Chilean election portends hope for US progressives

Chile's election Monday of socialist and former political prisoner Michelle Bachelet is being largely ignored by the U.S. press, but it is quite significant and hopeful on several fronts. The right in America probably wants to ignore it because they fear it signals a continuing leftward shift in Latin American politics following the election of Bolivian populist Evo Morales and the continued popularity of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, whose anti-American and anti-Bush rhetoric has drawn not only outrageous commentary from Pat Robertson, but a consistently hostile treatment by a majority of printed opinion in the states.

Whether one buys the usual denigration of Chavez as a Castro-style ideologue or not, Bachelet is clearly cut from a different cloth, and could serve as a unifying force in acknowledging the importance of free markets, at the same time as insisting on fairness to those of less means.

My favorite part of this story is the clear about-face from the brutal dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet from 1973-90. As a former victim of his brutality (Bachelet was imprisoned, then exiled to Argentina, and her father died in prison), the president elect, like Mandela did in South Africa, is speaking the language of reconciliation which is all too rare in politics:

Because I was the victim of hatred, I have dedicated my life to reverse that hatred and turn it into understanding, tolerance and -- why not say it -- into love.

American progressives would do well to study this victory as an antidote to the naysayers who contend that the Republican talking points of the last two decades have eliminated any chance of a true progressive being elected to the U.S. Presidency. Chile remains a quite socially conservative nation, and yet it has elected an agnostic, divorced, socialist woman as president. To me this shows that an electorate is able to think past simplistic formulas, and acknowledge forward thinking which may diverge from their own in the particulars. It is also worth noting that constitutional reforms have eliminated designated military senators, which should enable the new center-left majority in both houses to enact most of Bachelet's anticipated reforms. Maybe this can presage a development in the US in which a progressive's message can ring true to the electorate in spite of an association with a few particular ideas thought to be "out of the mainstream". The faulty equations which have gained currency here between liberalism and decadence, or progressivism and extremism, or conservative religiosity and morality won't be simple to break down, but they can be broken down because they are false.

Like Chile, America in her internal policies has a history of moderation, rather than fluctuating between violent extremes like so much of the world. The recent experience with Pinochet was an anomaly for Chile, sadly brought upon her with the complicity of the United States. Ariel Dorfman, in his essay The Black Hole speaks to his almost giddy anticipation in the wake of the election of Salvador Allende, before that dream was cut short by Pinochet's rise to power.

It was then, in the midst of that multitude of men and women I had never met and did not know, it was then, as I breathed in the air that they were breathing out, that I had an experience which I hesitate to call mystical but which was as near to a religious epiphany as I have had in my life.

Allende was making a brief speech, something about how we were now going to be the masters of our own destiny, the owners of our own land and the metals under the ground and the streets we walked through...

Times have changed, and Bachelet's brand of socialism is likely to more aggressively seek accommodation with capitalist partners, fending off any immediate backlash. Both Bachelet and her conservative opponent catered to the middle in this election, and the conservative opponent was even gracious in defeat.

What a dream that would be! Proponents of distinctly different policies competing democratically without stooping to demagoguery and ridicule. Oh wait! That's what we're supposed to have. Let's make it so!

The Neocon - Religious Right Alliance

Jack Whelan has captured some essential truths which I would really, really like every thinking liberal, moderate, and conservative to read before further participating in whatever version of the culture war that has captured their fancy. You can read the whole thing by going to his site and scrolling down to:

The Neocon Nightmare World
But because I want this to be seen, I am excerpting liberally:

Both Bloom and Lasch understood that a society pays a price when it values individualism and freedom above all other values. For both men the laissez faire in Liberalism creates a fragmented, atomized society. This is a problem for Lasch because it diminishes the possibility for human community life, destroys local traditions and neighborhoods, and creates a culture of narcissism, a culture of minimal selves--of lost souls who don't know who they are, a society of ungrounded people who are empty of any real interior life, and who are therefore weak and easy to manipulate.

In other words, Liberalism creates a vacuum in the life of a society where instead there should be a soul. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so the emptiness is filled with the crudest kinds of impulses. ... The problem lies with a society that is fragmented, because it is weak. An open, multicultural society in which every thing is equal, in which no value or cultural ideal is considered any better than any other, an anything-goes "different strokes for different folks" society loses any sense of cohesiveness and is very vulnerable to manipulation by a willful, well-disciplined minority that has no qualms about violently asserting its own values and suppressing any other value system as inferior and to be annihilated.

