Where's My Monkey Wrench?

By Steve Hynd

A couple of days ago,  Chris Bowers snarkily announced his conversion to being a "conservative Democrat".

After several years of trying to "retake" the Democratic Party and make it more progressive, today I am giving up and becoming a conservative Democrat. Upon careful consideration, the benefits packages are simply too heavily tilted toward the corporate wing of the party. Check it out:

It would be pretty sweet to be able to endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes to keep me in the Party. I mean, if you do this as a progressive, then you are pretty much screwed for life.

...If you are a conservative Democrat, you get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own. If you are a progressive, you have to stand at the back of the line, and then get threats about never hearing from the White House again if you step out of line.

Further, if you are a conservative Democrat, you can also refuse to pay your Democratic Party Committee dues, and still receive disproportionate expenditures from Democratic Party Committees. That is just a straight up good deal.

...Being a conservative Democrat gets you more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors. Hard to argue with receiving both enormous big dollar fundraisers held in your honor and huge amounts of money from small progressive donors. So really, who cares if bloggers complain about you. Their readers are still going to fork over huge amounts of money.

If you are a conservative Democrat, you get to hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want. And there are no repercussions. In fact...

Being a conservative Democrat also makes you far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama's cabinet by 7-1.

Finally, if one of those crazy progressives decides to challenge you in a primary campaign, if you are a conservative Democrat you can also count on the endorsements of 95% of your congressional colleagues, the entire party leadership, and virtually every progressive advocacy organization. They will stand by you.

"Bonesparkle" at Scholars & Rogues took up the issue (H/t Kat):

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence...

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

...Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.

It's not a new idea. The same ideas play out in the run-up and aftermath to every major election cycle as progressives - perpetual victims - steel themselves to vote for people they're sure are going to screw them, get screwed, then wonder how to stop being screwed. Indeed, back in 2005 I contributed some ideas to the discussion a whole bunch of bloggers were having for a "coalition of the left", an American Solidarity movement which would be a progressive "big tent" outwith the self-imposed political rapings of the Democratic Party. The best round-up of the discussion came from American Samizdat.

Then, as now, the biggest real-world barrier to a divorce of progressives and Beltway Democrats is the way in which the big two parties have the electoral process sewn up at the earliest stages, making it nigh-on impossible for a new third party to get on the ballot in enough places to mount a truly national campaign. The biggest emotional barrier is the perennial notion that "this time it will be different" - the Dems playing Lucy with the football, as Fester likes to describe it. For the 2006 cycle, the football was Iraq. For 2008, it was Barack Obama himself and his promises even convinced cynical me to back off from urging that divorce. But Obama has become more and more a Tony Blair figure - he said a lot of stuff to get elected but on healthcare, the economy, social safety nets, interventionist foreign policy, state secrecy, torture and the Imperial presidency he's turned out not to mean a whole lot of those words.

No more excuses. "Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet."

Solidarinosc!

Comments

[John Ballard]

Good observations. Those links to 2005 are excellent (and prescient). You make a pretty good prophet.

As I read this post and links the radio was reporting a news story about Gordon Brown defending the performance of the Brits in Afghanistan. As I listened with half an ear, and I could hear an echo of General Sir Michael Rose whose denunciations of the Iraq adventure were pitch perfect but lost like piss in the wind.

...by invading Iraq, of course we were going to make it almost impossible for the West to be able to mobilize the very people we need to help us fight Al Qaeda and that are the Muslim people of the world.

The roads and pathways of the Left have always been a tangled mess, overgrown with weeds and briers. It put me in mind of a rant I put up about a year and a half ago. A long and tiresome read now, but as I read it again I feel the bump-bump-bump of a tire with a swollen spot, making its way down the road. It's the tire on the driver's side... left rear.

[Russ Wellen]

Obama our Tony Blair. . . sounds about right.

As for the Lucy effect: Many Democrats are still flat on their backs with the wind knocked out of them.

[Batocchio]

My questions are, is the best route to go making a new party (or joining the Greens), or trying to take over the Democratic party? Also, can the country survive another round of Republican rule in the meantime, if it's option #1? I think many liberals aren't blind to the problems with the current system - it's the solutions that are tricky.

[Steve Hynd]

Hi Batocchio,

"can the country survive another round of Republican rule in the meantime, if it's option #1?"

Empirical fact: It always has before. America as a nation seems to be a lot more resilent than we often give it credit for.

But I'm not sure that a proggie exodus would leave the GOP in pole position. I wonder if we wouldn't see a lot more inter-faction arguing among conservatives (copycat dissent, if you like), leading to a lot of Republican's switching to the "centrist" Dems, in response. That would leave the GOP as the bastion of wingnut crazies, maybe a 20% voter share at best.

I don't think a takeover of the Democratic party is an option. The establishment, corporate funded and self-protecting, is too entrenched.

Regards, Steve

[Batocchio]

Well, "survive" is a relative term. I wouldn't say the Bush administration qualifies. Things were made much worse, and safeguards put in place to prevent fixing them. That will take a great deal of time, money and political power to overcome.

However, if the Dems are going to play the game as corruptly, and not fix many of those excesses or build on them, it's sort of moot.

So you're envisioning a three party system? Or something a bit more like the U.K.?

There's no doubt that anything that forces the parties and the media to acknowledge actual liberalism (although they'll probably continue to call it socialism) would be a big, positive step.

[Bustednuckles]

I better be knocked the fuck out or piss drunk if you see me on my knees.

I have been screaming into the ether for quite a while now, made phone calls and sent e mails to my representatives until I was blue in the face.
We finally have these bastards up against the ropes, just a few more wild assed haymakers could put us over the top.

Never surrender.

[Ten Bears]

Monkey wrench: green sharpie in your pocket. Next time you pull a dollar bill out of your other pocket write No War across GW's face, then spend it.