1972 vs. 2008, "Anti-War" and the Elections

Last Sunday's NY Times included a particularly telling article on the Democratic Party and anti-war candidates. In it, George McGovern argues that the time is ripe for an anti-war presidential candidate in 2008. Rather than viewing the '72 experience as a debacle for anti-war politics, Democrats should take advantage of the sea-change in how the public views the parties and the war in Iraq. McGovern claims, "I would love to be running if I were 25 years younger. I think I would win." At present, it has become increasingly common to draw parallels between the post-9/11 and Vietnam eras, with even George Bush admitting similarities with the Tet offensive. But, in our rush to call Iraq a quagmire and to see Rumsfeld as the second-coming of McNamara, we've increasingly lost sight of precisely what sets these two periods apart.

The conventional wisdom is that McGovern lost because of his anti-war stance. Yet, by November '72 virtually everyone was anti-war. In fact, Nixon's "peace with honor" would not be all that different from many views espoused by Bush's critics. At election time, the countdown had already begun to American withdrawal, and by the middle of the following year the war had ended for all intents and purposes.

At stake in the McGovern candidacy was not simply the war, but the future of a set of commitments that linked the civil rights project to anti-war activism. In the late 60s and early 70s, a sustained effort was made to merge two distinct social movements and to present a unified vision of domestic and foreign policy that represented labor, churches, civil rights groups, and students. Martin Luther King and others situated their critique of war directly in the social problems at home--issues of race and class equality. In other words, opposition to the war was part of a larger, structural opposition to the policies and power of political elites.

McGovern was not part of these movements. His campaign stances, including a commitment to full employment and an end to the war, were responses to the social pressures exerted by mobilized groups. Thus, his defeat in '72 was the electoral defeat of these forces. The Democratic Party which had long built its strength on working and middle class support among white southerners, was unable to successfully include new social groups and activists while retaining its base. As Johnson famously remarked to his aide, Bill Moyers, after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time." Thus, a vote for Nixon wasn't about the war as a stand-alone issue, it was about how one's view of the war related to these social movements and their future role in American politics.

In a sense, McGovern may well be right that an anti-war candidate can win in 2008. But that position wouldn't have nearly the resonances that it did during the Vietnam era. This is because no similar social movements exist to link domestic and foreign policy, and to compel politicians (today's McGoverns) to respond directly to their goals and aspirations.

One final point. 1972 and 2008 are alike and dissimilar in a further respect. No matter who wins, the next president will be trying desperately to exit Iraq, just as Nixon was in 1972. If all we want is an end to the war, the election might make no appreciable difference. But, if opposition is based on a more substantive rejection of not just the Iraq war, but the war on terror and the domestic policies that maintain it, real cleavages can form. When McGovern ran, those cleavages were obvious and compelling. Today, they've been submerged under a political consensus that refuses to question the basic assumptions of the post-9/11 climate. In other words, 1972 might not be a winning electoral strategy for Democrats, but it is certainly a critical image of the political organizing and social bases necessary for ordinary citizens to shape elite discourse and policy.

The Trouble With the Corruption Card

Perhaps even more than the Iraq debacle, a series of corruption scandals have made Republicans vulnerable this election season. The Mark Foley affair was only the most recent in a series of scandals stretching from former House Majority Leader Tom Delay to Congressman Randy 'the Duke' Cunningham to Vice-Presidential aide Scooter Libby. While the Democrats have not been immune - Bob Menendez's campaign for the Senate in New Jersey is lagging largely due to corruption allegations - it is the Republicans who have taken the full brunt of the issue. It is no wonder that they lean ever harder on the national security issue - fear is all they have left. Democrats, meanwhile, have attempted to take advantage of this Republican weakness - now making the 'end [of] the Republican culture of corruption' their number one issue on their agenda.

But Democrats are confused, or just short-sighted, if they think leveraging scandals for electoral gains will benefit them. Emphasizing corruption does not discredit the Republican Party, it discredits Congress itself, and by extension the political process. As a number of reports have noted, Congressional approval rating is the lowest it has been in decades. At around 25%, it is considerably lower than even Bush's miserable 39%. That is to say Congress itself - the most popular branch - is held in even worse esteem than this do-nothing President. Emphasizing the culture of corruption can only further entrench the public suspicion that no matter how bad the President, Congress is bound to be worse.

It is difficult to see how the Democrats will govern if Congress itself is seen to be the problem. Moreover, historically, a society convinced of the corruption of its representatives is less likely to place its trust in a new set of congressmen, and more likely to look towards a maverick, outside strongman who will 'clean things up.' This cannot work to the favor of the Democrats, nor American democracy.

Why the War On Terror Should Be The Issue

For those who missed Saturday’s teach-in, we reproduce a speech from the final session, originally delivered by Nick Frayn.

In this session I am going to suggest a possible standpoint from which we could oppose the further denigration of democracy.

So, first, I’d like to say, although the session is called ‘Why the War on Terror Should Be the Issue,’ I’m not calling for a single issue politics. When I say I’d like the war on terror to be the issue, I’m not suggesting that we pick a small discreet topic on which we believe we could bring about some kind of legislative change. This is not the marijuana reform party. And indeed, I think one could argue that the growth of these single-issue parties is actually representative of some of the political problems that we’ve been talking about today.

