Moderation is the message

The BC election brings US-style democracy closer - or what they call democracy

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Carole James ran a John Kerry campaign, playing to the centre and ignoring her party's traditional base. In effect, she let all know that if elected, the NDP would continue with the bulk of the Liberal initiatives.

Acceptable opinion in the corporate press was simple and repetitive. James's NDP did well, according to the sanctioned pundits, because she steered the NDP toward the centre, thus gaining the confidence of the electorate as a “moderate.”

The uncontested king of provincial columnists, Vaughn Palmer of The Vancouver Sun, persevered on the theme of moderation. Before the election Palmer wrote that “polls suggest her message of moderation will lift the party to an impressive showing.” After the election he wrote, dully, that James “ran a good campaign. Her party did well because she did well—presented a moderate platform.” And, the Dawn Yawner concluded, “Now she has to translate her moderate showing into a moderate message for next year.” If she does, well, she'll probably do moderately well. Ho hum.

Palmer's buddy, Norman Spector, sees all this moderation as good for BC's health: “Traditionally, BC has had the reputation of being a polarized province,” he wrote in one article, “a slightly wing-nutty province,” he wrote in another. But now, finally, here we have “the leader of the socialist hordes vaunting the NDP's attachment to a balanced budget and promising not to raise taxes to boot,” enthused Spector. Who could ask for anything more?

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, the dean of Canadian columnists, Jeffrey Simpson, wrote in the Globe and Mail that “this campaign lacked passion and was, well, dull. Good. . . . The difference between the Liberals and the NDP has shrunk to a fraction of what it was four years ago.” Simpson is right. Like most columnists, Simpson sees this conformity between the two parties as good.

The fact is the NDP did well despite James's lack luster campaign. But none of the corporate columnists can figure out why. In the mainstream press, only Norman Ruff got it right. “The astonishing recovery of the NDP” from “its 2001 debacle [was] driven by a deep negativist current of opinion against the Campbell Liberal administration,” wrote Ruff, correctly. But excuse Professor Ruff's poli-sci jargon; “deep negativist current of opinion” translates as “anger.” A large group of BCers were angry at the Liberals, and the NDP were the beneficiaries of that anger.

Kansas

Around the same time as the election, I was reading Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter With Kansas? The book sets out to explain “How conservatives won the heart of America,” as its subtitle succinctly puts it. Frank looks in detail at his home state of Kansas, a state with a long, honourable history of left populism, where the majority of the voters now back a faith-based right-wing Republican populism. Frank explores the political paradox of a population among the vanguard of the right wing of the Republican party who are under attack from right wing economic policies of the very same party (through NAFTA, de-unionization, cuts to the social safety net, job losses to third world countries and tax cuts for the super-wealthy). They are concerned overwhelmingly with social issues: homosexuality, gay marriage, the “decline of morality,” and crime. They seem uninterested in correcting the economic inequalities of which they are more and more the victims.   

For  240 pages this book uncovers the ironies whereby working people fight at the barricades protecting the most privileged elite the modern world has ever seen. But this work is marred by Frank's romantic take on US liberalism. Frank foregrounds his perspective from the very first page, stating that “it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized.” The book's cover has an elephant riding atop a donkey. Throughout the book the discourse is one that implies the Democrats are some how politically the opposite of the Republicans. For example, he writes at length of the differences between the “red states” (Republican voting states) versus “blue states” (Democratic voting states).

Yet a clear view of any Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt, does not support the argument the Democrats are significantly different from the Republicans. Democrat Bill Clinton's policies brought negative impacts to blacks, minorities, the poor, single parents and workers. Clinton's “Three-strikes you're out” crime bill has filled US prisons with black men caught in petty crime, such as possession of narcotics and minor property crimes. Clinton's welfare bill set the states free to race to the bottom and placed legal limits on the amount of time a person can collect welfare.

Clinton signed NAFTA, which dramatically accelerated the flight of industrial jobs out of the country. The 1996 Counter-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty act, by sanctioning the deportation of immigrants without due process, and denying prisoners legal recourse to appeal some court decisions, started down the path that Bush Jr’s Homeland Security Act deepens. Clinton was every bit as trigger happy as Bush Jr—think, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan. The only significant difference was that Clinton sought international support rather than going it alone.

Clinton and Blair's sanctions against Iraq, and incessant bombing of that country throughout the 1990s, killed more Iraqis than Bush Jr's invasion and occupation has so far. Clinton squandered huge historical opportunities, first to downsize the military in the wake of the end of the cold war, and second to bring some form of a national health insurance to the US. One of the few positive things Clinton did, to reintroduce a bit more progressiveness to the US tax system, was motivated more out of a neo-liberal desire to control the deficit than any sense of justice. There is more continuity than discontinuity between Clinton's rule and Bush Jr's.

As the book closes, on page 240 of a 251 page book, Frank is finally willing to concede that “liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon.” Why? Because current leaders ofthe Democratic Party have “long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters.” But Frank longs for a Democratic Party that never was. While the Party might have at one time given more lip service to big unions, those days are long gone.

For the US corporate elite, the genius of US democracy is that it presents no threat whatsoever to their interests. Regardless of which mainstream party is in power they engage in the same policies with only cosmetic differences, largely of style only. So, the Republicans harp on “moral” issues which, as Frank show, they cannot affect, while the Democrats prefer multilateral military action, rather than Bush Jr's unilateral action.

Palmer, Spector and Simpson are all enthusiastic about the recent BC election because it is a significant signpost on the road toward this US-style democracy. Regardless of which party rules, there will be largely the same policies. The small “l” liberal press's main function is to narrow the scope of acceptable choices, and to seal off openings to any real alternative. They perform that function admirably.

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