Originally posted by acepepper
I'll give you another reason not to be depressed. I can remember the euphoria I felt when the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, was elected in Britain in 1997, after 18 years of Conservative rule. This was the party that I'd supported all my working life, (and before) and never seen in power. For a while it was great. Sweeping social reform that is still in place today and the most stable economic conditions for generations. Then Blair got himself mixed up with GWB and the folly in Iraq and all my support for him dissapeared overnight.
The moral of this story is; in the end, they all suck.
There, that'll make you feel better.
I knew you had a sense of humor, acepepper!
Actually, i read something you might find of interest this week.
http://www.nationalreview.com/jos/osullivan200410280955.asp
The Democrats' Fantasy Island
Where they will be if they lose
JOHN O'SULLIVAN
With the race tightening in the final stretch, Democrats have begun to believe for the first time since the Boston convention that Kerry really will win. Their spirits are rising, their "get out the illegals" drives in full swing, their lawyers primed and ready. But what if they lose again after all? Few Democrats have been prepared to discuss this awful prospect in public. That is partly for reasons of decorum and partly because Kerry may well win and where would the pessimistic strategist be then? But there are occasional brave cases of men who will put their future where their mouth is.
Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, is one such. Writing in a recent issue of The Washington Monthly, he explored what the Left would and should do after a Kerry defeat. His argument was, essentially, that left-wingers should imitate the Goldwater conservatives after 1964 and embark on a long march through the institutions of the Democratic party. "Many of the young go-for-broke voters," Gitlin said, "having failed to change the world in their first electoral outing, will be tempted to paint themselves into a gaudy Naderite corner . . . some of the far left will yield to fury, sullenness and despair. The Greens will recruit." These futile ideological gestures will make future defeats even more likely.
Others may be lured into still worse activities. Let Gitlin spell it out with the sympathetic understanding of a political ally: "I would not be surprised to see outbursts of political violence the likes of which we haven't seen since the Weather Underground of the 1970s. The commitment to marginality in much of the anti-globalization movement would take on a tang of negative logic. The master argument will go like this: What else you got, you so-called practical types?"
Well, I couldn't have put it better myself. Not being a sociologist as well as a journalist, I would never have noticed that the movement's commitment to marginality had a tang of negative logic to it. How on earth did that happen?
Also, I cannot help observing in my partisan, mean-minded way that it is almost impossible to imagine the mirror-image of Gitlin's article being written by someone on the right. Imagine Ralph Reed or Bob Bork predicting that if Bush were to lose, then it would sadly be impossible to restrain the Young Republicans from supporting David Duke, joining the Michigan Militia, or blowing up the headquarters of the Handgun Control Coalition. And if either of them were to lose his marbles to the extent of writing such an article, it would be a major news story. He would be disowned on the right, excoriated on the left, and mentioned hourly on the news networks.
But we have different standards for judging the greedy careerists of conservatism and the young idealists of the Left. We all take it for granted that the Right will accept its defeats and work to reverse them politically, while even the Left fears that its own activists regard democracy as a disposable tactic to be abandoned for more direct action if it produces the wrong result.
So what will happen to the Democrats and the Left if Kerry does lose on November 2? There would initially be a burst of historical incomprehension. Leftists feel that 2004 is 1968 all over again but with one wonderful difference. They are not facing an evil genius like Richard Nixon, but a bumbling dimwit in George W. Bush. Their mood is based on the philosophical question: "How can we possibly lose to this guy?" So if they do lose, they will feel especially cheated.
For anyone who remembers the 1980s, however, it's déjà vu all over again. Reagan too was contemptuously written off in the 1980 campaign as a dangerous dimwit. A cartoon of the period shows a Samaritan gently counseling an elephant not to end everything; but even after all his good advice, the elephant replies: "It's no use, I'm going to nominate Reagan." Reagan duly won and the Democrats spent twelve years in the wilderness.
To be fair to them, they remained sane and nominated a series of respectable, practical types in the next three contests. They were obliged to adopt this prudent course by two factors. Democrats controlled some or all of Congress for those twelve years a strong disincentive to anything that smacked of revolution. And the party was recovering from its turbulent flirtation with the far Left in 1968 and 1972. Not only had that flirtation led to those two major defeats one a landslide but it had also provoked constant and bitter faction-fighting in the party. Many Democrats simply wanted a rest. Today, they are in a different and less quietist mood.
MRS. T. AND ALL THAT
A better example from the 1980s is Britain in Mrs. Thatcher's first term. Not only the Left regarded her economic and labor-union reforms as extreme, radical, un-British, and outside the mainstream: The political center and even "wet" Tories thought the same thing. By 1981-83, the Labour Left was happily confident that Thatcher was doomed electorally irrespective of what they did. "How can we possibly lose to this girl?" they asked themselves. So they decided it was quite safe for them to go mad. The so-called practical types threw in their lot with what became known as "the loony Left." They elected the decent but left-liberal Michael Foot as their leader, and adopted an "alternative economic strategy" of nationalization and protectionism. They duly lost the 1983 election and the subsequent two as well.