In other words, the easygoing, nonjudgmental laissez faire of Liberalism invites its own destruction by those whose attitudes are anything but laissez faire. ...

For the neocons, politics is thuggery, and you fight thuggery with thuggery, so the only thing that matters is whether the thugs you approve of are running things. The thuggery that we began to see assert itself on the right starting with Newt Gingrich, the impeachment of Clinton, through to the the bullying of Tom Delay in the House are all justified by Straussian theory. It's thuggery in the cause of the higher good. They really believe that. Liberalism must be destroyed or America will be destroyed by its enemies.

For the Straussians, following Carl Schmidt, politics is not the sphere of compromise and working things out, it's the realm of domination of the weak by the strong. For the neocons, politics is war. It's about controlling the political process or being controlled, annihilating or being annihilated. They understand power as the central truth, and every other value has value only insofar as it promotes power. And the neocon influence in the Republican party seems bent on proving their theory right by doing everything it can to discredit and destroy Liberal ideas and Liberal institutions. And so far, judging by the compliancy of the Democrats, they seem to have proven their case.

All of this has become so much clearer for me after reading Shadia Drury's Leo Strauss and the American Right -- particularly the virulence of the conservative attack on Liberalism which until recently I had naively dismissed as crackpot. Most normal people think of wingnuts like Limbaugh, Robertson, and Coulter as comical, barely sane troglodytes. These wingnuts, on the other hand, take the Liberals very seriously, and see them as a cancer that is destroying American society and making it spineless and weak, and as such all the more vulnerable to its enemies. They believe that Liberalism is destroying America, and they are totally committed to preventing that by destroying Liberalism. "Let the Liberals laugh at us," think the wingnuts. "We'll see how hard they laugh when eventually we put our boot on their throats."

The great virtue of the Liberal credo is its belief that a society can be built on truth, philosophy, and enlightened self-interest. But I also think that over the long haul that's not enough. Conservatives understand that a society needs myths, religion, and to stand for something worth dying for. Otherwise, as Drury points out, "it is little more than an animal farm." I would say that a postmodern America needs to find a way to integrate both the Liberal and Conservative credos. ...

Until reading Drury's book, I thought that the alliance between the intellectually sophisticated neocons and the simplistic religious-right extremists like Falwell and Robertson was a marriage of convenience engineered for short-term political gains. But Drury makes clear that the neocons believe that the religious right is essential for continued American dominance because it provides the requisite myths that justify American supremacy. ... ...

For the Straussians, if a society does not believe in itself as superior in every way to its enemies, it will be defeated by an enemy who is not intimidated and that believes itself superior. The neocons therefore have formed an alliance with the Christian Right not for political convenience, but because the Christian Right naively and fanatically accepts the myth of American superiority and of its special God-given role in world history. The neocons support the wingnut attitude that anyone who does not believe this myth is an America-hater and, as Ann Coulter puts it, is guilty of treason. There is no gray area. There is no room to criticize. It's my country right or wrong--any other attitude leads to inevitable defeat by another society that believes in itself more.

Sane people dismiss extremists like Coulter as comical crazies. I know that's been my attitude. But the very fact that her views have been legitimated by her ubiquitous presence in the media points to the drift of things in this country toward insanity. What should by now be clear to everyone is that the right is not just indulging in a lot of crazy talk. They are walking their talk. ...

Does that mean that anybody who wishes to oppose the neocons must resort to thuggery to defeat them? No. But I do not believe that secular liberalism has the resources to defeat it. Even if the Democrats win in the short run, the problem remains for the long run. We need a tough, principled, idealistic politics in the spirit of King, Mandela, Gandhi. These men were not nihilists. They were genuinely religious humanists who understood evil and knew how to fight against it on their own principled terms, not on the terms defined by the thugs.

The Straussians are convinced that we all live in a nightmare world and that there is no ultimate purpose or meaning to human existence... They believe that the masses have to be anesthetized and controlled with myths and religious fictions, but that the grownups have to run things, and the grownups understand that it's all about power, and that so long as the U.S. has the enormous power it now possesses, it had better use it or lose it.

