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Views > March 22, 2005

Face the Facts

By Joel Bleifuss

With the Republicans in control of the executive, legislative and, increasingly, judicial branches of our federal government, it is time for progressives to face up the sad truth that they are losers.

Only when we know where we stand can we begin to make wise choices about where we should be going. In this issue we provide two perspectives on directions progressives should consider taking.

Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback and, most recently, The Sorrows of Empire, lays out what a progressive foreign policy might look like. He writes, “First and foremost, we should get out of Iraq and demand that Congress never again fail to honor article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution giving it the exclusive power to go to war.”

Christopher Hayes challenges the time-honored assumption that a majority of Americans are in their hearts progressive—a political force ready to be activated by the right message. Instead, Hayes asks us to consider how we can win progressive converts. He suggests that creating a national, grassroots debtors movement “should be a top progressive priority.” Such a movement, he writes, might have been able to stop “the criminally venal bankruptcy bill just passed by the Senate” by a vote of 74 to 25.

What Johnson’s and Hayes’ proposals have in common is that their ultimate success requires that the number of progressives grow to the point that we can influence the votes and behavior of members of Congress.

Were those Democrats who supported the bankruptcy bill, which exempts credit card debt from bankruptcy laws, voting on principle? According to the Center for Responsive Politics, since 1999 the Democrats who voted against the bill each have received an average of $20,200 from the credit card industry, as compared to the $51,200, on average, collected by the 18 Democrats who voted to pass it.

Similarly, Senate Democrats had an opportunity to weigh in on the Iraq war when they voted on whether to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. They might have been expected to hold Rice accountable for her repeated lies about the dangers posed by Iraq. But only 13 Senate Democrats opposed her nomination.

Confirmation votes on two more Bush nominees, John Negroponte and John Bolton, provide Senate Democrats another opportunity to take a principled stand. Don’t hold your breath.

Being political animals, Democrats too often take the most politically expedient path. Barack Obama, for example, in his Senate debut voted to confirm Rice and help Bush pass the pro-corporate “tort reform” bill. That the darling of progressives can vote this way without fear of repercussion says something about progressives’ lack of clout and political immaturity. Didn’t we learn anything during the Clinton administration, when progressives muted their criticism of bad policies out of deference to their “friends” in power?

It is not enough to fight one judicial appointment or another legislative travesty. We need to confront Democratic legislators’ tendency to take progressive support for granted, at the same time that we challenge the legitimacy of the conservative worldview that sets the national agenda.

Progressives must be proud of their ideals and not shirk the responsibility to defend them. As Garret Keizer writes in the current issue of Mother Jones, “Had Howard Dean been an evangelical Christian with an evangelical Christian base, would his followers have deserted him because his Iowa holler made him ‘unelectable’? Or would they have closed ranks behind him because his stand on the Iraq war made him right?”

We are right, and though we may not be in the majority, we should be motivated by the conviction that the ideal of “liberty and justice for all” is a basic principle not to be compromised. Relentlessly defending that principle may seem hopeless, but we are not required to win now, only to persevere until winning becomes possible.

Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.

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  • Reader Comments

    I’m a conservative who is neither rich nor Christian, my sympathies are with the efforts of individuals and not the efforts of groups. Nevertheless,the Bush administration is deeply troubling to me and I’m concerned with the direction of the republican party. The corrective is a strong progressive movement. I don’t agree with most of the views, but the influence is overall healthy.  You progressives are awfully weak and that weakness hurts everyone. A debtors’ movement - yeesh, count me out, but if it can raise your numbers and efficacy, go for it. Alienating a few more people like me won’t matter.

    Posted by Toadvine on Mar 22, 2005 at 8:44 AM

    I keep hoping media organs democratize, the corporate elite lose control of communications technologies, the prominent viewpoints come from working people abroad and south of us, and that we move from debates about “truth” to an all-out and frankly confrontational war against compromise and oppression.  Voting means little, the multiple ways to exercise power is preferred to taking it, and radical direct action, while failing to round up more more pliant supporters, forces the changes that are on the way.

    Posted by Bernie Roddy on Mar 22, 2005 at 11:25 AM

    First, progressives have to tell Americans how much worse off they are than they think they are – but before they can do this progressive have to figure it out themselves – the numbers are lying about waiting to be picked up – I am a high school educated cabdriver and I picked up on them.

    NUMBERS: The best progressives do with numbers is their favorite family income chart where lower family quintiles don’t keep half way pace with highest quintile growth since 1973 (12-35% compared to 65%). 

