"No difference between Democrats and Republicans": The Perils of Cliched Thinking

"No difference between Democrats and Republicans": The Perils of Cliched Thinking

I write this from the perspective of someone who's thoroughly disenchanted with American politics, and sees the need for a radical change if this country is going to fulfill the promise that it proclaims in it's own highest ideals, "government of the people, by the people, for the people," and "liberty and justice for all." Anyone reading this website is likely to agree that we're on an insane collision course as a society with fundamental problems created by a form of capitalism that has hijacked the whole political and social structure and is driving it out of the control and against the interests of most people everywhere.

Among those who share such a view, who could fail to be disgusted with the sorry cowards who predominate among the Democratic Party's office holders? They seem to exist for no other purpose than to derail real opposition to the current state of affairs into cooptation and dead-end, false, and destructive compromises.

Every cliche usually contains an important kernel of truth. The key to a cliche is extracting the kernel of truth without becoming fixated on its outer husk. Cliched thinking is a form of ideological rigidity. It's a reaction to frustration and disappointment that seeks to protect us. "Already been there, done that, have no interest in examining the question further," it says. Sometimes this is a reasonable reaction, and sometimes it's a state of counterproductive pessimism. When you're in the opposition and the odds seem stacked against you, optimism is oxygen, and pessimism is asphyxiation.

Cliched thinking obstructs and shortcircuits critical thinking that could help us towards a constructive approach. It erases from sight the distinctions that could be important and useful to us. When we are in the position of a minority opposition, we have to leverage our power as effectively as possible. If a cliche helps us to dismiss a distinction as too insignificant to bother with because we don't have enough clout to leverage it to our advantage, then it has proven useful. But when it shortcircuits a critical appraisal that would reveal a useful distinction that we COULD have leveraged to our advantage, than the cliche has been destructive.

The cliche "There's no difference between Democrats and Republicans" holds multiple kernels of truth. One sense in which it's true is that there are Democrats who are quite rightwing, and there are moderate Republicans who are well to the left of those rightwing Democrats. Thus, mere party affiliation is not a replacement for looking at the actual details of an individual's record, affiliations, and views. The fact that one candidate is a Democrat and another a Republican may not be a relevant distinction. Another sense in which it's true is that both parties have become so dependent for financing on similar groups of moneyed and elite interests that neither tends to represent anyone effectively other than the moneyed interests themselves.

So where are the useful distinctions? Bearing in mind that one must abide by the foregoing caveat of examining each individual on their own merits, there are useful distinctions to be made in the relative willingness of politicians from the two parties to entertain the initiatives of their respective constituents. There is a useful distinction to be made between a Democrat who is weak, ineffectual, a careerist, even utterly unprincipled, but who might be pressured into taking the right position, versus a rightwing ideologue who fervently supports the wrong position.

The cliche that there are no distinctions between the two major parties seems to be the incestuous cousin of another dubious idea, the idea that "things get better by getting worse." The logic goes as follows: If we elect the Democrats, they will stab us in the back because people will complacently believe that the situation has improved, when really we've only replaced one set of corrupt politicians with another, and won't raise the alarm when the new set start screwing us over. Whereas if the obviously bad guys win, everyone will be on their guard for the worst. It's a peculiar paradox that these two ideas, the "no difference" cliche and the "things get better by getting worse" theory seem to coexist and prosper among the same people, despite the seemingly obvious fact that the latter contradicts the very premise of the former, by acknowledging that at some level there is a significant distinction afterall.

The "things get better by getting worse" theory has a practical affinity with the "no difference" cliche, though, in that it offers a justification for accepting a worse result rather than hoping and working for a better one, by way of a twisted logic that labels the worse result "better" in a strange way. A truly dedicated proponent of the theory will neatly square the circle as follows "Both these guys are the same. One will stab you in the back. The other will stab you in the front. It's better to be stabbed in the front, because then you will see it coming." Of course, if this were really the situation, we wouldn't see either one as better than the other, rather, we'd try to avoid getting stabbed altogether. But there's a fundamental pessimism in the theory that says you CAN'T AVOID GETTING STABBED, one way or the other. Once again, pessimism is suspect and will be our undoing when we are up against what seem like insurmountable odds.

Let's suppose that it were really true, for example, that "One will try and stab you in the front, the other in the back." Suppose you were in such a dire situation? What's an optimistic way to view such a dire situation? Should you assume that you so lack resolve or the ability to come to grips with it that only by the situation becoming more obviously dire than it already is will you be goaded into action -- thus, accepting the "better to be stabbed in the front" logic? Or, knowing that both your opponents were out for blood, with eyes wide open would you try to exploit whatever aspects of the situation existed in your favor to avoid getting stabbed? The "better to get stabbed in the front" idea isn't a constructive approach. At best it dramatizes the severity of the situation, but it does nothing to offer a strategy to avoid doom, merely postponing such a strategy until things get more obviously dire.

In reality, the situation is rarely quite as stark as such a metaphor suggests. There is usually quite a lot of room to maneuver. The parties don't usually actively connive behind closed doors to pull a "good cop/bad cop" number, even if the outcomes sometimes might make such a notion plausible. But by assuming the worst and not working for tangible gains when they are possible, we make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The truth is usually closer to the opposite of the notion that "things get better by getting worse." As a matter of fact, there's another cliche which is far more justified by experience: "When it rains, it pours," and "Nothing succeeds like success (and nothing fails like failure)." Set yourself up for low expectations, and you will probably meet them. Having met them, that will probably diminish your expectations yet further, and so on.

