Freedom Socialist • Vol. 28, No. 4 • August-September 2007

Scammed: two parties, one agenda

by Megan Cornish

Among people in the U.S., sentiment against the Iraq war is at its highest level ever — 76 percent. And 72 percent believe that things in general are seriously on the wrong track. Yet the Democrats, who won the last election on the strength of these feelings, gave President Bush $17 billion more than he asked for to expand the war. They have taken no important action against any presidential policy — with the result that Congress now has an even lower approval rating than Bush!

After the funding passed, noted anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan announced a complete break with the Democrats and called for "alternatives to this corrupt 'two' party system."

Professor Andrew Bachevich, who recently lost his son in Iraq, received condolences from his Democrat congressional representatives, but was rebuffed when he tried to discuss ending the war. He says, "Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. … It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent."

Both Sheehan and Bachevich are expressing important truths about the nature of democracy under the profit system.

Capitalist democracy is not rule by the people. The linchpin of avowed democracy in the U.S. is elections. Yet everyone knows that the rich call the shots.

Without publicly financed elections, only millionaires who toe the corporate line can raise enough money to run for office, let alone win. Election laws heavily slanted against third-party candidates reinforce this. And for any hardy independent soul who manages to hurdle those obstacles, the lack of requirements for equal media time means their candidacy will be practically invisible.

Without proportional representation in legislative races, which divides up seats according to the proportion of the total vote each party gets, minority parties don't stand a chance. Without ranked or instant runoff voting in races for executive offices, which allows people to automatically pass their vote to another candidate if their top choice doesn't win a majority, the same is true.

Proportional representation and ranked voting are common in the rest of the world. But nowhere do voting methods allow for complete freedom of choice. In countries such as Australia, for example, voters must rank all the candidates, even fascists, or their ballots are voided.

But real representation for working people was never the point of capitalist democracy.

This type of social system was born in the struggle of early business owners, the rising bourgeoisie, to wrest political power from feudal monarchs and landowners. The new capitalists gave working people only as many rights as they had to in order to muster support for their own ends.

Today, the stranglehold of two corporate parties makes the U.S. voting model one of the least representative. In Democracy and Revolution, Trotskyist George Novack observes, "The main mechanism through which big business maintains control over the country and … a large part of the planet is the two-party system. The Republican and Democratic parties are utterly committed defenders of the capitalist order, though their representatives may serve rival interest groups within it."

Democrats are simply one half of a con game to give voters the illusion of choice. The issue of war is a stark example.

The Democrat agenda of war and oppression. Democratic Party politicians have overwhelmingly supported the war from the beginning and continue to. The handful of "no" votes for the war funding bill in May, most of them by anxious presidential candidates, were a cynical and meaningless show for the voters.

Hillary Clinton has consistently backed the Iraq war, Israel's occupation of Palestine, and future action against Iran. Barack Obama is cagier, but not essentially different. Elected on an anti-war platform, he was silent on the war for his first 11 months in office, refusing even to vote for the half-measure of a timeline for withdrawal — until after announcing his presidential bid. He's in step with Clinton on Palestine and Iran. Even the alleged peace candidate Dennis Kucinich voted in favor of the original "war on terror" resolution that took the U.S. into Afghanistan.

To assuage the public, the Democrats will persist in posturing against the war, including through show votes in Congress. But the only thing that could cause them to do something real is a shift in rulingclass calculations about the cost-benefit ratio for big capital of the engagement in Iraq.

The Democrats took us into two world wars, escalated aggression against Vietnam, sponsored or supported covert wars in Latin America during the 1970s and '80s, and endorsed the first Persian Gulf war and the Yugoslav wars of the '90s. Bill Clinton oversaw the sanctions and bombing of Iraq that killed more than a million people, half of them children.

Their allegiance to the corporations also guides Democrat positions on immigration, healthcare, "free trade," civil liberties, and every key issue. Even the paltry increase in the federal minimum wage was just used to make the war spending bill go down easier with the public.

The Democrats voted for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. They supported the anti-labor bracero program of indentured "guest workers" that was only ended by mass protest in the '60s.

Bill Clinton's anti-terrorism bill introduced rollbacks in constitutional rights that opened the door to the even more drastic post-9/11 measures. Democrats in Congress backed the Patriot Act and its extension. They are again promising universal healthcare, but the record shows they will never implement any plan that hurts the drug and insurance companies.

And they supported NAFTA and CAFTA, championing the free-trade policies that drive down wages globally.

Democrats are not the "lesser evil." It is time for radicals and progressives to openly say that we have a one-party system with two faces. In fact, Democrats can often get worse measures passed than Republicans, because their apologists who head unions and NGOs tell activists to cool it so as not to "embarrass" the Democrats!

What is the reasoning behind the eternal unwarranted optimism about what Democrats will do for working people?

• Argument: Join the party and change it from within. Answer: This has been tried forever, with only bad results. It's a mistake to think that Democrat politicians only need the proper push to grow a backbone. There's nothing wrong with their spines — they are on the other side.

• Argument: Voting for alternative parties splits the progressive vote. Answer: Voting for Democrats throws away the progressive vote! Until we develop an anti-capitalist alternative, nothing will change.

• Argument: The other guys are so horrible — worse than ever before! — that we have no choice but to vote Democrat. We have to get the Supreme Court out of Republican clutches. Answer: A rigged game can only be changed by refusing to support our class opponents and flexing our own power as working people. History shows that the most effective means of influencing government, including the high court, is militant mass action.

The vote for women, the eight-hour day, Social Security and unemployment insurance, civil rights, ending the Vietnam War, and the right to abortion were all won through such mobilizations, not by electing Democrats. Radical mass movements and the withholding of labor through the general strike — these are what move capitalist mountains.

Challenging the monolith. Still, elections are important, not least of all because, wherever anti-capitalist candidates are on the ballot, they give working people a chance to vote for their own interests.
But, given the rigged electoral system, that is not often an option.

So what to do, besides make the long-overdue revolution? What's needed is for opponents of the war and defenders of the exploited and abused majority to come together to fight for electoral reforms like proportional representation and ranked voting and to form anti-capitalist electoral slates.

Whether candidates of these slates win or lose, they would make a strong statement and augment efforts for change in the streets. They would give poor and working people hope and heart!