Though Cowards Flinch

“Partisan politics” is a bad word in America.

Partisan politics means that you’re unwilling to compromise with the other side, that you’re not willing to “reach across the aisle” to pass necessary legislation that otherwise would not be passed.

I’d like to talk about what “partisan politics” really is: a way to destroy any remaining spirit of progressiveness in the Democratic Party. Partisans politics is a lie. Partisan politics is a phrase that Republicans use when Democrats try to propose legislation that the Democratic base actually wants. Republicans have absolutely no fear when it comes to passing radical legislation that pleases their base! They only complain of partisan politics when Democrats try to use it. For instance, I didn’t hear Democrats complain about partisan politics when Republicans passed the ban on D&X abortion (“partial-birth” abortions).

But why blog about partisan politics during one of the most exciting election cycle in recent years in the United States? Because I fear that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will fall prey to “bipartisanship” once again. And that, more than anything else, can kill them come the general election.

Voters aren’t excited about “bipartisanship”. People don’t get excited about “compromise” or “moderation”. No one can stand on soapbox and proudly proclaim that they love [X] candidate because [X] candidate will stalwartly defend everything that currently exists and will slowly push for minor changes. People get excited about candidates when they had radical policies. Republicans get this — George Bush is a radical. Republicans aren’t excited about John McCain, or Mitt Romney, the way that they are excited about Mike Huckabee, and it’s because Mike Huckabee’s social policies are radical and appeal to the base.

Democrats have not had a candidate who is like that for a long time. FDR was radical. LBJ was radical. Bill Clinton was not radical, and he probably would not have won if not for the third party candidacy of Ross Perot. Al Gore was unable to excite Democrats, nor was John Kerry.

The worst part about bipartisanship is manifested in people like Joe Lieberman. The Democratic Party loved Joe Lieberman. He could “work across the aisle,” and all that crap. We loved him so much we put him in the Vice-Presidential slot in 2004. And look what happens when you encourage bipartisanship! He’s not even a Democratic anymore, at a formal level. He certainly wasn’t a Democrat before hand, when he didn’t have the Democratic stance on most issues, but now he isn’t even a Democratic in name!

What Democratic candidates fail to understand is that we, the Party, like winning. Moreover, we like winning over people who demonize us; we like winning big. We like passing legislation that makes people like Bill O’Reilly puke. Passing a compromise bill is not satisfying. People like winning; people like partisanship when we can win. Democratic voters, I believe, have become in favor of bipartisanship only because they think, mistakenly, that that’s the only way to get even a little of our legislation passed. But the real way to get our legislation passed is to run radical candidates and take over Congress. It worked in 2006, when being anti-war was “radical” and it will work in 2008 and years beyond if we can actually field candidates who excite us, not because they’re excellent speakers or they can speak in moral terms, such as Obama, but if they can actually talk about exciting, radical policies.

Why Manism?

I’m writing this post in response to a comment on my first post by a poster named Jon. Jon offers several critiques of my first post, that I think I can sum up in the question, “Why Manism?” Let me begin by addressing Jon and say that you responded to my post with about twice the length, so let me apologize if you’ve criticized things I haven’t covered, because, well, I haven’t gotten to it yet.

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Hey everyone. Besides being interested in progressive politics in the United States, I have a keen interest in issues of sex, gender, gender relationships, and how our society views all of these things. In my (admittedly limited) experience attempting to get men involved in issues of violence prevention and in discussing these sorts of issues, I find that men are extremely resistant.

I have some theories on the problems of feminism, specifically regarding its failure in communicating its ideas, whatever they may be (and it means different things to different people) to men. Below the break is my attempt to summarize my thoughts on feminism, and how a social movement for men can be constructed.

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I’ll be.

I gotta say, I haven’t been impressed with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s quest for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He’s a Trustee of my University (Tufts), and a graduate of our undergraduate and graduate foreign policy school (Fletcher), but hey, he just hasn’t done it for me. He said his favorite Supreme Court Justice was Justice White, because he was a good (American) football player, (White wrote the dissent in Roe v Wade), which was either a poor attempt to woo pro-life Democrats, or a poor attempt to woo late ’30′s Pittsburg Pirates or early ’40′s Detroit Lions fans.

