Book Excerpt The Bulldozer And The Big Tent

Parties and movements are both indispensable and always to some degree uneasy with each other, for they work by opposing principles: movements aim to force or midwife something transcendent—something not-yet-existent—into existence, to convert energy into mass, say, while parties get results by converting existing mass into energy. Left and right alike incorporate both forces, and for each side, political success hinges on both a division of labor and a certain collaboration. Sometimes the movement side leads and the party side lags, sometimes the other way around; sometimes one is smarter, stronger, more gifted in leadership, or luckier than the other; but when they operate at cross-purposes, their common fate suffers.

One way to summarize the plight of the Democrats is as follows: through most of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the enfeebled Democratic Party and the sectoral liberal movements encountered each other—if at all—with acrid suspicion. The rupture was a large and fateful legacy, if that is the right word, of the fabled sixties. One short answer to the question of what happened to American politics after the sixties is that the right harnessed its movement to its party while the left did not do the equivalent.

As the Republicans built themselves a base of messianic Christians and antitax enthusiasts, traditional small-town Republicans and white working-class converts, the orthodox liberal Democrats and the movement left painted themselves into a corner: a culture of defeat. They seethed with resentment against their only victorious presidential candidates, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Each movement magnified its distinctness and indispensability for the progressive cause. Each took umbrage at the accusation that its cause—the cause of women, of African Americans, of Hispanic immigrants, of reproductive rights, of environmentalism—could be described as the cause of an interest group. Each of their causes was, movement activists devoutly believed, the cause of humanity. Their sincerity was undeniable. Each made a substantial case. Rarely were they arbitrary. They were not the demonic Valkyries demonized by the bitter enemies of “political correctness.” And still the sum of their strong cases was less than the sum of their parts because they nourished their differences more than their commonalities. Some liberals and leftists so deeply prized their purity as to swallow the tempting Kool-Aid of Ralph Nader.

It came to pass that the unified, hierarchically organized, well-funded, technically sophisticated Republicans, who for all their antigovernment passion devoutly believed in disciplined power, conquered every single national political institution in the country, and most of the states, and vast reaches of the national agenda. While tactically (though often sincerely) whining that “the liberal media” were rigged against them, they boasted a kept media of their own—a reliable, comfortably upholstered radio, television, print, and Internet apparatus (multiplatform, in the new jargon) for focused, pugnacious propaganda. They spurred themselves by insisting that they were recovering the people’s lost power, since they did not control the New York Times or Hollywood or Madison Avenue or Ivy League universities. They built their party around a fierce, mobilized base convinced that Democrats were plotting to vanquish them by illicit means—a useful projection of their own desires. They had vast treasuries to draw on.

For Republicans who wished to be an effective opposition, the election debacle of 2000 proved an instructive and transformational trauma. It smacked the opposition between the eyes, showed them definitively that there was a method, or several methods, to the mauling. After the first cousin of the loser of the popular vote, on a network owned by a partisan of that loser, led the media charge to declare that his cousin was the winner in Florida and therefore the winner of the electoral college vote, creating the presumption that all subsequent legal actions by his opponent were dilatory and illegitimate; after renowned custodians of national news repeatedly urged the winner of the popular vote to step aside in order to prove his statesmanship; after Republican mobs interrupted vote recounts in Florida (while the Democratic winner of the popular vote dissuaded another prominent Democrat, Jesse Jackson, from making so bold as to organize protests); and politicians waived the rules for counting overseas ballots; and the Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Florida cochair of the Bush campaign (and a Bush convention delegate who had campaigned for him in New Hampshire), the official who had supervised the purging the voter rolls, made decision after decision to Republican benefit; and, if there was any doubt, after the Supreme Court decreed who was president in an incoherent decision apparently arguing that the rights of George W. Bush and his voters trumped the rights of everyone else to have their votes counted—with this cascade of raw power, the opposition understood that it had to play catch-up on every practical front.

When they recovered consciousness, Democrats, progressives, liberals, even many of those who had cast ballots for Ralph Nader, understood viscerally what they were up against. Even intellectuals (some intellectuals, anyway), who had a stake in believing that ideas were the alpha and omega of politics, began to acknowledge that there was a great deal about the workings of the United States of America that they did not understand; that politics was concrete, not abstract; that, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you conducted politics with the people you had, not the people you wished you had; that political life was a matter of strategy as well as ideals; that political infrastructure mattered; that politics was more than an election here or there, but a mobilization to be measured in decades.

And so, both sides of a polarized politics came to converge on one banal but primal lesson: in a deeply divided country, power accrues to those who successfully organize to get it and hold it. The Bush usurpation of 2000 began to convert many liberals (and even those further left) to the party of practicality. As Miles Rapoport, who leads the think-tank Demos, put it, “It’s hard to hear many people [on the left] say it doesn’t make a dime’s worth of difference who’s in office any more.”

The trauma of 2000 multiplied as Bush entered the Oval Office and began to govern from the hard right, as movement conservatives had longed for decades to see a Republican president do. That trauma only multiplied with the compounding trauma of the September 11 massacres and the unwinding catastrophe of the Iraq war. Think-tankers, fund-raisers, get-out-the-vote activists, unions, campaigners for the environment, for women’s and gay rights, and various and sundry others in the vast terrain of the left-of-center began to grasp that the Bush machine that had commanded America for four years represented the triumph of more than cunning, more than deception, more than money and congenial media, though it had all those in spades. It represented, on many fronts, the culmination of forty years of the right’s effort to take power. The corollary was: there was no alternative to winning but losing, and the alternative to power was not freedom but powerlessness.

title: “Book Excerpt The Bulldozer And The Big Tent " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-24” author: “Richard Mitchell”