The one thing that Democrat-hugging progressives must never forget

Here’s former Democratic operative and current MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell, speaking in An Unreasonable Man:

If you want to pull the party–the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking–to what you’re thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you’re capable of not voting for them.  If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t…have…to listen to you.  I promise you that.  I worked within the Democratic Party.  I didn’t listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.

The emphasis there is all his; I’ve tried my best to transcribe and accent it just as he said it.  This is exactly what I’ve written on multiple occasions, but in this case it’s coming straight from the donkey’s mouth–a Democratic insider who knows just how the Democrats actually operate–and if there was ever any doubt about it, this should dispel it.

This is the one thing that progressives who choose to engage with the Democrats must never forget.  And the fact that so many of them did in 2004 is exactly why that election was a nearly unmitigated disaster for progressive politics in this country.  The fear that the Green Party challenge in 2000 had generated in the Democratic Party was tremendous (as evidenced by how far they went in 2004 to undermine Nader’s candidacy and to whip their left flank into line), and that fear could and should have been used as a lever to push the Democrats, kicking and screaming, toward slightly less insane policies.  But instead, progressives ran in terror from their principles and handed over their votes to the Democrats for nothing, surrendering the only leverage they had, making it crystal clear that they could be safely ignored in the future as well, and all but guaranteeing a Bush victory.  In 2004, a vote for Kerry really was a vote for Bush–in more ways than one.

One thing I should clarify: I’m not someone who believes in engaging with the Democratic Party.  They’re so institutionally inclined to exclude meaningful progressive positions that I think it would be all but impossible to effect any significant change within the party at this point.  But for any progressive who does believe in working with the Democrats, there’s no more important lesson to keep in mind than this one.  To those people I say: please, please, please emblazon the words above on your brain.

I’ve never paid much attention to O’Donnell, but everything he said in the film was just as spot on as this observation, and it’s given me a new respect for him.  It’s rare that you find a Democrat who’s capable of being this even-handed (not to mention making this much sense), and it’s nice to know they still exist.

17 thoughts on “The one thing that Democrat-hugging progressives must never forget”

  1. This is why I’m conflicted on the question of blaming the Greens for Bush’s being in office. OK, I think, our opposition wants to claim we have this tremendous power, the power to decide who becomes the next President of the United States. Shouldn’t we try to turn this delusional belief towards some good purpose? As in: “Damn right I put Bush in the White House, and I’ll do it again with Giuliani, if you don’t accede to my list of demands! I’ve got a vote – and I’m not afraid to use it!”
    Instead, we vigorously deny we have the power that the Dems imagine we have, simply because the facts and evidence tell us this is not the case.
    We Greens are just too damn honest to ever win at the “politics” thing.

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  2. It’s a pity, I think, that the Greens were most effective in 2000–which is when they were least needed and when the difference between the Dems and the Republicans were most prominent in the last two decades. I don’t think Gore would have invaded Iraq because I think Gore would have read the damn memo that said 9/11 was going to happen, and I think that is reason enough to prefer him to Bush. I also think there’s a fair bit of delusional petulance coming from the Nader-voters (“you’re saying you own my vote! Wah!”) that mixes in with the even more delusional wishful thinking from Dems (“let’s work WITH the Democrats, they really will listen to us this time!”) and prevents any real discussion of strategy. In 2000, I think the best strategy would have been to vote for Gore in swing states and for Nader in solid states.
    But I think 9/11 and the aftermath killed even the slightest meaningful difference between Dems and Republicans. Before, you could say that even small differences affected people at the margins, and we have no right to dismiss that. But after the Mid-East wars, the enthusiastic support of both parties for slaughter and mayhem abroad and tyranny at home really does make differences negligible.

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  3. Well, I’ll let the Democrats defend their own delusional thinking, but my own delusional version of “you don’t own my vote” goes something like this:
    I have certain standards, and candidates who don’t meet those standards don’t get my vote. Instead of beating up on me because you think my standards are impossibly high, why don’t you go find someone else who has standards low enough that your candidate can meet them? We all know such people exist, since millions of them voted for a sack of cement named John Kerry in 2004.