Nor do I want to be especially alarmist about the war on terror. Obviously I think the war on terror is a truly pernicious development—after all I do write for a blog called Against the War on Terror. But I’m not claiming that unless we end war on terror right now, we’ll be living in a fascist regime or that the next AWOT teach-in will have to be held in a secret location. I’m not going to argue that the war on terror has to be the issue because it is an atypical phenomenon.

In fact my argument is the opposite. I want to make opposition to the war on terror a key issue, because I think it is a typical phenomenon—that it is symptomatic of numerous contemporary trends, because I believe that opposition to the war on terror may actually be a way of opposing precisely the degradation of democracy that we have been discussing today.

This is because the war on terror has established a series of orthodoxies that we cannot question. And these orthodoxies have had the effect of stopping us from holding our leaders properly to account. This is the function of the war on terror—to suspend politics in favor of something that would be better described as governance.

How does it do this? These orthodoxies are a series of crutches that weak leaders can lean on as a means of shoring up their legitimacy. As BBC journalist Adam Curtis put it in his documentary ‘Power of Nightmares’ (which we showed in May): “But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to deliver us from nightmares.”

One of these orthodoxies is the war on terror’s illusion of immediate crisis. This is used in two ways. The first is that it justifies a very short–term activism on the part of government. Indeed, to be doing something is considered almost a virtue in itself, without reference to a clear means/ends rationale. Perhaps that activity for activity’s sake becomes most apparent when specific actions are criticized and the response thrown back at the critics is ‘well what are you suggesting; that we do nothing?’

The second and related point is that the crisis counsels us to suspend arguments for longer-term or more aspirational goals. It is an encouragement not to project into what seems like an uncertain future. This is not something that is consciously articulated, or devised by any group; nobody ever argues we can’t have universal health care because we haven’t caught Bin-Laden yet. But it is manifest in the logic of this politics of crisis which, even unarticulated, becomes a limitation placed on our thinking.

A second orthodoxy is the elevation of expert knowledge as a way of limiting political discussion of a given issue. The war on terror provides the ultimate rationale for establishing a monopoly over a given area of knowledge: intelligence. This is symptomatic of a broader technocratic tendency amongst political elites to cordon off certain discussions through the use of expert knowledge—for example in the celebration of economics (just look at the cult of Alan Greenspan). But this reaches new levels when it is not a just a question of expert knowledge but actually of secret knowledge.

So, for instance, the only argument the government makes in support of military commissions is that the government might have to reveal secret information if they held public trials. But government by intelligence cannot be questioned. How can we make a political judgment of an issue when we do not have access to all the information? And in addition to making it harder to question government, it also allows others to abdicate responsibility, a fact demonstrated in the support of Congress for the Iraq war.

I’m not arguing that these type of orthodoxies—these methods of establishing legitimacy for today’s discredited politicians—emerged simply in the 9/11 era. I think we could make an argument that a phenomenon like humanitarian intervention played a similar role for politicians during the 1990s. In both cases, the legitimacy of a politician’s actions comes from outside of his relationship with the electorate; in the case of humanitarian intervention from a higher moral logic; in the case of the war on terror from the immediacy of crisis.

So undermining these orthodoxies, these prohibitions on thinking certain ideas or arguing certain positions is necessary if we are to halt the degradation of democracy. Through a focus on the war on terror, we can use our opposition to pin our leaders down, box them into the corner, and force them to justify their position in a language that we can both speak. Our common language cannot rely on technical expertise and secret language, or higher moral logic that puts their actions beyond our questioning.

Mid-Term Democrats

In anticipation of tomorrow's teach-in, we post another comment, aimed this time specifically at the Democrats and the question 'Are the Democrats an Alternative?' We would like to make two basic arguments against voting for the Democrats: their vigorous avoidance of long-term political thinking, and their condescension to the voter.

On Thursday, Barack Obama spoke at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square, New York. He spoke to one of the most committed, liberal audiences he could have asked for. And the pep talk he gave them was, well, not particularly peppy. "The Democratic Party is not an ideological party, it is a party of common sense," he said. "It is a party that knows how to put aside differences, and get things done."* This is a surprisingly deflating thing to say to a liberal audience entranced by their next great hope. Yet it is no accident. Obama spoke the truth about the Democratic Party: it is purely pragmatic. When people complain the Democrats 'have no vision', they speak as if the Democrats once had one. But that is something of a mistake. The essential feature of the Democrats, throughout the twentieth century, has been that they have been a party that aggressively avoids strong ideological stances, and committed ideological positions. It has, instead, always been one that has acquired its reputation for being 'left-wing' more from being not as conservative as the Republicans, than for a coherent set of ideas that it stands for. Indeed, its hey-day, under FDR, was famously non-ideological; FDR and his New Deal was often criticized for its unplanned, experimental, and pragmatic character.

What makes this relevant to the current debate about the mid-terms and voting is that it sheds light on the 'Anybody but Bush' character of the Democrats' campaign. There is a myth that underwrites this campaign, which goes something like the following: if we throw-out Bush, and bring in the Democrats, that will create breathing room, which we can then use to develop some interesting ideas about politics. Obama's words belie that claim. Anybody But Bush is simply the most recent iteration of a long-standing Democratic strategy in their electoral war of position. They constantly seek that Archimedian point, just far enough from the Republicans to win an election, never too far to sound extreme and unelectable. This time, they may very well succeed in latching onto popular discontent with Bush and the Republicans, but they are not leveraging a short-term opening to bring in a long-term agenda.

