Democratic party about to lurch left?

[MKSheppard]

Linka

Left in the wings
The looming fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party

- Mark Hertsgaard
Sunday, October 10, 2004

Fights over a political party's future are common after the party loses a big election. But John Kerry figures to face a fight over control of the party from fellow Democrats even if he beats George W. Bush on Nov. 2.

Influential figures on the party's left wing are planning a long-term campaign to move the Democrats to the left, just as right-wing activists took over the Republican Party and moved it to the right over the past 30 years.

If the left's campaign is successful, it could transform the political landscape of the United States, changing the terms of debate and bringing dramatically different policies on local, national and international issues.

After George McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972, some centrist Democrats argued that Democrats had become too liberal to win national elections.

The accusation was repeated after Michael Dukakis' lopsided loss to George Bush in 1988. Leading the charge was the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of centrist Democrats who subsequently pushed the party rightward on crime, economics and foreign policy during the presidency of Bill Clinton, himself a council supporter.

Now, leftist Democrats are planning to challenge the centrists' control. The leftists argue that many Democrats, especially the party establishment in Washington, have become too much like Republicans and too afraid to stand up to right-wingers like George W. Bush.

In the short run, the left-wingers are working hard to elect Kerry, even though they regard him as representing the party's cautious center. In the primaries, most of the left preferred Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, whose populist, anti-war candidacy threatened to wrest the nomination from Kerry, to the horror of the party establishment.

The left is uniting behind Kerry out of a widely shared conviction that a second Bush term would be an unmitigated, perhaps irreversible, disaster. "Four more years of George Bush would destroy the country," Dean said in announcing last summer that he would campaign hard for Kerry.

If Kerry defeats Bush on Nov. 2, the left will probably demand significant roles and influence in the new Kerry administration -- a Cabinet position for Dean, for example, or Kerry's acceptance of the left's position on trade, health care and other issues.

To support its demands, the left will argue that Kerry could not have beaten Bush without its help. And it will have a point, on both ideological and organizational grounds.

After all, it was Dean's clear, forceful criticism of the war and other Bush policies that taught Democrats that standing up to the president and the right wing was not only possible but popular with voters. Without Dean's example, it's doubtful Kerry would ever have found his voice against Bush.

And left-leaning activists are mounting an unprecedented grassroots campaign to educate and turn out voters for Kerry.

The nation's largest labor union, the Service Employees International Union, has joined with the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the National Abortion Rights League and other groups to organize "the largest voter mobilization in American history" through the newly minted alliances America Coming Together and America Votes.

Other supporters to Kerry's left include Democracy for America, the organization Dean created after the primaries to channel the energies of his grassroots constituency, and the AFL-CIO, whose get-out-the-vote work was crucial for Al Gore in winning the popular vote in 2000.

And perhaps no one has attracted more attention than MoveOn, the Internet- based group whose television ads and in-your-face opposition to Bush has driven right-wingers crazy, even as its small-donor fund-raising model has challenged Big Money's hold over democracy.

Call them the Beat Bush Brigades. Collectively, these groups boast a combined budget of perhaps $100 million and tens of thousands of staff and volunteers. And as much as they may obey federal laws that prohibit them from coordinating with Kerry, in effect they operate as an unofficial "Kerry for President" campaign.

Whether they succeed in electing Kerry or not, key leaders see the newfound unity among these groups as a first step toward building the kind of political movement any president, whatever his party, must heed.

"It's self-interest that's bringing us together," says Deborah Callahan, the executive director of the League of Conservation Voters, a nonpartisan environmental organization that has endorsed Kerry.

"If we don't cooperate, we'll certainly fail to put a progressive in the White House in 2004. But if we succeed, we can build relations and trust that will continue beyond the election and result in something much larger than ourselves. Look at how the right-wing took power in this country: By following a long-term vision of building a movement of like-minded organizations. We're finally doing the same."

Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's former campaign manager, argues that the Dean campaign has already pushed the Democratic Party -- and thereby the national political debate -- to the left.

Speaking in May to an auditorium of cheering activists from MoveOn and kindred organizations, at a conference titled "What We Stand For," Trippi said, "The Democrats weren't really going to take Bush on in this election."

They only did so, Trippi told the crowd, "because of what you did" -- that is, because they saw how Dean's opposition to the Iraq war and the right- wing agenda gained him a huge surge in poll numbers, grassroots energy and financial support.

"We had to show Kerry and the Democrats how to stand up to Bush in the primaries, and now we have to show them how to win in November," added Trippi. "If we have to, we will carry John Kerry on our shoulders across the goal line. "

With Bush vanquished, the Democrats' internal battles will begin.

"We're going to celebrate with John Kerry the night of Nov. 2. But the morning of Nov. 3, we're going to start organizing to take the party away from him, because we have serious disagreements about what the party should stand for and where this country needs to go," said one activist at the "What We Stand For" conference, Bertha Lewis, co-chair of the Working Families Party in New York state and a leader in the grassroots antipoverty group, ACORN.

"In 2004, we have to elect anyone but Bush," said a veteran labor strategist working to link unions with other progressive groups. "But if we keep working and build on the lessons learned and the partnerships we're forging during this fight against Bush, we can elect somebody we really like four or eight years from now."

