Though Cowards Flinch

Reading the Economist this week, I noted an article which might provide the opening lines to the epitaph of Sunny Hundal’s idea (responded to by myself and Madam Miaow) that the right-wing Tea Party movement are somehow more successful at taking control of the Republican Party than their leftie counterparts.

The usual ideas (clichés?) are floated by Sunny – we socialists are all too busy fighting amongst ourselves etc, they’re more pragmatic while we’re more idealistic etc – but in actual fact, the seeming drift of the Republicans towards the Tea Party movement doesn’t change the nature of the Republican Party at all. Fiery rhetoric about slashing state powers on the ground, continuing corporate welfare when not stumping.

The Economist mentions the primary race for Georgia, in which all the candidates addressed the local Tea Party group and did a grip’n'grin. Candidates thought to be ‘establishment’ candidates – like Oxendine and Deal – lost out to Handel, who in her leaflets denounced her opponents, dubbed “the good ole boys” as “politics as usual”. Handel was also recognised to be more popular at the local Tea Party convention. So far, so good for the Tea Party movement, right?

Well, we’ll see. Ms Handel was endorsed by Sarah Palin, darling of the Republican grassroots, and surged ahead in polling shortly thereafter. Palin is the darling of the Republican grassroots and the Tea Party movement; her endorsements carry a huge amount of weight (or at least press coverage, which can amount to the same thing in races loaded up on TV spots) and she doesn’t wield them against Tea Party people – such as her decision not to endorse Jane Norton over Ken Buck in Colorado.

But who is she endorsing? In Handel’s case, whatever the candidate says about “the good ole boys” and ending “politics as usual”, she’s no outsider. One time President and CEO and a county Chamber of Commerce, having worked as an executive for companies like KPMG, she was appointed Chief of Staff for a previous Georgia governor, and from 2007 until 2010 she served as Secretary of State in Georgia. This is a full-time careerist politico, who, incidentally, has received numerous endorsements from the rest of the Republican establishment.

So what effect, really, is the Tea Party movement having on Republican politics? It would be easy to portray the Deal v. Handel run-off in August as establishment v. Tea Party-backed outsider, as the Economist does, but it would also be lazy. They are both political insiders, and actually, so the commentary from local sources seem to suggest, Handel is probably more liberal than Deal, but she has endorsements from well-known conservative figures to bolster her reputation.

My point in all this is to suggest that the Republican grassroots are being diddled in exactly the same way as Leftie grassroots activists. As has been noted with regard to the Labour leadership election, since the stinging criticisms a couple of months ago that most of the candidates fudged the question of gay marriage, more candidates have come out to back it – as it’s likely to be a popular position with a large section of Labour’s base (though very unpopular with another section).

It’s a sop – it won’t change anything fundamental about Labour’s approach, but it allows the candidates to appeal for grassroots support. The Tea Party movement is being used in the same way. At the bottom are people with a some genuine grievances – the belief that immigration results in worse employment conditions, or the wish that NAFTA should be scrapped, for example. Yet Republicans aren’t going to curb immigration, and they won’t scrap NAFTA. It’ll hurt economic growth.

Meanwhile, far from being grassroots-run, the Tea Party movement is basically a network of professional pressure groups which can link national political figures and large emailing lists, and which can fill stadiums with people who believe that these groups are the last-ditch American defence against socialism. The sort of hyperbole common to true believers here would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous – but the candidates they’re backing don’t share any of these beliefs. People who have served in state and national politics aren’t that naive. They are using the grassroots, and will then promote their own agenda once in office.

The odd sop will be thrown to the base, of course – that’s just good politics. But the disconnection between Right grassroots and leadership, and Left grassroots and leadership is exactly the same.

It should be a lesson that, after eight years of a Republican President, the grassroots of the Right – the sort who idealised things like the 9/12 campaign – were disillusioned and pissed off. Two years in to a Democratic Presidency and Congress which promised much and delivered little, the implication of Sunny’s remarks (though he might not see it like this) are that Democratic supporters expected too much – that blame should lie with the grassroots, rather than with tenacious corporate lobbying, a massively funded propaganda campaign, or with obfuscating Senators.

The grassroots American left has every right to be pissed off. They were taken advantage of – and the Republican grassroots will likely be in the same position once Obama can no longer be the whipping boy for every frothing congressional wannabe.

In the UK, we should learn this lesson. Whoever wins the leadership election now – John McDonnell having failed to make the ballot – the result is going to be a disconnection between what the activists of the party want and what the PLP and the trades union bureaucracies settled for. That’s not the fault of demanding activists – as in America, it is the fault of the process underpinning Labour Party politics.

