The Myth of the “Spineless Democrat” [View All]

When I refer to the “Spineless Democrat” as a myth I do not mean to imply that there aren’t a lot of elected Democrats who I would like to see act in a much bolder fashion. I do in fact wish that many of our elected Democratic representatives in Congress – and our president as well – would act much bolder in the pursuit of liberal/progressive ideals.

But the term “spineless Democrat”, as it is used today – probably more so by liberals/progressives than by other parts of the political spectrum – implies a dichotomy between Democrats and Republicans that reflects more favorably on Republicans. It implies that Democrats – and by extension liberals/progressives – are inherently “weaker” than Republicans or right wingers. That idea is both damaging to the liberal/progressive cause and inaccurate – as I argue in this post.

To the extent that Democrats are viewed as “spineless” by the U.S. electorate it sways them to vote for Republicans/right wingers. The idea is especially damaging because it fits in nicely (from the right wing point of view) with the ridiculous notion that Republicans protect us from danger whereas Democrats are “weak” on national security issues.


Where the idea of the “spineless” Democrat comes from

The idea of the “spineless Democrat” originates from a number of different circumstances, but I believe that there is one that stands out as being especially important and is emblematic of all the rest. That is the simple comparison of Republican vs. Democratic actions in legislative fights over our nation’s agenda during in the 21st Century. As we all know, The Bush administration was spectacularly successful in pushing their entire agenda down our throats during the first several years of its existence. They pushed two wars down our throats – one that was entirely without justification and the other which came with some superficial justifications but that was nonetheless in the long run unjustified and illegal. They shoved down our throats a massive tax cut proposal that benefited only the wealthiest members of our society and at the same time caused our national debt to rise to unprecedented levels. And there is so much more that they did, which I won’t go into here, except to note that I’ve written about them numerous times in my attempts to make arguments for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And they did this during an eight-year period in which they had bare majorities in Congress or in the face of Democratic control of one or both houses of Congress.

In contrast, since January 2009, with Democratic control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, and even with a filibuster-proof Senate during much of that time, very little has been accomplished. We got a very watered down health “reform” bill, which not only maintained control of health care by the health insurance industry but actually mandated that hundreds of millions of Americans obtain their health insurance through the private-for-profit health insurance industry. We got a watered down financial bill that Wall Street had no problems accepting, and which many question whether it will do more harm that good. We got an agreement at the climate change conference in Copenhagen that all the climate change experts agree will accomplish, even if fully put into action and enforced, only a small proportion of what needs to be done in order to stave off the most cataclysmic effects of climate change. And many other examples could also be given.

Where was the routine use of the filibuster during the Bush presidency? What explains the difference in accomplishments between the period of Republican control vs. the period of Democratic control?

But before we ascribe these differences to “spineless Democrats”, compared with presumable bolder Republicans, we need to consider a few things.


Republican “accomplishments” in recent decades

I’ve already noted some of the Republican “accomplishments” of this century. I put accomplishments in scare quotes because it’s hard to consider things like a war based on lies, resulting in hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, an accomplishment. Coincidentally, I just began reading a book in which the first paragraph of the preface neatly summarizes the major Republican “accomplishments” of recent times – in far fewer words than I used to describe specific Republican “accomplishments” in this OP. The book is titled “Toward Psychologies of Liberation”, by Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman. Their first paragraph bears repeating because it is so accurate and so neatly summarized:


One may disagree with me that these are Republican accomplishments. If we confined the argument to direct actions of the U.S. government, the case would be harder to make. But given the long history of support by our CIA and military for foreign right wing governments, by our Republican administrations (and to a lesser extent Democratic administrations), the case is not that difficult to make. The civil war in Vietnam that we later became embroiled in had its roots in the Eisenhower administration’s interference with the Geneva Conference Agreements of 1954 to prevent the uniting of the country under elections that were supposed to have occurred under those agreements. The Reagan administration’s Iran-contra scandal primarily involved the secret support for a resistance movement in Nicaragua that kept alive a civil war in that country for many years, despite the fact that our Democratic Congress expressly forbid that support. Likewise, the civil war in Iraq would not have occurred without George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of that country. I discuss these issues in much more detail in this post.

