We are two weeks past labor day and there is a very bad feeling in the country about what is happening abroad, and it is beginning to impact politics at whom Tomorrow I will go to the Peoples March Against Climate Change, and huge numbers will show up in New York. Hopefully, it will be an energizing event for
Although I am no great believer in polls or in history repeating itself, there are major reasons to fear the outcome of the coming elections in November. Simply denying those reasons and soldiering on against the Republicans, while the latter must be done, does not prepare effectively to meet the crisis?
First, the polls show the president and the Democrats losing support--the administration may be moving into the “cold war trap” in the post cold war era over Ukraine and especially the Near East. In both regions, the administration has demoralized its friends and delighted its enemies. The “cold war trap” which dogged the Truman, Johnson, and Carter administrations, saw these administrations launching aggressive militaristic foreign policy initiatives to save their majorities and then suffering major defeats because of those initiatives to the Republican Right,
The Near East Crisis today is the major one. Mass media, which either represents or appeases the Right, has bombarded the public with images of ISIS beheading journalists, terrifying images of barbarians, but without any serious contextual explanation of what is happening
that I mean the role of various regimes through the region, some U.S. allies some not, in oppressing people since the end of the British and French colonial empires; the role of the Reagan and both Bush administrations in allying itself with the forces that produced Al Qaida(of which ISIS is an off-shoot) for anti-Communist purposes in Afghanistan and anti-Iranian purposes in Iraq.
Much of this resembles the old British and French Empire colonial politics of the late 19th century, where ethnic and religious groups were used as pawns against each other and atrocities (disemboweling, beheadings, etc) carried out by exotic indigenous groups were the subject of massive retaliations in the name of “civilization” and progress. The slogans may be different and the media far more advanced, but the situations are similar in important ways, in both the neo colonial regions and the imperial centers
Photography, yellow press journalism and music hall/vaudeville songs and skits were the media that conveyed the old colonialism’s message to millions more than a century ago , drowning out those who saw colonies and military interventionism as the real cause of the atrocities. In the “post cold war period” the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have all reverted to versions what nineteenth century imperialists called “the great game,” with disastrous consequences, aiding and abetting the forces which restored capitalism and dismembered the Soviet Union, seeking unsuccessfully to advance those forces in China, and turning the NAT0 alliance into a global as against a European military force.
Where does the “old cold war” come in? Democratic party administrations, whatever they do will be portrayed by the Republican right as being “weak,” “soft,” not doing enough and/or doing the wrong thing in international affairs. Then, the right Republican politicians, who advocated more aggressive policies, will will elections with promises to “Go to Korea” and end the War(Eisenhower, 1952) carry forward a “secret plan “ to end the Vietnam War(Nixon, 1952) and close the “Window of Vulnerability” that led to the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanstan(Reagan ,1980”
In the late 1940s for example, the Truman administration used the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the formation of NAT0 to defeat the Greek revolution, keep the powerful French and Italian Communist parties and their allies from coming to power through democratic processes, and put enormous pressures on the devastated Soviet Union which it hoped to in effect re-encricle under the doctrine of containment.
Even though rational conservatives should have hailed Truman for what were really effective counter-revolutionary policies (also fomenting in the U.S. anti-Communist purges in labor and the arts sciences and professions that crippled postwar progressive policies) that wasn’t what happened
Denunciations of Truman for “losing China” happened. Accusations that Communist spies gave the Soviet Union the atom bomb happened Joe McCarthy and the slogan “every liberal is a socialist, every socialist is a communist, every Communist is Moscow’s spy “ happened.
Not that many Democratic party leaders cared about the assault upon the bill of rights, centuries old principles of Anglo –American law, but they did care about losing the Presidency and Congress. Truman and the Democrats won the 1948 elections avoiding cold war issues and promising to revive New Deal policies? Their cold war foreign policies were disastrous for the country and the world, and of course the masses of people who voted for their party.
Now let’s jump ahead, past the nuclear arms race, the consolidation of the military industrial complex, the cult of private sector “economic growth” as the solution to all problems shared by both parties, what the progressive economist John Kenneth Galbriaith called a society characterized by “private wealth and public squalor.” Lyndon Johnson, a cold warrior, ruthless organizational politician, had dreams of bringing the country both forward to a “great society” and back to the world of the rural electrification administration, the TVA, the New Deal, where he began his political life thirty years earlier.
The Civil Rights movement got the country moving again, not John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier sloganeering, and served as both a vanguard and a catalyst for people’s progressive movements. Which in turn made Johnson’s dreams possible The Republican Right ran in 1964 with its masks off so to speak in the Goldwater campaign
What followed then was the largest progressive congressional majority since the New Deal, a judiciary which served as a help not a hindrance to civil rights and civil liberties movements and a president calling for a “war on poverty” and major breakthroughs on social legislation in a variety of areas—Medicare and Medicaid, Federal Aid to Education, Housing and urban development, environmental protection. The votes were there, the money was there, and the people at the grassroots were there. But what happened?
The Vietnam War escalation happened, a neo colonialist war with a strong and clear racist subtext And Johnson, a far more effective politician than Truman, found himself trading off his great society programs to win support from his conservative enemies to advance the Vietnam War which they supported
. Richard Nixon, premier cold warrior and red baiter, whose slimy political career seemed to be over in 1962, then happened, born again so to speak with a pledge to end the Vietnam War catastrophe he had championed from the first U.S intervention in 1954, rally the forces of racism and reaction around calls for “law and order” in the interest of a “silent majority” and proclaim a foreign policy of “peace with honor” aka withdrawing troops and escalating bombing in South East Asia while seeking to build up and subcontract military interventionism to “regional allies” who included Iran South Africa, Brazil, and in the Near East, Israel.
