Since you asked....

Since You Asked ...

Dear Bill,

I do not accept the 1995 Presidential Poll and Democratic Party Member, ship Acceptance Form" sent to me recently by the Democratic National Committee. Although I'm a registered Democrat, I use the party in the same calculating way you use my vote. In a word, disloyally.

The formality of asking for my personal opinion is just that - a formality - so the best way to answer the poll is to ignore the official questions. Millions of citizens have now received this mass mailing with "handwritten" address labels, a truly tacky touch. Donald Fowler, national chair of the DNC, signed his name to a string of empty sentences such as this one:

He (the president) needs to receive

the tabulated results from

this poll as soon as possible be,

cause your input will help affirm

his legislative plan-of-action by

showing support for his agenda.

The pretence of popular support cannot be fabricated without such "tabulated results." This kind of exercise goes beyond cynicism or any kind of Machiavellian deception. By now it is blatant and mechanical. Of course, this is no social scientific survey, but even as a fair survey of partisan opinion it is useless. It's merely a mass rubber-stamp. And your opinion only stands out from the crowd if you send big bucks to become "an official member" of the party.

Disgruntled progressives in the party acknowledge as much. Thus David Axelrod, a stalwart Chicago Democrat, recently told the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Lately we've been cowed into the

position of not sticking up for

working people, because we've

been looking increasingly to

wealthy interests in order to fund

our campaign. You end up spending

time with wealthy people who

say, "Let's not make this a class

thing."

Donald Sweitzer, a former political director of DNC, says the Democrats now suffer from "an identity crisis." As for the growing number of senators and representatives who are retiring or defecting to the Republicans, Sweitzer says, "Goodbye and good riddance. If you have trouble being a Democrat, then get the hell out. We'll rebuild without you."

Maybe, but why not build on a new foundation? The Democratic Party is just not a trustworthy ally of working people. The party is far too indebted to corporate power to become an independent force for economic democracy. Decent folks like Axelrod and Sweitzer would do better to tear their unrequited love for the Democratic Party out of their own hearts.

Clinton once bragged about the bi-partisan support he gained for the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and promised economic gains for all. But the US. Department of Labor confirmed that over 38,000 workers lost their jobs by mid-August 1995 and projects one million jobs lost by the year's end. Under the NAFTA regime, this country's 77 million production workers were dealt a 3 percent drop in real hourly wages, the steepest one-year decline on record. And this was before the collapse of the Mexican peso, whose punishing effects will be compounded by NAFTA across national borders.

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll, reported in the August 12, 1995, New York Times, found that 79 percent of 1,478 respondents nationwide "said the Government was pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." The same survey found a majority favoring a new independent party, though "when asked what a third party should stand for, people offered few policy specifics." Indeed, and policies which challenge bipartisan business as usual are certainly not well publicized in the New York Times or CBS News. The real point of these official polls and surveys is to send the business classes early warning signals of trouble ahead.

No wonder so many Democratic politicians are abandoning a sinking ship - including Bill Bradley, who recently condemned bipartisan politics and quoted that commie Bertolt Brecht almost in the same breath. Has Bradley suddenly become a revolutionary? No such critter. Whatever Bradley and Clinton learned at Oxford and in government, both play by established rules and both endorse "centrism," the current universalist gospel. Bradley had private talks with Ross Perot and Colin Powell, but both of them are pursuing charismatic courses of their own. These "independents" are a sorry bunch, but at least they are lifelike, and many citizens are looking for any way out of the bipartisan morgue.

So there will be new opportunities for every kind of opportunist - and, of course, for far-right demagogues. Democratic socialists must follow a tougher and truly independent course, whether or not we cast tactical votes for Democrats.

A final personal message to Bill: my lover and I won't be voting for you the next time. Because we are Democrats. And socialists. And queers with self, respect. You have not led the fight against Colorado's Amendment 2, which outlawed civil-rights protections for gays; in fact, you obstructed efforts within the Justice Department to challenge it before the Supreme Court. In the military, the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy (which you called "an honorable compromise") has not prevented further queer hunts and purges. And you appointed a straight "liaison to the gay community" who spends her time warning us that we have nowhere else to go but into the embrace of the Democratic Party.

Yes we do. We'll be joining many democratic citizens of all kinds in protest outside the polling places in November of next year. And we'll keep working for a socialist democracy, without shortcuts and without illusions.

