[Sosfbay-discuss] Hyperpartisanship: Anatomy of one party rule and progressive's opportunity

[Drew Johnson]

{Three articles that spell out the challenge/opportunity facing America
today.  They detailing how CheneyBush maintain one party duopolistic
"hyperpartisan" rule. In the second Lindorf again reiterates his call for
progressives to quit the Democratic party and "go somewhere else" or
"found a new party".  The third NYT article points out that 74% of
Americans now believe we are on the 'wrong track' and how lasting
political power will go to "a broad coalition that locks arms to produce
meaningful progress against the country’s problems".  This is opportunity
folks! - DJ}


http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28666
Perversions of Power
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2007-11-13 16:05. Media

By Bernard Weiner, Crisis Papers

There are a few things in life that one can count on: death, taxes, and
people wanting to rewrite your play. And, for our purposes today, the
famous dictum from the noted British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902):

"...Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too
frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has
proven that. ... Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts
absolutely.”

It doesn't seem to matter whether those power-wielders are liberals or
conservatives, Democrats, Republicans or Independents, civilian or
military, decent or warped, whatever. There are exceptions, of course, but
the tendency certainly is there for power to corrupt, and the reality that
absolute power corrupts absolutely.

There seems to be something inherent in the holding of power that goes to
peoples' heads. The resulting misrule seems especially egregious for those
leaders who were installed in power via the electoral process. Somehow,
against all expectations, we assume -- we want to assume -- that elected
leaders will be more "pure," less likely to abuse the power at their
command, will be less prone to corruption, will be more accessible to
ordinary citizens.

And then our hopes are dashed when the old crew is defeated and the new
bunch turn out almost or just as bad, or sometimes even worse. (The only
saving grace is that democratic elections, provided they are honest, do
make it somewhat easier to remove bad officials -- at least in theory.)

Again, we're not surprised when a dictator behaves atrociously -- Hitler,
Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Amin, Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, et al.; indeed,
we'd be surprised if they conducted themselves in any other way. Dictators
dictate and go wild with the power they have at their command. Eventually,
either their own brutalized populations revolt and overthrow them, or
their neighbors or the world community finally decide they've had enough
and engineer their downfall. (It usually takes years for this revulsion to
build to action; in the meantime, during their reigns of terror, millions
have died, economies and institutions are in tatters, and countries' souls
have been strangled.)

So where am I going with this? In case you haven't sussed it out, I'll be
talking here about CheneyBush, the Democratic Party, and Pervez Musharraf.
Lord Acton would have a field day with these guys as negative role models
for how not to lead.

CHENEYBUSH & AUTHORITARIANISM

Cheney, ever since his days in the Ford Administration, has been consumed
with the desire to expand the powers of the presidency -- presumably as
long as he's in proximity to the Oval Office. Candidate-Bush appointed
Cheney to go find him the best Vice Presidential running-mate; after a
nationwide search, Cheney reported back that he found the perfect V.P. for
Bush: himself. The rest is (bad) history.

Bush has been quoted at least three times expressing, supposedly in jocular
fashion, that dictatorships are much preferable to clunky, messy democracy
"as long as I get to be the dictator." Ha, ha.

As they've clearly demonstrated, neither Cheney nor Bush has any affinity
for the give and take of democracy. Certainly they've evidenced very
little
patience for the way the country's Founding Fathers, in their genius,
doled out pieces of power to the three branches of government so that no
one person or faction easily could abuse their limited authority. If the
three branches couldn't come to compromise agreements, there would be
governmental deadlock for awhile and then the people would have a chance
to rectify and alter the situation with their pressure or with their votes
in the next election.

That separation-of-power arrangement worked reasonably well for more than
200 years, but Cheney and Rove and Bush much preferred a more
authoritarian
approach. They put democracy on hold and took matters into their own hands
in order to push their domestic and foreign agendas. The Founding Fathers,
and today's citizens, never imagined the scenario of "men with the quality
of gangsters" in the Executive Branch amassing all control in their hands,
and acting ruthlessly to maintain that stranglehhold on power by crushing
all opposition.

