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How the Demos lost the White House in Seattle
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Dec. 8, 1999 |
My first thought, as I watched the news footage of scrambling crowds, shattering windows and clouds of tear gas, was "There goes the Democrats' hope to hold onto the White House next year." Aging liberals may remember the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago for the fascist tactics of Mayor Richard J. Daley and his police, but the riots in the street partly provoked by anti-war demonstrators cost the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, the election, and they sparked a national movement to the right whose effects can still be felt among the electorate. When law and order break down, it's liberalism that loses. The battle in Seattle forced a welcome if brief international consciousness on the mass TV audience, which has been preoccupied with domestic issues and celebrity scandals throughout this decade, an obliviousness barely dented by President Clinton's outrageous boutique bombings abroad. The protesters' success in hamstringing the WTO, which adjourned without reaching key agreements, will surely inspire more young people to social activism for a wealth of causes. I hope it's curtains for another style spawned in Seattle -- the apathy and whining asexuality of passive-aggressive grunge. The danger is that this nascent coalition of Democrat-led trade unions with environmental and labor equity groups will get stereotyped as left-loony. When post-adolescent anarchist goons pledge total destruction of the system or when dinosaur Marxists denounce capitalism as "evil" and call all property "crime" (caught on camera in Seattle), this promising movement doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of gaining popular support. Capitalism, in my view, is the best vehicle of social change. Free enterprise and free thought are inextricably and creatively intertwined. Over the past 200 years, capitalism has enormously advanced global prosperity, even if an unacceptable economic gap remains between the first and third worlds. Though you'd never know it from the snide rhetoric of cloistered liberal academics, modern feminism owes everything to capitalism, which gave women financial independence for the first time in history. On the other hand, capitalism is inherently Darwinian, and a just society must provide a safety net for the poor. While intrusion by government into the market should be as minimal as possible, it is ethically imperative to monitor working conditions, product safety and environmental integrity. My lifelong scriptural texts are William Blake's radical poems "The Chimney Sweeper" and "London" (discussed in my first book), which heartbreakingly dramatize the disparity between the powerful and the powerless in newly industrial, polluted England. Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.
Adjusting tariffs or formulating trade guidelines is a very difficult matter when emerging nations interpret U.S. demands as a usurpation of their sovereignty. We need a stronger "green" lobby that will fruitfully ally with its foreign counterparts. And we urgently need a broad-based, rigorously rational progressive party that will, without succumbing to outdated Marxist formulas, challenge the corruption of the major political parties by big money; critique the escalating power of multinational conglomerates; and condemn flagrant corporate greed (as in the looting of company profits through the inflated salaries of top executives). There is no stopping the high-tech transformation of the world economy -- except by Mother Nature, of course, with one of her standard cataclysms (a perennial Paglia prophecy). What is needed is massive educational reform -- such as the development of trade schools and vocational programs serving students of every age. The social convulsion of job losses because of migration of industry abroad cannot be wholly prevented by artificial government manipulation. At present, American primary education is failing to provide either knowledge or skills for anyone but those already set on a professional track by their affluent, upper-middle-class families. Don't look to Washington for help, since Congress is stalemated and the immediate political field seems bleak. Gov. Bush has yet to show presidential qualities, and his elementary communication skills are weak. Hillary Clinton's senatorial fantasy is sapping the Gore campaign by stealing P.R. wattage and keeping 20 years of Clinton scandals on the front burner. Al Gore continues to lose credibility through his own foolish choices and grating hamster-wheel freneticism. After the devastating revelations in the Nov. 20 New York Times about the leading advisory role played by his shallow 26-year-old daughter Karenna (Naomi Wolf's Ivy League pal), who can take Gore seriously? Shame on the superstructure of the Democratic Party for its cowardly decision, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in early 1998, not to force President Clinton to resign: Gore would have been elevated to the presidency at his peak of strength and prestige and would have grown into the job, guaranteeing Democratic control of the White House well into the next decade. Instead, we Democrats must watch the gruesome spectacle of Gore whittling himself down day by day as dope-on-a-rope Clinton bounces from screw-up to screw-up. Meanwhile, Bill Bradley, for whom I need a palpable reason to cast my Pennsylvania primary ballot, is still plodding along in a coma. Bradley's obliqueness is starting to look like petulance. A president needs more dynamism. If Bradley doesn't ratchet up soon, Bush will sweep to victory simply by reason of his raw, youthful, bulldog vitality. As for Sen. John McCain, whom the liberal media are busily over-promoting to sabotage Bush, I can't believe anyone takes him seriously as a candidate for high office. He belongs in military operations, not the Oval Office.
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