Come back to the five-and-dime, Howard Dean, Howard Dean. Via Billmon, I came across David Corn's passionate screed in the Nation "dis-endorsing" Howard Dean, in the wake of Dean's decision to hand his campaign to the Gore-connected big-telecom lobbyist Roy Neel. I can understand Corn's disappointment:

For much of the past week, I listened to Dean repeatedly bemoan the influence of corporate lobbyists as he crisscrossed New Hampshire.  ... Since entering the race, Dean has insistently said, "we have to take our country back" from the special interests. The slogan on his bus reads, "You Have The Power." He has decried the hold that business interests have on the federal government. Well, what does he think Neel did when he ran the telecom lobby?

At the very least, whatever the internal forces that led to the Neel appointment, with respect to Dean's base this has to be a pretty tone-deaf move—though as several people have pointed out, and this article from the Register makes clear, as a stakeholder in Intel's digital-fascist Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, Joe Trippi ain't exactly on the side of just us folks neither. (And while you're on the subject, you could do worse than read Robert S. Boynton's article "The Tyranny of Copyright?" from last Sunday's Times magazine.)

I can understand Corn's disappointment, but I can't share it. For one thing, being devoutly ABBWTPEOJL (Anybody But Bush, with the Possible Exception of Joe Lieberman), not to mention having had my younger and tenderer lefty heart broken a few times before this, has kept me on the sidelines for the Dem primaries. More to the point, though: Did David Corn believe that Dean meant it when he talked his anti-corporatist talk? Meant it in the sense that, were the stars to align and Howard Dean found himself President, he'd actually set up somehow to fight the power? Where was a President Dean going to go for his appointees, after all, for all the bodies to fill all those hundreds of offices that have to be filled at the start of an Administration, if not to the Democratic policy establishment—to the Roy Neels and their ilk?

There isn't a Democratic candidate, current or conceivable, who can accomplish or would even genuinely try to accomplish a loosening of the corporate-state bond that now defines our Republic. The creation of that bond has been the work of three generations; it expresses itself through every facet of American public life. The culture of the revolving door has spread like a dry rot through the federal bureaucracy; not even a radical President (I'm trying to imagine such a creature) could manage to face it down in his few allotted years. Corporatism is the reigning ideology of the American millennium, and reversing or even checking it will require a sustained mass social movement—and though at opportune moments the forces of change may coalesce around them, Presidential campaigns are not the place where social movements come into being.

On this one particular axis, of allegiance to the principle of a corporatist state, the late unlamented Ralph Nader is right that there's no essential difference between Democrat and Republican. (Whether that's what Nader means by his claim I can't be sure, nor does it much matter to me since Nader lost any credibility he might still have had when he started making noises about 2004.) And no, that doesn't mean that it can't be vastly (not just incrementally) worse to have a Republican in office than a Democrat, as we all ought to be aware by now. Our handbasket is certainly getting to hell way quicker under Bush than I imagined it would in my worst nightmares circa 2000. It just seems to me that it pays to be disabused about what progressives can and can't hope for from a Presidential election.

The Dean campaign is/was a "reform movement," to use Corn's phrase, in a purely adventitious sense. Dean got lucky: forced by circumstance to run an outsider's campaign, he found a way to talk (mostly about Iraq) and an organizing platform (the Meetup, the blog) that were able to move a lot of outsiders into the process and into his tent. A population, as it happened, markedly more progressive than Dean himself. Any "reform" that a successful Dean campaign might have produced would have been party reform first and (probably) last, and while organizational reform of the Democratic party isn't to be sneezed at, it's a long way from anything that might have delivered on Dean's anti-corporate come-on.

The unexpected good news about the Dean phenomenon is that it revealed, as has MoveOn's success, that the progressive troops are out there and are ready, practically begging in fact, to be given a flag to march under. That's something I plan on spending some more time thinking and writing about.

posted by michael  5:23:09 PM  
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