The Democrats' Nosedive
Got to hand it to Karl Rove and whoever the other responsible agents are. This has been one successful Republican campaign drive, and as it came down to the wire, even a last-minute effort by the North Koreans couldn't pull it out for the Democrats. If you believed the weekend pollsters (why?) it was all too close to call. By all rights, on election morn the Democrats should have been exulting in the prospect of an increased majority in the Senate and a House Regain'd for the heirs to FDR by at least a four-vote margin. Instead of which they were biting their nails about the Senate and giving up the House for lost.
First, the silver linings. Maybe at last we can retire that awful phrase that has been flapping its way through the newspaper headlines since the Clinton campaign of 1992-"It's the economy, stupid." No, it's not the economy, stupid. If it were the economy, stupid, then House Speaker Hastert would be yielding his chair to Dick Gephardt and George Bush would be deluged in rotten cabbages every time he appeared in public.
The economy, stupid? Hmmm, let's take a look. The markets? Down, down, down. During Bush's term the Dow has gone from 10578.20 on Jan. 22, 2001, to 8397.03 on Oct. 31, 2002, a decline of 20.6 percent. Unemployment? Up, up, up, as the jobless rate has jumped in Bush's term from 4.2 percent to 5.7. Basic economic indicators? Teetering between indifferent and terrifying. Gross domestic product averaged a 3.1 percent annual growth rate in the first seven quarters under Clinton, compared with 1.4 percent in the same period under Bush. In the second quarter alone pension wealth fell by over $469 billion, or 5.3 percent. Housing prices cushioned the blow a little but still left a net decline in wealth of 3.4 percent in one quarter, with its successor shaping up to be just as bad.
It looks as though the boom in housing prices has topped out. Oil prices are up 40 percent since the start of the year. The telecommunications industry is on its ass, and it will take a very long time to crawl back from overcapacity in the 90 percent range. The airline industry is on life support. The official rate of profit on capital stock in the nonfinancial corporate sector as a whole is now at its lowest level of the postwar period (except for 1980 and 1982).
A recession? Most assuredly. Prospects of long-term economic doldrums? Near certain. You want me to go on? Okay.
So not only do we have an economy slowly flapping its way to the bottom of the fish tank, we have two men in the White House who, a scant two months ago, were hiding out in some subterranean war room in the Appalachians, hoping to dodge subpoenas on account of their shady business conduct, even as all their buddies at Enron were striking to make deals with the Justice Dept. It's true. Bush's Harken antics make the Clintons' involvement in Whitewater look like the pitiful little failed real estate deal that it was. Here we have a rich mine of corruption and insider dealing featuring such highlights as the Harvard endowment bailing out Junior at the behest of a Texas oilman. We have officials in the administration of former President Bush tearing up SEC rules to save the ass of the President's son. We have?well you know the story.
And Cheney? As bad if not worse, in terms of self-enrichment at the expense of the public investors in Halliburton.
This was the economic and scandal-stained backdrop to the midterm campaign, only two short months ago. So what happened? The public said, "Sure, the economy doesn't look good, but we're not stupid. The economy's sagging, but you can't blame the whole of the 90s on George Bush. Gives us till 2004, and we'll tell you what we think then."
The problem is, the Democrats have no credibility, because they haven't earned any. No one believes they have an economic strategy, and as for the rubble of the bubble, what were the Democrats doing as that same 90s bubble swelled? Led by Sen. Joe Lieberman, they destroyed the regulatory apparatus put in place in the 30s, after the 20s bubble, and burst into ecstatic applause every time the federal watchdog of the markets, Alan Greenspan, ambled along to the Hill to tell everyone what a fine job he'd been doing.
On top of all that we've had the war-whoop against Saddam Hussein. It's not been popular. A majority of Americans appear to believe that it's not a particularly good idea to trash Iraq, even though it would be fun to see Saddam Hussein swinging from a lamp post. Aside from Tony Blair, the world is against it. Closer to home, the Joint Chiefs are against it. All the same, the whooping worked. It changed the subject from the economy and Harken and Halliburton. It got the Democrats rearing and plunging till Gephardt panicked and rushed to the White House to enlist in the great Crusade.