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  4. Hey Steve, that’s an insult to sacks of cement!
    I have conflicted feelings about Nader, but I don’t see the point of blaming him or the Greens for putting Bush in office. There were many people very disgruntled with both parties in 2000 and wanted and were well within their rights to vote for an alternative, even if that alternative had no chance of winning.

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  5. Any comments on how this relates to the question of “defective” Democratic voters? I don’t have the statistics on the 2004 election, but I definitely remember, and can document (when I’m not feeling so lazy) that almost 1 in 10 registered Democrats voted for Bush nationwide, in 2000, while that ratio was actually 1 in every 8 registered Democrats in Florida. That means that something like 2.5 times as many Dems voted for Bush in Florida as the total number of Nader votes.
    If anyone is curious, in 2000, 1 in 12 Republicans voted for Gore nationwide, while 1 in 10 Republicans in Florida did so. Even levelling that difference would have swung the election to Gore by a wide margin.
    But whenever I quote these statistics to Democrats, they simply ignore me, and say “well a little spalling around the edges is only to be expected, meanwhile George Bush is ALL YOUR FAULT!!” Why do Greens get the blame for “throwing the election” when the Democrats have such a huge percentage of ‘defections’ ??
    The answer, of course, is that Greens are perceived as ‘working outside the system’ (while simply exercising their Constitutional right to run), whereas even if 100% of the Electorate voted Republican in some future election, the Dem apparatchiks would still feel they had some sort of secure place in the power structure.

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  6. Leia: Setting aside the “Wah!”, what do think is petulant about asserting the right to vote for the candidate you feel is best qualified? That seems like the essence of electoral democracy to me.
    When you talk about the difference between the two parties in 2000, I think you may be conflating the lip-service Gore of the past few years with the actual Gore of 2000. LSG made a nice movie about global warming, but AG2K was instrumental in blocking any effective action on climate change. AG2K agreed with Bush so many times in their second debate (on subjects ranging from the Gulf War to Plan Colombia to Yugoslavia to Israel) that the moderator said “It sounds like we have a love fest here tonight.” AG2K promised to increase the military budget more than Bush. I won’t recite the rest of the litany, but LSG and AG2K are by no means the same, and I’d say that AG2K was one one of the worst candidates the Democrats have run in my lifetime–all of Clinton’s policies with none of Clinton’s charm.
    Regarding Iraq: there was slaughter and mayhem going on in Iraq under Clinton/Gore, in the form of an intentional policy of siege warfare that killed hundreds of thousands of people. I have no doubt it would have continued under AG2K. It’s a toss-up as to whether Clinton/Gore or Bush have killed more Iraqis–the death tolls are both in the upper hundreds of thousands, at least–but the huge difference is that with Bush’s overt warfare, people (and in particular Democrats) are paying attention and are opposing it, and so there’s a chance that it may finally end. When it was just sanctions killing children, infants, the sick, and the elderly by the thousands every month (again, intentionally) there was no meaningful opposition in the US at all–and in fact Democrats almost universally defended the killing, because it was a Democrat doing it. As I don’t doubt they would have continued defending it once AG2K started calling the shots (or that if Kerry had become president in 2004, the war would have enjoyed a sudden boost in popularity among Democratic voters).
    So to me, the difference was as negligible in 2000 as it was in 2004.

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  7. But Thomas, don’t you understand that people who actually voted for Bush get a free pass from outraged Dems? A case in point, my girlfriend’s family: parents voted for Kerry, she voted Nader, her brother voted for Bush. So who gets all the crap for putting Bush in the White House?
    I don’t really have to answer that question, do I?

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  8. But Thomas, don’t you understand that people who actually voted for Bush get a free pass from outraged Dems? A case in point, my girlfriend’s family: parents voted for Kerry, she voted Nader, her brother voted for Bush. So who gets all the crap for putting Bush in the White House?
    I don’t really have to answer that question, do I?

