Twenty-two percent of voters leaving the polls cited "moral values" as their chief concern in the election–trumping even Iraq, terrorism, and the economy–and 80 percent of them voted for George W. Bush.

The pundits echoed the moral values explanation for Bush’s victory. "[Kerry’s] stiffness cannot fully explain the "God gap" that drives people of faith, and those more concerned with moral issues than economic ones, to vote disproportionately Republican," the Los Angeles Times editorialized.² "They just don’t believe that the Democrats share their values. More than any other factor, this failure cost the Democrats the presidency and four Senate seats on Tuesday." Leading Democrats also accepted the conservative spin on the election results. "Any time a party does better with non-church-going people than with church-going people, you’ve got a problem," said outgoing Democratic Senator John Breaux (D-La.). "That is why we’ve lost across the South," he said.³ The right-wing Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) put it this way: "The problem is that many millions of voters simply do not believe that Democrats take their cultural fears and resentments seriously, and that Republicans do." Predictably, DLC leaders who had touted Kerry/Edwards as the exemplary "New Democrat" ticket only days before, urged another rightward lunge.⁴

The Christian Right spared no time in claiming responsibility for Bush’s win and in demanding their pound of flesh from the new administration. The well-orchestrated campaign by Christian Right leaders against Republican Senator Arlen Specter’s accession to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee was one early skirmish. They didn’t derail Specter–who had angered the Right when he said that he would not support confirmation for Supreme Court nominees who opposed the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion–but they extracted a partial retraction of his statement against anti-Roe justices.

Bush’s victory has emboldened conservatives and has terrified many liberals who believe that little will stand in Bush’s way as he pushes his right-wing agenda. Even worse, many liberals and radicals believe that Bush’s policies represent the views of the majority of Americans, who have now shown themselves to be comfortable providing the mass base for a reactionary, imperialist clique running the federal government. Typical among these was Justin Podur, writing on Znet, who lamented:

Nation writer Katha Pollitt basically called the majority of Americans a bunch of yahoos: "Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, ‘safety’ through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President. Where, I wonder, does that leave us?"⁶

To the voters who aren’t part of "us," apparently, the disaster in Iraq, terrorism, lost jobs, and lost health care pale in comparison to the threats from, as John Stewart put it on the Daily Show, "two dudes kissing." It goes along with the notion that Bush’s victory symbolized a revolt of conservative country bumpkins against the city slickers in New York and San Francisco.

If Podur and Pollitt are right, then the U.S. Left might just as well abandon all hope and investigate exile to another country. But the siren calls of writers like Pollitt and Podur don’t accurately capture the real dynamics at work in the 2004 election. While the election results certainly represent a significant victory for the Right, Bush’s defeat of Kerry was not overwhelming. In fact, it was the slimmest reelection of any president since the 1880s. Even at the time of this writing, about one month after the election, Bush’s popular support barely cracks 50 percent. A raft of opinion polls showed sizable minorities or actual majorities opposing Bush’s policies on Iraq, abortion, the economy, and other areas. But they weren’t convinced that Kerry offered any better alternative.

Assessing what the election says about the United States in 2004 and 2005 must start from an evaluation of the true depth and breadth of Bush’s victory. When approaching this task, it does no good to deny that Bush won or to claim, as many Internet activists are, that only Republican electoral dirty tricks or manipulation of voting machines stole an election that Kerry really won. Alexander Cockburn is correct when he points out:

As the official vote totals that included provisional and overseas ballots are tallied in state capitols, the gap between Kerry and Bush has shrunk. It now appears that Bush beat Kerry by 119,000 votes in Ohio, rather than the 136,000 reported on election night. And the gap between Bush’s national total of 61.8 million and Kerry’s 58.6 million is closer to 3.2 million votes, rather than the 3.5 million reported on November 2. But all of this is mere detail.

Bush beat Kerry soundly, if not overwhelmingly. And the electorate that turned up on November 2 was more conservative than the electorate that gave Al Gore a popular vote victory over Bush and gave Ralph Nader nearly 3 million votes in 2000. Yet this election result was by no means certain even on Election Day itself. That was because Kerry was running against an administration that was presiding over an unpopular war; that was responsible for the loss of almost a million jobs; whose major domestic policy achievements are tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and a host of other horrors. Bush was a shoo-in for defeat. Yet Kerry ended up losing.

