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TechnoratiThe G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York
The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.
The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.
The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the guillotine.
Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a “true” conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as “global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.
The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.
Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.
Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.
The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.
The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.
The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.
These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.
This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”
They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.
That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).
No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.
Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”
There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.
31 Comments so far
Show AllOn the bank of Lake Placid, next to The Cottage restaurant, there's a sign that says "please do not feed the ducks". But it's not your average sign. It goes on to explain how feeding the ducks screws up their migration habits and whacks their survival skills. Damn, someone actually noticed we have potential intellects, curiosities, and ethics. I promise you nary an elite notices our potential to realize self-determination. So PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ELITES. Because they will enslave you and expend you and then eat your progeny.
OK, but can I feed the ducks instead?
· Yr Obd't Servant
I hope the author is right and it goes down to 0% Republicans. I hope then the same happens to Democrats like him and we end up with 100% Independents and debates full of third party candidates like Nader and Paul.
You know all these articles about big government-hating right-wing nuts seem to be implying that it is the concern about government power that is as much of the problem and the same thing as being conservative. But the two are not the same. What about libertarians, who are the most concerned about government power and are both conservative and liberal? What about Chomsky who considers himself a libertarian socialist and has concerns about government power? What about anarchists? What about the liberal founders of our country?
Anyone on the left who portrays those who question government power as idiots when they are in power is like the Republicans who call leftists unpatriotic when they are in power. In both cases those who question the government are neither idiots nor unpatriotic, they are the wisest and most patriotic Americans.
I was hoping for a better example of Republican Stalinism. There's plenty to choose from.
Every time the right tries to move the country further in their direction, liberals have scoffed at how delusional they were and predicted they would go down in flames. How's that working so far?
1980: Haw, haw, haw! That Ronald Reagan is so far to the right that he will never be elected President!
1992: Haw, haw, haw! Newt Gingrich thinks that the response to Republicans losing the Presidential election to Clinton is to move FURTHER to the right? Does he think that he can put a right-wing majority in charge of Congress? He can't possibly be serious!
2000: Haw, haw, haw! Bush is such an idiot and a right-wing nut! Al Gore will wipe the floor with him in the debates.
2004: Haw, haw, haw! Bush has screwed up the country so bad and moved so far to the right that any Democrat with a pulse should beat the pants off him.
2008: Haw, haw, haw! Do the Republicans seriously think that they can stop the New New Deal with Obama in the White House and Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate?
2010: Haw, haw, haw! Do the Teabaggers seriously think that they can move the Republican party even further to the right and win the midterm elections? The Republicans will be a minor party in no time!
"Every time the right tries to move the country further in their direction, liberals have scoffed at how delusional they were and predicted they would go down in flames. How's that working so far?" -- VAGreen:
Excellent question!
I recall when Governor Ann Richards, Texas, underestimated her opponent, G.W. Bush, and lost to him in 1994. Still, Democrats found him quite amusing, didn't they? In 2000, Governor Richards even tried to warn everyone NOT to underestimate G.W., but we all know how that turned out -- of course, with the help of the Supreme Court.
"The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009"
They still are but not once did Frank Rich cover those races and now just because his state has a seat in play he wants to pretend that something was given importance when it wasn't? Frank Rich is completely wrong. All these races are a strong indicator at the satisfaction of where this country is headed and it's pretty bad so far. The election results in both states, NJ and VA, are unlikely to be close.
Waiting in line at a big-box pharmacy the other day, I was treated to several conversations between the person in line behind me and several of his friends he encountered as he waited. These conversations besides the usual greetings centered on the demise of the Republican Party and their changing allegiences to the Constitutionalists. I smiled to myself and nodded my head in agreement at some of the complaints they aired as it became clear these folks were centerist libertarians and well over 65. Their future concerns vary little from ours, but they were obviously informed, which I cannot say about the Propagandized Teabaggers.
As for the Teabaggers, the man behind the BradBlog, http://www.bradblog.com/ went and videotaped his interviews with a group of teabaggers and turned it into a documentary film of sorts. The link to it is at the top of his main page. Brad networks with antiwar.com and other progressive sites; so if you've haven't been to his blog, you'll be happy to see what he's doing.