Short version: They relegated the then-minority opposition party, the
Democrats, to non-entity status with the aim of making them irrelevant to
government and, with the help of some electoral dirty-tricks and
vote-manipulation, creating one-party rule for at least a generation or
two. (The result of keeping all power in the hands of the Republicans was
that virtually all bribes and lobbying money went to GOP politicians --
which, given the truth of Lord Acton's dictum, resulted in numerous
corruption indictments of Republican office-holders a few years later.)

Further, if any bills passed that didn't please CheneyBush 100%, Bush would
attach a "signing statement" to the legislation saying he reserved the
right to ignore or overturn those parts he didn't agree with. In effect, a
permanent veto power outside the traditional way of quashing Congressional
legislation. It's estimated that Bush has attached close to 1000 such
"signing statements" to laws passed by Congress.

Even more outrageous: CheneyBush got their legal counsels (David
Addington/Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales) to devise a theory of
governance that permitted Bush to violate the Constitution or
Congressional laws whenever he claimed he was acting as
"commander-in-chief" to protect the "national-security" interests of the
American people. In short, under a cockamamie "unitary executive" theory
of governance, Bush would be permitted to act as a dictator on all matters
foreign and domestic. He warned the courts, which he has packed with his
own ideological kinsmen, not to interfere with these prerogatives, and he
essentially cut the Legislative Branch out of oversight of his behavior
and/or ignored their occasional objections, in effect daring anybody to
stop him.

Few felt brave enough to question this misrule at the top, especially on the
subjects of the lies used to invade and occupy Iraq, or on torture of
suspected terrorists, or on the shredding of the 800-year-old tradition of
habeas corpus along with Constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights.
(Bush's near-police state included domestic spying without court warrants,
rifling through one's computer, black bag jobs, "disappearing" citizens
into military jails with no access to lawyers, etc.). With no effective
opposition, and with most of the mass-media parrotting the White House
spin, CheneyBush have had free reign to rampage through the law and
threaten and invade around the globe. Hundreds of thousands have died or
been maimed as a result -- American troops and Iraq/Afghanistan civilians
-- and a new war is being planned for Iran.

THE DEMOCRATIC "OPPOSITION PARTY"

And how has the ostensible "opposition party" responded to the
stop-me-if-you-can gauntlet thrown down by CheneyBush and their GOP
supporters in Congress? The Democrats barely take on the issues that
really matter: the ongoing Iraq war, the impending attack on Iran, the
destruction of the Constitution.

In 2006, the American people -- angry and turned off by CheneyBush's
extremism, thorough-going incompetence, and corruption on so many levels
-- voted the Republicans out of power in Congress and installed a slim but
telling Democratic majority. Polls revealed that the voters were fed up
with CheneyBush policies, especially with regard to the quagmirish Iraq
war and the violation of their privacy rights, and that's why they gave
the Democrats a mandate to clean out the stables.

But the timid Dems forgot who put them into power and why, and continued to
act as if they were still in the minority by rolling over on their backs
whenever CheneyBush started calling them "soft on terrorism" or whatever.
In effect, the Democrats have become enablers of the worst policies of the
CheneyBush juggernaut, and now have blood on their hands.

The logic of the Dems' easy and constant capitulations is baffling. Bush is
now the most loathed president in modern history, even lower in approval
ratings than Richard Nixon at his lowest, a mere 24%, and Cheney is even
lower at 11% approval. The public is more than two-thirds opposed to
CheneyBush's Iraq War and Occupation and feel the U.S., in general, is
headed "in the wrong direction." And yet the Democrats behave as if they
have to snap to it whenever the Administration looks at them the wrong
way.

Perhaps the best symbol of that timidity is their refusing to even consider
impeachment of Cheney and Bush for a long list of high crimes and
misdemeanors. Because of their wimpy behavior, on impeachment and Iraq,
the Democrats in Congress are held in even less repute than CheneyBush.

