Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (33 page)

It's critical to detail the failures of the cons' policies, but we should also take on the oil wars, endemic corporate cronyism, slashed environmental regulations, and corporate-controlled voting machines. We need to work toward replacing an administration that daily gives the big pharma, HMO, banking, and insurance industries whatever they want regardless of how many people are harmed.

This lack of political power is a crisis others have faced before. We should learn from their experience.

After the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, a similar crisis faced a loose coalition of gun lovers, abortion foes, southern segregationists, Ayn Rand libertarians, proto-Moonies, and those who feared that immigration within and communism without would destroy the America they loved. Each of these various groups had tried its own direct-action tactics, from demonstrations and pamphleteering to organizing and fielding candidates. None succeeded in gaining mainstream recognition or affecting American political processes. If anything, their efforts led to their being branded "special interest" or "fringe" groups, which further diminished their political power.

Instead of getting angry, these cons decided to get power.

They decided that the only way to seize control of the American political agenda was to infiltrate and take over one of the two national political parties, using their own think tanks like the Coors-funded Heritage Foundation to mold public opinion along the way. Now they regularly get their spokespeople on radio and television talk shows and newscasts, and they write a steady stream of daily op-ed pieces for national newspapers.

They launched an aggressive takeover of Dwight Eisenhower's "moderate" Republican Party, opening up the "big tent" to invite in groups that had previously been considered on the fringe. Archconservative neo-Christians who argue that the Bible should replace the Constitution even funded the startup of a corporation
to manufacture computer-controlled voting machines, which are now installed across the nation.
¹
And former weapons manufacturer and current ultraconservative cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon took over the
Washington Times
newspaper and UPI.

Their efforts, as we see today, have borne fruit, as Kevin P. Phillips predicted they would in his prescient 1969 book
The Emerging Republican Majority
and as David Brock so well documents in his book
Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-conservative.

In response to the cons' takeover of the Republican Party and of American politics, the Democratic Party also swung to the right. Ask any Green or Progressive or left-leaning Reform Party member and they will tell you: "The Democrats have just become weaker versions of the Republicans!"

True enough, in many cases. And leaning to the right isn't working for the Democrats because, as Democrat Harry Truman said, "When voters are given a choice between voting for a Republican, or a Democrat who acts like a Republican, they'll vote for the Republican every time." (And history shows that voters are equally uninterested in Republicans who act like Democrats.)

How have progressives responded to the Democrats' swing to the right? Instead of taking a page from the cons and funding think tanks to influence public opinion, subsidizing radio and TV talk-show hosts nationwide, and working to take over the Democratic Party, many defected to create their own parties while others gave up on mainstream politics altogether.

The remaining Democrats were caught in the awkward position of needing to embrace the same corporate donors as the con-led Republicans, although they weren't anywhere near as successful as the cons because they hadn't (and haven't) so fully sold out to corporate and wealthy interests.

As a result, the Democratic Party is facing a crisis right now. A few Democratic stalwarts survive who may oppose Bush and
the cons on the national stage; but while the rest of us fixate on the cons' war in Iraq, the cons are creeping into the very heart of Jefferson's party, using lobbyist money and campaign slush funds as their way in.

Thus the best immediate solution to advance the progressive agenda is for progressives to join and take back the Democratic Party in the same way cons seized control of the Republican Party.

Alternative parties have an important place in American politics, and those in them should continue to work for their strength and vitality. They're essential as incubators of ideas and nexus points for activism. That does not mean, however, that they are an alternative to the two mainstream parties when election time rolls around.

Those on the right learned this lesson well. Many groups that in the past had fielded their own candidates stopped fielding candidates but remain intact and have become powerful influences on the Republican Party. Similarly, being a Green doesn't mean you can't also be a Democrat.

The fact that America is fundamentally a two-party country is not a popular truth. There's a long list of people who didn't want to believe it—Teddy Roosevelt, H. Ross Perot, John Anderson, Pat Buchanan, and Ralph Nader, to name but a few.

The United States—the first functioning democracy in the modern world—seems able to support only two parties, while democratic countries like Germany, India, and Israel have three, four, or even more. The reason is that in America—unlike most other modern democracies—we have regional "winner take all" elections rather than proportional representation. It's written right into our Constitution. The Founders rarely made mistakes, but "winner take all" elections were a whopper.

Here's what it means: say a country is leaning left, with 60 percent of the voters preferring left-wing candidates and
40 percent of the voters preferring right-wing candidates. In a system with proportional representation, people vote by party, and legislatures are created based on the proportion each party receives. So if 30 percent of the people vote for the Green Party and 30 percent vote for the Democrats and 40 percent vote for the Republicans, 30 percent of the legislators will be Greens, 30 percent will be Democrats, and 40 percent will be Republicans. The Greens and the Democrats can then band together if they want to put forth a left-wing agenda.

In a "winner take all" system, however, people vote for individual representatives, and whoever has the most votes gets all of the pie. Say 60 percent of the people in a state want a left-wing senator. If two left-wing candidates, one a Democrat and one a Green, split the left-wing vote (30 percent and 30 percent), however, the Republican candidate wins with 40 percent of the vote. The left-wing voters lose. If that happens enough times in enough elections, the legislature can end up having a Republican majority even if most of the people are Greens and Democrats.

