This is from the US but is, I think, of some value to Neither's aims. It
comes from just before the 1996 US elections. I believe it could be
re-written to suit Australian audiences.
Alister
--
"...wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, | "(may the force
that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the | never arrive on
human race against the alien menace ... set the pattern | your doorstep
for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic | at 3 o'clock in
stories which became ... steadily more hilarious..." | the morning)"
Starship Stormtroopers - Michael Moorcock
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3998/Moorcock.html
---------- Forwarded message ----------
The 1996 Elections and the Trap of Lesser-Evilism
David Finkel
[from New Politics, vol. 5, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 20, Winter 1996]
David Finkel is an editor of the socialist bi-monthly Against the
Current.
A STRIKING OBSERVATION ABOUT LEFT-WING "LESSER-EVILISM" in
electoral politics seems to be: the greater the actual evil of the
"lesser evil," the louder the argument for supporting it.
For a rough empirical test of this proposition, think back over the
past five Democratic presidential candidates -- Clinton, Dukakis,
Mondale, Carter, McGovern -- each more conservative than his
predecessor, more committed to and dependent on corporate America,
more distant from labor's concerns and influence. Yet with each
turn of the political cycle, the liberal and social democratic
commitment to these candidates and to the Democratic Party seems to
be more and more consolidated.
Not only that -- even as the real influence of the institutions of
labor, liberalism and their social democratic appendages within the
Democratic Party shrinks toward the vanishing point, the shriller
becomes their insistence on shoving the Democratic Party option
down the throats of social movements and radicals. Refusing to
support the Democratic Party right now, in (what is always) the
most decisive election of the century, means abandoning the black
community and the workers to the virtual onset of fascism.
The end product of lesser-evilism for labor and the left seems to
be that we inherit all the evils. Since the 1992 election we have
had a right-wing Democrat as president; for the past year, a
right-wing Republican Congress; a year from now we may face
Republican control of both Congress and the White House. But the
greatest of all evils for the left is the absence of an independent
voice -- so that Clinton's wretched corporate health-care "reform,"
for example, was labeled by Gingrich & Co. as the left's program!
That lesser-evilism grows, not declines, with the evil of the
lesser-evil -- and even with the actual weakening of the
lesser-evil ideologists themselves -- seems paradoxical. In fact,
the paradox is only an apparent one; but before returning to it
let's deal with some consequences as we consider the left and the
Clinton reelection campaign in 1996.
If my observation is valid, it both simplifies and complicates the
argument about Clinton and the left. On the one hand, it becomes
unnecessary, even irrelevant, to try to detail the Clinton
Administration's atrocities. The fact that Clinton initiated the
drive to "end welfare as we know it," meaning an attack on the
poor; that "putting 100,000 more cops on the street" and more petty
drug users in prison is the centerpiece of his reelection campaign;
that his (extremely feeble) efforts to curb "permanent replacement"
of strikers were linked to compulsory arbitration schemes that
would effectively eliminate the right to strike itself; that his
only first-rate appointments, Dr. Joycelyn Elders and Prof. Lani
Guinier, were in the latter case abandoned in the face of a
right-wing slander campaign and, in the former, preemptively fired
for mentioning "masturbation" before the reactionaries even had
time to mount their attack; that his crime-control and
"anti-terrorism" initiatives contained provisions for secret trials
and executive deportations that exceed the police-state wet dreams
of the Bush, Reagan and Nixon regimes; and that his defense of
medical care for the poor and elderly against Republican budget
ax-murderers reduced itself to a technical dispute over which
figures to use for a seven-year budget-balancing crusade -- none of
this, you see, actually matters.
We could say even more -- how Clinton allowed the military
gangsters in Haiti to massacre thousands, then sent troops in to
"restore democracy" (and coincidentally, to steal the documents
showing the CIA's deep involvements with the death-squad regime)
after forcing the popular elected president to implement an
International Monetary Fund program and to promise not to run for
reelection. How he announced, then renounced, the end of the ban on
gays in the military. All this and NAFTA too -- but so what?
It's precisely because the political situation is so dire, the
soon-to-arise chorus of liberal and social democratic commentary
will tell us, that we must at all costs resist the ultimate horror
of simultaneous Republican control of the White House and Congress.
How could we be "indifferent" to the prospects of turning the
entire government apparatus over to the right wing?
Since no facts about Clinton can affect the argument, it becomes
necessary to turn to a more complex problem: the character of the
evils we confront, and the possibility of alternatives. Clearly it
won't do to rely on ritual formulas claiming that the Democrats and
Republicans are identical, which they aren't; or to deny that the
Republican agenda is, taken as a whole, a worse evil than the
Democratic one, which it is. If there weren't greater as well as
lesser evils in bourgeois politics, there wouldn't be a lesser-evil
debate in the first place.