Add to that his gaffe of addressing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as the AFSCME. When you’re in a big, crowded hall full of people, and well, there are signs everywhere that say “SEIU,” you should get it right. This sounds like the stereotypical rock band joke, where they’re in Detroit, and yell “Thank you, Chicago!” At least rock stars have the excuse of all the drugs they take. Richardson is a professional politician.

So, what did Bill Richardson do? Well, I’m reading my mainstream yahoo news article, and I read that different Democrats offered their education plans. Hillary Clinton offered 250 million, mainly in tax credits and such, and then I read Richardson’s plan gives 60 billion. I blink a few times. 60 billion. That’s a lot of money. And for what? 2 years of free public college, in return for one year of public service, like the Peace Corps, Americorps, of Teach for America, the article reports. And at some universities, students could qualify for as much as 4 years of tuition. Add to that his support of universal pre-kindergarten, opposition to vouchers, and support for higher teachers salaries, according to his website, and that ain’t half bad.

Holy crap. This sounds like an actual, good program. I know, I’m scratching my head too. Where does the money come from? I tried to figure it out, and it appears that nearly all of it is supposed to come from “cut[ting] unnecessary Cold War-era weapons system” or at least, that’s what his white paper says. Good luck getting that through Congress, but hey, if he can do it, more power to him.

Dave had a post a week or so back about student activism.

A friend of mine, whose views, I should preface this post, I respect and admire deeply, invited me to a Darfur Rally at Boston’s Government Center this past weekend. While I admit, I haven’t been following Darfur very closely, my friend is deeply involved in the student movement, and being a veteran of no few number of protests myself, I figured I should go.

While on the steps of government center, I began talking with my friends who had gone, and we began talking about the efficacy of student activism. Dave and I also got into a comment discussion on his post about the same thing.

Really, what it comes down to, I think is this: student activism on uncontroversial issues doesn’t accomplish anything, and I think the Darfur rallies are an excellent example. They encourage education, yes, and they raise awareness, yes, but do they enact political change? No, they don’t. Yes, people have written their Congresspeople and Senators, but does that enact political change? Even assuming our politicians follow through, I don’t think that enacts political change. Because really, what the Darfur movement is all about is putting pressure on China to put pressure on Sudan. However, it seems clear that China’s number one priority is its economy, and its economy needs oil. It gets much of its oil from Sudan.

Throughout the ’90′s and into this decade, it’s been made clear that China is unwilling to sacrifice its economic growth. China refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty as an equal partner, wanting caveats that permitted it to continue burning the fossil fuels as it develops it economy. Will China really give up with oil ties with Omar Bashir’s government because the Unites States pressures it to, particularly given the trade deficit the U.S. has with the P.R.C.?

I don’t think so.

But what about other types of protests? Protests on controversial issues, such as anti-war protests, I don’t believe affect political outcomes. Looking back at the Amercan anti-Vietnam War protests, I don’t believe they accomplished policy changes. What changed for politicians was not some sense of public opinion, but their opinion as to whether or not we were losing the Vietnam War. Once it became clear to Cold War Democrats, who held a majority in both Houses, that we were losing, I think there was more impetus for a withdrawal.

Looking at the Iraq War, our protests have been larger, more worldwide, and the anti-war movement coalesced at light-speed compared to the Vietnam anti-War movement. We had more people protesting the Iraq War before it began than we ever had during Vietnam. But still, there are no political effects. We have not withdrawn from Iraq.

While one can say that the Iraq War was the impetus for the Democratic takeover of Congress, and I would agree, one still has to take the next step and see that Democratic Congress take political action to end the war. Congress could end the war. It could simply stop approving military appropriation. Bush might have a veto, and thus Democrats most likely cannot pull together enough support to pass legislation to withdraw troops, but Bush cannot legislate. Ultimately, he needs a majority in both Houses to pass his military appropriations bills, and thus far, the Democrats have been giving him those majorities.

