The Shadow Party
The war in Iraq marks a new era in America’s political life. Never previously has one of America’s two major political parties attacked a sitting president and wartime commander-in-chief with the ferocity manifested by leaders of the Democratic Party today. Never before has the country been so divided in the early stages of a war on foreign soil.
Bipartisanship in wartime has been a hallmark of American foreign policy since the Second World War. Republicans displayed it when President Clinton went to war in Bosnia and Kosovo— wars conducted without congressional authorization or UN approval, but which Republican leaders nonetheless supported. Such bipartisanship is strikingly absent in America’s war in Iraq. It has been undone by a Democratic leadership committed to more radical goals.
The Democrats’ movement to the political left is not new. “Progressive” activists have been carrying out a broad-ranging infiltration of American political and cultural institutions for forty years. Now the effects of that infiltration can be seen in the inability of America’s political leaders to form a united front against a clear military threat from abroad.
This book is about the radical forces which are undermining American unity. It identifies the radical leaders and explains their strategy. These activists are organized in two distinct movements, one exerting pressure from below, the other exerting pressure from above. In a 1957 tract, Czech Communist Party theoretician Jan Kozak explained how a small number of communists managed to gain power in Czechoslovakia through parliamentary maneuvers. The trick was to exert pressure for radical change from two directions simultaneously—from the upper levels of government and from provocateurs in the streets. Kozak called this tactic “pressure from above and below.”
One way to exert “pressure from below,” as Kozak explained, was to fill the streets with rioters, strikers and protesters, thus creating the illusion of a widespread clamor for change from the grassroots. Radicals in the government would then exert “pressure from above,” enacting new laws on the pretext of appeasing the protesters in the street—even though the protesters (or at least their leaders) were themselves part of the plot. The majority of the people would have no idea what was going on. Squeezed from “above” and “below,” most would sink into apathy and despair, believing they were hopelessly outnumbered by the radicals— even though they were not. Thus could a radical minority impose its will on a moderate majority, even under a democratic parliamentary system.
In America today, pressure from “below”—the intrusion of street-level radicals into the political process—has already profoundly changed the Democratic Party. This became evident as early as the McGovern campaign of 1972. It has become obvious in recent years that a corresponding pressure “from above” is now closing the pincer from the opposite direction. This movement from “above” is spear-headed by forces, both inside and outside the party, situated at the highest levels of political and financial power. The revolution from above involves key figures from the Clinton White House, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and her factotum Harold Ickes, along with Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff John Podesta.
The “Lenin” behind this revolution, however, is a man outside the political process altogether. Financial wizard and political manipulator, George Soros is the architect of a “Shadow Party” which operates much like a network of holding companies coordinating the disparate branches of this movement, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, and leading them toward the goal of securing state power. Once attained, that power will be used to effect a global transformation—economic, social and political—a post-Berlin Wall reincarnation of the old radical dream.
In short, this book documents how, through an extraordinary series of political, legal and financial maneuvers, an unlikely network of radical activists and activist billionaires gained de facto control over the Democratic Party’s campaign apparatus— including both its media “air war” and its get-out-the-vote ground war, and thus over its electoral future. This party within the party (but also outside the party) has no official name, but, without fully comprehending its scope, some journalists and commentators have dubbed it the Shadow Party, a term we have adopted in writing this book.
The Shadow Party is a network of private organizations that exercises a powerful and hidden influence over the Democratic Party, and through it, over American politics in general. It is not a political party per se, and it works outside of the normal electoral system, in pursuance of goals that are not openly disclosed.
The Shadow Party cannot afford to function as an ordinary political party. That would require making an honest, public appeal to voters, and this it cannot do, for its radical vision would offend most Americans. If Americans understood the intentions of the Shadow Party organizers, they would recoil in revulsion and reject its overtures. For these reasons, the Shadow Party network must proceed by stealth. It must (and does) use secretive, deceptive, and extra-constitutional means to achieve its objectives. It must infiltrate government bureaucracies, corrupt public officials and manipulate the press. And it must conceal who and what it is.
