American Politics Journal

How Green is the Valley...
Democrats have a dip in the road ahead
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 1, 2001 (APJP) -- There was a little news item this week that ought to give every Democrat in the country pause as they look to the future and hope we have elections in 2002 and 2004 so the Congress and the White House can be taken back.

Here in California, the Greens report that they’ve had a 10% increase in party voter registration since the November, 2000 election.

An increase in such registration immediately after an election would be odd under any circumstances. People who weren’t excited enough to register before an election are rarely excited enough to register after an election. Most people, registered and unregistered alike, are perfectly happy to forget about politics for a while.

Then, too, there’s the fact that a lot of people blamed the Greens for the results of the last election. Six months after the inauguration, and one can find, on a weekly basis, at least one column or political cartoon depicting the ruinous policies of Putsch and snarling, “I hope you’re satisfied, Ralph Nader!”

Some of that is what the psychs call “transference”. Living in a household with three dogs ranging in size from 70 pounds to 25, we see it often enough. Big dog, for no apparent reason, trashes middle sized dog. Middle sized dog whimpers, get up, glares at retreating back of big dog, spots little dog who is doing nothing more threatening than just watching, and goes over and trashes him. Little dog, if he’s lucky, can find a cat to harass.

The Democrats got kicked, capriciously and unfairly, and some of them went looking for someone else to kick. The Greens made a wonderful target.

So some Democrats kicked and kicked and kicked. Some were furious because they honestly believed the Greens cost them the election. Some just needed something to kick, and weren’t brave enough to kick Republicans.

Liberals and lefties are the cats of the political world. They are independent and stubborn, and will pretty much do what they please, with or without your approval. They don’t want your approval. They want your support. Abuse them, and they walk away from you. This has hurt the Democratic party.

There’s another element involved in the Democratic bashing of the left. The right wing is very organized, and they often appear to be an implacable force, with influence beyond their numbers, simply because of the extraordinary party discipline they show. They make the trains run on time. They are people of action, not interested in debates or studies or discussions. It’s easy to envy them.

But that only works when things go right for them. When things go wrong, as so much has in the past six months, they become an implacable, well-disciplined horde of lemmings, marching stoically off a cliff. And when the discipline breaks down, it gets very bloody, very fast. Those well-trained shock troops of the right are quick to revert to cannibalism in the event of frustration. Democrats want to be organized, and rarely notice that quite often, the independence of the typical Democrat is often the greatest strength of the party as a whole, since the sense of loyalty of each member extends inward, as well as out. If Team was All, there would be no need to pay football players. They would be content to make glory for the owner. Republicans try to duplicate that sense of personal identification with ersatz religion, but as often as not, that blows up in their face. Religious movements tend to be even more inflexible and uncompromising than far-right ones. The pseudo-religious branch of the party is one of the main reasons California has moved so far back to the left in the past 6 years. People are put off by the regimentation and intolerance of the state GOP.

So here we are, at a point where a large portion of the Democratic party has assiduously tried to assure the left that being a Green is shameful, a disgrace, disloyal and ruinous to the country.

The result of this is that in the nation’s largest state, Green registration is up 10%. This suggests that the Democratic tactic of trying to shame the left into becoming centrists isn’t working. In fact, it’s backfiring.

It’s a little strange hearing a Democrat gripe about how establishing a third party will only split the vote and hurt the country. This complaint wasn’t heard much among Democrats in 1992, when Ross Perot came along. Of course, Ross Perot appealed to disaffected voters who were right of center. That muted Democratic criticism quite a bit.

But Ross ran and got a fifth of the vote mostly by campaigning on reducing the debt, and both the GOP and the Democrats stole the issue and made it their own. When a third party gains any influence at all, its philosophy is co-opted by one of the major parties, and Perot was on to such a good thing that his idea got stolen by both major parties. This is the way it’s worked since political parties became major entities about 1824, and the two-party system evolved.

