As someone who is independently liberal, and vocal about it, I get the question in the headline a lot, and have for many years: why focus on criticizing the Democratic Party when the Republican Party is so much worse? Political conventions time – a routine stop along the way in what passes for “democracy in action” – is one of the moments when more people pay some attention to “politics,” at its scripted entertainment best/worst, and so one of the times the criticisms of my criticisms increase for a few days. And that’s fine with me. Differing ideas and perspectives are healthy.
Anyway, my Inbox has seen an increase in, “If you’re really a liberal, you wouldn’t be criticizing the Democratic Party, especially at a time when the Republicans are so horrible” kind of stuff. I also do get some messages from those who agree with me, or at least say they understand.
Given all of this, I all but cheered when I read a post from Bruce Dixon, at Black Agenda Report last week, a commentary he delivered on Black Agenda Radio. I’m excerpting liberally, in more than one sense of the word. I’ll forego bolding the whole thing, but as far as I’m concerned, it could be.
Why We Don’t Spend As Much Time Denouncing Republicans As We Do Democrats
We know who and what the Republican party is. Back in the mid 1960s, when Democratic president Lyndon Johnson, under relentless pressure from the Freedom Movement embraced enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in the South, Republicans opened their doors wide to welcome the exodus of white supremacist voters and politicians who’d been Democrats until that time. The modern Republican party re-made itself into the permanent white man’s party not just in the South, but across the country, the party whose brands are rancid racism, pretentious piety, monstrous misogyny and shameless warmongering.
When you match Republican brands against those of Democrats … the difference isn’t black and white, but it’s clear enough. The Republican brand is odious and deeply scary, easily more frightening than that of Democrats.
In today’s political ecology, the job of Republicans is to provide political camouflage to right wing Democrats like the last two Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama, by moving still further rightward, even past the boundaries of lunacy. …
The fact is that 120% evil Republicans offer the only justification for our support of 100% evil Democrats. And with the dissolution of what used to be the black consensus for equality, civil liberties, full funding for public education, and opposing war spending and corporate privilege, Obama-era Democrats continue to flee rightward toward war, privatization and austerity.
This deformed puzzle is not the political logic of free and responsible people. It’s the cramped and twisted reasoning of someone trapped in a box urgently trying to convince himself that it’s not really a box, that pragmatic acceptance of the box as the whole of the great and free universe is really all that can be hoped, struggled and strived for. It’s not. Only a beaten, cowed and enslaved people can imagine their forbears sacrificed and struggled for them to choose among greater and lesser, but both still monstrous evils.
We at Black Agenda Report spend more time denouncing Democrats because they act like and enable Republicans. We don’t spend as much time denouncing the party of white supremacy because Republicans rarely bother to pretend to be anything else. …
That’s what choosing ‘lesser evils’ has earned us. It’s time to chuck the fake choice between evil Republicans and slightly less evil Democrats. It’s time not just to think, but to climb outside the two-party, lesser-evil box, to breathe the free air and get ready for something new.
The Republican National Convention will produce the only thing it can: more of the same “how far Right can we go and get away with it” marketing. Basically, that’s what the Democratic National Convention will do, too, knowing all they have to do is stay somewhat Left of the GOP, even though they crossed over the “middle” into Right territory years ago.
Basically this post is: what Bruce Dixon said, and in the American Extremists comic above, what Vast Left said. Along with a growing number of other people.
(American Extremists comic via Vast Left on FB).
While I don’t subscribe to many of the ideological concepts important to you, I certainly intellectually grasp what you and Taylor Marsh are attempting to do with your rage against the “Duopoly”, as you like to phrase it.
The obstacle you face, as I see it, is that most of your kindred ideological spirits simply do not want to invest in the effort it will require. The very same mindset that finds comfort in government as the solution obviously has a very difficult time embracing that they must actually fight against government as it is presently configured because government has now become an entity with its own inertia, in stark contrast to what people think they are granting it from one election to another.
Even at the local level, I can see that once a politician grabs some incumbency within the government structure, decisions are primarily executed from the perspective of what is best for maintenance of the status quo structure, not primarily whatever original ideology might have motivated them initially. Ideology is then simply a tool to utilize to maintain the status quo (or more accurately, the political power to do so).
Sure, there was a time when people of kindred ideology banded together to give political strength to their ideology. Now, however, political strength, (i.e., political parties) use ideology merely to give strength to the party. A distinction, no doubt, too subtle for most of your complaining readers to appreciate. They can wish for more railing against Republicans, but actually Republicans are way more transparent with revealing how things really work.
Railing against the opposition is simply a much less demanding path for liberals to follow than what it otherwise required to get the job done.
Some, perhaps. Others among us know full well that this is a possibility. Anyone who is aware of our national history knows something about how hostile our governments tend to be towards anything that makes working peoples’ lives less difficult. A lot of what you call “government as the solution” I’d call not allowing the government to use its resources to promote the interests of the wealthy. There’s a related problem, though, and I think it is at least as responsible as what you’re discussing. That is the question that arises when you first realize that the Democratic Party, and many supposedly “progressive” institutions that we’ve come to rely on to keep an eye on government, are useless or even counterproductive. The next logical question is “What do we do now?” There aren’t any easy answers to that question. Yet it’s the question we really need to be addressing.
Yes, that is our problem in a nutshell. Most of the advocacy groups that sprang up during the ’70s have now been around so long that their goals always include self-preservation. I’m tempted to write that’s their top priority, but that’s only based on observing their behavior, not knowing what’s on their minds. It’s possible they’re still in favor of whatever it is they were formed to promote, but the only things I see many of them doing these days is being an adjunct of the Democrats.
Exactly so.
Apologies for the blockquotes not working in that previous comment. They showed up as blockquotes in the visual editor. I don’t know why they aren’t set off like they used to be, but there are three quotes from casualobserver’s comment.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, casualobserver.
I think there are actually a lot of people on the Left, in particular those working outside the status quo system, who are criticizing the government in its two corporate party process and structure. That’s a big part of what the Occupy and reletated movement represent, as well as independents who are concerned with the need to change the broken system rather than “rseforming” the Democratic Party.
On Left and Right, when the focus is more on a party “win” than on actual policy outcomes, we get what we have today.
There’s another reason I spend more time criticizing the Democrats, besides the ones Bruce Dixon mentions. That reason is that the Democrats are the party in power. As long as they are, what they say and do matters more than what the Republicans do. In the first couple of years I was blogging, I think I was a lot more critical of Republicans than I am now. But back then they mattered. They had the White House, and up until the end of 2006, they controlled Congress, also. When you’re the one making the decisions, you get more of the blame.
I agree with what Dixon writes, but when all is said and done, to those of us who aren’t partisan so much as interested in a having a better country, that matters, too.
Agreed, Cujo, that this is another very good reason for criticizing the Dems. And I like this very much: “to those of us aren’t partisan so much as interested in having a better country.”