Opposition to these initatives has been by far the strongest consistent realm of mass struggle on the Left in California over the last four years, with grassroots organizations like Californians for Justice growing across the state in a semi-permanent campaign to mobilize new voters in poor and minority communities (with relatively dramatic success).
So we have one party, the Republicans, lining up solidly on initiatives that those in mass struggle see as the cutting edge of rightwing, corporate assaults on the grassroots and a party, the Democrats, which has opposed those initiatives. Unless one dismisses the importance of issues that have consumed the energy of those in mass struggle, it seems hard to take seriously the idea that there is no real difference between the parties.
Of course, there has been plenty of justifiable criticism that many Democratic leaders have verbally opposed the initiatives but haven't done enough to defeat them. That is where the spectrum of Democrats come in, from those opposing these initiatives out of fear of retribution in primaries to those who actively fought the initiatives as part of their campaigns.
What was interesting this year was the way the Dem governor's nominee, Gray Davis, tied his campaign to mobilization against Prop 226. He was supposed to be the dead duck against two incredibly rich opponents but due to mistakes by them, he was back in the race by the end. And on the leadup to election day and on election day itself, Davis tied his whole operation to the anti-Prop 226 get-out-the-vote operation. The result was rather dramatic on both Davis's and the Prop 226 campaign.
Davis went from a slight lead to a blowout on election day (something like 58% of the primary vote) while Prop 226 was solidly defeated. This was one of the most organic demonstrations of grassroots mobilization and Democratic campaigns reinforcing each other to defeat a top corporate anti-worker initiative.
Now, the contradictions in this are that Davis is hardly a left Democrat, at best described as an old-line liberal Dem, with rather appalling death penalty politics in regards to crime and chummy with all sorts of corporate types. But because labor is important within the Democratic party, Davis had an interest in tying his campaign to the fight against Prop 226. And labor gained by mobilizing many more centrist Davis supporters to also vote against Prop 226.
The result was that Prop 226 went from being favored in polls just before election day to a close, but solid defeat on election day.
THe defeat of Prop 226 is a rather large example of a gain for the Left from participation in Democratic party politics.
Now, what drives me crazy about those who attack the Dems is they state that corporations have a strong presence in its politics, as if this is some dirty secret they have just revealed. If corporations and the wealthy did not have some role, the Dems would be a workers party and there would not be a need for strategic debate on who to support.
There are Democrats pushing for proportional representation (Cynthia McKinney is a great advocate) but in the meantime with majority geographic districts, US parties end up being the worker-liberal bourgoisie coalitions during election campaigns that European governing coalitions become only after elections. None of this means that social democratic coalitions in Europe are the long-term goal, but the politics of labor and grassroots participation in the Democratic Party is no different in kind from left support in Europe for a variety of center-left governing coalitions. The Communist Refoundation in Italy has helped keep the center-left coalition in power there for years, the CP, Socialists and Greens collaborate in power in France, and countries like the Netherlands and Denmark have a multitude of parties sustaining center-left governments.
Now, if someone wants to argue that every left party in Europe should refuse to support any governing coalition with any bourgeois participation (thus keeping the Right in power in perpetuity), then that is consistent with the view that we should never support Democrats in the United States.
Otherwise, we are left in the US with the unsatisfying strategic maneuvering within the Democratic Party to make it as progressive as possible. One unfortunate fact, despite everyone's claim that "this has already been tried" is that there is no national organization in existence fighting specifically to push the Dems to the left, no equivalent of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council. Lots of organizations like unions intervene in specific primary races but there is no equivalent to the Christian Coalition which has county-by-county seized control of the Republican Party apparatus.
The fact is that despite a lot of breast-beating over the issue, the Left has done lousy, uncoordinated electoral organizing, usually sporadic in response to crisis, and the result has been very weak control of the electoral apparatus. Big surprise. It doesn't take much ideological analysis to see why smart, well-coordinated grassroots organizing by the rightwing beat sporadic, uncoordinated electoral organizing on the Left.
We don't have a GOPAC, a Christian Coalition or any other organization consistently fighting for control of the electoral apparatus. Some folks want to blame the ephemera of Clinton's actions in his first term for the rise of the Republican Congress in 1994. The fact is that polls just never showed that as a cause for the changeover.
THe fact is that the rightwing won power largely on what the Christian Coalition dubbed the 15% solution (envisioned soon after its founding in 1989), which meant that a well-organized minority of as little as 15% of the population could take over Congress in an off-year election. Since turnout is so low, often in the mid-30s, if that well-organized minority gets its voters to the polls in massive numbers, they can take power.
And that's what the Christian Coalition along with the NRA and GOPAC did in 1994. In fact, Newt Gingrich and others back in the early 1980s had declared that it would take them ten years of organizing to take over the Congress and envisioned taking power in 1992. They were off by two years (this was before the 15% solution idea) but if you study indepth what the conservatives did in their organizing between Reagan's election in 1980 and the rise of Newt in 1994, you have to admire the sheer comprehensiveness and strategic intelligence of their organizing.
And you have to be sad at how pathetically unorganized the Left has been in its actions around the electoral realm.
---Nathan Newman