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If my e-mail inbox is any indication, many American progressives plan to use the Nov. 2 election as an opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by either not voting or casting ballots for third parties, even if this contributes to the expected Republican (and Tea Party) landslide.
If my e-mail inbox is any indication, many American progressives plan to use the Nov. 2 election as an opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by either not voting or casting ballots for third parties, even if this contributes to the expected Republican (and Tea Party) landslide.
The thinking seems to be that the loss of the congressional majorities will punish the Democrats for accepting half-measures and compromises on issues from health care and financial reform to job stimulus and war. The Left's hope apparently is that the chastened Democrats will then shift toward more progressive positions and be more assertive.
However, modern American political history tells us that this strategy never works. After the four key elections in which many progressives abandoned the governing Democrats - in 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 - not only did Republicans take U.S. politics further to the right, but the surviving Democrats tacked more to the center and grew more timid.
All four elections also were marred by GOP dirty tricks that drew little or no reaction from either the governing Democrats or the progressives, emboldening the slash-and-burn Republicans to operate in an ever more audacious style.
Tragically, too, the Left's sideline-sitting contributed to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people in wars from Vietnam and Central America to Iraq and Afghanistan. Arguably even worse, U.S. inaction on global warming - a neglect surely to be continued if Republicans and Tea Partiers are victorious in Election 2010 - may doom the future of a livable planet.
In other words, the "teach-the-Dems-a-lesson" strategy not only doesn't work, it's extremely dangerous.
The Vietnam Precedent
Take, for instance, the pivotal election of 1968. The Left was furious with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam War and with the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for the bloody Chicago convention.
Many on the Left refused to support Humphrey, even though they knew that would help the election chances of the divisive and disreputable Richard Nixon. Some anti-war activists voted for minor third-party candidates while others simply sat out Election Day, allowing Nixon to win one of the closest elections in U.S. history by less than one percentage point.
However, we now know - based on declassified information from Johnson's presidential library - that Johnson was on the verge of a peace settlement with the North Vietnamese in Paris and that Humphrey's election likely would have led to a rapid end of the Vietnam War.
Nixon, who was getting briefings on the progress in Paris, knew that a breakthrough was imminent. The evidence is also now clear that Nixon, possessing that knowledge, let his campaign make contacts with the South Vietnamese government behind Johnson's back, promising President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal if he boycotted the Paris talks.
Thieu did as Nixon's campaign wished, refusing to attend the peace talks, thus torpedoing hopes for a quick end to U.S. participation in the war. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Significance of Nixon's 'Treason.'"]
After taking office, President Nixon had no choice but to continue - and to expand - the war in pursuit of a better outcome for Thieu, who after all knew of Nixon's treachery.
The additional four years of war resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers and millions of Indochinese in Vietnam and Cambodia, yet the final peace agreement mirrored what had been available to the United States in 1968.
Nixon's nasty, take-no-prisoners style also shook the political foundations of the United States. The nation grew bitterly divided; parents turned against their own children; war-fueled inflation ate away at incomes; hopes for alleviating poverty vanished; and Americans came to doubt their government could accomplish anything good.
The national wounds inflicted by that ugly era have never fully healed. Much of that, however, might have been avoided if disaffected progressives had swallowed their anger and cast their ballots for Humphrey.
'Good for the Country'
During Nixon's Paris-peace-talk gambit, the governing Democrats also revealed what would become a pattern for them, an unwillingness to expose political wrongdoing by Republicans ostensibly to avert partisan divisions for "the good of the country."
President Johnson was aware of what he called Nixon's "treason" in the days before Election 1968 and was tempted to expose the illicit contacts. However, other senior Democrats fretted that exposure of such treachery might not prevent Nixon from winning, yet could destroy his legitimacy as president.
"Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I'm wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected," said Defense Secretary Clark Clifford in a conference call with Johnson on Nov. 4, 1968. "It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests."
Clifford's argument carried the day. Johnson remained silent, Nixon won, and Johnson carried the secret of Nixon's peace-talk sabotage to his grave.
So, in 1968, the U.S. political process was undergoing three dangerous transformations. The Left was separating itself from practical politics; the Republicans were learning that they could win by playing dirty; and the governing Democrats were shying away from demanding accountability for Republican abuses.
Over the next 42 years, all three of these patterns have deepened, combining to create a political crisis for the nation.
Republican Extremes
Over the past four decades, the only times when the Left and the governing Democrats have pulled together in a meaningful way were when the Republicans were in power and when that power went to their heads.
That was the case when Nixon, who had locked himself into a continuation of the Vietnam War, went nearly crazy in denouncing anti-war protesters as "bums" and going to extremes to block publication of the Pentagon Papers secret history of the war in 1971.
Nixon's paranoia then led him to commit felonies surrounding his Watergate political spying operation, a scandal that played out from 1972 until Nixon's resignation in 1974. The Watergate case was one of the few times when the governing Democrats and the Left mostly were on the same page, objecting to Nixon's abuses.
However, whenever the Democrats were in power and had the potential to accomplish something meaningful, the split always reopened. The governing pragmatists sought incremental change in an often difficult political/media environment, while the idealists demanded sweeping reforms regardless of public resistance.
The division opened up during Jimmy Carter's presidency when the Left viewed Carter as too centrist and too cautious, prompting a primary challenge from liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1980. Kennedy's bid fell short but left behind deep antagonisms between the two wings of the Democratic Party.
Many progressives turned a deaf ear to Carter's warnings about what Ronald Reagan's election would do to the country. Some backed independent John Anderson or other minor candidates, and some simply didn't vote.
Iranian Crisis
As it turned out, Carter - like Johnson and Humphrey - was facing Republican skullduggery. The evidence is now overwhelming that elements of Reagan's campaign contacted Iranian officials who were then holding 52 Americans hostage, a crisis that was eroding Carter's remaining political support.
Like Nixon with Thieu, Reagan's team appears to have offered the Iranians a better deal than Carter did, in this case, promises of military hardware via Israel that Iran needed for its conflict with neighboring Iraq.
Failing to win the hostages' release, Carter saw his reelection hopes dashed. With the first anniversary of the humiliating hostage-taking coming on the day of the election, the polls showed a suddenly widening lead for Reagan who coasted to an easy victory. The hostages were finally released immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
(As with the Nixon-Vietnam scheme, governing Democrats recoiled at the idea of holding the Republicans accountable even when extensive evidence of Reagan's Iran contacts came to light in the last half of the 1980s and the early 1990s. For "the good of the country," Democrats again swept the evidence under the rug.) [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Reagan's election marked another turning point in American history, and it was not a positive one. President Carter, for all his shortcomings, had begun addressing some of the big problems confronting the United States, including the need for alternative energy sources, Middle East peace, and human rights as a core value in U.S. foreign policy.
Reagan, however, countered with a "don't worry, be happy" approach to the future. Tax cuts would swell revenues; no need to worry about your gas-guzzlers; government was the problem, not the rapidly expanding power of multinational corporations; human rights were for sissies.
In selling his policies, Reagan also was aided by a rapidly expanding right-wing news media that was bankrolled to challenge the remnants of the Watergate-era press corps. Meanwhile, the Left largely abandoned the goal of having a national media infrastructure. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Left's Media Miscalculation."]
Ugly Americans
Despite the harm that Reagan's economic policies did to the United States - corporations accelerating the shipping of jobs overseas, unions broken, Carter's solar panels ripped from the White House roof - perhaps Reagan's most destructive actions came in his global strategies.
Reagan unleashed right-wing "death squads" in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua - killing tens of thousands. To challenge the Soviet Union, he funded Islamist radicals in Afghanistan who would become the backbone of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He acquiesced to Pakistan's building of nuclear bombs, perhaps today's greatest threat to world security.
To justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars more on U.S. military hardware, Reagan also oversaw the politicization of the CIA's analytical division so it would exaggerate the Soviet threat in the 1980s. Two decades later, that perversion of U.S. intelligence would help justify the invasion of Iraq with "fixed" analytical reports about non-existent WMDs.
In terms of government personnel, Reagan credentialed a young group of intellectuals and ideologues who became known as the neoconservatives. To justify U.S. interventions abroad, these neocons felt justified in using propaganda techniques to manipulate the American people, herding them like cattle in a desired direction. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Many on the American Left who had abandoned Jimmy Carter were aghast at what Reagan did, especially the atrocities in Central America. But the blame was put mostly on the hapless ex-President and the governing Democrats.
There was very little soul-searching on the Left, which viewed itself as essentially blameless for the catastrophes that the Reagan years wrought.
