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Edited on Sun Dec-14-03 12:36 AM by arendt
I have taken a step back from all this "civil war" stuff and tried to analyze it in some historical depth. I don't know if I buy my own conclusions, but its what comes out of the analysis.
Can't we please have an INTELLIGENT discussion of what the heck is going on?
I have put on three layers of asbestos underwear and a Nomex suit. Flame away.
arendt
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The Emergence of the "New Republican" Party by arendt
..Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; ..None but ourselves can free our minds. ..Have no fear for atomic energy, ..'Cause none of them can stop the time. ..How long shall they kill our prophets, ..While we stand aside and look? ..Some say it's just a part of it: ..We've got to fullfil the book. .. ..Won't you help to sing ..These songs of freedom? - ..'Cause all I ever have: ..Redemption songs; ..Redemption songs; .. ..- Bob Marley
1. The New Republicanism
Just as the 1850s were polarized over the issue of slaveholder rights, our era has been polarized over the issue of corporate rights.
The 1990s saw an immense power grab by the corporations. Intellectual Property (IP) was invoked to privatize what had been an intellectual "commons". Corporations won court decisions allowing the patenting of software algorithms and living organisms.
Once monetized, universities began to patent IP as a potential revenue source. Government agencies, like NIH, whose mandate was to make publicly funded science available for free, filed patents so that IP could be put in the public domain. Already entangled in grant paperwork, scientists now had to worry about patent and trade secret issues. Corporate values were imposed even on academia by the deliberate defunding of governmental support and its replacement with the handcuffs of corporate grants. We have seen these grants used to bury inconvenient scientific facts and to compel silence on non-scientific issues on the same campus by the threat to withdraw funding.
With the creation of NAFTA and GATT, corporations have created a version of the Fugitive Slave Law for profits. Anything that had a profit attached to it could not be withheld from its corporate owners - even wanna-be corporate owners. For example, today UPS is suing the government of Canada because Canada refuses to open its Express Mail system to UPS cream-skimming. Canada argues that Express profits fund rural free delivery in the vast Canadian interior. The case is before a government-unfriendly NAFTA tribunal.
The Fugitive Slave analogy resonates here, in that many freemen were body-snatched in the 1850s by slave-hunters, just as many completely taxpayer-organized and -funded services are being hunted by corporations affronted by the insolence of governments that actually serve the people without gouging them.
With the enactment of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), the right of first sale and reasonable personal use was denied to anything in an electronic medium. Libertarians and other digerati were radicalized by this. Covert resistance began with Napster and continues with Kazaa. Formal resistance is fierce, e.g., the legal support of the Electronic Freedom Foundation for the Diebold Papers release.
As for corporations and politics, I wrote on the corporate hijacking of the political process one year ago:
.." Today, only money talks; not the voters...There are only two ..sources of big and ideologically acceptable money in America ..today: big business money and hard right ideological money... ..What is emerging is an echo of the old British governmental ..coalitions: Tories and Whigs. In today's America, the Republicans ..have become Tories for Bush, and Democrats have taken on the ..features of Whigs. .. .."The Democrats became Whigs when the conservative, ..corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), ..headed by Bill Clinton took over the party machinery... ..The GOP today feels like a royal court with no criticism of ..the ruler allowed, with rich courtiers bribing and currying royal ..patents and subsidies for themselves and royal offices for ..their offspring." .. ..- "Tories and Whigs" by arendt Dec, 2002.
But, in the intervening year, something most remarkable has happened. A new source of money, and hence a new voice has come on stage in America. The money comes in small quantities from individual middle-class donors, and it is organized over the Internet. The originators of this approach have been the "MoveOn" website and the Dean campaign.
This essay explores the landscape of the New Republicanism that middle class donations and Internet activism are in the process of creating. We begin by surveying today's landscape and its correspondences to the 1850s. I beg the reader not to construe this correspondence as an anti-Southern screed. The comparison is not about racism, but about the real conflict of the Civil War, the one between plantation economy and small business economy. The reader must remember that it was only after, and because of, the Civil War that the economy became dominated by the large corporations.
2. The New "Fire-eaters" in the GOP
In the 1850s, the "fire-eaters" were the most pro-slavery, hard-line supporters of the plantation economy and the low tariffs that supported it - to the point of advocating Southern independence. They were also fierce militarists, launching unsuccessful colonizing raids into South America. These raiders were called "fillibusteros".
Today, the neocons are the most pro-corporate, hard-line supporters of the globalized corporate plantation economy - to the point of making corporations independent of any government control. They launch neo-colonialist wars in the oil-rich countries that will probably fail in the end.
