Black Tuesday

The Democrats surrender

by Himself
November 6, 2002

PACIFIC NORTHWEST, USA - I awoke this morning to the news, already predicted by George W. Bush, that the Republicans had retaken the U.S. Senate and increased their lead in the House.
     This put me in a foul mood that I am only now managing to emerge from, some five and half hours later.

A s the Democrats reel in a daze asking "What happened?" I feel myself growing angrier than ever about the concession of the Democrats, and indeed of the center-left world-wide, to an increasingly right-wing status quo.
     I can tell you what happened: The Democrats, led by Tom Daschle, surrendered unconditionally to George W. Bush in his bogus "War on Terrorism" and his pathological insistence on launching a colonial war of aggression on Iraq. Key Democrats who supported Bush in his jingoism (Jean Carnahan in Missouri and Max Cleland in Georgia) resoundingly lost their Senate races.
     The message to Democrats: You can't beat Republicans by presenting yourselves as Republican Lite. (How many times must this lesson be repeated before you get it?) You inconceivably failed to focus on the economy and the theft from working people's retirement funds by the obscenely rich, led by George W. Bush's crony Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay. You failed miserably to capitalize on the fact that the majority of U.S. citizens oppose attacking Iraq unilaterally. You let the Republicans call the tune and utterly failed to present an alternative.

T he inexorable slide to the right by the Democrats is nothing new, of course; it's just finally beginning to pay off big time for the Republicans. Jimmy Carter infamously mined the civilian harbors of democratic Nicaragua and fired tens of thousands of federal employees in the name of "streamlining the government." Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, unabashedly bashed unions, making his state a "right to work" state, and as president presided over "welfare reform" that continues to kick thousands of children off of public assistance, reinforcing a cycle of grinding poverty that keeps 16% of our children living in abject poverty and fully 37% of our children living in low-income families, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
     All around the world, we see the resurgence of the right. In Israel, the unthinkable is happening: The notoriously hawkish Ariel Sharon, the man found by his own government to be indirectly responsible for the 1982 massacres at Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, is being challenged from the right. When he won a special election in 2001, nobody would have believed that his ultimate challenge would come not from a resurgent left, but from an increasingly frightening and draconian right. Despite the obvious failures in Sharon's escalation of the war of attrition with the Palestinians and the resulting erosion of security, Sharon is now under fire for being too soft.
     In Great Britain, the Labor Party, like the U.S. Democrats, has long since been taken over by center-right neo-liberals who have surrendered all opposition to global capital and U.S. military hegemony. Tony Blair jumps up and down like an insecure lap dog to the U.S., shrilly insinuating himself into the U.S. ramp-up to an ill-advised invasion of Iraq. (What is it with the brits? Nostalgia for the Empire?)
     In Russia, we have George W. Bush's perfect counterpart, the instinctively autocratic Vladimir Putin, gleefully using Bush's "War on Terrorism" as cover for his seemingly intractable mess in the Caucasus.
     All across Europe, the right is making a comeback, having dealt recent blows to social democracy in the Netherlands and France, the latter with an alarming showing by the neo-fascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.

S o where does this all lead us? If history is any indication, a resurgent right signals the onset of another period of great war. This at a time when the chances for global peace have never been so great. Must we go through yet another dark period in the history of human kind before we see the light?
     In the next two years, we are faced with a stunningly dangerous milieu: unilateral aggression by the United States against Iraq, causing untold death and suffering to an oppressed Iraqi population, and the possibility of the collapse of the uneasy alliances and treaties that have kept the middle-east from erupting into full-scale war for half a century.
     We can also look forward to more reverse-Robin-Hood plundering of our savings accounts by the unreasonably rich, the further erosion of labor rights, and no solution to our train wreck of a health care system in which insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and health care conglomerates profit while tens of millions languish without care.
     The time has never been better for a real opposition, the kind based on the universal values of human rights and democracy. We must rise up as working people and oppose global corporate domination and U.S. unilateralism. Our power is in our numbers. We must speak out about our opposition in our work places, in our neighborhoods, in our schools and in our places of worship. We must speak from the grass roots, in a loud and clear voice, telling George W. Bush, his Republican minions, and their Democratic shadows "Not in our name!"
     From the ashes of Black Tuesday, we must rise up. We are the majority.