Let's outline, then, the more complex and practical case against
voting for the Democrats, lesser evils that they are. It is
necessary to grasp that the two political evils, while by no means
identical, are profoundly co-dependent, as manifested in several
ways.
(1) The greater, overtly right-wing and reactionary (roughly
speaking, Republican) evil, which felt the political wind in its
sails from the defeat of Clinton's wretched health-care
pseudo-reform until the Republicans' own debacle in the budget
wrestlemania of November 1995, can scarcely exist without the
weakly pro-welfare state, slightly liberal (roughly, Democratic)
lesser-evil opposition.
For one thing, after the collapse of Communism the "big spending,"
"soft on crime" and "weak on God and family values" Democrats are
the only remaining official enemy so desperately required by the
right. For another, on a practical political level, many angry and
alienated white working people who voted for the Republicans in
1994 may have done so because of the belief that a divided
government, with a Democratic administration still controlling the
executive institutions, would prevent the Contract on America being
implemented in a way that would directly impact on them.
This belief is actually mistaken, inasmuch as profound changes in
U.S. and world capitalism underlie the truly bipartisan
screw-the-people consensus in today's politics -- but who will
present that reality to the working class public if there is no
independent left to do so?
(2) The ever-more-rightward moving Democratic establishment,
responding faithfully to the imperatives of its corporate masters,
requires the looming menace of the Republican greater evil to
discipline its own voter base. After NAFTA, after the betrayal of
every Democratic promise to labor from the Carter-era
labor-law-reform on, what could keep either the institutions of
labor, or workers (two very distinct entities!) in the Democratic
loyalist camp if not the hideous visage of Newt Gingrich?
By now, the process of political decomposition has reached the
stage where even the menace of the right may not be able to hold
the Democrats together much longer. I suspect that workers, unlike
ideologues of the liberal or social democratic left, will not vote
from purely cynical lesser-evil motives, but only for something
that is seen to be, even if only in a partial and wrong-headed way,
somehow positive. If the Democrats offer nothing, white workers
either don't vote or try to get what they can from the conservative
option (the illusory tax-cutting promise, for instance, or the
pledge to wipe out affirmative action's "special privileges" for
minorities).
(3) This dynamic affects the debate in the left in ways that are
too rarely acknowledged. I mentioned at the outset that the
shrillness of the lesser-evil argument escalates as the real
political influence of its adherents diminishes. This is not so
hard to understand.
At the elite levels, Democratic leadership pays less and less
attention (or even lipservice) to the concerns of the left. For
liberal intellectuals or social democrats within trade union
structures, then, maintaining their last shreds of credibility
within the Democratic Party depends on delivering the votes of
constituencies that naturally incline toward the left. Crudely put:
who needs a DSA (or some other left cover) if it cannot deliver or
impose some discipline on any base? Self-preservation thus plays at
least a scarcely acknowledged role in the formulation of the
lesser-evilist argument.
(This is not the occasion for a full-fledged polemic, but there is
at least a rough parallel here between social democrats' role in
seeking to channel anger and political disaffection back into the
Democratic Party, with their historic work of blunting the
organizing of mass independent anti-war or disarmament campaigns
during the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.)
Let's move, then, to briefly consider alternatives to the
lesser-evilist trap. The Perot phenomenon is of course symptomatic
of profound political alienation, but circumscribed by the fact
that the 20% of the electorate drawn to Perot are outnumbered, two
or three to one, by those who (correctly) regard him as a political
snake-oil salesman.
More interesting is the fact that Bill Bradley, for the one day he
publicly contemplated an independent presidential candidacy, became
a virtual front-runner -- not because he was seen as either a left
or right alternative to Clinton (generally he's somewhere to the
right), but mainly because he looked like something different. Or
that Colin Powell, as a possible moderate Republican candidate,
threw both the Democrats and the Christian Coalition into a panic.
Obviously neither Bradley nor Powell represents anything in the
nature of a progressive new political party. Their appeal, however,
reflects the extraordinary malaise that has the ruling class
parties desperately looking for new faces, new images, new sound
bites -- anything but new politics.
For its part, the left can look -- if it so chooses -- to a number
of developments in recent electoral politics. In several states,
including New Mexico, not a traditional left bastion, Green parties
made important steps forward in the 1994 elections. Labor Party
Advocates will hold a founding convention by mid-1996. The New
Progressive Party is on the political map in Wisconsin; Campaign
for a New Tomorrow and other activists have carried out aggressive
city council and board of education campaigns in Pittsburgh; Bernie
Sanders has proven in Vermont that independent political action
informed by populist and socialist convictions can succeed.
Activists should be working to bring these and other local or state
efforts into some kind of operational alliance.
This is not the place for a comprehensive survey or detailed
strategic discussion of how to bring about such unity, but I would
hope that this and other journals committed to independent politics
would undertake it.
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