The facts simply don’t support the view that Rahm Emanuel ‘engineered’ the Democratic victory. He’s no Karl Rove… but he does represent a power-center in the Democratic Party that is contending for influence. And regardless of public opinion, his ability to attract money is an asset for him. And he is clearly using that money to support very specific types of candidates, not just the Democrat.

Following the Democratic victory, the Nation, in particular, was quick to announce the end of the Republican Revolution.

To me, that represents wishful thinking, the gains of the Progressive Caucus notwithstanding.

First, the Republican Revolution — and its policies like welfare reform (passed by Clinton), the estate tax, income tax, and the Iraq war — represent the culmination of 30 years of patient organizing in communities, developing a hard core of activists, inflitrating key institutions in our government and taking over the Republican Party.

That one mid-term election has reversed or marked the end of this, I doubt.

To truly bring the Republican Revolution to and end would require, I think by definition, a ‘counter-revolution,’ a major progressive shift similar to what the radical Republicans have achieved over the past decades.

While I think Bianchi’s analysis of the significance of the mid-term results is accurate, I think we’re still far from a progressive revolution.

1. The progressives don’t yet constitute the hegemonic bloc in the Democratic Party. They are are on the ascendancy and are the biggest single caucus as pointed out by Bianchi. This is important. I am convinced that there are still a significant amount of voters who voted in opposition to Bush, not in favor of a progressive agenda.

2. The progressive caucus doesn’t yet represent a coherent, comprehensive alternative vision. There’s still a fine line between free trade, anti-trade and protectionism. Economic populism can go left or right. While there is consensus in OPPOSING Low Road trade agreements, a High Road, alternative vision is lacking. What do high road trade policies look like? How would a progressive agenda promote the development of a robust, High Road economy with a focus on the backbone of that economy: small and medium manufacturing firms? There is lots of evidence that we’re not “loosing jobs” to low-wage countries, but that succession is a bigger culprit: what role does employee ownership play in a progressive vision?

3. The anti-war movement, which is succeeding in bringing people who have not traditionally associated with protest movements out into the streets, it’s still having a hard time going from opposition to proposition. You can only organize people against something for so long… you have to also be for something (this is related to point two).

4. The DLC still exerts a lot of influence over the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton will be a contender for sure in 2008. She is overly cautious, doesn’t lead on any issues (she still can’t say the Iraq War is wrong: “It’s time for the Iraqi government to take responsibility”) and is an opportunist.

But my conclusion is not Brenner’s.

I do see hope, and it is in the potential convergence of the objective factors of a poorly-performing economy, stagnant to declining wages, an intolerable war, the rising number of uninsured Americans and the resurgence of grassroots activism, the growth of the Progressive Caucus and groups like PDA who are in a position (though not yet doing so, I don’t think) to define a positive, alternative political platform for a progressive revolution.

The Left needs to engage all of this critically and dialectically.

