Parties, parties, parties—there were dozens in the nineteenth century, many paving the way for outlandish reforms that later became accepted as commonplace. There was the party to abolish slavery, so outrageous to the cotton plantation owners, and the party to enfranchise women, so outrageous to the early industrialists (who knew that many women opposed cruel child labor practices and therefore wanted women kept out of the polling booth). There were the post-Civil War parties demanding the forty-hour work week, the right to form trade unions, the right to strike. Other parties pioneered for the great populist-progressive movement launched by East Texas farmers in 1887. Many of these parties had short durations, four or fewer election cycles. They found their issues co-opted in significant measure, as when Franklin Delano Roosevelt adopted key social insurance and regulatory positions of Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party. Other parties withered away for lack of resources and leadership. Still others declined from internal conflicts. But they all contributed to the public debate, brought out more voters, raised expectations, and pushed their agendas into the political debate.
Our Constitution made no mention of political parties. Many of the framers despised them, calling them “factions”—narrow-minded, self-interested groups tempted by insidious power. George Washington, John Adams, and especially James Madison in the Federalist Papers—how prescient they were regarding today’s Democratic-Republican duopoly. But the founding fathers also established the predicate for such a duopoly with the Electoral College and winner-take-all elections. That approach, adopted largely to mollify the smaller states, had unintended effects.
One latter day effect was to desensitize many civil libertarians to the rights and virtues of small parties or independent candidates who may siphon votes from their cherished Republican or Democratic Party. Dissent tends to produce discomfort, which in turn gives rise to intolerance, an unseemly willingness to look the other way as the two major parties pass law after law in state after state to exclude multi-party competition. If ballot-access barriers don’t suffice, the major parties resort to a sequence of arbitrary moves by various bi-partisan agencies, including: disqualifying signatures, adopting instant new impediments, marginalizing ballot placement, ignoring write-in votes, excluding candidates from debates, and assorted shenanigans on election day (such as discouraging or intimidating voters) and at ballot-counting time.
And so, sources of regeneration and reform, the provision of more choices and voices, the opportunity to vote for a candidate of one’s choice, not the duopoly’s choice, are effectively denied. Inside the electoral system, impediments frustrate free speech, the right to petition and the right of assembly. Still, civil libertarians are not perturbed, unless their party’s ox is gored. Most civil libertarians won’t push their party to support Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which could promote expression of these rights.
Thwarting or stifling competition has consequences, just as if nature were to keep seeds from sprouting or laws kept entrepreneurs from starting businesses. In politics, duopoly has become politics as usual. When just two parties control the electoral scene, they tend to converge. They are dialing for the same commercial interest dollars and recruiting mostly candidates willing to grovel and make quid pro quo deals. The parties naturally become more cautious toward the powers-that-be and develop a strategy of protective imitation toward one another. Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” was one example. George W. Bush had his phony but politically effective “leave no child behind” and prescription drug benefit. More and more the major parties become Coke and Pepsi, frantically highlighting their dwindling differences and masking their growing similarities.
The two-party duopoly is redistricting the nation’s congressional and state legislative districts into one-party districts. Ninety-five percent of congressional districts are now seen by both parties as safe, not competitive. About 40 percent of state legislative seats are so “safe” that no opponent from the other major party even challenges the incumbent. Entire states are effectively becoming one-party states. In many states, one or the other major presidential candidate makes no effort and thereby further depresses the vote for his party from governor down to city council. In the face of this political monoculture and massive voter turnoff, the liberal intelligentsia plays the least-worst game with the presidential election.
There was a time when the Republican and Democratic Parties more distinctly represented different constituencies. The former bent toward the wealthy, propertied, and protectionist interests, much of rural America and the early ethnic groups. The latter responded to the populist-progressive agendas of the industrial workforce and recent immigrants to the cities. Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania was a flamboyant type of Republican a hundred years ago. A dedicated glutton, he weighed in at 350 pounds. His feasts (which included a dozen oysters, pots of chicken gumbo, a terrapin stew, two ducks, six kinds of vegetables, a quart of coffee, and several cognacs as windups) were often paid for by business buddies. Once he explained his political philosophy to a gathering of supporters: “I believe in a division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under…which you make money…and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money.”