In the 1850s, the fire-eaters were a sub-branch of the Democratic Party. By 1860, their hard-line had split the Democratic Party down the middle over the slavery question, causing it to lose the election.
As of 2002, the GOP party discipline over the few remaining moderates in the party held; although, increasingly, New England moderates defected.
3. The morbiund Whigs in the Democratic Party
The Whig Party was a businessman's party. But in the 1850s, it was, by and large, a party of smaller, independent businessmen. That is not to say they were not men of means; but they were not the handful of filthy rich millionaires of the Robber Baron Era. The Whigs desired peace and economic growth.
It was their inability to end the escalating North-South rivalry, and, specifically, the horrendous Kansas-Nebraska act and the guerilla war that it provoked, which split the party in two and rapidly drove it right out of existence by the election of 1856. A final ghost of the Whigs put in an appearance in the election of 1860 as the Constitutional Union Party.
In the early 1990s, what had been a labor-liberal Democratic Party was captured by part of the corporate party. The DLC of Bill Clinton held on to office by selling out basic Democratic positions. Clinton signed NAFTA and GATT, ended welfare, and was hamstrung in all his other initatives by a corporate media that sniped at him from before the time he took office. What legislation he passed was stolen from the GOP by what was known as "triangulation". While Clinton emerged unscathed and popular from the 1998 impeachment, the entirely partisan Starr Committee and a newly-tabloidized media gave the Democratic Party the equivalent of the nearly murderous 1850s "caning" of Sumner by fire-eater Brooks on the Senate floor. The party had been savaged beyond any bound of decency, and it henceforth was craven in defending itself against increasingly high-handed GOP behavior.
In the 2000 elections, the DLC hung the crypto-conservative Joe Lieberman as a millstone around the neck of Al Gore. Lieberman, a nobody on the national stage and a religious Jew, left secular Democrats distinctly queasy and actually took the GOP line in the Florida Recount. The recount soured the blacks on even the DLC's bare awareness of the criminality involved, much less the effectiveness of the DNC leadership. The DLC further managed to lose control of both houses of Congress in the 2002 elections, and was not even aware of the surreptitious onslaught of voting machine fraud.
It is at this low point that something new began to happen.
3. The Rise of a New Republican Party
By 2002, due to rapidly dropping PC prices, the Intenet had achieved critical mass in the American electorate. It made politics "local" in a way that had not been seen in 100 years. Anyone could get in a political discussion by simply going on line. And those who had not been de-politicized by the incessant bombardment of corporate advertising did so with increasing vehemence.
The Democratic Whig oppositional silence was broken first by Net-organized anti-Iraq War demonstrations of unheard of scale and global reach prior to a war. These demonstrations were also "unheard of" by most corporate news consumers, because corporate news became actively pro-war. At this point, the Internet reality and the radio-TV reality had become as polarized as the North-South worldviews of a century and a half earlier. As in the 1850s, when preachers in the South made excuses for slave-holding, TV news personalities rationalized suppression of basic civil and political rights in the name of "fighting terror".
The Internet worldview highlighted the growing dissatisfaction of many people at their representation in Congress. Democrats asked why their representatives had ignored 100 to 1 messages against the war. Genuinely conservative Republicans asked why George Bush was running huge deficits, increasing the size of government, lying about WMDs, and why the media was protecting him. Anti-Bush and anti-neocon articles bloomed in unlikely places, like Business Week and U.S. News and World Report.
We are finally to the place where we can begin to suggest the outlines of our future by continuing the analogy.
The 1850s Republican Party took up the business torch from the Whigs. It promoted the radical-for-its-day ideology of free-trade capitalism. At the time, small entrepreneurial capitalism was vastly more productive and progressive than the slave-wage depressed Southern business sector. Capital in the South went to buy slaves, in the North, to buy machinery. The Republican ideology went on to victory for the next sixty years.
In 2003, the Internet dissatisfaction found its first political focus in the candidacy of Howard Dean. The DLC wing running the moribund Democratic Party apparatus at first ignored a threat it did not appreciate. Only belatedly did they find themselves completely out of touch with their constituency. Their reaction was to attack Dean, their own party member and DLC member.
Using history as an analogy, the end result of such an attack will be to simply drive the Internet-savvy people out of the party. The DLC will maintain control of its machinery and go down in flames in the 2004 election, no matter who they run.