Quite the opposite. The Democrats are employing a strategy of short-term politicking to sell out the long-term. This is their political stock-in-trade. After all, what will happen if they are elected? They will not suddenly open their arms to interesting political schemes. Anything that begins to sound too exploratory or radical will instantly be dismissed with that short-termist trump card: "what about the 2008 elections? It's just too unrealistic now." When, then, is long-term thinking appropriate? This is the rub with the Democrats. Trapped in the electoral cycle, they will always have one eye to the election just around the 2 year corner, which constantly short-circuits any attempt to develop an interesting and coherent vision of the future. A vote for the Democrats is a vote to sell-out the long-term in the name of the short-term.

But that is not all. The Democrats are often accused of (or, depending on who you are, heralded as) being the party of intellectuals. Unlike the dogged Republican Party of dirty tricks, Democrats are supposedly the party of ideas. But this is a gross mischaracterization. It is true that many educated people vote Democrat, and that there are many intellectuals in the Democratic Party. But if you look at the Democratic Party's relationship with its own members, we see that the Democrats are the party of ideas for the few, not the many. They love their policy-experts, big thinkers, and university professors, but they carefully isolate them from their membership as such. They do little or nothing to make their 'whole' party a party of ideas, and ensure that each of their members is a thoughtful and self-reflective participant in the party debate. Rather, they see most of their members as a kind of voting army, to be trotted out once every two or four years to vote into power the various experts who will take care of ruling, thank you very much. The Democratic Party relates to the public as voters but not as citizens. What they want from most people is their vote, and not much else.

The flip-side of this is that the Democrats have a great deal of difficulty answering for their own political failures. They blame diabolical Republican machinations, corrupt voting machines, apathetic voters, unpredictable world events, and anyone else but themselves for their own failures to convince, persuade, inspire and, in short, conduct themselves like a truly democratic party. All the talk of holding the Republicans to account if the Democrats win this election is just another smokescreen for their failure to exercise political backbone during their numerous opportunities over the past five years. They have done, and will do little, to be worthy of a vote in this election. They are not an alternative worth considering.

*Obama's exact wording may have been slightly different, but this is what he said almost to a word.

Grandin on the Dems

Greg Grandin has a great piece over at TomDispatch that echoes much of what we have been saying about the Democrats. Definitely worth a read.

The Difference Between Democracy and Elections

As part of the run-up to our teach-in this Saturday, we have posted this short essay on the difference between participating in elections and doing democratic politics:

Today in America democracy-talk is everywhere; its invocation a recurrent feature of public life from news anchors on television to the addresses of Presidents. Bill Clinton in his Second Inaugural Address described the U.S. as “the world’s greatest democracy,” which stood poised to “lead a whole world of democracies.” Yet, in practice the idea of democratic life has been truncated, reduced to little more than an electoral process.

This electoral democracy offers citizens the opportunity to vote various leaders in and out of office, but what it does not include is the capacity for individuals to maintain practical control over these structures and the outcomes they produce. A democracy that focuses almost exclusively on electoral politics has created a network of experts and strategists, who work to massage and shape the exercise of political voice. The recipient has no sense of what poll projections or horse race strategies amount to, but does develop the sneaking suspicion that politics has little to distinguish it from buying a car or choosing between retirement plans.

Once every two to four years, the citizen is alternately wooed, coaxed, and mystified by forces beyond his or her control. The citizen appears out of the darkness and once the act of consumption is complete retreats to the confines of private life. Few of the consumer categories that map the voting public under electoral democracy describe collective groups with any sense of shared purpose or consciousness. To speak of men between 18 and 49 or cell phone users is to aggregate individuals with little common interest. Last election, various stories repeatedly stated that the rise of cell phone use created “problems for pollsters” and made the election hard to call. Yet, to divide American citizens into the opposing camps of cell-phone-only voters and landline voters is to establish a distinction with no meaningful political relevance. It inevitably promotes the idea of a public that is atomized and disconnected. It calls into question the possibility groups might organize politically around shared interests and social commitments.

More importantly, the emphasis on the process of voting also suggests that politics does not have any substantive content or goal. The limits to democracy right now are not the absence of participation, but the absence of a coherent set of political ideas that can make participation meaningful. Popular control over the institutions of political life is useless if the public has no sense of collective possibility, no vision for the future, or guiding ideals. Ultimately, participation is simply a means—albeit an incredibly important one—to the end of creating a better, more progressive society. Therefore, the solution is not just to call for greater accountability and public involvement. It is to develop, through political debate and collective action, compelling options and ideas that make the act of participation worthwhile.

This is not to attack the apolitical citizen. Clearly, in a world without significant political ideas, there is little reason to do more than the bare minimum. Only if one actually believes that social change is a real possibility would the exercise of our public freedoms be valuable. In a sense, what we now have is a state of affairs in which the political arena cannot even justify itself as a space for social improvement and thus rouse its citizens from general indifference.

The fact that participation is no longer tied to the possibility of social progress has created a second force in American politics: the obsession with doing, acting (what the editors of LiP magazine call “activistism”). This ethic says “do something,” almost regardless of what that “something” is and what are its consequences. Such a passion for doing undercuts the value of ideas, purposes, or projects. It makes suspect the attempt to link action to a vision of the world as it should be, because action exists only in the moment, in the experience of doing. We see this trend in activisms of all kinds: consumer activism, shareholder activism, environmental activism, human rights activism, anti-globalization activism, etc., etc. All of these efforts share a single, basic message, which is to act or to protest in spite of whether you are entirely clear about your ultimate goals or even who shares those goals. It is this compulsion to “do something” regardless of political coherence that today creates such strange political bedfellows.