By contrast, consider the two wealthy President Roosevelts—considered traitors to their class—who rode the crest of the progressive movement, challenged “the malefactors of great wealth,” championed the rights of workers, and developed a regulatory framework that saved business from its own avaricious excesses. The Great Depression of the 1930s imprinted more deeply the line between the two parties—one was for the haves, the other for the have-nots.
After World War II, the parties presented themselves differently. Other image-driven perceptions came to dominate: the Republicans as tough on communism and street crime, the Democrats as more solicitous of minority and elderly rights. Although Republicans talked a better game on the hot button international and military issues, actual differences tended to be exaggerated. The bigger differences were in the civil rights, civil liberties, consumer, worker, and environmental areas—with most Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House representing the more progressive party.
Meanwhile corporations, stung in the 1960s and early 1970s by regulatory legislation covering cars, other consumer products, credit, toxic pollution, workplace safety, and the like, resolved to regroup. If there was a marker, it was a Lewis Powell memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (CEOs only) in 1971. Powell was a corporate attorney in Richmond, Virginia, before Richard Nixon nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court. His detailed memorandum warned the business community of a radical turn of forces that was gaining momentum both in Washington and around the nation. Public opinion, especially among the young, was turning against corporations, Powell observed, and he offered a list of what had to be done. The list included more money in campaigns, more lobbying muscle in Washington, and a dedicated expansion of pro-Big Business think tanks and public relations activities.
In the following decade, the business lobby turned Powell’s recommendations into reality and benefited from serendipity: they found Congressman Tony Coehlo, the Democratic Party’s lead fund-raiser in the House, quite accommodating. Coehlo convinced his fellow Democrats that they could receive an ample share of business campaign contributions if they aped the Republicans. In 1980, prodded by Coelho, the Democrats jump-started their own business cash register politics. Corporate political action committees (PACs) began multiplying like rabbits and buying into both parties. Ronald Reagan’s presidency made it easy for Democrats to ignore their better instincts. They failed to push progressive measures in Congress, claiming that Reagan would only veto them. Many veteran progressive stalwarts had left Congress, accelerating the Democrats’ slide. A concessionary political culture took hold of the party. And it routinely kowtowed to business lobbyists.
This period was also marked by shifts of power inside the Democratic Party. Trade unions kept losing influence and settling for less and less, becoming mostly defensive in nature. An emergence of corporate and conservative Democrats out-hustled the liberal/progressive wing of the party when it came to setting the policy agenda and mapping electoral strategy. They planned what they claimed was a necessary move to the center. But the Center was more like the Right when it came to populist, regulatory, and union issues. The liberal/progressives inside the party ran out of gas. Many left and weren’t replaced. Who wanted to play the rancid money-raising game? More and more, good people decided not to run. Conforming to Gresham’s law, bad politics drove out better politics.
Washington, D.C., is not exclusively a federal city with government and business cutting deals. A large number of progressive civic organizations address many areas of injustice; ways to help the poor, the aggrieved, workers, and consumers; ways to protect the environment, civil rights, and civil liberties; and to influence domestic and foreign policy across the board. Twenty-five years ago, many sensed the doors starting to close on their efforts. It wasn’t just that they were losing battles; they were getting less and less of a hearing from all three branches of government. They did not like to acknowledge this shift publicly. They had to keep their spirits up to keep fighting against the mounting odds. These citizen groups had to fight the Republican resurgence that threatened the legitimate needs of those Americans for whom they fought.
These Americans numbered in the tens of millions. Why then wasn’t the Democratic Party speaking forcefully for these people? Why was the party losing its historic anchors, its soul? Was it just that Republicans had become more clever, more opportunistic, more obsessed with victory? As one who was in Washington, D.C., trying to understand and stem the shift in favor of the Republicans, I found the behavior of the Democrats more frustrating. They fantasized that Republicans were winning for one reason: They had more money. It wasn’t the Democrats’ absence of message, organizing energy, or reach to the grassroots where the people live. It wasn’t the way Democrats increasingly resorted to expensive electronic combat with dull thirty-second television ads instead of relentlessly working the precincts between, not just before, elections. Over and over again, I asked Democratic lawmakers: Don’t Republicans oppose the legitimate interests of workers, consumers, low-income people, and people of color? Aren’t their policies harmful to the environment and political reform? Of course, they reply. Then why aren’t the Democrats winning landslides?