Bush’s strategy of firing up his base assured that a more conservative electorate showed up at the polls. As many Republicans as Democrats turned up at the polls (37 percent of the total electorate each), compared to 2000, when Democrats held a 39 to 35 percent edge.⁸ Across the board, Bush did better than he did in 2000 among all groups in the population with the exception of gays and trade unionists, where still about one-quarter of gays and about 39 percent of trade unionists voted for Bush. Even though the trade union vote stuck with Kerry as much as it stuck with Gore, its weight in the electorate, after four years of job losses, actually declined from 16 percent to 14 percent between 2000 and 2004.

And while he beat Kerry by more than five million votes in the states of the old Confederacy–meaning that Kerry won the rest of the country–Bush also did better than he did against Gore in so-called blue states like California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. So it’s easy for liberals to point their fingers at Southern and rural backwaters, but Bush did better in their own backyards as well–where you would think the pull of "anybody but Bush" (ABB) would be strongest. In fact, Democratic pollster Mark Penn said that shifts in Democratic "base" groups such as Latinos and women towards Bush more easily explain Bush’s popular vote victory than the votes of the Christian Right. Although there has been some dispute about the magnitude of Bush’s gains among Latinos, there’s no dispute that Bush increased his share of the Latino vote over 2000.⁹

The idea that Bush’s victory owed to a great conservative tide also falls apart when considering the election in historical perspective. The main poll that has tracked the influence of "moral values" in national elections since 1992–that conducted by the Los Angeles Times–showed little change in the proportion of voters citing "moral values" as their chief concern since 1996. And as we know, the GOP lost the popular vote in both 1996 and 2000.¹⁰ Also, comparing the composition of the electorate between 2004 and 2000, it becomes clear that the percentage of evangelical Christians remained the same; the percentage of people opposed to abortion remained the same, and the percentage of people who say they pray every day didn’t change either. Slightly more evangelicals voted for Bush in 2004 than in 2000, but there wasn’t a great surge of evangelicals to the polls, at least not on a nationwide level. Finally, several analyses of the vote in the eleven states that passed anti-gay marriage referenda showed that Bush’s gain in percentage of the vote from 2000 actually increased less than it did in states without the referenda. "If anything," wrote political scientist Phil Klinkner, "Bush’s vote was a bit lower than expected in states that did have such a measure on the ballot."¹¹

The assumption that U.S. politics has realigned along cultural, rather than class or economic lines–which underlies all the brain-dead punditry about the election–also deflates on closer scrutiny. Kerry did win, albeit barely, the majority of voters who make $50,000 or less in annual income, while Bush won overwhelmingly among those making more than $100,000–who made up a greater portion of the electorate in 2004 than in 2000 (18 percent in 2004, up from 15 percent in 2000). This set of wealthy voters may have contributed as much as two-thirds of the difference between Bush and Kerry.¹² The problem for Kerry was twofold: First, the electorate was richer, whiter, and older than the population as a whole; second, Kerry didn’t pull a big enough margin from working-class voters to offset the heavily pro-Bush tilt at the top of the income ladder. A good share of the blame for these factors lies with Kerry, whose timid proposals on jobs, health care, and other economic issues didn’t register with more working-class voters or draw the non-voting 40—45 percent of the electorate (that is disproportionately younger, female, and working class) to the polls.¹³

According to network exit polls, 52 percent of voters said that the Iraq war had not made the U.S. more secure; 52 percent said things are going badly in Iraq; 45 percent disapproved of the decision to go to war in Iraq (compared to 51 percent who supported it); 49 percent said the U.S. was going in the right direction (compared to 46 percent saying it’s going in the wrong direction); 52 percent said the national economy is "not good or poor"; 49 percent described themselves as "angry or dissatisfied" with the Bush administration; and 70 percent said they were "very concerned" about the cost of health care. Only about 44 percent of Americans supported Bush just last summer. A consistent finding in opinion polls leading up to the election showed that most Americans were ready to turn Bush out of office; but they weren’t ready to hand it over to Kerry. Kerry’s failure is even more amazing when one considers that the Democratic effort at all levels (president, House of Representatives, and Senate) actually outspent the Bush/Republican effort by more than $60 million.¹⁴

And this leads right back to his compromised Republican-lite strategy of pursuing conservative "swing voters" instead of presenting voters likely to vote for a Democrat with a compelling reason to choose him over Bush. This meant for Kerry accepting the terms of debate Bush set in the post—September 11 ideological climate. That’s why he twisted and turned on the Iraq war–voting to authorize Bush’s invasion, criticizing it during the primaries to cover his left flank, and, after clinching the nomination, swinging right once more. Those who were motivated to oust Bush because of the Iraq war found themselves with a Democratic challenger who pushed his military credentials at the Democratic National Convention–and who declared that he would have backed an invasion of Iraq even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Some of the "inside the campaign" chatter emerging in Newsweek and Time, shows that the Bush campaign couldn’t believe how easy it was for them to get Kerry to walk into the trap Bush laid when he asked Kerry if he would still vote for the war knowing that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq. Not only did this demoralize people who could be motivated to vote for Kerry, it fit right into the Bush campaign’s portrayal of Kerry as a flip-flopper.

