Truth and Power

The Sunni feel that way, and I can sympathize with them.

When your enemy has the advantage of numbers, and not only holds overwhelming military and economic power and a lock on the media but also possesses the institutional and political means to strengthen his advantage through the polls both legally and extralegally, then life can look pretty bleak.

Like it does for Democrats here.

Let me say I’m an agnostic on the whole vote fraud issue.

Maybe the Republicans had the votes. Maybe they didn’t.

But what counts on the bottom line is that we lacked the eager minions, administrative mechanisms, or judicial infrastructure to steal an election even if we wanted to.

But the Republicans do.

And the election was just the beginning of the Bush political strategy, not its culmination.

To paraphrase Clausewitz, elections are just the continuation of politics by other means.

For the Bush administration, politics is all-consuming, because its objective is to destroy the liberals, the Democratic Party, and progressivism as effective political forces.

Not for the sake of a conservative nirvana.

But for the sake of a corporate nirvana, to create a capitalist wonderland in which big business roams free and the people — bereft of unions, organized political opposition, judicial protections, or hope of an alternative future — have no recourse but to work, earn, and obey.

As an excellent article in Feb. 2’s LA Times points out, the Republicans are striving to make their election day advantage self-perpetuating by using their hold on political power to systematically attack not only the programs but the interest groups that form the core of the Democratic Party’s electoral support network.

Case in point: tort reform as a measure to impoverish trial lawyers and diminish their ability to fund Democratic campaigns.

One point the article didn’t make was a more subtle one: that one way the Republicans attack a program is by convincing America that its cause is hopeless…because the Republicans are dedicated to its destruction.

Case in point: social security. The only reason why future retirees would ever believe that their benefits are at risk is because the Republicans have announced their determination to tip the government’s — and the system’s — finances off a cliff by runaway deficit spending and the refusal to fund the future SS shortfall with a payroll tax increase.

Case in point: education. The reason that African American households are attracted to vouchers and charter schools is because they know the Republicans will do nothing meaningful to support public education.

Case in point: security. The reason America acquiesces to second-class citizenship in a bloated, predatory national security state is because they know that the Republicans are flinging us into a brutal, dangerous future in which the cynical exercise of American hegemony have rendered trust, negotiation, and accommodation quaint, irrelevant, and perilous.

I never agreed with the lefty bloggers who proudly took membership in the reality-based community.

When they did so, they said We look at facts…and respond to events.

The Republicans say We create “facts on the ground”…and shape events.

That’s not just their goal, or their promise.

It’s a threat.

We may have truth on our side, but the Republicans have the power.

The power to screw up the world and take away the hope that Democrats not only want to, but can create a better world.

So, on November 2, the people didn’t speak.

Power spoke.

And the people responded.

People (except liberals, I guess) join political parties for real victories, not moral ones.

And we’ve delivered precious few of either kind lately.

Having the electoral wind at the Republicans’ backs — the growing power to win elections by means either fair or foul — is a dagger in the heart of the Democratic Party, demoralizing our supporters not only by defeat but by the awareness that by supporting Democrats they are painting a political bull’s eye on their backs.

Of course, the Republicans only enjoyed a slight electoral edge in the last presidential contest.

One of the things they do is use bluff and impudence to assert a mandate they don’t possess, like the time they steamrollered Al Gore and the American people in the Florida recount farce.

And underneath the bluster about taking us back to the age of McKinley and an era of decades of Republican dominance is their anxious hope that the wheels don’t come off their rickety debt-laden war machine for another year or two until they’ve had a chance to flatten the Democrats with it once and for all.

But we have to understand that the Democratic Party’s inability to provide a credible alternative to venality, corruption, and corrosive cynicism is the real problem.

Democrats have to understand it is not our policies — it is our powerlessness, and the perception that we don’t have a clue about what happened or what we should do — that is driving America into the arms of a cynical, predatory Republican administration.

Now the Democrats aren’t regarded as a loyal opposition, or as the representative of legitimate interest groups.

We’re just targets.

The right wing wants to treat 2005 as mopping up after the victory, with their pundits and bloggers scurrying onto the battlefield to loot the corpses and bayonet the wounded.

But now’s the time to regroup. To form our government-in-exile, our resistance.

Not just to contest elections, but to confront the illusion and reality of Republican power that underpins their whole strategy of national intimidation.

Perhaps we don’t attack the enemy where he is strong — at the ballot box — but where he is weak — in the anxious hearts of his addled followers.

I wasn’t a Deaniac, but I’ll be glad if he becomes DNC chair.

I don’t care if he wins a single election. I don’t care if he raises a goddam dime.

All I want him to do is stand up and scream (OK, well, shout) that he doesn’t just represent the liberal wing, or the Democrats.

I want him to say that he represents the people of the United States…

…not only people who already know and despise what Bush’s cruel and incompetent corporate oligarchy is doing to this country and the world…

…and also those Americans who may have lost faith in the liberal version of the future, but will come to realize that the Bush vision of incompetence, violence, debt, and division is much worse.

I want him to give the American people hope.

Hope of what we can do…and undo.

Because if we can give the American people hope, we are offering a political alternative to Bush and the Republicans, and strong leadership and political success will follow.

As for elections, for the time being, don’t think of defeats as a repudiation of us or our principles, or as the bestowal of any mandate. They are simply a waypoint in an unequal struggle against an unscrupulous and immoral power.

If we do have to lose, let’s make the defeats tactical victories instead of moral ones. Less me-too mush and platitudes aping the hypocritical stances of Dear Leader; more full-throated attacks driving a wedge between the conniving Bushites and the timorous followers they pretend to champion.

If the Iraqis can throw off the yoke of George W. Bush and the Republicans, maybe we can too.

It just might take us a few more years — and a few more elections.

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halycon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.