(7:58 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Beyond 2004

I have been called out by Adam Robinson, and rightly so. Allow me to reformulate.

Kerry is inevitable. I sincerely believe that nothing short of a military coup will allow Bush to continue in office beyond the end of his current term. We all still need to vote for Kerry, no question -- though I hate the idea of allowing the Republicans to set the terms of the national debate, there is no feasible way in the next six months that this election is going to be about anything other than George W. Bush's miserably failed presidency and the need to end it. The fact that George W. Bush is arguably the worst president in history does not make Bill Clinton, John Kerry, or Millard Fillmore wonderful, saintly people. But the relative unattractiveness of John Kerry certainly does not make another term of Bush/Rove tolerable.

I'm taking the Chomskyan position: yes, the Democrats are morally bankrupt, but they are noticeably less morally bankrupt than the Republicans. It's a small difference, but in the context of the most powerful nation in the history of the world, that small difference can end up making a huge difference for a lot of people. Still, we need to take a long, hard look at the performance of the Democratic Party. I contend that while the Democratic Party can be embraced in itself, as the only realistic alternative to Republicanism within the next six months, there is no real way for a serious leftist to embrace the Democratic party for itself. We have to ask some very serious questions:

1. Why did the Democrats vote for the tax cuts?
   
2. Why did the Democrats support the USA PATRIOT Act?
   
3. Why did the Democrats vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq?
   
4. And a related question: Why is it that Tony Blair, formerly known as Bill Clinton, Jr., remains Bush's staunchest ally and defender?

The same events could have happened in a Gore administration. They would have been handled more competently; they would have had more finesse; they wouldn't have been so over-the-top -- but the basic sequence of events that has characterized the Bush administration is also a plausible sequence of events for a Democratic president.

That, to me, is a problem. That's something we need to work on during the Kerry years. Adam Robinson is right that domestic politics suck and we need a two-party system and whatever else -- there is no genuine, fundamental choice. There are significant choices. There are good, solid reasons to vote against Bush, and I don't want anything I say to be taken as anything less than fully supportive of a John Kerry presidency, given the present circumstances. We do get to vote on some very significant issues in 2004. But do we get to vote about whether we want CEOs to earn 5000 times more than their workers? Do we get to vote about whether we really want to substantially privatize what was hitherto a public sphere -- public schools, universities, the publicly-owned spectrum licenses, even the military? Do we get to vote on whether we prefer a system in which everyone has relatively secure access to food, housing, and medical attention over a system in which the very few are allowed to accumulate unfathomable amounts of money and power while the children of the homeless starve? That is a fundamental choice. That would be politics properly-so-called.

I don't want to denigrate the importance of the 2004 election at all. The depth of my disgust and revulsion at the Bush administration is well-documented. But we do need to look beyond 2004. We need to look at what it might mean to have real politics, real democracy in America. That might mean building up the Green Party into a nation-wide movement. That might mean taking the risk of criticizing the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party Clinton shaped for their complicity with an immoral economic order -- something that has heretofore been done only by a handful of radical thinkers (Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, etc.). And although I do believe that Ralph Nader is no longer a credible rallying point for a national left-wing movement, it might mean doing what Nader has been criticized for doing: reaching out to social conservatives, making clear to them the deep contradiction between their values and the economic model they are objectively supporting. It might seem cynical, like it would get one's hands dirty, but it is necessary, because the 1990s have shown us that "social issues" cannot help to produce a humane, egalitarian society without being articulated in a broader political-economic scheme -- and so I'm all for fundamentalist preachers, whose views I would otherwise find abhorrent, denouncing the evils of corporate power.

More to the point in this context, we have already witnessed the power of blogs to fuel political movements. The Dean campaign was a huge success on that level, and a new progressive movement might look into tapping not just into the model of the Dean campaign, but into the actual people who are still involved in it. Atrios has had a lot of success raising money for the Kerry campaign (which I think is completely appropriate and wonderful and to be applauded). It's been objectively demonstrated that the Internet is a powerful tool for grass-roots organization and fundraising. So during the Kerry years, the lefty blogosphere may have to take the step of ignoring entirely the multitude of slander (or perhaps even deserved criticism) that the right-wingers will be directing toward our dear president -- that is, it might have to use the opening of a Democratic president to think of ways to wrest the control of debate away from conservatives and toward the agenda of a more humane, egalitarian society.

And on a practical level, building a congressional block is probably more important than jumping straight to the presidency -- and also more doable.

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