When I put the question to a major Democratic presidential candidate recently, he replied: “The Republicans have so much money to cloud the issues.” Such hand-wringing is not good enough. The Democratic Party has failed to defend our country from the corporate Republicans whose extreme servility to big business actually betrays even conservative principles. Republicans (with Democrats’ acquiescence or active complicity) have given us gigantic deficits, uncontrolled business subsidies, and sovereignty-diminishing global trade agreements. For ten years, the Democrats have been losing races to control state legislatures, big city mayoral posts, governorships, and Congress. They even blew a presidential election they had won in 2000. They have become very good at electing very bad Republicans. In the face of all this, their biggest electoral asset is that they are not as bad as the Republicans. Long forgotten is Jimmy Carter’s campaign motto—“Why not the best?”
When a party’s sole claim to legitimacy is that its major opponent is even worse, idealists in the party have a choice. They can hold their noses and join the interminable slide or they can deny their party their vote until the party shapes up and resumes working for the people. It is clear that the majority of progressives have no intention of either leaving their party or fighting to rescue it from the likes of the powerful Democratic Leadership Council, which bizarrely blames the party’s defeats on its being too liberal.
What of the public? What will it take to replace cynicism and powerlessness with a resurgent and robust reform movement? Remember old Senator Penrose, the glutton who openly coddled corporations in exchange for their largesse. Here is his current version: George W. Bush, who pushes through Congress over two trillion dollars worth of tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, over ten years. The wealthy, saving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, are predictably grateful. They attend Mr. Bush’s huge fund-raisers and return a bit to his re-election coffers. He’ll raise over $200 million in hard money, an all-time record, to splash coast-to-coast television ads misleadingly touting his claim to return money back to “the people.” But Bush knows who got the lion’s share of his tax cuts. His knowledge is personal. In one year, he saved $30,858 on his taxes, Cheney saved more than $88,000 on his, and Rumsfeld saw a benefit of $184,000. In return, Bush continues to run the government to favor the super-rich and the business powers.
Washington has become a much larger bazaar of accounts receivables than ever before. The avarice and abuses have become increasingly complex and institutionalized. What outraged the public thirty or forty years ago is now seen as business as usual. In the 1970s, a five cent increase in the price of natural gas prompted congressional indignation and investigation. Now natural gas sells at ten times what it sold for then and a lone Senator Joseph Lieberman writes an objection. The rest yawn at a 50 percent increase over six months, despite the fact that supply and demand remained about the same during that period. Gasoline prices quickly rise thirty to fifty cents per gallon for no perceptible reason except tight refinery capacity in an industry that for twenty years has been voluntarily closing—and not replacing—domestic refineries. Stretched over a year, thirty cents a gallon takes $45 billion out of motorists’ pockets in the U.S.
The people used to cry out for action. Not today. They feel it is useless. Murmurs from Washington about a possible investigation quickly fade away. And why not? Bush has forty-one executives from the oil and gas industry in high government positions. They want an even more lucrative job to return to on the Houston-to-Washington-to-Houston merry-go-round. Beyond that, their mind-set and that of their boss in the White House is marinated in oil. Let the millions of drivers pay, because they have no say.
In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave away what then presidential candidate Robert Dole estimated to be a $75 billion asset of the American people—the digital spectrum—to the broadcast industry. Dole attacked this heist in a rare expression of anticorporate outrage and demanded congressional action. So did Senator John McCain. But Dole’s successor as Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, refused to do anything. His college chum, Eddie Fritts, the executive director of the National Association of Broadcasters, stands watch over the media companies’ free use of the public airwaves from his modernist headquarters near DuPont Circle in Washington. This enormous giveaway wasn’t an issue in the presidential campaign; Clinton couldn’t be bothered since after all it was his FCC that made the decision. Dole did not press the matter.
Each year the shredding of our federal government’s public assets and obligations becomes more brazen. Even in the face of ever more outrageous subsidies and handouts to corporations, bloated military contracts, consumer gouging, and environmental destruction, both parties favor less regulatory law enforcement. In the face of a crime wave against small investors, pension holders, consumers, and workers, the Justice Department’s corporate crime prosecution budget is starved by Congress and the White House. You’d think trillions of swindled dollars would create a front and center political issue. But not if both parties are hustling business interests for campaign cash and selling out the nation for a “mess of pottage.”
