Is Cowardice Really the Explanation for Democrats' Impotence?

Journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote an angry piece last week on his blog “RebelReports”. If you haven’t heard of Scahill you need to check out his award-winning book on military contractors, “Blackwater”. Or his recent interview on Bill Moyers Journal. He’s a serious journalist in the muckraking tradition and it’s a good article.

But it got me thinking…

Here’s what I mean. On the topic of the Iraq/ Afghanistan war supplemental funding bill, which was passed by the House this week, he opens with this attack:

“The cowardly Democrats who checked their spines at the door to Congress when they voted Tuesday try to defend their flip-flop on war funding. Frankly, it is embarrassing.”

IT FEELS GOOD TO CALL'EM YELLA, DON'T IT?

Now, for those of us citizens who are resolutely against these wars, this line of attack my feel pretty satisfying. A good visceral gnashing of the teeth and pounding of the table -- it’s an attack that’s been leveled against House Democrats by numerous journalists, bloggers, and commentators since they took back the House in 2006 (and, let’s face it, well before that). And it’s the kind of charge that tends to produce instinctive and vigorous head nodding among those that want a lot more from the Democratic Party.

But I can’t help myself in wanting to interrogate this position. It seems to me that it’s more often uttered in frustration than anything else. “Those damn cowardly Dems!!! Why don’t thy grow a pair?!!” Okay, cool, I’m down with a little populist anger, right on, but you know there sure are a lot of people in the House of Representatives. Are you telling me that every single one of those reps that fails to support progressive legislation is some form of coward? Every Blue Dog Dem, and those who fear their opposition, is a fraidy cat? Really?

Well, here’s one of those situations where outrage is all good and well, but a little step back is in order. I think odds are there are numerous explanations for why these different reps vote the way they do -- moving from position to position in seemingly sober procession, from one to the other, and different explanations offered for each. There’s just too much ridiculousness going on here, too many nonsensical gyrations, for mere cowardice to be the cause of our government’s poor decision-making in the face of a seriously critical time in history. And if you can’t feel that bitch-slap the Creator’s been serving up to this country by now, maybe you were numb before it swung, because there is enough much sad, angry, messed up shit going on all across the country right now to make you curl up in fetal position. It is a bonafide critical time.

And it’s the growingly un-refutable fact of how critical a period we’re entering that makes this kind of inquiry into motivation so important. There’s not a lot of time for the United States to start making smarter decisions before things get genuinely ugly and heartbreaking. I think the common epithet about the Democratic Party being filled with officials having no backbone is starting to look a bit glib. (to steal a phrase from Tom Crusie)

The charge of cowardice assumes that most Dem officials have some core set of beliefs about fair play, social safety nets, civil liberties, and participatory democracy. And the implication seems to be that it’s just that, in the face of big bad corporations and other powerful interests, they can’t muster the stomach to take the heat these groups will bring down on them if they don’t play ball. So they betray their own beliefs and, by extension, their constituents.

But can you safely say that most politicians want to represent their constituents, but are scared? For that matter, can you say for certain what any politician truly believes? Or, as you watch each political scandal unfold, whether it be about sex, influence, corruption, whatever, it becomes pretty difficult to hang onto the idea that Dem officials vote the way they do solely out of cowardice.

I mean, screw it. Some group of intrepid journalists should marry up with a crack private investigation firm to look at each Dem on a case-by-case basis. What makes Nancy Pelosi tick? Why is Arlen Specter switching parties? I want to know. What’s in their garbage? What do they say when nobody’s listening? What really goes on, not just behind the committee room door, but before all those folks walk into the room? Who’s whispering in their ear? Who’s filling their cookie jar? It’s only when we have much more verifiable information on the motivations of Democratic Party officials and reps that citizens groups of all stripes can formulate more effective strategies to move these officials closer to the people’s will – or vote them out of office when they don’t respond. As I said before, it is a critical time. Things are moving much too rapidly for wasted efforts. Global warming is totally indifferent to the strength of incumbents or any “political reality”. Wouldn’t you rather have a more compelling accounting of what motivates your House Rep, your Senator, your City Supervisor, or your Mayor than simply that they’re cowards? Or even the more likely reality that human beings have a lot of trouble wielding power wisely?