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  9. Steve: I demand that you quit reading my mind. It’s creeping me out.
    I always thought it was hilarious how on the one hand Democrats say how worthless our votes are if we don’t vote for them, and on the other hand they say we’re personally responsible for the defeat of their candidates. So which is it? Are we powerless or omnipotent?
    Thomas: That’s always one of the things I pull out first when people start in on the 2000 election (that 200,000+ Florida Democrats voted for Bush, and another 2 million of them didn’t vote at all). Why is it my responsibility to vote for your candidate before people in your own party?
    I think you’re right that a lot of that anger comes from the fact that Green voters dared to commit the unpardonable sin of going off the reservation.

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  10. The one thing that Democrat-hugging progressives must never forget

    If you want to pull the party–the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking–to what you’re thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, …

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  11. I’m late to this comment section, but maybe someone will read this.
    Leaving aside the centrist Democrats who hate Ralph (they should), I think the reason the debate over Ralph among lefties is so vicious is because both sides know they’re helpless to have much of an effect in the current political environment. If you voted for Gore in 2000 you were effectively endorsing the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party, and as O’Donnell admitted, you are telling the Democrats that your leftwing views can be safely ignored, because you’ll vote for anyone slightly to the left of the Republican. On the other hand, if you vote for Ralph in a swing state you might end up supporting Bush.
    When people have two bad choices they often get defensive and angry, or at least that’s what seems to happen in any discussion about Ralph.

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  12. I’ve thought something similar: that people who wanted to vote for Nader but didn’t are in large part just angry at themselves, and they’re projecting that anger on those who did. I don’t think that’s all of it, but it’s there.
    In my experience, though, the viciousness of the debate is one-sided, and the anger from Nader voters–when there is any–is just a natural response to being told that they’re naive or selfish or foolish or deluded or responsible for everything bad that’s ever happened, simply because they exercised their right to vote for the candidate they felt was best qualified. It gets tiring being lectured on principles (where “lectured” generally means “harangued” or “screeched at”) by people who’ve demonstrated that they’re willing to compromise theirs, and who are mainly angry at you for not doing the same.

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  13. I have to agree with the above two comments and maybe add a little more.
    I did a small amount of volunteer work for the Nader campaign in 2000, and that was basically the first time I got personally involved in a national campaign. I think Ralph attracted a lot of young voters and disaffected political cynics to participate for the first time, so from the Naderite side it can be tough to argue dispassionately when people accuse your first serious political decision of being The Cause Of All The Evil In The World.
    (Of course, for his part Ralph also made a lot of very inflammatory statements during the campaign which aroused Dem ire. Two problems, though: #1, most of his statements had a very large grain of truth to them, which just made the ire worse; #2, the same Dems who supported Gore/Lieberman despite disagreeing with the candidates’ positions on various issues such as Star Wars, militarism, NAFTA etc., –seemed utterly incapable of believing that any Nader voter might think Ralph the superior candidate without endorsing every single word that came out of Ralph’s mouth… So, many Dems took Naderism as a personal threat for those reasons.)
    On the other hand, when D. Johnson says “leaving aside Centrist Democrats who hate Ralph (they should),” I feel obligated to make the personal observation that massive numbers of Democrats I know really did become more “centrist” — strike that, let’s call a spade a spade; a huge portion of the country became more conservative, more Right-wing, more reactionary, more self-righteous, believing themselves prosperous and virtuous and thus more likely to hate and fear anyone who proposed wealth redistribution. Particularly among historically liberal Dem constituents such as ethnic minorities and gays (witness the rise of Andrew Sullivan). We’re not just flapping our lips when we say that the country and the Democrats in particular really did move Rightward starting around the eighties.
    So really, a lot of the true rancor and viciousness between Dems and Greens is based on actual policy differences — it is my general experience that, even though almost every Democrat criticizes and badmouths the Democratic Leadership Council, starting in the late Clinton years the DLC principles were to a great extent adopted as a party philosophy, even by large numbers of rank-and-file Democratic voters, effectively rendering responsibility for social progress to the so-called “Free Market” despite much rhetoric about belief in progressive goals.
    Certainly many Dems ‘wished’ they could have voted for Nader, but my point is that a large portion of the party honestly did not, and this was not the simple tactical disagreement that they claimed it was. I don’t place a lot of weight in Democratic protestations that they support the same causes as Greens… I imagine that pro-slavery Democrats before the Civil War probably handed quite a lot of rhetoric to Abolitionist Republicans about how “we’re both on the same side, we just want what’s best for the Negroes”.
    Confronted with a legitimately different party with legitimate political differences, the Dems simply continued the time-honored tradition of electoral dirty tricks, as the Chicago Dem machine used to do early last century.
    Arguably they were so focused on doing this to the Greens, and so overconfident from the PR “successes” of the Clinton years, that they were blindsided when the Republicans did exactly that to the Democrats in 2000, 2002, and 2004.
    I always found it ironic that the same Democrats who told Greens in September of 2000, that “it’s crucial we all show unity behind our duly chosen leader” (Al Gore) and that we had to “voluntarily give up a few Constitutional rights” (the right to run for office or vote for whom we please) during this “temporary but ongoing emergency” (the candidacy of George Bush and neo-cons in general)… to a man they acted shocked and horrified when Republicans said exactly the same things to them one year later…

