> But for those like myself who care about the proportion of strong
> progressives within the Dem caucus, especially the Progressive Caucus, the
> 1990s have been a great period of progressive electoral success. Why
> third party people can be so excited about a few Green city council
> members, yet dismiss the growth of the Progressive Caucus is sometimes
> beyond me.
Only 37% of the US electorate bothered to vote in 1998. What kind of progress is that?
> I would love to see Greens, Labor Party, Socialist Party members in
> Congress. I just have not seen any good explation or empirical
> demonstration of how such strategies win in the context of a
> first-past-the-post system and ballot access laws that so favor a
> two-party stranglehold.
You organize third parties *and* you fight to change the electoral system. A true emancipatory politics is not about winning that next seat or conforming to the status quo, just because "that's the way things are always done here". There's a time to be moderate and push for coalitions, when you have strong Left parties and deep socialist traditions, like in the EU; but when you don't have Left parties or socialist traditions, when rentiers are trashing your country, when social disintegration has reached a point where 2.8% of your adult population is in jail, prison or on parole, when unchecked market forces are plundering the entire goddamn land mass of Asia and Africa -- that is a time, my friend, to register and vote Green, Labour or what have you.
It's not a question of some revolutionary purity thing. If there's an election and there's a dim Dumbocrat versus a leprous Rep and no other choice, you go with the lesser virus. A cold is better than hepatitis-A. But you have to understand that persistent colds will weaken that political immune system to the point where the body politic is highly susceptible to hep-A. The cure is a true multiparty democracy based on an organized cultural and political resistance to the forces of Capital, i.e. to get out there and get yourself on that ballot, to organize unions, to get third parties together.
-- Dennis