Lance Selfa is on the ISR editorial board.

BY ALL RIGHTS, George W. Bush’s resume as president has earned him a return trip to his converted pig farm in Crawford, Texas. In the post-9/11 media mythmaking that morphed Bush into a composite of Lincoln and Caesar, it was easy to forget that he actually lost the 2000 election. Or that his program, stripped of its wrapping in the "war on terrorism," has never been popular. Or that his swaggering style has produced not simply opposition, but revulsion and rage against him among millions of Americans.

Three months before the November election, it appears that chickens are coming home to roost. At the time of this writing, all major national surveys show Bush’s current level of support to hover below 50 percent. Even more ominous for him, majorities tell pollsters that they think it’s "time for someone new" in the White House in November 2004.

Even more important than the possibility of Bush’s defeat in November is the fact that a majority of Americans (54 percent in Gallup surveys in June and July) told pollsters that they believed the war in Iraq was "not worth it." A near majority of Americans support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. These facts show not only that the antiwar movement’s efforts of two years ago were not in vain, but they show the potential that exists to build a movement that can actually challenge the priorities of a system that would sponsor such atrocities. Added to that is the six of ten Americans who say they would support a national health care system or the more than half of non-union workers who say they would like to be in a union, and there is a vast potential audience for politics on the Left.

Yet much of this potential will remain untapped, and worse, will be channeled into votes for Democratic standard-bearer John Kerry. Unfortunately, many people who could lend their voices, insights, and organizational skills to shape the diffuse anti-Bush sentiment into a political force on the Left are instead using their talents to corral support for Kerry. For instance, many leaders of the mass antiwar movement that put more than one million demonstrators on the streets on the weekend of February 15—16, 2003, have essentially endorsed Kerry, an unabashedly pro-war candidate.¹ Meanwhile, a phalanx of well-known leftists have lent their support to the Democrats’ campaign against the independent candidacy of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo, the only ticket running against the war and calling for other progressive goals like the repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act and creation of a single-payer health care system.

On the key questions of the day, on which, presumably, elections are supposed to be fought, there is little difference between Kerry and Bush, and not just on the question of Iraq. Kerry voted for the No Child Left Behind Act and the Patriot Act. Kerry has been a firm and unwavering supporter of "free trade" agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. He, like Bush, opposes the right of gays and lesbians to be married. On all of these questions–all of which are quite fundamental–there is no difference, save perhaps a rhetorical one, between Bush and Kerry.

An aggressive campaign promising to address the economic insecurities and class inequality could actually give millions of Americans a reason to vote. But that would raise working-class expectations–which is exactly the opposite of what big business wants from the Democratic Party. That’s why the true audience for Kerry’s campaign since he locked up the Democratic nomination has been the ruling class. Knowing that a significant section of the ruling class has lost confidence in Bush, Kerry has positioned himself to offer "Plan B" to the Bush administration’s failures. Kerry has striven to portray himself as the candidate who can rescue the failed occupation of Iraq. He proposes to increase troop strength in the military. He has reassured any wavering business leaders that his blast against "Benedict Arnold corporations" is simply campaign rhetoric. For business, he proposes an orthodox budget-balancing program, supervised by the architects of Clintonomics. Before a group of big-business donors, Kerry insisted, "I’m not a redistribution Democrat…who wants to go back and make the mistakes of the Democratic Party of 20, 25 years ago."² Kerry has been so successful in projecting this Bush-lite "centrist" image that he’s even won the enthusiastic support of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council. "Democrats are on the cusp of becoming a majority party today" write Al From and Bruce Reed, "because New Democrats like Bill Clinton and John Kerry rescued the party in the 1990s."³

