The Guardian (London) Tuesday November 12, 2002
by George Monbiot
THE RESCUE PARTIES
Far from handing elections to the right, protest votes galvanise major
parties into action
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How many political parties can dance on the head of a pin? The answer,
it seems, is one. In Britain and the US, the opposition parties are
beginning to discover that there simply isn't room for both them and
their rivals on the narrow political platforms they have chosen to
contest. Without enough space to shift their feet, they are being
pushed ever closer to the edge of oblivion.
While the Conservatives are left with no choice but to steal back the
clothes New Labour stole from them, the Democrats' refusal to step off
the pinhead and find another platform is, at first sight, mysterious.
It is plainly not a response to the demands of the electorate: indeed,
they seem to be wildly out of touch with some of its main concerns.
The tens of millions of US voters opposed to a war with Iraq were,
until he died in a mysterious plane crash two weeks ago, represented
by just one senator, Paul Wellstone. A survey in July suggested that
76% of American voters would like to see corporations forced to reduce
their carbon dioxide emissions, while another poll, in June, found
that 67% of the electorate believed that energy conservation, fuel
efficiency and the development of solar technology were the best means
of solving the impending US energy crisis.
Yet Democratic congressmen have helped the Republicans to obstruct
global efforts to tackle climate change. The Democrats have failed to
respond decisively to the widespread public anger about tax cuts for
the super rich, corporate corruption and the privatisation of state
pensions.
It is true that Bush was assisted by the voters' tendency, when faced
with an external threat, to cling to their government. But the
Democrats, as even they now acknowledge, are largely to blame for
their own destruction in last week's mid-term elections. As party
strategist James Carville lamented, "we've got to just stand for
something. No one made the case."
Faced with a choice between two ugly parties, the electorate, quite
rationally, stayed at home. In the US, as in Britain, young voters
have all but abandoned party politics. Even in the presidential
elections two years ago, only 17% of 18-29 year olds turned out. Yet
young people, as the crowds gathering in Florence last week reminded
us, are perhaps more politically active today than they have ever
been. It's just that very few mainstream political parties, anywhere
on earth, are appealing to them. So why, when a low turnout hurts the
Democrats, and they desperately need to recapture the youth vote, have
they continued to follow the Republicans towards the right?
While political choice in many other nations is restricted by the
threat of capital flight, the US (because the dollar is both the
global reserve currency and the haven of last resort for speculative
capital) has little to fear from the markets. Indeed, as America slips
into recession, a policy of social spending and radical
interventionism would probably be supported by by the banks.
Campaign finance and the power of the media are more plausible
explanations. The big money and the big media conglomerates are always
much further to the right than the people, for the simple reason that
what is good for billionaires and corporations tends to be bad for
everyone else. In last week's elections, the Republicans and Democrats
spent, between them, a record $1bn. Without money, you can't
advertise, and without advertising you can't contest the increasingly
vituperative attacks by your opponents.
But, by itself, this is an inadequate account of the Democrats'
disengagement with the voters. It does not explain, for example, why -
despite deep public concern about corporate corruption - the party has
become even more pro-corporate than it was before the presidential
elections two years ago. There is another factor at work, whose impact
has been either disregarded or comprehensively misunderstood.
What the Democrats lacked in last week's elections was the danger of a
countervailing force. There was no threat to their left flank grave
enough to distract them from their obsessive pursuit of the corporate
buck. There was, in other words, no sufficiently focused fear of the
electorate. The Democrats lost the mid-term elections because the
Greens did not rattle their cage.
The Green party, led by Ralph Nader, is widely reviled by liberals in
the US for "handing the presidency to Bush". The 2.7% it won in the
presidential election is said to have deprived the Democrats of power.
Nader, as a result, is now held responsible for everything from the
bombing of Afghanistan to the logging of old-growth forest. But his
critics are wrong, on two counts.
The first is that Bush did not win the presidential election. Al Gore
did, though as we know he lost the subsequent power struggle. The
second is that the Democrats won only because Nader forced them to
win. In the last few weeks before the presidential election, Gore,
alarmed by Nader's popularity, turned sharply to the left, promoting a
series of green and progressive policies which had previously been
ignored. The result was that the Democrats rose significantly in the
opinion polls. Had Nader not frightened them, Gore may well have lost.
Had Nader frightened them a little more, Gore may have won with
sufficient conviction to prevent Bush's bureaucratic coup. Nader
dragged the Democrats back to the electorate.
In last week's elections, by contrast, the Greens were not perceived
to be a major threat, partly because they have become the scapegoats
for the presidential election. The Democrats, unmolested by the
prospect of political choice, remained free to engage in their deadly
dance with the Republicans around the corporate dollar. The result -
as they now acknowledge - is that they lost touch with their core
vote.
If you doubt that third parties force their bigger rivals to give the
voters what they want, take a look at the Barnett formula. This is the
arrangement, devised by the Labour government in 1978, for
distributing money to the different parts of Britain. As even Joel
Barnett, who invented it, now concedes, the formula is "grossly
unfair".
Scotland and Wales are given far more public money than the poorest
English regions. The people of the north-east, for example, are on
average 13% poorer than the people of Scotland, but they each receive
20% less government spending. The reason is straightforward: in
Scotland and Wales, Labour's vote is threatened by the Scottish
National party and Plaid Cymru, while the voters of north-east England
love their party not wisely but too well. Their failure to extend
their own political options permits the government to walk all over
them.
A vote for a third political party, even one which has no chance of
being elected, could, far from being wasted, be the most powerful vote
you can cast. It is arguably the only force which could drag the
bigger parties apart, oblige "progressive" politicians to implement
progressive policies and enhance the scope of mainstream democratic
choice. Ralph Nader, as the mid-term elections show, did not sink the
Democrats; he rescued them. The tragedy of American politics is that
they were too blinkered to see it.
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page created 17 Nov 2002