So, the question is still up there: do protests of controversial issues lead to political change? With Vietnam, I don’t believe it did so. With Iraq, it hasn’t done so yet.

I think there’s a very good case that the Civil Rights Movement may have brought on political change. But it’s still tricky, particularly given how much of the change, at least at a legal level, came from the Courts, prior to the mass movement that came in the late ’50′s and ’60′s. However, political action through legislation, all came after the long mass-based struggles, so I suppose this might be where my argument falls apart.

I think an argument can be made though, that the Civil Rights Movement, unlike the two anti-war movements mentioned above, was more than just a series of protests. It was a concerted campaign waged at a legal level, a political level, and at the grassroots. It also, and I think this is most significant, also had the threat of violence implicit in it. Notwithstanding Dr. King’s principles of non-violent protest, there were large race riots in the early 1960′s, from Harlem in ’64, Watts in ’65, to most large urban cities in ’66-’67, to just about everywhere after Dr. King was assassinated.

Does anyone else have any examples that support or disprove my thesis? To sum up:

1. Uncontroversial protests don’t accomplish anything, because by nature of being uncontroversial there are factors beyond politicians’ control or power.

2. Protesting controversial issues does not ultimately bring about political change because our government’s institutional mechanisms are designed to prevent swift change at the electoral level, and even then, majorities are often unwilling to act in favor of the protesters who supported them.

3. Movements such as the Civil Rights Movement succeed because there is the implicit or explicit threat of violence if their cause is not heard and heeded.

As I was reading Dave’s top 5 political influences, I couldn’t help but notice that we shared two of them. I do want to mention that I don’t name these people necessarily because I agree with everything they did (all people are flawed), but because of their influence on my way of thinking (or not thinking, as the case may be). I’m also going to cheat, and list a couple together. In no particular order, I’ll list my 5:

John Adams/Thomas Jefferson & Abraham Lincoln: Being a student in part of the American Revolution, you can’t help but be awed at the profound role that Adams & Jefferson played in the formation of the young Republic. For one of the first times in history, a small group of people, professional revolutionaries in a very primitive sense, who had written voluminously about how a free republican should be structured, had the opportunity to build what they wanted. Both are tragically flawed figures: Adams for his Alien & Sedition Act, and Jefferson for being a hypocrite in some of his most important things that he wrote. I tend to lean towards Adams as the more sympathetic of the two of them, as he was at least consistent in doing what he said, and saying what he did, while Jefferson’s actions ran against his principles on numerous occasions. Nevertheless, they both played an extremely important role in the conscious formation of the young Republic, and the famous Adams-Jefferson correspondence, which fills a volume or two, is an incredible archive of the informal musings and debates of two of the greatest American intellectuals of their generation.

I add Lincoln to the mix, because his role in dealing with one of the first great crises that could rend the Republic in two. Again, while history has certainly painted him very well, Lincoln stands as a model, often repeated, of how American politicians would deal with the issue of race. Lincoln didn’t believe in racial equality, and many of his actions were cautiously timed and carefully thought through so as not to anger his more conservative constituents, as well as frustrating those who (in my humble opinion) were both more principled and radical in their quest for racial equality. This pattern would be repeated during the Civil Rights movement, with almost the same verbatim arguments.

I add, like Dave, Eugene Victor Debs. Again, the man wasn’t perfect, but there is something so sublime, and so pregnant with meaning to boldly declare, “I am for socialism because I am for humanity.” Being one of the first clear and articulate voices of American socialism would be enough to put him high on any progressive’s list, but add to that his fight for the freedom of expression, culminating in his defeat in Debs v United States, and his relentless pursuit of electoral success even running from jail, winning nearly a million votes in 1920. Like his many socialist brethren across the world, Debs joined the tiny minority in America who opposed World War 1, which is what ultimately led to his jailing.