Indications are that Kerry’s Plan B strategy is working. He has managed to raised a staggering $187 million, and a growing roster of business leaders have announced support for the wealthy senator from Massachusetts–former Chrysler chairman Lee A. Iacocca; Marshall Field of Field Corp.; Robert Haas of Levi-Strauss, Silicon Valley figures like Marc Andreesen, Jim Clark, and Charles M. Geschke; Charles K. Gifford of Bank of America; AT&T Broadband President Leo Hindery, Jr.; Sherry Lansing of Paramount Pictures; and even Peter Chernin, chairman of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the owner of the rabidly right-wing Fox News.⁴

Nevertheless, many on the Left are still willing to give some credence to the notion that the differences between the Democrats and Republicans, however minimal they are, justify at least a nose-holding vote for Kerry, if only in a "swing" state. Noam Chomsky, the radical critic of American imperialism who has always stressed its bipartisan nature, told a British Guardian interviewer:

So Chomsky’s advice appears to be "vote for Bush-lite." Chomsky has since endorsed a vote for Ralph Nader in "safe states" (ones where a vote for Nader won’t have any impact on whether Kerry or Bush will win that state’s electoral votes). But as Chomsky has spent his career showing, the policies flowing from the national security state don’t depend on votes in swing or safe states. They flow from a bipartisan, ruling-class consensus. A vote for Kerry means rejecting one wing of the imperialist establishment for another–a choice that is no choice at all. For the Iraqi civilians or the Colombian peasants who will bear the brunt of U.S. imperialism’s assaults, it makes no difference whether a Republican or Democratic administration is ordering the bombing of their villages or the arming of death squads.

Unfortunately, the notion that there is something uniquely awful about the Bush administration has caused many dedicated antiwar and anti-imperialist fighters to line up with Kerry–either openly, or by default. In an August 6 WBAI-New York radio interview, British antiwar activist and socialist Tariq Ali told Doug Henwood that

The problem with claims like Tariq’s is that there’s no way to verify them. We don’t know what the future holds, so we can’t say whether Kerry will take the U.S. into a new war. After all, Lyndon B. Johnson campaigned as a peace candidate against the warmonger Barry Goldwater, and won in a landslide. Yet LBJ escalated the war in Vietnam.

We do know that Kerry and Edwards voted for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know that both of them advocated "regime change" in Iraq long before Bush signed on to the project. And now we know that Kerry would have voted for the war even knowing that the justifications Bush gave for it–that Iraq was stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction"–were bogus. Responding to a Bush dare to state whether he would have voted for the 2002 war resolution, "knowing what we know now," Kerry said: "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have."⁶ The Democratic platform that Kerry’s operatives largely wrote criticizes the Bush administration because it "did not send sufficient forces to accomplish the mission" in Iraq. It asserts, "With John Kerry as commander-in-chief, we will never wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake." In other words, Kerry is not going to give up his right to "unilaterally" order U.S. troops around the world. It also hints that Iran may find itself on the short end of another U.S. invasion: "a nuclear-armed Iran is an unacceptable risk to us and our allies."⁷ Kerry has even proposed a more aggressive stance against Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez than Bush has.

While it’s generally true that party platforms aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, it’s hard to avoid the message that the Democrats were sending with the parade of ex-generals and the browbeating of antiwar delegates to accept a pro-war platform at their convention in July. The Democratic platform espouses the key points of the neocon agenda, without the neocon baggage. If the neocons around Bush loudly trumpet the need for a new American imperialism, Kerry and the Democrats speak for the need for "muscular internationalism." Kerry doesn’t criticize Bush’s decision to go to war. He simply criticizes Bush for bungling the job. This proves that his real audience is the ruling class, to which he is proposing himself as a more competent manager for U.S. imperialism. Kerry has even gotten the seal of approval from leading neocons. "When I look at the kinds of people who are advising Kerry, assuming Kerry runs his foreign policy from center and right of the Democratic Party, it would be very compatible with the Bush administration," Johns Hopkins University’s Elliott Cohen, one of the neocons’ ideologues, told the San Francisco Chronicle. Yet delegates at the Democratic convention nominated him despite the fact that a Boston Globe survey showed that 90 percent of them opposed the war in Iraq.⁸

Anti-imperialists like Tariq Ali and Noam Chomsky know this very well. In his recent Bush in Babylon book, Ali quotes as an example of the support for unilateral intervention in Washington a Blairite ideologue who notes, "A Bismarckian revolution is underway in international relations and it was launched not by George W., but by Bill Clinton when he decided to intervene in the Balkans."⁹ Certainly Ali and Chomsky will oppose imperial adventures led by a President Kerry as vigorously as they oppose those of Bush. But isn’t that also a good reason for them not to cut Kerry any slack today?

