Reply #37: Your examples are not sudden shifts, but very gradual evolutions... [View All]

[IrateCitizen]

The DLC has risen to ascendancy because the Democratic Party never ceased being a bourgeois party. Had the New Left been able to articulate an alternative vision in the 1960's, as opposed to simply recoiling in horror at the development of advanced capitalist society founded upon multinational corporate entities, then perhaps they might have wrested control away from the bourgeoisie to a certain degree. But the fact is that the bourgeoisie remained in complete control of the party apparatus.

Why is this important? Because the forces controlling the Democratic Party, then, are products of a society of advanced capitalism, and have bought into all of its inherent contradictions and dysfunctions as gospel. This is why the DLC has seen its ideology advance in Democratic Party high circles, while any politicians who question the established corporate order are relegated to eternal backbencher status. The Democratic Party elite have thrown their lot in with corporatism, and those who embrace that path are the ones who will shine.

As for the Republicans, the neocons are actually former Trotskyists, for the most part. In fact, a lot of them used to claim membership in the Democratic Party, but left the party because they believed in provoking a showdown with the Soviets during the Cold War. Everything about them is anti-conservative -- they believe in imposing revolutionary change from the outside rather than adhering to established ideas and norms. However, their influence is primarily in the foreign policy arena, and it dovetails nicely with the rhetoric of the cultural republicans who became organized mainly as a backlash against the excesses of the New Left in the 1960's.

The neocons promote an agenda that is concerned with imposing American ideals and institutions on others, by force if necessary. The cultural conservatives eat this up because they believe it, and they also share a common belief that due to the superiority of our institutions, we are entitled to rule the world (i.e. American exceptionalism). What's funny to me is that the only real organized resistance to the corporatist agenda is coming from the social conservatives -- their denouncement of coarseness and vulgarity being at the core of popular entertainment, which is an assessment that I find some agreement with, even if they are completely in error at where to place the blame.

You speak of "taking back the Democratic Party". My question would be, when was it ours to begin with? And how do we take it back? The problem you fail to recognize is that you're attempting to forge some kind of massive grassroots movement in a highly atomized society passively controlled by an all-pervasive culture industry and mass media.

As for me, I'm more of a revolutionary in thought, and I've resigned myself to living pretty much out of the "mainstream", because when you join the mainstream even with the best of intentions as a rebel or revolutionary, it ultimately assimilates you and commodifies you. If you believe in taking back the Democratic Party, then by all means continue in your effort. Personally, I believe that Marx and his later contemporaries were correct when the recognized that addressing the ills of industrialized (and advanced capitalist) society means relearning history, absent all of the contradictions and false assumptions that permeate our current modes of thought. Working with the Democratic Party is accepting those contradictions at face value, even if you don't realize it, gradually becoming assimilated into the vast corporatist juggernaught.