The short list of events from the preface of Watkins’ and Shulman’s book could hardly be considered accomplishments. It would be more accurate to say that it a list of tragic actions and consequences. As such, I would characterize those who facilitated them as psychopaths. Let’s face it. U.S. Republican elected officials in recent years have done nothing but pass and sign legislation that benefit only the rich and powerful, at the expense of everyone else. Most of these people are what Bob Altemeyer refers to as “Authoritarian Leaders” or “Social Dominators”, in his book, “The Authoritarians”:



What is “bold” about these “accomplishments”?

Bob Altemeyer is a retired psychologist who devoted his professional career to the study of authoritarianism, and he is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the subject. His description of “Authoritarian Leaders” is very similar to what psychologists refer to as the psychopathic personality. And it characterizes the leaders of today’s Republican Party fairly accurately.

I’ve never heard anyone claim that psychopaths are “bold”. They do whatever they need to do to accomplish their own ends, to the extent that they believe they can get away with it, because they don’t care about other people. They are walking definitions of selfishness. They lack consciences. I think that “reckless” “or psychopathic” would be a much better term than “bold” to describe their actions. Call it “bold” if you want – but whatever you call it, I don’t think we want those kinds of people protecting us from danger.


Why right wingers are able to “accomplish” so much

In any event, what I’ve said so far doesn’t explain why Republicans are able to “accomplish” so much more than Democrats – why they’re able to defy public opinion so often, by repeatedly filibustering proposed legislation that is highly popular with most Americans.

There are two very simple related explanations for this. First, right wing forces have pretty solid control over our national media. So no matter how many times Republicans lie in the service of their wealthy masters, they can always rely on even the so-called “liberal media” to spin what they’ve done in ways that will put their actions in a positive light. The highly related second reason is that their wealthy masters shower them with campaign contributions for their services. They then use that money to further misrepresent their actions and the actions of their opponents to the American electorate.

Take the health care bill, for example. The American people have been overwhelmingly in favor of universal health care for a very long time. How could Republicans even threaten to filibuster such legislation? It’s simple. They radically mischaracterized the legislation, knowing full well that the national news media would not call out their lies – at least not in a definitive enough manner as to show them up for the psychopathic liars that they are.

The Republican attack against the Democratic plan rested mainly upon two related and absurd contentions: that the plan would have the federal government “take over” health care, and that after taking it over it would convene “death panels” to deny crucial medical care to Americans who would otherwise receive health care. Neither claim was remotely accurate. There was no plan for a federal “takeover” of health care. To the contrary, the heart of the plan was to provide subsidies to those currently unable to afford health care and to curb the abuses of the health insurance industry. Far from creating “death panels” to deny care to people, the plan would attempt to prevent the private insurance industry from denying care to people who needed it. A decent national press core would have exposed those lies. Was it “bold” of Republicans to suck up to the insurance industry by lying to the American people like that, in return for cash?

Republicans can always count on this kind of protection from our corporate news media. In this post I document how the supposedly unbiased Tim Russert: tried to protect George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential election “victory” by bullying Joe Lieberman (as the 2000 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate) into agreeing to concede the 2000 election if the Florida Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore’s request for a recount of the vote in Florida; accepted without question George W. Bush’s assertion that he had authorized the release of his military records to address the charge that he had gone AWOL from his previous National Guard duty (he had NOT, and Russert must have known that); and utterly failed to follow up (with Bush appearing on his show) on then current revelations that Bush’s excuse for the Iraq War was a fraud.

Several excellent books have been written about the extent to which wealthy corporate interests control our news media and protect right wing causes and candidates. I would highly recommend “Lapdogs – How the Press rolled Over for Bush”, by Eric Boehlert, “What Liberal Media – The Truth About BIAS and the News”, by Eric Alterman, and “Into the Buzzsaw – The Myth of a Free Press”, edited by Kristina Borjesson.


