Ditto the Demos?


By John O’Kane


The demos are back but what’s their comeback plan this time? If they’d shown some savvy in 2000 and demanded a real recount of Florida, they wouldn’t need one. The prospect of a Gore-Lieberman regime looks mighty tantalizing from hindsight, but wait a minute! Would 9/11 have remade it into a version of what we have now?

Of course 9/11 might not have happened in the first place with an administration pushing the multilateralism of the Clinton years. The arrogance of the new Bush administration toward other nations fueled an already volatile international situation where victims of our aggression were returning blows against the empire, as Chalmers Johnson has shown. Bin Laden after all had been our ally against the Soviets in Afghanistan, turning to dastardly deeds only after being snubbed. But then the Clinton team was not exactly practicing group therapy in the 90s when its loose canons were bombing pharmaceutical plants and killing innocent civilians.
The idea that the demos are more different than the repubs is an attractive one. But when 9/11 did happen, they did little to brake the pathological militarization. Deluded by false intelligence like everyone else. Yet had they got religion earlier 150,000 Iraqi civilians might still be alive!
The demos and repubs are mostly a team and it’s hard to see recent events at the polls as much more than a family feud. If the demos had captured the big house in 2000, and 9/11 didn’t happen, the same ole disastrous neolib policies would likely have been perpetrated on the populace; bad globalization, with the unfree-trading multinational conglomerates having their way with us, would likely have been the order of the day; military budgets for defending us against the post-Cold War rash of new enemies (one of Clinton’s first gestures!) would likely have remained at their epidemic levels; the corporate purchase of all candidates would likely not have given way to real campaign finance reform; the anti-anti-trust movement begun in the 80s, and what allows the merger-gobbling corporate order to continue its attack against the lower orders and spike inequality, would likely have gone on as usual.
Sure, the givebacks to the richly-endowed would likely not have been as extreme. But the demos just don’t represent the masses out there who refuse to participate in the system. The numbers who didn’t vote in this election tell a much more relevant story. The demos’ managed centrism in the past has served to block what’s truly needed, the emergence of a third party system like what all other advanced industrial nations have where voter turnout is nearly universal. A party that speaks for the excluded will never emerge in the current winner-take-all system. America’s love affair with lotteries reflects more than desperation by the destitute. And such a change is hardly in the interests of either party. But this is what is necessary for the Peace and Freedom Party and others to emerge and help balance the democratic scales.
So if the demos are really serious, forget bipartisan cooperation. They should start sending administration perps to The Hague, give their corporate endowments back while sponsoring short and commercial-free elections in the months to come, and make the rebate-rentiers repair the budget!

Posted: Fri - December 1, 2006 at 07:59 PM          

©