Antiwar.com
June 9, 2005
The Left Must Learn From 2004
An interview with Joshua Frank
by Kevin B. Zeese
Joshua Frank: I learned a lot from the 2004 elections, and this book is my attempt to put it all together and make sense of what went down. In Left Out! I shovel through the muck of our current political arrangement, where progressives and those on the Left are continually told that we have real options within the so-called two-party system. Many told us during the 2004 elections that George W. Bush was so darn bad that we had to, just had to, vote for John Kerry. There was no other choice. The polluted climate, as you well know, was "Anybody but Bush." Or better put, "Nobody but Kerry." Hatred of Bush drove the support for Kerry. We had buses to Ohio, we had DVD parties, and all were targeting Bush rather than trumpeting Kerry. That should have been sign number one that the Democrats were on the wrong path. The candidacies of Ralph Nader and even that of the Green Party's David Cobb were seen as far too dangerous to support in the states that could have actually put pressure on Kerry (i.e., swing states) to take on issues we believed in. The strategy, endorsed by so many respected activists and intellectuals on the left, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Medea Benjamin, Norman Solomon, to name just a few – was all about expediting the process of removing Bush from office. Not issues.
Their strategy was a miserable failure, however. The Democratic alternatives were grossly inadequate. The Left asked absolutely nothing of Kerry, and guess what? They got absolutely nothing in return. That's what you get when you give someone's candidacy unconditional support, despite the fact that the Democrats mirrored Bush on so many crucial issues – from the economy to civil liberties to trade to foreign policy to the environment. It was textbook lesser-evilism and it was a loser. The left had succumbed to the plague of ABB. Their unconditional support made Kerry worse and undermined everything the Left supposedly stood for. And this is where I think we must be crystal clear as to what the costs of expedient choices are, even if the benefits seem predominant. As I argue in Left Out!, backing the lesser evil, like the majority of liberals and lefties did in 2004, keeps the whole political pendulum in the U.S. swinging to the right. It derails social movements, helps elect the opposition, and undermines democracy. This backwards logic allows the Democrats and Republicans to control the discourse of American politics and silences any voices that may be calling for genuine change.
Frank: The antiwar movement should have backed a candidate that embraced their call to exit Iraq at once. They should have forced Kerry to take this position or risk losing their support. The best way they could have done that was to support a candidate that was willing to put pressure on Kerry in the states that mattered most to the Democrats. They should have supported Ralph Nader in swing states, plain and simple. They should have told Kerry that he wouldn't get their votes unless he took on their positions. Of course, some of us were saying this during the election, but few in the antiwar movement were listening. They thought that supporting Nader could tilt the election in favor of Bush. They were wrong. What they didn't realize was that by curbing their own important antiwar convictions, they were making Kerry unaccountable. They were making Kerry worse than he already was. By not opposing his Iraq position, they helped tilt the election to Bush.
Remember how Kerry just couldn't get anything right? He was constantly in flux. That's why more people were mobilized against Bush than for Kerry. If we learned anything from 2004, we should realize that hatred of an incumbent is not enough to elect a challenger. Had the antiwar movement mobilized behind an antiwar candidate, despite who he or she was, and despite the alleged consequences – Kerry would have felt tremendous pressure to differentiate himself from the Bush agenda, and particularly Bush's position on Iraq. But Kerry couldn't do it. Nobody was pressuring him. So he wavered, collapsed, and lost a monumental election. In the end it wasn't just the election that was lost, the soul of the antiwar movement was lost too.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zeese.php?articleid=6270
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