Indeed, elements of the Democratic activist base, the ones who worked so
hard to get them into the majority in 2006, are threatening to abandon the
party and are denouncing Dem leaders and many of the announced
presidential
candidates for the 2008 race. Many Dems are no longer sending donations to
the Party coffers, and instead are restricting their giving to specific
candidates who demonstrate moral strength and independence in their policy
choices.

In short, as Lord Acton would have known would happen, the ascension to
Congressional majority status power has tended to corrupt the Democrats,
and there is great suspicion that if they were given absolute power they
would be only a little different from the morally-bankrupt CheneyBush
Administration, with more wars of choice abroad and more willingness to
misuse the expanded powers of the presidency against their perceived
political enemies.

HYPOCRISY IN PAKISTAN

The situation in Pakistan is uber-serious. If a centrist/secular Pakisan
government were to fall and militant Islamists got their hands on that
country's nuclear missiles, there is no telling what kind of conflagration
might occur in the Greater Middle East, or beyond.

But certain lessons can be drawn from the situation there. And, lo and
behold, Condi Rice and George W. Bush delivered some of them, calling for
Musharaff (nudge nudge, wink wink) to return to democratic institutions,
guarantee an honest voting process, support a free-wheeling investigatory
press, respect an independent judiciary and oppositional elements, etc.

Trouble is, the CheneyBush vision of what's wrong is sharp when it refers to
Pakistan but they seem incapable of seeing the mote in their own eyes. You
can't pretend to be an admirable democratic country when you violate your
Constitution and deny citizens their rights, and you can't denounce
torture and mistreatment of protesters and prisoners when you sanction
such in your own behavior, and you can't decry a political leader also
being the head of the military when your country operates that way, too.
The American double-standard reeks.

(Catch this quote from White House Press Secretary Dana Perino when asked
about the situation in Pakistan. Question: "It is ever reasonable to
restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism?" Her
unequivocal answer: "In our opinion, No." Oh, but I love the smell of
hypocrisy in the morning.)

LIMITED CHOICES IN PAKISTAN

In a way, what's happening in Pakistan, with Musharraf proclaiming martial
law and arresting his political enemies, is reminiscent of the era of Cold
War politics. The U.S. supported with gobs of money and military aid any
country that professed "anti-communism"; this policy meant that the U.S.
lost popular international support around the globe because we were
backing the worst sort of dictators who represssed their peoples (Marcos
in the Phillipines, the Shah of Iran, the apartheid regime in South
Africa, etc. etc.). And here we are again: If you claim you're
anti-"terrorist," American will supply you with billions in cash, police
"training," and loads of high-tech weaponry.

Musharraf, who assumed office in a military coup, always has been in a
delicate position with his own people. He has to mollify the U.S., his major
benefactor, while not losing the support of his more nationalist, Islamic
population. Eventually, of course, by being so tightly allied to Bush, he
antagonized the nationalists and the Islamist extremists, the latter of
whom began suicide bombing in Karachi, Islamabad and beyond. By stomping
on his political opposition, Musharraf, who continued to head the military
while serving as president, nearly-destroyed the moderate middle of the
political spectrum. Now what does he do?

(If he loses the election he promises to hold in January or February, and
militant Islamists were to move into power, would the U.S. honor the
democratic will of the Pakistani citizenry? Or, as happened in the
Palestinian territories, would the U.S. denounce the result of the
election and refuse to deal with the popularly-elected victors? For
CheneyBush, democracy is a bitch when the "wrong" people get elected.)

CheneyBush have few decent choices with regard to Pakistan. They could cut
Musharraf loose and support Bhutto, but she has yet to demonstrate that
she can command the allegiance of the people, that she can govern from the
middle, that she would be any more welcome by fundamentalists in her
country. How to arrange all this without greasing the tracks for the
militant Islamists to ride into power -- that's the trick.