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  14. Man, I run off at the mouth a lot, particularly on this topic, but I’ll hasten to add — that a lot of pro-slavery voters probably did believe they had the negroes’ best interests at heart, just like a lot of DLC-type Dems apparently believe the Free Market is the “best” way to achieve progressive goals. But crafting specific means towards rather vague common goals is kinda the entire definition of politics, and so is the judgment about whether the means are justified by those goals, or destroy them…

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  15. Thomas: That’s a good point. I definitely agree that there are many, many Democrats who are perfectly happy with the DLC-inspired rightward drift of the party, and who want it to continue going in that direction. They’re the angriest ones, actually, because they want the party to continue moving to the right without paying a price–and it’s the Greens and Naderites who are making that difficult.

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  16. Were you as disappointed as me that neither Nader nor anyone interviewed nor the filmmakers even discussed the “spoiler” issue and how it is a symptom of a flawed and fixable election system? This has always driven me crazy about Nader and upset me so much upon watching the film that I was inspired to pour out a post, <a href=”http://www.systemsthinker.com/blog/2007/12/an-unreasonable-man/” title=Instant Runoff Voting Excluded: An Unreasonable Omission from An Unreasonable Man”>Instant Runoff Voting Excluded: An Unreasonable Omission from An Unreasonable Man.
    It is such a complete waste of energy that people sit and debate on either side of the Nader issue instead of all banding together to push for election reform that would eliminate the “spoiler” issue altogether. I hope people will read my post, get in touch, get organized, and start supporting those campaigns for election reform that can actually channel this energy constructively.

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  17. Howard: I’ve worked on IRV a bit as well (in San Francisco, where we now have IRV for all local elections), and I also think it’s a critical electoral reform, but no, I wasn’t disappointed that it wasn’t mentioned in the film. First of all, Nader didn’t direct, produce, or (especially) edit the movie; he was just the subject. He didn’t have control over what was included or the direction the interviews took. Second, the movie was about Nader–not about electoral reform. An extended discussion of IRV would have been out of place.
    And third and most importantly, Nader featured electoral reform in general and IRV in particular in his campaign both in 2000 and 2004 (here’s the link for the latter). I heard him speak several times in 2000 and 2004, and he always discussed electoral reform and/or IRV. When you say he fails to speak about it “over and over in his own speeches and other interviews”, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about; we’ve clearly been listening to different speeches and interviews.
    So to be so frustrated and angry at Nader’s disingenuousness (your words), and to posit theories about him being motivated by some (deeply uncharacteristic) desire for revenge, is in my opinion badly misplaced. Your anger is pointed in the wrong direction. I’d ask: why are you so upset with Nader, who’s highlighted this issue prominently, rather than the Democrats, who 1) clearly have a strong motivation to work on the issue, 2) actually have the power to make it happen at the state and local levels, but 3) have entirely ignored it in favor of deeply anti-democratic tactics and attacks?

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