Asks If The Democrats Can Salvage Anything From The Conservative Catastrophe And Visits A Convention Of Former Socialists

...The age of market extremism, as Kevin Phillips has termed it, is shuddering to a halt, undone, as in all its previous incarnations, by its own excesses...

...With Bush now seeking congressional blessing for a move on Baghdad, silence is no longer an option for Democrats...

...The question is, how much can labor get for its money...

...Berman praised the Socialist International in 1889 for laying out the civil and social rights that the socialist parties and union movements of the West then actualized during the subsequent century...

...then Newt Gingrich, then Baby Bush—that's a full quartercentury that American liberalism has spent on the defensive, fighting to preserve a program here, stop a privatization there...

...The Sarbanes bill was really national-emergency legislation, the equivalent of the depositor-security laws passed in the first week of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, when a nationwide depositor panic had closed every bank in the land...

...And when we look to the domestic left's response to the corporate scandals of the past half-year, we find no more grounds for encouragement...

...Surely, however, that is not a movement that the self-marginalizing antiglobalization forces that have been in decline since Seattle are capable of building...

...So the shift in U.S...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is editor-at-large of the American Prospect...

...Sensing they can win at the polls so long as voters have economic issues uppermost in mind, they spent the summer content to let the two generations of Bush family retainers duke out the Iraq question all by themselves...

...14 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 COMMENTS & OPINIONS WHAT WAS THIS...

...But, wait, also speaking were the New Yorker's Rik Hertzberg and Dissent's own Paul Berman: Harrington-Howe (not Shachtman) socialists...

...It gets worse...

...By a stupefying margin of 67 percent to 4 percent, the public believes big business has too much influence over the GOP rather than too little...

...ALTHOUGH DEMOCRATS may not yet be committed to the substance of populism (and we're talking a suburban, new-age populism here), they are certainly committed to the politics of populism...

...just 6 percent said they had "quite a lot" of confidence in big business...

...To what degree Democrats are inclined, and liberals able, to use this change in the zeitgeist to alter the American agenda is by no means clear...

...The folly of their comrades was cause for sneering and some venomous mirth...

...If Rove is counting on Iraq to change this fall's discussion, he also has a succession of niche strategies to move discrete groups of voters from the Democrats' column to the Republicans...

...These things require Democratic victories this November and two years hence—entirely plausible prospects...

...Besides fishing for Latinos, he has twice reached into the Democrats' territory, trying to poach teamsters with the allure of Arctic drilling and steelworkers by imposing steel quotas...

...Now, while there's time to get congressional Democrats on record against going to war against Hussein...

...when the market went into free fall, even conservative Republicans were compelled to vote yes...

...Both directed their fire at nineteenth-century utopian Robert Owen, though Kirkpatrick's main target was Socrates, a proto-totalitarian with living habits worthy of a San Francisco Democrat (her gay-baiting characterization of the mideighties Democratic Party...

...You can probably find more than 4 percent of the public who believe the world is run by Wayne Newton...

...Fun, as I said, for the whole family...

...What really moved the Sarbanes bill was a classic Wall Street panic...

...But Rove couldn't let the immigration deal just drop...

...One's freedom of maneuver in the middle of a landslide is limited...

...So steeply has the playing field tilted toward capital and away from labor that unions have leverage in this battle not as workers, who could withhold their labor, but as investors, who could challenge the board...

...And yet, it's not 1930 or 1932, years of economic desperation and Democratic triumph...

...Already, increased black and Latino voter registration threatens the GOP with the loss of a Senate seat in Texas this November...

...And indeed, it wasn't Kemble's and Feldman's SD buddies, but Berman and Hertzberg who came to social democracy's rescue...

...The Movement Ponders In the coming months, the prospect of a war of the kind that the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal has been promoting in Iraq may evoke a broader, more mainstream antiwar movement than the nation has seen in a very long time...

...You can't do all that much with a membership that's dwindled to 13 percent of the workforce, but with three trillion dollars in pension funds, you're in the game...

...The numbers were clear and alarming: Either Bush boosted his Latino backing by 10 percent, and the Republicans by more than 10 percent, or the Sunbelt—the stronghold of the modern GOP—would be lost...

...It's an ambitious agenda, made possible solely by the three trillion dollars in union-controlled pension funds...

...Corporate reform is important, but not, for unions, an end in itself...

...As with corporate reform, the looming war on Iraq has been an issue on which the Democrats have been careful not to over commit themselves...

...The Democrats Move Just Enough The Democrats, it's already apparent, are scarcely more prepared for this change in the political weather than the Republicans are...

...All the cousins had their own interpretations of the clan's rocky history, while father told son that if there was a utopian impulse to be feared, it was that messianic laissez-faire nonsense he must have picked up once he'd left home...

...Music by Ron Radosh...

...Do they even have an offensive playbook...