The unreality of the "realists"

Global Exchange and Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin has another motivation for a vote for Kerry:

This election is a referendum on the Bush administration. The world is watching and waiting with bated breath to see if the U.S. people will reject the Bush agenda. When I was last in Iraq, Ghazwan Al- Mukhtar, an Iraqi engineer, said, ‘Saddam Hussein was a bastard, but this was not a democracy and we didn’t elect him. So his evil deeds were not done in our name. Can you say the same thing for George Bush?’ We owe it to ourselves and to the global community to make sure that Bush is no longer allowed to speak in our name.10

This would be a compelling argument if the national elections were set up to fire the president alone. Unfortunately, as Benjamin herself knows, the only way to accomplish this is to elect Kerry/Edwards. In "An Open Letter to Progressives," Benjamin, Peter Coyote, Daniel Ellsberg, and other prominent figures made just that case: "The only candidate who can win instead of Bush in November is John Kerry," and urged a vote for Kerry in swing states.

But a sense of reality among the "realists" urging a vote for Kerry seems lacking. This is most obvious among those Left critics who make all the arguments against Kerry before turning around and endorsing a vote for him. In his "The Lizard Strategy," circulated on the Portside Left discussion listserv, Ricardo Levins Morales calls Kerry "a reactionary career politician with a history of accepting labor support while undermining our interests"; he calls for a vote for Kerry because "the most important reason for making the removal of Bush a priority has to do with our relationship to our sisters and brothers in struggle around the world." The radical writer Naomi Klein endorsed Kerry

While Morales and Klein make all the correct arguments against Kerry, their endorsement of him undercuts everything else they say.

Should Kerry be elected on a platform that calls for the continued occupation of Iraq, an increase in the number of troops deployed there, a further internationalizing of the occupation, etc., can we really say that a vote for Kerry is a vote against Bush’s war policy? Kerry has openly campaigned as the candidate who can make the occupation work–which can hardly be good news for ordinary Iraqis. If the end result is the same for ordinary Iraqis, and U.S. soldiers and their families, why is it better to have John Kerry "speaking in our name" than George Bush? In fact, by Benjamin’s and Morales’ logic, one could argue that a democratic vote that puts Kerry, with his war program, in office (with a majority vote and without Supreme Court hijinks) could represent a "democratic" decision on the part of Americans to lord it over Iraqis. Against this, Susan Watkins provides a reality check: "On [Kerry’s] present showing, a vote for him is little more than another bullet for Iraq. In this sense, the Bush revolution has succeeded; it has produced its heir."¹²

Even more unrealistic are the claims of Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and Campaign for America’s Future leader Robert Borosage:

Of course, this argument isn’t specific to 2004. In fact, it resurfaces every election year. Unfortunately, this is another claim about which the evidence is thin–and getting thinner with each election year. In fact the ruling orthodoxy of the Democratic Party today–stoked by the mandarins of the Democratic Leadership Council–is that Democratic candidates have to prove themselves by not "pandering" to the Democrats’ most loyal voting constituencies, but by doing all they can to help out the party’s big-business funders. And given the treatment of the Kucinich delegates at the convention, and Kerry’s constant rhetorical appeals to the Right and center, what makes the authors think that Kerry has the slightest interest in being "responsive" to the "progressive base?"