The myth persists that the politicians comprise our government. Our government is ruled by corporate executives, thousands of lobbyists, and corporate lawyers who plunder, pillage, and reduce our revered national capital to corporate-occupied territory. The powers-that-be escape their fair share of taxes, attack sacred constitutional rights, and exclude the people from the commonwealth of resource-rich public lands, and the public airwaves. It can be numbing to people who struggle to get by and believe they have no time for anything other than a bit of relaxation after work before the daily grind starts again.
What is occurring here could be an addendum to Machiavelli’s classic rules for rulers, The Prince. As corruption, robberies, and usurpations become bigger, more complex, and obscured by semantic baloney, opposition diminishes. It is replaced by passivity, resignation, hopelessness, surrender. Yet sometimes something happens that gets our attention. Year after year, Congressional and media investigations and private whistle-blowers document the stupendous waste, incompetence, redundancy, and graft in the military contracting budgets—tens of billions of undeserved dollars steered to prime Pentagon munitions corporations. The people scarcely stir. But when a few intrepid souls disclosed that the Pentagon paid $435 for a $10 claw hammer, which the contractor billed the government for under the description of “multi-directional, impact generator,” the public and editorialists took acid notice. When a $1,700 toilet seat cover followed, the reaction was vociferous. When spending is broken down and placed within the framework of ordinary experience, civic sparks start to fly and a rumble from the people can be heard in Washington.
Why did Richard Nixon sign all those historic bills in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Because he wanted to? Probably not. It was because he took notice of marches, rallies, teach-ins, confrontations with power, and agitation. Justice-seekers were on the offensive. That is a key lesson of history: Once those strivings for justice are thrown on the defensive, reacting to the agendas of the corporatists and reactionaries, expectation levels fall, self-confidence declines, and the whole balance of power shifts. That is what started to happen in the mid-1970s. When the organized oligarchs counterattacked, the rumble faded away. This was facilitated by Nixon ending the draft, the end of the Vietnam War, and the end of sheriffs hosing down and handcuffing nonviolent civil rights demonstrators. Those successes reflect the dilemma of liberalism. The more it succeeds, the more it takes the steam out of itself. This necessitates the emergence of new leaders and agendas to revive the rumble of democracy.
Many injustices lack the visceral immediacy of young people conscripted to fight and die in Vietnam, or innocent citizens pummeled on the streets of Birmingham. Today, massive risks are often more abstract, remote, and complex. Farts disturb more people than odorless pollution or global warming. Thoughtless ethnic slights rile more people than widespread lead poisoning of children and skyrocketing levels of childhood asthma. We must awaken to the many menaces around us and dedicate some civic attention to widespread perils.
Personal irritations shrink as the magnitude of civic challenges is absorbed into one’s purposeful self. When people move into the civic arena and take on a cause, they experience stress and uncertainty, but the gratification is deeper, a more truthful part of the summit of their being, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Anne Witte completed a series of interviews with women who became super-active leaders, for her book Women Activists: Challenging the Abuse of Power, I asked her to identify the one over-riding impression she took away from them. Without hesitation she said, “I’ve never met happier people.” Hmmmm.
From whom should the Republican and Democratic parties take instructions? From artificial commercial entities that subjugate the public interest, or from human beings who possess inalienable rights? The question answers itself. But the question is not repeatedly and insistently asked in party platforms, on the campaign trail, in media, in the legislative halls, and judicial forums. What are the answers, someone asked Gertrude Stein? “What are the questions?” she replied. Scientists know that the properly formulated question is well on the way to finding an answer. When it comes to politics, we don’t ask ourselves enough questions. Here are some:
As these questions imply, we need to summon will power and self-confidence to envision the wonderful benefits of political participation for the quality of life and justice in America and in the world. Asking these questions of oneself in earnest starts one on the road to replacing what irreverent author Sam Smith calls the “don’t care, don’t know, and don’t do” rationalizations of futility with “I care, I know, I do.” It brings one closer to what Emerson called “the integrity of your own mind.” Some one hundred and fifty years ago he advised, “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”