It was like this with any number of issues. Terrorism? He would fight a real war on terrorism. Gay marriage? We oppose it, but think the decision should be left to the states, said Kerry-Edwards. And, voters in the eleven states who voted to ban gay marriages took Kerry’s advice.

Jobs and health care? Kerry promised tax breaks to business. With Kerry mouthing these Republican talking points, he actually helped to legitimize many of Bush’s disastrous policies. No wonder exit polls showed the electorate giving Bush the benefit of the doubt even though they were unhappy with most of his policies.

In 2000, liberals blamed Ralph Nader for defeating Gore. Now, liberals like Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank are blaming advocates of gay marriage, including San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, for the loss to Bush. Yet by running scared from the issue of gay marriage, the Democrats and liberals simply helped Bush and the Right make the argument that there’s something wrong about defending equal rights for gay people.

This is not simply an argument by assertion or counterfactual. This actually unfolded on the ground in Ohio and Oregon, two states that passed anti-gay initiatives. In Ohio, the Democrats plowed thousands into lawsuits and lawyers intended–as it turned out, successfully–to keep the Nader/Camejo ticket off the ballot. Meanwhile, activists opposed to Issue One, the anti-gay initiative, pleaded with the party for help in challenging the Right’s petitions. Sarah Wildman, writing in the American Prospect, finishes the story:

One Oregon gay activist, Rebekah Kassell, said the refusal of the national party to argue against the initiatives on the grounds of equal rights meant that local activists felt stranded against a concerted right-wing campaign that reached all the way to the White House. "To be a state facing this kind of campaign and to not have leadership at the national level saying the right things was really tough.... This was about much more than marriage."¹⁶

Understanding these kinds of details is important because it shows that a failure to challenge right-wing ideas–even in the most tepid way–simply leaves the field open to the Right. While the Democrats were refusing to lift a finger to defeat the anti-gay initiatives, they actively worked to shut down the grassroots activism on behalf of equal marriage that exploded after Newsom began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. So on the issue of gay marriage, as on the issue of the war and many others, the mainstream organizations closed ranks around similar positions, and the Left largely fell behind Kerry. Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that conservative politics won the day. Ordinary people in the U.S. are not part of some reactionary mass. Their consciousness is not fixed in stone. Fully 60 percent of the 2004 electorate supports either gay marriage or civil unions for gays and lesbians–a position that was itself considered "controversial" only four years ago. Yet with no popular left (or even liberal) political ideas on offer, voters are faced with choosing between different versions of the same bosses’ program. No wonder more than one-third of Kerry’s voters said they voted for him primarily as a way to vote against Bush.

Bush’s campaign strategy depended almost wholly on making Kerry an unacceptable alternative. Indeed, he barely sketched out plans for his second term during the campaign. And in the end, he received a "mandate" based on the votes of about 30 percent of the eligible electorate. But no one should think that Bush will hesitate to charge ahead with his hard-right plans. Despite losing the 2000 election, losing the Senate in the first half of his first term, and generating loathing among nearly one-half of the American population, Bush managed to push through virtually his entire reactionary program in his first term. Judged by its grand promises–that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs and stimulate a booming economy or that Iraqis would welcome the U.S. invasion with flowers–Bush’s first term was a failure. But judged by its ability to set the political agenda and to steamroll opposition to its most harebrained schemes, Bush’s first term was a raging success. Surely the huge boost he received from the "9/11 effect" and haplessness of the Democrats in opposing him contributed to a sense that Bush had recreated the "imperial presidency." With solid Republican majorities in Congress, he approaches his second term in a stronger position.

