Leighton's Blog

The problem with revolutions is that they can’t survive success. Sooner or later, the causes that give birth to insurrection are subordinated to the imperative of holding onto power. The same that can be said of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution can now be said of the historical footnote once known as the “Republican Revolution”: a revolution ascendant is a revolution betrayed.

Initially, the Republican Revolution of 1995-1996 followed the standard trajectory: First was the Reign of Terror, under the Jacobin rule of the House’s “Freshman Congress,” led by Newt Gingrich playing the role of Robespierre. Then Thermidor, when, after a series of missteps beginning with the fatefully ill-conceived shutdown of the Federal Government, Gingrich, like his historical counterpart, was consumed by the revolution that he himself had begun.

But historical analogies are cheap, and if revolutions really were governed by a formula – or if Republican temper tantrums were truly “revolutionary” – the Republican Party would now be in the phase known as “The Directory,” during which a brief, tenuous French democracy preceded the usurpation of power by Napoleon Bonaparte. In fact, no such phase of moderation has restrained the fanatical esprit de corps of the Republican Party. Instead, a figure vaguely reminiscent of the French dictator prematurely seized the executive and began waging a war upon democracy in the name of the Republic, and rather than swinging away from its radical excesses, the party has merely substituted for the original revolutionary program an agenda no less radical but entirely out of sorts with its founding orthodoxy.

Gingrich’s revolutionary manifesto, the Contract With America, was an unimaginative indictment of “Democratic” deficit spending, excessive government bureaucracy and onerous regulations and tax burdens, in other words, the standard Republican fare. Its only real innovation was its introduction of Congressional term limits as a major Republican policy objective, and most of the document’s originality lied in its novel use of uncontroversial values like “personal responsibility,” “accountability” and “opportunity” to spin ideas that were new and exciting when John Locke wrote about them in the seventeenth century. What was new was the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners approach that Republicans in the 104th Congress adopted in their effort to champion the platform. To achieve its objective of a wholesale annihilation of the New Deal welfare state in a single term, the party had to recast itself in the mold of a revolutionary vanguard: zealous, disciplined, chauvinistic. The inveterate intransigence of the Republican Party of 2004 owes much to these beginnings.

As a policy platform, the Contract With America by and large failed. No constitutional amendment to require a balanced Federal budget ever saw the light of day. President Clinton managed to steal the credit for a compromised version of “welfare reform.” The line item veto became law, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court two years later. Tort reform remains an unfulfilled item on the Republican wish list. After two aborted attempts at a Constitutional amendment, the term “Congressional term limits” found itself in the company of “the information superhighway” in the refuse bin of quaint lexicological curiosities from the nineties. Today, the legislative legacy of the Contract is little more than a host of modifications to the parliamentary rules of the House.

But in spite of its legislative failures, the spirit of the revolutionary vanguard remains a pervasive feature of the majority party almost ten years later, only now, the original call to arms has become counter-revolutionary, and its stubborn adherents in Congress are cast as regressive subversives unravelling the movement from within. Having seized the castle, the party has been stripped of a king to dethrone, but like so many post-revolutionary one party states, it clings to the rhetorical cause of the downtrodden masses while doing everything in its power to suppress it.

Party discipline requires fealty to party leaders, and as with all radical movements, the Republican Party has become an inhospitable place for political moderates and brokers of compromise. The Club For Growth, a supply-side, anti-tax lobbying group, runs a hit list of moderate Republicans whom it deems to be out of step with the party line. Earlier this year, the Club attempted, in vain, to purge Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter from the Republican roster. Conservative Republicans openly call for the ouster of what they term “RINOs”: Republicans In Name Only. Chief among their targets are Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, and Senator John McCain of Arizona.

At the top of the heretical agenda of the RINO caucus is the caution it urges against excessive tax cuts that are not accompanied by decreases in government spending, that is, its preoccupation with balancing the Federal budget. Evidently, flying the banner of yesterday’s Republican Party is grounds for treason today. Last week, Democrats joined Republicans in both chambers of Congress to approve of Bush’s plan to extend middle-class tax cuts without offsetting the loss of government revenue by closing corporate tax loopholes. By their own admission, the Democrats’ about-face on the measure was based on political calculation alone: afraid of being branded tax hikers in an election year, they set aside for a moment their concerns about soaring deficits. In turn, the three Republican moderates in the Senate, including Chafee and Snowe, whose temporary alliance with the Democrats had, until last week, made possible the Congressional majority that was holding out for a more fiscally responsible plan, abandoned course. The tax cuts were extended for five years, corporate welfare survived unscathed, projected deficits increased. Bush Republicans patted themselves on the back for forcing through precisely the kind of deal that Gingrich Republicans ten years ago had sought to make unconstitutional.