In our society, the vote, in effect, has become a Faustian bargain between citizen and leader. The citizen is begged to vote, only so he or she can disappear from the political stage afterwards. Just as importantly, it teaches us that politics is simply about the act of doing rather than any practical goals achieved by that act. It tells us that living a political life is just participating, “getting involved,” instead of developing a set of coherent ideas that can form the basis for collective action and social change. Today, American politics is confronted by a decline of meaningful alternatives, and the activist ethic of “Vote or Die!” and “do or die” is no solution to this fundamental shortcoming. In fact, one can view the breathless call to engage as a product of this decline, and an attempt to conceal the emptiness of American politics under the mask of expended energy. This of course does not mean that politics should just be about thinking and discussing, but it does mean that right now the most pressing political need is to reimagine our collective choices. This can only be done if we interrogate the reasons and implications for action, and provide better accounts of what it is we are actually fighting for rather than just protesting against.

The Legitimacy of Crisis: Why We Must Confront the War on Terror

Thus far, campaigns for the mid-term elections have barely touched upon the war on terror. Perhaps we should welcome that. After all, it probably indicates what a hollow shell the WOT has become of late. But like most problems, the WOT will not go away if we simply ignore it. Let us not forget that 18 years after the end of the Reagan administration America is still fighting a war on drugs.

And the WOT is unlikely to remain as inert a political issue as the war on drugs has become. That is for the simple reason that the WOT offers the temptation of a political carte blanche to those who can control it. For when the raison d’etat becomes the elimination of risk, preventing random violence is a political program that carries a significant moral force. And in a political climate without a clear and coherent direction, the war on terror can suggest purpose and authority. It does so because it conjures an enemy that must be dealt with now, with the greatest dispatch and effectiveness. Because terrorism is seen as an exceptional foe, to whom the only response is action, the terrain of the war on terror is one of crisis and immediate action, not reflective thinking and deliberate planning. What this really means is that the impression of effectiveness - ie the application of power - becomes its own standard, because 'meeting the threat' crowds out discussion of whether this threat deserves such attention. In this way, the crisis character of the war on terror manages to produce the image of a self-confident, purposeful leader, lifting himself above the petty squabbles of domestic conflict.

These features of the war on terror has been noted on our blog any number of times. Our leaders, Blair and Bush foremost amongst them, love to suggest they are shouldering a great burden on behalf of society, as if they directly bear the weight of keeping 60mn or 300mn souls safe at night. They might adopt slightly different styles in so doing (Bush the tough-talking everyman who says ‘Bring 'Em On’, Blair, a noble isolated figure tortured by the terrible choices he must face) but the message is the same. They want to claim an unambiguous moral purpose, raising themselves above the status of the compromised, cynical politicians of whom we have all become weary.

This is highly problematic for the normal functioning of democracy. In a healthy democracy, we elect leaders based on the principles and policies by which they intend to govern during the period until the next election. Yet how can we hold our politicians to account, if they keep claiming their actions are driven by a higher, more immediate, rationale about which there can be little debate? By stating that they are above politics, that they need to be free of partisan bickering and deal making, our leaders undermine our democratic control. Permitting only debate over tactics and strategies in this 'crisis', they do not want to permit proper political debate over the ends themselves.

We would not want to give the impression that the war on terror is the only issue through which our politicians are trying to short-change democracy. Today there is a tendency to paint a range of issues with the brush of crisis. Al Gore’s campaign on global warming has something of the same character—Gore’s program encourages the suspension of ordinary political discourse (in particular overcoming partisan disagreement) in the pursuit of a greater goal. And this is not just a post-9/11 phenomenon. During the Clinton administration, international politics proved a constant source of moral legitimacy; from violent interventions in Bosnia or Haiti, to peace negotiations in the Middle East and Ireland.

We do not want our criticism to be taken in the same alarmist and hysterical light with which the war on terror itself is discussed. It's not that our constitution is on its last legs, fascism around the corner, and democracy stamped out with an iron fist. This may have been the relationship between crisis and democracy in the past - war and domestic crisis was a way of consciously undemocratic forces to redirect rising democratic forces away from greater control of government. In our context, however, the problem is that the political ends of the crisis-mongers are unclear—indeed external legitimacy (the immediacy of the crisis) is pursued partly due to a lack of ideas about what those ends might be. Thus, the suspension of certain democratic functions has an oddly muted character—democracy seems to be in decay more than it is being stamped out. The war on terror serves as the most recent crisis by which the inability to develop a positive, forward-looking direction for our society is concealed behind a mask of hysterical activity.

This is why we must confront, not ignore, the war on terror. But not in the way that the Democrats and liberal opponents of the Bush administration have taken it up -- as a technical discussion of how best to fight the war. That, in fact, is only an attempt to seize the moral authority of the war for themselves. What we need is to confront the principles that underlie the war on terror. When they say security we need to ask the bigger question: what are we securing? For as we have argued here repeatedly, there can be no program that makes us absolutely safe; we need to engage in a discussion about what can make us live better lives, not necessarily safer ones. We must pin our politicians down and stop them escaping into the universe of moralized hysteria that allows them to avoid such questions.

Guest Essay: Stanley Aronowitz on Left Political Organization

Today we post the second chapter of Stanley Aronowitz's recently published Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future. Aronowitz will be speaking at our Teach-In: Why Vote? this Saturday. A few selections from his book are pasted below; for the full chapter, click here.