Tellingly, after all the blather about moral values in the media, the money quote in Bush’s November 4 post-election press conference was this one: "I’ve earned capital in this election–and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is–you’ve heard the agenda: Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror."¹⁷

When Bush talks about "fighting and winning the war on terror," he means, first, stabilizing the situation in Iraq, and second, pursuing the imperial agenda he sketched out in his first term. This means deepening U.S. intervention in energy-rich parts of the world, from the Middle East to Colombia, using the excuse of the "war on terrorism" to justify a huge military budget and global military intervention. It also means confronting so-called rogue states, in particular, North Korea and Iran, whose pursuits of nuclear weapons challenge the U.S. ability to dominate their regions. The Bush administration will remain committed to the policy of "regime change," that is, overthrowing the governments of (usually weak) states opposed to the U.S. agenda. Cuba and Syria might expect increased pressure towards regime change.¹⁸ As the Iraq adventure has shown, this aggressive agenda is risky and will encounter disasters along the way. But as long as the U.S. government feels that no force–political, economic, or military–can stop it, it will plow ahead.

It is likewise with Bush’s domestic policy agenda, whose ultimate centerpieces will be the replacement of the progressive income tax with regressive taxes on consumption and the privatization of the Social Security system. The first prong is Bush’s ultimate gift to the rich that has the added benefit of compounding the government’s fiscal crisis. Bush hopes to use the government’s deficit as a wedge to leverage even greater cuts in government, especially the privatization of Social Security. For the strategists of the Republican Right, the privatization of Social Security is not simply, or even primarily, about lining the pockets of their Wall Street cronies. The GOP hopes that dismantling the most popular and enduring legacy of the 1930s New Deal–and as such, one of the chief sources of legitimacy for the modern Democratic Party–it will create the conditions for a decades’ long Republican domination of American mainstream politics. That’s the true agenda behind the Madison Avenue hype of Bush’s "Ownership Society."¹⁹

What is to become of Bush’s moral values agenda? One should be careful about either overestimating or underestimating the influence of the Christian Right and its social policy concerns on the Bush administration. It must be understood that, post-election chest puffing from the likes of Reverend James Dobson aside, the Bush administration holds the leash on the Christian Right. If the Bush administration decides that pushing a ban on gay marriage or abortion will advance its strategic goals, it will do so. But its chief interests lie elsewhere–in the war on terror or in conservative economic goals like "tort reform" and Social Security "reform." However, this understanding shouldn’t lead us to the belief that the Christian Right leaders are simply hucksters who really don’t want to ban abortion, but who just want to say they do to gull voters. The Right has advanced many of its most far-fetched ideas, from outlawing so-called partial birth abortion to promoting marriage for public assistance recipients, into the mainstream of U.S. politics. Their goals of overturning legalized abortion and whatever else is left from the liberal social advances of the 1960s and 1970s coincide with Bush’s goals to create a conservative Republican-dominated judiciary. For this reason, fights around judicial appointments and other parts of the Christian Right agenda will be flashpoints over the next four years and beyond.

Bush’s ability to push through his agenda depends on his political clout when the decisive time comes for a vote on say, privatization of Social Security, or, on confirmation of a judge dedicated to overturning Roe. On paper, Bush has what he needs–a fairly secure Republican majority in Congress, a supine press, and a non-existent mainstream opposition–to win his key demands. But whether those three factors will hold when the time comes will depend on other forces that are not in Bush’s control. For example, the dollar’s slow decline may turn into a rout, shaking the confidence of millions in Bush’s economic policies when he tries to win privatization of Social Security. A worsening of the disaster in Iraq could sap him of any political authority, as the Vietnam War undermined President Johnson’s ability to pursue the Great Society programs. Or a revived antiwar movement involving heightened opposition among U.S. troops or struggles around other issues like abortion or health care could become big enough to break through a status quo that regularly ignores the demands of millions.

From the Left’s point of view, the last of the factors listed above is the most important. It will of course be crucial to build campaigns that will defend legalized abortion, Social Security, or other targets of the Bush agenda. But just as important is the challenge to build a political alternative: not just a movement or pressure groups, but an actual political and ideological alternative to the two-party dominated status quo. Because conservative assumptions underlay both major party campaigns–opposing withdrawal from Iraq, hawkishness in the war on terror, and opposition to gay marriage to name a few–the election debate was already largely conducted on Bush’s terms. For that reason, it shouldn’t be surprising that Bush ended up winning. Kerry offered no compelling reason to vote for him, and it’s likely that many more than 3.2 million voters decided to stick with the "devil they knew" rather than the one they didn’t know. What’s more, those on the Left like Katha Pollitt who despair about convincing ordinary people to break with conservatism should remember the saying, "nothing ventured, nothing gained." Because the key lesson for the Left–especially for the majority of the Left that jumped on the ABB bandwagon–should be the price of its surrender to Kerry and the Democrats. For most of 2004, the Left and the antiwar movement that had mobilized millions in 2002 and 2003 engaged in unilateral disarmament, essentially folding up the antiwar movement–and thus, its potential influence on popular consciousness–as thousands of its activists joined the Democratic campaign.