The Clinton Years
The Reagan excesses, especially the mirage of tax cuts producing extra revenue and the myth that the United States didn't need an industrial base, created so much economic pain by 1992 that Bill Clinton was able to exploit a split in the conservative vote - between President George H.W. Bush and billionaire Ross Perot - and slip into the White House.
Clinton's election also came at a time when evidence was finally pouring in regarding political and national security crimes of the early Reagan years, including the Reagan campaign's arms-for-hostages deals with Iran in both 1980 and later with the Iran-Contra Affair and Reagan's secret orders to help arm Iran's enemies in Iraq.
In late 1992, so much new evidence of Republican guilt was arriving at a House task force investigating the 1980 hostage crisis that chief counsel Lawrence Barcella said he urged the chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, to extend the inquiry for a few more months, but Hamilton declined citing political difficulties.
Instead, with the goal of maintaining some bipartisan comity in Washington at the start of the Clinton administration, Hamilton's task force concealed much of the new evidence and issued a report asserting Republican innocence.
In a similar way, the new Clinton administration helped clean up for Reagan and his team on the continuing Iran-Contra investigation (which represented a sequel to the 1980 Republican-Iranian contacts) and on the Iraq-gate scandal regarding clandestine military assistance to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
High Hopes
As Bill Clinton became the first Democratic president in a dozen years, the governing Democrats had high hopes that they could make progress on some difficult issues that had been ignored under Republican rule, including health care and environmental initiatives. The Democrats also moved to get the nation's deficit under control, approving a modest rise in income tax rates.
Yet, for all the Clinton administration's hopes for bipartisanship, the Democrats instead encountered near unanimous Republican opposition to every major initiative. Not a single GOP vote was cast in favor of Clinton's budget in either the House or the Senate.
Instead, the Republicans relied on their expanding right-wing media, which had added powerful AM radio programming to an influential roster of newspapers, magazines and book publishing houses. Voices on the Right like Rush Limbaugh made every day a fiesta of Clinton bashing.
As the Democrats headed toward Election 1994, the Republicans and their right-wing media allies rallied the conservative base with wild stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton as a kind of Arkansas-based Bonnie and Clyde, leaving a string of death and corruption in their wake.
Though political pundits cite the collapse of health care reform as the key blow to the Democratic majorities, the media-driven hysteria about the Clintons also was a major factor in the right-wing tidal wave that was building. The failure of the American Left to invest in a media infrastructure to counter the Right was another little-noticed factor. A strategic media imbalance was forming.
Yet, even if the Left had worked on building a media infrastructure, it's not clear that progressive voices would have done much to protect the Clintons from the right-wing attacks. To many on the Left, the Clintons were a couple who had long since sold out their principles to corporate interests.
So, with both American progressives and mainstream Democrats discouraged and demoralized, the Republican tsunami in November 1994 wiped out not only the fragile Democratic Senate majority but ended the long-time Democratic control of the House.
Reagan Redux
The Republicans saw their resounding victory as a mandate to resume Reagan's assault on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Trying to assert his "relevance," Clinton conceded that "the era of big government is over."
For the next six years, the Republicans and the right-wing media derided government programs that tried to help the middle class and the poor, while pushing through more and more deregulation of corporations, including repeal of a New Deal law separating commercial and investment banks. The repeal passed with the support of the Clinton administration.
Besides trying to dismantle much of the federal government, the Republicans hounded Clinton, finally impeaching him in the House for lying about an extramarital affair. Though Clinton survived a humiliating Senate trial, the Republicans were optimistic about regaining total control of Washington in Election 2000.
The Republican presidential nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, was a thinly qualified scion of a political royal family. Opposite him was Clinton's wonky Vice President Al Gore, who was an expert on the complex workings of government and who had a particular passion for the environment, alternative energy and the pressing need to address global warming.
In my view, Election 2000 may have represented the last real chance for the world to turn back from environmental devastation and from the dangerous political instability that will follow. In 2000, the future of the planet was truly in the balance - and Gore, despite his lack of charisma, may have been the best person for the job, at least the best that modern U.S. politics could produce.
However, much of the Left viewed Gore as an unacceptable centrist. A number of prominent progressives also rejected my warnings about the dangers posed by Bush, particularly my concern that he would restore the neoconservatives to positions of power over foreign policy.
I was especially alarmed by Bush's choice of Dick Cheney to be his vice presidential running mate. I had covered Cheney for years when he was in Congress and knew him to be a rigid ideologue who was much closer philosophically to the neocons than was generally understood.
Bush Illusions
At the time, most political analysts of all stripes viewed Bush as an Establishment Republican. They accepted his self-description as "a compassionate conservative" and thought he would govern with his father's moderation, surrounded by his father's old foreign policy hands, the likes of Brent Scowcroft and James Baker.
I was assured by several left-wing political analysts that I was overly alarmed at the prospects of a neocon revival if Bush won.
This widely held viewpoint fed into the notion on the Left that Bush would not be much different from Gore and that Election 2000, therefore, represented a good opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by showing them that they couldn't "take the Left for granted."
So, many progressives decided that they would back Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
To rally more support on the Left, Nader's campaign touted what may be one of the biggest - and most dangerous - lies ever told in American politics, that "there's not a dime worth of difference" between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Nader succeeded not only in siphoning off votes from Gore but his attacks on the Vice President - often echoing similar attack lines from the Republicans - frustrated the Gore campaign's efforts to gain momentum.
A Stolen Election
Though Gore still managed to outpoll Bush by about a half million votes nationwide and almost surely would have beaten Bush in the key state of Florida if all legally cast votes were counted, Bush used a combination of clever lawyering and hardball politics to seize the White House. [For details, see Neck Deep.]
To this day, very few Nader supporters will admit that they contributed to Bush's tainted victory, although it should be obvious that Nader's votes in Florida - if most would have gone to Gore - would have put the election too far out of reach for Bush to steal.
A Gore presidency also would have taken the country in a far different direction. Most significantly, he might have made significant progress in getting the United States to face up to the crisis of global warming, an existential threat to mankind that Bush studiously ignored.
It may be a bitter irony that the one major political accomplishment of America's Green Party will be that it helped condemn the world to environmental disaster.
Whether Nader backers acknowledge their complicity or not, the hard truth is that the American Left - in this attempt to "teach the Democrats a lesson" - contributed to the dangerous ascension of George W. Bush to power.
Besides his inaction on global warming, Bush restored the neocons to key positions throughout the foreign policy bureaucracy and, after 9/11, adopted their aggressive strategy for seeking violent "regime change" in Muslim countries considered hostile to Israel.
As a result of Bush's "global war on terror" and his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands have died and many more - including many children and other noncombatants - have lost limbs and suffered maiming.
Bush also trampled on traditional constitutional and legal principles with his assertion of unlimited presidential powers that included his secret wiretapping of citizens, his waiving of habeas corpus rights to a fair trial, and his torturing prisoners held in clandestine prisons.
At home, Bush's tax cuts mostly for the rich and his further deregulation of corporations contributed to a bubble-and-bust economy that - by the end of his eight years in office - had devastated the American middle class, which had grown during the Clinton years but was rapidly shrinking by late 2008 and early 2009 with the disappearance of millions of jobs.
Brief Reunion
Because of the alarm over the Bush administration, the Left and the governing Democrats found common ground in Election 2006 and 2008. In Election 2008, many progressives set aside their concerns about Barack Obama's accommodating style of politics and rallied behind the first major-party African-American candidate for U.S. president.
Obama's historic victory in November 2008 touched many progressives as it did other Americans, though some on the Left resisted any sentimentality.
On Election Night, I encountered Ralph Nader at the make-shift studio in downtown Washington where TheRealNews.com was handling its election coverage. He had run again as an independent candidate but had gotten far fewer votes than at his high point in 2000.
Nader was attacking Obama and the governing Democrats, making clear that he would continue opposing them unless they turned to him for advice and direction. He said that if they didn't, he would be like "the canary in the coal mine," an indication that Obama was another centrist sell-out.
No doubt, many progressives believe that Nader's comment was prescient. The Obama administration did disappoint many of them by making too many concessions to the Republicans in a quixotic search for bipartisanship.
With the Republicans moving almost in lockstep against Obama's initiatives -- and resorting to Senate filibusters at an unprecedented rate -- Obama and the Democrats did scale back their proposals, like the job stimulus plan, and they sacrificed key features, such as the public option for health insurance, in their bid for legislative accomplishments.
Obama also came in for progressive criticism for refusing to hold Bush and his subordinates accountable for torture and other war crimes, another example of governing Democrats shying away from a divisive struggle that they might deem not "good for the country."