From Left Turn Chapter 2: On Political Organization

"The United States is the only nation in the “advanced” capitalist world without a significant left party, whether labor or socialist/communist. Although these parties have existed since 1828 at the local level when many cities had Workingmen’s Parties; the Socialist Party made important electoral inroads at the turn of the 20th century; and the Communists were key organizers of the mass industrial union and other social movements in the 1930s and 1930s, in general Americans have been tied to the two-party system. The question is whether the absence of a left political formation of significant influence and constituency is a function of “American Exceptionalism” as was first argued by the German sociologist, Werner Sombart whose book Why There is No Socialism in the United States first appeared in 1907 when the Socialists were in a phase of rapid growth. Or whether far more concrete, that is, “subjective” influences have prevented the sustenance of a left party of national influence."

"We are at a moment when all of the old arrangements are in disarray. As we have noted in many of the major countries of Europe, as well as Latin America, the disintegration of the Center/Left parties has resulted in a revival of a series of Left political formations whose relation to the old Russian question has been partially severed. Is it not the time to consider a similar break from both anti-party and anti-radical assumptions in the United States?"

Maneuvering Yourself Out of Existence

What will it mean if the Democrats win the mid-term election decisively enough to take back the House and the Senate? According to Paul Glastris, editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly, everything turns on this question. If the Dems fail to take back the House, then each party will take the wrong message from the election. According to Glastris,

"Egged on by their “friends” in the mainstream media, Democrats may come to believe that their mistake was one of message: They didn’t offer up enough bold ideas, an alternative vision to contrast with the Republicans’."

Glastris gives no evidence for why this will be the lesson the Dems take from a defeat - it certainly wasn't the lesson they learned from the 2000, 2002, or 2004 elections. In fact, the striking thing about this campaign is that they have stuck with the 'Anybody But Bush' platform they used to no effect in the previous two elections.

Glastris goes on to argue that the wrong lesson for the Republicans is that they will see even the slimmest majority as a mandate, and will try to use their power to pursue an ideological, rather than compromise, agenda. They will fail to realize their own inner corruption, their inability to convince a majority of Americans, and that one can't rule as a majority party with only a plurality of the vote. Perhaps.

Glastris' larger point is that the mid-terms are, first and foremost, a referendum on the party in power. And the reporting on most papers seems to agree. Republican weakness appears to be entirely a problem of their own making. Corruption scandals, stalled legislative agendas, but most significantly, the stalled occupation of Iraq, has meant the Republicans have been hoisted by their own morals-and-security petard. The New York Times reports Rahm Emmanuel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, saying that "an even greater focus on the war in Iraq...[has turned] what was once the Republicans greatest strength into a major liability," ie, security.

This 'greater focus on the war' is partly the Democrats' own doing. As Glastris notes, having fielded a number of veterans, the 'Fighting Dems', and having pushed the 'Bush has failed us on security, and everything else' line, the Democrats have made their best effort to make no independent impression on the electorate. This is exactly how Glastris, and the majority of Democratic campaign strategists, would have it.

But Glastris et al. miss two fundamental things about party politics. The first is that, there is a limit to which one can simply win by allowing a party to self-destruct. Appropriating the language of security and morality, and turning it against the Republicans, might highlight just how severely the Republican party has decayed over the past half-decade. However, it does nothing to guarantee that once Republican voters will now vote Democrat. It only decreases the Republican vote. It is more likely to produce apathy, not a decisive shift in public opinion. This certainly seems to be the subtext of the mid-term coverage: Republican losses are not necessarily Democratic gains.

The problem with attacking the Republican Party with a kinder gentler version of Republican ideas isn't just strategic. Indeed, the second problem is that the Democrats may very well win, but at the cost of having maneuvered themselves out of existence. Having tailored their message so carefully over the past series of election cycles to necessities of winning, the Dems seem to have forgotten the point of party politics in the first place. Parties don't exist just to win power. They exist to win power so they can use it to certain ends. What are the ends of the Democratic Party? There might be some distinctive legislative proposals, but if they win an election on the basis of security and morals, and then try to change the subject once in power, they will reveal their own lack of mandate. To pursue an independent agenda, one must convince others of the legitimacy of that agenda, otherwise, a combination of disagreement and disinterest will undermine any ability to pursue that agenda.

In other words, the Democrats, like the Republicans, have concentrated so much energy on winning that they have forgotten what the point of winning is. Winning has become an end in itself. In other words, Glastris is wrong that who wins determines whether each party will take the right or wrong message from this election. Regardless of who wins, each side is likely to take the wrong message from the mid-term, because neither side wants us to think very seriously about the principles at stake. They prefer to dabble in fear and personal ethics and to play electoral Stratego.

Talking Up the Caliphate

Throughout Tuesday’s press conference, President Bush made sure to drive home the point that “the stakes are high,” presumably in the choice between Democrats and Republicans, and particularly with respect to Iraq and other aspects of the war on terror. Exactly what are the stakes? Apparently our goal is now to stymie efforts to “extend the caliphate.” This is not the administration’s typical claim that its war on terror is necessary to repel attacks to “the homeland.” It places the foreign policy dimensions of the war on terror front and center, as the focus shifts once again--from simply protecting Americans from specific attack—to an “ideological battle.” But this attempt to expand the importance of the war on terror by reemphasizing an alleged ideological battle places the administration on shaky ground. Americans would be quite reasonable to ask, why should we care about a distant group’s desire to establish or “extend” a caliphate abroad?

