain or his heart, or how he compares to Reagan. It's sufficient to know that his policies are frightening in global proportions. As the focus turns away from the laurels for the deceased, deserved or not, I'll press forward to move for regime change here in America.