A talented diplomatic magician is needed to help arrange this trick, and the
U.S. should be in the thick of it. But Bush, Cheney and Rice (fixated as
they are on the catastrophe they've unleashed in Iraq and now on how and
when to attack Iran) have demonstrated time and time again over the past
seven years that they are not skilled at the kind of nuanced diplomatic
negotiations that are required.

My guess is that we'd better prepare ourselves for what's about to hit the
giant fan in South Asia. Break out the umbrellas. #

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D, in government & international relations, has taught
at universities in Washington State and California, worked as a
writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and
currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). For comment:
crisispapers at comcast.net

_________

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28668
{Here Lindorf again reiterates his call for progressives to quit the
Democratic party.  DJ}

This Revolution Could Be Televised On Fox
Submitted by dlindorff on Tue, 2007-11-13 16:14.
By Dave Lindorff

Now even the New York Times is saying it. In an editorial on Oct. 20, the
Times wrote, “Every now and then, we are tempted to double-check that the
Democrats actually won control of Congress last year.” Noting how the
Democratic House and Senate had rolled over and given the president
permission to massively spy on Americans without showing any probable
cause, the Times concluded, “It was bad enough having a one-party
government when Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of
Congress. But the Democrats took over, and still the one-party system
continues.”

There is no question about it. The Democrats, after persuading voters to
hand over control of Congress to them last November, have been worse than
failures. They have betrayed the trust of the voters.

Although the party clearly has the power to end the Iraq War by simply
refusing to approve funds for continuing the mayhem and madness, it has
instead given the president every dollar he’s asked for to continue it,
and then some. Although every leading Democrat admits that the president
has been torturing the Constitution, not one member has submitted a bill
calling for the president’s impeachment, and the one bill submitted
calling for Cheney’s impeachment, submitted by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, has
been pushed off on a siding by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her gang of
“leaders.” More recently in the Senate, where 41 Democrats could stop any
presidential appointment, 53 Democrats instead approved a new attorney
general, Michael Mukasey, who refuses to say waterboarding is torture and
illegal, and who, even worse, says that in his view the president has the
power to ignore laws passed by the Congress.

I would go the Times one step further. There is no need to check to see if
Democrats won control of Congress. It doesn’t matter. The Democrats have
simply ceased to be an opposition party. The party of Franklin D.
Roosevelt is now simply a collection of incumbent hacks who are looking to
their own re-election, and who stand for nothing.

So what is to be done?

Various left-leaning activist organizations, like Democrats for America
and Progressive Democrats of America, and pseudo-progressive organizations
like Move-On and DailyKos, argue that liberal Democrats need to work
within the party to elect more progressive candidates and party officials.
But this strategy is doomed for several reasons. First of all, the
leadership of the Democratic Party doesn’t want real liberals or,
heaven-forefend, lefties. It wants candidates who can appeal to the
corporations that bankroll both parties. And second, the leadership
undermines those liberals who do have a chance of replacing the hacks who
currently hold Democratic seats in Congress.

As I have written before, we have seen more than 50 years of betrayal of
liberal and left voters and their issues by the Democratic Party, and
despite the efforts of would-be reformers, the situation has been getting
worse, not better.

The answer, I submit, is to tell Democratic incumbents and party officials
that we’ve finally had it. We are not going to be ignored or walked over
or taken for granted any longer.

How to do this? By mass resignations from the Democratic Party, at which
it is made crystal clear that there are two reasons for the actions:
Congress isn’t stopping the war funding, and Congress isn’t initiating
impeachment hearings.

I am proposing that left and progressive organizations, civil rights
groups, Church groups, anti-war coalitions, labor unions and other
progressive and liberal groups start organizing mass actions that involve
marches to the local board of elections or voter registrar’s office, for
collective de-registration from the Democratic Party. Here in
Philadelphia, we could have a mass march from Independence Hall to the
Board of Elections, for example.

This is a strategy that would hit the Democratic Party leadership like a
bucket of ice water—or a brick--in the face.

