(excerpts from links below — written in 2005)
Given a choice between an erstaz Jacksonianism and the real thing, I believe that many Americans would prefer the real thing. But given a choice between ersatz Jacksonianism and frank Hamiltonianism, it's no contest; they'll take the ersatz friend over the open enemy any time. In this respect, of course, Red Staters are very much like their Blue State counterparts, who embrace those false friends, the Democrats, in fear of the open enemy, the Republicans. Speaking of false friends, of course, brings us back to those Blues in Red's clothing, those Aunt Pollys trying to cuss and drink like Pap, the Triangulators: the DLC and its entourage of satellite organizations, the he-Clintons and she-Clintons, the Joe Liebermans. The faux Jacksonians of the Republican party are what we might call first-order con men, or hypocrites simpliciter; they're errand boys for corporate power and greed, masquerading as advocates for the Little Guy. Their form of dishonesty is comparatvely straightforward.
The dishonesty of the triangulators is of a far more complex and exotic kind. They are second- or even third-order con men: grifters of one kind posing as grifters of another kind; degenerate liberals posing as hypocritical corporate populists. Or perhaps it's the other way around; in such a well-stirred and long-simmered stew of dishonesty, it becomes difficult to distinguish the ingredients.
The Republicans have a comparatively simple role to play in the American political comedy, and they play it with a certain amount of conviction and plausibility. By contrast, the triangulation game is an exceptionally complex and involuted sting -- a design so intricate that it can't possibly ever work right. The triangulator role is so subtly conceived that it's unplayable -- the hapless actor cast in this part can't help giving off a ripe stench of slipperiness, contrivance, and chronic bad faith. His task is to tell two obviously contradictory lies to two different audiences, while both audiences are simultaneously present. He has to tell the liberals that he's really, basically, a "progressive" like them, and at the same time he has to tell the disgruntled Jacksonians that he endorses their resentments. Compared to the Democrats, no wonder the Republicans look comparatively straightforward and honest -- which is, perhaps, the Democrats' greatest service, among many services, to the triumphal march of reaction. The Democrat is such an obvious gallows-bird that the Republican by contrast seems like a straight shooter.
It would be a great deal easier for the American people to see through the Republican and his false populism, if it weren't for the Democrat on the same stage, looking so deeply and manifestly fraudulent, so hang-dog, sidelong, slinking and serpentine, so embroiled in multiple simultaneous cons that he can't remember himself which lie he's telling to whom at any given moment.”
There are a number of sort-of leftish "community" web sites -- perhaps the best known is www.dailykos.com. A visit to one of these is depressing but instructive. There are literally thousands of mostly-young people burning up a huge amount of time on these sites, thinking and arguing and analyzing -- about getting Democrats elected, Democrats whom most of the participants in these discussions frankly consider unsatisfactory. It's painful to watch these always well-meaning, and often ingenious and well-informed young folks trussing up their thinking in the suffocating straitjacket of ward-heeler calculation. It's as if they were all trying to turn themselves into James Carville.
No doubt they think this is the best way to advance the causes that are dear to their heart. But what a disastrous mistake. They'd be better off wheat-pasting homemade flyers on lampposts, organizing twenty-person demonstrations at the local shopping mall, or trying to upset the two-party Frick-and-Frack applecart by building up some spoiler third party. Any of these activities would be an infinitely better use of their time than nattering about the relative merits of two cookie-cutter Democrats contending for a House seat somewhere.
The Daily Koses, the MoveOn.orgs, the Radio Americas, have anesthetized a whole generation of potential activists. The oxygen that should go into building up activist culture has been sucked right out of the atmosphere by these bloated, fungoid excrescences of the Democratic Party.
An old friend of mine refers to the Democratic Party as the "activists' graveyard," which is not only funny but profoundly true. It's only half the story, though. The Democratic Party is not only a necropolis where activists decay into bureaucrats; it's also a toxic growth poisoning the soil where activism grows -- the crabgrass or milfoil that crowds out all the other species and devours all the nutrients. It is not merely an alternative to activism; it is the enemy of activism, and thus the enemy of any politics worthy of the name -- by which I mean politics that goes beyond an empty, meaningless rivalry between two white-collar street gangs for the spoils of office.