Former US congressman, Tom Tancredo, spoke on Thursday evening at a Tea Party meeting. The Tea Party groups, which we’ve discussed on this blog before, are supposed grassroots supporters of the view that Obama is a socialist and this his massive programme of deficit spending to bail out the US economy is on a par with the measures of Stalin and Hitler. Nuanced stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Speaking to six hundred delegates of what is supposedly the first national Tea Party conference, Tancredo declared his belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” (repeat foreign-sounding middle name ad nauseam) was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” A lot of commentators have since dwelled on how this echoes the Jim Crow laws which prevented black people voting.

The significance of this should not be lost, in a country which elected a black president. Nevertheless, I think it’s counterproductive to concentrate exclusively on the racial aspect. It is, in fact, an attack on all poor people, of all colours. Whilst black and latino people, and single mothers, are still disproportionately poor according to the last census, the connection of poverty to education is undeniable and transcends race and gender.

American socialists and Democrats should be hammering this message home, as it completely undermines the pretensions of the batshit crazy Tea Party movement to stick up for normal Americans, using rhetoric that portrays Americans as crushed under the jackboot of income tax. It offers the opportunity for radical socialists particularly to escape from the caricature of being addled Ivy League professors.

The Left has confidence in Americans to make up their own mind, without asserting prior conditions before they can have a vote. Moreover, through massive funding of the public school system and full democratic engagement with school boards, it’s the Left which has an answer to the problems of education and poverty.

Meanwhile a genuinely progressive coalition would give substance to our claims of defending the US working class by boosting redistribution – directly and through additional funds for areas of high poverty. Abolishing income tax and FICA tax for those earning under $30,000 and recouping the money through much more stringent corporate taxes, reversing the Bush-era tax cuts and then some, would be a start.

As someone once said, “Let’s hear that dirty word now…SOCIALISM!”

The Bleeding Heart Show recently blogged about the Democratic Party’s netroots and how it could possibly be applied to the Labour Party.

I don’t know if it could work, but there is a single significant thing missing from the Bleeding Heart Show’s analysis that I want to address, and that’s the lack of Democratic Party grassroots. I don’t think it necessarily changes their conclusion, but it needs to be talked about to understand the larger picture.

In the aftermath of Watergate, the Republican Party radically reinvented itself in many ways. A lot of its reinventions are pretty familiar to all but the most casual follower of politics: the Evangelical Right got involved, the South’s incorporation into the Party was completed, but one thing frequently is overlooked, and that was the massive build-up of the Republican Party at the most local and State levels.

The Republican Party built up the grassroots in the 1970′s at local levels: City Council people, State Treasurers, etc., etc., on bread-and-butter issues, like busing, school issues, prayer, and issues that mattered to people at a local level.

The Democratic Party did not do that, and has not done that until the past several years.

While the Republican Party was building up its grassroots, the Democratic Party crumbled. With the collapse of the Clintonian Consensus on how to win elections (triangulation), in 2000, in 2004, and with the demonstration of an alternative model in 2006, the Democratic Party leadership, which was mainly Clintonian, doesn’t have a base.

Enter the netroots. With a Democratic Party from 1992-2006 that didn’t cater to the “Democratic” position on issues (remember, triangulation was to find the traditional Democratic position, the center, and go in the middle of them), true believers of traditional Democratic positions and values had no where to go, until the Internet. With the Internet, the netroots was born, and the bottled up grassroots of the Democratic Party found an outlet.

Results

For the Republican Party, the result of their choice to encourage local and State buildup was huge electoral success from 1980 to the present, dominating State and local governments, State legislatures, Congress (from 1994 to 2006) and the Presidency. The young, local candidates they nurtured in the 1970′s are now mature candidates who run for national positions. Moreover, these guys owe quite a bit to the national Party that nurtured them.

For the Democratic Party, you have a massive fundraising apparatus that is out of the control of the Party, which is particularly fascinating and in contrast to the Republican Party. The netroots has incredible fundraising capabilities, and we’ve seen it do incredible things that the Party could never do.

The clearest example of that are Democratic Primaries (no, not the Presidential ones). The Democratic Party, at a local, State, and National level does not take an official position on primaries. For instance, if the two people are running in a Democratic Primary for a Senate seat, the Party doesn’t endorse one over the other, or fundraise for one over the other. But with the netroots, we see people-powered candidates like Ned Lamont win a Democratic Primary against a sitting Senator, using the fundraising power of the netroots. Similarly, we see candidates like Jim Webb be propelled into the U.S. Senate on the backs of netroots Democrats.

This helps to explain why the Republican netroots isn’t developed. If I’m a Republican activist, there are strong State and local party organizations I can get involved in. There’s no need to snipe at the national Party from the sidelines on my blog: I can go out and shape my party from the ground up, and so they do.

Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy, widely recognized as an attempt to reproduce what the Republican Party did in the 1970′s, will, I think, weaken the netroots. If there’s a competent local and State party apparatus that people can get involved in, won’t they want to join up, rather than comment from the blog sidelines? Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. If the strategy is successful, a lot of the netroots might migrate into local and State party apparatuses, but then again, you might not be able to put the genie back into the bottle.