The hypocricy does not stop at deficits and balanced budgets. If the Republican Party stood for any principles at all, it would be the President who would be branded a party member “in name only,” not his moderate detractors whose positions accord so closely with the philosophical convictions that the Bush Republicans still claim, ridiculously, to hold sacred. The Bush Administration has thrown caution to the wind in its military and foreign policy, overseen the most dramatic expansion of the Federal government bureaucracy in U.S. history, driven up staggering deficits with no exit strategy, and, in multiple arenas, has ordered the most intrusive government interference in the private lives of its citizens of any American presidency, ever. By comparison, the moderates that the Republican leadership made such convenient use of at the party's showcase convention in New York City are, in fact, the stalwarts of the Republicans' supposed commitment to fiscal conservatism and "small government," the Trotskyists to the Bush Politburo. In the spirit of Josef Stalin's loyal sycophants, Congressional Republicans still speak the language of the revolutionary fanatic, but their fiery exhortations are in the service of what they used to call “business as usual” on Capitol Hill. Priorities look quite a bit different from the vantage point of the seat of power, and as history has demonstrated on more than one occasion, those who continue to pay service to yesterday's cause can easily find their way onto the enemy list of today's Revolutionary Party.

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin, when Stalin assumed control of the Comintern, his first priority was to purge the party of potential rivals. His most influential adversary, Leon Trotsky, exiled from the orbit of power in the Central Committee, watched while Stalin betrayed the cause of the Russian proletariat, along with any semblance of a principle transcending the raw dictates of political power. Reflecting on that experience, he surmised that “in inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.” The party is a different one, but the apparatus is the same, and the present has a stubborn tendency to mimic the past.

“In the Olympic Games,” the 2004 Athens XXVIII Olympiad website proclaims, “what matters most is to share the common vision of promoting peace and friendship among all the people of the world, through the noble competition in sport.”

The sentiment is derived, ostensibly, from the spirit of the original Olympics. In ancient Greece, each Olympiad was accompanied by a truce among all the warring city-states of the region, and for the duration of the games, the known world would limit the competition of nations to the confines of the athletic stadium. The Olympic flame, in the modern pictorial lexicon, is a symbol of our inheritance of what our nostalgia leads us to believe was that ancient spirit, bringing to our modern world the wisdom of antiquity.

As in those ancient times, one of the most defining characteristics of the modern human condition is a state of perpetual international conflict, and today it’s hard to imagine even contemplating anything like a ritual truce. Indeed, even the simulacrum is a challenge to maintain. In addition to serving as a showcase for the unity of mankind, the modern incarnation of the Olympics has become the largest soapbox in the world, easily exploited to advance the divisive nationalistic ideologies of both the most and the least powerful peoples on the planet. Hitler tried to use the Berlin Olympics in 1936 to espouse the Nazi ideology of Aryan racial supremacy. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes hostage in an effort to secure the release of 200 Arab prisoners, and provoked a standoff with the German police that ended in a bloodbath. In 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States used the games to strike a calculated posture of indignation, leading an international boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The U.S.S.R. responded in kind in 1984, when the games were in Los Angeles. Though the Olympics are meant to celebrate the best of humanity, what is best is routinely outdone by what is worst. Between the cosmopolitan Olympic ideal and the parochial prerogatives of political actors, the contest is all but preordained.

This year has proven no exception. Thanks to the Bush administration, the United States has entered the global arena in Athens with as close to a pariah status as it has ever been accorded. As if to celebrate the honor, the Bush campaign has refused to concede to the demands of the U.S. Olympic Committee to pull off the air a political television advertisement that uses the games to tout the dubious record of the Administration’s intervention in Iraq. "Freedom is spreading throughout the world like a sunrise,” the Bush campaign ad’s announcer proclaims. “And this Olympics there will be two more free nations. And two fewer terrorist regimes." Flags of Iraq and Afghanistan wave in the distance.