The fact is that real democracy is dangerous to the elites in any country. And, yes, we do have elites in this country. They want to run things. They want to be important. They are not a bunch of Jimmy Stewarts, desperately trying to raise ordinary voices above the din of elite consensus. They believe they know better. I suspect that even Obama, whose rhetoric about citizen participation in democracy is so convincing to so many, believes he knows better than his fellow citizens (and president or not, we are Obama’s fellow citizens).

Check out this great clip of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon from back in 1964, when he vociferously opposed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the brewing up by President Lyndon Johnson of a wider war in Vietnam. How many times have you heard your Senator mention the Constitution, or the fact that democracy means the people rule? And note how even way back in 1964, an elite person from the established class (namely the journalist with whom Morse is arguing) is so quick to say that his fellow citizens aren’t equipped to chart the course of their own nation.



Scahill is an excellent reporter and he shakes his fist mightily with facts crushed between his fingers. But citizens and journalists need to dig a lot deeper if we have any real intention of renewing small d democracy in America. I’d rather see honest to goodness positive change than enjoy the fleeting satisfactions of righteousness, wouldn’t you?

Tie Global Warming More Directly to Local Quality-of-Life Issues

When I was in college, I used to drive down this quiet two-lane highway to Cincinnati. Cinci was the closest place from my small Midwestern college that was even close to happening. But the road was beautiful. Everything was laid out before you: old farmhouses, calm fields, large swaths of forest. That is, until you got about a half an hour outside Cincinnati, where the roadside became a crawling neon expanse of service stations and fast food chains. I tried to imagine how many people within a 30-mile radius really needed to eat hamburgers on a daily basis. Why’d they build so many of these places? It was just so unremittingly ugly.

I think about this a lot when I read all of the organized environmental arguments about why we need to do something about global warming – which of our practices cause the most greenhouse gases, the likely effects of doing nothing, the economic benefits of greening the economy, how to combat the powers that be, etc. -- and I’m on board with most of this analysis intellectually, no question.

But the thing I hear so rarely from environmental and political organizations (okay, excepting Bill McKibben and other individuals), the simple gut-smacking truth outside all the facts and figures and political this-and-that, is how tragic it is that the way we’ve used land these last 50 years has turned one of the most extraordinary continents on the planet into something ugly to be around. And that right there is the global warming connection between aesthetics and greenhouse gases. Because all this extra ugliness not only affects the tone and quality of daily life, but needs enormous amounts of carbon-spouting energy to run: factory farms to grow and harvest pesticide-infested food, buildings upon buildings to sell the food, energy from oil and coal to power the buildings, fences upon fences to protect the buildings, and cars upon roads under cars to get people to the buildings, drab, energy-inefficient subdivisions to house all the people in the cars.

Why am I doing all this hand wringing about our increasingly ugly communities? It's not just aesthetics. It’s basically about motivation. People get quickly overwhelmed by the statistics and the debates over global warming. But if the call to action was more about making our towns places that once again please the eye and the spirit, you might see folks from all walks of life realizing they were environmentalists after all. You might see them out in the street making things happen. Not in Washington, but in their own towns, the places they can relate to best.

I mean, when you sit down to think about it, there’s no reason Ohio shouldn’t be as beautiful as Vermont. What I’d love to see from the environmental movement is a little less of an appeal to facts, figures, and political strategies (as important as they are) and more local organizing around beauty. It may be the most galvanizing and least naive thing to do.

Clean War?

