Getting Real About the Democrats

Many people who are really angry about the Bush regime and who care about what is happening in the world are turning a wistful eye toward the Democrats and hoping for 2006. But illusions are very dangerous.

YOU want an end to the murderous wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Hillary, Biden, Lieberman, Reid, Pelosi, and all the rest of the Democratic big-shots are down for these wars. Didn’t Kerry pledge, "We will never be forced out of Iraq"? They helped to approve Bush’s $82 billion military budget, they pledged to give the troops better armor, and they are even calling for putting "more boots on the ground." If you follow them,you end up with never-ending war.

YOU are against the Patriot Act, with all its fascist police-state measures, but the Democrats in Congress unanimously joined the Republicans in backing Bush’s move to make most of the sections of the fascist Patriot Act permanent. If you follow them, you will end up with more secret searches, more arrests and detention by executive order, and the use of military tribunals.

YOU are for preserving secular government in the United States, but the Democrats’ "Secretary of Religion" Jim Wallis tells one and all that you can’t fight "bad religion" with secularism; it must be opposed with "good religion." If you follow this, you end up accepting the basic thesis of theocracy.

YOU support women’s reproductive rights and women’s refusal to be reduced to the social role of incubators, but that is certainly not the direction the Democrats are going. Everywhere they are scrambling to establish antiabortion credentials. In Pennsylvania they are running an antiabortion candidate against Republican Senator Rick Santorum. Hilary Clinton now talks about the "tragedy" of abortion. If you follow them, you will end up capitulating to the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the outlawing of abortion.

YOU are for the full extension of civil rights to gay and lesbian couples, including the right to marriage, but you can see the clouds of dust as the leading Democrats flee this issue. At most--and who knows for how long--the Democratic leadership is for "civil unions." If you follow this, you will be supporting a U.S. version of the 1935Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany that established a legal category of second-class citizenship, and the basis for much worse.

Is all this that the Democrats stand for what you want to support and be a part of? If you don’t bust out of this framework, you will end up where you never wanted to go. Sure, they may dangle another Kucinich or Sharpton type in front of you as bait. But the Christian fascist agenda is right now setting the terms overall, and the elections will be used once again to drag YOU, and the very terms of political discourse, ever further to the right.

The time to take action--mass action, action independent of this framework, action based on what the people really need and really want, and not what some Democrat tells them it is okay to want--is now. The world can’t wait.

"If you fall into the orientation of trying to make the Democrats be what they are not, and never will be, you will end up becoming more like what the Democrats actually are."

Bob Avakian