(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words)
It’s hard to decide what to quote from this excellent Mike Davis article about what the left can expect from the Democrats after their November victory, but I think the following two paragraphs are best at showing the juxtaposition between expectations and reality:
The fate of New Orleans, of course, is one of the great moral watersheds in modern American history, but most Democrats shamelessly refused to make federal responses to Hurricane Katrina or the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the Gulf Coast central issues in the campaign. Although President Bush himself had declared in his Jackson Square speech that ‘we have a duty to confront this poverty [revealed by Katrina] with bold action’, the Democrats have shown no greater sense of ‘duty’ or capacity for ‘bold action’ than a notoriously hypocritical and incompetent White House. Their priorities were exemplified by the six-plank national platform in November that stressed deficits and troop buildups but failed to mention either Katrina or poverty.
[…]
But Nancy, Harry and Hillary do have one domestic crusade whose importance transcends other dogmas and constraints: the promotion of the ‘innovation agenda’ that the Democrats hope will dramatically solidify their support among hi-tech corporations and science-based firms across the country. If you wanted to find the missing urgency and passion that the Democrats should have focused on Katrina and urban poverty, it was evident last year in the rousing speeches that Pelosi and other leading Democrats delivered in tech hubs like Emeryville, Mountain View, Raleigh and Redmond.
It seems to me that what happened in November is that the grassroots groundswell of anger and frustration aimed at the Republicans has been co-opted by the Democratic Party’s Washington establishment. While the party’s base has always been strongely opposed to the Patriot Act, the War against Terror and the War on Iraq, it’s leadership has largely prefered to go along with Republican plans, either out of calculation or fear. According to the netroots (including myself) this attitude was the reason for the Democratic defeats in 2002 and 2004, with the gains in November last year as a vindication of the netroots’ vision. In reality however, the Democratic leadership hasn’t changed its stance on these issues; it’s still largely supportive of the War on Iraq and only willing to offer symbolic opposition rather than real opposition. From their point of view, their strategy of triangulation, of playing to the supposed centre worked. They didn’t need to radicalise
themselves in order to win Congress back form the Republicans, they just needed to wait and let the Republicans destroy themselves. In other words, the netroots have largely failed to move the party to the left, or even to get them to be more aggressive in opposition.
Instead, as Ilya suspected last Tuesday, the Democrats have courted those segments of business who’ve become unhappy with the Republican focus on war and the accompanying corruption. The war may have been kind to Halliburton and Exxon, but has it for companies like Microsoft? The credit for this split in elite opinion lies mostly with the Iraqi resistance who’ve managed to shatter the dream of a obedient Iraqi client state, but also with the anti-war movement, which for the moment has made it harder for politicians to be openly pro-war…
What we’ll probably see in the next few years then is a tug of war between the Bushites and the corporate elites that profit from them and the Democrats, with the former trying to keep the full war going while the latter will argue for a withdrawal with residual force. In both cases, expect more use of airpower to keep American casualties down at the expense of Iraqi civilians.
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War on Iraq, Mike Davis, Democratic Party, US politics