Midnight plus 17 Minutes

Although Bush may yet be defeated, his winning of Florida is an astounding testimony to the horrific weakness of the Democratic Party. As a force for mobilizing the electorate to cast out an Administration that has been catastrophic to the interests of working Americans throughout the country (and even worse for people in the rest of the world), the Democrats are a disgrace, and almost certainly beyond any hope of reform. Rather than mounting a frontal challenge to the Republicans in a South it once took for granted, the Democratic ticket frittered away its time in the so-called "battleground" states. Kerry did everything he could to avoid the class issues that so clearly illustrate the real divide between the haves and have-nots and the ongoing war waged by corporate elites and their lackeys to be free of all accountability while saddling the rest of us with the cost of plutocracy and empire. What exactly was the point of putting John Edwards on the ticket if not to make some headway in the South? Now Edwards can sit and watch his Senate seat go to a Republican tonight.

Speaking of the Senate (and the House), the Republicans are doing a fine job of increasing their majority margins in both chambers as I write, further evidence of the decay of the Democrats as a force to be taken seriously. If there is any place in the national arena where bread-and-butter issues might be mustered to support a winning campaign, it is in the House of Representatives, yet here again the Democrats have fallen victim to their own corruption.

I have no illusions about the Democrats. In New Jersey especially, one would be a fool to ignore the party's ignoble record of crookedness and thuggery. For several years I attended the Socialist Scholars Conference and listened to the late Michael Harrington tell me we had no choice but to work within the Democratic Party if we wanted to effect meaningful change. I grew increasingly skeptical of this, even though I was always impressed with the force of Harrington's arguments (and even had the pleasure of sharing a beer with him in his room at a DSA conference in Slippery Rock, PA one year). Harrington died in 1989, and I've wondered since then whether he would have finally given up on the Democrats in the years that have followed. I'm inclined to think that Clinton's cruel "welfare reform" might have been the last straw for him.

In the interests of ousting Bush, I decided to adopt a "Popular Front" electoral strategy in the polling booth today and suspend my practice of casting votes for independent candidates, as I did in the last two presidential elections. Of course, my approach was based on opposition to Bush rather than support for Kerry. I realize many other forms of political action will be required to stop Bush's agenda (and, frankly, that of the national Democratic Party), but it seemed possible that the old-fashioned method might be enough to dispense with the man himself and to send a clear message to his successor that the war needs to end. So this year the Democrats had my vote...but where are they?

If the organizations that spent so much time denouncing Kerry's critics on the left had instead pressured the candidate to make some overtures to a progressive agenda, he may well have thumbed his nose at them and continued to cast his lot with the millionaires and corporate interests that have long funded the national Democrats. But at least that effort would have brought some clarity to all of us about the wisdom of working "within" the system. At best, it would have resulted in a larger electorate mobilized for real change instead of the tripe Kerry has been offering all along. The Democrats cannot blame Ralph Nader this year for their pathetic showing. For the rest of us, however, the issue is NOT how to salvage the Democrats as an electoral force but rather how to gain some ground in a class war that is growing uglier by the day and stop the bloody imperium. It's difficult to see how the Democrats factor into this strategy as anything other than an impediment.

Live to fight another day...but live!