Self-described Independents almost outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined!! (That Rich doesn't touch on this stat is important as one could make a similar argument about the Democrats that he's making about the Republicans.) I would say an Independent People's Party could shove both parties to the curb. A vacuum is growing in US politics resulting from the years of policies that put people and the planet last and profits first. This is obvious to a majority of the citizenry, but isn't addressed at all by either party. The bipartisan looting of the future on Wall Street's orders and the wholesale failure of the similarly bipartisan War OF Terror provides a unique historical oppotunity to greatly change US politics and defeat Corporate Hegemony--which is the real enemy.
Corporations are a huge problem and democracy (the real thing) is the antidote. No doubt. But your're way off, in my opinion, in your analysis that envisions all non-registered voters as potential 3rd party members who 'reject' the policies of the 2 main parties (corporatism, to simplify).
You either have capitalism (warts and all) or you have communism. Communism is not a realistic choice (dictatorship under whatever type of deal always leads to major shit...period.)
So we're stuck with capitalism, but democratic countries (Sweden, etc., even Canada) do a much better job of controlling capitalism that does this country, where corporations definitely have way too much control of our economy and culture.
I guess you don't run local campaigns. There are millions of people who are not enrolled in a party, sure, but they cannot be the solution. The reasons are self-evident.
1) People who aren't in a party aren't in a party oftentimes because they don't believe in voting in a partisan way (or at least don't want to be on some state computer list that identifies them as having that potential), that is, they want to independently consider each candidate on the balance of the issues in the particular race. You can't get them to hew to any idea or candidate.
2) People who aren't in a party fall to the same sides as the population at large. In a town where 50% are enrolled Democrats and 35% are enrolled Republicans, even when a third-party or independent candidate is on the ballot the non-enrolled voters vote roughly 50% Democrat, 35% Republican, with a small number going to fringe candidates that correspond very closely to the numbers for those fringe parties.
3) Most people who call themselves independents do so because they think Democrats are too far to the left and Republicans are too far to the right -- that is, they are not opposed to corporatism one bit and will consider anyone proposing an anti-corporate agenda to be extremely far to the left of the Democrats, whom they already consider too far to the left. This is why non-enrolled voters exhibit the voting behavior already described in items 1 & 2.
As far as your idea, it was discussed in the run-up to 2008, with former Democrat then former Republican now non-enrolled Michael Bloomberg as the likely candidate. Think about that -- the richest individual Wall Streeter in Wall Street's home town. He decided to wait, and while he's been waiting, he's formed a "philanthropic" alliance with fellow billionaire Tom Golisano (who had formerly controlled Ross Perot's Reform Party in New York, now called The Independence Party) to re-fuel the Reform Party line. So the "independent" presidential candidacy may yet come to pass, but it's not going to be independent of corporations as you hope. Quite the opposite, it's intended to be the partisan personification of Wall Street interests, devoid of social and culture-war considerations.
In any event, the reason students of electoral conduct ignore the huge numbers of non-enrolled people isn't because of ignorance or a conspiracy of silence controlled by the major parties. It's simply because it's well studied, and independent votes fall out on Election Day in the same proportions as everyone else's. They are not the Sleeping Dinosaur you're hoping for. And if and when they ever Rise Up As One, they'll be voting for Bloomberg or someone just like him, not Nader or someone just like him, so you may as well leave them be.
Barack Obama's most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to get elected.
This article is worthless. Its whole focus is limited to the "horserace" aspect of politics: what's good for the Dems, what's good for the president, & so on. Obsessed with the horserace to the exclusion of all else, it manages to completely ignore the "minor detail" that Obama's policies are essentially the same as Bush's, in all significant respects.
Insofar as the real problems of US society are concerned, it would make no difference even if Democrats won every single election for the next 20 years. The US would still be fighting immoral wars in a desperate attempt to control world oil resources, & spending obscene amounts of money on the military. US society would still be a corrupt corporate oligarchy, where Wall Street owned & operated the government, using the public Treasury as its own private piggy bank. Private insurance companies would still control health care, and oil companies would still control energy & environmental policy. The US media would still be corporate-dominated propaganda (like the NY Times, for example). And Americans would still be forced, in every election, to choose between a Democrat & a Republican.