This explains their gambit in Iraq--it was an opportunity to fill a geopolitical power vacuum with American power after the collapse of the Soviet sphere of influence in the Middle East. It's a gambit that has failed--the Muslims there are not Liberals, and they do not fold so easily. But I for one am worried about what they have up their sleeve now that their policies are being discredited by their failure. They will not walk away with their tail between their legs. They still believe they are right even if their tactics were ineffective. They will not be gracious in defeat.

And they are not going away. Wingnuttery in America will always be a problem so long as there is a vacuum in American society where there should be a soul. How to solve that problem in a sane, progressive way is for me the most pressing issue that confronts Americans in the 21st Century.

Cox Appointment Solidifies Corporatocracy

With the resignation of William Donaldson, the reform minded insider who Bush was shamed into appointing as head of the SEC in 2002 by the Harvey Pitt embarrassment, this administration will waste no time in filling the vacancy with an ideologue who answers first to corporate America. Christopher Cox will of course talk the talk of continuing reform, but his record is there for anyone to see. He played a major role in the mid-nineties in shielding corporations such as Enron from investor lawsuits. The resulting Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was dubbed by Ralph Nader as the "Swindlers & Crooks Protection Act."

While this appointment has not gotten a lot of attention in the blogosphere, there is a good article at Bloomberg about it, which quotes former Republican Congressman Vin Weber as saying,

I've known Chris Cox since he was elected to Congress in 1988 and I will be shocked if he's anything other than a very strong deregulator.

Donaldson is being rightly hailed by Democrats and Republicans alike as having been an effective reformer. A Republican himself, it was only because he frequently sided with the two Democrats at the SEC that many of those reforms came to pass. I think it's a pretty good bet that many of those same corporatocrats who are publicly praising Donaldson, are privately elated that his departure gives Bush this opening to shift the balance back to business as usual. Then they'll express surprise six years hence when a new round of Enron / WorldCom / Adelphia type scandals plague us anew.

Any Democratic opposition to Cox will be labeled as strictly ideological, and won't likely have any political legs, but the appointment will stand as yet another pillar in the corporatocracy that is further overtaking our government at an alarming rate. Cynicism that corporations own both parties anyway is quite understandable in these times, but the fact that Donaldson and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer have forced real reforms even in the Bush era, which have ameliorated real ill effects of corporate greed cause me to insist that exposing that greed at every opportunity to every possible audience remains our best weapon in fighting it.

I can't be bothered with strategizing about losing ground to create the necessary outrage to "bring on the revolution"; revolutions are messy and undesirable; we still have the machinery to bring about peaceful reform. It may take a few years now, but think about the mountains that Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, Dr. King, Lech Walesa, and Nelson Mandela stood at the foot of, and tell me we should either give up and submit to the will of the multi-nationals, or see violent revolution as the only solution. The corporations' money and power may be daunting, but corporate executives are still human beings, and I'm convinced that many want reforms that they are just not willing to publicly admit they want.

One more reflection seems relevant here. When Bush jokes, as he did on at least three occasions in his first term that a dictatorship would be easier, he is acknowledging that he is still subject to political considerations, so it's incumbent on both Democrats and more moderate Republicans to enforce those political conditions. Donaldson's tenure at the SEC and moderate Republican Christine Todd Whitman's tenure at the EPA are two examples of that reality keeping corporatism slightly in check. John Biggs almost appointment to lead the oversight board to check corporate abuses, though it did not happen is another example that Bush can be pushed to less than radical choices, even when corporate pressure succeeds in reversing them. These are small things, but they remain significant because even lip service to having checks and balances keep that conversation alive. We must keep that conversation alive. That conversation and many others.

Be Resolute and Strong, but also Kind and Fair

Anger is a motivating initial response when the sheer meanness or short-sightedness of a policy or appointment really hits home. And in our action and reaction it is right and just to speak the truth plainly, when we see fear exploited - to gut a noble program; or wage a war; or excuse inhumane behavior. But if our compassion is limited to only those who agree with us, then we will stand alone and be marginalized. Only when we demonstrate our caring for those whose fear is being exploited successfully, and even for those who are exploiting it, can we reach out and in time have the truth we see so clearly be seen more broadly, and eventually accepted as obvious in the mainstream culture.

Nelson Mandela after years in prison tells us in his essay, The Dark Years,

I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. ... For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

From The Impossible Will Take a Little While, edited by Paul Loeb.