The Shadow Party does not confine its activities to the Democratic Party. If it did, it would be less effective. A number of notable Republicans, among them Senator John McCain, have exchanged political favors with the Shadow Party. But the Democratic Party—because it is already a party of the Left—is the focus of the Shadow Party’s activities and its chosen instrument. The Shadow Party has not yet achieved its goal of federal power, but since the 2004 election, it has attained a degree of control over the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party in general, that is nearly complete.
During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party—headed by a group of leftist billionaires—was able to contribute more than $300 million to the Democrat war chest, and, through its independent media campaigns, to effectively shape the Democrats’ message. Despite their defeat at the polls, Shadow Party leaders were intoxicated by their achievement. On December 9, 2004, Eli Pariser, who headed the Shadow Party group MoveOn PAC, boasted to his members, “Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it.”‘
Whom does Pariser mean exactly when he says “we?” What special interests does he represent? Who “bought” the Democratic Party in 2004, and what use do they plan to make of it? The following pages provide answers to these questions. They reveal the radical network that now steers the Democratic Party and shapes its policies. They recount the history of this network and describe its players, tactics and goals. These goals are informed by a fundamental hostility to American institutions—even to the idea of America’s sovereignty as a nation.
This is not a book about beating Democrats at the polls. A two-party system is vital to our democracy, and it is because we feel this system is imperiled by the subversion of one of its elements that we have written this book. The issues we seek to raise transcend party identifications and electoral contests. Every American interested in the health of the two-party system has reason to fear the Shadow Party. Ordinary Democrats who have been disenfranchised by the seizure of their party’s apparatus have reason to fear it most. Much of the network’s power lies in the general ignorance of its existence and purposes, in its ability to conceal its radicalism behind moderate language, and in the kaleidoscopic arsenal of issue-defined front groups, smokescreens of disinformation and public relations spin which the Shadow Party employs.
Radical organizer Saul Alinsky, an early mentor of Senator Hillary Clinton and of many Shadow Party operatives, identified for his disciples the path to power in American politics. Alinsky observed that radicals could achieve revolutionary change without majority support if they understood and exploited the rules of the game. This was the subject of his book, Rules for Radicals. The requirements for a radical power grab were a small core of disciplined activists pushing their agendas and a citizenry sufficiently in the dark about its purposes. In these circumstances, a radical minority could impose its will even on a great democracy such as the United States.
Alinsky’s theory was tested during the Vietnam War. As he predicted, a minority of radical activists succeeded in imposing its will on America, without achieving victory at the ballot box. The American people supported the war in Vietnam to its bitter end. Yet, after years of organized chaos on the home front, American leaders grew weary of the internal divisions and yielded to the forces of defeatism. Americans allowed the Left to prevail, not because Americans supported the Left’s agenda, but because the Left had a strategy and determination to succeed, while their opponents lacked either the understanding or the will to counter them.
America was not united during the Vietnam era, and our Communist enemies in Hanoi were fully aware of that fact. The harder we fought, the shriller the protest from America’s internal opposition became. The radicals’ slogan was not “Support a Communist Victory in Vietnam,” which would have been rejected by the American people out of hand. The radicals’ slogan was “Bring the Troops Home Now.” This slogan did not proclaim the radicals’ desire that the Communists would win the war—but created the illusion that the anti-war movement cared about America’s troops, which it most certainly did not. “Anti-war” activists like the young John Kerry called American soldiers “war criminals,” even while minimizing and excusing the genuine war crimes of the enemy.
The radicals’ slogan “Bring the Troops Home Now,” played on the natural fears and desires of American parents for peace and for a return of their sons. It divided the home front and weakened the national resolve. Eventually it forced an American retreat— and a victory for the Communists in Cambodia and Vietnam. The consequences were brutal—nearly three million Cambodians and Vietnamese were slaughtered by the Communists when they came to power. But they could not have come to power on their own. In every military encounter with American forces, the Communists suffered defeat. Their victory was only possible because the American radicals won.
This book describes forces at work behind the surface of political events, which seek to remake America as a radical Utopia. They are driven by the belief that American “hegemony” (as they like to describe it) is harmful and its purposes oppressive. In the name of globalism, they would deny America its nationhood, character and culture. Theirs is a party—a Shadow Party—that is subversive of the American idea itself.