With liberals and radicals making the case for Kerry, Kerry feels no pressure to respond to their issues. "Kerry has less of a problem on the left in the Democratic Party than any Democratic candidate in my memory, which goes back to [John F. Kennedy]," said Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.). "The proof of that is that I am less busy this presidential campaign than other ones. I’m not being sent out to calm down the left."¹⁴ And, in fact, all of the Democrats’ "progressive" constituencies–unions, women’s groups, gay organizations, and so on–have signed on to Kerry’s campaign with virtually no assurances from Kerry that he will do anything to advance their demands. On the contrary, abortion rights supporters have received a pledge that Kerry won’t make support for abortion rights a litmus test for the appointment of federal judges. Gay rights supporters have received assurances that Kerry opposes gay marriage. Yet in the face of Kerry’s insults to his closest supporters, leaders of progressive constituencies simply keep their mouths shut and resolve to work harder for a Kerry victory. No wonder Kerry feels no pressure.

Anyone who believes that a President Kerry will show his gratitude to those who worked for him should remember Bill Clinton’s record. Organized labor’s efforts regularly deliver around half of the Democrats’ votes in key battleground states like Michigan. Yet the Clinton administration "rewarded" labor with the NAFTA trade agreement and "welfare-to-work" programs that undercut union jobs. Meanwhile, he let a central demand of organized labor in 1992–a ban on the use of permanent striker replacements–to fall to a Senate filibuster without lifting a finger.

When he was running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton promised to pass a Freedom of Choice Act that would guarantee a woman’s right to choose. After he took office, he dropped the bill. While he vetoed GOP (and Democratic) efforts to outlaw so-called partial birth abortions, he signed into law abortion bans on federal employees, District of Columbia residents, and maintained the ban on Medicaid funding for abortion. Women’s rights groups never made Clinton pay a political price for these betrayals. Meanwhile, a concerted attack on abortion rights gathered steam at the state level, while feminist leaders refused to mobilize a counter-offensive based, in part, on their assumption that abortion was safe with a Democrat in the White House.

The balance sheet of the Clinton years does not make for happy reading. The gap between rich and poor increased almost ten-fold. The number of federal prisoners nearly doubled. The number of gay people forced out of the military under Clinton’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy increased. The number of people lacking health insurance increased by eight million. Clinton ordered U.S. forces into combat situations more than his previous four predecessors combined. Clinton ended the federal welfare system, accomplishing something Ronald Reagan could never have done. Trade unions represented a smaller percentage of the workforce at the end of Clinton’s term than at the beginning.¹⁵ For virtually any progressive issue one could imagine, the situation worsened under Clinton. And the climate was made even worse by the fact that liberals and progressives refused to organize opposition because "their man" was in the White House. Peter Edelman, a liberal Health and Human Services official who at least had the self-respect to resign in protest against Clinton’s welfare reform, conceded that "so many of those who would have shouted their opposition from the rooftops if a Republican president had done this were boxed in by their desire to see the president re-elected and in some cases by their own votes for the bill."¹⁶

This is a central fallacy of the progressive case for Kerry that someone like Naomi Klein makes. Far from encouraging the growth of opposition movements, a Democratic presidency can actually retard the development of opposition. This is a particular danger for the antiwar movement. As noted above, Clinton dispatched troops around the world more than any of his immediate predecessors. Yet antiwar opposition to these adventures was virtually nil during the Clinton years. One key reason for this was Clinton’s proven ability to sell U.S. military intervention with the liberal claptrap of "humanitarian intervention." Perry Anderson reminds us that:

Where the rhetoric of the Clinton regime spoke of the cause of international justice and the construction of a democratic peace, the Bush administration has hoist the banner of the war on terrorism.... The immediate political yield of each has also differed. The new and sharper line from Washington has gone down badly in Europe, where human-rights discourse was and is especially prized. Here the earlier line was clearly superior as a hegemonic idiom.¹⁷

The Clintonite rhetoric played not only in Europe, but in the U.S. as well, where opposition was minimal and difficult to build. Perhaps no greater testament to that fact was the liberal support that General Wesley Clark, the man who prosecuted the 1999 Kosovo war, received when he ran for president–including a high profile endorsement from filmmaker Michael Moore. If the Pentagon believes that its imperial adventures require a military draft, John Kerry will be better at selling it than George Bush. If the "war hero" claims a draft will be "fairer" to working-class and minority youth, liberals will nod their heads.

