The difference between parties and movements is simple: Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda; movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it. This is one of the few enduring political axioms, and it explains why the organizations purporting to lead an American progressive “movement” have yet to build a real movement, much less a successful one.
Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington’s major labor, environmental, antiwar and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor — specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.
The effort involved a sleight of hand. These groups begged their grass-roots members — janitors, soccer moms, veterans and other “regular folks” — to cough up small-dollar contributions in return for the promise of movement pressure on both parties’ politicians. Simultaneously, these groups went to dot-com and Wall Street millionaires asking them to chip in big checks in exchange for advocacy that did not offend those fat cats’ Democratic politician friends (or those millionaires’ economic privilege).
This wasn’t totally dishonest. Many groups sincerely believed that Democratic Party promotion was key to progressive movement causes. And anyway, during the Bush era, many of those causes automatically helped Democrats by indicting Republicans.
But after the 2008 election, the strategy’s bankruptcy is undeniable.
As we now see, union dues underwrote Democratic leaders who today obstruct serious labor law reform and ignore past promises to fix NAFTA. Green groups’ resources elected a government that pretends sham “cap and trade” bills represent environmental progress. Healthcare groups promising to push a single-payer system got a president not only dropping his own single-payer promises, but also backing off a “public option” to compete with private insurance. And antiwar funding delivered a Congress that refuses to stop financing the Iraq mess, and an administration preparing to escalate the Afghanistan conflict.
Of course, frustrated progressives might be able to forgive the groups who promised different results, had these post-election failures prompted course corrections.
For example, had the left’s preeminent groups responded to Democrats’ healthcare capitulations by immediately announcing campaigns against these Democrats, progressives could feel confident that these groups were back to prioritizing a movement agenda. Likewise, had the big antiwar organizations reacted to Obama’s Afghanistan escalation plans with promises of electoral retribution, we would know those organizations were steadfastly loyal to their antiwar brand.
But that hasn’t happened. Despite the president’s healthcare retreat, most major progressive groups continue to cheer him on, afraid to lose their White House access and, thus, their Beltway status. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Moveon.org has “yet to take a clear position on Afghanistan” while VoteVets’ leader all but genuflected to Obama, saying, “People (read: professional political operatives) do not want to take on the administration.”
In this vacuum, movement building has been left to underfunded (but stunningly successful) projects like Firedoglake.com, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and local organizations. And that’s the lesson: True grass-roots movements that deliver concrete legislative results are not steered by marble-columned institutions, wealthy benefactors or celebrity politicians — and they are rarely ever run from Washington. They are almost always far-flung efforts by those organized around real-world results — those who don’t care about party conventions, congressional cocktail parties or White House soirees they were never invited to in the first place.
Only when enough progressives realize that truism will any movement — and any change — finally commence.
© 2009 Creators.com
I’m a video game geek, so as I sat through movie previews a few weeks ago, I was sure I was watching Nintendo ads.
There on the cinema’s screen was a super-sleek plane flying over a moonscape while communicating with an orbiting satellite. In the next moment, a multicolored topographical map, orders being barked — and in my own mind, memories of “Call of Duty” graphics. And then, finally, two guys in front of a computer console, and the jarring punch line: “It’s not science fiction; it’s what we do every day,” said the bold type, followed by a U.S. Air Force symbol.
Before giving the audience a chance to digest the slogan, it was onto another montage, this one of helicopters and explosions with 1970s music playing in the background. A preview for a Steve McQueen-themed game, I thought. Then, though, the familiar kicker: “The drones fight terrorism and protect America, and in the process, they keep the front lines unmanned,” said the voiceover, adding, “This isn’t science fiction; this is life in the United States Navy.”
The ads preceded “The Hurt Locker” — a dramatized movie about soldiers who defuse roadside bombs in the midst of Iraq’s horrifying carnage. And even with its fictionalized dialogue, the film was far more honest than the U.S. military’s fantastical sales pitch. Join the armed forces, the ads suggest, and you don’t have to experience the blood-and-guts consequences of combat. Instead, you get to hang out stateside, entertaining yourself with a glorified PlayStation.
During this, one of the bloodiest months in the Afghanistan war, the spots promote a somewhat comforting, if disturbingly misleading, message — and it is aimed not just at potential soldiers, but also at the public at large.
For the former, the goal is reassurance. As Bush-era attempts to conflate bellicosity and patriotism were undermined by persistent body bags, military recruitment has become more challenging. In response, the Pentagon hopes to make prospective volunteers believe their tours of duty will be as safe as a night on the couch.
