11-13-06, 7:24 p.m.

It really was a remarkable election. Although only 40% of eligible voters cast their ballots, the Democrats really did win a sweeping victory, gaining over 30 seats in the House and recapturing the Senate, when few professional analysts gave them any chance to do so as late as Labor Day.

This was a major defeat for the ultra-right, and in response, many right-wingers went on the attack – against other Republicans. For example, Richard Viguerie, of direct mail fund-raising fame for the far right for the last 30 years, and other leaders of far right organizations issued statements denouncing the Bush administration for its big spending, corruption, and domination by Big Business! No, this wasn't an episode of the Daily Show, but it gives rats deserting a sinking ship a bad name.

What is important now is to continue the offensive. Looking at the election returns, what is most significant besides the victory itself is how many northern Republicans barely survived their congressional races. Had the Democrats had more money and better organization, the Republicans could easily have lost 50 seats or more. It is also significant that the election victory was won at all levels and in all regions, as Republicans lost state legislatures, governorships, and mayoral elections across the board.

The Democrats need to realize that they were swept into office by mass outrage against the Bush administration's corruption, disastrous foreign policy, and dictatorial acts in violation of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Before the campaign, I wrote a piece for this website listing 10 practical reasons to get out the vote and defeat the Republicans. Now the Democrats can begin to turn those reasons into practical policies that will keep up the momentum to 2008 and set the stage for a greater victory that will begin a real social reconstruction.

First, the Democrats can launch a full scale, high profile investigation of the Iraq war, calling on prominent antiwar critics like Joseph Wilson. They could issue subpoenas to people like Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi con artist whose Iraqi National Congress provided phony information to Bush administration insiders, produced false documents, and invented testimony about Saddam's weapons programs that were used to stoke pro-war sentiments on primetime television.

These crimes have been exposed in books and documentaries, and there are numerous former Pentagon employees, State Department officials, and CIA and FBI people who have appeared in documentaries and wrote books who would be willing to testify about the misuse of intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq.

Congressional hearings are needed to help us learn the truth about the administration's abuse of power to purposely mislead the American people and Congress to support the war. With the aide of the media, such investigative hearings would reach the whole American populations and force even Bush supporters to confront the crimes of the administration.

Congress should also link a more general Iraq investigation with an investigation of the unprecedented corporate corruption and conflicts of interest related to military spending in Iraq that have characterized the Bush administration. One focus might be on the activities of Vice President Cheney, who has become something like a one-man holding company for military industrial complex profiteers. Another broader focus might on the larger problem of crony capitalism that has characterized this administration to the tune of hundreds of billions for energy companies, military contractors, and construction companies.

Economists have used the term crony capitalism for dictatorial regimes in poor countries (the Philippines under Marcos and Indonesia under Suharto are often cited examples). While the U.S. is not a poor country (even though it has more poor people than any other rich developed country!), crony capitalism has characterized this administration as no other in American history, making the crony scandals of the Grant and Harding administrations seem insignificant by comparison.

Drafting legislation to re-regulate energy companies and financial institutions and also to restrict the corruption associated with lobbying could be an important result of such investigations.

The Democrats must expose, challenge, and reject the administration's use of the 'war on terrorism' to proclaim its right to spy on and arrest people without warrants, to hold them without trial, to use torture to extract confessions and information from them, and to subcontract torture policies to open dictatorships like Egypt when that appears to be convenient. While such policies have existed at various times in United States history, they have never in themselves been a general policy openly proclaimed by the government.

Although I concede that this is unlikely, progressives in Congress could use such hearings to introduce a 'Freedom Act' to balance the ill-named 'Patriot Act' in order to protect US citizens and residents from warrantless wiretapping, arrests without habeas corpus, and imprisonment without access to legal counsel and trials.

In addition to the Democrats' announced plan to propose legislation to raise the minimum wage, they should pass labor law reforms, such as the Employee Free Choice Act, that will permit unions to organize and bargain collectively on a more even playing field.

The Democrats can do these things and make themselves stronger by strengthening their core constituent groups and bolstering the confidence of the people in their leadership. Such policies would make the Democrats a positive good and improve their image as a real alternative to the Republicans, rather than merely a lesser evil. This would unite and energize progressive constituencies and continue to divide and weaken the right.

Much of television and the press are attempting to play down this victory, contending that the Democrats who won were 'conservative populists' rather than 'social issues' liberals, and that the victory was only in the Northeast. Such distinctions tell us much more about the sophistry that passes for political analysis in American media than it does about the elections.

In reality, the Democrats who won (in the Northeast, the Middle West, the Far West, and even in the South) won as much on economic (i.e. class) issues by attacking the administration's assault on middle-class working people and lower-income groups generally, along with its favoritism for the corporations and the wealthy, as they did by attacking its disastrous war and occupation in Iraq.

That some of these Democrats are either silent or opposed to legislation concerning reproductive rights and gun control, while playing up their religiosity, is true. However, past experience in US politics shows that successful progressive politicians, such as Robert La Follette in Wisconsin in the early 1900s and Franklin Roosevelt nationally in the 1930s, find ways to avoid conflict over social issues like religion in politics, prohibition, etc., while building broad economic coalitions of working people who disagreed with each other on some social issues.

Ultimately, the liberalization of the judiciary and of society generally that progressive governments have established, enabled social movements to win major victories on a variety of social issues like reproductive rights. With right-wing Republicans in power, advocates of gay civil rights, an extension of reproductive rights, effective separation of church and state, and national gun law reform can never expect to gain anything tangible through mass protest except a few minutes of media fame.

All progressive people must demand that the Democratic majority in Congress use its powers to compel the Bush administration to cease its dishonest and disastrous policies that we have had to endure over the past six years.



--Contact Norman Markowitz at