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We, The Liberal
by Highlander
I’ve had the same wet dream as all liberals: someone starts up a viable third party over on the left, calling it something like the American Liberal Party, or the National New Populist Party. It would be a third party for all of us who are still brave (or just tired) enough to still call ourselves liberals, a party that hasn’t sold out to the moderates as comprehensively as the Democrats, a party that would run on truly progressive platform planks like a Worker’s Bill of Rights, and comprehensive gun control, and protecting the government from religious incursions, and all that other good left wing stuff that the Democrats have completely wimped out on over the past, oh, fifteen years or so, in order to remain viable in American national politics.
And they’d have people in charge like Howard Dean and Ralph Nader, and all us far left wing nuts would just be havin’ a ball, right up until the actual election, when our New American Liberal Party candidates would get 20% of the vote, the Democrats would get 30%, the Republicans would pull in 50%, and all you or I will hear for the remainder of our fairly short lives is the sound of joyous well tailored mobs singing Onward Christian Soldiers as they march us to the wall against which we will be shot by their now completely legal fully automatic assault rifles.
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly in my last point, although in my heart of hearts I fear I am not, really, at all. But I am entirely correct when I say this: a liberal third party will destroy progressive politics in this country for the next twenty if not fifty years, by completely splintering the half of the electoral base that is currently anywhere, even a fraction of a percentage point, to the left of center.
Yeah, I found Bill Clinton annoying when he was in office. This guy was a Democrat? He completely dismantled FDR’s social safety net! He totally blew off all his promises of universal health care! He spent eight years accomplishing absolutely nothing in regard to enacting any sort of progressive liberal agenda, while getting his rocks off in apparently every woman who walked within three paces of him and then held still for five minutes! He was a joke! And this guy was a DEMOcrat? Oh PLEASE!
But, you know, five years into an apparently eternal, if utterly illegal and illegitimate, Shrub Administration, I have to admit, Clinton looks awfully damn good to me now.
Clinton is, unfortunately, the kind of candidate the Democrats have to run in order to win any kind of national office nowadays… a non-liberal moderate Democrat who is capable of keeping most of the left of center vote while picking up at least 5 to 7 percent of the slightly right of center vote. And let’s face it, even with a candidate as non liberal as Clinton, the Democrats needed Perot running from the right as an independent to get Bill into the White House. Once he was there, the power of the incumbency was enough to keep his margins fairly intact, but without Perot, the Dems would never have gotten back in.
All of which leads me to my point: we liberals need to abandon the orgasmic masturbation fantasy of a viable third party on the far left, and start hoping for a viable third party to spring up on the far right.
It could happen. Quite a few of the more diehard, States Rights, small government, personal privacy, libertarian style conservatives are getting more and more fed up with the Republican Party’s ongoing sell out to the crazy Christian fringe. The only thing that is keeping a lot of these folks from setting up their own shop is the need for party unity. They know what a lot of us on the left fringe don’t seem to want to acknowledge – splinters don’t win elections for at least twenty years. Should the Republican Party fragment, they can kiss their choke hold on national political prominence good bye for at least a generation… and the party leaders on the right are way too smart to let that happen.
What liberals SHOULD be doing is everything in their power to start up a viable third party on the right. Get it rolling. Make it as extreme as possible. Call it the American Glory Party, or some such thing. Get Pat Robertson to run for President with Jerry Fallwell as his running mate. Get every conservative Christian church in America to do fundraisers. Take ALL those nuts out of the Republican voter base and get them all hyped up, thinking they could possibly put a Real Man Of God in the White House, one who won’t have to compromise with worldly powers… that would pretty much put paid to conservative aspirations on a national level for quite some time.
Of course, the problem is, the American Glory party would probably sweep any number of Congressional districts and would end up as a viable third party over in the legislative branch…something that wouldn’t happen for a liberal third party, which would pull maybe a dozen districts at best… and that’s probably a wild pipe dream.