NY Times liberals like Frank Rich can fill up column after column with stinging ridicule of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh & Glenn Beck, but it's simply a diversion from the far more significant & painful truth, which is that inside the US political system, the so-called "lesser evil" is not meaningfully different from the "greater evil."
In fact, even Frank Rich's implicit premise (& the comfort he thereby offers liberal readers) -- that the GOP is "self-destructing" -- is inherently ridiculous. It's ALWAYS the case in the US that columnists on one side or the other happily chortle about the imminent demise of the other side. But it's NEVER really true -- not least because both parties need each other, & will do anything that's necessary to prevent the destruction of the other party. No one would vote for Democrats if it weren't for the looming specter of GOP boogeymen like Palin or Romney, for example. And no one would vote for Republicans if Democrats weren't so two-faced & hypocritical in their own right.
Writers like Frank Rich are an integral PART of the propaganda system. They don't stand outside it or above it. No less than FOX News, writers that orient to the Dems love the horse-race, need it, & work to ensure that US politics remains permanently limited to choosing between the two parties of big business.
You don't read Frank Rich very often, do you? He writes about what's wrong with the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama, all the time. What's wrong with the Republican Party happens to be his topic today. He doesn't write about that topic very often these days, a) because they're not the ones making the bad decisions just now, being out of power; and b) there's not much interesting going on with them most days. If you separated this one article from the bulk of what he's written all year, you'd take him for a severe moderately left-liberal critic of a centrist-right Democratic Party and President.
Today he's writing about Republicans because something very interesting happened with them yesterday that has serious potential ramifications for the political system at large, not unlike observing that the rise of Bill Clinton did not represent so much popular appeal of a man as an institutional reshaping of the Democratic Party.
I happen to think Rich is wrong on this one -- yesterday's events (the withdrawal of the Republican, resident candidate and the immediate switch of support by the RNC to the non-Republican, non-resident candidate of the teabagger movement) do not signal the continued descent of the Republicans into electoral irrelevancy. Quite the contrary -- it only signals that the angry populists have fully displaced the corporatists at the helm of the party machinery. We already know from recent news reports that the arms industry can't keep up with their demand for bullets, even working all three shifts, seven days a week. New York State was the last bastion of "Rockefeller Republicans." We just came out of 12 years of George Pataki, as moderate a Republican as you'll ever find. He funneled more money into the State Parks system than any previous governor -- not something for which Reagan Republicans are famous. For the Palinites to have so easily vanquished the indigenous New Yorkers on their own turf, turf so secure for Rockefeller Republicans that all eleven elected local Republican Committees (meaning these were not people who didn't have their fingers on the pulse of their membership) had agreed unanimously on a candidate, is newsworthy. Desperately so. It happened because for several weeks now, teabaggers from outside New York, with outside money and Fox promotion, have been coming here, filling up motels, sleeping on couches, buying media time, knocking on doors, pushing hard for this arch-conservative candidate who is not even a resident of the Congressional district, overwhelming the local Republicans. Rich thinks it means the Republicans are becoming increasingly irrelevant. I might agree were it not for the rapidity of the Republican National Committee endorsement and promise of financial and media support to the insurgent. They didn't merely surrender, but offered everything they have as collaborators. I think it means the Republicans are becoming increasingly dangerous. You have the right to think for yourself, but that doesn't make it wise to pretend the events didn't happen and that they're not worth contemplating.
Instead of this boilerplate "anyone at the Times is as guilty as Murdoch" useless auto-reply, stop for a second, think about the events (rather than the person who wrote about them, including me, or who paid to put their thoughts into print) that happened in upstate New York, and ask yourself if there is something going on worthy of your attention -- your physical attention as well as mental notice of the significance. What you have typed here is akin to reading in the Times that someone just detonated a small nuclear device 10 miles upwind from you, and instead of figuring out how to evacuate your family, you throw down the newspaper and yell "The NY Times is just as guilty in the system that caused nuclear weapons to be developed as the NY Post, so this story is worthless to me."
Start organizing. The reason the Palinites are conquering on of the last fortresses of "moderate" Republicanism is because they've been ceaselessly organizing for 30 years and progressives have been doing nothing, and most who have thought to do something have thought to do little more than blog.
