Suicidal Tendencies Among Democrats

Share this

It used to be that the Republicans wanted to overturn the New Deal and take us back to the days of Herbert Hoover but lately it has become clear that it is the other Roosevelt, Teddy, whose legacy they want to expunge and return us to the Gilded Age. 

The radical budget they just passed is a roadmap to a new American plantation, with tax cuts for the super-rich who have already been taken care of by the Bush tax cuts that were extended.  As the rich get even richer than ever, having successfully sold the deficit hoax, the Republicans are now selling their solution to a mythical problem.  Lower the deficit by cutting programs for the elderly, the poor and children.

At the heart of their mean-spirited social Darwinism is a strategy to lock in the redistribution of wealth so that the bulk of the public money from middle class and working American’s taxes, is transferred into private hands.  No other democracy operates this way with citizens paying their taxes but having their services cut while subsidizing the rich and private corporations. 

If only the Democrats would describe it for what it is, not “tax and spend” but "spend and cut".  We don’t have a deficit problem.  We have a revenue problem!

With more tax cuts for the top one percent, and a blank check for industry to pollute and charge whatever the market will bear without regulation or consumer advocacy, clearly the plutocrats who back right wing ideologues like Congressman Ryan are getting more than their money’s worth.  But what explains the supine silence on the Left?

The dynamic is in place and the Republicans are calling the shots as they inexorably move the debate to the right.  Ryan’s budget is a giant leap into right field, but guess what the Democrats will do?  They will compromise and in doing so they will move further to the right too.  In a negotiation that is the equivalent of one side asking for more and the other side not offering less.  So when they eventually meet in the middle, the side that asked for more gets it while the side that agreed to compromise gets screwed.

But the reason for the craven and cowardly silence of the Democrats can be squarely laid at the feet of most people who call themselves Democrats.  They are just not motivated and fired up like the Tea Partiers are.  In fact they are plain disengaged. 

And to the extent they are engaged, they complain about their Party and its leaders, but do not have their backs.  The Tea Party is pushing the Republicans into enacting their crazy ideas, but Democratic activists are whining and bitching about Obama selling out as though the last election did not happen.  Haven’t they noticed that they lost the House in 2010 and are in danger of losing the Senate in 2012?  Will they blame that on Obama too? 

Last night I hosted a farewell dinner for an old friend who is one of the country’s leading authorities on power generation and the most knowledgeable advocates of alternative energy.  He is on his way to a new venture to make Palestine the world’s first solar state.  

When the discussion turned to Obama, the sparks flew.  Then the debate got pretty boisterous when a friend of Dennis Kucinich argued that Obama is a “Manchurian Candidate” and we should run Sherrod Brown against Obama in the primary.

This is not new in the annals of the suicidal tendency of Democrats to self-destruct.  In 1968 liberal Democrats abandoned a good progressive Humphrey for a quixotic Eugene McCarthy and helped elect Nixon.  In 1980 they abandoned Carter for Ted Kennedy in the primary then supported a phony Republican Anderson in the general, thus helping elect Reagan. 

In 2000 enough progressives on the Left voted for Nader to ensure Bush’s fraudulent victory in Florida, thus resulting in one environmentalist defeating another and helping elect an anti-environmentalist who ran up a third of our national debt on losing wars and appointed two reactionaries to the Supreme Court who have permanently enshrined Corporate control of our elections.   

And so it goes, as the poet Yeats lamented, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity”.  As I watched the argument rage between disillusioned progressives who were insulting the hopeful pragmatists, and vice versa, my daughter stood up and called for a time out, suggesting that this senseless infighting was making it easier for the very people we believe are ruining the country to plunder it further, capture it completely and irrevocably change it to the detriment of all but the fortunate one percent. 

From the generation we are handing this mess over to, a moment of wisdom caused the gathering to pause for a moment and agree that divided we will be conquered.  Then the argument resumed.