So there aren’t any easy answers for us over on the left who believe in truly tolerant and progressive government. In fact, we may all just have to pack it in and move to France. But we do need to get one thing straight: this let’s start a third party for us liberals stuff isn’t going to do anything except hand the country even more firmly over to the nuts on the right.
B wrote: … uncle$camed
do you have anything to add for a discussion?
Yes, I do, my initial response was not meant as a derail, contrary to popular belief, I am an ally here, all be it a cynical one. Nevertheless, I was trying to point out that the system is locked. While I appaulade Highlander’s attempt at working out and proposing ideals as iconoclastic as this post seems, it’s still new skin wrapped around old bones. I believe there will be no third party left or right as Hightlander so boldly and bravely proposes. Let me explain this way:
First and foremost I am not a fan of Soros György, i.e. George Soros, and his Open Society Institute and Soros Foundation Network, I feel he is half right for the wrong reasons, which make him wrong for the meta-naratives and issues we are struggling with here. And for things I have as yet to work out in my own mind. Having said that,
I have mentioned organizational change theory and systems thinking, many times… I feel we must see through this filter and if we are to agree, in the premis that “we do not have an open system”. once agreed, We see that Open systems are freqently capable of change and resists entropy. They can be said to practice creative self-destruction. Closed systems are neglected until the system breaks-down or discentagrates. Trying to change a system (like our political system) by changing its content is called First Order Change. In this case, people try to change what an individual element does, try to reorganize a specific organization, or change the people who work for an organization read democrats. These types of change alter only the look of the system, not its actual behavior. It is called “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” However you arrange the chairs, the ship will still sink.
Homeostasis is an unconscious process by which systems seek to maintain the status quote. All elements within the system interact to keep the system from changing. Any effort toward system change will result in homeostatic responses from within the system to block the change.Which is what I feel is the left/right Bush/anybody but bush binary logic. Most system change strategies tend to fail because they do not address the interactions within the system. When a change effort fails, (which it has again and again) the most common response is to try the same (or the same type) of strategy again.A forever feed-back loop that stagnates and falls anyway.
To understand a system, study its content, to change a system study its context. I feel what the good intentions of the progresives and open minded people here at the bar and elsewhere seem to get caught up in is study of content and not it’s context. How long must we play this lessor of two evils game?
New Project Censored Story on Vote Fraud
“Welcome to a world where statistical probability and normal arithmetic no longer apply!(36) The Democrats, rather than vigorously pursuing these patently obvious signs of election fraud in 2004, have nearly all decided that being gracious losers is better than being winners,(37) probably because – and this may be the most important reason for the Democrat’s relative silence – a full-scale uncovering of the fraud runs the risk of mobilizing and unleashing popular forces that the Democrats find just as threatening as the GOP does.
The delicious irony for the GOP is that the Help America Vote Act, precipitated by their theft of the Florida 2000 presidential vote, made GOP theft of elections as in the preceding examples easy and unverifiable except through recourse to indirect analysis such as pre-election polls and exit polls.(38) This is the political equivalent of having your cake and eating it too. Or, more precisely: stealing elections, running the country, and aggressively, arrogantly and falsely claiming that “the people” support it.
Flavor Flav of the rap group Public Enemy used to wear a big clock around his neck in order to remind us all that we’d better understand what time it is. Or, as Bob Dylan once said: “Let us not speak falsely now, the hour’s getting late.” To all of those who said before the 2004 elections that this was the most important election in our lifetimes; to all of those who plunged into that election hoping and believing that we could throw the villains out via the electoral booth; to all of those who held their noses and voted for Democrats thinking that at least they were slightly better than the theocratic fascists running this country now, this must be said: VOTING REALLY DOESN’T MATTER. If we weren’t convinced of that before these last elections, then now is the time to wake up to that fact. Even beyond the fraudulent elections of 2000 and 2004, public policies are not now, nor have they ever been, settled through elections. ”
Also see:
-From No Paper Trail Left Behind: The Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election,By Dennis Loo, Ph.D. Cal Poly Pomona
Item: A long time back I predicted this year’s vote fraud story would make it to this year’s list of Project Censored stories. And I was right. Check out this article. And here are the top ten things you need to believe in order to think that the 2004 election wasn’t fraudulent. It’s written by another one of those PH D wackos.