Though Obama did begin winding down the Iraq War as he had promised, he acquiesced to the insistence of Bush holdovers at the Pentagon, including Gen. David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Bush Holdovers Trapped Obama on Afghan War."]
The Right's Narrative
While many on the Left grumbled about Obama's centrist approach, the Right sold millions of Americans on an entirely different narrative, that Obama was a closet socialist who was taking over the economy and wasting tax dollars on useless jobs programs.
Again, the Right's media dominance, contrasted with the Left's media weakness, has played a key role in convincing a large segment of the population that whatever slur is directed at Obama and the Democrats is true.
This media dynamic, combined with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling permitting unlimited corporate spending on political ads, has thrown the Democrats profoundly on the defensive, with many of them running away from their votes on health care and stimulus spending.
To compound this crisis facing the Democrats, many on the American Left have chosen this moment to repeat the experiences of 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 - determined to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by sitting out the election or voting for third parties.
There is little indication that these progressives have learned anything from the outcomes of those four earlier elections. Nobody seems to be asking the pertinent question: "Has that technique ever worked?"
Instead of the Left's goal of pulling the governing Democrats and the American public to the left, the undeniable direction of U.S. politics (and media) has been to the right.
After 42 years, the Republicans are far more right-wing than Richard Nixon (and arguably even crazier), and most governing Democrats are far more centrist than the likes of Tip O'Neill, Lyndon Johnson and the old Democratic lions of that earlier era.
In other words, the Left's notion of "teaching the Democrats a lesson" is a myth. It may make some progressives feel morally pure, but it doesn't work. And, the results of the last 42 years should make clear that the idea is not only folly but it is dangerous.
If the pundits are correct and the Democrats go down to a crushing defeat on Nov. 2, the result will not be more progressive legislation but even less; not more spending on green jobs and a rebuilt infrastructure but more neglect; not a strengthening of the middle class but even starker financial inequities and enhanced corporate power; not a reordering of priorities away from the military-industrial complex but more tough-guy foreign policies.
Indeed, some of the more extreme Tea Party-backed candidates have made clear that their ultimate goal is the total repeal of FDR's New Deal. For both governing Democrats and disaffected progressives, the results of Election 2010 could well prove catastrophic.
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If my e-mail inbox is any indication, many American progressives plan to use the Nov. 2 election as an opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by either not voting or casting ballots for third parties, even if this contributes to the expected Republican (and Tea Party) landslide.
The thinking seems to be that the loss of the congressional majorities will punish the Democrats for accepting half-measures and compromises on issues from health care and financial reform to job stimulus and war. The Left's hope apparently is that the chastened Democrats will then shift toward more progressive positions and be more assertive.
However, modern American political history tells us that this strategy never works. After the four key elections in which many progressives abandoned the governing Democrats - in 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 - not only did Republicans take U.S. politics further to the right, but the surviving Democrats tacked more to the center and grew more timid.
All four elections also were marred by GOP dirty tricks that drew little or no reaction from either the governing Democrats or the progressives, emboldening the slash-and-burn Republicans to operate in an ever more audacious style.
Tragically, too, the Left's sideline-sitting contributed to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people in wars from Vietnam and Central America to Iraq and Afghanistan. Arguably even worse, U.S. inaction on global warming - a neglect surely to be continued if Republicans and Tea Partiers are victorious in Election 2010 - may doom the future of a livable planet.
In other words, the "teach-the-Dems-a-lesson" strategy not only doesn't work, it's extremely dangerous.
The Vietnam Precedent
Take, for instance, the pivotal election of 1968. The Left was furious with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam War and with the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for the bloody Chicago convention.
Many on the Left refused to support Humphrey, even though they knew that would help the election chances of the divisive and disreputable Richard Nixon. Some anti-war activists voted for minor third-party candidates while others simply sat out Election Day, allowing Nixon to win one of the closest elections in U.S. history by less than one percentage point.
However, we now know - based on declassified information from Johnson's presidential library - that Johnson was on the verge of a peace settlement with the North Vietnamese in Paris and that Humphrey's election likely would have led to a rapid end of the Vietnam War.
Nixon, who was getting briefings on the progress in Paris, knew that a breakthrough was imminent. The evidence is also now clear that Nixon, possessing that knowledge, let his campaign make contacts with the South Vietnamese government behind Johnson's back, promising President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal if he boycotted the Paris talks.
Thieu did as Nixon's campaign wished, refusing to attend the peace talks, thus torpedoing hopes for a quick end to U.S. participation in the war. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Significance of Nixon's 'Treason.'"]
After taking office, President Nixon had no choice but to continue - and to expand - the war in pursuit of a better outcome for Thieu, who after all knew of Nixon's treachery.
The additional four years of war resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers and millions of Indochinese in Vietnam and Cambodia, yet the final peace agreement mirrored what had been available to the United States in 1968.
Nixon's nasty, take-no-prisoners style also shook the political foundations of the United States. The nation grew bitterly divided; parents turned against their own children; war-fueled inflation ate away at incomes; hopes for alleviating poverty vanished; and Americans came to doubt their government could accomplish anything good.
The national wounds inflicted by that ugly era have never fully healed. Much of that, however, might have been avoided if disaffected progressives had swallowed their anger and cast their ballots for Humphrey.
'Good for the Country'
During Nixon's Paris-peace-talk gambit, the governing Democrats also revealed what would become a pattern for them, an unwillingness to expose political wrongdoing by Republicans ostensibly to avert partisan divisions for "the good of the country."
President Johnson was aware of what he called Nixon's "treason" in the days before Election 1968 and was tempted to expose the illicit contacts. However, other senior Democrats fretted that exposure of such treachery might not prevent Nixon from winning, yet could destroy his legitimacy as president.
"Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I'm wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected," said Defense Secretary Clark Clifford in a conference call with Johnson on Nov. 4, 1968. "It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests."
Clifford's argument carried the day. Johnson remained silent, Nixon won, and Johnson carried the secret of Nixon's peace-talk sabotage to his grave.
So, in 1968, the U.S. political process was undergoing three dangerous transformations. The Left was separating itself from practical politics; the Republicans were learning that they could win by playing dirty; and the governing Democrats were shying away from demanding accountability for Republican abuses.
Over the next 42 years, all three of these patterns have deepened, combining to create a political crisis for the nation.
Republican Extremes
Over the past four decades, the only times when the Left and the governing Democrats have pulled together in a meaningful way were when the Republicans were in power and when that power went to their heads.
That was the case when Nixon, who had locked himself into a continuation of the Vietnam War, went nearly crazy in denouncing anti-war protesters as "bums" and going to extremes to block publication of the Pentagon Papers secret history of the war in 1971.
Nixon's paranoia then led him to commit felonies surrounding his Watergate political spying operation, a scandal that played out from 1972 until Nixon's resignation in 1974. The Watergate case was one of the few times when the governing Democrats and the Left mostly were on the same page, objecting to Nixon's abuses.
However, whenever the Democrats were in power and had the potential to accomplish something meaningful, the split always reopened. The governing pragmatists sought incremental change in an often difficult political/media environment, while the idealists demanded sweeping reforms regardless of public resistance.
The division opened up during Jimmy Carter's presidency when the Left viewed Carter as too centrist and too cautious, prompting a primary challenge from liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1980. Kennedy's bid fell short but left behind deep antagonisms between the two wings of the Democratic Party.
Many progressives turned a deaf ear to Carter's warnings about what Ronald Reagan's election would do to the country. Some backed independent John Anderson or other minor candidates, and some simply didn't vote.
Iranian Crisis
As it turned out, Carter - like Johnson and Humphrey - was facing Republican skullduggery. The evidence is now overwhelming that elements of Reagan's campaign contacted Iranian officials who were then holding 52 Americans hostage, a crisis that was eroding Carter's remaining political support.
Like Nixon with Thieu, Reagan's team appears to have offered the Iranians a better deal than Carter did, in this case, promises of military hardware via Israel that Iran needed for its conflict with neighboring Iraq.
Failing to win the hostages' release, Carter saw his reelection hopes dashed. With the first anniversary of the humiliating hostage-taking coming on the day of the election, the polls showed a suddenly widening lead for Reagan who coasted to an easy victory. The hostages were finally released immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
(As with the Nixon-Vietnam scheme, governing Democrats recoiled at the idea of holding the Republicans accountable even when extensive evidence of Reagan's Iran contacts came to light in the last half of the 1980s and the early 1990s. For "the good of the country," Democrats again swept the evidence under the rug.) [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Reagan's election marked another turning point in American history, and it was not a positive one. President Carter, for all his shortcomings, had begun addressing some of the big problems confronting the United States, including the need for alternative energy sources, Middle East peace, and human rights as a core value in U.S. foreign policy.
