Anybody Want a Stuffed Unity Jackass? Anybody?
By LisaB on August 30, 2008 at 2:00 PM in Current Affairs
This election cycle has been an eye opener. Many of us long-time Democrats are turning away from the party, some vowing to vote for McCain, for a third party candidate, or not at all.
Why? What is at the bottom of this? No matter how much we like Hillary, we would have accepted her defeat – had the process been democratic.
I think many readers here at NQ instinctively realize that the Democratic party no longer exists in the way we understood it. Some saw this already; but for many of us, it only became clear when we watched the perversion of the primary process this year. Hillary was a great candidate, but she also became a lens through which we finally saw what the Democratic party was doing. And how it operates.
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A conversation on Bill Moyer’s Journal between Moyers and author Andrew Bachevich, makes a very interesting point about both the Republican and Democratic parties. (You can also download the interview in video or audio free from iTunes, and it’s worth the time.)
Emphasis – mine.
ANDREW BACEVICH: One of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans. And the same thing, of course, applies to the other party. It’s not true. I happen to define myself as a conservative.
Well, what do conservatives say they stand for? Well, conservatives say they stand for balanced budgets. Small government. The so called traditional values.
Well, when you look back over the past 30 or so years, since the rise of Ronald Reagan, which we, in many respects, has been a conservative era in American politics, well, did we get small government?
Do we get balanced budgets? Do we get serious as opposed to simply rhetorical attention to traditional social values? The answer’s no. Because all of that really has simply been part of a package of tactics that Republicans have employed to get elected and to – and then to stay in office.
BILL MOYERS: And, yet, you say that the prime example of political dysfunction today is the Democratic Party in relation to Iraq.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I may be a conservative, but I can assure you that, in November of 2006, I voted for every Democrat I could possibly come close to. And I did because the Democratic Party, speaking with one voice, at that time, said that, “Elect us. Give us power in the Congress, and we will end the Iraq War.”
And the American people, at that point, adamantly tired of this war, gave power to the Democrats in Congress. And they absolutely, totally, completely failed to follow through on their commitment. Now, there was a lot of posturing. But, really, the record of the Democratic Congress over the past two years has been – one in which, substantively, all they have done is to appropriate the additional money that enables President Bush to continue that war.
BILL MOYERS: And you say the promises of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi prove to be empty. Reid and Pelosi’s commitment to forcing a change in policy took a backseat to their concern to protect the Democratic majority.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Could anybody disagree with that?
The idea that struck me was the part about “one of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans.”
The parties sell themselves to voters on the basis of those “core convictions.” We pick the values we like and join up. But believing in a political party’s “core convictions” is a sucker bet.
Many of us here at NQ have watched Obama as an individual and the Democratic party as a whole not represent the “core values” of the party – in issues of fairness, respect for others, transparency, for example. Collectively and individually, we’ve witnessed race-baiting, misogyny, misapplication of rulz, and manufactured delegate counts that bear no resemblance to any democratic process. A candidate emerging from such a process cannot then turn around and represent those “core values” with any credibility.
The Democratic party has no values other than staying in power. Equal rights for women became unequal pay in the Obama campaign and an organized effort to get a strong female candidate to leave the race early. Support for the LGBT community morphed into Obama not having a picture taken with the mayor of San Francisco and the effort to remove a gay state legislator in Alabama. Ending the war turned into talking mean, funding it anyway and a candidate who can’t be bothered to visit troops. Holding the Bush administration to account turned into taking impeachment off the table and holding hearings, instead, on baseball. Post-racial politics became a 20+ year association with the likes of Rev. “God-damn-America” Wright and Father “There was a whole lot of white people crying” Pfleger. Protecting America to this group includes a long friendship with an unrepentant domestic terrorist, support from a shadowy former Iraqi minister with lots of money and the suggestion of a “domestic security force.” Respect for all people became calling people racist for not supporting Obama and destroying the reputation of a popular Democratic former President.
Who are these people? What do they believe in? You know, I don’t care. They won’t tell me the truth anyway, and I don’t trust them. Any moral authority the party enjoyed as a result of its “core values” is long gone. This is not the Democratic party I used to know, and I’ve outgrown them.
by Ronald Scott
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