Sen. Arlen Specter's big switch from Republican to Democrat is only news to those inside the spiritually bankrupt beltway of two-party politics. It is within this barren space that our alleged two parties fight for the center-right by not addressing structural problems of poverty and human rights. The very fact Specter, who used to be a Democrat, can jump from one ship to another so easily speaks to the common ground of our one party system, its ideological seamlessness. The US is ruled by one political party, the Property Party, and it has two branches. James Baldwin, with his usual articulate phrasing, said the official religion of the United States is Commerce.
To help you visualize the fact of the single party, look at the left and right origins from the French Revolution. Left and Right came into political speech literally from where different factions of the merchant class, the bourgeoisie, sat themselves to caucus for the future of the French state.
Alas, they were merchants all, whose liberty, equality, and fraternity did not at all extend to the slaves they were buying and selling or those kept captive in the richest colony in the Americas: France's San Domingue, which became Haiti after its own revolution. These French merchants may have sat themselves in different places within the Assembly, but they were united in that they had been kept out of political power by the Old Regime of Sun King, Nobles, and the Church, a wicked trinity more alive today than dead.
Alas, the Republicans and Democrats are a merchant party as well, fundamentally believing in and willing to fight wars against workers, the poor, women within and beyond the US border. And if you believe they've reformed their tolerance of human slavery, look at some of the regimes they support.
Specter's switch from Democrat to Republican and back again is unremarkable because he moves from one faction that condones terrorism to another faction that condones terrorism. Putting profits for a few over the well being of humanity is the perfect foundation from which to allow terrorism. Remember, Ronald Reagan was a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat and a Union boss before he left the party to become a Republican.
For Specter to join the Greens, the Socialist Party USA, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Revolutionary Communist Party would be a earth-shaking as the deathbed conversion of a Roman emperor to Christianity, another merchant party if ever there was one, to distinguish it by all means by the revolutionary teaching of that quasi-rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. These political parties to varying degrees propose a radical restructuring of our political machinery.
Democrats are aglow at the prospect of a 60-seat majority in the US Senate. But this has nothing to do with expanding medical benefits to all, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing public education, the slaughter of Iraqi and US young in that Imperial adventure, US support of the Israeli apartheid measures, or the theft of public funds to support failing private enterprise with arguments that certainly make the late infamous Ayn Rand smiling in her dark pit next to the Christian Roman emperor.
The slaves must rise up as surely as those in San Domingue did, perhaps putting meaning to the empty phrases of our masters: yesterday, liberty, equality, fraternity; today: change is coming. The villainy they teach we must execute ...
The US is still without a viable working-class political party. This is by design. Those I mentioned have a hard time getting ballot access because the rulers rule the roost. In California, the Peace & Freedom Party, my current affiliation, is elegantly described as a "feminist socialist political party." This hits all the right notes for me. It is the only socialist party recognized by the California secretary of state, which means I can run for mayor under the party label and not as an Independent. But Peace & Freedom is a rarity, and it should not be. In place of real sea-change we as spectators are asked to be awed by Specter's shift from one side of the Titanic to the other. Specter would never consider taking planks from a socialist party platform, not even on the principle that all children must be fed. Our bankrupt political system is owned by people for whom such socialism is as much a threat as democracy was to the Framers of the US Constitution.
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