Dump the Donkey? - Steve

Dump the Donkey? - Steve Perry is the editor of the Minneapolis City Pages, a sort of cut-rate Village Voice that combines some very thorough (if robustly biased) advocacy journalism with the sort of invincible left-wing slant that makes Molly Ivins look like Cal Thomas.

Perry reflects this, himself - an excellent editor, his politics give "loony left" a bad name.

This week's long-form Op-ed discusses reasons for giving up on the Democrat party. It's a longish piece, alternately fascinating and skull-thumpingly incongruous. For instance:

Since the mid-1980s there has been a steady dribble of social issues polls that have shown the American public standing considerably to the left of its elected officials. (There are polls that prove the converse, too; usually they are the ones that lard their queries with one overriding presumption: You don't want to pay higher taxes, do you?)

So many responses to that; what "social issues" polls? It'd seem to me that November 5 was the social issues poll we need to keep in mind. And Perry, good überliberal that he is, seems to think that the presumption that people want lower taxes is a distraction to the simple-minded voter.

Then there's this:

I am going to argue that the Democrats are not really a lesser evil, that their turn to Republican Lite in the past generation has been as cynical as it is deliberate. But for the moment let's take the lesser evil argument at face value and suppose that the courts and the human services bureaucracies do fare a little better (that is, erode more slowly) under Democrats. Is that "democracy" in any sense? Do you really think so little of your country and your citizenship as to accept that?

Catch that? "Democracy" is equated with a robust "Human Services Bureaucracy".

I'll let you draw your own conclusions. He goes on:

how does the rank-and-file react? Why don't the Democrats... If only the Democrats... If the Democrats were smart... Hold on right there. Let's dispense with the ridiculous, shopworn notion that the Democrats don't get it, that they are too dim or too timid to do the things that are evident to the rest of us: tack left, talk populist, stand up to Bush, push hot-button issues like corporate malfeasance, health care, and campaign finance reform.

Perry ignores the fact that the Dems tried their damnedest to stick Bush and the GOP with each of these issues. None of them stuck; most people see corporate ethics as a business ,not political, issue. Health Care is a cold button. Campaign Finance Reform is like a lead balloon - at the very least, nobody cares. At the most, the samizdat media (talk radio, the internet and the new balanced-to-right news outlets) have convinced enough people that it's really nothing more than elitist speech rationing dressed up in ill-fitting populist clothes. As far as failing to "tack to the left" - well, from Sacramento, Boise is east. From Steve Perry, the Democrat party is "Right".

They see these things as clearly as the rest of us, and they choose not to do any of them. Why? Money is the simple, vulgar answer, and the correct one. The matter of corporate crime, to take one example, is not seen by the national Democratic party as an opportunity to capitalize on Republican weakness and seize an upper hand; it is seen as a problem shared in common with Republicans--the problem of helping one's cash clients in a tough time.

"Seen as" a problem? No, Steve, Democrats benefitted just as much from corporate malfeasance as the GOP, and it's not a matter of perception!

...big money has not held all the cards in quite this way since the Gilded Age of robber barons like Morgan and Rockefeller. And in their day there was nothing approaching the staggering concentrations of media that exist now, which is to say there was not the opportunity to exclude so many voices and interests from public dialogue.

This could only come from someone who's spent his entire career in the "establishment" "alternative" media. I challenge any of Perry's supporters to show a time in our history when the flow of information has been more decentralized, both structurally and ideologically! There are robust alternatives on all sides of most issues (little as Perry thinks of them - being the "establishment" figure he is). Show me if you can an analogue in our history anything like the challenge the "alternative media" (and by that I mean different media as well as points of view) present to the "establishment" media that we have today.

There is so much more to talk about - I could fisk this piece for days. And maybe I will.

Read it and let me know what you think.

Posted by Mitch at November 27, 2002 01:52 PM