When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching reruns of Star Trek. Not the new fangled remake from the 80s and 90s, but the original show from the late 1960s. I know, I know, for the non-initiated in such pastimes the cheese factor is high. But I can’t help it. Pop culture has always had an insidious way of informing my experience.

I want to tell you about this one episode (for sticklers out there, it’s an episode called “A Taste of Armageddon”) in which the crew of the Enterprise arrives on a planet where two countries have been fighting a lengthy war. The weird thing is that the crew doesn’t encounter a devastated and war-torn planet. You see, the warring groups had gone and made their war virtual. They’d set it up so that each attack and counterattack occurred via computer game. When each side lost in the game, they’d send a group of their citizens to die (for real) in a sort of sci-fi body-pulverizing gas chamber. There you go. No fuss, no muss, no mess.

Well, Captain Kirk is so upset by this he takes it upon himself to destroy this virtual war system, even though the two countries believe it’s made their war more humane. Sure, they haven’t had true peace or diplomacy for generations, but they believe they’ve been managing pretty well. But Kirk rails that this is exactly the problem: Because there’s no real physical aspect of their war, they’ll fight it forever. From Kirk’s point of view, if you decide to be enemies, you have to deal with the real-world consequences – the death and loss and hurt that war actually causes. The key takeaway of the episode: It’s irresponsible to sanitize war.

In the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself thinking about this Star Trek episode. Why? Well, just listen to the TV and the radio, read our newspapers. How do we talk about war?

You know how it sounds. The language we use in the United States to talk about war uses a lot of technical and political terminology, words and phrases that didn’t really exist before WWII – things like “collateral damage”, “theater”, “actionable intelligence”, “non-state actors”, “unmanned drones”. Strange phrases that seem to have only vague meanings, and tend to just wash over those of us who go about our increasingly busy lives of school, work, family, community, and place of worship. Add to that the fact that we never see an actual war zone on the TV news (as people did during Vietnam), never see the bodies, the blood, the crumpled buildings, the coffins, the shell-shocked soldiers and civilians. It’s hard for people to get a real understanding of the consequences of war if they never have to come face to face with them. For better or for worse, human beings learn best by experiencing things.

I wonder sometimes if these sanitized phrases have come into existence – not just because of the media or political forces – but because it’s simply not that easy to talk about war (not even for soldiers) if you really confront it. Because confronting it involves looking at death. Not person-by-person death, say from disease, or auto accident, or old age. But mass death because of metal tearing apart flesh and buildings coming violently to pieces. It’s beyond disturbing and if you think about it too hard, if you put yourself there inside your mind, if you really use your imagination about what war is, you can quickly get overwhelmed with a whole host of unpleasant feelings.

If we, in our ostensible democracy, are going to make decisions together about stuff like war, it’s awfully hard to do what’s right for all of us if we don’t get a little more real in assessing the consequences. After all, they don’t go away just because we changed the names of some ugly things to make them sound not so bad and made sure some upsetting pictures don’t get shown in nice folks’ living rooms. You can blame the media or the politicians for our sanitized wars, but we also have ourselves to confront.

Getting back to the episode, I think what Kirk did was call out the cowardice involved in waging war while running from a reckoning with its brutality.

How do you talk about war? With whom? What do you think about how war is portrayed in the media? Does it matter?

Preconditions for third party politics

This is my first blog posting, though I realize now that I’ve been posting blogs inside my head since before there was an Internet, let alone a Web 2.0. So here I am, adding my disembodied voice to the multitudes here in cyberspace. My intention: to share some thoughts and ideas about politics, culture, consciousness and whatever comes to mind. I’d like to consider myself passionate, but not strident. Civil but not a pushover. And deeply aware of not having a monopoly on good ideas, the truth or any other such hifalutin’ grandiosity.

I’d sure like to consider myself these things, but my behavior during the course of this experiment will go a ways longer toward showing how accurate any of these “considerations” really are. That’s the reality we all live in – that slippage between who we’d like to be and where we’re really at. The better we acknowledge the slippage, the better chance we have of actually putting in the work it takes to even come close to embodying our most passionately held significations about ourselves. Anyway, blogs are for talking about stuff, so let's go.

