The Chris Moeller Archives

The Kucinich and Wallace tradition

Thank you Dennis Kucinich.

The passionately liberal and populist Congressman from the Buckeye State bowed out of the presidential race this week after a year of coming up against every imaginable roadblock that the monied interests of our country could throw at him. The Democratic party bosses spit at him and at other lower-profile candidates with a nominating structure that weighs heavily on the certainly grass-roots, but completely undemocratic Iowa Caucuses, and excluded voters entirely in Florida and Michigan, the latter state being one that nearly borders Kucinich's congressional district. In my Iowa precinct caucus, similar I'm sure to others across the state, Kucinich registered roughly 5% of the tally on the first count (despite the media blackout,) but that otherwise modest total left him "nonviable" in the eyes of the party bosses, and he came away from the Hawkeye State without a single percentage of support under this totalitarian system.

In December, the Gannett Corp. newspaper branch in Des Moines excluded Kucinich from the statewide televised debate they sponsored because the candidate didn't have a "campaign office," by their standards, located in Iowa, and that was before General Electric, "the company with a heart," as Carson called it, and the fourth largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States (and that's just Tim Russert), appealed a judge's ruling all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court to exclude the anti-NAFTA and anti-WTO candidate from a nationally-televised debate on one of their cable news networks. Dennis returns to Cleveland now to face a Congressional primary challenge from a quartet of Democrats generously funded by special interest groups in a concerted intra-party attack that recalls the 2006 primary assault on anti-Iraq War Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, now a Green Party candidate for president.

Because Kucinich chose to wage a presidential campaign that focused on the powerless, jobless, insuranceless, and homeless, within the electoral apparatus of the center-right Democratic Party, he has been marginalized if not outrightly dismissed from the national policy debate nearly 10 full months before the election even takes place. It could be interpreted perhaps as at least a small sign of progress that, during this election cycle, one of the "major" Democratic presidential contenders, John Edwards, adopted and ran with much of Kucinich's anti-corporate political message, which is more than can be said for the 2004 campaign, but will be small consolation when Edwards falls to the wayside in short order also, excluded from the corporate shills' preferred and dumbed-down media narrative of the blacks versus the broads. Indeed, we will have had multiple women and African-Americans serving us from the Oval Office before we get our first-ever working-class president, which Kucinich would have been.


I renew then my call for people who proudly call themselves "liberals" to abandon the Democratic Party once and for all. Look at that fellow Democratic voter on either side of you and see that they don't even believe the same things that you do. This is the cold hard reality of the Party of the Clintons after a generation and more of so much compromise and triangulation that the cupboard of common man (and woman) ideas and idealism has gone bare. Americans suffer from what author and historian Studs Terkel calls "a national Alzheimer's." We're not taught in primary or secondary schools about those so-called "free market" forces that caused the Great Depression, or the New Deal policies that rescued us from social disintegration after that unrestrained capitalism fell on its ass. We're not given an understanding of the origins of Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, or any other extraordinary piece of collective, people-centered government action responsible for what we can claim as good and decent in America today.

In 2008, even the "progressive" candidate in the Democratic's preferred head-to-head presidential primary, Barack Obama, questions the solvency of Social Security, when the program is not only alive and financially sound, but so wildly successful in its operation, that it could be conceivably prioritized and expanded to cover every man, woman, and child in the 50 states and the territories.

The Democratic Party, responsible for the original enactment of the social safety-net programs in the 1930s, after various other "third" parties did the heavy lifting of placing them in the national debate, has been complicit in allowing them to disintegrate over time. When we look back over history, in fact, we find that the glory days of the party are pretty much confined to the time period of 1932 to 1944, and it's been a long downhill slug ever since, save for the efforts of public activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Betty Friedan, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, the Hollywood 10, and the Chicago 8, all of whom and others made their contributions outside of the power structure of the dominant political parties. Before Roosevelt's New Deal, Democratic power brokers in the 20th Century gave us unremarkable and often overtly conservative candidates like Alton Parker, James Cox, and John W Davis, and/or white supremacists like Woodrow Wilson; and since the New Deal, it's been more or less a parade again of well-packaged servants to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.

In his 2007 memoir, Terkel opines that FDR's Secretary of Agriculture and later Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, was the heart of the New Deal, which led to the elimination of prohibition, and the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps and Social Security. Wallace pushed for the right to organize, as well as for the construction of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the National Youth Administration (NYA), Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Resettlement Administration (RA), each of which fell, in part, under the jurisdiction of Wallace's Department of Agriculture. (The RA migrant camps were depicted most memorably by author John Steinbeck in his novel "The Grapes of Wrath.")

The decline of the Democrats thus began in 1944 when a group of party bosses, as Roosevelt lie gravely ill, conspired to have Wallace removed as the party's vice presidential nominee in favor of Harry Truman. "By this time," Terkel writes, "Henry Wallace had become known as being too soft on the Soviet Union. Also, he was anti-agribusiness, although that word wasn't used then. The bosses were out to get him. They hated him because he represented the radical idea of people having a stake in things, having ownership. They called him a dupe of the Communists."

Truman was then thrust into the presidency; our former ally, the Soviet Union, becomes our enemy; and a Cold War commences that, despite the media's having declared its conclusion nearly 20 years ago, still actually exists in form and may yet steer us into financial and moral bankruptcy as we continue to fight our wars of political ideology in surrogate nations across the globe, now taking on our enemies two or more at a time.


At my precinct caucus earlier this month, the chairperson in attendance earned guffaws from the gathering when she announced to all that the Kucinich supporters were struggling to secure an unclaimed area for themselves in the school gymnasium. There was no room for Kucinich on many of the debate stages, and there was no room for his supporters on voting night. It's time for all of us to take our liberalistic passion and activism elsewhere; that is, to a third party slate of candidates. The Democrats are laughing at us. They rage in fury, slander and slime, and attempt to destroy a man of real progressive action like Ralph Nader, but they don't laugh at him.

posted by CM @ 12:09 PM