...they want to eliminate stock options altogether...

...Senate liberals such as Jon Corzine, Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone and Paul Sarbanes have used the moment to promote meaningful reforms—most prominently, Sarbanes's clean-up of the accounting industry...

...Many of these SDers hadn't been social democrats for decades...

...running for president without mega-funding from business must seem daunting beyond words...

...Then they plunge to earth...

...they want workers to elect the trustees of their retirement funds...

...After last year's attacks, everything changed...

...They just hope that the public is on to the Democrats, too...

...September 11 derailed, for now, at least, his grand vision of creating a guestworker, neo-bracero program for new immigrants from Mexico in return for legalizing the undocumented Mexican immigrants already here...

...The shift in public opinion on big business and regulation in the past several months has been stunning...

...But because the Democrats already poll so much better than the Republicans on the question of which party will better protect ordinary Americans, the political imperative of further safeguarding the system from abuse may not have struck Daschle as all that imperative after all, especially after the Democrats' mega-funders in high tech told Daschle that stock options were the holy of holies in Silicon Valley...

...I'd been invited to some Washington think tank for a May Day symposium on socialism, which also seemed to be a reunion of the old Shachtman-Meany-Kirkland Social Democrats USA...

...Yes, the number of contestable districts is small...

...Those are the real pay-offs that workers need...

...Both laws were intended, by Republicans and Democrats alike, less to challenge American finance than to save it...

...What he bought was the birth of industrial unionism in America...

...Behind these reversals is a crisis of faith in actual existing capitalism...

...THIS LATINO strategy is the most important element of Rove's overall program to expand the Republican coalition beyond economic and social conservatives, business, and five Supreme Court justices...

...But if the market continues to slide, the recession rears up, and Republican numbers keep tanking, it will take more than the gerrymanderer's art to keep Tom DeLay in control of the House...

...It was twenty-four years ago, with the passage of the tax-cutting Proposition 13 in California, that the war on government and the ascendancy of laissez-faire really began...

...They require some dreaming and some planning, some organizing and some rage...

...And that done, Manny let the reader know that his own life, and that of Josh's mother, would be impossible today absent the very sort of anti-market reforms— Medicare, rent-controlled apartments—for which they'd worked while Josh was still a pisher and toward which he sounded at best ambivalent today...

...Throughout the summer, as the public turned on business and the GOP, as Democrats pushed for some major financial reforms and eviscerated others, as Republicans groped for ways to hold on to the House, the liberals and the left stood by with open-mouthed amazement...

...A party that had criticized Bush for not pursuing an IsraeliPalestinian accord stood silent at the mention of a war that could detonate an already exploding Middle East...

...What strange error had led the planners to invite a former executive committee member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee such as I to their fish-fry...

...The third is the realization that the Republican Party—in both the legislative and executive branch—cares more about big business than it does about ordinary Americans...

...Now, while an otherwise not very encouraging election day looms...

...For the first twenty months of the Bush presidency, the threat posed to the United States and its allies by Saddam Hussein's ability to deploy and develop weapons of mass destruction was such that it did not require immediate action...

...But neither has the administration clearly laid a trap for Democratic members...

...Democrat Carl Levin's bill requiring the Federal Accounting Standards Board to consider mandating such expensing was tabled to the legislative gulag where bills unwelcome to the leadership are routinely "disappeared...

...But the current crisis of faith has three other dimensions that we haven't seen since 1929 and its immediate aftermath...

...Nothing so befuddles as a sudden expansion of the limits of the possible, and are liberals ever befuddled...

...From the viewpoint of Bush 12 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 political consigliore Karl Rove, a better time for beating war drums and threatening Saddam Hussein is unimaginable...

...For that matter, respondents opposed the privatization of Social Security by 55 percent to 41 percent, whereas just last December they were evenly split...

...hopeful that the public doesn't make too much of the fact that the Democrats are themselves thick as thieves with a distinctly smaller number of CEOs (the cool ones from high tech), the Democrats take to the field in the fall optimistic that they'll expand their margin in the Senate and may just retake the House...

...This was a bit much for the vintage Norman Thomas socialists in the crowd, and for none more so than an old social democrat, who as head of the Jewish Labor Committee had been a close ally of the MeanyKirkland wing of labor...

...Can labor amass enough boardroom clout to get major corporations to abandon their rabid opposition to organizing drives...

...Many of these proposals emerge directly from the multitude of shareholder challenges that union pension funds, under the coordination of the Federation, have waged against corporate management...

...Its leaders want workers to get first dibs on the assets of miscreant companies gone belly-up...

...Both Harringtonians spoke of the roots and achievements of actual, existing social democracy...

...At minimum, there's enough public skepticism over the COMMENTS & OPINIONS administration's Iraq policy that the Democrats should be able to chart any number of alternative courses—international weapons inspection, say, backed by the threat of broad international force—without suffering grave political consequences...