The U.S. Olympic Commission is not alone in its disapproval of the campaign’s opportunism. The players for one of the two “free nations” are outraged, and the Iraqi soccer coach has wondered aloud, "The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?" The Bush administration’s invasion and continued occupation of Iraq stands among the most internationally divisive acts of world history. The campaign’s choice of the Olympic Games as a vehicle to sing the war’s praises says nothing about the solidarity of the community of “free nations” competing in Athens, but is another example, as if we needed it, of the Administration’s absolute indifference to the opinions of any other member of that community.

The cynical irony of the Bush campaign’s appropriation of the Olympic ideal of international solidarity to espouse an unapologetically unilateralist and militaristic foreign policy conforms to an almost formulaic pattern of Republican propaganda making. It is the same Alice in Wonderland algorithm that has produced such absurdities as a draft-dodging deserter casting doubt upon the credentials of a Vietnam War hero; a campaign commercial that morphs the face of a Vietnam vet triple amputee Democratic Senator with that of Osama bin Laden; and a public relations campaign that associates the heroism of first responders on September 11th with the foreign adventures of a trigger-happy administration, shortly before that same administration guts federal support for firefighters all over the country and slashes war veterans’ benefits.

One might be tempted to ask is nothing sacred, if not for the fact that the Olympics have never been spared such cheap political maneuvers. But as the strategic misfire of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has begun to show, while disinformation can well serve the purposes of distraction and obfuscation, you can’t build a viable campaign out of it. Nor can you make a fact out of the fiction of a “free Iraq” merely by pronouncing its name. The lie is simply too stark to be packaged as anything but a lie.

Last week, Ralph Nader named as running mate for his independent presidential ticket Peter Camejo, former Green Party candidate for governor in the California recall election. Nader’s choice of a running mate with a national reputation (political relevance was Camejo’s dividend from sharing the stage with the “serious” contenders in the California election) was meant as a signal to the Kerry campaign that in spite of the earnest hopes of Democrats across the country, Nader's run for office is not merely a ruse to broker a deal to nail a few vaguely greenish planks to the Democratic platform. For the third time in as many elections, it appears that Nader intends to stick it out to the final hour.

Nader’s much-maligned mantra in the 2000 presidential race was that the Democrats and the Republicans were virtually indistinguishable. Big business controlled both; each could be counted upon in almost equal measure to sell out labor, the environment and public health to a free trade agenda.

The Bush administration has rendered any such facile comparison untenable. Even Nader now acknowledges the breadth of the chasm that has come to divide the two parties since Bush’s inauguration. The Republicans’ quasi-fascist pivot under Bush’s leadership is invariably cited by those progressive-minded Americans who disparage Nader’s decision to run this time around as the sword of Damocles whose peril dwarfs the significance of any philosophical objection to the two-party system, no matter how legitimate.

But there is another, and perhaps better reason to reject the specious arguments Nader has offered in support of his candidacy: since the last election, the Democratic Party has changed at least as much as the Republican Party.

In 2000, when Nader galvanized the Left with his indictment of the Democratic Party’s betrayal of both its founding principles and its most steadfast traditional supporters, he was responding to the quite deliberate transformation of the party by President Clinton and his kingmakers at the Democratic Leadership Council. In the early nineties, in the United States as in Britain, the Left had spent the last twelve or so years vainly inveighing against the hegemony of conservative orthodoxy in national government. In the U.S., save for the brief and failed interlude of a single, one-term Democratic administration whose domestic economic policies largely followed a Republican deregulatory agenda, the Republicans had controlled the White House since before the end of the Vietnam War. Neither the old, social democratic, New Deal-type Democratic platform, nor the newer multicultural/feminist Great Society vision seemed capable any longer of doing much more than rallying party activists and intellectuals. They certainly were not winning national elections.

The Democratic Leadership Council offered a solution to the Democratic quandary. By jettisoning its commitment to the value of material egalitarianism and co-opting the Republican vision of a free market Utopia, the DLC, effectively in control of the Democratic National Committee, reinvented the party as the sympathetic alternative to the only game in town – free market capitalism with softer edges. The ploy worked: for the first time since the seventies, a Democrat was elected president, and then, for the first time since the sixties, a Democrat was re-elected president.