START ORGANIZING. Time is running short. Obama is not going to solve the economy or the wars. That means the teabaggers are going to get angrier and angrier, and more willing to make greater sacrifices to get their way. You have only two years to organize to sufficient power to match the forces of regression that have been organizing, live, face-to-face, for thirty years. The odds are overwhelmingly against you already, but as every day goes by they get closer to zero.
Getting started and staying in operation is easy and does not require money. Read here: www.commonplans.blogspot.com
The Adirondack North Country is hardly the last bastion of Rockefeller Republicanism. At least half of it is downright hillbilly, the last bastion of NY Rednecks. Palin is a pefect fit for the area.
I was referring to New York State, which, overall, is the first and last bastion of Rockefeller Republicanism in America. We were the state where Republicans were people like Jacob Javitz, and Ben Gilman, and George Pataki, and Nelson Rockefeller, and Dede Scozzafava. Sure, there are plenty of others not as "nice," but in New York State overall, and in the 23rd in particular (already represented by Scozzafava at the state level, and formerly by McHugh in the congressional seat), the "nice" ones were the norm. We have no meaningful anti-gay, anti-woman Republican leaders in this state. Hell, even the despicable Rudy Giuiliani was pro-gay and pro-choice, and still makes speeches at NY Republican committee meetings advising the party to focus on strong military and business freedom and drop all the social stuff. On top of that, Scozzafava was nominated unanimously by all 11 Republican Committees in the 23rd. There can be no evidence-backed claim that either Ms. Sozzafava or the process by which she rose up through the party ranks to this nomination did not reflect the prevailing Republicanism of the 23rd. The Conservative candidate doesn't even live in the district, and is running on no district issues, just the social repression stuff that the Christians and Teabaggers get so fired up about. He's pure culture warrior and know knowledge or experience, just like Palin. And that's why I'm scared by the RNC capitulation, and how it happened with no discussion time (which would have been useful, given that the local Republicans seem pretty upset with the National's collaborating, as shown by Scozzafava's endorsement of the Democrat). But no, the RNC has seen the writing on the wall -- the base of their party is now all culture war, no governing philosophy. It was a long time coming, and now it's completely here. The weapons of mass electoral destruction in the silos of the Republican Party are now controlled by bona fide extremists. It's time for all the laughing to stop, or we'll be crying -- maybe even fleeing, with nobody to buy our homes, and no foreign land willing to take us -- come 2013.
You make many good points and it's obvious you know what's going on in upstate NY. But the demand that progressives, liberals and leftists "start organizing" has been made for 40 years to little or no avail. Everyone says this, on Common Dreams and everywhere else, and has for countless years. Nothing much happens apart from a few fairly hapless efforts that fade out in a matter of months for lack of numbers and appeal to a mostly indifferent citizenry. Mainly, these groups, such as MoveOn, PDA and a handful of others, refuse to work together over petty differences and the posturing of leaders more interested in controlling their turf than in formulating a vision that has enery and conviction. The problem is, the left hasn't learned how to organize effectively since the 1940s, so lecturing us on getting out there and doing it begs a question: How? What are you doing?
Please read the website, www.commonplans.blogspot.com. I'm not lecturing -- I'm pleading with everyone to please start organizing. The site shows what we're doing in my town. We follow the models I've listed on the site. Of course it doesn't show how well we're succeeding, which I avoided deliberately, because I don't want to convey that I'm presenting myself as a potential national-scale leader, or spamming for support for my organization's agenda, which is local for our town and county, nor do I want to be dismissed as boastful, rather than helpful, which is all I'm trying to be. I'm trying to bottle the stuff we use so others can drink it.