Reagan, however, countered with a "don't worry, be happy" approach to the future. Tax cuts would swell revenues; no need to worry about your gas-guzzlers; government was the problem, not the rapidly expanding power of multinational corporations; human rights were for sissies.
In selling his policies, Reagan also was aided by a rapidly expanding right-wing news media that was bankrolled to challenge the remnants of the Watergate-era press corps. Meanwhile, the Left largely abandoned the goal of having a national media infrastructure. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Left's Media Miscalculation."]
Ugly Americans
Despite the harm that Reagan's economic policies did to the United States - corporations accelerating the shipping of jobs overseas, unions broken, Carter's solar panels ripped from the White House roof - perhaps Reagan's most destructive actions came in his global strategies.
Reagan unleashed right-wing "death squads" in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua - killing tens of thousands. To challenge the Soviet Union, he funded Islamist radicals in Afghanistan who would become the backbone of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He acquiesced to Pakistan's building of nuclear bombs, perhaps today's greatest threat to world security.
To justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars more on U.S. military hardware, Reagan also oversaw the politicization of the CIA's analytical division so it would exaggerate the Soviet threat in the 1980s. Two decades later, that perversion of U.S. intelligence would help justify the invasion of Iraq with "fixed" analytical reports about non-existent WMDs.
In terms of government personnel, Reagan credentialed a young group of intellectuals and ideologues who became known as the neoconservatives. To justify U.S. interventions abroad, these neocons felt justified in using propaganda techniques to manipulate the American people, herding them like cattle in a desired direction. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Many on the American Left who had abandoned Jimmy Carter were aghast at what Reagan did, especially the atrocities in Central America. But the blame was put mostly on the hapless ex-President and the governing Democrats.
There was very little soul-searching on the Left, which viewed itself as essentially blameless for the catastrophes that the Reagan years wrought.
The Clinton Years
The Reagan excesses, especially the mirage of tax cuts producing extra revenue and the myth that the United States didn't need an industrial base, created so much economic pain by 1992 that Bill Clinton was able to exploit a split in the conservative vote - between President George H.W. Bush and billionaire Ross Perot - and slip into the White House.
Clinton's election also came at a time when evidence was finally pouring in regarding political and national security crimes of the early Reagan years, including the Reagan campaign's arms-for-hostages deals with Iran in both 1980 and later with the Iran-Contra Affair and Reagan's secret orders to help arm Iran's enemies in Iraq.
In late 1992, so much new evidence of Republican guilt was arriving at a House task force investigating the 1980 hostage crisis that chief counsel Lawrence Barcella said he urged the chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, to extend the inquiry for a few more months, but Hamilton declined citing political difficulties.
Instead, with the goal of maintaining some bipartisan comity in Washington at the start of the Clinton administration, Hamilton's task force concealed much of the new evidence and issued a report asserting Republican innocence.
In a similar way, the new Clinton administration helped clean up for Reagan and his team on the continuing Iran-Contra investigation (which represented a sequel to the 1980 Republican-Iranian contacts) and on the Iraq-gate scandal regarding clandestine military assistance to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
High Hopes
As Bill Clinton became the first Democratic president in a dozen years, the governing Democrats had high hopes that they could make progress on some difficult issues that had been ignored under Republican rule, including health care and environmental initiatives. The Democrats also moved to get the nation's deficit under control, approving a modest rise in income tax rates.
Yet, for all the Clinton administration's hopes for bipartisanship, the Democrats instead encountered near unanimous Republican opposition to every major initiative. Not a single GOP vote was cast in favor of Clinton's budget in either the House or the Senate.
Instead, the Republicans relied on their expanding right-wing media, which had added powerful AM radio programming to an influential roster of newspapers, magazines and book publishing houses. Voices on the Right like Rush Limbaugh made every day a fiesta of Clinton bashing.
As the Democrats headed toward Election 1994, the Republicans and their right-wing media allies rallied the conservative base with wild stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton as a kind of Arkansas-based Bonnie and Clyde, leaving a string of death and corruption in their wake.
Though political pundits cite the collapse of health care reform as the key blow to the Democratic majorities, the media-driven hysteria about the Clintons also was a major factor in the right-wing tidal wave that was building. The failure of the American Left to invest in a media infrastructure to counter the Right was another little-noticed factor. A strategic media imbalance was forming.
Yet, even if the Left had worked on building a media infrastructure, it's not clear that progressive voices would have done much to protect the Clintons from the right-wing attacks. To many on the Left, the Clintons were a couple who had long since sold out their principles to corporate interests.
So, with both American progressives and mainstream Democrats discouraged and demoralized, the Republican tsunami in November 1994 wiped out not only the fragile Democratic Senate majority but ended the long-time Democratic control of the House.
Reagan Redux
The Republicans saw their resounding victory as a mandate to resume Reagan's assault on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Trying to assert his "relevance," Clinton conceded that "the era of big government is over."
For the next six years, the Republicans and the right-wing media derided government programs that tried to help the middle class and the poor, while pushing through more and more deregulation of corporations, including repeal of a New Deal law separating commercial and investment banks. The repeal passed with the support of the Clinton administration.
Besides trying to dismantle much of the federal government, the Republicans hounded Clinton, finally impeaching him in the House for lying about an extramarital affair. Though Clinton survived a humiliating Senate trial, the Republicans were optimistic about regaining total control of Washington in Election 2000.
The Republican presidential nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, was a thinly qualified scion of a political royal family. Opposite him was Clinton's wonky Vice President Al Gore, who was an expert on the complex workings of government and who had a particular passion for the environment, alternative energy and the pressing need to address global warming.
In my view, Election 2000 may have represented the last real chance for the world to turn back from environmental devastation and from the dangerous political instability that will follow. In 2000, the future of the planet was truly in the balance - and Gore, despite his lack of charisma, may have been the best person for the job, at least the best that modern U.S. politics could produce.
However, much of the Left viewed Gore as an unacceptable centrist. A number of prominent progressives also rejected my warnings about the dangers posed by Bush, particularly my concern that he would restore the neoconservatives to positions of power over foreign policy.
I was especially alarmed by Bush's choice of Dick Cheney to be his vice presidential running mate. I had covered Cheney for years when he was in Congress and knew him to be a rigid ideologue who was much closer philosophically to the neocons than was generally understood.
Bush Illusions
At the time, most political analysts of all stripes viewed Bush as an Establishment Republican. They accepted his self-description as "a compassionate conservative" and thought he would govern with his father's moderation, surrounded by his father's old foreign policy hands, the likes of Brent Scowcroft and James Baker.
I was assured by several left-wing political analysts that I was overly alarmed at the prospects of a neocon revival if Bush won.
This widely held viewpoint fed into the notion on the Left that Bush would not be much different from Gore and that Election 2000, therefore, represented a good opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by showing them that they couldn't "take the Left for granted."
So, many progressives decided that they would back Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
To rally more support on the Left, Nader's campaign touted what may be one of the biggest - and most dangerous - lies ever told in American politics, that "there's not a dime worth of difference" between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Nader succeeded not only in siphoning off votes from Gore but his attacks on the Vice President - often echoing similar attack lines from the Republicans - frustrated the Gore campaign's efforts to gain momentum.
A Stolen Election
Though Gore still managed to outpoll Bush by about a half million votes nationwide and almost surely would have beaten Bush in the key state of Florida if all legally cast votes were counted, Bush used a combination of clever lawyering and hardball politics to seize the White House. [For details, see Neck Deep.]
To this day, very few Nader supporters will admit that they contributed to Bush's tainted victory, although it should be obvious that Nader's votes in Florida - if most would have gone to Gore - would have put the election too far out of reach for Bush to steal.
A Gore presidency also would have taken the country in a far different direction. Most significantly, he might have made significant progress in getting the United States to face up to the crisis of global warming, an existential threat to mankind that Bush studiously ignored.
It may be a bitter irony that the one major political accomplishment of America's Green Party will be that it helped condemn the world to environmental disaster.
Whether Nader backers acknowledge their complicity or not, the hard truth is that the American Left - in this attempt to "teach the Democrats a lesson" - contributed to the dangerous ascension of George W. Bush to power.
Besides his inaction on global warming, Bush restored the neocons to key positions throughout the foreign policy bureaucracy and, after 9/11, adopted their aggressive strategy for seeking violent "regime change" in Muslim countries considered hostile to Israel.
