Shortly after the Goldwater election debacle many, many years ago when most of the media proclaimed the imminent death of the Republican Party, I went around to individual progressives and progressive groups and urged them to consider joining the Republican Party. I argued at the time that the reports of the Republican Party's demise were greatly exaggerated and that all the election defeat did was to cause some of the more liberal members of that Party to abandon it, making it even more conservative. I argued that if progressives were able to gain control of the party during its nadir, the establishment of a true Progressive Party was possible. The Democratic Party then as now, I believed, was little more than a coalition of rightist and leftist elements that appeared comfortable belonging to the same political Party while holding diametrically opposed political positions on many issues.
I was laughed at. They were probably right at the time. I was young and believed whole-heartedly in the power of generalization and simple solutions. Now older and more skeptical I see politics and ideology more as long-term conflict.
Still at that time it was argued to me that the Republican Party could never again rise from the ashes of their defeat; that conservatism will always remain the political philosophy of a minority.
I responded with the question: "What happens if they run a conservative in a velvet glove, someone popular say like Ronald Reagan?" Ronnie was making noises at that time about entering electoral politics.
I was laughed at again. They responded that they did not for a moment believe that second rate actor could ever get elected. I had to agree with them. Even I believed at that time Ronnie probably could not get elected to a school board in Orange County.
Now almost fifty years later we are faced with a Republican Party again in crisis having suffered a disastrous loss at the polls in the last presidential election. We are told that not only is that party unravelling but the demographics look bright for future prospects of the Democrats and the progressive agenda. All that remains of the Republican Party is some aging white racists in the South, temporary control of the House of Representatives, a few right wing billionaires, Fox news and talk radio. History is on our side.
Alas, I heard something like that same smugness 50 years ago. Yet only a decade later we witnessed the wholesale defection of two of the Democratic Party's "bedrock constituents" to the Republicans; the working men and women who became at first Reagan Democrats and then rock solid Republicans, and the racist arm of the southern Democratic political establishment converted en-mass to the Republican Party in response to the civil rights movement.
Those defections have been followed by over forty years of assault on the progressive agenda developed over the previous 50.
The concept that ten to twenty years from now, Latinos, blacks, women, gays and whomever else makes up the current progressive bedrock, once their immediate social interests are obtained, will not become the conservatives and reactionaries of the future is as unrealistic now as it was forty years ago. The young will become old and their urge for change and economic and social justice mitigated. The rural poor will remain as they always have shackled to a political-economic system they do not understand and enslaved by the economic ascendency who stoke their fear of the effects of social change on their lives.
After all, what is the Democratic Party of today or more appropriately what has it become? On social issues it has, in fits and starts (and more often than not had to be dragged kicking and screaming), supported a host of social legislative initiatives perhaps only because the Republican Party has run on opposition to those social issues thereby leaving their proponents nowhere else to turn.
On economic issues, the Democratic Party has, in my opinion, become more conservative than the 1956 Republican Party. Can anyone believe that the Democratic Party will in the future do substantially more in terms of economic justice than it has during these past 40 years? During that time the most it has accomplished is to modify the worst excesses of the economic system while doing little to halt its continued drift towards a society resembling that which existed before the Great Depression, a society made up of the very rich, growing numbers of poor and a desperate declining middle class.
There is a reason why the Democratic Party itself so often rejects the economic initiatives of progressives like Bernie Sanders. That reason is, in my opinion, because on economic issues many Democratic office holders see the job of the Democratic Party is to put a kinder and gentler face on the ravenous urges of the more openly conservative party.
Can anyone believe that corporate financial interests, once they realize they are wasting their resources on the Republican Party, will not redirect those resources to subvert the Democrats on economic issues while accommodating some minor social advancement? That is precisely what is happening now with "bipartisan" support for a few issues like watered down immigration reform. They seem calculated to generate some vague sense of hope while Wall Street and the extractive industries continue to bank their ever increasing profits. Cuts to social welfare remain hostage for whatever deal is ultimately agreed to.
Yes I know, but for the massive obstruction of Republicans, the Democratic Party perhaps could do better. But did it really when it had power? Well, maybe yes. We did get a Republican proposed health care program.
As Chomsky has elegantly put it:
"In the past, the United States has sometimes, kind of sardonically, been described as a one-party state: the business party with two factions called Democrats and Republicans. That’s no longer true. It’s still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction. The faction is moderate Republicans, who are now called Democrats. There are virtually no moderate Republicans in what’s called the Republican Party and virtually no liberal Democrats in what’s called the Democratic [sic] Party. It’s basically a party of what would be moderate Republicans and similarly, Richard Nixon would be way at the left of the political spectrum today. Eisenhower would be in outer space."
So should progressives join the Republican Party en-mass to take it over and remake it into the nations Progressive Party while the Democrats settle into the Party of complacency to which it has been headed for many years now? Although it is an attractive idea, it probably is infeasible and most likely ill advised.
Perhaps it is possible to consider an alternative in some local, State and congressional races where the Republicans have gerrymandered themselves to a significant advantage. What would happen in those districts if the left re-registered as Republicans and ran their own candidates in the primaries? Moderate Republicans would have an option. The Republican Party would have to spend money to turn back the challenge. If the Progressive wins, Republicans will vote, as they usually do for anyone on the Republican ticket. Democrats in the district can vote for someone who shares their values and can win.
Perhaps this also is unrealistic. I believe however that even if the Republican Party shrivels up and dies, the Democratic Party inevitably will become the Republican Party of the future and progressives may once again find they have nowhere to go.
The tragic truth, however, is that the young as they age become conservatives, ethnic groups as they move into the middle class do so also. The gay community is now free to vote Republican without shame while the black community is prevented from voting even if they are Republican. And worse of all, the seven and eight year olds of our nation seem to be being indoctrinated in many of our schools to hate other Americans as well as to despise science*.
We progressives can slap ourselves on the back all we want, but as usual we have failed to grasp the grim reality of politics which is that it is an eternal war of attrition and the opposition is better equipped and trained than we are. All too often all we have is our optimism to sustain us while the barricades are overrun as we wait for popular support that never arrives.
*Note: Go into many of the suburban and rural public and private schools and even the urban schools of the South and Mid-west and speak with the third to sixth graders there. You will be shocked how many have been indoctrinated with racist and anti-science biases (irrespective of ethnic backgrounds). Read paragraph three in Today's Quote below and see if you agree that there exists a similar phenomena today to that which Grant experienced 150 years ago. Some things do not change. Roosevelt's assessment of the price of liberty is as accurate now as it was when he said it.
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Today's Quote:
"Demagogues who were too old to enter the army if there should be a war, others who entertained so high an opinion of their own ability that they did not believe they could be spared from the direction of the affairs of state in such an event, declaimed vehemently and unceasingly against the North; against its aggressions upon the South; its interference with Southern rights, etc., etc.
"They denounced the Northerners as cowards, poltroons, negro-worshippers; claimed that one Southern man was equal to five Northern men in battle; that if the South would stand up for its rights the North would back down. Mr. Jefferson Davis said in a speech, delivered at La Grange, Mississippi, before the secession of that State, that he would agree to drink all the blood spilled south of Mason and Dixon's line if there should be a war.
"The young men who would have the fighting to do in case of war, believed all these statements, both in regard to the aggressiveness of the North and its cowardice. They, too, cried out for a separation from such people. The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation. Under the old regime they were looked down upon by those who controlled all the affairs in the interest of slave-owners, as poor white trash who were allowed the ballot so long as they cast it according to direction."
--U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (via Ta-Nehis Coates)