THANKS FOR the article exposing the weaknesses of the “good Democrats” (“What about the ‘good’ Democrats?”).
It is important to point out the role of even the most left-sounding Democratic politicians who win support to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. As the article discusses, Dennis Kucinich is probably the most notorious practitioner of this art—stressing a broad tent to reel in radicals. His abandonment of his supposed antiwar principles to support Kerry in 2004 should have been a wake-up call to anyone who thought fundamental change could come through the Democratic Party.
Often, people who vote for Democrats as a lesser evil to the Republicans wish and hope that the Democrats could be made into a consistently liberal party. They feel that the problem is conservative or moderate Democrats who dominate the party. However, this view is an illusion. Even a completely liberal Democratic Party would still be pro-imperialist.
Unfortunately, while being clearly in opposition to the Democratic Party, the article leaves some room for inadvertent support for those illusory sentiments. It talks about Senator Baldwin’s “holes in her impeccable liberal credentials” referring to her support of China bashing and Iran bashing. Later it says, “The CHEATS Act isn’t the only issue where Baldwin has been far from liberal.” This implies that liberalism is antiwar or is at least consistently less aggressive than conservatism.
In fact, liberalism is a resolutely pro-imperialist ideology. Liberals dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war in Vietnam was prosecuted by the Kennedy liberals. From the 1950s through the 1980s, “Cold War liberalism” dominated. The most admired liberal president, Franklin Roosevelt, established the basis of U.S. dominance through the Second World War. Obama increased U.S. troops in Afghanistan and drone attacks over what George W. Bush did!
As Sharon Smith wrote in the International Socialist Review:
[L]iberalism in the U.S. has never forged a principled opposition to U.S. imperialism, given its fealty to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, like its Republican counterpart, is a prowar party. The Democrats have never wavered from principled support for the aims of U.S. imperialism—whatever weak-kneed rhetoric they offer to the contrary. Indeed, most of the United States’ 20th century wars were initiated by Democrats, not Republicans.