Bush conjures up the bogeyman of a caliphate just weeks before the mid-term elections, an election he claims will be decided by security and the economy. By hyping the putative goals of Bin Laden and his ilk, Bush hopes to shore up support for his “preventative” approach (which he contrasts to the “law enforcement” approach of the Democrats who allegedly would wait until after an attack to respond). In doing so, he underscores the fact that Republicans still view national security as a strength issue for their party, and central to any winning campaign strategy. But the President’s remarks should also make clear that there is little to be gained by liberals who seek to talk up the terror threat. For instance, critics of the administration have made much of the recent National Intelligence Estimate as a means of showing that the administration’s policies have not “worked.” But to do so only reinforces the very assumptions (of a global war on terror, a powerful plot to “extend the caliphate,” a direct correlation between the Iraq war and terrorism) of which the administration has been attempting to convince us of all along.

The Administration has recommitted itself to playing up the threat, banking on the idea that they still win on the national security card. Try as they might, Democrats cannot outflank the Republicans on the security issue. And until they stop trying we all lose.

Mid-Term Movie Review: So Goes The Nation

For our readers who have not seen the new documentary about the 2004 presidential campaign in Ohio, called 'So Goes The Nation', we say: go see it. We heard many excuses after John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential campaign: corrupt Diebold voting machines, partisan use of state offices, unfair elimination of eligible voters, and other dirty tricks. These were self-serving arguments for the Democrats to make. They deflected attention from how poorly the campaign was run. As So Goes The Nation demonstrates, responsibility lay squarely on the Democrats' shoulders. They failed to establish any serious field campaign in Ohio (which turned out to be the swing state); they left most of the Ohio campaign to the disparate efforts of various volunteer organizations; and, perhaps most damning, they couldn't even produce a clear message and vision that volunteers could adopt and make their own during their political canvassing. Democrats seem to have thought they could just bring voters out to vote by...asking them to vote.

The movie sometimes exaggerates its point. The contrast between Democratic haplessness and Republican discipline is overdrawn. The Republicans did have one impressive accomplishment. As Paul Begala, half of the famous Carville-Begala team that got Clinton elected in 1992, notes in the documentary, the Republicans managed to increase their national vote by 11 million in 2004 without raising the President's approval rating one percent. This means they effectively expanded the electorate, drawing out those already favorable towards Bush but who didn't normally vote. Nonetheless, this achievement needs to be kept in perspective. The Republicans barely won Ohio (51% to 49%), and the election (51% to 48%). The deeper point, which the documentary points to, is that Democrats have an oddly passive relationship to their voters. They do little to establish a continuous and dynamic relationship with the electorate, between elections; they then get caught flat-footed during election season; and above all, they seem to believe that all these non-voters are natural Democrats to begin with. Their only explanation for electoral problems, then, is to pass the buck: the voter is presumed to be apathetic or uninformed, or there is some way in which they were cheated out of the election.

So Goes The Nation points to these issues by putting some great interviews together with unique footage of the Republican and Democratic campaigns in Ohio. At times it is a bit vague about whether the problem for Democrats is simply lack of organization or lack of political ideas. But it's hard not to conclude that the world's oldest political party suffers from both problems at once. This raises a set of questions that we will be discussing at our October 21 Teach-In: given these problems, how do we relate to the Democratic Party and the vote more broadly? Can the vote be used constructively, to send a signal? Can non-voting? Or is party politics, for now, simply not a serious avenue for political engagement?

AWOT EVENT: TEACH-IN - WHY VOTE?

Register Now!

October 21st, 10:30-4:30pm
Skylight Room, CUNY Graduate Center
34th St and 5th Ave

Against the War on Terror announces a new teach-in in anticipation of the upcoming mid-term elections. Why Vote? will examine what voting means and what it's worth in an age marked by terror and diminished expectations. How do we think about voting when the options seem so narrow but few alternative forms of political action seem available? Nobody wants to be mistaken for the merely apathetic non-voter, but voting for the 'least worst' option is hardly an inspiring use of our ballot. Can one be against voting in the name of real democracy, or is that a substanceless, radical pose that makes a mockery of hard won political rights?

Speakers will include (Click for Full Program)

Professor Stanley Aronowitz, professor of sociology at CUNY Grad Center and director of the Grad Center's Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work

Dan Cantor Executive Director of the Working Families Party

Justin Krebs co-founder of Drinking Liberally and Cosmopolity, and

The Editors of Against the War on Terror

Sessions will include :

* Are the Democrats An Alternative?;
* Is This Democracy Worth Your Vote?;
* Why the War on Terror is The Issue;
and more.

Each session will contain short presentations by two speakers, followed by a period of open discussion from the floor. WHY VOTE? Will be held in conjunction with CUNY Graduate Center's Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work, and Center for Place Culture and Politics

For more information on the Teach-In and to register, email the editors at editors@againstwot.com.

Preying On Our Fears

From this week's Time magazine, an amusing and perceptive piece on the Foley scandal by media critic, James Poniewozik. He claims that Foley’s sleazy advances to a young Capitol Hill staffer have played into the contemporary obsession with pedophilia, giving the events a resonance far beyond the usual government sex scandals. In Poniewozik’s words “It's the difference between “The G.O.P. leadership messed up in a sex scandal” and “The G.O.P. leadership went soft on one of those monsters who are out there waiting to prey on my kids.””