We see the result of the "winner take all" system in races across the nation, such as my former home state of Vermont. In the 2002 election for governor and lieutenant governor, the people who voted for the Democratic and Progressive candidates constituted a clear majority. Nonetheless, the Republican candidates for governor and lieutenant governor were elected with 45 percent and 41 percent of the vote, respectively, because each had more votes than his Democratic or Progressive opponents alone. (Example: Republican Brian Dubie—41 percent; Democrat Peter Shumlin—32 percent; Progressive Anthony Pollina—25 percent. The Republican won.)

Similarly, Republicans have overtly used third-party participation on the left to their advantage. In a July 2002 story in the
Washington Post,
writer Thomas B. Edsall noted: "The chairman of the Republican Party of New Mexico said yesterday he was approached by a GOP figure who asked him to offer the state Green
Party at least $100,000 to run candidates in two contested congressional districts in an effort to divide the Democratic vote."
²

The Republicans well understand and exploit the fact that in the U.S. electoral system a third-party candidate will always be a detriment to the major-party candidate with whom he or she is most closely aligned.

The Australians solved this problem in the past decade by instituting nationwide instant run-off voting (IRV), a system that is making inroads in communities across the United States. There are also efforts to reform our electoral system along the lines of other democratic nations, instituting proportional representation systems such as first proposed by John Stuart Mill in 1861 and now adopted by virtually every democracy in the world except the United States, Australia, Greece, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

These are good and important efforts for the long-term future of American democracy, but they don't solve the immediate problem. If you don't think your local party is doing a good job, by all means go ahead and form an alternative. But don't stop there. Also join your local Democratic or Republican party. Put your energy into taking your mainstream party back so that on election day your representative really represents you!

Today's so-called Republicans have established a mind-numbing record of polluting the environment; bloating government; appointing crony partisans; pushing the nation into debt to fund tax cuts for the rich; legislatively catering to the world's largest corporations; opposing women's rights; kneecapping states, local communities, and schools; eviscerating constitutional protections of liberty at home; and devastating our nation's reputation abroad.

Corporate shills like former Enron lobbyist and GOP chair Ed Gillespie would have us think that the Republican Party was born in service to corporations. But Abraham Lincoln, the first
Republican president, was also the first president to actively use the power of government in support of striking workers.

In Lincoln's era the idea of strikes was so novel that the word
strike
was put in quotation marks in newspapers, but Lincoln was often on the side of the strikers. "Labor," Lincoln wrote, "is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Republicans would do well to revisit the Republican Party's campaign platform of 1872—before the Republican railroad bribery scandals of the late 1870s and 1880s corrupted the party—as it may hold the seeds of their redemption.

The Republicans of 1872 didn't think that anybody should be appointed to high office just because he was a party hack or the son of the secretary of state. Instead, they wrote in their national party platform, "Any system of civil service under which the subordinate positions of the government are considered rewards for mere party zeal is fatally demoralizing; and we, therefore, favor a reform of the system, by laws which shall abolish the evils of patronage, and make honesty, efficiency, and fidelity the essential qualifications for public positions."

They didn't think corporations—particularly big ones—should get the kinds of freebies that corporations today regularly demand for moving into a community. Instead, resources owned by We the People should be held in trust for, or given to, human beings, as they wrote in their platform: "We are opposed to further grants of public land to corporations and monopolies, and demand that the national domain be set apart for free homes for the people."

The Republicans of 1872 felt that the national debt (from the Civil War) should be paid off as quickly as possible, and a budget must not only be balanced but show a surplus while at the same time paying pensions to retired persons. They were also protectionists, in favor of import duties and tariffs to protect working
people's salaries and keep manufacturing jobs from moving off-shore. They proclaimed in their platform:

The [nation's] annual revenue, after paying current expenditures, pensions, and the interest on the public debt, should furnish a moderate balance for the reduction of the principal [of the national debt]; and that revenue should be raised by duties upon importations, the details of which [duties] should be so adjusted as to aid in securing remunerative wages to labor, and promote the industries, prosperity, and growth of the whole country.

The Republicans of 1872 had repealed most of Lincoln's wartime arrogations of civil rights and opposed any other Patriot Act–like interferences with civil liberties. They were rediscovering the Bill of Rights—and said so in party platform plank sixteen:

The Republican party proposes to respect the rights reserved by the people to themselves as carefully as the powers delegated by them to the States and the Federal government. It disapproves of the resort to unconstitutional laws for the purpose of removing evils, by interference with rights not surrendered by the people to either the State or National government.

The party platform said that Republicans would embrace only "modest patriotism" and "incorruptible integrity" in their leaders because the nation's "honor" was, in that day, "kept in the high respect throughout the world."

They added, perhaps presciently, "We believe the people will not entrust the government to any party or combination of men composed chiefly of those who have resisted every step of such beneficent progress."