The beauty of the idea is that it will garner enormous press coverage,
even if the numbers are relatively small. Thanks to the overall
pro-Republican bias of the media, news outlets like AP, CNN and especially
Fox TV, will find the idea of Democratic activists marching on voter
offices and quitting the Democratic Party irresistible. And as other
groups across the country see these protest actions, they will want to
join in.

In no time, Democratic incumbents in Congress, at the DNC, and in city
halls and Democratic clubs across the country will see their most loyal
voting base eroding.

If that should happen, they will be in a panic. Just watch how fast they
start impeachment hearings and stop passing war funding appropriation
bills!

Now whenever I’ve suggested this scheme, after the wild applause subsides,
there are always those who raise the question about voting for progressive
candidates in primaries, and about electing progressives to party office.
I agree these are important steps, and that they should be attempted, but
mass party quitting doesn’t preclude doing them.

In many states, first of all (CA, NH, VA, MA, and SC, for instance), you
don’t need to be registered in a party to vote in that party’s primary.
But even in those states like my own Pennsylvania, where you do need to be
registered in a party to vote in its primary, it is an easy thing to
re-register in time to qualify for the primary. Just check with your voter
registrar and learn the deadline. Then, after you’ve voted, just quit
again. The same for party caucuses. Those who are elected to positions
like county committeeperson should stay in the party, where they can try
(good luck!) to make change.

The important thing is those mass quit events.

The other thing I hear is the argument that people should not be just
urged to quit; they should be urged to join a third party.

I disagree. As soon as you start trying to get agreement about joining a
third party, you are introducing division into a movement that should be
narrowly focused on the two issues of getting the Democrats, now, to end
funding for the war and to initiate impeachment hearings. Anything else is
a diversion.

Besides, getting significant numbers of progressive-minded people to cut
their ties to the Democratic Party offers the potential of creating a new
base out of which a genuine mass party of the left might come. The first
step though, is for all of us, who have been tethered to the Democratic
Party for most of our adult lives, to cut the leash.

If desperate Democratic officials respond by according us the same
attention and support that they regularly accord to hedge fund managers
and health insurance companies, if they meet our demands to end the war
and defend the Constitution, so be it. Maybe we will back them in November
‘08.

If they don’t, then we’re free to go somewhere else, or to found a new party.

One thing is clear: If we don’t do this, we will no longer live in a
democratic state. We will live in a one-party state.
______________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and
columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The Case
for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in
paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

{This excerpt is from a NYT review of the book THE SECOND CIVIL WAR
How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America
By Ronald Brownstein that gets at the same phenomenon from a slightly
different angle} speaks of

He points out the practical dangers of hyperpartisanship — how it has
prevented America’s leaders from agreeing on everything from a
comprehensive immigration plan to a strategy for reducing the country’s
dependence on foreign oil to a long-term plan for securing Social
Security. And he reminds us that while the country itself is not more
divided than it has been in the past (especially when compared, say, with
the 1960s or the 1860s), the nation’s current political system accentuates
differences instead of bridging them.

In contemplating the possibility of building a political system that would
be “less confrontational and more productive than today’s,” Mr. Brownstein
explores a host of suggestions, including term limits for Supreme Court
justices, the opening of all party primaries to independents, and the
formation of a viable third party. Some of these suggestions may seem
unrealistic, given the current state of politics. But the low approval
rates for both the Bush White House and the Democratic-controlled
Congress, combined with a growing conviction that the country is now
off-track (an ABC News/Washington Post poll this month showed that 74
percent of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction),
attest to the public’s dissatisfaction with legislative gridlock and
poisonous fights over national security, social issues and Supreme Court
appointments.

In the long term, Mr. Brownstein writes toward the end of this sobering
book, “the party that seeks to encompass and harmonize the widest range of
interests and perspectives is the one most likely to thrive. The
overriding lesson for both parties from the Bush attempt to profit from
polarization is that there remains no way to achieve lasting political
power in a nation as diverse as America without assembling a broad
coalition that locks arms to produce meaningful progress against the
country’s problems.”