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archived: 3 - 9 Apr, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: April 5, 2005 A HOUSE DIVIDED "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.” Abraham Lincoln, 1858 When he was seeking the nomination for the US Senate from Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivered his classic speech uttering the biblical line, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln was debating his worthy and redoubtable political opponent, Stephen Douglas. Lincoln described America in the middle of the nineteenth century as deeply riven across a racial and cultural fault line. In Lincoln’s mind, part of America wanted to perpetuate slavery, and the other part of America wanted to bring it to a close. As we know, Lincoln championed the abolition of slavery. Although he lost to Douglas in 1858, Lincoln won the presidential nomination in 1860, and the rest is history. Today, America is a house divided against itself. Half of America supports the reactionary policies of George Bush and his Republican neoconservatives. The other half opposes them. While Bush’s party does have some dissenters, they are few and far between. Astonishingly, Bush has a considerable amount of political support among his most implacable political opposition, the Democratic Party. While Bush’s house is politically united, the Democratic Party is a house divided against itself. Inside the Democratic Party there is a new spirit of progressive resurgence led by Howard Dean, Barbara Boxer, John Conyers, Mel Watt, Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Dennis Kucinich, but at the same time, there is a palpable and strong countercurrent of reaction. Known as the New Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) supports huge swathes of Bush’s religious brand of neoconservativism. These neoconservatives in the Democratic Party serve as a fifth column of support for Bush’s reactionary movement. The neoconservative Democrats purport to oppose some of Bush’s policies, while they enthusiastically support the core of his strategic agenda: the Bush Doctrine; The Patriot Act, The War Powers Act and, most egregiously, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Just who are the DLC? The “DLC Leadership Team” is headed by the two right-wing war horses: Al From and Bruce Reed. They are leading the organization, and they are enforcing the ideological discipline. They are the heavyweight ideologues of the right-wing drift of the DLC. Senator Evan Bayh is the Chairman of the DLC, and he is assisted by Senator Tom Carper. Michael Coleman is the mayor of Columbus, Ohio, and he serves as Chair of the DLC’s Local Elected Officials. Jennifer Mann, a Pennsylvania state representative, is the head of the DLC State Legislative Advisory Board. Just as Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz want to use American military power to colonize the oil-rich provinces of our planet; the Democratic leaders of the DLC support this deeply unpopular policy. While a search of the DLC website returns zero results for PNAC, it is obvious that they do not oppose the stream of reckless military interventions wrought by the neocons. Worse. In a series of statements on their website, they have launched their own version of PNAC. Dubbed “Progressive Internationalism,” the DLC and its leaders echo every syllable of the reactionary ideology of the neoconservatives. The neoconservative Dems argue strenuously for a vigorous and assertive US foreign policy predicated on military intervention s to bring un-named “rogue states” to heel over a variety of frightening issues from terrorism to drug-trafficking to the spread of AIDS. While admonishing Bush for his unilateralist approach, the DLC do not criticize him for the reckless invasion of Iraq which we have learned was based on a tissue of lies fabricated by a desperate and “crazy” Iraqi intelligence agent appropriately codenamed, “Curveball”. With great fanfare, the DLC launched their version of PNAC in October, 2003. “Progressive Internationalism” was designed to re-brand the Democrats as the Party of responsible “national security” and to sharpen the contrast with the irresponsible Neoconservatives infesting the Republican Party. It failed. Today, we know that this DLC program had virtually no positive political impact whatsoever. Yet, leading members of the DLC are now attempting to recycle their failed policy. In a recent attack on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, DLC leaders have launched what is nothing less than a ruthless assault on the progressives who are reinvigorating the Party at its grassroots. In a recent issue of New Yorker, John Kerry and Joe Biden are both quoted as arguing for the “unbranding” of the Democratic Party and the adoption of a much more strident and militaristic message that echoes the “Progressive Internationalism“ of the DLC. Joe Biden even went so far as to claim that John Kerry was “weak” as a presidential candidate, while his supporters working in the burger bars and sandwich shops of Delaware have informed him that he (Biden) is “strong”. Senator Biden interprets this intelligence which was used as a means of explaining one person’s support for George Bush over John Kerry as extremely flattering to Biden. This is a very curious situation. Biden was informed of this political dichotomy when it was cogently defined for him by a waitress working late one night when he dropped into a popular sandwich shop in Delaware to pick up one of their steak sandwiches for a midnight snack. When he heard the waitress explain her rejection of Kerry as a “weak” presidential candidate and her contrast to him (Biden) as “strong,” Biden had a vision. A penny dropped, and he interpreted her political quandary as a clarion call for him to leap into the presidential sweepstakes in 2008. Biden now sees himself as unfurling the standard of “national security” within the genetically “weak” Democratic Party. In his patriotic vision, Biden dreams of revitalizing the Party by reforming it into a mighty engine for “national security” and using it as his platform for a lunge for the White House. He is, after all, the “ranking Democrat” on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he now believes that he can hear the call of history beckoning him to join the presidential fray. From these lofty ramparts, he is waving the flag of “national security” in the faces of his cringing opponents, the progressives, who do not support PNAC, the Iraq War and the neutering of the State Department which is now in full song under the lash of Condoleezza Rice. Others involved in this Democratic Thermidorian Reaction are: Senators Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and North Carolina’s John Edwards. Joe Lieberman is the Honorary Co-Chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). The CPD was originally founded in the 1950s during the witch-hunts led by the late and unlamented Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was revived in the 1970s during the Ford Administration as a means of organizing and controlling conservative Democrats, especially the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who actually hired and trained some of the leading neoconservatives in the Bush government today. Senator Clinton is a long-standing devotee of that wildly unsuccessful Democratic pollster, Stanley Greenberg, who has recently issued a memo urging Democrats to move decisively to the right toward a pro-life position in a desperate and deeply dubious strategy to attract Roman Catholics in the South and the Mid-West. John Edwards is trying his best to be a Democratic Everyman, and his flirtations with the “national security” Democrats are reported to be in an advanced stage of courtship. If they continue, these unwise and unsound machinations will torpedo any tenuous claim that Edwards might have to progressive credentials, his amazing bootstrap story notwithstanding. In the past fortnight, we have seen the publication of a series of striking statements calling for the immediate reform of the Democratic Party. Former Senator Bill Bradley has lamented the inversion of the Democratic Party. In a call to his Party, Bradley raises stark questions about its ambiguous ideological base. He urges the reconstruction of the Party from the ground up. According to Bradley, the reconstruction will be a project that will require Democratic equivalents of Ann Coulter and Grover Norquist to inspire the grassroots. At the same time, Matt Taibbi asks an extremely cogent question, “With the majority of the public against the war, Democrats have the perfect opportunity to differentiate themselves; so why are they embracing Reaganomics and pre-emptive war?” This is a pregnant question, and it should be echoing in the halls and antechambers of the Capitol building morning, noon and night. Chalmers Johnson has analyzed America’s predicament, and he concludes that we are in what may be the last throes of cultural collapse. If Johnson is correct, within a few short years, America may become virtually indistinguishable from its debt-ridden neighbors in the Southern hemisphere – just another debtor nation with massive unemployment and a minimum wage far below the poverty line. Our debt mountain is being financed by India, China, Japan and South Korea. We are borrowing $2 billion per day from the savings accounts of Chinese coolies, Indian untouchables and Asian peasants. Johnson states that our bully boy foreign policy is a danger to our economy and national security. He concludes that until we correct both of those massive problems, we will have no chance to make any positive improvements. Ergo, we are doomed to a future of competition with the coolie economies of India, Pakistan and China. Our national minimum wage is already one half of the minimum wage of Europeans, and our performance in academic terms proves that US education has fallen to the levels of the third world, and it is still dropping like that proverbial lead balloon. In a perspicacious interview, Scott Ritter predicts that the struggle against the neocons will last for another ten to twelve years. The aftermath may well be over the bones of a civilization that - at one time – held the opportunity for greatness in its hand, but crushed it to death in a fit of searing rage against the nightmares driving our deepest fears – racism, xenophobia and religious bigotry. The bottom line is that there is no coherent political opposition to neoconservativism. The Democratic Party is coming apart at the seams at just the time when it should be uniting under the banner of stalwart and forthright opposition. While Howard Dean won the Chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), he has inherited a crew as obsessive and compulsive as a nest filled with cuckoo’s. With a crew of maddening Captain Ahabs heaving about on a rolling deck, each obsessed with finding and killing the White Whale that devoured his long lost leg, the new Chairman of the DNC may have accepted what is literally a mission impossible. As other writers have observed, America is only one atrocity away from hurling the Constitution into the shredder. With that prospect on the horizon, we find ourselves with a house divided against itself as our only defense against the onslaught of right-wing paranoia that will sweep our pretensions to democracy, freedom and the rights of man into the dustbin of history. Lincoln provides a glimmer of hope, but it is flickering and guttering in a brisk and rain swept wind. He said, “Our cause, then, must be entrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends -- those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to falter now? -- now when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail -- if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.” Now is the moment for the Democratic Lincolns to rise up in common cause against the insidious reactionary filtrations that would bring an end to Jeffersonian democracy and our now deeply unconscious constitutional heritage. The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail – if we stand firm, we shall not fail. We cannot, however, say with any degree of confidence, “Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.” In the twenty-first century, with the specter of nuclear terror still hanging over our heads like the proverbial sword of Damocles, nothing can be certain. SOURCES
The Dems: Bums
American Thermidor
THE UNBRANDING
A Party Inverted
The Dems: Bums
Scott Ritter: "Mark Your Calendars!"
Wake Up!
Sleepwalking to disaster in Iran
Scott Ritter: Neocons as Parasites __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global political action organization based in the United Kingdom.
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