Democrats Are No Longer Electable
By The Editorial Board

So, by now any person concerned about the state of the United States of America as a viable nation in the global community with a mandate to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” must be concerned that the most cynically conservative supermajority since the Gilded Age with no intention of adhering to the old liberal values of that particular preamble now controls three branches of the federal government. More disturbing is that, unlike the previous election, this appears to have happened by the will of the voting public, for what that’s worth. All sides will concede that our voting turnout is the most anemic of any “democracy.”

Yes, we certainly reject advanced state capitalism’s electoral veneer, with its two-hour lawsuits, its thirty-second, rapid-fire image distribution and its various types of ballot systems (geographical overlays of which look suspiciously like those maps that delineate the various forms of execution in our great land: optical scan, lethal injection, punch-card, electric chair, electronic ballot, lever, gas chamber, etc.).

Yes, we concede that a cynically conservative supermajority across the whole government will probably further the Marxian-Hegelian “engine of history” as the re-burgeoning anithetical protest movement will become stronger and our youth-popular culture apparatus will certainly become radicalized, late-eighties style. We do indeed look forward to this, perhaps more so than we would welcome a tepid Democrat-controlled Senate.

All things considered, however, there will still be marked disadvantages “on the ground” that will follow from a completely Republican government: the judiciary will be reactionary for years to come, the justice department will have far less restraint in curtailing the civil liberties of the various minority groups of America (Democrats sadly included now) and President Bush will be able to pursue his schizophrenic and destablizing foreign policy with impunity. When explained to the American people in terms that respect them as free-thinking individuals, the Republican agenda is notably unpopular. However, even fairly progressive Minnesota (which had nearly a sixty percent voter turnout involving an Iron Range-rural labor turnout of nineteen-sixties proportions) elected a Republican senator over Vice President Mondale, a Republican governor and sent the first non-Democrat majority House delegation to Washington since the 1978 “Minnesota Massacre.”

For this, we must place blame solely on the shoulders of the Democratic National Committee. Why? Throughout this painfully inane campaign season, they offered the electorate no coherent alternative economic or foreign policy, choosing instead to walk a thin line between supporting the president out of self-interested fear and offering vague, vapid sound bites of uneasiness with the administration. In other words, the Democrats ran as the Republicans Lite. Both fundraising machines are now sufficiently implicated within the same corporate donor structure that from a purely economic standpoint it is now impossible to distinguish between the two parties’ strategies, save the inevitable fact that the Democrats will never quite match the Republicans in real dollars. In other words, the Democrats can never beat the Republicans at their own game; this is the sad legacy of Bill Clinton, for he was the only Democratic politican of the current governing generation who ever could. The rest (clinging desperately to Mr. Clinton, their only real post-Kennedy success story) are doomed to try, and fail.

With the tragic death of Senator Wellstone, there is no longer any member of the Senate in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a truly sad state of affairs. We submit to you, dear reader, that the Democrats are (sadly) an increasingly irrelevant party and that it is time for Representative Barbara Lee and her fellow progressives to jump ship to either form their own party or join the Greens.

The people of the United States of America will vote for a principled, viable, progressive agenda, given the chance. For example, in the spirit of the PPA Senior panel discussion on the AIDS pandemic on November 6, the day after election day, we submit that $7.5 billion of the money we spend on “defense”/dealing with the diplomatic fallout of our regressive foreign policy would be better spent on fully funding generic anti-retroviral drugs for sub-Saharan Africa, which could essentially cure AIDS in the region. This would truly be a positive step for the United States as a progressive, global citizen in such a way that would move us beyond the facile question “why do they hate us?” and would constitute a more accurate and less costly “war on terrorism,” as it were.