All this signals a historic shift in the American left's approach to national politics. In the past, left-wing groups and individuals would moan about a Democratic nominee's perceived deficiencies and defect to a protest candidate, such as Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson.

By contrast, the Beat Bush Brigades are showing a new patience and maturity. They are working in the short term to elect a Democrat they see as imperfect in order to build their movement's strength over the long term.

Ironically, the left's strategy is consciously modeled on the campaign that right-wing activists mounted to take over the Republican Party, explained Robert Borosage, the director of the Campaign for America's Future, at the "What We Stand For" conference.

Beginning in 1964, said Borosage, after conservative Republican Barry Goldwater's landslide loss to Democrat Lyndon Johnson, key right-wing figures decided to rebuild the conservative movement from the ground up.

They recognized the importance of thinking big, planning long-term and building enduring institutions. Thus they went on to invest in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and grassroots organizations like the Christian Coalition.

By 1980, the right had gained sufficient influence within Republican circles for its champion, Ronald Reagan, to win first his party's presidential nomination and then the general election.

Soon, the combination of Reagan's charisma and the right's continued activism -- and especially its subsequent creation of a right-wing media infrastructure dominated by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh -- had shifted the entire nation's political center of gravity to the right, in ways that remain obvious today.

The left now hopes to copy the right wing's success.

If Bush wins on Nov. 2, the battle for control of the Democratic Party will probably come quickly. Leftists will argue that Kerry and the centrists forfeit any right to leadership if they cannot defeat the most vulnerable incumbent since Jimmy Carter.

If Bush is defeated, the battle will unfold more gradually. The left will probably cooperate with Kerry on some issues and fight him on others, while it focuses on building the media, research and grassroots institutions that can swing the party in its direction.

In any case, none of this new thinking and activism on the left would have happened if Bush had not pursued such an extreme course as president.

Thus the threat of four more years of Bush may end up calling forth a genuine American left for the first time in a generation -- an ironic accomplishment for this most right-wing of presidents.

Mark Hertsgaard is the author, most recently, of "The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World."

[BlkbrryTheGreat]

If the "left" part of the democratic party does win, it will be interesting to see the contradictory portions of it, such as the "greens" and the unions tear into each other.

[LadyTevar]

I'm hoping that sooner or later, both parties split down the middle and we get the Right, the Left, and the Middle.

[HyperionX]

To be truthful we know that a leftward shift was in the works simply because the country has been in conservative mode for a while. It's just the natural political pendulum action. How this will happen I don't know and I don't think that anyone can seriously predict how it will happen, just that it will. Especially after Bush, who probably has greatly incited the rise of the left and greatly damaged his own ideology. For the conservatives on this site don't think of this as a point to celebrate over, chances are it will drag the Republicans along with it and/or run modern conservativism down into the ground. Those who want a moderate party are daydreaming. Hell, It could very well be the leftward shift in action, it's dragging conservatives leftwards to what is now the moderates, leaving true conservativism to be abandoned.

[buzz_knox]

To be truthful we know that a leftward shift was in the works simply because the country has been in conservative mode for a while. It's just the natural political pendulum action.

Historically, the pendulum effect has been effectively nil. People tended to vote conservative at a national level and more liberal at the state/representative level.

[Sir Sirius]

Hmmm... If his predictions prove to be accurate the US might finaly get a genuinely left-wing party worth taking seriously, instead of the current right-wing vs. far right-wing setup. Alas, I do not share his optimism, you Yanks are too conservative for the Dems to have the balls to truly pull something like this off.

In any case, I predict that which ever way the election goes, the events with in the Democratic party will provide much entertainment in the near future.

[HyperionX]

To be truthful we know that a leftward shift was in the works simply because the country has been in conservative mode for a while. It's just the natural political pendulum action.

Historically, the pendulum effect has been effectively nil. People tended to vote conservative at a national level and more liberal at the state/representative level.

Totally false AFAIK. Johnson soundly crushed Goldwater in 1964, same thing for FDR in all his elections. Going back to the Progressive era, liberals obliterated the conservatives until finally the Democrats chose a liberal candidate, Wilson, meaning that there were no conservatives on either ticket. As for the opposite, Reagan and Bush I easily beat the liberal candidate, Mondale and Dukakis. Harding won entirely on a "return to 'normalcy' " platform. I find it hard to believe that these are "nil" effect. These are huge swings in the political stance of the nation, and the congress usually follow the course of the presidency during these times. However, the last one is really long (24 years or 46 years depending on how you measure it), and somewhat tepid until recently because the democrats controlled the congress until the last ten years. Of course now the conservative movement is at full force, with its own builtin propaganda machine and religious-like dogma of political beliefs, and control of the entire government.

Like the stock market I think the conservative movement will end when it is at its strongest. It appears to me that a certain political idea will start out good, such as the conservative movement under Reagan as a response to the failures of Carter, but then as it continues to develop and expand it becomes dogma and outdated, as it is right now. This is just like the Internet based commerce bubble of the 90s. Great idea at first, but just way overhyped at the end and simply collapsed. Same thing here. In response to Bush II's failures the public will recognize the stupidity of some of the conservative policies and will shift toward the left, leaving modern conservativism to be practically discarded.