As a result of Bush's "global war on terror" and his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands have died and many more - including many children and other noncombatants - have lost limbs and suffered maiming.
Bush also trampled on traditional constitutional and legal principles with his assertion of unlimited presidential powers that included his secret wiretapping of citizens, his waiving of habeas corpus rights to a fair trial, and his torturing prisoners held in clandestine prisons.
At home, Bush's tax cuts mostly for the rich and his further deregulation of corporations contributed to a bubble-and-bust economy that - by the end of his eight years in office - had devastated the American middle class, which had grown during the Clinton years but was rapidly shrinking by late 2008 and early 2009 with the disappearance of millions of jobs.
Brief Reunion
Because of the alarm over the Bush administration, the Left and the governing Democrats found common ground in Election 2006 and 2008. In Election 2008, many progressives set aside their concerns about Barack Obama's accommodating style of politics and rallied behind the first major-party African-American candidate for U.S. president.
Obama's historic victory in November 2008 touched many progressives as it did other Americans, though some on the Left resisted any sentimentality.
On Election Night, I encountered Ralph Nader at the make-shift studio in downtown Washington where TheRealNews.com was handling its election coverage. He had run again as an independent candidate but had gotten far fewer votes than at his high point in 2000.
Nader was attacking Obama and the governing Democrats, making clear that he would continue opposing them unless they turned to him for advice and direction. He said that if they didn't, he would be like "the canary in the coal mine," an indication that Obama was another centrist sell-out.
No doubt, many progressives believe that Nader's comment was prescient. The Obama administration did disappoint many of them by making too many concessions to the Republicans in a quixotic search for bipartisanship.
With the Republicans moving almost in lockstep against Obama's initiatives -- and resorting to Senate filibusters at an unprecedented rate -- Obama and the Democrats did scale back their proposals, like the job stimulus plan, and they sacrificed key features, such as the public option for health insurance, in their bid for legislative accomplishments.
Obama also came in for progressive criticism for refusing to hold Bush and his subordinates accountable for torture and other war crimes, another example of governing Democrats shying away from a divisive struggle that they might deem not "good for the country."
Though Obama did begin winding down the Iraq War as he had promised, he acquiesced to the insistence of Bush holdovers at the Pentagon, including Gen. David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Bush Holdovers Trapped Obama on Afghan War."]
The Right's Narrative
While many on the Left grumbled about Obama's centrist approach, the Right sold millions of Americans on an entirely different narrative, that Obama was a closet socialist who was taking over the economy and wasting tax dollars on useless jobs programs.
Again, the Right's media dominance, contrasted with the Left's media weakness, has played a key role in convincing a large segment of the population that whatever slur is directed at Obama and the Democrats is true.
This media dynamic, combined with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling permitting unlimited corporate spending on political ads, has thrown the Democrats profoundly on the defensive, with many of them running away from their votes on health care and stimulus spending.
To compound this crisis facing the Democrats, many on the American Left have chosen this moment to repeat the experiences of 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 - determined to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by sitting out the election or voting for third parties.
There is little indication that these progressives have learned anything from the outcomes of those four earlier elections. Nobody seems to be asking the pertinent question: "Has that technique ever worked?"
Instead of the Left's goal of pulling the governing Democrats and the American public to the left, the undeniable direction of U.S. politics (and media) has been to the right.
After 42 years, the Republicans are far more right-wing than Richard Nixon (and arguably even crazier), and most governing Democrats are far more centrist than the likes of Tip O'Neill, Lyndon Johnson and the old Democratic lions of that earlier era.
In other words, the Left's notion of "teaching the Democrats a lesson" is a myth. It may make some progressives feel morally pure, but it doesn't work. And, the results of the last 42 years should make clear that the idea is not only folly but it is dangerous.
If the pundits are correct and the Democrats go down to a crushing defeat on Nov. 2, the result will not be more progressive legislation but even less; not more spending on green jobs and a rebuilt infrastructure but more neglect; not a strengthening of the middle class but even starker financial inequities and enhanced corporate power; not a reordering of priorities away from the military-industrial complex but more tough-guy foreign policies.
Indeed, some of the more extreme Tea Party-backed candidates have made clear that their ultimate goal is the total repeal of FDR's New Deal. For both governing Democrats and disaffected progressives, the results of Election 2010 could well prove catastrophic.
If my e-mail inbox is any indication, many American progressives plan to use the Nov. 2 election as an opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by either not voting or casting ballots for third parties, even if this contributes to the expected Republican (and Tea Party) landslide.
The thinking seems to be that the loss of the congressional majorities will punish the Democrats for accepting half-measures and compromises on issues from health care and financial reform to job stimulus and war. The Left's hope apparently is that the chastened Democrats will then shift toward more progressive positions and be more assertive.
However, modern American political history tells us that this strategy never works. After the four key elections in which many progressives abandoned the governing Democrats - in 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 - not only did Republicans take U.S. politics further to the right, but the surviving Democrats tacked more to the center and grew more timid.
All four elections also were marred by GOP dirty tricks that drew little or no reaction from either the governing Democrats or the progressives, emboldening the slash-and-burn Republicans to operate in an ever more audacious style.
Tragically, too, the Left's sideline-sitting contributed to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people in wars from Vietnam and Central America to Iraq and Afghanistan. Arguably even worse, U.S. inaction on global warming - a neglect surely to be continued if Republicans and Tea Partiers are victorious in Election 2010 - may doom the future of a livable planet.
In other words, the "teach-the-Dems-a-lesson" strategy not only doesn't work, it's extremely dangerous.
The Vietnam Precedent
Take, for instance, the pivotal election of 1968. The Left was furious with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam War and with the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for the bloody Chicago convention.
Many on the Left refused to support Humphrey, even though they knew that would help the election chances of the divisive and disreputable Richard Nixon. Some anti-war activists voted for minor third-party candidates while others simply sat out Election Day, allowing Nixon to win one of the closest elections in U.S. history by less than one percentage point.
However, we now know - based on declassified information from Johnson's presidential library - that Johnson was on the verge of a peace settlement with the North Vietnamese in Paris and that Humphrey's election likely would have led to a rapid end of the Vietnam War.
Nixon, who was getting briefings on the progress in Paris, knew that a breakthrough was imminent. The evidence is also now clear that Nixon, possessing that knowledge, let his campaign make contacts with the South Vietnamese government behind Johnson's back, promising President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal if he boycotted the Paris talks.
Thieu did as Nixon's campaign wished, refusing to attend the peace talks, thus torpedoing hopes for a quick end to U.S. participation in the war. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Significance of Nixon's 'Treason.'"]
After taking office, President Nixon had no choice but to continue - and to expand - the war in pursuit of a better outcome for Thieu, who after all knew of Nixon's treachery.
The additional four years of war resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers and millions of Indochinese in Vietnam and Cambodia, yet the final peace agreement mirrored what had been available to the United States in 1968.
Nixon's nasty, take-no-prisoners style also shook the political foundations of the United States. The nation grew bitterly divided; parents turned against their own children; war-fueled inflation ate away at incomes; hopes for alleviating poverty vanished; and Americans came to doubt their government could accomplish anything good.
The national wounds inflicted by that ugly era have never fully healed. Much of that, however, might have been avoided if disaffected progressives had swallowed their anger and cast their ballots for Humphrey.
'Good for the Country'
During Nixon's Paris-peace-talk gambit, the governing Democrats also revealed what would become a pattern for them, an unwillingness to expose political wrongdoing by Republicans ostensibly to avert partisan divisions for "the good of the country."
President Johnson was aware of what he called Nixon's "treason" in the days before Election 1968 and was tempted to expose the illicit contacts. However, other senior Democrats fretted that exposure of such treachery might not prevent Nixon from winning, yet could destroy his legitimacy as president.
"Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I'm wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected," said Defense Secretary Clark Clifford in a conference call with Johnson on Nov. 4, 1968. "It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests."
Clifford's argument carried the day. Johnson remained silent, Nixon won, and Johnson carried the secret of Nixon's peace-talk sabotage to his grave.
So, in 1968, the U.S. political process was undergoing three dangerous transformations. The Left was separating itself from practical politics; the Republicans were learning that they could win by playing dirty; and the governing Democrats were shying away from demanding accountability for Republican abuses.
Over the next 42 years, all three of these patterns have deepened, combining to create a political crisis for the nation.
Republican Extremes
Over the past four decades, the only times when the Left and the governing Democrats have pulled together in a meaningful way were when the Republicans were in power and when that power went to their heads.