The Democrats are a party of ghosts and revenants, not the most convincing battalion to put against the party of property and oil, of fundamentalist Christians now in coalition with warmongering neocons ranging from Wolfowitz to Hitchens. The most articulate voice against the war fever has been an octogenarian, Bobby Byrd, and the man assigned the task of carrying the torch of liberalism in Minnesota is Fritz Mondale.
Whose Left Is It Anyway?
"I have always been far closer to the idiomatic, colloquial left than to the more elite varieties...I have never gotten on that well with the Hitchens' former pals in the elite left because I never could find the time to straighten out my paradigm. It turns out it wasn't all that important anyway, because the people who made the difference were not the famous talkers but the little known doers, ordinary people, who in Conrad's phrase, for one brief moment did something out of the ordinary.
"They were people who had not studied Marx and Hegel and couldn't tell a Trotskyite from a troll. But they knew, in Pogo's words, when to 'stand on the piano and demand outrage action.' These are the people of whom Carl Sandburg wrote: 'I am the people-the mob-the crowd-the mass. Do you know that all the great work of this world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns... Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then-I forget. When I, the people, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool-then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: 'The People' with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far off smile of derision. The mob-The crowd-The mass-will arrive then.'
"Consistently, the east coast shuttle left from which Hitchens has departed has been indifferent about, ignorant of, or even in opposition to the issues of the idiomatic, colloquial left. The people who are changing the way other people think about things are found scattered around the nation...
"Hitchens and his ilk will continue to have their little debates, all carefully framed in a manner that excludes most of the people they claim to care about and most of the people who actually produce change. It worked at university and it works now. But it has little to do with either America or the left as it really is."
I think Smith's contrasting of the doctrinaire sterility of the failed old "left" with a creative, nondoctrinaire-spirited "real left" leaves a lot of the story untold. In my years of going around the country doing anti-intervention talks, fundraisers, book tours, etc., etc., the first thing to notice is that there's a truly vast left that is invisible to almost all East Coast commentators. Church people, labor people, public defenders, National Lawyers Guild, faculty people, farm people, radical greens, World Federalist types, red-diapered middle-agers in almost every town. (And in every town the left will tell you with gloomy pride how conservative their town is.) And in meeting after meeting you can look at the audience and see older folk who were labor commies in the 50s, and who have certainly had their share of doctrinal struggle, and who have read Marx etc., and 60s-vintage people who might have fought their way through the Revolutionary Communist Party and out the other side, and then younger people still who might have come aboard in WTO wars and who read CounterPunch.
It's a rich geology that varies from place to place. For example, in one town in Wisconsin the two most bustling left activists and organizers were both kind of ex-Revolutionary Communist Party. In the Deep South I've met radical lawyers who are still the organizing backbone of their communities, who came down as Maoists in the 70s. In for the long haul and lively and not deserving of Smith's misprision. A lot of good organizers are still in left groups that mainstreamers might instinctively deride as fossilized Trots or Maoists or whatever. Red-baiters like The Nation's David Corn may write long articles about how the Workers World Party stage-managed the DC demo, but so what? Corn's ideological forebears were red-baiting the commies for being behind the civil-rights movement, which often they were. Sectarians know how to organize. Someone has to do it.
Sam was right in one thing: many of these, especially the younger lot, couldn't give a toss about Hitchens. I was reminded of this when I gave a speech in SF a few months ago and derided Hitchens' positions, and a lively young woman in a left group asked me impatiently what was all the talk about this "Clifford Hutchins."
As for Hitchens, he parted ways with anything decently radical long, long ago, as I occasionally point out. My hope, of course, is that the left should understand that common cause can be made with many in the populist right who take the Bill of Rights seriously. Ashcroft is doing his best to help.