You can google my name and my town's name "New Paltz, NY." Although many of our early impacts, starting in May 2003, are slowly disappearing from cyberspace news, you'll still find plenty. We elected three Green Party candidates to our Village Board in May, 2003, which were simultaneously the first Greens elected in our state and the first municipality with a Green board majority. I and some of the people I still work with were on that campaign committee. You'll find the name Jason West, who became Mayor, and the following winter became quite famous as a result of same-sex marriages. I strategized the media campaign for the weddings and the court cases that followed. I personally organized a write-in campaign that ended corporate support for Liberty Counsel, the Falwell organization's law firm that was bringing court cases against Jason and gay rights activists throughout America, in a single day. We drove a neo-Nazi recruiting drive out of town. I organized a local movie theater chain boycott for running a racist ad that also claimed they wouldn't show Michael Moore movies. That got me attacked by name and address on almost every major right-wing media program, including Rush Limbaugh, and publicity on Moore's website. The theater chain pulled the ad. When I tried to primary against Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2005, the mainstream media lit up like a Christmas tree, but that effort faded in the face of overwhelming opposition from the PDA. In 2008 I got elected to the School Board, and this spring a key member of my campaign team got elected, completing a new progressive majority. This fall we ran a candidate against a Democratic Committee-suppported 8 year incumbent at their own caucus for a town position, and won by over a two-to-one margin. That candidate will win tomorrow in a blow-out. There have been other things along the way -- becoming one of the first towns to have our boards approve resolutions opposing the wars, the Patriot Act, etc., and a raft of new environmental regulations and rejections of inappropriate development projects -- we're not primarily electoral (which is the key to being successful -- you work to direct legislators to do what you want, and only work to kick them out when no other method works).
I recommend strongly against the tactics of the PDA and MoveOn. Obviously those tactics don't work, as you can see. They can't work, for two reasons. The biggest is that they subscribe to the "inside-outside" theory, and that theory has never worked, so I don't know why people keep trying it. Worse, it actually weakens the non-partisan issue activist groups whose wore they're hoping to support by forcing them under the umbrella of partisan electoral politics. The second reason they don't work is because they're top-down organizations -- they start with a political party they want to support, they devise a platform, they try to raise substantial funds (which compromises them to a party program the exact same way our dysfunctional campaign finance system does the same thing to "electable" candidates), and then engage in a massive outreach to identify and cull large numbers of people who will agree to support the leadership in whatever they choose to do. As Code Pink just displayed this month, when you push to a place where your donors feel their partisan position is threatened, you either agree to be triangulated down or your funding gets pulled. Now Code Pink is officially out of the anti-war movement, because they got drunk on Democratic Party donations and the media attention it bought. With all due respect to the many well-intentioned people who have been roped into this, all of this is bass-ackwards. You organize around issues. You stay fluid around electoral affairs -- you have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.
The main thing is to get started. Almost nobody is getting started. It's depressing. Please visit www.commonplans.blogspot.com, chew it's content over for an hour with two or three friends, and start something local. We'll all meet up soon enough, and when we do, we'll have power beyond our own towns. No cart before the horse like PDA and MoveOn, no partisan allegiance as the alpha and omega like PDA and MoveOn. It's DYI, it's easy, it's very inexpensive, and it works.
I totally agree with you about MoveOn, PDA and other Dem Party affiliated efforts. I have zero interest in participating in those work-from-within tactics. Every one of them gets either co-opted or watered down to the point of absurdity. But the work you describe here scarcely sounds "easy." Or inexpensive, for that matter. My God, you're a full-time political activist if you've taken on all this. It's your career, or may as well be, which is fine and noteworthy, but hardly anyone else has the time for all that. Not to mention the dedication and resolve.
You're working on a very local level and it sounds more time-consuming than if you were a key staffer for a national campaign. How many people do you really think will commit to that? I'm in a very rural area in the Midwest, and there's no question of trying to do anything like what you describe here. I know maybe three people around here who are even remotely liberal, much less crusading progressives. And it's no more rightwing here than most anywhere else in the midwest, which means it is rightwing, but mainly as an unthinking reflex to events. Mostly there's just massive indifference. No one feels they can possibly have the slightest effect on anything. Telling them we need to "organize" would only elicit blank stares or advice to "get back on your meds" or some such dismissive drivel.
