Onward Where?
December 18, 2004
Mother Jones
To the Editor:
David Swanson is an activist and writer based in Washington, D.C. |
What do you mean "Onward"? Gitlin imagines we're unaware of all the work and money we just dumped on a candidate who had "Loser" tatooed across his forehead. Gitlin spends most of his article telling us about it, pausing only to ask us to "forget all the blah-blah" about whether the passion was anti-Bush, whether any of it was pro-Kerry. Yet if the platitudes of Gitlin's penultimate paragraph about "concentrating our minds" on reaching 51 percent are going to be realized, or -- better -- surpassed by a movement that aims for a landslide, we will have to understand what we did in terms of what we were up against. We took a corporate, free-trade, pro-private-health-insurance, pro-war Democrat afraid of his own shadow and either beat Bush - as I'm convinced - or came damn close to doing so. But to do so again will require a Republican at least as detested as Bush, and probably more so, because we will be up against greater skepticism about the validity of the vote count and the possibility of victory.
Kazin is, of course, right about the need to build a grassroots movement, but blaming the size of the labor movement is too easy. The labor movement is still far more powerful than it chooses to demonstrate. Rather than laying out a platform that a candidate would have to support, unions and the AFL-CIO, like other progressive organizations, treated the endorsement process like betting on a horserace, and made no demands of the horses. Union members were hardly involved in the endorsement decisions, and in many cases were not inspired to work for the candidates chosen. And the candidates' platforms were not forced into a vision that working people would support with enthusiasm.
Gitlin is concerned that we dare to dream of 51 percent. Kazin is already predicting that progressives won't win the next presidential election. But this self-defeatism is the biggest difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats fail to push for positions favored by most Americans: single-payer health care, corporations out of government, a living wage, improved education, an end to the war, fair trade policies that protect workers and the environment. Republicans notice that they are being investigated for vote fraud in Ohio and call an emergency session of the state government to push for the elimination of campaign finance restrictions. Let's stop copying Republican policy and start copying Republican brashness.
David Swanson
