Elections - A Mugs Game

With the election officially over, where should the focus be for progressives in the US?

Iraq? It's certainly a central life and death issue that must be taken up. But how can a movement be rebuilt to deal with Iraq without dealing with the bigger question of the "pre-emption strategy"? How can a movement that doesn't have a post-election plan even be a movement? Were all the peace eggs (reluctantly) in the Kerry basket? The Fallujah offensive is unlikely to succeed in quelling the resistance making this a war with no end in sight - perhaps just the beginning and not the end.

How about election fraud and how there is growing, hard, statistical evidence that Bush's vote was padded? Certainly a worthy issue given the energy put into the election by so many. Too bad Kerry was such a patriot and a gentleman. It should have never been Kerry's call to make. But can the issue of Bush's legitimacy really be dealt with outside the context of the overall rot of the US electoral system?

Then there's tax cuts? Again, another deserving issue but doesn't it lose its context without dealing with poverty, healthcare and the overall economic structure?

The list of issues of course, goes on, and on, and on, ad infinitum. There'll never be a shortage of important human issues.

The issue certainly is not "values", which is nothing more than an election gimmick. Monday night I saw Nancy Pelosi on Lou Dobbs (CNN) trying to jump on the religion bandwagon. "Helping the poor is biblical. Protecting the environment God gave to us." Reaching out to the reactionaries. I almost retched.

The obvious point for progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party is not to emulate the Republicans and religious whackos to try and get elected. We saw (cheating aside) Kerry try to out-hawk Bush and look where it got him. What Kerry should have said was "I served in Vietnam and I know a bad war when I see one." Instead, he pandered to the killers and the fundamentalists as if his own base didn't matter. He didn't lead. He followed.

And I guess that's a lesson that's been learned once again. Without a strong left to organize resistance to the Democratic/Rethuglican duopoly, they've got free reign to move as far to the right as they want.

What's needed in the medium to long term is electoral reform - dismantling the duopoly; proportional representation, "reforming" the electoral college (as if!); instituting national election rules and standards and federal regulations over the election industry - as preconditions for any progressive third party to be serious players in the politics.

In the meantime, labour, peace, environmentalistal, civil rights, women and other activists who give their time, energy and money to the Democrats have got to figure out how to hold them accountable, push them away from the right and stop allowing themselves to be taken for granted. They've got to figure out how to grab the imagination of the 40-50% who don't even bother to vote. They've got to figure out how to the use the Democratic Party to move electoral reform forward.

More on this to come. Fair Vote Canada presents an solid organizing model that could be informative and useful for electoral activists in the US.