In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.(1)
1) A big turnout and a highly energized and motivated electorate favored the GOP instead of the Democrats for the first time in history.(2)
2) Even though first-time voters, lapsed voters (those who didn’t vote in 2000), and undecideds went for John Kerry by big margins, and Bush lost people who voted for him in the cliffhanger 2000 election, Bush still received a 3.5 million vote surplus nationally.(3)
3) The fact that Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republicans’ votes that he got in 2000, receiving in 2004 more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties, merely shows Floridians’ enthusiasm for Bush. He managed to do this despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000 and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points.(4)
4) Florida’s reporting of more presidential votes (7.59 million) than actual number of people who voted (7.35 million), a surplus of 237,522 votes, does not indicate fraud.
5) The fact that Bush got more votes than registered voters, and the fact that by stark contrast participation rates in many Democratic strongholds in Ohio and Florida fell to as low as 8%, do not indicate a rigged election.(5)
6) Bush won re-election despite approval ratings below 50% – the first time in history this has happened. Truman has been cited as having also done this, but Truman’s polling numbers were trailing so much behind his challenger, Thomas Dewey, pollsters stopped surveying two months before the 1948 elections, thus missing the late surge of support for Truman. Unlike Truman, Bush’s support was clearly eroding on the eve of the election.(6)
7) Harris’ last-minute polling indicating a Kerry victory was wrong (even though Harris was exactly on the mark in their 2000 election final poll).(7)
8) The “challenger rule” – an incumbent’s final results won’t be better than his final polling – was wrong;(8)
9) On election day the early-day voters picked up by early exit polls (showing Kerry with a wide lead) were heavily Democratic instead of the traditional pattern of early voters being mainly Republican.
10) The fact that Bush “won” Ohio by 51-48%, but this was not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote doesn’t cast any suspicion upon the official tally.(9)
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 18 2005 5:20 utc | 34
Hmmmm. Okay. My original point was that liberals (like, I presume, all of us) yearn to create a third party considerably farther left than the Democrats (a party we pretty much all agree has failed miserably to adequately represent us for the last twenty or thirty years), it would be a bad idea, because it would split the left in a country that is already almost exactly split between left and right, and deliver clinching electoral victories to the right for decades to come.
And many people here have made many good points, some of which I even understand (that’s an admission of my own lack of sophistication at political nuance, not a crack aimed at anyone else’s articulation or erudition). Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps we could start up a virtual party, although I think that the way individual voting power is divided up by geographic region pretty much makes that unworkable. Or perhaps a more liberal party could work if we thought outside the box and came up with some univerally appealing issues. I don’t know. I’ll admit, it’s very possible, however, that my original point was incorrect, although I’m not fully convinced of it, so I’ll also admit I think it’s very possible it was correct, too.
I think it’s even more possible that my opinion is as subjective as anyone else’s in a very subjective field (politics) and probably even more ignorant than many’s, so I’m just going to leave that at that.
On gun control: in my absolutely unequivocal opinion, if you let everyone who wants to carry a gun carry a gun, freely and without legal hindrance, you will have a lot of ignorant, bigoted, overly emotional and potentially violent dimwits wandering the streets with the power to point a magic stick at me, or my girlfriend, or any of her kids, and make any of us die. That’s a spectacularly bad idea.
I’m a very casual football fan. Having lived outside Buffalo when I was a kid, one of the teams I like is the Buffalo Bills. Having spent nearly ten years of my life in Florida, the other team I like is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I have a little bit of experience with the fervor of football fans (and the fans of both teams are among the most civil you’ll find associated with the sport) and I will tell you this: I would not want to be in a sports bar with a lot of Buffalo Bills or Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan after their team has lost an ugly, bitterly contested game. Those people (men and women) get violent.