I’d like to talk about third-party politics in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. Specifically, I want to address the issue of third-party candidates (It should be noted here that I do not mean presidential candidates, as third parties have not even come close at this point in time to gaining enough mass interest to make their presidential candidates part of widespread political discourse), their supporters and the relative viability of political platforms that lay outside our age-old two-party discourse.

To get to this exploration within some kind of context, we could easily get into a whole discussion about the history of third parties, particularly the farmers/peoples’ movement that erupted at the end of the 19th century and its impact on citizen consciousness and government policy, but what I’d like to do is start with a bit about the presidential election in 2000. To anyone who’s been inclined to pay attention to the general mood/outlook of the electorate since Watergate (and this can be a difficult thing to get a handle on, since the country is so large and diverse an we live our lives within limited circles), it’s been pretty evident that people have been feeling a level of dissatisfaction with both parties that makes it possible for third parties to have an impact on our day-to-day politics. This was apparent even in 1992, when Ross Perot made a huge dent (in a one-off fashion) as an insurgent candidate. Had he not been present to embody voter dissatisfaction, Clinton may very well not have won the election.

The 2000 election represented a major opportunity for a third party to gain more widespread acceptance of its ideas. There were several things happening at once at that time:

• A significant amount of people were severely disappointed by the Clinton admin, blow jobs notwithstanding – no systemic problems the country faces were honestly addressed during his tenure, especially for working people
• Tabloid-style 24-hr news cycles trivialized or ignored serious issues, leading many voters to seek info outside of official channels via the rapidly developing Internet (Indymedia for one)
• The shutdown of WTO talks in Seattle 1999 as a result of street actions taken by grassroots groups and individual citizens helped bring back the belief that citizens could have real influence on the national and international stage
• Al Gore ran a tepid, advisor-influenced campaign that failed to inspire the people. He underperformed against an easy mark in GWB.
• The overwhelming influence of money in politics became so impossible to ignore that the actual differences between the two parties seemed less apparent to many voters/citizens
• Ralph Nader, although he didn’t receive all that many votes, electrified disaffected audiences in huge rallies around the country and garnered a certain amount of attention for the Green Party, which actually had in many respects a persuasive, thought-provoking platform in need of greater development and attention. This was, I think, a significant achievement.

Despite the debacle of the 2000 election decision - and I would love a lawyer to weigh in here and explain to me whether or not the Supreme Court actually has the legal right to overrule the decision of a state Supreme Court – the energy of the Nader campaign opened the door for the Green Party to make a huge leap in acceptance and interest (over time) by a wide variety of citizens. Unfortunately, the subsequent moves by the Green Party showed that they either didn’t see, weren’t able or didn’t know how to capitalize on their opportunity.
I have a real interest in seeing the growth of a third party within a larger peoples’ movement in this country. And it strikes me that, as the debate rages over whether or not Barack Obama will be a true change agent (on which I won’t elaborate, as journalists, scholars and bloggers have been covering this territory plenty starting before the election), a third party with some kind of juice among the electorate, not to mention actual representation in at the very least state and town government, would be instrumental in enlarging mainstream policy debate and pushing an Obama administration (and possibly more importantly, members of Congress) towards more systemic solutions for what ails this country, this people, this continent and this planet. Just imagine if the Green Party had really enacted a strategy to build the party, its ideas and its constituency from the ground up over the past 8 years and what that collective power would bring to bear RIGHT NOW both politically and culturally. Hmmm…..

Now, in my next post I’m going to try and get a discussion going about how a third party could make a good start on building itself up and also get into some observations about the 60s and how we can learn from that massive period of change in relation to the building of cultural/political movements.

Thanks so much for listening, if you’re out there.

Best,
Rufus Xevious