Doug Henwood Talks

[Sometimes I wonder what planet these things are filed from. What
about the Dem party makes Greider thinks they’re likely to listen to
any of this? Ankle-biting enforcers?]

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20061204&s=greider

The Nation - December 4, 2006

Watershed by WILLIAM GREIDER

The Democratic Party was not really ready for this. Democrats have
been in the wilderness so long–since Ronald Reagan launched the
conservative era twenty-five years ago–that older liberals began to
think it was a life sentence. Bill Clinton was the party’s rock star;
he made people feel good (and occasionally cringe), but he governed
in idiosyncratic ways that accommodated the right and favored small
gestures over big ideas. The party adopted his risk-averse style. Its
substantive meaning and political strength deteriorated further.

Then George W. Bush came along as the ultimate nightmare–even more
destructive of government and utterly oblivious to the consequences.

The 2006 election closed out the conservative era with the voters’
blast of rejection. Democrats are liberated again to become–what?
Something new and presumably better, maybe even a coherent party.

This is the political watershed everyone senses. The conservative
order has ended, basically because it didn’t work–did not produce
general well-being. People saw that conservatives had no serious
intention of creating smaller government. They were too busy
delivering boodle and redistributing income and wealth from the many
to the few. Plus, Republicans got the country into a bad war, as
liberals had decades before.

On the morning after, my 6-year-old grandson was watching TV as he
got ready for school. He saw one of those national electoral maps in
which blue states wiped away red states. “Water takes fire,” he said.
Water nourishes, fire destroys. How astute is that? It could be the
theme for our new politics.

With Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate, we can now
return to a reality-based politics that nourishes rather than
destroys. The party’s preoccupation with “message” should take a back
seat to “substance”–addressing the huge backlog of disorders and
injuries produced by conservative governance. This changeover will be
long and arduous. But at least it can now begin.

Republicans lost, but their ideological assumptions are deeply
embedded in government, the economy and the social order. Many
Democrats have internalized those assumptions, others are afraid to
challenge them. It will take years, under the best circumstances, for
Democrats to recover nerve and principle and imagination–if they do.

But this is a promising new landscape. Citizens said they want
change. Getting out of Iraq comes first, but economic reform is close
behind: the deteriorating middle class, globalization and its
damaging impact on jobs and wages, corporate excesses and social
abuses, the corruption of politics. Democrats ran on these issues,
and voters chose them.

The killer question: Do Democrats stick with comfortable Washington
routines or make a new alliance with the people who just elected
them? Progressives can play an influential role as ankle-biting
enforcers. They then have to get up close and personal with
Democrats. Explain that evasive, empty gestures won’t cut it anymore.
Remind the party that it is vulnerable to similar retribution from
voters as long as most Americans don’t have a clue about what
Democrats stand for.

The first order of business is taking down Bush. The second front is
the fight within the Democratic Party over its soul and sense of
direction. These are obviously intertwined, but let’s start with Bush
and how Democrats can contain his ebbing powers. This is not a
philosophical discussion. Events are already moving rapidly.

Everyone talks up postelection bipartisanship, and voters are weary
of partisan cat fights. But that doesn’t mean selling them out to get
along with the other party. If Bush wants compromise, let him start
by promising not to nominate any more hard-right-wingers to the
federal judiciary. Harry Reid, the new Senate majority leader, could
respond by promising not to confirm any nominees if Bush doesn’t keep
his word.

The tables are turned now. Democrats will control the pursestrings of
government. Beyond keeping post offices open, they can kill anything
Bush proposes. They have the high ground, but they can now also be
blamed for what goes wrong. For the first time in a dozen years,
Democrats have the power to alter the governing fundamentals.

Ending the war cannot be compromised. Voters want out “now,” as soon
as possible. They did not endorse a couple more years of US
occupation, many more lost lives and wasted billions. If Democratic
leaders get that wrong, it becomes their war too, and Americans will
not be forgiving. A coherent alternative that deserves bipartisan
support may emerge from the Baker-Hamilton group. But, if not,
Democrats should be principled critics and draw up their own road map.

Let Iraqis decide their own fate. Telling them to split up into three
parts sounds like more colonialist intervention. Iraqis are robbed of
true sovereignty as long as occupying Americans are present.
Democrats can come up with a plausible timetable for withdrawal,
accompanied by rational foreign-policy steps like direct talks with
Iran and other Middle Eastern powers to defuse the sectarian violence
and to arrange a manageable exit for the US military.

Congress cannot command troops, but it has enormous leverage to coax
and prod Pentagon policy through appropriations and other
legislation. Cutting off funds in the midst of war is not going to
happen–it never has in US history–but the military itself could
become a valuable source of strategic ideas, both in hearings and
through back-door communications. Bush’s promised “victory” in Iraq
is not an option.

The Pentagon, in fact, is especially vulnerable to Congressional
pressure, because its spending is scandalously out of control.
Rumsfeld allowed it, and the services took advantage of his open
checkbook. Emergency “war” spending is headed toward $507 billion and
covers numerous projects with no relevance to Iraq or Afghanistan.
House and Senate committees can force out the facts and expose this
outrage now. If they don’t, it will haunt them later when they try to
reduce federal deficits.

When Democrats take up their commitment to reducing Bush’s budget
deficits, they face a big problem up front. The economy is heading
toward recession. Shrinking federal deficits would only make things
worse. Dems need to back off that pledge and consider stimulative
spending instead.