In spring 2004, when Bush’s popularity was collapsing over the disastrous war in Iraq and the revelations about prison torture at Abu Ghraib, most of the antiwar movement got behind a prowar candidate. This is why Pollitt’s screed is so disingenuous:

Pollitt didn’t miss these demonstrations because the mainstream antiwar movement organizations didn’t throw their weight behind protests. Whatever protests against the Abu Ghraib atrocities took place were small and localized. There were no national demonstrations because to organize them would have caused leaders of the antiwar movement to embarrass their prowar candidate. Meanwhile, those on the left committed to Kerry’s election spent months haranguing Ralph Nader and his supporters, who actually wanted to build a left-of-center ideological alternative in national politics. Nader and running-mate Peter Camejo spent most of the election season on the defensive, fighting Democrat-inspired lawsuits attempting to push him off ballots, and criticism from so-called friends urging them to get out of the race. And the no-name Green Party candidate, David Cobb, ran an invisible "safe states" campaign that succeeded in garnering fewer votes than Nader/Camejo, the Libertarians, and the far-right Constitution Party. The ABB Left’s dive for Kerry assured that crucial issues like opposition to war and the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties, or the demand for national health care, were pushed to the margins–and almost out of the national debate altogether.

In the lead up to November 2, it was hard to find any nationally known figure on the left who didn’t urge a vote for Kerry, if only to get rid of Bush. Since November 2, it seems it’s hard to find one nationally known figure on the ABB Left that doesn’t think Kerry was a terrible candidate who didn’t really deserve the support he got. The December 2004 Progressive editorialized that "In a pivotal election like this one, the candidate owes his supporters more discipline and toughness" in criticizing Kerry’s concession speech urging cooperation with Bush and support for the war in Iraq. The editorial continued: "A whopping 87 percent of Kerry voters oppose the war in Iraq. How dare he tell them now to support it. And how dare he blur the line between the Iraq War and the war on terror."²¹ This is all true. But it was true during the election season too. And yet the Progressive urged a vote for Kerry. Worse, the Progressive even found itself echoing Kerry’s talking points, when it called in an October editorial for "good intelligence, a prudent use of our military forces, and yes, the sensitivity to build alliances." Since when has the Left taken on for itself the role of advising the Pentagon and the CIA about how best to carry out the war on terror? But this October editorial was one small example of a much larger trend of left intellectuals and activists either echoing the Democratic campaign or ignoring or falling silent on huge points of difference between Kerry and the independent Left–again contributing to the narrowing of the political choices on offer in the election.

Naomi Klein blasted Kerry for refusing to make an issue of Abu Ghraib and other atrocities for which Bush and Co. are responsible, concluding that "the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanization of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are insufficiently important to risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked."²² Klein is correct. But again, she also joined the ABB bandwagon, and didn’t raise criticisms of Kerry this sharp during the campaign. In fact, she actually urged Americans to vote for Kerry as a gesture of solidarity with Iraqis, long after the Abu Ghraib revelations were well known.²³ Global justice campaigner and antiwar activist Medea Benjamin made a similar appeal on behalf of Kerry.²⁴ In a post-election interview with the Progressive, Benjamin confessed she did so reluctantly: "It was almost as if those of us from the anti-war movement grimaced every time Kerry would open his mouth and say something about Iraq. I never put on a Kerry sticker, button, bumper sticker. Not for a person who supported a war in Iraq. And I know a lot of people like that."²⁵ Benjamin was also a key Green Party supporter of Cobb, helping to ensure that the Greens would deny the nomination to Nader/Camejo. She’s certainly correct to conclude: "This election has not been good for third party politics in general. We didn’t come out of this campaign with a strong sense among progressives of the need to build a third party."²⁶ But Cobb’s safe-state strategy that she and many other Nader 2000 supporters pursued contributed to this state of affairs.

