Looking Back, Looking Forward (Page 12)

The defeat of John Kerry, combined with the Republican advances in the House and Senate, has unleashed waves of dismay and perplexity within liberal and progressive circles. What happened? Why did so many voters embrace a President whose Iraq policy was paved with lies and deceptions, who has shown contempt for science, the rule of law and many of the principles of the Enlightenment, and whose economic policies favor the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans? What lessons do we draw from Kerry's failure to win over the electorate in spite of the Bush Administration's conspicuous failures? Are the Democrats crippled, or merely wounded, and is the party really out of touch with "mainstream" values? Finally, what should the priorities of the progressive movement be in this era of Republican dominance, and what is the best formula for future electoral success? The Nation asked some of the country's leading political activists and intellectuals for their thoughts on one or more of these questions. Their brief essays follow.   --The Editors

TROY DUSTER

THE REPUBLICANS HAVE DUG BOTH themselves and the nation into a very deep hole, combining an unwinnable war of occupation in Iraq with domestic policies that have produced the largest gap between rich and poor in all of American history. A day of reckoning will surely come--and rather than rushing to act as willing accomplices, the Democrats should be developing strategies that will provide the nation with alternative and corrective pathways when that day arrives.

Interpreting the election results, we get to choose between two nightmares: One, 60 million Americans knowingly voted for George W. Bush, ratifying the right-wing ideology guiding his Administration. Or two, we have just witnessed a second successive nonviolent coup d'état--a massive voter fraud that produced, among other anomalies, a gap between exit polls and paperless electronic voting tallies.

If we assume that Bush actually won, progressives are entitled to disappointment, but not shock. For at least a full century, every industrialized nation has had a strong right-wing base hovering at about 15-20 percent of the population. Energizing that constituency to be a potent force is contingent on many factors, but it is an enduring potential, smoldering, waiting to be stoked by those who would "go there." It is a mistake to think of 1930s Germany, Italy and Spain as exceptional and inexplicable political aberrations that could not happen here. We easily forget that those right-wing governments had strong electoral showings and sympathizers in many Western nations.

To suggest that Democrats move closer to this base, emulate or embrace its ideas or even call these ideas "moral values" is morally unacceptable. Too few in the electorate recognize that our taken-for-granted institutions of social justice did not arise, as the Republican drumbeat tells them, from "bad values" but as a decent, humane response to widespread woeful living conditions. Our national commitment to offset the attacks on these efforts to achieve greater social justice reflects the true American moral values.

Troy Duster, professor of sociology at New York University, is a senior fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

JONATHAN KOZOL

EDUCATION BARELY SURFACED in the final weeks of the electoral campaign. This was partly because George Bush effectively displaced domestic issues (other than his coded emphasis on "faith" and "values") from the nation's attention, but also because the Democrats have abdicated any serious oppositional position on the President's benighted test-and-drill agenda for our public schools. In saying he would continue to enforce these policies but would simply come up with more money to enable districts to fulfill these goals, Senator Kerry sounded the familiar note of tired and defensive semi-liberals, capitulating to a right-wing ideology while promising more federal funding to advance that ideology perhaps a bit more evenhandedly.

The late Paul Wellstone openly denounced the President's obsession with the measuring of children's skills while starving children in poor neighborhoods of the amplitude of learning still afforded to the children of the privileged. With the exception of a handful of his colleagues in the Senate and most of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Wellstone found no backing for his eloquent dissent within the Democratic Party. It is dissent and indignation on that order that was missing from too many of the statements Kerry made on education and related issues of equality for children. Here was a highly principled, intensely decent and enlightened man who, like most of his party, somehow could not rise above the terms of argument that have been locked in place by educational conservatives.

I doubt that this will greatly change until there is a grassroots movement in defense of children on a scale progressives have not dared envision since the year Ronald Reagan came to office. It may seem to some beyond imagination, at this moment of defeat, that liberals can reignite the passion and assemble the resources it would take to counteract the power of the right-wing juggernaut in education policy today. But we will never win the victories we do not fight for.

Jonathan Kozol is the author of Amazing Grace (Crown) and other books on urban education.

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