The Democrats’ dilemma

The national news media’s treatment of Democrats, and liberal ideas in general, is the flip side of how they treat Republicans and most right wing causes. Democrats who espouse liberal ideas know that they will get no protection from the media if they say anything that is remotely untrue. But far worse than that, they know that even when their statements are fully accurate they will be mercilessly attacked by the media if their ideas stray too far from what is considered acceptable by the forces of the status quo. Consider Tim Russert’s treatment of Howard Dean, then frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, on Russert’s June 22nd addition of Meet the Press:

Pulling out a highly partisan analysis of Dean’s tax plan, Russert asked Dean, “Can you honestly go across the country and say, “I’m going to raise your taxes 4,000 percent or 107 percent and be elected?”. Then Russert erroneously informed his viewers that Dean’s teenage son had been indicted for steeling beer.

And the fatal trap came when Russert asked how many men and women were serving in the U.S. military. When Dean said he didn’t know the exact number Russert lectured him, saying that “As commander in Chief, you should know that.”

An argument then ensued between Dean and Russert on this subject. Though I felt that Dean did a fine job of handling this, I tried to view the exchange through the eyes of a typical undecided American voter, and my conclusion was (later verified, I believe) that Dean was hurt badly by this episode. Indeed, the conventional wisdom was that Dean “failed” Russert’s test, and that Russert “cleaned Dean’s clock”. And I do believe that if not for this interview Howard Dean would be President today, having won the 2004 presidential election and then having been re-elected in 2008.

By that I don’t mean to criticize Dean. I have a great amount of respect for him. To put it bluntly, he was put in an untenable position. Here was “the ultimate unbiased nonpartisan” journalist telling him that he was unfit to be president. If he argued too strenuously with Russert about this he might appear to viewers to be belittling the responsibilities of the Presidency. If he argued not strenuously enough he might appear to be conceding that Russert was correct about his unfitness for the Presidency. What could he do?


How can liberals deal with this?

What if Howard Dean had responded to Tim Russert’s ridiculous attacks like this?

Tim, I don’t need a lecture from a Bush administration shill on my qualification for the presidency. As you might remember, when you asked presidential candidate George Bush in 1999 how many missiles would be in place if a new START II nuclear weapons treaty were signed, Bush had no idea what you were even talking about – but you didn’t seem to think that that had anything to do with his qualifications to be president.

You criticize my tax plan by quoting from a highly partisan and inept analysis of it. You tell your reviewers erroneously that my son has been indicted for a crime. And now you’re telling me that I’m not qualified to be president because I don’t know the exact number of soldiers currently serving in our military.

I have described for you and your viewers in great detail my foreign and domestic plans for making America a stronger and better country. You can ask me any question you like about my plans for our country, and I will not evade your questions. But if you want to question my fitness for office I suggest that you do so in an honest editorial format, rather than in the guise of a neutral nonpartisan journalist who is supposedly conducting an interview. Do we have an understanding on that?

Of course such a response would not be without significant risk. Dean might have appeared to viewers to be aggressively attacking an unbiased journalist just because he was asked an uncomfortable question. He might have been seen as rude or petulant or “whiney”, as Democrats are so often portrayed by our corporate media. And just as bad, Russert with or without the help of other journalists (more likely with their help) might have attacked Dean publicly for such remarks.

Our corporate news media will attack progressives/liberals whether or not they aggressively fight back. So why not change the rules of the game and expose those corporate shills for who they are? If they want to attack us for that, fine. But they do that anyhow, and I don’t believe that they could do a better job of it than they already have. I realize that some progressives might consider such advice to be reckless. But with an open fight between progressives and the corporate news media, at least Republicans will have a hard time trying to sound legitimate when they whine about the “liberal media”.

We absolutely need politicians who will tell the truth in the face of intense pressure not to do so – ones like Russ Feingold and Representatives Kucinich and McKinney, who introduced Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush, despite intense pressure not to do so. Whereas they took great risks in doing that, and probably hurt their political careers more than they helped them, those actions were nevertheless the right thing to do. By doing these things they helped (by how much is hard to say) increase the awareness of the American people about terrible crimes, and thereby helped to keep those issues alive.

I do believe that our elected Democratic leaders should be much bolder than they are in fighting for liberal causes. But using phrases that make them appear weak compared to Republicans is both misleading and harmful to our cause.