Signs of the Times

Yesterday (September 17), Jesse Jackson was in my home town of Philadelphia warning black citizens to make their votes expensive. Clinton plainly wants to buy them cheap, and when he comes to town today he will be visiting black neighborhoods and churches. Will black citizens have a decent chance to ask the president direct questions about affirmative action, about inequities in criminal justice and in death sentencing, about tax, wage, and corporate policies which turn inner cities into wastelands and war zones?

Doubtful. The president's past visits have been highly stage-managed, even to the point of producing an elaborate "photo opportunity" in the court, yard of City Hall, passing out hundreds of tickets to loyal Democrats and restricting public access. (Nevertheless, ACT UP spoiled that show by sneaking in our members and chanting, "HIV is not a crime! Why are Haitians doing time?") Philadelphia Mayor Eddie Rendell, a New Democrat after Clinton's own image, has been far more aggressive against unions and in favor of privatizing city services than Republican Mayor Rudolph Guiliani of New York. Rendell, a former district attorney, and current DA Lynne Abraham have also worked to make Philadelphia "the capital of capital punishment," in the words of a recent New York Times Magazine article.

Although the Philadelphia Inquirer publishes some first-rate investigative journalism, the editorial board is a poor crew. In the September 10 issue, Jane Eisner, the editor of the editorial page, announced a change in the paper's lineup of six syndicated columnists. All had been inside-the-beltway pundits, but now three white males - George Will, Jeff Greenfield, and Richard Reeves - are being replaced. Predictably enough, with none other than three more white male inside-the-beltway pundits: neandertal right-winger Joseph Sobran, neo-con E. J. Dionne, and phony populist David Shribman. So the "new" lineup stiff contains not one principled liberal, never mind a spirited leftist. In this way, the mass media have been most useful in pushing the official "center" of political discourse ever further to the right.

But Eisner may really have gone too far in her eagerness to please suburban and corporate conservatives. The choice of Sobran is scandalous, since he is on public record (in the May 13, 1986, issue of the New York City Tribune, a Moonie newspaper) praising Instauration, an anti-Semitic and racist publication:

Our ethnic etiquette makes our

ethnic problems pretty nearly in,

soluble.... I know of only one

magazine in America that faces

the harder facts about race: a little

magazine called Instauration ....

[It is) an often brilliant magazine

covering a beat nobody else will

touch, and doing so with wide,

ranging observation and bitter

wit. It is openly and almost unremittingly

hostile to blacks, Jews,

and Mexican and Oriental immigrants.

Alexander Cockburn's column in the June 7, 1986, issue of the Nation provides other details of Sobran's relations with Instauration (which has returned his compliments in print). Cock, burn also quotes an article in the January 1982 issue of Instauration which announced:

We are pro-abortion, despite the

aesthetic horror of it, because it

is the only effective way to cut

down on nonwhite proliferation,

both here and abroad. Unfortunately,

a greater proportion of

whites in this country practice

abortion than blacks.

Instauration attacked the Reverend Jerry Falwell as a "Majority Renegade" for keeping company with Menachem Begin and published an article entitled "The Brave Pen of Joseph Sobran" in September 1985. Sobran was praised for supporting President Reagans visit to Bitburg Cemetery in Germany: "The man has repeatedly defended white racial pride and solidarity, despite the mounting campaign to get him."

Jane' Eisner gave Sobran a royal reception in the Inquirer on September 10, promising "a philosophy that espouses minimalist government, excoriates liberalism and eschews political compromise." For readers who complained that "unvarnished conservatism" was lacking in the editorial pages, Eisner assured them, "Sobran's work should fill that gap." She knows full well that readers and writers on the democratic left have also complained about exclusion, but all fair-minded people understand that "the free market of ideas" must have some limits....

On September 17, one reader thanked the editors for their "courage," commenting, "You seem familiar enough with Mr. Sobran that you must know he has been charged in some quarters with anti-Semitism. McCarthyism is as alive and well today as it was 35 years ago."

It certainly is, and McCarthyism of this very kind is being used, now as then, to erase much of history and silence dissident voices. Jane Eisner asked Inquirer readers: "Does this latest makeover work? Or is plastic surgery the only solution?" The only way to put a pretty face on racism and reaction is to persuade readers that fair is foul and foul is fair. And this is just what the Inquirer's editors have done by hiring a new crew of pundits to do the same old job of stupefying the public.

Scott Tucker is an artist, activist, and writer, as well as a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of ACT UP.