People are not organizing or even thinking about it, in significant numbers, because they are convinced they're completely powerless. I know, that's a circular mindset, they remain powerless because they've resigned themselves to it. If only they would organize . . . but you can't get them anywhere near the idea. They'd have no idea what it means, they're all over the place with blaming various (mostly liberal-sounding) causes and groups for all their perceived problems. The kind of organizing you're talking about may go on at a number of localities, small towns or neighborhoods in big cities, maybe electing a Green candidate here and there on school boards, town councils, possibly getting a real progressive in a state government position here and there, but it doesn't seem to ever advance beyond this. The duopoly still rules nationally and on every state level. So the illegal wars just keep churning, no health care reform is on the near or far horizon, the economy stays firmly in the hands of the kleptocracy no matter how much they destroy it, and all we get is Democrat or Republican "choices" for our corrupt leadership positions. Or, we get to eternally argue about whether voting third party is good or bad. We never seem to get off that merry-go-round.
I don't do it full-time. I'm a musician by trade. I also don't even do this with all my volunteer time -- I'm a volunteer firefighter. I'm on the School Board. I have three kids and chaperone class trips, little league, music lessons, etc. I go on dates with my wife -- (lucky to have my Mom and Dad to babysit, or we couldn’t afford that, but that is part of improvising a good life for yourself based on your own circumstances). But there are many things that are part of the normal, American consumer life of which I partake much less than most people. Transformation requires sacrifice. I find sacrificing things that money can buy is pretty easy and frees me up to focus on relationships. The people who commit themselves to the forces we're fighting make unbelievable sacrifices, some reaching heroic proportions. Our side is very light on the willingness-to-sacrifice end, which not only holds back our effectiveness, but keeps us from being newsworthy (this last part is worth a whole separate essay -- we complain too much about not getting coverage, but the truth is, we don't do much that merits coverage).
The big thing affecting the time management end is I do this stuff for enjoyment, like some people go bowling every Wednesday night. I don't have to win to be glad I went out -- it's about the relationships. It's therefore quite possible that the reason I spend so much time at it is because I don't have cable. I watch no TV at all, and believe me, it hasn't diminished the quality of my life one bit. But based on American averages, it opens up something like 6 hours of every day. The people I work with have TV (probably don't watch it as much as most people), they have 40 hour, modest-paying jobs, kids, the whole thing. It's just not as time consuming as you're thinking by just looking at it like its a chart. And trust me, turning off the TV is incredibly liberating. And once you get into doing these things regularly, the prep time shortens up, as you know from practice which systems you've already built any new project should be channeled through. But we're digressing.
If you look at the blog, you'll see that I'm advising you to start out by doing nothing more than hanging out together. Build a habit, like bowling night, or church, or Fire Department training night (every Monday, 7 - 10 PM). You get together at the same place, same time, every week, for the same amount of time. If you have no project, and you're having a hard time figuring out how to fill out this week's two hours, show a movie and invite people down to watch, like "Meet John Doe," or "Norma Rae," not just the obvious things that will scare people like Fahrenheit 911 or King Corn. This stuff is available free from your library. There are a million ways to pass time, so do whatever fulfills you, but the main thing is, you're becoming a community. You also make yourself present in your rural community by volunteering for town committees, whether it be something devoted to policy like the Transportation Committee, or just the Spring Park Cleanup committee. You'll meet more people, and the people who meet you will slowly come to think of you as reliable, committed to community service, and a useful ally.
I know all about rural right-wingers. I'm surrounded by them every day in the Fire Department. Obviously my politics are no secret, and that made my initial entry a bit challenging. But I still got elected department secretary each of the last two years. One of the things we also have to do is stop ghettoizing ourselves in our larger lives. We have to start showing up in places where people don't usually meet people like us, and don't bring our politics with us -- just show up as ourselves, and do work that's the mission of whatever it is you joined. As they get to know you, they learn that you're not out to destroy America, that liberals are not all cowards who leave the risky stuff to their "inferiors," that you're not an elitist, that you don't mind getting bruised or dirty, that you're a decent person, committed to the betterment of your community, raising a decent family, etc. and when someone like Sarah Palin starts talking about the "real America," they choose to embrace you instead of a meddling outsider like her. The organizing process is personally as well as socially transformative. It's worth it.
