Do you get The Atlantic? I do, although I'm about ready to cancel my subscription because they've veered extremely to the right lately.
However, they have been running a fascinating series about American by a Frenchman, Bernard-Henri Levy, who seems to have spent an entire year (on someone's dime, I'm assuming The Atlantic's) running all around the country and examining it with an outsider's eyes.
This month he deals with American politics, and with the Democrats in particular.
The Democratic Party as a Black Hole
The real surprise on the political left in America is that nothing is happening. Not that I claim to have seen everything in such a limited time. But I did meet former members of the Clint, Gore, and Kerry teams. At the AFL-CIO headquarters I attended a "joint conference" of three organizations designed to extract lessons from the defeat and prepare for battles yet to come. I saw union members and intellectuals, elected officials and strategists, the old and the young. For three days I hunted down the New Democrat, that supposedly developing breed of which, I was told, I could find as many specimens as I liked in Washington.
The results, I'm afraid, didn't measure up either to my hopes or - far more serious - to what anyone might reasonably expect given the quality, intensity, and strength of the idealogical argument mounted by the right.
(He goes on to give several examples of various Democrats, and gives his opinions (mostly negative) on all of them. It's too long to go into here. The part I want to emphasize here is this:
He makes it very clear that the mainstream democrats he met in Washington were only concerned about money and fundraising ....)
Then he adds:
I wanted to hear about something else. I looked for speeches about why this money should be raised. I yearned for one voice, just one, to articulate the tthree or four major issues that, given the current debate and balance of power, might constitute the framework of a political agenda. A defense of the Enlightenment against the creationist offensive. A Tocquevillian revolution extolling certainly not atheism but secularism, and maintaining the separation of church and state. A new New Deal for the poorest of the poor. An uncompromising defense of human rights, and a rejecion of the "exceptional" status of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
No.
Money, and then money yet again. Money, the index and criterion of all things. The hypothesis, the axiom, according to which, in order to win the battle of ideas, you first have to win the battle of money.
An observer -- someone who, like me, was struck by the vigor of the neo-conservative awakening and was expeting to see at least its equivalent on the other side -- senses a trap in the process of closing. For a long time the Republican Party was the party of money. For a long time the Democrats repeated, "We have ideas, but you have the money, and that's why you win."
Today a turnaround -- or rather, a trick of history -- has occurred, and all of a sudden the two camps are struggling on opposite fronts: a right wing of money but also of ideas, which in twenty years has renewed its idealogical supplies; and a left wing that, by diint of wanting to compete on the battlefield of money, is in the process of losing its footing on the ground of ideas, and thus of losing, period.
Perhaps the problem with today's Democratic Party is more simple than we think -- perhaps because of their desire to raise more money to fight the Republicans, they've inadverently turned into "Democrats in Name Only", selling their political souls to those offering the largest sums of money -- corporations. Perhaps they meant well in the beginning -- let's raise as much money for the party as we can! And they slowly, inexorably, began to morph, like those bitten by vampires, into something that would have horrified them in their prior incarnations.
How to solve this? And get our old Democratic Party back? Well .... the only thing I can think of is that we're gonna have to fund them ourselves.
Which of course is what the Internet is all about. And why these DLC types are screaming like vampires in the sunshine about us "radical fringe" folks. :)
We're a threat to them. They were, in fact, bitten by the corporate vampires, and now it's up to us to drive a stake through their hearts and throw them on the pyre.
Guess we have to pony up.
Who's buying?
(note: I didn't post a link to the source material because it isn't online yet. I typed it from my magazine)