To make his point Poniewozik points to the saturation of mainstream media with pedophilia horror stories, paying particular attention to the Dateline series 'To Catch a Predator'. On this show (for the benefit of our international readership), men are invited to rendezvous with the teenage girls they believe they have been courting online. Needless to say, the ‘girls’ are in fact decoys, and upon their arrival at the specified location, the men are confronted first by Dateline’s presenter Chris Hansen, then by local law enforcement officials. As Poniewozik puts it, the show is “ratings gold, a jaw-dropping combination of public service and blood sport that lets viewers indulge their voyeurism righteously--like the Colosseum, if the lions were allowed to eat only the really, really evil Christians.”

Poniewozik is sensitive to the fact that the contemporary pedophile obsession has been sustained by our politicians; keen to connect with the voters on what seems like an entirely uncomplicated issue. Indeed, Foley himself was chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and Poniewozik quotes him in that capacity, ““Now, more than ever…we need to stand together and unite cities, communities and states in the effort to stop the assault on America's children,”” before cynically retorting “An assault on our children: that's a consensus builder if ever there was one.”

It is here that a parallel with the war on terror starts to emerge. Politicians seize on the highly unusual phenomena of predatory pedophilia, and elevate it to the proportions of a crisis. This imbues their actions with a sense of urgency and necessity, establishing the agenda they sorely lack. Yet this can unleash a social force that runs out of their control. As mentioned above, Poniewozik correctly points out that, while Foley’s actions might always have attracted attention, the extreme outrage they have provoked is the result of an obsession with pedophilia that men like Foley himself have propagated.

Also analogous to the war on terror is the way in which the perceived crisis is used to stifle political discussion. Poniewozik notes that “arguing in the name of ‘the children’ is an irresistible device” through which numerous authoritarian measures have been adopted. The worst case scenario (child abuse or terrorist attacks) becomes a moral absolute which trumps any defense of even the most fundamental freedom. To leave the last word to Poniewozik (and Foley):

“In 2002, Foley was furious when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to outlaw computer-generated animations—not actual video—that depict underage characters having sex. “The high court sided with pedophiles over children,” Foley blustered. Or it sided with, you know, the First Amendment. Tomato, tomahto.”

Animal Rights...Terrorists?

The war on terror has about as many fronts as the government can invent for it. It’s so hard to keep up with all of them that many issues fly under the radar until they appear in some new piece of legislation or executive order. We have written about ‘animal rights terrorists’ once or twice before, but, until recently, we did not realize just how much this ‘terrorist threat’ has been preoccupying our leaders on the Hill. Largely un-noticed outside of the websites of animal rights activists in the US and UK, the Senate this week unanimously passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA).

This bill amended the already draconian Animal Enterprise Protection Act (APEA). The APEA, law since 1992, created a penalty of $10,000 or 10 years to life imprisonment for any physical disruption that leads to $10,000 in damages to an animal enterprise.

The new AETA amends existing law in a number of ways. Firstly, the definition of an animal enterprise has been broadened to include (1) an enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products for profit for educational purposes; and (2) an animal shelter, pet store, breeder, or furrier. So virtually any enterprise that deals with animals is now included.

Interestingly, AETA goes further by expanding the type of prohibited criminal behaviour. It changes the term used to describe activity in AEPA from "for the purpose of causing physical disruption" to "for the purpose of damaging or disrupting" an animal enterprise. This widening of the kind of prohibited activity means that everything from death threats or serious bodily harm against individuals (including their family members, spouse, or intimate partners) who are involved with animal enterprises, to even benign and peaceful protests that might urge say a consumer boycott of a company are now included. This definition might also apply to a whistleblower seeking to make public what they deem to be harmful or illegal activities by an animal enterprise. The act also allows for Title III federal criminal wiretapping surveillance of animal rights organizations. AETA effectively criminalizes First Amendment activities such as demonstrations, leafleting, undercover investigations, and boycotts.

Passage of the act follows hard on the arrests and convictions of a large number of environmental and animal rights activists. On 7 December 2005, the FBI began 'Operation Backfire', a multi-state sweep of activists. Fifteen people have since been indicted by a Grand Jury on 65 charges in connection with actions between 1996 and 2001. Last month saw the sentencing of three animal rights activists of four to six years in prison and payment of more than $1 million in restitution for 'inciting violence and terror'. The activity involved mainly the administration of a website against Huntington Life Sciences, a contract research organization in the U.S. and U.K. that has long been the target of animal rights activists. Three others were convicted and have been given 30 days to hand themselves into the authorities.

Animal rights activists have been getting it here and abroad. While in the US Federal Authorities are determined to brand animal rights activists as terrorists, UK authorities are reluctant to include animal rights activists in their lexicon of terrorism, still calling them extremists. This is partly a result of a turf war between the police and MI5. Calling these activists terrorists would put them on the radar of MI5 and effectively close down a number of specialist police units.

In fact, the British Police seem to have all the powers they need. Earlier this year four animal rights activists were sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment for conspiracy to blackmail the owners of the Darly Oaks farm in Staffordshire, which bred guinea pigs for medical research. Their campaign against the farm culminated in the theft of the body of the grandmother of one of the owners of the farm from her grave in October 2004. Some of the sentences handed down to those convicted were harsher than those given for manslaughter in UK courts. So proficient have the UK authorities been in dealing with animal rights activists that the police report over half of them are now in jail.