Even before the election, it’s clear what toll support for the "lesser evil" has taken on the Left. Gay leaders and Democrats have sabotaged the promising campaign of civil disobedience for equal marriage that erupted in early 2004 because they worry it will cost Kerry votes. The antiwar movement is weaker and less visible today despite the fact that more Americans support its positions than ever. Democrats and forces sympathetic to them hijacked the June 2004 Boston Social Forum, turning much of it into a pro-Kerry pep rally and preventing representatives from the only presidential campaign that actually agrees with the Social Forum’s anti-neoliberal principles–the Nader/Camejo independent campaign–from speaking at the event.¹⁸ The effect of all of this is to further marginalize the Left, and to allow the general political climate to continue its slide to the right. Bush pulls U.S. politics to the right, Kerry follows, and the Left trails after Kerry. That is the unintended consequence of left-wing support for the lesser evil.¹⁹

The "Anybody But Bush" sentiment that propelled the "electable" Kerry to the head of the Democratic pack and has pulled so many Left and liberal supporters into the Democrats’ orbit has also undermined the only potentially positive development in the 2004 election: The independent campaign of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo on an antiwar, and pro-working class platform.

The surprising showing of support for Ralph Nader’s independent run for president in various opinion polls–with millions indicating that they might consider a vote for Nader–is a sign that the potential exists to organize a minority who are fed up with the inability of the two-party system to provide answers to the most pressing questions today. But the Democrats and the Anybody But Bush Left have worked on parallel tracks to make sure that potential won’t be realized.

For more than a year before Nader announced his intention to run in February 2004, publications like the Nation and prominent liberals and radicals called for Nader not to run in 2004. After he announced his candidacy, they subjected him to a campaign of abuse intended to demoralize him and his potential supporters. Democratic Party organizations–who, it will be recalled, did virtually nothing to protest Bush’s theft of the 2000 election–have devoted tremendous resources to challenging his appearance on ballots across the country. And unlike the Left that says it’s alright to vote for Nader in Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts, Illinois, and California, the Democratic Party in each of these states challenged (and may succeed in denying) Nader ballot access.

One should expect this kind of behavior from the sleazy politicos who run the Democratic Party, but significant organizations and individuals on the Left have also participated in the campaign to undermine Nader. The worst example of this was the successful campaign by no-name lawyer David Cobb to win the Green Party’s nomination on the explicit promise of running a "safe-state" campaign. Some on the Left even provided Cobb with a pseudo left-wing justification for choosing Cobb over Nader. Writing in New Politics before the Greens nominated Cobb/LaMarche, Stephen Shalom, wrote

Hence, a vote for Cobb–who is committed to campaigning in safe states–is a way to build the Left without "giving undo aid to Bush."²⁰

This argument for voting Green would only carry weight if the purpose of Cobb’s candidacy was to aggressively take on Bush and Kerry on the questions of the war, the occupation, the Patriot Act, abortion rights, national health care, and any of a number of other positions on which the Greens have positions to the left of the Democrats. Yet by carrying out a safe-state strategy–illustrated most absurdly when Maine native and Cobb running-mate Pat LaMarche said in an interview that she would vote against herself if the election looked close in Maine–the Green ticket has declared its own irrelevance to the national debate. You can’t "build the left" if you don’t want your ideas to have any consequence in the real world.

The Green Party’s suicide and, more broadly, the Left’s failure to offer an alternative to the two-party charade, will have impacts beyond November 2004. The Green Party, having now accepted the principle that it shouldn’t compete against Democrats if it could produce a Republican victory, have rejected its own raison d’être. Having taken a dive in 2004, what’s to stop them from doing the same in 2008 when, say, Jeb Bush might be in a position to win the presidency? If activists dedicated to building an alternative to the Democrats don’t succeed in regaining control of the Greens, the Green Party will go the way of organizations like the Labor Party or the Working Families Party of New York. It will become simply a pressure group on the Democrats–the tail wagged by the Democratic donkey.

