The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #3

In my lifetime the Democratic Party -- I'm speaking here of the rank'n'file -- has always shown a concern for peace. I think it's non-controversial to say that Obama won the presidency because he was the only mainstream candidate of either major party to have a public record opposing the Iraq War. Who can deny that Trump's margin of victory in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania was due to his running as the anti-war candidate in 2016?

Rank'n'file Democratic Party opposition to war tracks back to Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy was blocked at the convention in Chicago by the old bull party bosses congregated around Hubert Humphrey. George McGovern became the placeholder for Kennedy delegates after Senator Teddy Kennedy declined to pick up the mantle of his assassinated brother. 

McGovern would go on to lead the McGovern-Fraser Commission which would rewrite the rules on how Democrats nominate their presidential candidate. The work McGovern did on the commission would pave the way for his nomination in 1972. In the general election McGovern would lose every state to Nixon except for the Kennedys' Massachusetts and the Black-majority District of Columbia. Nixon's '72 landslide victory would come to naught as his administration imploded over Watergate. 

Which brings us to Seymour Hersh. I recently finished reading his memoir, Reporter. In it Hersh explains how his reporting on Watergate gave way to the revelation of the "Family Jewels," a compendium of CIA crimes commissioned by agency head James Schlesinger as a response to Nixon's  attempt to deflect White House responsibility for the Watergate burglary by asserting it was a CIA operation.

What struck me about Hersh's account was that after the initial splash the Family Jewels created, along with related followups, there wasn't the interest or support from his editors at The New York Times to pursue more of these national security state bombshells. Hersh mentions that congressional committees, e.g., Church and Pike, would continue the work with subpoena power; so off he goes on vacation and then relocates to New York City where he starts reporting on corporate corruption for The Times.

That's 1975. You have to get all way to the mid-1990s in Hersh's memoir to understand what happened (really, what didn't happen) with the Church and Pike investigations of national security state crimes. Hersh explains that senate leaders were reticent to give Frank Church chairmanship of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities because they knew that he coveted a presidential run as leader of the Democratic Party and they didn't want to muddy the investigation with presidential politics. Church promised that he would not run for president in 1976. He lied.

The result of this lie, according to Hersh, is that the committee's work was compromised and the crimes of the Kennedy administration were obscured or soft-pedaled because Church believed to win the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1976 the victorious candidate had to be perceived by primary voters as the true representative of the Kennedy legacy; to tarnish that legacy was to guarantee defeat.

To correct the record and debunk the myth of Camelot Hersh writes The Dark Side of Camelot (1997).

I purchased a copy of the book as soon as it appeared. In the 1990s I worked nights and spent my free time studying Kennedy assassination literature. I was drawn to the topic because, from college days, I was a Derridean, someone who believed that perception is textual. When it comes to textuality you would be challenged to find a field larger than that provided by the Kennedy assassination. My thinking was -- at the time I was still south of 35 years of age -- that if one could master that mass of literature, one could claim to have mastered perception itself.

But I never finished The Dark Side of Camelot. I think I made it halfway through, and then, because none of the material was what I considered at the time to be of a bombshell nature, since I was so thoroughly immersed in the literature, I set it aside. Hersh was pilloried at the time in the mainstream press for material, forged documents, that never even made it into the book. He was also criticized for getting marginal stuff wrong.

After I finished Hersh's memoir, I picked up the copy of The Dark Side of Camelot I set aside more than 20 years ago.

It's a tremendous book. I truly savored it. Hersh systematically demolishes the Kennedy legacy:

• JFK worked with the mob to win the presidency
• Bay of Pigs is laid at JFK's feet
• JFK/RFK fulsomely supported "Executive Action," a.k.a., assassination
• Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear holocaust (then Kennedy lied about swapping the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba)
• Kennedy supported the assassination of Diem because Diem was negotiating with the North to end the war

There's much more. Overall the picture -- both of Jack and Bobby -- is of an unhinged presidency. Jack Kennedy was addicted to sex, in poor health, committed to ruthless skulduggery, seemingly always in crisis, and Bobby was his loyal little brother enabler.