The success of the DLC’s tactic vindicated its vision of a “New” Democratic Party. There is a difference, however, between tactic and strategy, and while the party’s centrist feint was a brilliant exemplar of the former, the true believers of the DLC thought themselves to be in possession of the latter. The New Democrats saw in Bill Clinton the future of the Democratic Party, while in fact, the “Third Way,” as the Brits call it, was just a marketing tool, whose eight-year lifespan was only sustained for that long by the star-quality charisma of its leader. At least for the Democrats, it could not last; as a Marxist might observe, its "internal contradictions" were bound eventually to unravel the whole ball of yarn. The fantastic optimism of neoliberalism is predicated upon the non-existence of social classes in American society. That kind of denial is sustainable only for a party that represents the dominant class: while you can tell a roomful of capitalist oligarchs that there’s no such thing as “working people,” only entrepreneurs and their “team leaders” and "associates," and get a roomful of nodding heads, the same song falls flat on its face in a roomful of janitors, parking lot attendants and welfare recipients. The Republicans can celebrate the wonders of the free market into perpetuity. The Democrats cannot. Pretty soon, those at the receiving end of the instruments of "market discipline" are going to get tired of being told by their own party that the market has spoken, and it has deemed them unworthy.

In 2000, Nader was the only national figure ready and willing to stump for those who objected to the DLC’s narrow and cynical conception of the party’s future, and though he ran under the banner of the Green Party, his campaign was fueled primarily by the disaffection of a sizable swath of Democratic voters. The surprising breadth and vitality of the movement he rallied around him testified much more to the divisiveness of the New Democrats’ vision than to the power of Nader’s persona or the strength of his organization.

The groundswell of resistance to the DLC’s hegemony within the party only grew over the next three and a half years under the Bush administration, as the Democratic “opposition” in Congress played a role entirely unworthy of the name. Then, as much to the candidate’s surprise as to everyone else’s, Howard Dean found himself taking over for Nader as this year’s vehicle for the insurgency within the party ranks. Dean’s campaign slogan, “Take Back America,” was – probably consciously – a call to arms against not only the Bush administration, but against the New Democrats. If not for the need to maintain a modicum of party unity, the candidate of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” (a phrase unabashedly ripped-off from the late Senator Wellstone) might as well have dispensed with the euphemism and called on his supporters to “Take Back Your Party.”

Of course, the Deaniacs did not succeed in taking back their party, as Iowa caucus-goers selected the very un-rebellious John Kerry as their choice for the Democratic presidential candidate. The unspoken condition, however, of the rest of the party base’s agreement to forget about Dean and go along with Iowa’s decision was that Kerry refrain from following the counsel of the DLC. For its part, the DLC had already effectively suffered a vote of no confidence, as it became increasingly clear that its candidate, Joe Lieberman, was to be refused even the honor of being considered viable by both the voters and the party apparatus itself, the disapproval of the latter most notably demonstrated by the person of former running mate (and former DLC hope) Al Gore. Kerry emerged as a compromise candidate between the faction supporting Dean and the faction sympathetic to the rhetoric of the New Democrats. To build and maintain a united front in the general election, the party needed a leader either so broadly inspirational or so blandly uncontroversial as to transcend or else to fly under the radar of the fissures in the party base. We got the latter.

Ralph Nader refuses, perhaps willfully, to recognize that the energy behind his 2000 campaign had little to do with third parties per se, and far more to do with the struggle over the fate of one of the two behemoths he disparaged as one and the same monster. For the time being, that struggle is resolved. In his fruitless search for new turncoats to form a support base for his pointless candidacy, Nader now wanders aimlessly in the lingering smoke that will eventually clear for him, as it has for everyone else, to reveal an empty battlefield whose fight has already been waged. The spurn he suffered at the Green Party convention and his acceptance of the Reform Party endorsement are testaments to the complete absence of support from those who championed his cause in the last election, and the sad desperation of an insurgent in search of an insurgency. Four years ago, Nader campaigned on the widespread opposition to the ideological proximity of the two parties. His supporters in the last election took his message to heart, and went on to reclaim the Democratic Party from those who would turn it into a watered down version of the Republican Party. He assisted substantially in that worthwhile purpose. Now his egoistic blindness threatens to derail its success.