That was the case when Nixon, who had locked himself into a continuation of the Vietnam War, went nearly crazy in denouncing anti-war protesters as "bums" and going to extremes to block publication of the Pentagon Papers secret history of the war in 1971.
Nixon's paranoia then led him to commit felonies surrounding his Watergate political spying operation, a scandal that played out from 1972 until Nixon's resignation in 1974. The Watergate case was one of the few times when the governing Democrats and the Left mostly were on the same page, objecting to Nixon's abuses.
However, whenever the Democrats were in power and had the potential to accomplish something meaningful, the split always reopened. The governing pragmatists sought incremental change in an often difficult political/media environment, while the idealists demanded sweeping reforms regardless of public resistance.
The division opened up during Jimmy Carter's presidency when the Left viewed Carter as too centrist and too cautious, prompting a primary challenge from liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1980. Kennedy's bid fell short but left behind deep antagonisms between the two wings of the Democratic Party.
Many progressives turned a deaf ear to Carter's warnings about what Ronald Reagan's election would do to the country. Some backed independent John Anderson or other minor candidates, and some simply didn't vote.
Iranian Crisis
As it turned out, Carter - like Johnson and Humphrey - was facing Republican skullduggery. The evidence is now overwhelming that elements of Reagan's campaign contacted Iranian officials who were then holding 52 Americans hostage, a crisis that was eroding Carter's remaining political support.
Like Nixon with Thieu, Reagan's team appears to have offered the Iranians a better deal than Carter did, in this case, promises of military hardware via Israel that Iran needed for its conflict with neighboring Iraq.
Failing to win the hostages' release, Carter saw his reelection hopes dashed. With the first anniversary of the humiliating hostage-taking coming on the day of the election, the polls showed a suddenly widening lead for Reagan who coasted to an easy victory. The hostages were finally released immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
(As with the Nixon-Vietnam scheme, governing Democrats recoiled at the idea of holding the Republicans accountable even when extensive evidence of Reagan's Iran contacts came to light in the last half of the 1980s and the early 1990s. For "the good of the country," Democrats again swept the evidence under the rug.) [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Reagan's election marked another turning point in American history, and it was not a positive one. President Carter, for all his shortcomings, had begun addressing some of the big problems confronting the United States, including the need for alternative energy sources, Middle East peace, and human rights as a core value in U.S. foreign policy.
Reagan, however, countered with a "don't worry, be happy" approach to the future. Tax cuts would swell revenues; no need to worry about your gas-guzzlers; government was the problem, not the rapidly expanding power of multinational corporations; human rights were for sissies.
In selling his policies, Reagan also was aided by a rapidly expanding right-wing news media that was bankrolled to challenge the remnants of the Watergate-era press corps. Meanwhile, the Left largely abandoned the goal of having a national media infrastructure. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Left's Media Miscalculation."]
Ugly Americans
Despite the harm that Reagan's economic policies did to the United States - corporations accelerating the shipping of jobs overseas, unions broken, Carter's solar panels ripped from the White House roof - perhaps Reagan's most destructive actions came in his global strategies.
Reagan unleashed right-wing "death squads" in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua - killing tens of thousands. To challenge the Soviet Union, he funded Islamist radicals in Afghanistan who would become the backbone of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He acquiesced to Pakistan's building of nuclear bombs, perhaps today's greatest threat to world security.
To justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars more on U.S. military hardware, Reagan also oversaw the politicization of the CIA's analytical division so it would exaggerate the Soviet threat in the 1980s. Two decades later, that perversion of U.S. intelligence would help justify the invasion of Iraq with "fixed" analytical reports about non-existent WMDs.
In terms of government personnel, Reagan credentialed a young group of intellectuals and ideologues who became known as the neoconservatives. To justify U.S. interventions abroad, these neocons felt justified in using propaganda techniques to manipulate the American people, herding them like cattle in a desired direction. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Many on the American Left who had abandoned Jimmy Carter were aghast at what Reagan did, especially the atrocities in Central America. But the blame was put mostly on the hapless ex-President and the governing Democrats.
There was very little soul-searching on the Left, which viewed itself as essentially blameless for the catastrophes that the Reagan years wrought.
The Clinton Years
The Reagan excesses, especially the mirage of tax cuts producing extra revenue and the myth that the United States didn't need an industrial base, created so much economic pain by 1992 that Bill Clinton was able to exploit a split in the conservative vote - between President George H.W. Bush and billionaire Ross Perot - and slip into the White House.
Clinton's election also came at a time when evidence was finally pouring in regarding political and national security crimes of the early Reagan years, including the Reagan campaign's arms-for-hostages deals with Iran in both 1980 and later with the Iran-Contra Affair and Reagan's secret orders to help arm Iran's enemies in Iraq.
In late 1992, so much new evidence of Republican guilt was arriving at a House task force investigating the 1980 hostage crisis that chief counsel Lawrence Barcella said he urged the chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, to extend the inquiry for a few more months, but Hamilton declined citing political difficulties.
Instead, with the goal of maintaining some bipartisan comity in Washington at the start of the Clinton administration, Hamilton's task force concealed much of the new evidence and issued a report asserting Republican innocence.
In a similar way, the new Clinton administration helped clean up for Reagan and his team on the continuing Iran-Contra investigation (which represented a sequel to the 1980 Republican-Iranian contacts) and on the Iraq-gate scandal regarding clandestine military assistance to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
High Hopes
As Bill Clinton became the first Democratic president in a dozen years, the governing Democrats had high hopes that they could make progress on some difficult issues that had been ignored under Republican rule, including health care and environmental initiatives. The Democrats also moved to get the nation's deficit under control, approving a modest rise in income tax rates.
Yet, for all the Clinton administration's hopes for bipartisanship, the Democrats instead encountered near unanimous Republican opposition to every major initiative. Not a single GOP vote was cast in favor of Clinton's budget in either the House or the Senate.
Instead, the Republicans relied on their expanding right-wing media, which had added powerful AM radio programming to an influential roster of newspapers, magazines and book publishing houses. Voices on the Right like Rush Limbaugh made every day a fiesta of Clinton bashing.
As the Democrats headed toward Election 1994, the Republicans and their right-wing media allies rallied the conservative base with wild stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton as a kind of Arkansas-based Bonnie and Clyde, leaving a string of death and corruption in their wake.
Though political pundits cite the collapse of health care reform as the key blow to the Democratic majorities, the media-driven hysteria about the Clintons also was a major factor in the right-wing tidal wave that was building. The failure of the American Left to invest in a media infrastructure to counter the Right was another little-noticed factor. A strategic media imbalance was forming.
Yet, even if the Left had worked on building a media infrastructure, it's not clear that progressive voices would have done much to protect the Clintons from the right-wing attacks. To many on the Left, the Clintons were a couple who had long since sold out their principles to corporate interests.
So, with both American progressives and mainstream Democrats discouraged and demoralized, the Republican tsunami in November 1994 wiped out not only the fragile Democratic Senate majority but ended the long-time Democratic control of the House.
Reagan Redux
The Republicans saw their resounding victory as a mandate to resume Reagan's assault on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Trying to assert his "relevance," Clinton conceded that "the era of big government is over."
For the next six years, the Republicans and the right-wing media derided government programs that tried to help the middle class and the poor, while pushing through more and more deregulation of corporations, including repeal of a New Deal law separating commercial and investment banks. The repeal passed with the support of the Clinton administration.
Besides trying to dismantle much of the federal government, the Republicans hounded Clinton, finally impeaching him in the House for lying about an extramarital affair. Though Clinton survived a humiliating Senate trial, the Republicans were optimistic about regaining total control of Washington in Election 2000.
The Republican presidential nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, was a thinly qualified scion of a political royal family. Opposite him was Clinton's wonky Vice President Al Gore, who was an expert on the complex workings of government and who had a particular passion for the environment, alternative energy and the pressing need to address global warming.
In my view, Election 2000 may have represented the last real chance for the world to turn back from environmental devastation and from the dangerous political instability that will follow. In 2000, the future of the planet was truly in the balance - and Gore, despite his lack of charisma, may have been the best person for the job, at least the best that modern U.S. politics could produce.
However, much of the Left viewed Gore as an unacceptable centrist. A number of prominent progressives also rejected my warnings about the dangers posed by Bush, particularly my concern that he would restore the neoconservatives to positions of power over foreign policy.
I was especially alarmed by Bush's choice of Dick Cheney to be his vice presidential running mate. I had covered Cheney for years when he was in Congress and knew him to be a rigid ideologue who was much closer philosophically to the neocons than was generally understood.