For the general public, the objective is sedation. New polls show the country strongly opposes the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — but military officials want to preserve the possibility of an escalation in Afghanistan and a permanent deployment in Iraq. So along with persuading President Obama to withhold photos documenting fog-of-war brutalities at Afghanistan and Iraq prisons, the Pentagon is seeking an opiate to placate the war-averse populace. What better anodyne than a marketing campaign implying wars are fun video games?
Certainly, the ads aren’t pure “science fiction.” As the armed forces build more unmanned drones, Popular Science magazine reports that recruiters are indeed looking to add new remote pilots. The “science fiction” is the specific assertion that “the front lines are unmanned.” Claims like that are deeply destructive, beyond their obvious insult to the thousands killed, wounded or currently stationed on those very front lines.
For instance, it’s a good bet more than a few enlistees will expect their service to be happy video game tournaments, only to find themselves dodging real bullets in a Baghdad shooting gallery.
More broadly, the American psyche’s slow progress toward an increasingly peaceful disposition could be stunted by the propaganda’s powerful paradox: While sanitizing ads play to the country’s growing disgust with militarism, they could ultimately lead us to be more supportive of militarism. How? By convincing us that violence can be just another innocuous expression of adolescent technophilia.
If we end up thinking that, we will have once again forgotten what all wars, even the justifiable ones, always are: lamentable human tragedies.
© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.
Those of us living in the Rocky Mountains are steeped in America’s famous gun culture — and we therefore know well the binary debates surrounding the Second Amendment. Firearm enthusiasts — the vast majority of whom use weapons responsibly — believe the Constitution protects their right to bear arms. Gun control advocates counter that the Constitution doesn’t give anyone the inalienable right to wield automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in seconds.
This is the stultified freedom-versus-safety quarrel that seemed to forever define gun politics — that is, until anti-government activists started bringing firearms to public political meetings.
In early August, a protester came to a raucous Tennessee congressional forum packing heat. Days later, President Obama’s healthcare event in New Hampshire was marred by a protester posing for cameras with a pistol and sign reading, “It is time to water the tree of liberty” — a reference to a Thomas Jefferson quote promising violence. And this past week, 12 armed men — including one with an assault rifle — not only showed off their firearms at Obama’s Arizona speech, but broadcast a YouTube video threatening to “forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority.”
These and other similar examples are accurately summarized with the same language federal law employs to describe domestic terrorism. Generating maximum media attention, the weapons-brandishing displays are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” Yes, the gun has been transformed from a sport and self-defense device into a tool of mass bullying. Like the noose in the Jim Crow South, its symbolic message is clear: If you dare engage in the democratic process, you risk bodily harm.
With that implicit threat, the incessant arguments about gun ownership have been supplanted by a more significant debate over which should take precedence: The Constitution’s First or Second Amendment?
Based on America’s history, the Founders’ answer to that question clearly lies in the Bill of Rights’ deliberate sequencing.
The First Amendment ethos guarantees people — whatever their politics — a fundamental right to participate in their democracy without concern for physical retribution. It is the primary amendment because America was first and foremost created not as a gun-owners’ haven, but as a place to shelter citizens from oppression.
Over two centuries, we have taken this tradition seriously, enacting statutes reinforcing freedoms of speech, creating the secret ballot, and outlawing harassment at Election-Day polling stations. This is why, whether tracing roots to Colonial England, Nazi Germany or any other tyranny, so many Americans say they came here specifically looking for protection from political persecution.
While the First Amendment doesn’t ensure credibility or significance, it is supposed to guarantee freedom from fear — a freedom that is now under siege. Citing the Second Amendment and the increasingly maniacal rhetoric of conservative media firebrands, a small handful of violence-threatening protesters aims to make the rest of us — whether pro- or anti-health-reform — afraid to speak out.
And so we face a choice that has nothing to do with healthcare, gun ownership or any other hot-button issue that protesters of both parties are fighting over. It is a choice about democracy itself — a choice that comes down to the two axioms best articulated by, of all people, Mao Zedong.
One option is willful ignorance: We can pretend the ferment is unimportant, continue allowing the intimidation and ultimately usher in a dark future where “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Better, though, is simply making public political events firearm-free zones, just like schools and stadiums. That way forward honors our democratic ideals by declaring that politics may be war, but in America it is “war without bloodshed” — and without the threat of bloodshed.
© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.
Confidence is a strange and elusive thing. As a nation, we clearly have it in this post-Vietnam age of chest-thumping invasions and flag-pin patriotism. But as humans, we are each, well, human. In our minds’ most secret caverns — those shadowy places that stiff upper lips, Botox and sports cars obscure — aplomb is often just a fleeting relief from more constant fear and loathing.
A country of human self-doubt birthing a nation of superhuman hubris — it’s not the paradox it seems. After all, the popular culture sustaining this oxymoronic reality revolves around exalting the impossibly gifted virtuoso, the against-all-odds champion, the Mount Rushmore-size megastar — in short, the larger-than-life individuals from Michael Jordan to Lance Armstrong to Ronald Reagan whom we know we cannot be.
While such deification drums up national pride, it also evokes the ugly feelings associated with personal insecurity, which is why I think so many mourned last week’s passing of John Hughes. The 1980s filmmaker was one of the only contemporary artists who found success providing an uplifting antidote to those darker emotions — an antidote that is more relevant today than ever.
While Hughes’ works were marketed as one-off parables about teenage angst, they really comprise a single catalog extolling something bigger — something that today’s infotainment teaches us to ignore: the intrinsic worth of the regular person.
Hughes created “National Lampoon’s Vacation” — a classic so intent on honoring the typical buffoonish-yet-loving father that its poster featured Clark Griswold as a Herculean colossus. In “Pretty In Pink,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” “Uncle Buck” and “Some Kind of Wonderful,” Hughes made films whose paladins weren’t aristocratic perfectionists, but working-class and decidedly flawed commoners. Even when Hughes went sitcom conventional with “She’s Having a Baby” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” he still produced plots forcing picket-fence protagonists to make due with — rather than magically transcend — their weaknesses.
Certainly, the demography of Hughes’ on-screen world was whiter and wealthier than the country he aspired to portray. And even devoted fans admit he occasionally dabbled in offensive stereotypes (examples: “Vacation’s” redneck caricature, Eddie, and its minstrel-show depiction of the inner city).
Yet, for all his blemishes, Hughes accomplished the seemingly impossible: At the very moment America was being conquered by the cult of the celebrity superhero, he ascended through films insisting that the rest of us mere mortals are not as weird, alienated or worthless as we’ve been implicitly led to believe.
This is a big reason why Hughes’ work remains as embedded in the American psyche — and therefore politically significant — as any recent cultural product. That includes even those ubiquitous Obama T-shirts because, in many ways, Hughes’ thematics are central to today’s epic battle between hope and panic.
As economic crises compel us to confront debates about taxes, healthcare and the common good, the enduring hyper-individualist conservatism of the 1980s now chafes against a president with a very different vision. He asks us not to trust only in his individual skills and not to obsess over society’s differences, but instead to be confident in our own problem-solving talents and to remember that everyone is in this together.
We are, indeed, watching Obama posthumously channel his fellow Chicagoan, Hughes. As if ordering the band to substitute “Don’t You Forget About Me” for “Hail to the Chief,” the president implores us, as “The Breakfast Club” said, to understand that “each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal” — that is, each one of us, however flawed, is of value.
The only question now is whether we will run with that Hughes ethos, or simply walk on by.
© 2009 Creators.com
I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Healthcare and Tax War. And yet, I’m euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.
Finally.
Finally, there’s no pretense. Finally, the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd’s ugliest traits are there for all to behold.
The group’s core gripe is summarized in a letter I received that denounces a proposed surtax on the wealthy and corporations to pay for universal healthcare:
“Until recently, my family was in the top 3 percent of wage earners,” the affluent businessperson fumed in response to my July column on taxes. “We are in the group that pays close to 60 percent of this nation’s taxes … Think for a second how you would feel if you built a business and contributed more than your share to this country only to be treated like a pariah.”
This sob story about the persecuted rich fuels today’s “tea parties” — and I’m sure you’ve heard some version of it in your community.
I’m also fairly certain that when many of you run into the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd, you don’t feel like confronting the faux outrage. But on the off chance you do muster the masochistic impulse to engage, here’s a guide to navigating the conversation:
What they will scream: We can’t raise business taxes, because American businesses already pay excessively high taxes!
What you should say: Here’s the smallest violin in the world playing for the businesses. The Government Accountability Office reports that most U.S. corporations pay zero federal income tax. Additionally, as even the Bush Treasury Department admitted, America’s effective corporate tax rate is the third lowest in the industrialized world.