In contrast, the Nader/Camejo campaign is attempting to offer an alternative on the Left for people who want to vote against the war and occupation, against the Patriot Act, and for gay marriage and national health care. Despite these long odds, Nader/Camejo’s campaign will offer the only focus in the 2004 elections for the millions who oppose the Iraq war and who want to see some positive change for working people in the U.S. Yet the full-court press by Democrats and the vicious baiting campaign against them may end up pushing their campaign to the margins, with a good possibility that it will appear on fewer ballots than Nader’s Green ticket appeared in 2000. What’s more, it may compel Nader to accept ballot lines from the right-wing Reform Party–which will also hand ammunition to opportunistic liberals who will use it to further disparage Nader.

Whatever happens to the Greens, the Left more broadly has suffered a setback because so many of its leaders and intellectuals–in the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and so on–have caved into a pro-war, pro-business party. When movements fall behind Democrats like Kerry, they are weakened. It makes them get used to lowering their sights, putting their issues on the back burner, and not being "too aggressive." What does it say to the millions of people who are questioning the war if antiwar activists tell them they should vote for a pro-war candidate?

It could undermine their own doubts about the war, and in that way, undermine the potential to build opposition to the war.

For a Left that constantly berates itself about being irrelevant to the concerns of ordinary Americans, the collapse behind Kerry will only confirm that irrelevance.

At the time of writing, early August 2004, the election is still too close to call. But whatever the outcome of the November election, it will not change the main tasks that will confront the U.S. Left.

Many on the Left who have jumped on Kerry’s bandwagon think (or hope) that Kerry’s election will move U.S. politics in a positive direction. But unless one is willing to restrict the definition of positive movement simply to evicting Bush from the White House, very little will change even if Kerry is elected. For a brief moment during the Democratic convention, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern allowed himself to be caught speaking the truth when the Washington Post quoted him as saying that a Bush re-election might deliver the shock that a labor movement in "deep crisis," might need. He complained about the Democrats, which he described as a "hollow party" that refuses to do anything about the low-wage, non-union "Wal-Mart economy." Although he subsequently retracted the statement and will prove his commitment to Kerry by devoting $65 million of SEIU members’ money and two thousand organizers to get out the vote for the Democrats, Stern was at least onto something.

In his campaign speeches, independent vice presidential candidate Peter Camejo says the Anybody But Bush Left confuses opposing an individual (Bush) with opposing his program ("Bushism"). He’s right. Therefore, we cannot sell short the idea of what needs to be done to turn politics around: what will be needed to actually defend our rights and win the kind of reforms we want. If unions took seriously their talk about organizing Wal-Mart workers (and not waste millions on Democrats), they would begin to address the Wal-Mart economy that Stern talks about. Building an antiwar movement that understands the necessity of working in solidarity with the Iraqi resistance to the colonial occupation of their country will shift U.S. politics far more than an election between two pro-war candidates.

If the November election manages to re-defeat Bush, the Left will confront in Kerry a president committed to the free-market economy, the war in Iraq, and the "war on terrorism." That is because those policies–and many more that could be listed–are bipartisan policies of the U.S. ruling class in the early years of the twenty-first century. Challenging those priorities demands a class and political struggle that starts with the realization that the Democrats are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

1 See, for example, "Bush Can Be Stopped," endorsed by, among others, Leslie Cagan, leader of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) at http://www.cc-ds.org/statements1/bush_can_be_stopped.htm, or "An Open Letter to Progressives: Vote Kerry and Cobb," whose chief signatory is Medea Benjamin, a leader of UFPJ, Global Exchange, and the Code Pink women’s antiwar organization at http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0723-09.htm.