If you're starting out thinking your new effort is somehow tied to power or the prospect of achieving it, you'll have a very hard time getting started and not getting depressed with sluggish response. But if your only goal (at first) is to just hang out every Wednesday night with the handful of coolest people in town (or in your county if your town's too small) and spend your time in a mutually enjoyable way, you'll succeed from the very first gathering. It feels good. The rest comes from there, but there's no place for the rest to come from if you don't start from the starting point. Maybe in your town you'll never be a force to be reckoned with, but perhaps what you've accomplished is to put exactly four people together who are so dedicated, and enjoy each other's company so much, that they can get on a bus and go to a neighboring town for four days before Primary Day doing Get Out The Vote for a progressive candidate who has a close shot at winning, if only he or she had four more quality door-knockers for the last four days. Just like all those Christians who came from out of state to destroy the local Republican in the 23rd. Learn from what works.
Steve
www.commonplans.blogspot.com
Partisan analysis as usual. The Republicans wouldn't be making a comeback if the Democrats would boldly stand for the people rather than the corporate interests. As usual, FR lives in his own corporate bubble. Both the Republicans and Democrats stink in their own ways !
I'm surprised Frank Rich can't see the connection between his closing paragraph and the fact that it's dangerous to assume, as he does throughout the rest of the article, that what's going on in NY's 23rd is bad for the future of the Republican Party. Read his last paragraph again:
"There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down."
Yes, but what happens if Obama loses control (as all evidence has it he will) of Afghanistan and the economy? Doesn't a new reality come into play then? Won't the Republicans continue to be the only major party that can organize sufficient resources to beat Obama's bid for a second term, and all the members of Congress that will be thrown out along the way? Does anyone think they're going to opt out of the coming political opportunities?
Something significant and dangerous has happened in NY's 23rd. The right-wing maniacs have conquered the Republican Party. Eleven local committees unanimously endorsed a candidate, and today the Republican National Party instantaneously supported out-of-state invaders and an candidate who doesn't even reside in the 23rd district instead of enforcing the party chain of command. The Republican National Committee has now formally become the Vichy Republican Party, fully beholden to the Christian fundamentalists and far-right extremists they empowered in 1980 to help them overcome Watergate. Just like the corporatists in Weimar Germany who started financing the early Nazis as an intervention against rising Communism and the chaos of social disorder resulting from the WW1 loss and the Great Depression, the Republicans of the 1980's failed to calculate that empowering maniacs raises the specter of eventually losing control. And that was before "mainstream" Republicans had to face the ignominy of losing to a Black guy, and then trying to cope with that by naming a weak Black guy to their own top post, who immediately ceded control to Rush Limbaugh.
For Rich to ignore the terrible dangers of Stage Two when things don't go perfectly for Obama in Stage One is like pretending the first domino somehow doesn't hit the second when it falls. And things can't go perfectly for Obama in Stage One, because all the money and manpower needed to keep Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan from spiraling down their predictable path is the same money and manpower he needs to fix the American economy. Since he needs to do both to avoid being voted out in 2012, and since he can only do one or the other, the first domino is already starting its tip towards the second. And since all the dominoes behind the second now belong to the media demagogues in the employ of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes (who now control the corporate end of the supply of communication via the Wall Street Journal along with the populist end via the yellow press that provided their entrance), someone had better start nailing the second domino into the ground pretty damned hard if we're not going to face the onset of ultimate disaster in the very near future.
We're all worried about Pakistan falling into the hands of extremists because Pakistan has nukes. Well, we have the most nukes, and one of our two major parties just had its chain of command usurped by extremists. This is not bad for the Republican party, because as of today, the "Republican Party," which breathed its last gasp through the equally old and ailing John McCain, is now something else. And since they're the only place in the ballot booth people land when they fall away from the Democrats, it's time to be scared.
Sorry, Frank. I love your work, but you missed the target this time, very wide, to the right. What happened today in NY's 23rd CD isn't bad for the Republican Party. It's bad for everyone. We'd better smarten up and take this seriously. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. This is the time to remember history. As Glenn Beck points out every day, the Republic is in peril. The forces of good must not stand idle doing nothing, as that is all evil needs to triumph.
Don’t count the Republicans out yet. They have nothing to lose by having a fight among themselves for control of their party right now while they are down. Once it is settled they will close ranks and walk all over the doormat Democrats.
It won’t matter whether the “center” right controls the Republicans or the lunatic fringe. They will have a unified party that has the backing of every large corporation and control over all of the media.
Contrast this to the Democrat’s strategy of waiting until they have full control of the white house and congress before they fall to fighting among themselves.