What they will scream: But the rich still “pay close to 60 percent of this nation’s taxes!”
What you should say: Such statistics refer only to the federal income tax. When considering all of “this nation’s taxes” including payroll, state and local levies, the top 5 percent pay just 38.5 percent of the taxes.
What they will scream: But 38.5 percent is disproportionately high! See? You’ve proved that the rich “contribute more than their share” of taxes!
What you should say: Actually, they are paying almost exactly “their share.” According to the data, the wealthiest 5 percent of America pays 38.5 percent of the total taxes precisely because they make just about that share — a whopping 36.5 percent! — of total national income. Asking these folks to pay slightly more in taxes — and still less than they did during the go-go 1990s — is hardly extreme.
Stripped of facts, your conversation partner will soon turn to unscientific terrain, claiming it is immoral to “steal” and “redistribute” income via taxes. Of course, he will be specifically railing on “stealing” for stuff like healthcare, which he insists gets “redistributed” only to the undeserving and the “lazy” (a classic code word for “minorities”). But he will also say it’s OK that government sent trillions of dollars to Wall Streeters.
And that’s when you should stop wasting your breath.
What you’ve discovered is that the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd isn’t interested in fairness, empiricism or morality.
With 22,000 of their fellow countrymen dying annually for lack of health insurance and with Warren Buffett paying a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd is merely using the argot of fairness, empiricism and morality to hide its real motive: selfish greed.
No argument, however rational, is going to cure these narcissists of that grotesque disease.
© 2009 Creators.com
For those still clinging to quaint notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10 years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.
The 21st century opened with a handful of Supreme Court puppets appointing George W. Bush president after he lost the popular vote — and we all know the costs in blood and treasure that insult wrought. Now, the decade closes with another cabal of stooges assaulting the “one person, one vote” principle — and potentially bringing about another disaster.
Here we have a major congressional push to fix a healthcare system that leaves one-sixth of the country without coverage. Here we have 535 House and Senate delegates elected to give all 300 million of us a voice in the solution. And here we have just 13 of those delegates holding the initiative hostage.
In the Senate, both parties have outsourced healthcare legislation to six Finance Committee lawmakers: Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. The group recently announced it is rejecting essential provisions like a public insurance option that surveys show the public supports. Meanwhile, seven mostly Southern House Democrats have been threatening to use their Commerce Committee votes to gut any healthcare bill, regardless of what the American majority wants.
This, however, isn’t about the majority. These lawmakers, hailing mostly from small states and rural areas, together represent only 13 million people, meaning that those speaking for just 4 percent of America are maneuvering to impose their healthcare will on the other 96 percent of us.
Census figures show that the poverty rates are far higher and per-capita incomes far lower in the 13 legislators’ specific districts than in the nation as a whole. Put another way, these politicians represent exactly the kinds of districts whose constituents would most benefit from universal healthcare. So why are they leading the fight to stop — rather than pass — reform?
Because when tyranny mixes with legalized bribery, constituents’ economic concerns stop mattering.
Thanks to our undemocratic system and our corrupt campaign finance laws, the healthcare industry doesn’t have to fight a 50-state battle. It can simply buy a tiny group of congresspeople, which is what it’s done. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, health interests have given these 13 members of Congress $12 million in campaign contributions — a massive sum further enhanced by geography.
Remember, politicians trade favors for reelection support — and the best way to ensure reelection is to raise money for TV airtime (read: commercials). In rural America, that airtime is comparatively cheap because the audience is relatively small. Thus, campaign contributions to rural politicians like these 13 buy more commercials — and, consequently, more political loyalty.
The end result is an amplifier of tyranny: precisely because the undemocratic system unduly empowers legislators from sparsely populated (and hence cheap) media markets, industry cash can more easily purchase tyrannical obstruction from those same legislators. In this case, that means congresspeople blocking healthcare reform that would most help their own voters.
Of course, there is talk of circumventing the 13 obstructionists and forcing an un-filibuster-able vote of the full Congress. Inside the Washington palace, the media court jesters and political aides-de-camp have reacted to such plans by raising predictable charges of improper procedure, poor manners, bad etiquette and other Versailles transgressions.
But the real crime would be letting the tyrants block that vote, trample democracy and kill healthcare reform in the process.
© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.
A party is not a movement 
Screen shot from USAF advertisement. 
Director John Hughes in 1984 