Nathan, I think you have found exactly the right calling in the legal profession. I must point out to you, however, that Marx was talking about the workers voting for socialist parties, not bourgeois parties.
>I could also quote Marx's praise of Lincoln and other bourgois politicians
>in the US, but I will leave the old boy alone. Marx is a wonderful
>thinker precisely because the dogmatic quotes usually attributed to him
>are the rhetorical side of a thinker of much broader and nuanced
>distinctions than his disciples in name would grant him.
Marx supported Lincoln against the slavocracy because he believed in free labor. He had no illusions about the Republican Party being an instrument for socialist transformation, so I don't know why you would throw this red herring in. The SWP supported Eisenhower sending troops into Little Rock in 1956 to quell racist riots.
The question is how to achieve socialism. That must be done through an act of mass revolutionary insurrection, not unlike the war against the slavocracy. In this case, however, the class alignment will be different. On one side will be the workers, family farmers, radicalized middle class. On the other side will be the bourgeois vultures and their fascist goons. As class polarization deepens in the United States, the Democratic Party will shift more and more to the right. You will find more and more outbreaks of skinhead and klan violence. Strikebreaking activity will be organized more and more by "pro-American" armed detachments, just like the kind that defended Henry Ford in the 1930s. The reason for this polarization is right in front of our eyes. It will be more and more difficult for the system to satisfy people's basic material needs.
The whole purpose of Marxism is to prepare people politically for such an eventuality and to ensure victory for our side. When we screw up, as we did in Germany in the late 1920s, the consequences are awful.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)