If I would've finished the book back in 1990s I could've seen that Hersh basically affirms the hypothesis -- that Kennedy's assassination tracks back to LBJ -- that I was working on. Hersh doesn't make this argument explicitly because he, improbably, accepts the conclusion of the Warren Commission, that there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but Hersh does say that in final months of Kennedy's life the decision was finalized to boot Johnson off the ticket in 1964. The Bobby Baker Quorum Club scandal taken up by the Senate Rules Committee tainted both Jack (because of his affair with German party girl Ellen Rometsch) and Lyndon (because of petty kickbacks, the details of which RFK was surreptitiously feeding to Republicans on the committee). Then Kennedy's brains are blown out in Texas.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that RFK's rebirth as an anti-war politician post-Tet might have been sincere but it was most likely mere crass opportunism. Bobby was no peacenik.

Nonetheless, as decades plodded on after '68, there remained and remains a significant constituency within the Democratic Party which is opposed to the national security state and perpetual warfare. This constituency elected Obama and probably defeated Hillary. 

Russiagate was designed and continues to be used to neuter and bleach this constituency, and in this regard it has been largely successful. The Democratic Party is now just as bellicose as the Republican Party, and for that reason it needs to be destroyed. Because even if the George Floyd Rebellion and the Black Lives Matter renaissance are fundamentally anti-imperialist and pro-peace, a lot of the white liberals who have supported the movement are card-carrying Russiagaters and defenders of the CIA , NSA and FBI.

The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #2

In the first installment of "The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed" I mentioned reading recently Robert Remini's Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959).

For me the book was a revelation because I was unaware what a stalwart Jeffersonian Republican Martin Van Buren was and how strongly he conceived of his mission to elect Jackson as the standard bearer of the new Democratic Party as a way to salvage Jefferson's legacy.

What is Jefferson's legacy?

To answer that question I next turned to Roger G. Kennedy's Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (2003), a eye-opening formidable piece of scholarship.

In a nutshell Jefferson's legacy is a massive expansion of slavery and the re-colonization of the American South by the British Empire a few decades after the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War.

Jefferson accomplished this by appropriating Indian lands under a cloak of expanding yeoman farmer homesteads but in reality the lands were raped with mono-culture cash crops (cotton, tobacco) destined for the English export market and harvested by brutalized African slave labor. 

At the very root of our party system in United States is the left of tribal lands, the expansion of African slavery and the British Empire.

As the statues are torn down, let's hope Jefferson's is one of them.

The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #1

After reading the latest from Caitlin Johnstone, the unassailable "The Democratic Party Exists To Co-Opt And Kill Authentic Change Movements," I am introducing the first of what I hope to be a series of posts arguing that the Democratic Party ought to be destroyed posthaste.

Soon after Super Tuesday and in the run-up to the nationwide pandemic lockdowns I devoured a copy that I had lying around the apartment of Robert Remini's first book, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959).

What was a revelation to me was that the Democratic Party, the supposedly transformative, egalitarian "Party of Jackson," was actually a salvage operation for the listing "Era of Good Feelings" Republican Party of Jefferson, the primary political vehicle of Southern slavocracy.

The Democratic Party was a creation of Martin Van Buren, Bucktails party boss of New York. He used the Tariff of Abominations and Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign to rejuvenate the old planter Republican Party coalition.

In other words, the origin of the Democratic Party is synonymous with  the rejuvenation of the political power of slavocracy, not to mention the genocide of indigenous peoples.

Bear that in mind when you consider legislation proposed by congressional Democrats to address the policing crisis in the United States. If we can create a new federal department post-9/11, why can't we re-imagine how we police ourselves? Let's defund and abolish police departments as presently constituted.