Also, like Dave, I add Trotsky and Lenin. Like Adams and Jefferson, they were men who made it their lives’ work to understand the nature of revolution, the means to create revolution and what to do afterwards, and a progressive would be remiss in not studying their example, as much for its positives and its negatives. The fate of the Russian Revolution seems over with the fall of the Soviet Union, but their analyses of revolution, capitalism, and imperialism remain relevant to this day.

I add William Brennan (in office ’56-’90) and Thurgood Marshall (’67-’91), who may be a bit unknown to the British crowd. Both were United States Supreme Court Justices, and the most clear and articulate voices of their generation and (sadly, for my generation) to the present of a progressive view of the law. Brennan’s writings, although sometimes criticized as pompous and arrogant, demonstrate the empowering possibilities of our laws. I’ll give just a little quote: “Our amended Constitution is the lodestar of our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text.” What’s so important about Brennan’s philosophy is that it rested on a modern interactions between interpreter and text, not the historic searching and speculation that is so marked in conservative originalism.

Thurgood Marshall was one of the greatest lawyers to ever appear before the Supreme Court. As a lawyer with the NAACP, he worked to desegregate the armed forces with President Truman, overturn restricted covenants, and in his greatest triumph, overturn Plessy v Ferguson with Brown v Board of Education in 1955, ending school segregation and eventually all segregation, at least at a legal, if sadly, not at a practical level. As a judge on the Supreme Court, besides being a fervent proponent of civil rights, offering his fellow Justices his first-hand experiences with the degradations of discrimination, he was also a zealous opponent of the death penalty with Justice Brennan, both of them opposing it out of principle, supporting every single subsequent defendant (of hundreds, if not thousands) who petitioned the Court to oveturn their death sentence. Marshall’s greatest strength, I think, lay in his recognition of the practical applications of decisions, and their actual effect on human life, as shown in his concurrence/dissent in Hogson v Minnesota (1990) where he vehemently opposes a law that would require minor, unemancipated women wishing an abortion to notify both parents or seek a judicial bypass (justify their decision to a judge): “This scheme forces a young woman in an already dire situation to choose between two fundamentally unacceptable alternatives: notifying a possibly dictatorial or even abusive parent and justifying her profoundly personal decision in an intimidating judicial proceeding to a black-robed stranger. For such a woman, this dilemma is more likely to result in trauma and pain than in an informed and voluntary decision.”

Lastly, I add my family. From disparate roots, they all embodied a profound sense of social justice. My mother’s father was a labor leader in the City of New York before working as a social worker. My father’s parents met in a “Walking Club” (I guess you walk together in these clubs) of the YCL (America’s Komsomol) and remained Party members for much of their lives, imparting to my father his activism, making him a very active member of New York’s anti-war movement and progressive movements in his youth. Both my parents passed on their values to me.

Law is easy.

But for some reason, in America, we like to pretend it’s really hard. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted nearly 200 years ago, political questions tend to resolve themselves into judicial questions. Thus, in the modern times, we see abortion as a judicial, and not a political or philosophical issue. We see affirmative action as a judicial and not a policy question. We see a myriad of issues, from the reach of the executive, to military tribunals, to all the issues surrounding the detention of alleged enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay all resolve into judicial questions.

Why is that? And is it good? The first question is harder to answer than the second, which I will answer with a resounding, “No!” The tendency to resolve political questions into judicial abrogates the responsibilities of our elected representatives to debate political issues, and resolves political issues into simple, binary, right-or-wrong issues, because ultimately, our judicial system is an adversary one, and one side wins, or another looses. While certainly Courts can hand down decisions that are subtle and award a victory to neither side, politicians do not need to debate the subtleties of those policies they have abrogated to the Courts, because they have little role in fashioning the policy anymore.

Why is it bad? It brings policy questions, which should be debated by the public into the judicial realm, which has no democratic means of input, that is, the people have no way to tell judges what they think. The reasons political questions should be political questions is that if the people don’t like the result, they can express their discontent through the electoral process. There is no way to do that through the judicial process.