Bush Illusions
At the time, most political analysts of all stripes viewed Bush as an Establishment Republican. They accepted his self-description as "a compassionate conservative" and thought he would govern with his father's moderation, surrounded by his father's old foreign policy hands, the likes of Brent Scowcroft and James Baker.
I was assured by several left-wing political analysts that I was overly alarmed at the prospects of a neocon revival if Bush won.
This widely held viewpoint fed into the notion on the Left that Bush would not be much different from Gore and that Election 2000, therefore, represented a good opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by showing them that they couldn't "take the Left for granted."
So, many progressives decided that they would back Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
To rally more support on the Left, Nader's campaign touted what may be one of the biggest - and most dangerous - lies ever told in American politics, that "there's not a dime worth of difference" between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Nader succeeded not only in siphoning off votes from Gore but his attacks on the Vice President - often echoing similar attack lines from the Republicans - frustrated the Gore campaign's efforts to gain momentum.
A Stolen Election
Though Gore still managed to outpoll Bush by about a half million votes nationwide and almost surely would have beaten Bush in the key state of Florida if all legally cast votes were counted, Bush used a combination of clever lawyering and hardball politics to seize the White House. [For details, see Neck Deep.]
To this day, very few Nader supporters will admit that they contributed to Bush's tainted victory, although it should be obvious that Nader's votes in Florida - if most would have gone to Gore - would have put the election too far out of reach for Bush to steal.
A Gore presidency also would have taken the country in a far different direction. Most significantly, he might have made significant progress in getting the United States to face up to the crisis of global warming, an existential threat to mankind that Bush studiously ignored.
It may be a bitter irony that the one major political accomplishment of America's Green Party will be that it helped condemn the world to environmental disaster.
Whether Nader backers acknowledge their complicity or not, the hard truth is that the American Left - in this attempt to "teach the Democrats a lesson" - contributed to the dangerous ascension of George W. Bush to power.
Besides his inaction on global warming, Bush restored the neocons to key positions throughout the foreign policy bureaucracy and, after 9/11, adopted their aggressive strategy for seeking violent "regime change" in Muslim countries considered hostile to Israel.
As a result of Bush's "global war on terror" and his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands have died and many more - including many children and other noncombatants - have lost limbs and suffered maiming.
Bush also trampled on traditional constitutional and legal principles with his assertion of unlimited presidential powers that included his secret wiretapping of citizens, his waiving of habeas corpus rights to a fair trial, and his torturing prisoners held in clandestine prisons.
At home, Bush's tax cuts mostly for the rich and his further deregulation of corporations contributed to a bubble-and-bust economy that - by the end of his eight years in office - had devastated the American middle class, which had grown during the Clinton years but was rapidly shrinking by late 2008 and early 2009 with the disappearance of millions of jobs.
Brief Reunion
Because of the alarm over the Bush administration, the Left and the governing Democrats found common ground in Election 2006 and 2008. In Election 2008, many progressives set aside their concerns about Barack Obama's accommodating style of politics and rallied behind the first major-party African-American candidate for U.S. president.
Obama's historic victory in November 2008 touched many progressives as it did other Americans, though some on the Left resisted any sentimentality.
On Election Night, I encountered Ralph Nader at the make-shift studio in downtown Washington where TheRealNews.com was handling its election coverage. He had run again as an independent candidate but had gotten far fewer votes than at his high point in 2000.
Nader was attacking Obama and the governing Democrats, making clear that he would continue opposing them unless they turned to him for advice and direction. He said that if they didn't, he would be like "the canary in the coal mine," an indication that Obama was another centrist sell-out.
No doubt, many progressives believe that Nader's comment was prescient. The Obama administration did disappoint many of them by making too many concessions to the Republicans in a quixotic search for bipartisanship.
With the Republicans moving almost in lockstep against Obama's initiatives -- and resorting to Senate filibusters at an unprecedented rate -- Obama and the Democrats did scale back their proposals, like the job stimulus plan, and they sacrificed key features, such as the public option for health insurance, in their bid for legislative accomplishments.
Obama also came in for progressive criticism for refusing to hold Bush and his subordinates accountable for torture and other war crimes, another example of governing Democrats shying away from a divisive struggle that they might deem not "good for the country."
Though Obama did begin winding down the Iraq War as he had promised, he acquiesced to the insistence of Bush holdovers at the Pentagon, including Gen. David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Bush Holdovers Trapped Obama on Afghan War."]
The Right's Narrative
While many on the Left grumbled about Obama's centrist approach, the Right sold millions of Americans on an entirely different narrative, that Obama was a closet socialist who was taking over the economy and wasting tax dollars on useless jobs programs.
Again, the Right's media dominance, contrasted with the Left's media weakness, has played a key role in convincing a large segment of the population that whatever slur is directed at Obama and the Democrats is true.
This media dynamic, combined with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling permitting unlimited corporate spending on political ads, has thrown the Democrats profoundly on the defensive, with many of them running away from their votes on health care and stimulus spending.
To compound this crisis facing the Democrats, many on the American Left have chosen this moment to repeat the experiences of 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 - determined to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by sitting out the election or voting for third parties.
There is little indication that these progressives have learned anything from the outcomes of those four earlier elections. Nobody seems to be asking the pertinent question: "Has that technique ever worked?"
Instead of the Left's goal of pulling the governing Democrats and the American public to the left, the undeniable direction of U.S. politics (and media) has been to the right.
After 42 years, the Republicans are far more right-wing than Richard Nixon (and arguably even crazier), and most governing Democrats are far more centrist than the likes of Tip O'Neill, Lyndon Johnson and the old Democratic lions of that earlier era.
In other words, the Left's notion of "teaching the Democrats a lesson" is a myth. It may make some progressives feel morally pure, but it doesn't work. And, the results of the last 42 years should make clear that the idea is not only folly but it is dangerous.
If the pundits are correct and the Democrats go down to a crushing defeat on Nov. 2, the result will not be more progressive legislation but even less; not more spending on green jobs and a rebuilt infrastructure but more neglect; not a strengthening of the middle class but even starker financial inequities and enhanced corporate power; not a reordering of priorities away from the military-industrial complex but more tough-guy foreign policies.
Indeed, some of the more extreme Tea Party-backed candidates have made clear that their ultimate goal is the total repeal of FDR's New Deal. For both governing Democrats and disaffected progressives, the results of Election 2010 could well prove catastrophic.
"What is it going to take for Senate Republicans to oppose this unfit nominee? Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bove will be complicit in undermining the rule of law and judicial independence."
After a second whistleblower came forward claiming that Emil Bove III instructed attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice to ignore federal court orders, his critics on Friday renewed calls for the Senate to reject the DOJ official's appointment as an appellate judge.
"Evidence is growing that Emil Bove urged Department of Justice lawyers to ignore federal court orders. That alone should disqualify him from a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful courts in our country," said Sean Eldridge, president and founder of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, in a statement.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced in late May that he would nominate Bove, his former personal attorney, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. Then, last month, a whistleblower complaint was filed by Erez Reuveni, who was fired from the DOJ's Office of Immigration Litigation in April after expressing concerns about the Kilmar Ábrego García case.
On Friday, as the Republican-controlled Senate was moving toward confirming Bove, the group Whistleblower Aid announced that another former Justice Department lawyer, whose name is not being disclosed, "has lawfully disclosed evidence to the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General that corroborates the thrust of the whistleblower claims" from Reuveni.
"Loyalty to one individual must never outweigh supporting and protecting the fundamental rights of those living in the United States."
"What we're seeing here is something I never thought would be possible on such a wide scale: federal prosecutors appointed by the Trump administration intentionally presenting dubious if not outright false evidence to a court of jurisdiction in cases that impact a person's fundamental rights not only under our Constitution, but their natural rights as humans," said Whistleblower Aid chief legal counsel Andrew Bakaj in a statement.
"What this means is that federal career attorneys who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution are now being pressured to abdicate that promise in favor of fealty to a single person, specifically Donald Trump. Loyalty to one individual must never outweigh supporting and protecting the fundamental rights of those living in the United States," Bakaj added. "Our client and Mr. Reuveni are true patriots—prioritizing their commitment to democracy over advancing their careers."
Bove has also faced mounting opposition—including from dozens of former judges—due to his embrace of the so-called "unitary executive theory" as well as his positions on a potential third Trump term and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by the president's supporters.
The Senate on Thursday voted 50-48 to proceed with the consideration of Bove's nomination. Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) joined all Democrats in opposition. Responding in a statement, Demand Justice interim executive director Maggie Jo Buchanan warned that "Bove will be a stain on the judiciary if confirmed."