    This chart leaves out: (a) that Census practice of top coding out income over a million a family may hide half the real income growth of the top quintile; (b) that most of the growth of the bottom four quintiles – since 1973 – is a result of more people working more hours; (c) the more optimistic “private brand” of inflation that the Census uses (CPI-U-RS) may much exaggerate “how good” the picture is; (d) all the above took place in the context of income in America growing 70% since 1973 (more than the top quintile!)! – on the average (per capita).

    The poverty rate supposedly dropped a couple of points since 1967, but if you compare what it costs to buy the same basket of goods and services now that constituted poverty then – instead of being guided by the crackpot federal formula of three times an emergency diet (established in 1955 and presumably not extremely off the mark by 1967) – actual poverty may have doubled by 1967 – as average income doubled!

    Everyone to whom I relate that the minimum wage was $9/hour in 1967 (adjusted for inflation – CPI-U, “standard brand” of the BLS) nearly jumps through the roof – why doesn’t every last person in America know this?  All the while average income doubled.

    CATCH-UP MONEY FOR THE FROZEN-WAGE MAJORITY IS WAITING FOR THE ASKING – W/O EVEN GIANT INFLATION: (a) average income is up 70% since 1973 (whence hourly wages stopped keeping up with productivity, except for the dot.com breather); (b) average income is up 90% since 1967 (CPI-U – 110% according to CPI-U-RS); (c) ditto for average income since 1968.

    Raising the minimum wage to $12/hour would add all of 4% cost to GDP output (inarguable back of the envelope stuff).  Another 2-3-4% inflation for one year might be caused by other wages being pushed up.  This is using inflation to re-re-distribute the overall income growth which trickle-up economics has been sending to the happy few.

    SOLUTION – PERMANENT SOLUTION: (a) much higher union density; (b) much higher union density; (c) much higher union density.

    HOW TO ACHIEVE THE PERMAENT SOLUTION – WITHOUT A GENERATIONAL STRUGGLE – THE OH, SO EASY WAY: mandate unionization or seriously outlaw (perhaps criminalize) restraint of labor combination by intimidation (organizing is a serious human right – ask the Pope) or mandate union elections: whatever you do, use legislation to do your heavy lifting (done elsewhere in the world – may be the wave of the future, the world tending to imitate the USA).

    Progressives have to start by telling – high pressure selling—the income dropout story to the public – we have as shocking a story to tell as any reform movement ever did – and its all eight grade arithmetic that even a non-college educated, American born cab driver can understand.  :-)

    Posted by Denis Drew on Mar 22, 2005 at 1:18 PM

    Unfortunately, people will have to learn for themselves. Trying to convince conservative, evangelical (anti) christian Bush voters that their beliefs are in fact specious and delusional; kind of like trying to convince them that, in fact, “the sun isn’t yellow, it’s chicken!”

    Posted by Winston Obrien on Mar 22, 2005 at 3:13 PM

    Winston:
    Guess what?  Conservative, evangelical Christian (that’s with a capital “C” :-]) Bush voters voted Democrat before Bill (et al) convincned them the Dems were never going to do anything serious for them by pushing NAFTA ($7.25/hour min. wage, after 3 years?—break out my I-LIKE-IKE buttons for the 1956 inflation adjusted replay).  Bush voters figure they might as well go with the side who will at least do their cultural bidding.

    Show Americans how really seriously bad off they are (literally a trickle up economy; they really belive this is the best country to work in)—show them you have a serious plan in mind (outlaw union busting as the economic crime it is—mandate unions) and watch them come running back.

    BTW, as you might have guessed by my capital “C” joshing I am prolife as can be and even support the Vietnam war—and I voted for Kerry.  Bush in a way is a Godsend—waking average Americans up to how bad things are going their way.  Gore would have put them back to sleep w/o ever scratching the service of the numbers I quoted above—not they are at least awake.

    PS.  Can you imagine Bush vetoing a minimum wage level that Eisenhower signed into law 50 years ago—he would really be between a rock and a hard place if we ever get it passed (better than the literal 1939 minimum wage take home the minimum wage pays now—adjusted for inflation, no tax back then).

    Allow me to go on one more paragraph: back when we had sufficient union density, Republicans were not so bad; they tried to help labor a little—while Democrats helped a lot.  Today, Dems help you a little while Repubs try to hurt you a lot.  Its all about resurrecting our bargaining and political clout and that means only one thing that Americans with their “self-reliant individual” culture have been fatally slow to understand.  The numbers quoted above should wake them up like a screaming alarm clock—then the “coservative, free market” solution is rebalancing the labor market with union power.

    Posted by Denis Drew on Mar 22, 2005 at 3:41 PM

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