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The 2003 Sellout of the American Left
2004-1-25
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” ~John Maynard Keynes.
I used to be very pro-Dean. I can’t say I was an “enthusiastic supporter,” as I never even considered volunteering on his campaign, and as my contribution to his campaign had been posting three or four replies on the Blog for America website. Still, I viewed him very warmly. As far as I knew, he was a secular rationalist. Indeed, he was against the Iraq war, for separation of church and state, completely pro-choice, against any tax cut, and for free trade; I could have of course have asked for more, his positions on the death penalty and gun control being lacking, but he was good enough.
That was ten months ago. Slowly but surely, my opinion of Dean started going down from about August 2003. The candidate who said what he thought because he had nothing to lose started selling out; the left wing of the Democratic party became more partisan, and while in the final weeks of 2002 it was ready to go Green following what they called the Republican-Lite strategy, by the summer the tone changed to Anyone But Bush. Check the archives of the Democratic Underground, and specifically compare late 2002 to late 2003—the tone is now more unified, more mainstream, more partisan, and much less committed to change.
This leads me to a theory I call the 2003 Sellout. Democrats sold out in the past, for example in 1992-3 when they supported Bill Clinton despite his being liberal in rhetoric only, so that Michael Moore would call him in Stupid White Men, “One the best Republican presidents we’ve ever had.” The 2003 Sellout is different, in that the people are keeping their principles somewhere, but are selling out to the promises of electability and the Democratic Party.
Consistency is one of the first things to be thrown out the window, along with being logical, which is replaced with winning whatever the cost. Dean flip-flopped on trade at least once in 2003. Perhaps flip-flop isn’t the best word, because more than changing positions, Dean changed the emphasis from support of free trade to support of labor rights. This link has a list of Dean statements about free trade—notice that Dean contradicts himself by supporting free trade but lamenting the fact that “right now, we’re exporting jobs” (free trade always causes flow of capital and labor from developed to undeveloped areas), and doesn’t answer Kerry’s attack at all.
Another hallmark of the 2003 Sellout is the elevation of electability and appearing “mainstream” above most other things—probably above everything else, in fact. Michael Moore’s endorsement of Wesley Clark is a prime example of this—he does not support Kucinich because “Kucinich can’t win.” I personally opposed Kucinich but never because he couldn’t win, but because he was (and still is) too much of a protectionist and a fundamentalist to my taste; Michael Moore, however, agrees with Kucinich on practically everything, and as far as I remember does not attack the fusion of religion and state in the United States even once in Stupid White Men, and yet he didn’t endorse him. Worse, Moore seems to have been far less partisan in 2001 and 2002; Stupid White Men supports Ralph Nader and mocks those liberals who didn’t vote for him even if they completely agreed with me, attacks Clinton, and advises people to vote Green for Congress in case “the Democrat acts like a Republican.”
I think that the best representative of the 2003 Sellout movement is Howard Dean, though I am not completely sure now that the Sellout is still raging even though Kerry has the highest chance of winning the Democratic Party’s nomination. If Dean in early 2003 was a principled straight-talker—at least he managed to convey that without much if any evidence to refute that image—he now contradicts everything he said a little less than a year ago. In March, he said about religion in his family: “we’re fairly secular.” By the end of December, he had become a “committed believer.”
It is important to note that the 2003 Sellouts aren’t conservative, unlike Gore and the Clintons who are about as liberal as George McGovern is conservative. They also seem to care more about policy and substance. However, all these are relegated to distant seconds to the prospect of winning. William Rivers Pitt doesn’t agree to vote for Lieberman should he win the nomination out of conservatism or out of lack of principle; he does that because for him the main principle is strategic rather than policy-related. The winning mentality is apparently what is behind Pitt’s proclamation on the forums of the Democratic Underground that the “I” doesn’t matter, but only the “we” does. Pitt, however, remains firmly liberal, albeit consumed by patriotism and by partisan fervor.
The problem with the 2003 Sellout is that it may well win. And if it wins, there is ample evidence that we will get a slightly less charismatic Clinton, which means that government practice will hardly change, and in fact the only thing that will change is the rhetoric in which it is clothed. However, in one important aspect there will be change, namely that the various leftists who now vehemently oppose Bush’s actions will defend the same actions if done by a Democrat because “The President must remain electable/viable.”
Another problem with the 2003 Sellout is that it is very hard, maybe even impossible, to find a solution to it that can work in practice. Kucinich is not a 2003 Sellout, but in many respects he is even worse than the compromise candidates of the Sellouts. Working to undermine patriotism will help, since part of the rationale for the Sellout is “Saving the country from Bush,” but it can work only in the long run; and besides, if the Great Depression, which destroyed several democracies in Europe and particularly Germany’s, couldn’t defeat 150 years of democratic tradition, how can a group of activists defeat 220 years of patriotic tradition? I presume that electoral reform, particularly proportional representation in the House of Representatives and Approval Vote or Condorcet’s Method for single-winner elections, will help by splitting the Democrats and Republicans into several factions each and thus promoting issues over partisanship, but looking at Europe’s multiparty systems doesn’t inspire much hope.
Emma Goldman may well have been right on the money when she said, “If voting changed something, they’d make it illegal.”
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