In reality, in both the US and the UK we are talking about small groups of marginalized individuals who are little more than a public nuisance even to those who work on animal research. One may wonder about the moral code of people prepared to attack, harangue or stalk those involved in animal research. However, it’s incumbent on those of us who don't want to live in our bizarre security state to speak up for even this group of misanthropes’ right to protest. This is especially the case because the new law demonstrates how the war on terror has created a permissive environment in which all kinds of authoritarian law and order measures are considered acceptable and even necessary. One suspects the Senate didn’t even need to call these activists terrorists – just asserting the underlying principle of security would likely have been enough to pass this law restricting basic rights.

It's also clear that a battery of new laws and police powers aimed to halt the activities of this motley crew really avoids the issue. The government is not defending science by turning animal rights activists into terrorists. The real issue at hand is society's reluctance to endorse many of the activities of scientists, and rigorously to defend the idea of animal research. Animal rights activists simply leech off that existing suspicion. To deal with that problem, we need a wider cultural shift through a public debate on science and progress, not new laws and a clamping down on the right to protest.

AWOT EVENT: WHAT IS THE GREATEST THREAT TO LIBERTY TODAY?

The United States is famous for its commitment to liberty. Yet today many Americans feel that their liberty is being threatened – by terrorists who call our modern values into question, or by a wayward administration that flaunts the constitution and surveils its citizens, or by a willingness on the part of politicians to sacrifice liberty for security, or by a public itself more concerned with security than liberty. For a society committed to liberty, yet that feels its liberty threatened, it is a pressing question: ‘what is the greatest threat to liberty today’? What is the best way to defend liberty in these times?

October 5th, 6:30pm at Barnes and Noble (18th St. & 5th Ave.)

Speakers include:

Priti Patel, an attorney with Human Rights First's U.S. Law and Security Program (www.humanrightsfirst.org)

Megan McArdle, a correspondent for The Economist who blogs at Asymmetrical Information (www.janegalt.net)

Danya Reda, an attorney practicing in New York City and an editor of Against the War on Terror

Who Governs? (That Detainee Bill)

The detainee bill that the Senate approved on Friday is undoubtedly a horrible piece of legislation. Since the final language was only approved late last week, there are probably some terrible parts of the bill we haven't even heard about. However, rather than rehearse the various criticisms that have been made of the bill, we think it's more important to think about what this bill reveals about the political process. First, it is rather transparent that this bill was a piece of crass campaigning by the Republicans leading up to the mid-terms. Consider the following from the Washington Post:

"The legislative action prompted extraordinarily blunt language from House GOP leaders, foreshadowing a major theme for the campaign. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) issued a written statement on Wednesday declaring: 'Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and 159 of her Democrat colleagues voted today in favor of MORE rights for terrorists.'"

Beyond the sheer cynicism and opportunism of this propaganda campaign, one is struck by the emptiness of the Republican 'platform'. As we have discussed before, the Republicans have turned to the national security issue in the last months out of pure political desperation. For the mid-terms, they have substituted fear for political principle.

This is fairly self-evident, but there is more to the political dancing on the Hill. Consider the following action taken by Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.):

"Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) voted for the bill after telling reporters earlier that he would oppose it because it is "patently unconstitutional on its face." He cited its denial of the habeas corpus right to military detainees. In an interview last night, Specter said he decided to back the bill because it has several good items, "and the court will clean it up" by striking the habeas corpus provisions.

Specter's position reveals that the abandonment of principle is not merely a product of mid-term electioneering, but has become part and parcel of our governmental structure. Specter has adopted a position that liberals consistently adopt: The Supreme Court will save us from ourselves. With the ideal of nine judges in robes standing astride the Constitution proclaiming 'thou shalt not pass', representatives often feel quite safe in not having to consider or worry about the deeper principles behind their legislation. Rather, they abandon that responsibility to another branch, seeing in judicial review the permission to become absorbed only with pragmatic and symbolic considerations. They think they can have their cake and eat it too - write bad legislation that looks good, and not have to think about or deal with the bad consequences. It is striking that a Senator made the above comment, because the Senate is supposed to be a deliberative body. But in effect, Specter is saying that judicial review absolves the Senate of having to deliberate very carefully about its own legislation: it's enough that there are 'several good items'. The thrust of this kind of attitude, which is equally and even more common amongst liberals, is that the Judiciary should be part of the legislative process, and that representatives don't really represent. It is the Court that really speaks for the nation, the implication being we shouldn't be too hard on our elected representatives, it really isn't their job to worry about the deeper issues. It is a long, slow path to the Supreme Court, however, and it has at best a spotty history in defending liberty. Politically, it is certainly no substitute for an actual democratic body taking responsibility for governing the nation itself.

In the system of political evasion, the Democrats, our cowardly minority party, take the cake. When a few Republican senators and military lawyers objected to parts of the detainee prosecution plans and the pending bill, the Democrats moved to their preferred position of hoping their opponent does the dirty work for them. Rather than mounting a significant campaign against this bill on their own, the Dems seem to have been banking on Republican internal dissension to sink this legislative ship. Not only was this an losing strategy, it suggested a strange allergy towards political leadership. The Democrats show almost no will to rule at all, nor even a will for a principled defeat!

In this bizarre circus, the most problematic thing is not just that we don't know where anybody really stands, but that nobody particularly wants to take responsibility for their own positions. The very minimal democratic activity of holding one's rulers to account is difficult when it is hard to tell who governs.