By David Swanson
Two years ago, Moveon.org dropped out of the anti-war movement because Democrats had taken over Congress, and David Sirota dropped out with them. He came back, and someday they might too. But Sirota’s announcement today that Moveon is back in the peace business seems a bit premature. As you begin reading it, once you get past Sirota’s revisionist history of his own brave standing up to the party-firsters, you are led to believe that Moveon has suddenly returned to “pressuring congressional Democrats to take a strong position on ending the war.” But read a bit more and you discover that, rather than doing anything at all in relation to current members of Congress, what Moveon has proposed doing is focusing on yet more elections off in the future – and Tom Geoghegan’s.
Promoting progressives in primaries is a good thing. And Sirota’s blogging — or 95 percent of it anyway — is a good thing. But nobody’s ever made peace by election campaigning. What changes the direction of a government is what the people do in between elections. My impression is not that party-before-peace groups are refinding their spines, but rather that formerly strong peace advocates are contemplating joining the invertebrates. I hope I’m wrong, but this latest project from Moveon doesn’t provide any indication of it.