A few years ago I was cycling on the Maryland shore, near a place called Deale, and stopped at a rustic local dive called The Happy Harbor. It's a nice little "biker" bar (of the Harley sort), with a restaurant, portch, and some picnic tables, on a little bay. While sitting on the portch with some of my fellow cyclists I noticed a white-haired gentleman at the next table, who looked very familiar. I was sure I knew him from somewhere, but couldn't dial it in. After awhile I leaned over and asked where I might have known him. At that point he introduced himself as "John Anderson," and said he had once run for President. He then pointed to my rearview mirror (called a "Take-A-Look") which was still fixed to my glasses, and asked if I was handicapped. "Only in the sense that I have no eyes in the back of my head," I quipped.
Anyway, after the smart-ass remark we had a nice chat and he told me he had started an organization called The Center for Voting & Democracy, which interested me because I was writing my dissertation on the 1996 Elections. I later developed a modest relationship with the organization, and had a number of fruitful exchanges with its director, Rob Richey. I've even attended their gatherings and symposia, though the last time I was there was right after the Florida 2000 debacle. At that time I was amazed by the lethargy of Democratic operatives concerning the task of reforming the voting system. They were effectively sitting back and allowing the momentum to be carried by the Republicans. This irked me, at the time, because I viewed the window of opportunity as closing. But I recall walking away from that conference thinking that they'd probably try to launch an initiative around the time of the next Presidential election, and be surprised to find the chance had passed them by.
Today I just received an invitation for a two day conference from the Center for Voting and Democracy, billed as the:
CLAIM DEMOCRACY CONFERENCE, NOV. 21-23:
Securing, Enhancing and Exercising the Right to Vote
This "call to action" is endorsed by a list of organizations that includes, among others, ACORN, Common Cause, Friends of the Earth, Democracy Matters, and a host of similar groups with mostly left-oriented agendas. Some are more radical than others. The League of Women Voters, for instance, isn't usually thought of as an ideological organization. But what strikes me is that the list doesn't seem to contain a single organization that has a kind word about America's little pro-Democracy project in the Arab Middle East. And glancing through the agenda, which appears to be all about "enhancing the vote," "claiming democracy," and other reform-minded slogans, there isn't one single plenary, panel, speaker, or exhibit devoted to "expanding democracy" into autocratic nations that don't have it. "Reform" looks different from that end of the stick, apparently. Indeed, there's one session, chaired by Common Cause President Chellie Pingree, with the intriguing title "Is There a War on Democracy." But something tells me they won't be talking much about Al Qaeda, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and the Baathist Insurgency, or Ansar al-Islam. (Hat tip: Winds of Change)
Whenever I see a situation like this I think of a scene in Thieves where Marlo Thomas is climbing a ladder into her date's bedroom and complains: "Gee, you really make it hard to claim later this was an accident."
Jonah Goldberg has an excellent piece in NRO about this rather extraordinary discontinuity. Says Goldberg:
Rarely has the intellectual rot of liberalism been more evident. Both at home and abroad, the honorable tradition of liberalism — and there is one — has been hollowed out by its own appetite for power and vengeance. Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult to see how liberalism, at the national level, stands for anything but appetite — undirected, inarticulate, unprincipled, ravenous appetite. Truly it has become Bill Clinton's party. (Hat tip: Jane Galt)
Well I don't know if I'd go that far, but if there were a time when the Democratic Party and the "Progressives" owned the issue of Democracy, it has passed. It's too late to play that card. We now have a situation where a Republican Administration is attempting to establish a foothold for liberal democratic government, for the first time since the failure of the half-hearted British attempt, in the Arab Middle East, and it's being opposed by most of the people in this hollowed-out, compromised, and non-representative conference "claiming" Democracy as their exclusive project.
I'm currently working to establish a pro-Democracy Forum at my university, along the lines of Oxdem, that has an anti-terrorist/rescue-of-failed-states kind of agenda. It's a side of "pro-Democracy" that I don't see represented in this "Claim Democracy Conference." Indeed, it would be my guess that most of the participants are, quite unambiguously, opposed to Democracy where it counts, within the nations and societies that are governed by autocrats, tyrants and totalitarian regimes--or any place where the effort might involve a fight. Both for the sake of many of the concerns that the people attending these conferences surely have, and for the sake of the concerns that many in the "other pro-Democracy movement" have, there ought to be a consensus that makes partisan political posturing look downright amateurish.
I'm not sure how long these "little Democrats" can demure from the larger struggle and maintain credibility.
Posted by Demosophist at October 31, 2003 07:30 PM | TrackBack