Now assume they aren’t Buffalo or Tampa Bay fans. Let’s say they are Oakland Raider or Philadelphia Eagle fans, either of which pride themselves on their, let’s call it rambunctious, behavior.
And now let’s say we live in a world with no gun control. Those guys n’ dolls in that sports bar who would otherwise be throwing punches and hitting each other with bar stools will, instead, be blasting holes in the windows, interior partitions, exterior walls, each other’s torsos, and, oh yeah, possibly, ME, or my girlfriend, or any of her kids, if we just happen to be walking by.
Liberals who don’t like gun control, and who like guns, are generally responsible gun owners. But they tend to assume that everyone else in the world would be equally responsible, and, well, in my opinion, that is a very foolish assumption.
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns… maybe. When guns AREN’T outlawed, all the morons will have them. I don’t even want to go to the library if the librarian is packing a .357, and ready to use it the first time a 12th grader gets snotty with her.
No gun control? Bad idea.
Posted by: Highlander | Aug 19 2005 1:47 utc | 52
“Sadly, only Republicans have the power to stop the oncoming disaster. Over what issue would they split? Whatever it is, we need to help give that issue traction.”
Good question, gylangirl. The answer seems to be, Church & State. The Repubs have shored up their base mightily by working hard to incorporate the lunatic Christian fringe. But many more mainstream Repubs still believe in small government and individual rights, including the freedom to be any religion you like (or none) and, very specifically, a right to privacy that allows the individual and the family to make ‘private’ decisions.
The fringe-nut Christian/Dominionist movement, however, has absolutely no patience for any ‘rights’ that would get in the way of them policing your bedroom. You cannot be gay, you cannot get pregnant out of wedlock, you cannot have sex with anyone but your properly registered and taxed heterosexual mate, you cannot have certain kinds of sex with that properly registered and taxed heterosexual mate, you will go to church every Sunday and it better be the right kind of church, you cannot get an abortion under any circumstances, you cannot allow any of your family members, no matter how desperate their circumstances, to have life support withdrawn. In point of fact, the fringe Christian-Dominionist movement doesn’t believe we have any ‘rights’ at all. We are just here to please God, and what pleases God is something that only Jerry Falwell can tell you.
We need to keep hammering hard at various privacy issues, as they are the ones where the rabid evangelicals will always fall on the other side of a very great divide from most mainstream Republicans. The Repubs took a big hit over the Terri Schiavo situation; DeLay, Frist, and the rest of the pack felt very confident that they could pander to the Christian fringe without losing mainstream support, and they were shocked to discover they were wrong. Quite a lot of their base got up on their hind feet and said “No, we don’t want government interfering in these kinds of decisions; this is our business, not yours”. It was a slap across the nose with a rolled newspaper that most of the Repubs still haven’t gotten over.
Beyond that, Dubya and Cheney keep handing us perfect fracture lines with their continued bungling of the war in Iraq. The party line is becoming increasingly frayed the longer the war goes on and the higher the body count gets. Cindy Sheehan, apparently, isn’t going anywhere, and unlike Michael Moore, and to a lesser extent, the rest of us on the left wing, she’s someone the right wing attack dogs simply cannot get their teeth into (no matter how hard they try).
Conservatives tend to be pro military and support very aggressive foreign policies, but they’re like any avid sports fan — they expect their team to WIN. We’re not winning in Iraq (despite what wingnut dickheads like Dean Esmay keep shrilly chanting) and it isn’t very plausible that we’re going to start winning any time soon. Eventually, this will erode the conservative base as more and more of them just get sick of the whole thing (and the steadily mounting body count) and start calling for us to pull our kids back out of there before we throw too much good money after bad.
I would, of course, like a faster solution; way too many people (American, British, Iraqi, what have you, they’re all people) have died unnecessarily in this ongoing military calamity.
Posted by: Highlander | Aug 20 2005 1:51 utc | 69
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