(10:59 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

For a new second party

The one thing that will change as a result of an election, you can be sure, is that millions of deluded but well-meaning people will find deplorable US policies that much more tolerable - as they did when Clinton was in power. [...] Indeed, the real issue of this election is one's manner, one's inclusiveness, one's willingness to bend somewhat to the rest of the world's "concerns" while essentially staying the course. This message could not have been more open, or more obvious. Kerry will communicate with European powers without Bush's condescending smirk; he will reject Kyoto/ICC etc firmly but politely, but additionally seek to win over his "European allies" with some sweet talk.

But hold on a minute! Isn't this exactly what neoconservatives were calling for not so long ago? Didn't Robert Kagan write an article for Foreign Policy bemoaning the President's image, and the unnecessary way in which he pissed off allies? Didn't Oliver Kamm, the liberal imperialist for Axa investments, announce this is his only dissatisfaction with Bush? Kerry is the neocon dream. Pro-war, pro-Israel, pro-Plan Colombia. And also, not to miss the finer points, loaded.

Regarding this election, it is at least plausible that who wins will matter more than usual – perhaps even monumentally -- both in the policies that ensue and in the psychological and cultural messages heard by elites and electorates around the country and around the world. Where the Bush camp and the Kerry camp differ is over how best to maintain or expand society’s defining gender, cultural, political, and economic hierarchies. We leftists may reasonably disagree about the scale of the difference between class enemy Bush and class enemy Kerry, but we would be delusional to claim there is no difference.

Kerry is a vile warrior happy to defend corporate interests. Bush believes military might produces diplomatic right, offense is everything, and all obstacles and negotiation must be damned. Kerry will weakly defend past progressive domestic social gains and under sufficient pressure may plausibly expand some. In a second term Bush will wage unrelenting war on virtually every progressive domestic social advance of the past hundred years, even as he also elevates right-wing fervor and fear with unknown repercussions.

Thus, another fact of this season’s electoral calculations is that whether Bush or Kerry wins will greatly affect various people’s immediate well being as well as broader domestic and international prospects.

The Anyone-But-Bush movement is based on the one consistent reflex of Democrat party activists - cowardly submission. Terrified to do anything that might in fact make a difference "because then the Right will react against us", they would sooner spend an evening listening to a windy fatso like Clinton pretending he didn't piss on every decent principle and dream of the Left while in office. [...] Republicans have always known how to energise their base, while Democrats only seem to know how to put theirs to sleep.

How electoral campaigns are conducted can also have many and varied effects, even beyond who wins. Regarding the two dominant parties, mainstream campaigns of course overwhelmingly disenfranchise and depoliticize people. This is why the media obliterated Howard Dean despite that Dean is no less an ally of elite interests than Kerry is. I don’t know why Dean’s campaign morphed to the point of threatening to politicize young people and perhaps even poor people, but it did, and since that is the penultimate violation of elite interests in American politics, Dean’s campaign had to be derailed, and it was.

Evidencing the same underlying dynamics, Kerry will try to win the election not by contesting the allegiances of the 50% of the population that typically doesn’t vote, but instead by fighting to win a majority of the 10% or so of swing voters in each state. In fact, if we count only swing states, this election will probably address primarily 4% of the voters and only 2% of the population.

More, Bush and Kerry’s battle for swing voters is actually not even a battle over the informed decisions of those individuals. It is a battle for support from donors and media moguls who provide the means to manipulate swing voters.

Kerry will campaign vigorously for the tiny swing group but will largely ignore the massive non voter pool from which he could plausibly garner landslide support. This is because Kerry just doesn’t want support from those sectors. He won’t risk arousing them because to do so would threaten his larger agendas. Anyone who doesn’t understand how structurally complicit in injustice the Democratic Party is has only to fully comprehend this single fact to have the truth clearly register.

Why is it that Osama Bin Laden and his band of 40 thieves have been able to turn us inside out? Is it because he’s still breathing and 3,000 Americans are not? Is it because we know he’s going to do it again? In the run-up to the general election? Won’t he try to finish what he failed to accomplish when the fourth plane fell short of its target? Won’t he attack our political system, as the first two planes attacked our economy and as the third attacked our military? It’s interesting that in the sequence of attacks, our political system came last. Is that Bin Laden’s ranking, or is it ours?

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