In the process of purging their party the Republicans can easily afford to lose seats in congress. However small their number, they can count on the doormat Democrats to hand them a fifty percent stake in any congressional committee and for the “blue dogs” to side with them.
There is only one political opponent whom Democrats really have to worry about at this moment: Rahm Emmanuel.
Frank Rich's comparison of the Palin wing of the GOP as Jacobins was spot on. Like the guillotine utilizing politicians of Revolutionary France, ideological purity has overruled every other consideration to the point of strategic failure. What progressives must be on the look out for is a GOP Napoleon like figure who takes over out of the chaos that is sure to enmesh the Republican Party. Other than that, I gain a certain measure of schadenfreude watching the party that has dragged America into virtual Third World status implode and irrevocably start down the road to irrelevance, finally joining their predecessors, the Whigs, into the annals of history.
Vive le revolution!
May they self-destruct, and in record-breaking time.
They are not self-destructing. All that has happened is that extremists have solidified control. This is something to fear and take deadly seriously, not to chuckle over. Many of us saw this coming. The Republican National Convention of 2008 was the last gasp. The machinery isn't disappearing -- it's just being taken over by extremists, extremists who are angry, irrational, paranoic, and extremely well-funded.
Does this sound like anyone we remember from the 20th century, who took power under conditions of war-weariness and persistent economic privation without benefit of having said a single sensible word?
This is no laughing matter. Quit laughing and get to work.
www.commonplans.blogspot.com
Italy in 1922 is a more apt comparison.
ummm... Weimar Germany?
Wow. Got it on the first try! Wonder how Frank Rich missed it.
Please start a small, regularly meeting group in your immediate locale. Visit www.commonplans.blogspot.org for tips on this that definitely work. I'm using them now in a town called New Paltz, NY and they definitely work. We're kicking butt here. A handful of people have developed significant, consistent progressive influence over local politics without partaking in anyone's machine and without leaning itself towards a political party.
Sioux Rose
STEVE: You're obviously a shrewd, political animal. Not everyone is equipped for picking up the torch that comes naturally to you. As for local organizing, I live in a very conservative Christian Bible belt town and keep my politics under the radar for very good reasons. Upstate NY (I went to college in Albany and was friendly with a jazz musician who resided in New Paltz, so I know the zone) has far more pockets of progressive thinkers than much of the south. If you've ever seen the map of hate groups and neo-nazi organizations published by The Southern Poverty Center, you'd see the concentration where I live, not unlike Western Pa. Organizing is a sound strategy, just not for everyone. My path is to write in the hopes of awakening minds, especially those that have the capacity to synthesize data, once they are able to see all that they have not seen, or been allowed to see.
Please see what I wrote to Ephraim above. I wasn't born a shrewd political animal. I learned it by doing this with my life, no differently than the childhood time I spent practicing music and being shuttled by my parents to concert band rehearsals on Saturday mornings. I eventually became a decent musician, and now it's my job. It's the same thing now. All I did was spend a few hours a week over several years with people who wanted to comprehend and act upon various causes. Now I'm good at it -- most of what I need for this is now as automatic to me as playing a major arpeggio in any key.
I live in an enclave that's encircled by hostile territory. Even freewheeling New Paltz was Republican-controlled just 10 years ago. Even after the successes of the progressives in the last five years, we took on the National Alliance right here in New Paltz a few years ago. I was threatened, and had my photo put on the opening page of the Stormfront website. But we mobilized our community to become inhospitable to nazi organizing, and they withdrew. Rush Limbaugh threatened on-air to lead a mass right-wing rally here in response to my theater boycott, but he never materialized. Refused to let me call in to his show, too.
I know organizing is not for everyone. The trouble is, for the last 35 years in progressive circles, organizing has been for practically no one. That absolutely has to stop. The whole world is suffering from our absence. Just as not everyone is an organizer, or at ease taking risks, not everyone is a writer. Someone has to be out in the field. In fact, almost everyone has to be out in the field. The gosh darned internet, with its free, corporate advertising-driven blog sites, as turned everyone and his mother into a published writer. If you're certain the movement is better off with you being one of its writers, then do what I'm doing with some of your writing -- tell people to become organizers, or at least hang out with organizers.