The Fantasy Ideology of the Democrats

by Armed Liberal at May 14, 2003 5:04 AM

Rhetorically, what I'd like to say is that "While the GOP sells a past that never was, the Democrats sell a future that will never be." But that's not the case.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, are living in the past. They have a slight edge, in that the past they are living in - Selma in 1965 - is real. But like the aging high school baseball star, they see everything through the lens of the One Big Game, of the time years ago when they stood at the plate swung away and hit one over the fence.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to explain what the Democrats are doing is that they desperately want to see everything as Selma in 1965, and they are constantly looking for a Bull Connors to stand up against. Why? As a way of establishing their courage and moral stature. Courage because they stood against the forces of ignorance and brutality - and even more important, against our own forces of ignorance and brutality. And moral stature came because they did the right thing in the face of difficult odds and prevailed.

The problem is that governing the country is not the same as marching on Selma. The necessary compromises, the inevitable comfort with the levers of power means that those who once marched from the Sierra Maestra now sit comfortably in corner offices.

And absent an organizing principle, other than Selma, keeping those corner offices becomes the critical feature. I told a story a while ago over at Armed Liberal, it's a very small local one, but to anyone who has watched Democratic politics in the DLC era, it will sound very familiar:

In the 60’s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.

Most of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I'm getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors ... Leopold’s Records ("Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free") and the Missing Link bicycle shop.

Leopold’s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.

The student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why??

The small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.

Now this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren't sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.

They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don't know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the "mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm" (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn't that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn't stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.

And the fantasy that allowed them to do this - that blinded them to what they were really doing, and pulled them away from what they professed to believe - was one that had them at the head of the march in Selma on Bloody Sunday, standing arm in arm with Dr. King.

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