I'm trying something new here, which is to respond to news and opinions from various publications/blogs in a focused manner. Kinda like commentary. Don't know if I can sustain this on the regular, but that wont stop me from experimenting.
Todd Gitlin is currently a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and is also famous for being a founder and president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the seminal "New Left" organizations of the 1960's.
Last Sunday he wrote an op-ed for the LA Times called "Nader's Dead End" in which he argues that the willingness of the Netroots to play inside the Democratic Party and the willingness of Democratic Party gatekeepers to accomodate them has made leftist minor party electoral challenges to the Democrats largely irrelevant. He uses the specific example of Ralph Nader's recent (and possible future) runs for president on a Green Party ticket to make this point, setting up the pro-Nader arguement thusly,
"As Nader's advocates do not weary of pointing out, American third parties have often been the vehicles in which those excluded from the two-party system (such as the abolitionist Republicans of the mid-19th century and the Socialists of the early 20th) hitched a ride. The idea is that when the major parties duck the urgent and transforming issues of their time, outsiders will fuse their passion and ideals into a battering ram. They are likely to lose in the end, but they will be influential.
There's some truth to that argument, and especially to the idea that their self-sacrifice is both inevitable and, at times, somewhat effective. A rhythm of outsider assault followed by accommodation runs through American history. The moral declaimers aim to upend the table but eventually find seats there -- if not for themselves then for their ideas, as espoused by their better-behaved, more accommodating cousins. The Socialists and Progressives, for example, were rarely elected, but their ideas were critical to the New Deal. And many of Alabama Gov. George Wallace's anti-federal attitudes found their way into Ronald Reagan's programs."
But then Gitlin makes his main point: The way leftist interact with the Democrats has changed and in a way that makes minor parties irrelevant and pointless. Dead-enders, you might say.
"What Nader refuses to recognize, however -- indeed, what he is intensely committed to not recognizing -- is that political reform movements today are not what they were. The world has changed. The energy and moral vigor of outsiders has now taken up residence inside the Democratic Party. There, it is a force -- a recruiting channel, a source of funds, a well of campaigners, a lobby, a debate center. ...Now, the fervent activists of the so-called netroots have taken a page from the conservative playbook. They have stormed into the Democratic Party and become one of its indispensable segments. First visible in the MoveOn.org anti-impeachment effort of 1998, then in the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean, and most recently in the decidedly more successful Democratic mobilization of 2006, the netroots number in the millions, united, organized and empowered by the power of the Internet. Their numbers are compounded by their fervor -- they are, in the main, activists.
...The netroots want their movement to function within the party -- a machine committed to winning and governing. And this is why Nader no longer matters. In the post-Bush setting, Nader's Greens are dead-enders. MoveOn.org counts 3.25 million members, a larger number than the Nader voters of 2000."
Okay. I totally agree that Nader would be stupid and egotistical to run in 2008. In fact, I think that about any of the minor parties because there is absolutely positively no way on Earth, Heaven, or Hell that they stand a hope of winning. All they do is siphon votes away from people already running, setting up the possiblity that in voting for who you really want, you are likely to toss the election to the person you would most dread to see elected.
But there's really much more here that Gitlin is (intentionally?) leaving out. First, as the good folks over at
The Democratic Strategist note, 58% of respondents in a July 2007 poll, when asked, "...Do the Republican and Democratic parties do an adequate job of representing the American people, or do they do such a poor job that a third major party is needed?", agreed that a third major party is needed.
Either these folks haven't been paying attention to the leftist takeover of the Democratic Party or, more likely, they are skeptical of the ability of either major party to adequately represent them without selling out their values, regardless of how much the vim and vigor of a new populist movement has been injected into one of the two majors.
From a progressive perpective the problem can be boiled down to toxic corporate influence in the Democractic Party's decision-making and it's pursuit of legislation at all levels of government. Gitlin opines that,
"To vote for Nader now means to agree with him that there's no real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats -- a proposition as absurd as attributing 9/11 to Saddam Hussein."
And I agree with him, but that doesn't mean that I trust the Democratic Party to resist the tempation to play to corporate power in return for perks like junkets to tropical locales or the legalized bribery of campaign donations. Voting for a minor party isn't necessarily about being stupid and brain dead, though that's what Gitlin would like you conclude, it's about things like integrity, ethics, and values, ostensibly those things which, at their fundamental core, politics in a democracy are supposed to be all about.
But in Gitlin's world, minor parties aren't an option; Democrats are progressives' "natural" party. However, given the current way elections are run in the US, this analysis actually makes a fair amount of sense. But it is disingenuous because it doesn't address the strucutral advantages built into the system for the two major parties. (
Ballot Access News run by Richard Winger is the best source for news on the challenges facing getting on the ballot for minor parties and there's this
primer from Wikipedia.)
The Democrats are the natual party for progressives because they are a perpetual party (thanks to structural advantages), just like the GOP, and at this stage in their existence they are the center-left (this was not always true; in the post-Civil War period they spent a long time fighting the integration of African-Americans and immigrants into America's political life).
If Gitlin were truly concerned with progressive politics rather than whether or not the Democrats are going to win contested elections, then he would do two things (1) address the problem of built-in advantages for the Democrats and Republicans in almost every state and at the Federal level and (2) address the problem of accountabillity in which people we send to City Hall, the Statehouse, or Congress inevitably end up doing the bidding of, well, the highest bidder, rather than that of their constituents.
Remember those 58% who want another party to vote for? Well, Dan Cantor, the Executive Director of the
Working Families Party, recently spent a week at TPM Media's
Table for One making arguements for a specifc voting reform that progressives can use to do two things (1) build a strong minor party and (2) hold Democrats accountable to their constituents, not their corporate contributors. You can find the five essays and comments
here,
here,
here,
here and
here.
What Gitlin is really concerned about here is a national minor party challenge to the eventual Democratic Presidential nominee and he's launching a pre-emptive strike against Nader to try to scuttle one before it gets going. He's using the example of the netroots' recent successes (which are conveniently difficult to quantify) as a front to
camouflage this attack. (See? It's a big tent and progressives can make a difference here!) And let me be clear that I'm not discounting the Dems. With the rules we have, they are still the best electoral hope for progressives. But long-term progressive electoral hopes are not the same thing as long-term Democratic Party interests. Progressives want to use the electoral process to win public policies that matter to us (health care reform, raising the minimum wage, education reform, affordable housing, green energy, action on climate changes, extension of civil rights to marginalized communities and people, etc. etc. etc.). Democratic loyalists want their party to win every election.
Not. The. Same.
Todd Gitlin's essay shows him to be a Democratic Party loyalist first and a liberal second. I'm a progressive first, a Democratic voter occasionally, and a liberal never. I may agree with his conclusion (please, Ralph, don't do it), but I sure don't agree with why he's drawing it or how he got there.
Kick ass and shill for your Party.
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