The Last Page
Junius
WHAT IS going on? The richest Americans are about to give themselves a big tax cut. The bigger the cut, the less money there will be for government programs that many less-than-rich Americans...
...Until we can construct a frame, politics for the left will continue to be a shameful series of surrenders...
...the Democrats are, for the moment at least, bereft of associational vitality...
...the net has simply been taken down, folded up, put away, like the flag at the end of the day...
...So why isn't there more opposition...
...Some residual feeling for poorer and weaker citizens survives among rank-andfile Democrats...
...they know what they want, and the certainty of their knowledge provides the internal discipline necessary for the pursuit of what they want...
...Politics is supposed to have, so we were always taught, a material base...
...Ordinary greed is at work here, but also ideology...
...for some of them it's not just that the safety net has holes...
...Yes, they have union support, which came close to carrying Gore to victory...
...Obviously it still does: the rich have material motives...
...Immediately upon coming into office, Bush II shut off all U.S...
...How was this accomplished...
...the Democrats plead for the support of their own members...
...Many Americans are at the end of their entitlements...
...But the rest of us seem to be...what...
...All sorts of militant associations feed into the GOP...
...Don't people still have nerve endings in their wallets...
...aid to clinics abroad that give counseling about or actually provide abortions...
...The National Rifle Association and its lobbyists are still around...
...The GOP has discovered solidarity and democratic centralism...
...It's that there is no political framework within which they can find one another and make sense of what they have to do...
...But the feeling isn't ideologically defined and reinforced...
...Don't the Democrats remember the gender gap...
...materially anesthetized...
...The Republicans, by contrast, have a doctrine...
...the Democrats are the party of sentiment and opportunism...
...Second, the Republicans have real grassroots strength in the provinces, organizational energy...
...the Democrats have media celebrities and the dingy remains of a few urban machines...
...So, why isn't anybody screaming...
...And if not that, then self-interest...
...Sympathy with third world women should have produced a fierce response...
...The bigger the cut, the less money there will be for government programs that many less-than-rich Americans need...
...The killings give no impetus to efforts to control the sale and use of guns...
...It's the economy, stupid...
...THERE IS A two-fold answer to all these questions...
...Where are the protests, the organized anger...
...JUNIUS 128 n DISSENT / Spring 2001...
...Obviously, this is what Bush would like to do at home, too...
...The people who want to do that are still around...
...A student takes one of his parent's guns, shoots up his high school, killing and wounding many of his fellows...
...Everyone is shocked...
...Why is no one outraged...
...Work safety rules established in the last weeks of the Clinton administration have been disestablished by a congressional majority that consists of all the Republicans and maybe 10 percent or 15 percent of the Democrats...
...the Democrats are weak and divided, a party of (as we used to say) renegades...
...Where is the feminist militancy of yesteryear...
...Like the Oakland in Gertrude Stein's cruel imagination, there's no there there...
...It's not that people don't have reasons to protest, argue, and organize...
...But, again, our local party of the left, because it has no ideology, also has no cadres...
...The economic downturn is starting to bring "welfare reform" home across America...
...Why not...
...But everyone has been shocked before...
...the help that was once available isn't there anymore...
...And between these two, among the people we call "the people," there is no agitation, discussion, movement...
...The Republican whips carry whips...
...The proposal of the new administration is designed to starve the government as well as to increase the income gap...
...they are still the local party of the left...
...First, in America today the Republicans are the party of conviction...
...This is a pocketbook issue...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