Another reason it is bad, and, I think, an even more profound reason, is that the very environment of the judicial debate, which, from an intellectual point of view is accessible, becomes insulated due to the nature of the judiciary. What I’m saying is: judges confuse things, and the things they confuse are really pretty easy to understand. Take, for instance, abortion. It’s not hard to understand the differences of each side, or to sum up the different interests involved (the interests of the mother against the state’s wish for her to have a child, the interests of the mother to follow the sound advice of a medical professional against the wishes of the state, the interests of the doctor to advise patients and perform those operations which s/he believes are in the best interests of the health of the patient, etc.., etc.), but once you get the Courts and the Law involved, it becomes a matter of interpreting complicated and often contradictory statutes, relying on cases law which you might not agree with, which might not agree with each other, and which might be, at best, barely analogous to the case at hand.

When political questions become judicial questions they become more difficult to understand, but not, I hasten to add, impossible to understand, because ultimately, I stand by my thesis that law is easy.

Law is easy, and people should realize that they can understand it, and that lawyers and judges do not have monopolies on the subtleties of opinions and policy that have been abrogated from the political branches of government to them. What lawyers and judges do, is make the politics more difficult to access by cloaking them in the language of law. But reading, say, Supreme Court cases, is like reading Shakespeare: it seems really weird for a while, but after you read enough of it, you can realize what’s being said. And really, what’s being said isn’t much more complicated than the original political question, before it was brought into the judicial arena.

The results of transforming political questions into judicial ones are negative, I believe. Since, (again, returning to abortion, since it’s a pretty decent example) abortion is a judicial question, the only way the people can democratically make their voice known is to protest decisions, and vote for Senators who will confirm judges they like. But by vesting their democratic powers in Senators, who are very far removed from the actual legal decisions, the people’s vote doesn’t really matter. If a Senator said he would vote for anti-abortion candidates, but, oops, that guy he voted for turned out to go the other way, there’s no way to hold the Senator accountable, who can perhaps sincerely say the candidate changed his mind and how could the Senator judge that, or maybe the Senator (more cynically) pledged to vote one way, and secretly approved a candidate whom he knew would flip-flop on the issues.

Now, if political questions were political, there would be accountability. A Senator couldn’t hide behind a candidate who changed their mind. The debate over the political issue, which occurs at the time of nominating the judge, wouldn’t be so far separated from the ultimate decision. It can take years for an issue hotly debated during judicial nomination hearings to eventually be decided by that judge, and by then, your Senator might not even be in office, and even if they are, the Senator has still even more political cover to point at the judge and say, “It wasn’t me! I thought s/he would vote the way you wanted, but s/he changed!” If our politicians were able to actually debate and vote on political questions at the same time, the people would be able to immediately recognize a dissonance between voting promises and votes on legislation.

Moreover, the Courts provide undue political cover for politicians. Many politicians vote for legislation that they don’t agree with, just in order to woo a certain voter segment, knowing that the legislation will, in all likelihood, be overturned by a Court. Does South Dakota really think it’s recently passed law banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother will pass Constitutional muster? Of course not, and because the cover the political-to-judicial-question transformation provides, politicians are free and able to make politics more of a show than it already is, rather than actually debating issues sincerely and voting sincerely. Politicians are able to vote on laws that they might not actually agree with, simply to garner votes from population segments, rather than debate their sincerely positions.

This is a bipartisan issue (Democratic v Republican). Sometimes the issues the Courts decide come out the way I like them, and sometimes they don’t, but ultimately, all these factors are still there. There are certainly positive sides to having the Courts decide these questions though, and I would be remiss if I didn’t point some of them out. They do grant stability to the law (which could be good or bad), because whereas laws can change easily with new elections, the Judges who judge the constitutionality of those laws change much more slowly. This turning of political questions into judicial one helps numerous people, it should be noted: the gun lobby likes that the Brady handbill gun law was defeated, abortion rights’ activists like that many restrictive abortions law were declared unconstitutional, and anti-affirmative action politicians reveled in the victory Justice Kennedy handed them last year in the voluntary primary school assignments case.

The Democratic Party has a simple way to end this war and end the horrific nightmare that has been the George Bush Presidency. It’s a three step process.