...In 1936, John L. Lewis scraped up five hundred thousand dollars from the Mineworkers treasury—real money in those days—and handed it over to Franklin D. Roosevelt's re-election campaign...

...The Public Moves By midsummer, all the polls were reporting a sea change in the public's view of the political economy...

...The Teamsters don't seem to need much wooing so long as they think the administration may end the federal monitoring of their union...

...blanket legalization seemed to go against everything else the administration was saying and doing...

...Americans have long known that the GOP is the party of business, of course, but now they are stewing about it...

...Republican John McCain's bill requiring the expensing of options was unceremoniously liquidated...

...It's the annual shareholder meeting...

...But now is the time that debating and forcing a congressional vote on an invasion of Iraq must proceed...

...Clearly, this was not the case for convener Penn Kemble or American Federation of Teachers president Sandy Feldman, both of whom exuded a more catholic sense of camaraderie and who seized a middle ground— gainsaying nothing of the SDs' cold war zealotry, but rejecting the laissez-faire lunacy many of their onetime comrades now espouse...

...Seniors always constitute a bigger share of the electorate in low-turnout midterm elections than in less-low-turnout presidential elections...

...As I write in early September, the pending hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will likely pose most of the necessary questions about the shape of post-Saddam Iraq and the nature of our commitment to that nation, about the cost to the war on terrorism if we alienate our allies in an Iraqi invasion, about the other upheavals that may roil the Middle East in the wake of such a war, and the myriad other concerns that this strange war raises...

...the American people have soured on the dominant ideology of the past quarter-century...

...But with Daschle's backing, the bill picked up enough Democratic support in both houses to become law...

...That didn't mean, of course, that their colleagues were as disenthralled as they with the magic of free markets...

...But they can't escape their support for privatizing Social Security, which looks increasingly like the biggest glass jaw in recent electoral history...

...Reunion" seemed a bit of an overstatement, since, when the day came, a number of attendees from both traditions were united mainly in the belief that it was those other guys who had been wrong then and were wrong now...

...So the Sarbanes-Oxley bill snaked through the Congress, and precious few liberal groups could come up with a more ambitious agenda for the Democrats (which sure made it easier for the Democrats to stop right there and check with their money guys to see where it was safe to go next...

...All major market I 0 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 sell-offs, of course, stem from crises of faith: investors stop believing in the future of the stocks they've purchased, awakening—often, in a cold sweat—to the realization that their equities are impossibly overvalued...

...The second is the realization that the key players in the system— CEOs, CFOs, corporate directors, accounting firms, and stock analysts—have all been complicit in the cooking...

...Just one day after the House ratified the Sarbanes-Oxley Act with a mere three votes in opposition, the bill reinstating the president's fast-track trade authority was sprung, unheralded, from an all-night conference committee and within twenty-four hours was on its way to W.'s desk...

...It's not that Daschle fails to grasp the political advantage that will accrue to the party that champions investors and workers against nefarious CEOs, as his fast-tracking of the Sarbanes bill makes abundantly clear...

...Only one group has come forward with a program and a plan: labor...

...And so as attendees entered the hall, there was Josh Muravchik's father, Manny, eighty-five-years-old, breathing through oxygen tubes, handing out his own two-page Xeroxed affirmation of socialism...

...Speakers included some erstwhile SD stalwarts (Josh Muravchik, Penn Kemble, and Sandy Feldman) and battle queens of yore (Jeanne Kirkpatrick...

...Muravchik and Kirkpatrick would have none of it...

...The first is the realization that the numbers on which investors base their decisions—the audited statements of profits and income that corporations release—have been cooked...

...then Clinton, who came to power as both freemarketeer and bane of the right...

...The agenda dearth came complete with an activism deficit: hardly anyone was taking it to the streets...

...That's what progressives should be pushing for now—the reinvention of workers' rights, regulated capitalism, public provision, and social responsibility...

...Since midsummer, the AFL-CIO has been promoting serious corporate and financial reform...

...What he bought was Roosevelt's effectively pro-union neutrality (that is, FDR didn't send in the army) during the month-long sit-in the auto workers waged against General Motors later that winter...

...That the administration has chosen this fall as the time to make its case for invading Iraq seems un-coincidental...

...The great Democratic victories of those years were largely the result of the collapse of the "real economy" on a scale unimaginable today...

...Like Wile E. Coyote, they can run through mid-air until they notice there is nothing beneath them...

...It began with expressions of pride in his son's new book, Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Josh's take-down of the socialist experience...

...Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who shepherded the Sarbanes bill through the upper house, is the very same Tom Daschle who, a few days later and in concert with his colleagues in the Democratic leadership, killed two attempts to curtail CEOs' chronic abuse of stock options...

...But the world has changed, and suddenly, these things are possible...

