CAKE POLICE

Bertolt Brecht remarked in his crucial text "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties" that "it will not do to grant that goodness must be weak as rain must be wet. It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." In that spirit, Paul Jay has brought some devastating analysis to bear on what will most likely be a failure of the Democratic Party in tomorrow's election, enumerating six ways in which the Democrats have aided in the resurgence of the Republican Party and disappointed the majority of their base. Lest the alternative courses of action implicit in his criticisms seem utopian, we ought to remember that we live in a democracy, and that as such it is our province as citizens to demand things of our government, which is nominally representative, and it is the province of this government to enact our demands. The objection that is always raised that there are procedural obstacles to realizing these demands should be flatly rejected. If the Bush administration could find any number of legal loopholes to enact completely heinous policies that a majority of Americans did not support (even such Americans as John Ashcroft, Lindsey Graham and Richard Armitage), then certainly the present administration could find some way to enact policies that reflect the demands of most American citizens (e.g., a public option in health care*). If they do not do this, we can only assume that they have no interest in doing it, and the fact that Liz Fowler, "a former executive for a private health insurer," was a chief contributor to the health care bill is but one bit of evidence that could be adduced to support this claim. (As Bill Moyers notes in the linked video, "Movers and shakers rotate between government and the lucrative private sector at a speed so dizzying they forget who they're working for," going on to point out that there are six private health insurance lobbyists for every member of congress, and that more than five hundred of these are former congressional staff members.) So if Barack Obama in his Daily Show interview makes Jon Stewart look at all foolish, he himself comes off as glib and patronizing when he says, “If [your] point is that overnight, we did not transform the health care system, that point is true.”

In that connection Jay, at the end of his remarks about the Democrats, makes an implicit riposte to Stewart's plea for "sanity" in popular political discourse (and to the recent, rather embarrassing rally organized around this theme), as well as the sort of appeals made at the earlier "One Nation" rally:

But perhaps it’s way past time we realize that we are not one nation, there really are two Americas. That the lack of civil discourse and extremes of competing ideology is not the underlying problem but a symptom of an objective difference of interest. That what’s rational for most billionaires may not be so sane for the rest of us.Yes, we would like everyone to be in the same rowboat, all working hard to “get things done”, to solve the grave problems facing us. But the problem is some are sailing around in yachts, and the harder the rest of us row, the bigger those yachts get. The real division in America is not between the Democratic and Republican parties, its between the people who day after day, are out their pushing those oars and those that are just taking a cruise.

Jay here identifies the critical blind-spot of the calls for a coming together of people whose "values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done": namely the assumption that these "values and principles" somehow play no role in determining notions of the "things" that need to "get done." The very vagueness of this prescription - "working together to get things done"- is an index of its emptiness. The idea of the "non-ideological moderate" is basically a false one. Ideology is at work precisely in decisions about which goals are worth pursuing, and what means can be acceptably applied in pursuing them. For someone who truly believes in improving the lot of those whom some in the media label "ordinary and working people," the Libertarian-Tea Party-Republican program of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans while eliminating all or most forms of social spending is unacceptable, and there can really be no common cause with anyone who advocates such a program.** The lines in some cases are perhaps not so clearly drawn, like with those Tea Partiers who recognize the stagnation of wages over the last 40 years as a problem, but put the blame on illegal immigrants rather than corporate CEOs and Nixon-Reagan. But on the whole Jay is right to affirm the existence of "an objective difference of interest" among different classes of Americans, and a corresponding ideological difference that can't really be papered over with liberal platitudes about working together.

*It should be mentioned here that one Washington Post/ABC-conducted poll found that 80 percent of Americans "believed that universal health care was 'more important than holding down taxes.'"

**This position is less and less restricted to Republicans and their ilk, and has been since the Reagan administration. New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, for example, has made it his goal to wage a "permanent 
political campaign to counter the well-financed labor unions he believes have bullied previous governors and lawmakers into making bad decisions. He will seek to transform the state's weak business lobby into a more formidable ally, believing that corporate leaders in New York have virtually surrendered the field to big labor." It seems like a crass joke that a member of the Democratic Party, the supposed opponent of the neoliberal austerity that is the ongoing program of the Republican Party, should run on such a platform, which is more or less identical to the platform Meg Whitman is running on in California.