One: impeach Dick Cheney. This seems simple and self-evident to me. This guy has no excuse for being a member of government.His influence in pushing forward the Iraq War, even though he knew it would be a quagmire in 1994. His use of his legal advisor, then-Chief of Staff David Addington to push the most radical legal positions on the Executive in the history of the nation, as Jack Goldsmith’s (former head of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Council from 2003-4) recent book describes. His assertion that he is not part of the executive branch. I’d like to think we can all agree that we don’t like Dick Cheney very much. I could go on, I mean, I could talk about Cheney, in 2005, described the Iraqi insurgency as in its “last throes.” I could remind everyone how Cheney, in a September 14, 2003 interview on “Meet the Press” said we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq.

My point is, I don’t think I need to talk about how Democrats shouldn’t like Dick Cheney. So why do we still have him? We have 233 Democrats in the House of Representatives to 202 Republicans, so getting the simply majority to pass articles of impeachment shouldn’t be difficult. Granted, Democrats might be daunted by the two-thirds majority necessary in the Senate to convict, but let’s be honest, how many of the 49 Republican Senators are going to feel comfortable standing up and voting, saying, “I support Dick Cheney.”

Really, there are two possible results: Cheney doesn’t get impeached, or he does. If he doesn’t, I’m fine with that. Democrats will have a head count of those who support the administration and those who don’t. Republicans need to defend 22 Senate seats while Democrats only have to defend 12 in 2008. Prominent websites like The Swing State Project and Senate 2008 Guru are realistically predicting pickups for the Democrats in Texas, New Hampshire, Idaho, Virginia, Oregon, Nebraska (for Hagel’s seat, since he’s retiring, and only if Bob Kerrey, a favorite former Governor and U.S. Senator of that State, gets in it), Minnesota, and Alaska (being investigated by the FBI doesn’t help). The Democrats also have many good shots at Elizabeth Dole’s seat and Mitch McConnel’s seat. Bottom line is, come election time, all you’re going to need to do is show footage of the Senate roll call vote when these guys are supporting Dick Cheney, and their sinking ships will fall like lead. And well, what if we win? We could, after all. These Republicans are vulnerable, and for all their talk of standing up to the administration, very few Republicans have done so (hear that Warner? No one’s impressed with your Sense of the Senate resolutions and your bailing on the Webb Amendment!), and some of them might know which way the wind is blowing, and bow to popular pressure.

The next step is for the Democratic leadership to urge President Bush to appoint a new Vice-President with anti-war credentials and then he, Bush, should resign. Retiring Sen. Hagel has been against the war, so has Rep. Ron Paul, or even a late-comer to the anti-war movement, like say, a Dick Lugar. The Democrats should urge the President to appoint a reliable, anti-war Republican, on the threat that if he fails to, they will not confirm his pick. If President Bush refuses to appoint a reliable anti-war VP, or does so, and fails to resign, impeach him. If you could impeach Cheney, you could impeach Bush. Repeat the same strategy as above. If it works, you get an anti-war Republican for about a year until 2008, or Nancy Pelosi if Bush fails to make an appointment at all. If it doesn’t work, make sure those C-SPAN cameras are rolling, because you now have 22 clips for Democrats in Senate campaigns, and even more drastic gains in both Houses of Congress.

But what’s the point of this little thought-exercise of electoral strategy? Will the Democrats do this? Of course not. They’re taking a different road to victory in 2008 by proving how bankrupt they are to their supporters of 2006. The Democrats are going to continue to fail to end the war, continue to fail to stop the corruption in the Justice Department, and fail to stop all of the horrific programs inaugurated by the Administration’s War of Terrorism, because by keeping Bush & Co. in power, the Democrats think they can make the 2008 election be a vote against Bush, rather than against the Republican President candidate. They’re probably right. They stand to make huge gains if they do that, but at the cost of alienating a Democratic voter base that I didn’t think could be alienated a whit more. The Democrats were elected on an anti-war mandate, and they should pursue policies in accord with that mandate, but even the most optimistic fool in our Party can’t think they will. And any faith the faithful have in the Party will be destroyed.