"Voting to confirm Trump's judicial nominees to lifetime seats on the federal bench, as he wages a war on the very idea of judicial independence, is an unacceptable choice for any senator who believes in our democracy and the importance of individual rights," said Buchanan, who also blasted the Senate's Tuesday confirmation of Joshua Divine to be a U.S. district judge for the Eastern and Western Districts of Missouri.
"Trump and his MAGA allies are helping him consolidate power in the executive branch, attacking judges who dare to rule against his interests, and targeting Trump's perceived political enemies—all while seemingly unconcerned about the future this sets up for our nation," she stressed. "Every senator will have to decide where they stand when it comes to this assault on our country's values—and that choice will not be forgotten."
After news of the second whistleblower complaint broke on Friday, Stand Up America's Eldridge declared that "again and again, Bove has proven he lacks the temperament, integrity, and independence to serve on the federal bench. He's nothing more than a political foot soldier doing Trump's bidding."
"What is it going to take for Senate Republicans to oppose this unfit nominee?" he added. "Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bove will be complicit in undermining the rule of law and judicial independence."
"This administration deserves no credit for just barely averting a crisis they themselves set in motion," said one Democratic senator.
While welcoming reporting that the Trump administration will release more than $5 billion in federal funding for schools that it has been withholding for nearly a month, U.S. educators and others said Friday that the funds should never have been held up in the first place and warned that the attempt to do so was just one part of an ongoing campaign to undermine public education.
The Trump administration placed nearly $7 billion in federal education funding for K-12 public schools under review last month, then released $1.3 billion of it last week amid legal action and widespread backlash. An administration official speaking on condition of anonymity told The Washington Post that all reviews of remaining funding are now over.
"There is no good reason for the chaos and stress this president has inflicted on students, teachers, and parents across America for the last month, and it shouldn't take widespread blowback for this administration to do its job and simply get the funding out the door that Congress has delivered to help students," U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Friday.
"This administration deserves no credit for just barely averting a crisis they themselves set in motion," Murray added. "You don't thank a burglar for returning your cash after you've spent a month figuring out if you'd have to sell your house to make up the difference."
🚨After unlawfully withholding billions in education funding for schools, the Trump Admin. has reversed course.This is a massive victory for students, educators, & families who depend on these essential resources.And it's a testament to public pressure & relentless organizing.
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— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@pressley.house.gov) July 25, 2025 at 1:42 PM
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward—which represents plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's funding freeze—said Friday that "if these reports are true, this is a major victory for public education and the communities it serves."
"This news following our legal challenge is a direct result of collective action by educators, families, and advocates across the country," Perryman asserted. "These funds are critical to keeping teachers in classrooms, supporting students in vulnerable conditions, and ensuring schools can offer the programs and services that every child deserves."
"While this development shows that legal and public pressure can make a difference, school districts, parents, and educators should not have to take the administration to court to secure funds for their students," she added. "Our promise to the people remains: We will go to court to protect the rights and well-being of all people living in America."
Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes—a plaintiff in a separate lawsuit challenging the withholding—attributed the administration's backpedaling to litigatory pressure, arguing that the funding "should never have been withheld in the first place."
They released the 7 B IN SCHOOL FUNDS!! This is a huge win. It means fighting back matters. Fighting for what kids & communities need is always the right thing to do! www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...
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— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten.bsky.social) July 25, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association—the largest U.S. labor union—said in a statement: "Playing games with students' futures has real-world consequences. School districts in every state have been scrambling to figure out how they will continue to meet student needs without this vital federal funding, and many students in parts of the country have already headed back to school. These reckless funding delays have undermined planning, staffing, and support services at a time when schools should be focused on preparing students for success."
"Sadly, this is part of a broader pattern by this administration of undermining public education—starving it of resources, sowing distrust, and pushing privatization at the expense of the nation's most vulnerable students," Pringle added. "And they are doing this at the same time Congress has passed a budget bill that will devastate our students, schools, and communities by slashing funds meant for public education, healthcare, and keeping students from their school meals—all to finance massive tax breaks for billionaires."
While expanding support for private education, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month weakens public school programs including before- and after-school initiatives and services for English language learners.
"Sadly, this is part of a broader pattern by this administration of undermining public education."
Trump also signed an executive order in March directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin the process of shutting down the Department of Education—a longtime goal of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led roadmap for a far-right takeover and gutting of the federal government closely linked to Trump, despite his unconvincing efforts to distance himself from the highly controversial and unpopular plan.
Earlier this week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office determined that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department illegally impounded crucial funds from the Head Start program, which provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and other services to low-income families.
"Instead of spending the last many weeks figuring out how to improve after-school options and get our kids' reading and math scores up, because of President Trump, communities across the country have been forced to spend their time cutting back on tutoring options and sorting out how many teachers they will have to lay off," Murray noted.
"It's time for President Trump, Secretary McMahon, and [Office of Management and Budget Director] Russ Vought to stop playing games with students' futures and families' livelihoods—and end their illegal assault on our students and their schools," the senator added.
"You want history books to not record you as an evil genocide supporter?" said one organizer. "You need to actually make an impact, NOW."
U.S. college students are still facing punishment for protesting Israel's U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza and its starvation of more than 2 million Palestinians there, with Columbia University announcing this week the suspension and expulsion of dozens of students who spoke out over the past year.
But a number of observers have pointed to a shift in the rhetoric of some of the student organizers' biggest detractors in recent days, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton notably saying Thursday that "thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border" and calling for "the full flow of humanitarian assistance" to be restored.
Clinton didn't mention the Israeli blockade that has kept food from reaching Palestinians, more than 120 of whom have now died of starvation, or the at least $12.5 billion in military aid the U.S. has provided to Israel since the blockade first began in October 2023—in violation of U.S. laws prohibiting the government from giving military aid to countries that block humanitarian aid.
The former Democratic presidential nominee also didn't acknowledge the remarks she made in May 2024 about the campus protests that were spreading across the country, with students demanding that their schools divest from companies that work with the Israeli government and that the country end its support for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
At the time, Clinton said students who oppose Israel's policies in Gaza and the West Bank "don't know very much" about the conflict there. Clinton and other politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties have repeated the familiar phrase, "Israel has a right to defend itself" as the IDF has attacked so-called "safe zones," hospitals, and refugee camps.
Some suggested her comments on Thursday appeared to be those of an influential political figure who's come to a realization about the situation that both the Biden and Trump administrations, with bipartisan support from Congress, have helped to bring about in Gaza.
"Seems mostly like all the recent photos of starving children are responsible for this shift, though humanitarian aid groups have been warning about this for months and months," said Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein.
One observer said Clinton and a number of European leaders are speaking out now because Israel has already "carried out their final solution."
As Common Dreams reported this week, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has said that 85% of people in Gaza are now in Phase 5 of famine, defined at "an extreme deprivation of food."
New York Times columnist Megan Stack said she welcomed anyone who is "[waking] up" to the reality of man-made mass starvation made possible by U.S. support, but called it "an absolute indictment of the center-left, such as it is, that it took pictures of dying, skeletal babies with trash bags for diapers to muster this pale response."
"Subtext: We can stomach mass bombings, but starvation is a bridge too far," said Stack.
The comments from Clinton coincided with a shift in the corporate media's coverage of Gaza, with major outlets focusing heavily on the impact of starvation.
Organizer and attorney Aaron Regunberg said that instead of simply doing "reputational damage control by speaking up in these very last moments," powerful political leaders must "shut shit down."
"You want history books to not record you as an evil genocide supporter?" said Regunberg. "One speech now—after countless speeches condemning those who have been speaking out—ain't gonna cut it... You need to go to Gaza. You need to actually make an impact, NOW."
Progressive organizer Lindsey Boylan wondered whether establishment leaders "will ever admit that smearing all protests to stop the genocide actually contributed to the genocide."
"Few people could have played a more pivotal role in shaping the democratic response to prevent genocide," said Boylan of Clinton's comments. "Now here we are. Watching mass death of kids."
On Friday, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has consistently demanded that the Biden and Trump administrations stop funding Israel's assault on Gaza and warned of the impact mass starvation would have, issued his latest call for U.S. support to end immediately.
"American taxpayer dollars are being used to starve children, bomb civilians, and support the cruelty of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his criminal ministers," said Sanders. "Enough is enough. The White House and Congress must immediately act to end this war using the full scope of American influence. No more military aid to the Netanyahu government. History will condemn those who fail to act in the face of this horror."