Democrats: The Only Game In Town

Electoral politics are frustrating. A lot of energy went into the Jackson and Baker campaigns. They both got steamrollered by opponents who are at best liberals. It's no wonder some progressives are ready to give up on the whole process. Nevertheless, the most productive course for us right now is to back the Dukakis ticket. Of course, we will have to pressure his administration from the start. What is our alternative? If we want to make serious change, we need a strategy for forming a government, or at least pressuring one in our direction. We can write off the few secties who still dream about violent overthrows or general strikes. That leaves the electoral road. The third-party strategy has simply never worked - not once since the founding of the Republic - and there are no real aspirants on the horizon now. The Democrats are the only game in town. It is mere fantasy to think that we can run the country from the streets. Outside pressure is crucial to force a party in power to pay attention to its base, to take one of the roads it might choose anyway. That's what happened with the labor movement in the 30s and the civil rights movement in the 60s. But we can only blunt or slow the initiatives of a truly hostile government - and often not even that. Anyone who thinks we can stop Bush from appointing an anti-abortion majority to the Supreme Court - three seats will fall vacant within the first year, when his power is at its height - is dreaming. And we should not exaggerate our ability to work in a reactionary environment People are not mobilized by despair, but by forward movement that doesn't go fast enough. It 's no accident that the great surges of popular action began in the 30s and 60s when liberal Democrats were in power. Another four, or eight, years of Reaganite futility will only further the Republican agenda of discrediting all political action. The people will sink into terminal passivity, and little bands of radical activists will not be able to turn that around. To be sure, electoral work is frustrating. But a lot of our problems with electoral politics stem from not understanding the system. You win the electoral game by assembling a broad coalition. Reagan has drawn in yuppie libertarians and fundamentalists. Jackson tried to bring together Blacks, gays, and blue-collar Catholics. Can you really imagine all of them in one room? The trick is to slur over the differences, to water down the ideas, and to cover it all with more or less meaningless rhetoric. Intellectuals sometimes have trouble with this and look for ideas that aren't there. The rejection of Jackson's platform planks was not a matter of principle. The plank on taxing the rich didn't fail because Democrats have conscientious objections, but because the pros decided it would lose more votes in the suburbs than could ever be made up in the inner city. They just might be right. So don' t worry too much about the campaign rhetoric. And forget all the glib talk that there is no difference between the major parties. In fact, they face very different political problems. The Republicans built their coalition by excluding the Rainbow constituency. They take strength from our opposition - holding us down is what they were elected to do. The Democrats, however, whether they know it or not, need our support. Though they can't win with the Rainbow alone, they can't win without us. And that gives us leverage. A Dukakis administration can be put in serious political difficulty if it tries to impose more austerity. We have to be ready to create that difficulty. If a new austerity drive can be blocked, the government will practically be forced in a leftward direction. The child care, health care, and education the Democrats have promised - promises we should hold them to - have to be paid for. The "last resort" of taxing the rich and cutting the military budget may come sooner than we realize. An "industrial policy" - the germ of national economic planning - will be necessary when the downturn comes. The prospects for serious change are better than a lot of us realize. So we will be much better off with Dukakis in the White House - if only to keep abortion legal. At the same time, we have to keep an independent ability to apply pressure. We must be ready to go into the streets and workplaces if need be, to push some serious progressives in 1990, and to mount another primary challenge in 1992. Grassroots pressure is vital, but it must be co-ordinated to exploit the vulnerabilities of a government in power. And what we can get depends entirely on who is in power. Are you really that busy on November 8? There's a false confidence in what I call mathematical modeling of scenarios. A scenario is a kind of an extrapolation from known facts to unknown facts. These fellows sit there using mathematical models, all of which are based on assumption. But the power of the model, and the reason we're usually intimidated, is because it produces a number, and when we see a number, we think we've seen a fact. They 're very naive about their own models, and worst of all, they have a false confidence in their ability to control events, and human beings. This confidence grows, perhaps, out of the command and control nature of their training. But it is I who feel that what is much more likely is there will be some uncertainty, some unplanned intervention in the case of a crisis escalation. And our nation's official policy in the case of a nuclear crisis is to have escalation dominance. Meaning we will escalate, we will decide the time, the place, the location and the nature of the next escalation. We will not lose control over the escalation process. That's what the motivation is. It's not warmongering, it's not monstrosity. It is wrong-headed thinking. It is emotional and irrational attachment to weapons. It is trusting machinery more than human beings. It is a preference for superiority over parity, which I think is stupid. The moral issues are there. And there are others who may argue them belter than I. For me the issue is that the experts are not very smart.