There have been exceptions, of course. The Whigs could have picked up the challenge of the abolitionists in 1856. They didn’t, left an opening for a new political consensus to bypass them, and went extinct. Democrats in 1948 rejected the Dixiecrat racists, and ceded the south to the GOP. The Republicans DID pick up the philosophies of those authoritarian elitists of the south, and that attitude suffuses the GOP today.

Third parties usually die, but often leave a legacy. Perot failed on free trade, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams on the federal deficit. The Dixiecrats are long gone, except for J. Strom Thurmond, but live on in the GOP. The Prohibition Party never won a single electoral vote, but influenced the major parties enough to cause a constitutional amendment.

If both major parties ignore a movement, it is liable to keep growing until it cannot be ignored. It’s pretty unlikely that the Republicans are going to co-opt any of the Green Party principles, and indeed, they will be quite happy to watch it grow at Democratic expense, even giving it a surreptitious hand here and there as they did in the 2000 campaign.

New Democrats have been so anxious to be Republicans Lite, and the rank-and-file was hit with wave after wave of right wing propaganda that being a leftist is somehow disloyal and irreligious, that the Democratic Party has alienated its left. Liberals and leftists, according to the polls and depending on your definition, make up between 22 and 33% of the population.

If one in ten of them stayed home, assuming it would be pointless to vote Green and even more pointless to support the slower death of misguided centralism, that was at least 2% of the potential Democratic vote. Sure would have come in handy in Florida, if only 2,000 Green voters had seen something from Gore that suggested he wasn’t just going to sell them out. The Republicans could only steal so many votes, after all.

Democrats were already outraged enough by the rise of this upstart party, but when Ralph Nader made a remark about it perhaps being a good thing that Putsch won because the differences, while small, would be enough to galvanize people, they went ballistic. How, they demanded in trembling voices and pointing with a shaking hand at the grinning autocrats of the Putsch administration, could anything Gore offered be as bad as THIS?

There are lots of things the left are concerned about beside the environment: workers’ rights, globalization, the drug war, the death penalty, the concentration of power and wealth in our society. On these issues, there is very little difference between Republicans and Democrats. On globalization, the drug war, and the death penalty, there is no visible difference, and to leftists, those issues are just as important as abortion rights, or civil rights.

For eight years, the left of America put nearly its entire agenda on hold in order to help Clinton fight a common foe. Clinton, in return, did precious little for the left, and in the end, the Democrats completely ignored the left and put up a centrist so weak he was cowed out of running on the peace and prosperity that Clinton indisputably brought to America, and was intimidated out of fighting for an election he won. His running mate, a strange little bible-banger who opposes free speech and has since joined Putsch in trying to inflict the churches on us through government, was even worse.

For every left winger who said “To hell with this” and voted for Nader, another five stayed home, reasoning that a vote for Nader would make things worse, and that the Democrats had done nothing to deserve a vote. In Mediaeval England, blasphemers were given a choice between a hot fire and a cool fire. The cool fire was the smart choice, because it was much smokier, and the asphyxiation killed you faster and much more painlessly than a hot fire. For leftists, the choice between Democrats and Republicans was a choice between a hot fire and a cool fire.

In 2000, 2,858,843 voters cast ballots for the Greens. Over ten million leftists, disenchanted with the Democratic Party, stayed home. As long as the Democrats keep kicking them, they aren’t coming back.

And their numbers appear to be growing.

Does the Democratic Party want to go up against the corrupt and well-heeled election machine of the GOP in 2002 with at least fifteen million voters alienated by futile efforts by the party to appease the right?

There’s a word for parties that kick out nearly a third of their voter base and replace it with nothing.

Extinct.

If the Democrats depend solely on their efforts to attract Republican moderates, and do nothing to address the concerns of the left, they are in for a very nasty shock in November, 2002.

The Democrats currently offer little to the left other than abuse and ridiculous demands for undeserved loyalty. We can get that, cheaper and more entertaining, from the Republicans. That same left, on the other hand, is the key to picking up as much as 50 seats in the House and ten in the Senate, and setting up for kicking out the illegitimate junta in 2004.

How long will Democrats ignore a huge constituency prepared to help them in the forlorn hope of gaining disaffected centrists - who rarely vote - for the other party?