...You think your mother and I could survive in your perfect world, Mr...

...Then came Ronald Reagan and Papa Bush...

...confident that the public knows that the Republicans and CEOs are thick as thieves...

...July was the cruelest month for Republicans who read the network polling: they found that 50 percent of Americans believe that George W. Bush sides with corporations over just plain folks (37 percent believe the opposite), and that by a 58 percent-to-29 percent margin, Americans believe that the Republicans are more interested in protecting big business than they are in protecting them...

...Worst of all, from Republicans' perspective, the number of Americans who thought the nation had "seriously gotten off on the wrong track" leaped from 39 perCOMMENTS & OPINIONS cent at the beginning of July to 56 percent at its end...

...Consider the numbers from a succession of polls taken for the networks and major newspapers in June, July, and early August: a total of 67 percent of Americans believed that most corporate executives were dishonest...

...Ready or not, however, here comes their big chance...

...The White House has so mishandled the case for taking out Saddam all by ourselves that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose an invasion without significant international support, and there is anxiety, too, over the notion of going to war without a precipitating cause...

...Add to that the fact that the public is on to them, and Republican members of Congress are quietly terrified...

...But this kind of performance would take more guts than the Democrats have shown in the corporate reform wars...

...Socialism, they countered, had been so rooted in class struggle, so utopian in vision, that it was complicit in the rise of all modern totalitarianisms...

...Muravchik attacked democratic socialism for impeding freedom-maximizing markets...

...There's no time or political space for Rove to work a deal before this year's election, but this is a task he'll surely take up again in 2003...

...The challenge before Democrats in these hearings and this autumn's discussions is to make the doctrine of preemptive war as unpopular in domestic politics as it is destabilizing in international politics...

...for some, the group had been a halfway house on their journey from Leon Trotsky to Oliver North...

...But if the economy grows grimmer, and if Bush's stewardship looks as inadequate as it actually is, steelworkers and teamsters won't stray far from the Democratic fold this year...

...And damned if the left knew what to do about it...

...A party that had been committed to nuclear de-proliferation fell mute before the prospect of preemptive nuclear war, and what that precedent could mean to nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan...

...It does not require immediate action now: the invasion the administration is planning is not set until this winter at the earliest...

...Now, while the state of the economy would otherwise dominate the headlines...

...Note, however, that the arena of struggle isn't the plant gate, where union power ain't what it used to be...

...In the Senate, all four presidential possibilities for 2004—Daschle, John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman— voted in favor...

...HAROLD MEYERSON DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 15...

...A double-dip recession later this year, however, seems well in the works...

...Karl Rove Plots Counter•Moves The wild card that the Republicans are throwing into play this election season is Iraq...

...they want to reform the election of corporate directors...

...Asked whether they thought regulations were necessary to protect consumers and the environment or an unnecessary hindrance to business, Americans came down on the side of regulations by a 52 percent-to-30 percent margin— a dramatic turnaround from the height of Gingrichism in January 1995, when they rejected regulations by 47 percent to 40 percent...

...Can unions enlist more pliable corporations in a long-term campaign to reform labor law so that it actually protects workers...

...Barring only Lieberman and the croaking chorus at the Democratic Leadership Council, who seem willfully oblivious to the changes in both the economy and public sentiment, the party is poised to wage its most populist-sounding campaign in decades...

...Capitalist Shill...

...Purists who insist that union power was never built by wielding a big checkbook should review the history of the CIO...

...It was the strategically savvy thing to do—geopolitically moronic, morally bankrupt, but strategically savvy...

...Fun for the whole family...

...Under certain conditions, niche strategies such as these really work...

...In short, the symposium turned out to be an old-time family reunion after all...

...Abruptly, it's time to send the offensive team on to the field, but after decades on defense, that's no easy feat: Do libDISSENT / Fall 2002 n 13 COMMENTS & OPINIONS erals still have an offensive team...

...This year, the Social Security and prescription drug issues were already working in the Democrats' favor among seniors, and that was before the market sell-off wreaked havoc with their retirement savings...

...doctrine to support for waging preemptive war went unnoted...

...Harping on these issues, on Enron and WorldCom and Halliburton...

...Then, suddenly, the spell that the market had cast over the public was lifted...

...Republicans have sought to blur the differences between the two parties on the Democrats' bread-and-butter issues, offering their own inadequate and unpassable bills on prescription drugs and pension reform, DISSENT / Fall 2002 n I I COMMENTS & OPINIONS and caving altogether on the Sarbanes bill that they'd avidly opposed...

...A record number of Democrats on both sides of the Rotunda opposed it...

...The borders had to be secured, immigrants had to be screened...

...In the House, Dick Gephardt voted No, but he cannot assume that this will win him the endorsement of the AFLCIO, which just two years ago backed freetrader Al Gore...