They can look for money elsewhere. One promising source lies in the
many investigations and hearings Senate and House committees are
planning to expose war-profiteering–Halliburton’s no-bid contracts,
obscene subsidies and tax breaks for Big Oil and Big Pharma, the rank
corruption that has essentially looted government programs. Properly
managed, these inquiries can produce popular anger and demands for
recovering the public capital carried off by private interests.

The straightforward way to achieve this is taxation. For three
decades, Washington has been cutting taxes for corporate and
financial interests, not to mention the wealthy. Democrats have to
find ways to stop intoning this conservative tax-cutting mantra by
showing that government has been robbed and ordinary families are the
losers. Will voters be upset that Democrats are recovering public
money by raising taxes on the plunderers? I think they will cheer.

Representative Charles Rangel, the next chair of the House Ways and
Means Committee, has said he will not attempt to repeal Bush’s
outrageous tax cuts for the wealthy–but instead let them expire in
2010. That kills estate-tax repeal and puts other measures in
terminal jeopardy. Democrats should go on the offense and develop a
tax-shift strategy that increases taxes on corporations and capital
in order to finance tax relief for struggling families, middle-class
and below. Last-Ditch Bush may veto this, but let’s see how many
nervous Republicans vote against it.

All this depends, however, on the question of whether Democrats have
the stomach for a fight, not only with Bush and the GOP but with the
business and financial interests that underwrite both parties. We
don’t know yet, but a test case may come soon. Corporate leaders,
investment bankers and the insurance industry are lobbying to gut the
modest regulations enacted after Enron and to disable investor
lawsuits against fraud on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms.

Which side will Democrats be on? In the 1990s leading senators
supported big money against the interests of injured investors,
including pension funds. Deviating Democrats included Chris Dodd, Joe
Lieberman, Charles Schumer and Joe Biden, to name a few. If they are
on the wrong side this time, voters should hear about it.

This tension between liberal economic values and the center-right
economics of Clinton is the party’s great divide. Clintonistas-in- waiting–awaiting Hillary’s White House–still dominate party affairs
in Washington. But the facts have changed. Voters expressed their
contempt for Republicans in 2006. They did not suggest they want the
same behavior from Democrats.

Is the new Congress reflected in economic populists like Senator- elect Jim Webb of Virginia and free-trade critics like Senator-elect
Sherrod Brown? Or pro-gun, antiabortion conservatives from the South
and Midwest who might pull the party rightward? Both before and after
the election, major media, led by the New York Times and Washington
Post, repeatedly emphasized that no leftward ideological shift would
occur, because Democrats are moving rightward. This was bogus, way
too simplistic. It overlooked the fact that 100 or more candidates
ran aggressively on liberal or populist economic issues–against
unregulated free trade and the offshoring of American jobs, against
special interests, corporate excesses and social abuses. The Blue Dog
and New Democrat caucuses will expand, but the Progressive Caucus
will, too, and will remain the largest–at seventy-one members.

The spin originated with DLC types, and a principal source was
Representative Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, who recruited many of the candidates. “Emanuel
and other top Democrats told their members they cannot allow the
party’s liberal wing to dominate the agenda next year,” the Post
reported. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to be in charge, she might
not want Representative Emanuel standing at her back.

The party’s ideological debate is under way privately at a more
serious level. Robert Rubin, the influential former Treasury
Secretary and executive chair at Citigroup, launched the Hamilton
Project this past spring to head off the rising rebellion within
party ranks against corporate-led globalization. He is proposing
various measures, but holds fast to “free market” principle: Don’t
interfere with the global markets and multinationals.

Organized labor has taken up Rubin’s invitation to talk and is
countering with its ideas for fundamental reforms. Labor leaders do
not expect to change Rubin’s mind. Their objective is to show
Democratic incumbents that they are caught in a serious bind–between
their injured voters and multinational investment bankers. Democrats
will have nothing meaningful to say to them as long as the party
adheres to the economic orthodoxy. They need debate and an aggressive
agenda that stanches the bleeding for Americans and saves the global
system by reforming it.

Nancy Pelosi has the power to break through the risk-averse habits.
She and liberal allies like Representative George Miller are playing
shrewd, not reckless politics. But the Democrats don’t have forever
to establish bona fides with the electorate. A year from now, if the
party looks like the same old timid crowd, Democrats will be in
trouble of their own making.

This is where activists can develop influence inside Congress. They
have to work on persuading Pelosi, Reid and key House and Senate
chairs to take the larger risks. The breadth of the Democratic
victory gives them license to push a more ambitious agenda. The weak
public regard for Democrats gives them an incentive. The House-Senate
majorities enable the party to pass a lot of urgent progressive
reforms–regulating global warming, for example–that may not become
law but would create forward momentum and draw “nay” votes from
reactionary Republicans.

Progressives must develop an inside-outside strategy that engages
this new Democratic Congress intimately while it rallies citizens at
large to add their voices, too. This is going to be a hard, long
struggle. Turning around a political party and politics isn’t
accomplished in one or two election cycles.

But some newly elected Democrats found a smart formula in 2006. Talk
to people about their lives and really listen to what people, not
polls, say. Then offer solutions, not just rhetoric, that might work.
If they learn to do this conscientiously, pretty soon Democrats might
begin sounding like a political party.

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