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Democratic Loyalists May Bolt

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Gerald Horne is the author of "Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s" and, most recently, "Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham du Bois."

Some congressional Democrats already are salivating at the prospect of taking on the Republican Party in the 2002 midterm elections, even privately welcoming George W. Bush in the White House. The Senate will be evenly divided, possibly 50-50, and the GOP advantage in the House is small. Historically, the party in power loses seats in Congress, a pattern that may be amplified by an economy that increasingly shows signs of faltering.

Still, it would be unwise for Democrats to count votes before the elections are held. If November’s election results show anything, it is that two key Democratic constituencies--African Americans and the left--may have become restive, and there are hints that this may grow.

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 37 years ago, Malcolm X famously termed it a case of “chickens coming home to roost”--the endemic violence used to settle this continent was returning ill dividends

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Well, if the black nationalist were around today, he might be tempted to use the same phrase to describe the dilemma facing New Democrats, whose centrist philosophy dominates the party. In their quest for broader constituencies, these Democrats have distanced themselves from traditional Democratic special interests, such as African Americans. The draconian welfare-reform bill, the onerous crime bill, the “war on drugs” and the retreat from affirmative action carried out under the guise of “Mend it, don’t end it”--all were meant to signal that this was not your Pullman porter’s Democratic Party. That is why both Bill Clinton and Al Gore refused to campaign against Proposition 209, the 1996 California initiative that banned government-sponsored affirmative action.

At best, their capitulation to right-wing thinking on race may have marginally helped the Democratic Party. But was it worth the cost?

For example, the New Democrats’ tolerance for the war on drugs, which disproportionately targets minorities, may have come home to roost in Florida, where thousands of blacks were barred from voting because of previous felony convictions, many on simple drug-possession charges. In Florida, 31% of all black men cannot vote because of the state’s ban on felons. If Gore had received the votes of these erstwhile felons, he might have won Florida on the first count.

Furthermore, the most antiquated voting machines were disproportionately used in minority communities. Many of these machines didn’t register votes at the top of the ticket but did down-ballot, resulting in undervotes. Also on election day, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People noted reports of law-enforcement harassment of black voters, the refusal to provide interpreters for Haitian American voters and the turning away of black voters whose identification was challenged by canvassers. The racial atmosphere that tolerates such irregularities, if not outright discrimination, was created in part by the New Democrat philosophy that treats racism as history rather than as a chilling reality today.

There is no better representative of this attitude than the New Republic, the journal of opinion edited by Gore’s former teacher and good friend, Martin Peretz Jr. Self-described as the “in-flight journal of Air Force One,” TNR has excoriated the Washington Post’s affirmative-action policies, provided favorable coverage of the odious race-baiting tome “The Bell Curve,” by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, and routinely devotes space to articles denouncing such leading black intellectuals as Cornel West.

Intriguingly, although the Green Party’s Ralph Nader was commonly described as receiving next to no black support, in point of fact the African American community voted in higher proportion for his presidential candidacy than whites (Asian Americans and Latinos voted more heavily for Nader than either blacks or whites), and one of the chief backers of the Greens was West.

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True, blacks overwhelmingly supported Gore, though the vice president did not stir them as did Clinton. Yet, the caliber of black support for the Green Party cannot be ignored by Democrats. Not only did West back Nader, so did a leading black artist cum activist in the tradition of Paul Robeson: Danny Glover. So did a leading human-rights activist of this era, Randall Robinson, whose labors against apartheid have been applauded on two continents. So did the man who invented the concept of the “Rainbow Coalition” before Jesse Jackson adopted the phrase, Boston’s Mel King.

Moreover, West, Glover, Robinson and King are members of the left, a touchy subject for Democrats. The party did move belatedly to attract voters who took to the streets to protest the World Trade Organization. But the fact that 100,000 voters in Florida voted Green, after one measly campaign visit by Nader, suggests that it may take more than last-minute arm-twisting by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem to keep these voters in line in 2002.

The reason is that the Green-Democrat contest mirrors a larger rift between liberals and the left. These two political philosophies have never been that fond of each other, as battles over anti-communism during the Cold War attest. Martin Luther King Jr.’s reluctance to break with reputed communists despite intense pressure from his liberal allies is well-known. King eventually yielded, not least because of his fear of being demonized in the midst of the Cold War. But the Cold War is over, and old left-liberal tensions may again bubble to the surface.

The Nader-Gore battle was prefigured by other scrapes between liberals and the left, political forces that are often viewed--wrongly--as synonymous in the popular imagination. Recall, for example, the battle within liberal Pacifica Radio earlier this year, when Clinton appointee Mary Frances Berry, then chair of the Pacifica Foundation, was accused of censorship by striking journalists and contributors to Pacific Network News.

Liberal-left tensions show few signs of abating, and shouts for revenge against Nader for taking votes away from Gore are bound to exacerbate the situation. Similarly, New Democrats seem unwilling to alter their views on race.

Thus, Democratic expectations of victory at the polls in 2002 are premature, at best. African Americans, in particular, may realize that their long-standing loyalty to the Democratic Party has yet to yield them suitable dividends and that a better political home may be in a party to the left of the Democrats. *

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