O'Donnell has some interesting comments on lessons he learned as a Senate staffer. A lot of the interview deals with the upcoming Supreme Court overturn of the Roe v. Wade ruling. But his main emphasis is that Democratic voters and activists should never, ever, ever criticize establishment Democratic elected officials for not delivering on their own explicit program.
Not exactly new! But he makes the argument this way. The problem, he says, that the United States is not a democracy, and has never been a democracy. He elaborates by talking about how the nature of Senate representation (two Senators per state) has nondemocratic bias, as does the Electoral College that chooses the President.
That could be the prelude to a case for remedying that situation. Or even some kind of leftie critique. But he actually argues: that's just the way it is, that's how it's always been, and because it not democratic there's no hope to change it to become more democratic. An argument for cynicism and resignation, in other words.
Put in this way, the argument is not much different from the old Bircher saying that is becoming more popular among Republicans again today: the US is a republic, not a democracy. It's a historically false formulation and really just a propaganda slogan to say that democracy is bad and un-American.
O'Donnell doesn't use it in exactly that way. (And Mary doesn't push back on the implications of his claim.) He uses it to say that Democratic voters should never criticize their own party's leaders for failing to deliver on constructive and popular proposals. The Senate's undemocratic, his argument goes, so Congress can't do anything and the President can't do anything, so Democrats should just vote for Democratic politicians so they can fail to deliver on any of their commitments.
I'm not quite sure who O'Donnell thinks the audience for this might be. Because corporate donors and rightwing plutocrats do expect the politicians they finance to deliver on what they want. But despite the superficially radical-sounding diagnosis of the democratic deficits in the US system, O'Donnell doesn't address the most serious obstacle to democratization in the US currently: the campaign-finance system in which the wealthiest have effectively unlimited ability to buy politicians through legal campaign donations.
O'Donnell goes on to make a strange historical argument. According to him, the antiwar protests of the 1960s were effective because they were motivated by hopelessness. In his view, antiwar protesters had no hope they could actually end the war, but they protested anyway. And they succeeded!
He draws a contrast to these kids today (he himself doesn't use that exact phrase), who in his version go out and protest against police misconduct or whatever and actually expect politicians to act on it. Then they get all disappointed when Democrats who promised to support them on those issues get elected to control the Presidency, the Senate, and the House, and don't act to deliver and some of them don't want to keep going to the polls to vote for Democrats.
He goes on to say that what today's activists need to do is to adopt the attitude of hopelessness that he says characterized the anti-Vietnam-War movement. That way they wouldn't bitch and moan about Democrats not delivering on even their most popular promises when they get the explicit power to do it. Look at the anti-abortionists, he says. They worked for 50 years to get to the point where the Supreme Court was ready to discard abortion rights, and they won because they kept voting for Republicans.
In the exotic world of the multi-millionaire press corps on the major TV outlets, this line of argumentation actually makes sense. Because in their view of the world, the show goes on with Democrats arguing with Republicans, and the horse race is always the center of the story. Democrats cheer for their side, Republicans cheer for theirs, and just like in football games, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Corporate finance domination of elections is a part of the fabric of that system it's not even worth mentioning.
So, if (non-wealthy) American women have to spend half a century living in a Handmaid's Tale dystopia, if Black and Latino voters are denied the right to vote, if cops across the country routinely murder African-Americans for no good reason, if the Republicans roll back Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, if immigrants are denied rights and treated with arbitrary cruelty - well, that's part of the game. It's role of the audience (voters) to buy their tickets and cheer for their side, not to actually expect there elected representatives to deliver on anything that's not a demand of wealthy donors.
Because, the liberal O'Donnell scolds us to remember: the US is not a democracy, it was never a democracy, it never will be a democracy, so stop expecting actual policy goals to be achieved if you're not a corporate donor. (Except it's not polite to talk about the dominance of wealthy donors in the process.)
Although the argument is transparently silly, it's worth noting why it's unhistorical. The antiwar movement of O'Donnell's youth did expect to end the war and demanded it happen sooner rather than later. The civil rights movement actually did expect to secure the right to vote for all African-Americans. The women's movement actually did demand abortion rights, and the rights of wives not to need their husbands' consent to get a credit card, and equal access to jobs and education. O'Donnell may have felt hopeless or just wanting to let off steam when he was protesting the war. But it's nonsense to generalize that to everyone involved. It's ridiculous, actually.
But there is a notable difference between how the two major American political parties approach their voting bases. Donors from the petroleum and pharmaceutical and real estate and other business groups aren't especially concerned about whether all citizens can vote or whether women have equal rights or not. And there aren't huge differences between the two parties right now on whether the wealthiest citizens should have to pay taxes to support their country and communities (both regard such a thing as undesirable) or whether the military budget should increase (both agree that it should increase every year even more than the Pentagon itself requests).
The US electoral system creates heavy pressure for a two-party system. And the ambitions of each party require that they round up votes from people who are not part of the One Percent and who are concerned about things like living wages, secure retirement systems, public schools and health departments, and reasonably non-corrupt governance. Present-day lutocracy notwithstanding, the group dynamics that James Madison famously described in Federalist #10 back in the day (1787) still function.
The Republicans mobilize voters around the so-called "cultural war" issues around patriotism, militarism, and a Christian Right version of "traditional values." While the Democrats still run on a general support of New Deal, Great Society, civil-rights, and women's-rights issue.
But there is a clear difference in intensity between the two parties in how they mobilize their base voters. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein called in "asymmetric partisan polarization" in their excellent 2012 book, It's Worse Than It Looks, which described how that situation developed. Despite the more prominent role of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, we still have an asymmetric partisan polarization.
And what I call The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010) Just after January 6, 2021, I was willing to add that Democratic pols hate crazy-ass Republican lynch mobs hunting them down in the halls of the Capitol even more.
But in May 2022, the tone has largely reverted to the Frumian norm. Republicans are desperate to look acceptable to their party's modern-day insurrectionists. Democrats are bashing progressives who are part of their essential voting base, saying we've got to FUND the police, and try to reanimate a long-departed Republican Party which included actual moderates and maybe even the occasional liberal.
In the immediate wake of the leaked Samuel Alito opinion indicating that the rightwing Supreme Court is about to throw out the Roe v. Wade abortion-right decision, the Republicans were united in expressing outrage about the leak itself. And then in pivoting to the strange argument that overturning Roe v. Wade would hardly making any difference at all in access to abortion services in the US. While the Democratic establishment seemed to be stuck in their all too characteristic deer-in-the-headlights pose, apparently not having put in place any kind of high-level quick-reaction plan to a development that everyone could see was very likely to be coming.
Unfortunately, Larry O'Donnell seems also to be stuck defending the Democrats' political paralysis. He's essentially saying that Democratic voters shouldn't actually care about the issues they vote on and definitely should never criticize the party for not delivering on them. That's really the core of his strange argument about how protesters and Democratic activists should be hopeless that they can ever actually accomplish anything.
It's a beautiful example of the Frum Principle: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs."
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