Ralph Nader: 'Cowering' Democrats face defeat

[Ken Burch]

474. There was nothing for progressives in the Gore program in 2000

Fine, they should have voted for Gore by default, but we both know that such votes could never be positive votes for progressive politics or any sort of popular gains. We both know Gore was a status quo candidate and that there was no good reason to run a status quo candidate in 2000. The progressive wing was owed a return to influence in the party at that point...There was no good reason to run someone who's program was "I'll be just like Clinton". There was no good reason to stay the course when the failure to regain Congress for four straight years(when we were should have just automatically retaken the House in 2006 after the Gingrich shutdown)proved that bland centrist politics doesn't work for this party.

And no progressives were able to do anything at all working within the Democratic Party in the Nineties. Clinton had total control and tolerated no dissent. There was no debate, and we ended up in 1996 with TWO parties that hated the poor(we lost any right to ask poor people to vote Democratic after Clinton signed the welfare bill-we made it clear we weren't on their side). Those who wanted cuts in the war budget were silenced within the party in the Nineties...there were NO instances of any progressive victories over the DLC on any issue ever during that decade. How can you demand people stay loyal to a party that does all it can(as the party did than)to drive them away?

Can you at least admit, at the very least, that the progressive wing of the party NEVER deserved the treatment it got from Clinton and Gore in those years? Can you at least admit that there was no good reason to put all those good people totally out in the cold that whole decade? To create a climate in which ceo's and defense contractors mattered to a "Democratic" administration but workers and the poor didn't(and clearly, Clinton's support of free trade proved he never cared about the poor and the workers at any point in his life, because you can't care about those people AND kowtow to multinational corporations at the same time)?

You say progressives should have worked within the party. If you felt that way, you had an obligation AT THE TIME to stand up to the DLC and tell them to stop silencing all debate. And, really, you had an obligation to support a primary challenge to Clinton in 1996, since he'd stopped being a Democrat once and for all with the way he'd run things in his first term.

The base of the GOP right, by contrast to the base of OUR party(none of which is "centrist" in the economic royalist DLC sense)were never, EVER treated as contemptuously by Reagan or either Bush as our base was treated in the Nineties. If you are going to condemn progressives for leaving(and most of those who left worked their asses off for Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale and even Carter, if you're going to be honest about it)then you need to admit that it was wrong for the party to spend the Nineties treating progressives and activists as if they were to blame for all the defeats in the Seventies and the Eighties, and thus had to be punished and totally disregarded by the party just to get someone CALLING himself a Democrat elected. The truth is we'd have lost every election we lost in those decades, and by just as large a margin, even if all our candidates had been just like Clinton and everyone damn well knows it.

Why was it asking so much for progressives, for people who'd marched for peace and civil rights, for people who'd walked picket lines, to be treated with as much respect as ceo's and merchants of war? It's not like it gained us any votes when Clinton told the left to fuck off and die.

The lesson is clear-progressive votes need to be earned just like centrist votes. Why can't some people accept that? Why SHOULD the Democratic party just be able to demand progressive votes without ever moving towards progressives at all?
How is there any legitimacy at all in treating people like that. Loyalty always has go in both directions. Is this too much for you to grasp?

Do you actually drink the Joe Klein "America is a center-right country" koolaid?