No doubt most activists who joined the ABB camp sincerely believed that this was necessary to get rid of Bush. But the effect of this decision on the part of the majority of the Left was to allow Kerry’s Democrats to establish the left boundary of the debate. The movement of civil disobedience in support of marriage rights for gays and lesbians–touched off in February 2004 when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples–largely ceased its activism so as not to embarrass Kerry. As a result, no visible national presence supporting marriage rights existed when the Christian Right mounted its anti-gay campaign. The Left will not be able to develop as a viable independent force if it continually surrenders itself to a party that opposes most of what it stands for. If the Left plays the quadrennial game of corralling the support of activists most passionately opposed to the Bush agenda behind the Democratic candidate, it bears some responsibility for the fact that its issues, like opposition to the Iraq war or the need for national health care, are ignored.

Most people on the Left, wherever they stood on November 2, realize that Bush plans to launch a wave of attacks that will require opposition. But it will be crucial for the Left to understand what kind of opposition is needed to have even a fighting chance to stop Bush.

It’s clear that many of the traditional liberal interest groups have become little more than Washington-based shells that have no real grassroots base. They operate as Democratic lobbies who tailor their message to the Democratic talking points of the day. They are part of the inept "Washington insider" Democratic establishment of politicians, consultants, pollsters, and lobbyists that Kerry best represented. A good example of what this means came when Democratic Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a conservative, anti-abortion politician, took over as Senate Minority Leader in the wake of the defeat of former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Organization for Women raised no objections to Reid’s promotion. Reid even touted his support from women senators and from Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL, as part of his campaign for the post.²⁷ With the supposed leaders of the pro-choice movement playing this insider game, it’s no wonder that they seem incapable of inspiring the pro-choice majority to make its voice heard. Their strategic vision, like that of their friends in the Democratic Party, is fixated on going backwards less rapidly rather than on shifting the political climate in their favor.

Having accepted that the best they can hope for is "the lesser of two evils" and, what’s more, having become part of the Washington apparatus that promotes lesser evilism, it’s not surprising that supposed Democratic base organizations would retrench and move rightward after the election. But they’re turning a setback into a full-scale retreat. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the main gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender lobby tied to the Democratic Party, concluded at a December meeting to "moderate its message and its goals. One official said the group would consider supporting President Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security partly in exchange for the right of gay partners to receive benefits under the program."²⁸ So, in addition to retreating on fighting for equal marriage in favor of emphasizing building personal relationships, some in the HRC are willing to throw the elderly and disabled overboard if only the Republicans would be nicer to them. But if the HRC follows through on this plan, it will amount to surrender to the GOP and the Right. Matt Foreman, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told the New York Times. "A lot of gay people understand the concept of bullies. The worst thing you can do with a bully is not fight back because you’ll only get hit harder the next day."²⁹ The HRC’s post-election moves aren’t an adjustment to political reality. They’re a confession of political bankruptcy.

Organized labor, on the other hand, still has a mass base. But it faces increasing pressure from hostile employers and the government. What will it do? A battle is shaping up in preparation for the 2005 AFL-CIO convention between the forces arrayed in the New Unity Partnership–which advocates consolidation of multiple unions into about twenty and dedication of substantial resources to organizing–against the status quo Sweeney leadership. Clearly, unions must increase their membership if the employers and politicians are going to take them at all seriously in the future. But it’s unclear if either side of the debate in the AFL-CIO holds the key to stem union decline. And a union movement that continues to muddle along will simply decline further.

As we come to terms with the current political climate, it’s important to remember two fundamental points that have guided revolutionary socialists for years.

First, elections represent the lowest form of politics. They discourage active struggle in favor of passive participation at the polls. Ideologically, they encourage a kind of "lowest common denominator" politics that often obscures or avoids posing the most important questions. Consequently, election results reflect a distorted picture of the true state of mass consciousness.

Second, all of the major reforms that have improved the lives of working people and the oppressed have come from struggle. Even in our own recent history–when struggle has been at a low ebb–one can recognize the electrifying effect of eruptions of struggle on national consciousness. The 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, the 1997 UPS strike, the 1999 Battle of Seattle, or the 2003 mass demonstrations against the war in Iraq all shoved the Left’s issues into the national debate. All of these episodes owed their success to the efforts of ordinary people. They burst up outside of (and often, in opposition to) the "normal" channels of the political establishment. And they challenged ordinary peoples’ ideas much more sharply and fundamentally than months of electioneering ever will.

Positive political change to confront the crises that face working people will only come from below–from the active struggle of ordinary people to fight for their interests in their workplaces, communities, and schools. Building and developing these struggles will not only present the only chance of winning them, but they will create a more confident and independent Left that won’t be so easily convinced to surrender itself to the lesser evil.