They will go down in flames because they are perceived as part of the problem. Citizens of all parties have no desire to be chained up in the corporate plantations sprouting all over the country - plantations that are bankrupting small businesses, driving health care out of reach, outsourcing jobs at an increasing pace, and generally bringing third-world maquilladora sweatshops right into the USA, complete with imported, and often illegal, alien workers. The DLC is complicit in all these arrangements. It was they who enabled NAFTA and GATT.
The New Republican Party's platform will be whatever compromise can be hammered out among a United Front of labor Democrats, moderate Republicans, and even Libertarians and anti-immigration, anti-foriegn-involvement Paleo-conservatives. Dean is already giving anti-corporate rhetoric a trial balloon, and recently added anti-fundamentalist rhetorical riffs.
One of the main accusations against Dean has been that he has "been all over the map". By this analysis, that is a virtue, not a vice. The Dean Campaign is trying to put together a United Front and a new party. Being self-funding, it can either take over the Democratic Party or start its own. How that plays out depends on the DLC and its true boss, Bill Clinton. The problem for Bill is that, if the Internet crowd walks, the Dems lose. the problem for the Internet crowd is that if they walk, the GOP win.
Al Gore's endorsement is the spark that lit the powder keg. No matter what you say about Al, you have to admit he is wicked smart, maybe not a true politician like Clinton, but way smart. He probably had this entire essay figured out months ago.
The powder keg does not need to explode, because the Democratic Party is already wreckage. It contains honorable people like Robert Byrd, Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, and many others, who want to do right by their traditional constituency. They know that the future of our Union is at stake. Think of them as Stephen Douglas Democrats. It contains wafflers, apologists, and cowards, like Tom Daschle and Joe Biden; and pro-military patriots like John Edwards and Bob Graham. Finally it contains crypto-neocons who will be more than happy to join the neocons - people like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller.
This isn't a party, its the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers' "Night at the Opera". There is no party discipline, only deal- making that would make a Byzantine emperor dizzy. Al's endorsement is merely the unveiling of this chaos for all to see. It isn't a civil war; it is merely a parting of ways, a re-forming of alliances.
4. What the Heck is Going On?
The Internet People probably have an intuitive understanding of this re-formation much better than the ostrich-like, inside-the- beltway DLC. On the Internet, lefties, libertarians, paleo-cons, labor organizers, and Zoroastrians regularly cross-post anything that looks interesting or takes their side. Strange, informal alliances to sabotage the corporate takeover of everything are popping up in ways too diverse to even keep track of. Spontaneous campaigns to screw WalMart, stop the FCC giveaway, and indict Bob Novak attract followers that defy party identification.
When Joe Trippi says he isn't in charge of Dean's Campaign, he really means that Dean's Campaign isn't in charge of the New Republicanism growing out there on the Internet. But Joe and Dean do understand that something is happening out there, and it is protean. Dean is a gut-instinct politician who, in what is suicidal for the "scripted" world of TV, is not afraid to make a mistake. Of course, on the Internet, who hasn't said something stupid and gotten flamed?
Dean has first chance to ride this new wild bucking bronco of a political phenomenon. His style is a good fit to it, and that match probably explains his success to date. All the Dean-bashing about "all over the map" is irrelevant. The issue is not what Dean said in the past. The issue is who best can ride the Internet bronco. So far, its not Harley John Kerry or Milk-truck-driver Dick Gephardt, its Doctor Howard from the Wild East of the Vermont hills.
The DLC is scrambling, with the "fresh" and conservative face of Wesley Clark being the most likely Internet-acceptable face of that faction. Clark is smart as a whip, devastatingly effective, and more Internet savvy than most politicians of any party. But, if it looks like Clark is merely fronting for the DLC, then he may stop Dean, but it won't save the DLC. Also, if it looks like Clark's previous conservatism and neocon-shmoozing plus his current progressive posture spell "opportunist", then he won't be able to differentiate himself from Dean, and Dean was there first.
Bottom line, either the DLC lets Dean and his people influence the DLC's position away from compliance with the corporate takeover agenda, or the anti-corporate people run their own campaign on the Internet. Yes, I know this sounds horrendous, but it tracks the historical analogy. The Republicans cried no tears for the Whigs.
For over a year, its been ABB and you must vote for the Dems to beat Bush. As the above analysis of wreckage shows, this strategy is totally uninspiring and unlikely to energize the emerging Internet-mediated anti-neocon, anti-fundamentalist coalition. It took the 1850 Republicans four years to get their act together. The New Republicans have 11 months from now. But, the Internet accelerates everything. I think they have a shot.
on edit: details of "caning"
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