In this context, it is useful to observe that the last major period of expansive, creative, progressive political energy in this country, the period of the late 1960s-1970s, was not the culmination of a period of stark, ever worsening repression, but rather, something close to the opposite. Notwithstanding the Red Scare of the 1950s, the young people of the 1960s were the heirs of a long period of middle class prosperity and progress in hardfought areas like civil rights. They were beneficiaries of the New Deal era which did much to strengthen and enlarge the clout of middle and working class people and create an extensive period of more widespread access to education (think "GI bill") and social protections that went a long way in making American society more equitable.

Young people of that era were probably the first generation in the history of the country who, while mostly not coming from the aristocracy of money, were nonetheless often privileged enough to think about more lofty considerations than basic survival, which they could take for granted. So their thoughts turned to things like social justice, peace, and ecology, "quality of life" instead of just "quantity." Likewise, the gains of the civil rights movement, in the courts and the legislature, in the 1950s and early '60s, laid the groundwork for rising expectations and fueled militant black political movements.

So much for "nothing succeeds like success." Now we are living the flip side of the coin, "nothing fails like failure." As the political situation in the country regresses, our expectations are diminished. Then things get even worse as a result.

The thing to bear in mind about politicians is that they usually don't act on their own initiative alone. They are usually driven by events and the public mood around them.

Consider: Was Richard Nixon "more progressive" than Bill Clinton because he proposed a plan for a guaranteed national income, whereas Clinton put forward a plan to "end welfare as we know it"? Or was it really the quality of the times that accounts for the difference? I maintain that it was mostly the quality of the times and the respective pressures that they were under. Given the ultraright mindset of Nixon, as revealed in such excruciating detail by his infamous tapes, no one would mistake Nixon for a closet liberal. No one should have any doubt that Nixon would have relished "ending welfare," or that, by temperament and personal inclination, he would have been much more enthusiastic about such an agenda than even Clinton was. But it was to his advantage to put forward a guaranteed national income proposal at at a time when his political opponents seemed to be filling their sails at his expense with it, just as Clinton coopted "welfare reform" from Republicans.

In the bigger picture, we can't expect to see really positive change, politically or otherwise, without a bigger change in the minds of people. Arguably, this is where the real work lies, and we can easily get too caught up in politics to notice this. Nonetheless, politics is not irrelevant here either, as the example of the New Deal and the civil rights struggle, culminating in the ferment of the 1960s and '70s, points out. So long as we are not wasting our time dissipating our energies where they really can't bear fruit, we should not dismiss the value of political engagement, even in electoral politics, and even within the two major parties.

The stereotypical "liberal" is driven by fear, and condemns third party and other more "insurrectionary" politics as "spoiling." The radical proclaims that "there's nothing to spoil when it's ALL rotten to the core." The truth is that they're both wrong. I supported Ralph Nader when he ran in 2000, because I rejected fear-based politics, and believed that progressives were showing enough energy and creativity at the time that, even in the face of a Republican victory, they could use the Nader campaign as a stepping stone to an even better organized and effective progressive political movement. I never agreed with Nader that "there's no difference" between the two parties, or that the difference was irrelevant. But I agreed that the difference was not relevant enough to waste a vote on the Democrats when there seemed to be a chance of real forward movement with Nader's campaign. Alas, I was disappointed, because Nader squandered the energy and enthusiasm he'd unleashed with his campaign by sheepishly laying low afterwards in the face of angry recriminations by hardcore Democrats, when he should instead have taken the lead in attacking the Bush junta and those Democrats who lay down before it and became its willing accomplices.

In retrospect, I was wrong about the progressive movement at the time, and wrong about Nader. We lacked the right candidate and the right analysis, and we suffered for it. What we needed was a candidate who would be truly fearless, who would set up a "shadow" government and keep the heat on BOTH the Democrats and Republicans long after the election. What if Nader had announced that he was going to form such a shadow government, and name cabinet secretaries for each of the branches of the executive? What if he had managed to put together a strong group of progressive visionaries to join this "shadow government," and with each Republican move, as they got more and more awful, and each cowardly Democratic retreat, he had held a press conference, explaining the decisions and positions that his parallel shadow government was taking? Nader could have galvanized opposition to the lawless thugs running this government now, and stiffened the resolve of the always unreliable and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.

Instead, Nader dropped out of sight for months, and the many, many good people who had worked on his campaign became demoralized and disillusioned. No one formulated any plan to deal with what quickly became the more and more obvious, abject and total surrender of the Congressional Democrats to a fraudulent, ultraright regime, starting from January 6, 2001 (the day Senate Democrats in joint session couldn't manage to muster even a single cosponsor to entertain the challenge put forward by a dozen members of the House to the fraudulent Florida electoral college). Anyone not utterly oblivious at that point should have seen what was coming, and seen the dire urgency of putting the Congresscritters' feet to the fire. But I watched in utter dismay while the people in DC who I protested the fraudulent annointment of this new emperor with went immediately on to spend most of their time campaigning against the closure of DC General Hospital. The fraudsters went from strength to strength, while the Democrats were their willing accomplices. But where were the radical and progressive voices giving them hell and making their lives miserable for it?

Where was the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, you ask? Ha! The real question for me is, where were the radicals and progressives when they should have been raising holy hell about this lack of difference? Once again, chalk it up to diminished expectations, I guess.

The problem with those of us on the radical side of progressive politics is that we are too scattershot, too overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, to ever come up with a coherent medium term program, and too thin on the ground to achieve much with the scattershot, nanosecond-attention-span tactics that we do tend to pursue. As a result, we really need to work, with mutual respect and commitment, with others, most of whom don't share our radical perspective, to develop a better approach. This means maintaining a positive outlook, and rethinking cliches like "there is no difference..." as well as morbid fears of compromising our ideological purity.