In modern societies, however, electoral victories and control of government are not the whole of political power. Throughout the period of Thatcherite "hegemony" in Britain, as today in the United States, the Left was the overwhelmingly dominant force in cultural institutions, including the BBC and London's excellent subsidized theater. Hence, when it went mad, the Left was able to preserve and broadcast its skewed view of reality through these and other outlets. No London theater went for long in those days without a play that showed Mrs. Thatcher eating a baby or Queen Victoria (these two women were indistinguishable to the Left) sodomizing an African chieftain.
Nor was more popular culture neglected. There was a series of commercial thrillers that depicted Britain as a country governed by a sinister secret coalition of right-wing Tories, MI6, and "the Americans." This trend reached its apogee with A Very British Coup, a television thriller (based on the lively novel by Chris Mullin, now a Labour MP) in which the Tory-MI6-U.S. coalition seeks to bring down an elected left-wing Labour government that is implementing an "alternative economic strategy." The bad guys almost succeed by fomenting an artificial financial crisis. Fortunately, the canny prime minister obtains a generous loan from the Soviet Union to move Britain towards full socialism. Moscow Gold saves the day!
What was absurd about this cultural propaganda is not that it was invariably left-wing. George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells both wrote their plays and novels in order to persuade people that socialism was a better way of organizing society than capitalism. (Socialism did not then exist to refute them.) But they gave their capitalists a fair crack of the rhetorical whip. Undershaft, the arms manufacturer in Major Barbara, wins all the arguments. And in The New Machiavelli Wells not only presents a fair-minded picture of Edwardian politics but even has his hero turn Tory (for good socialist reasons, of course).
Because they are rooted in reality, the works of Shaw and Wells are dramatically powerful and politically persuasive almost a hundred years later. What rendered the cultural propaganda of the '80s British Left manifestly fake and ultimately ridiculous was that it was a comforting retreat into fantasy. A Very British Coup was broadcast at the very moment when Thatcherite Britain was booming and the Soviet Union economically collapsing. History in this instance trumped culture, and Tony Blair drew the appropriate lesson. Only by shaking off the illusions of the Left "narrative" and replacing it with a more realistic New Labour one which accepted the essence of Thatcherite economic policy was Blair able to make his party electable again.
MANCHURIAN CANDIDATES
All the signs are that, if Bush does win in November, the American Left will in addition to supporting Nader, rioting, blowing themselves up, etc. retreat onto the same political Fantasy Island. Having beached their coracles there, they will win elections, expose Halliburton, uncover the bribery that induced the U.S. Supreme Court to steal Florida, discover the intelligence reports finally proving that "Bush Lied," and so on. Michael Moore's popularity is one index of their lust for comforting lies: Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first documentary for which the audience is asked to suspend reality. Hollywood has already signified its willingness to meet the demands of the ideological market with films like The Day After Tomorrow and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
These movies, and others like them, mix fantasy with a documentary-like reality. They set recognizable political figures and actual controversies in a hazy alternative universe of wild conspiracies and dark forces. Thus, in The Day After Tomorrow, a Vice President Cheney look-alike is held responsible for starting a worldwide flood that makes Noah's Ark seem like an afternoon's row on the lake.
The 1962 Manchurian Candidate was a brilliant paranoid satire of McCarthyism as a convoluted Communist bid for power. Though the broad concept was highly improbable to say the least its logical implications were worked out quite consistently. Thus, the Kremlin plans to win the Cold War by putting its agent (Angela Lansbury), outwardly the wife of a Joe McCarthy look-alike, in control of the White House by making her husband a vice-presidential candidate and then assassinating his running mate. But when they also make her own son the brainwashed assassin, she turns against Moscow (as most mothers would). And when a Communist psychiatrist orders her brainwashed GI son to kill his best friend, he does so to show the effectiveness of brainwashing to a skeptical KGB. (It convinces them.) All in all, highly unlikely, but a rattling good tale.
The remake is based on the theory that U.S. politics is entirely run by a sinister corporation that seems to be a blend of Halliburton and the Blackstone Group. It is this Manchurian Corporation that seeks to plant its own agent in the White House by using a brainwashed Gulf War veteran to assassinate the president. Why it takes such great risks and uses such a roundabout method when it already controls everything else in Washington is not at all clear. Its female agent now a right-wing senator played by Meryl Streep as a blonde Elizabeth Dole is not annoyed by the fact that her son has been transformed into the brainwashed assassin. In fact, she thought up the idea in the first place. And when the psychiatrist (now a South African geneticist and war criminal) orders him to kill his best friend, it is for no reason whatsoever except perhaps to show that white South Africans are almost as nasty as the corporations they work for.
Yet this incomprehensible nonsense got rave reviews. The Nation's critic was especially complimentary about its realistic portrait of an America in which we are all subjected to constant electronic brainwashing. Terrorism, by the way, is happening all the time throughout the movie, but it is tacitly assumed to be a trivial matter compared with Halliburton-Blackstone's sinister manipulations.
Maybe a victorious Republican party should happily accept the Democratic Left's indulging its revolutionary fantasies on the large and small screens provided, as Mrs. Patrick Campbell said, they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses. Unfortunately, as Professor Gitlin obligingly warns us, that is exactly what some of them may do.