Was the November 2006 midterm election an epic political massacre or just a routine midterm brawl? In the week after the Democratic victory, partisan spinmeisters offered opinions as contradictory as those of the protagonists in Rashomon, Kurosawa’s famously relativistic account of rape and murder. On the liberal side, Bob Herbert rejoiced in his New York Times column that the ‘fear-induced anomaly’ of the ‘George W. Bush era’ had ‘all but breathed its last’, while Paul Waldman (Baltimore Sun) announced ‘a big step in the nation’s march to the left’, and George Lakoff (CommonDreams.org) celebrated a victory for ‘progressive values’ and ‘factually accurate, values-based framing’ (whatever that may mean). On the conservative side, the National Review’s Lawrence Kudlow refused to concede even the obvious bloodstains on the steps of Congress: ‘Look at Blue Dog conservative Democratic victories and look at Northeast liberal gop defeats. The changeover in the House may well be a conservative victory, not a liberal one.’ William Safire, although disgusted that the ‘loser left’ had finally won an election, dismissed the result as an ‘average midterm loss’.
I. VICTORY AND ITS WOES
But Safire doth spin too much. Although the Democratic victory in 2006 was not quite the deluge that the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay unleashed in 1994 (see Table 1), it was anything but an ‘average’ result. Despite the comparatively low electoral salience of the economy, the opposition’s classic midterm issue, the Democrats managed to exactly reverse the majority in the House (the worst massacre of Republicans since 1974) and reclaim the Senate by one seat. Indeed, the Senate gained its first self-declared ‘socialist’, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
Democrats, for the first time ever, did not lose a single incumbent or open House seat. Independent voters (26 per cent of the electorate) swung to the Democrats by an almost two-to-one ratio—‘the biggest margin ever measured among independents since the first exit polls in 1976’. With the strongest female leadership in American history, they outpolled Republicans among women 55 to 45 per cent in House races; but more surprisingly, they also managed to reduce the gop’s famous lead among white men (a staggering 63 per cent in the 1994 House contests) to 53 per cent. According to veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg, one out of five Bush voters moved into the blue column; but none so dramatically as the electoral market segment of ‘privileged men’ (college-educated and affluent) where the gop’s 2004 margin of 14 per cent was transformed into a slim Democratic majority. Although the slippage among the gop hardcore—evangelicals and white rural and exurban voters—was slight, the party of the moral majority declined 6 per cent among devout Catholics, while angry Latinos, recoiling from the gop grass roots’ embrace of vigilantes and border walls, murdered Republicans in several otherwise close contests in the West.
In state races, the Democrats demonstrated even more traction. On election eve, the gop boasted a majority of governorships (28 to 22) and a slight lead in control of state legislative chambers (49 to 47, with 2 tied). Contrasted to overwhelming Democratic dominance in state legislatures before 1994, when Republicans controlled only 8 states, this rough parity—according to John Hood, the president of a North Carolina conservative think-tank—has been ‘one of the most significant and lasting products of the Republican Revolution’. But it is a legacy now lost as the Democrats have exactly reversed the partisan ratio of governors (leaving Republican executives in only 3 of the 10 most populous states), while winning control of 8 more state chambers (now 56 Democrat versus 41 Republican, with 1 tied). ‘What’s worse for the gop’, Hood points out, is that the majority parties in state legislatures will control congressional redistricting in the wake of the rapidly approaching 2010 Census. ‘If Democrats retain their current edge, the us House will get a lot more blue.’
Regionally, Republican candidates were decimated in the gop’s original heartland, New England—including notoriously conservative New Hampshire, where Democrats took over the legislature for the first time since the Civil War—and the Mid-Atlantic states, leading one prominent conservative to lament that ‘the Northeast is on its way to being lost forever to the gop’. Democrats also made surprising gains in the Midwest and the ‘red’ interior West, especially in Colorado where hi-tech money leveraged a growing Latino vote. Even in the South, the Democrats managed to arrest their long-term decline and claw back 19 seats in state legislatures. (Despite the prevalent myth of a solidly Republican South, the Democrats still retain a 54 per cent majority in Dixie state houses.)
In Kansas—Tom Frank’s icon state of voter false consciousness —Democrat Nancy Boyda defeated incumbent Jim Ryun (the former Olympic track star) in a congressional district that Bush had carried by 20 percentage points two years earlier. Popular Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius was easily re-elected, while the other top state offices, the lieutenant and attorney generalships, were won by former Republicans running as Democrats—a startling reverse in the trend of political conversion. The state’s foremost cultural conservative, the fanatically anti-abortion attorney general Phil Kline, was pulverized: receiving barely one-third of the vote in the usually Republican exurbs of Kansas City (Johnson County). Nothing seemed particularly ‘wrong’ with Kansas in the fall of 2006.
Such results convincingly refute the legend of invincibility that had been woven around Karl Rove’s signature strategy of intensive base mobilization (usually stimulated by hysteria over some imperiled Christian value) and massive negative advertising (usually perpetuating some outright lie or slander against the opposition). According to Stanley Greenberg, ‘the Republican Party has ended up with the most negative image in memory, lower than Watergate’. But the Democratic pollster (writing in collaboration with Robert Borosage and James Carville) was adamant that Republican losses are not necessarily Democratic gains. ‘The Democratic Party also ended up being viewed more negatively during this election than in 2004 . . . Democrats have only modest advantages—and are chosen by fewer than 50 per cent on such key attributes as being “on your side”, “future-oriented” and “for families”.’
Thomas Edsall agrees that ‘Democratic triumphs are fragile’ and warns that they are ‘based far more on widespread dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq than on the fundamental partisan and ideological shift that was apparent in 1980 and 1994 Republican breakthroughs’. Partisan registration remains closer to parity (38 per cent Democrat versus 37 per cent Republican) than at any time since the late nineteenth century, and control of the House is arbitrated by swings of just a few percentage points: the reason the Republicans have been so keen to undertake controversial midterm redistrictings and gerrymanders to buttress their power.

I agree with Bianchi. All that analysis reaching back to FDR, but no ‘What Is To Be Done?’ Whatever happened to ‘the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’?

Besides, even the analysis in problematic. Brenner would do well to pay a little more attention to the Globalist vs US hegemonist divide worldwide, then the the nationalist opposition to both, and he’d get a deeper understanding of divisions in both parties. Rahm Emanuel is my favorite Democrat to focus my fire on, by the party has about six contending factions at the moment, and he’s only one of them.

Now I hold no fundamental hope for either party, and try to following a strategy and tactics that will unravel both and create something new, reflecting the politics of this site.

But this doesn’t help much.