Nixon’s collapse in the Watergate conspiracy (his targeting of sections of the liberal and even moderate establishment individuals and groups and the Democratic Party itself) led the danger of open dictatorship, national revulsion and a crushing defeat for the Republican party,
Although the Carter administration didn’t come to power with any high hopes in the post Watergate period and the forces of reaction in the U.S. had already through powerful foundations and research organizations (The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation) begun to put together a political-religious right coalition Carter made some gestures in foreign policy around the issue of human rights, sought to de-emphasize cold war themes, and introduce a new national energy policy,
But all of that went by the boards in 1979-1980. Instead of responding intelligently to the Iranian revolution, Carter simply denied the role that the CIA had played in installing the Shah’s brutal regime in the 1950s, which Iranians knew well, and gave the hated Shah asylum in the U.S. on humanitarian grounds, following the advice of Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller. Carter then compounded this disaster, which produced the Iranian hostage crisis, by joining with Pakistan to aid rightwing Muslim Guerrillas against the Communist led government of Afghanistan, to, as his National Security advisor, Zbigniew Brezshinski, stated, would led the Soviets to invade Afghanistan and there suffer a Vietnam style defeat. In short, the Carter administration wanted the Soviets to invade Afghanistan.
Carter responded to the Soviet by withdrawing from the Moscow Olympics, instituting a grain boycott against the Soviets, launching a failed Hollywood style “rescue mission” to free the hostages in Iran, and losing the election to Ronald Reagan, leader of the Republican right, with devastating consequences from the people of the U.S. and the world. Reagan profited from Carter’s cold war revival policies, which destroyed any possibility of Carter’s re-election and enabled the Republicans to gain control of the Senate for the first time since the Korean War. Instead of saving his Presidency, those policies doomed his presidency.
The point here is not to rehash the successes and failures of the Obama administration over the last six years, but simply to say that the Democratic Party nationally and the administration lost in 2010 the initiative it had through the 2008 elections, where it had mobilized and brought to the polls millions of young voters.
The rightwing counterattack it faced its first months was massive and vicious, with a clear racist subtext and appeal those who would never accept the reality of an African-American president
A well funded guerrilla war against administration initiatives by far right activists, disrupting town meetings, harassing Congressmen and Senators. Mass media gave enormous recognition to these far right activists, using uncritically their self identification as a “tea party” providing no analysis of the influence of Ayn Rand, Ludwig Von Mises, and other theorists of a utopian capitalism where, government doesn’t exist, society doesn’t exist, and everyone will maximize their wealth by happily exploiting everyone else.
And speaking about wealth, providing no analysis of the role of the Koch Brothers in funding this pseudo movement made up generations of recycled rightists, Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists, Fortress America “isolationists,” those who would repeal all labor and social legislation and withdraw the U.S. military from the world (not such a bad thing) in order to use them against labor and peoples movements at home (a very bad thing)
There have been large numbers of Americans in motion through the Obama years in opposition to the ultra-right Republicans. There is today a mounting national campaign to eliminate the Citizens United decision, to raise the minimum wage, to reclaim the environment those make war against it. But, like the masses of working people who supported the New Deal policies and the coalition of working people, oppressed minorities, and women who supported the war on poverty and the Great Society policies, these masses of people have no sympathy for policies of military interventionism, the neo colonial manipulations of the U.S./NAT0 bloc.
When these policies come from the Obama administration, which raised hopes among progressive people higher than they had been since the 1960s when it first came into office, the mass constituencies who vote Democratic can only respond in a half-hearted way
That doesn’t mean that they will support the Republican right, but it does mean that they will not mobilize the numbers of voters necessary to defeat the Republican right, if both the past and the present polls are any judge. It also means that some well be prey to the pseudo anti-militarist policies of Rand Paul and other “tea party” leaders of the Republican party
What can we do? First, continue the to work with labor and peoples movements at the grassroots level against the Republican Right, educating everyone to understand what complete Republican control of the Congress would mean---a blockade against all progressive executive and judicial appointments of the Obama administration, further anti-trade union legislation, to completely marginalize the trade union movement among private sector workers and advance at the national level the assault on unionized public sector workers being carried out by rightwing Republican governors and legislatures. And in all likelihood, a militarization of the U.S. Mexican border and no mans land style violence against illegal immigrants.
On foreign policy we can and must separate ourselves from the Obama administration and at the same time inform everyone that the roots of the present crisis are first and foremost in the policies pursued by the Reagan and Bush administrations. And we must clearly enunciate a progam for the broad left that can be embraced by the center left. What are the main points of that program?
We reject neo-colonial ideologies like “nation building” and “client states” We reject NAT0, not because we are “isolationists” but because we are internationalists who look toward a reformed and renewed United Nations and radical changes in the policies of the IMF and World Bank in order to institute a global war on poverty, not the present global war against the poor which the U.S. NAT0 bloc, the IMF, and the World Bank. We reject bogus “free trade” policies and agreements like NAFTA as a cause rather than a cure for poverty and inequality. We believe that international labor solidarity has a role to play in U.S. foreign policy in both NAT0 bloc nations like England and Germany and neo colonial battle ground nations like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq
If the Obama administration and the leadership groups within the Democratic Party are deaf and blind to these policies, we must respond simply that on these issues we are deaf and blind to the Obama administration. If it cannot adopt a foreign policy that will serve the people and save itself, we can advance such a policy independently
And we must make it very clear to those whom we work with that we will not accept passively a Republican victory. Because it is a “victory” against us, or freedom and security, not the administration or the Democratic Party.
We must, win or lose, begin to work with the trade union movement and all other peoples movements to act politically both inside and outside of the Democratic Party to prepare for the trade union and mass movement struggles that will finally put an end to “the Second Gilded Age” of neo Robber Baron capitalism at home and neo colonialism abroad.
