I don't understand your reference. I'm talking about local grass-roots organizing into permanent, autonomous groups. Nothing prevents you or me from designating ourselves, the Virtuous Democratic Club of Palookaville, educating our members, supporting strikes and other direct action, pressuring Members of Congress to vote the right way (when available), running candidates in primaries. McGovern never did this. Jackson had the means to begin it and pissed it away.
It is true that the national party apparatus is not easily transformed. In the face of a national movement it would either resist via unfair tactics, discrediting itself to the electorate, or crumble. An independent movement can be nimble enough to react to either development.
> Street are money-driven franchises, not mass popular parties in the non-US
If you can win a primary and an election, you become the Party. If you can't, what else could you hope to do? At the top it's a different question, as suggested above.
> sense of the term, so reforming the Dems is like pushing on a string. It
> doesn't matter how many caucus votes you get, only a long-term,
> membership-based organization, with powerful roots in trade unions,
> micropolitical movements, and Left intellectual and aesthetic traditions,
> can really change things in this country.
This last is not inconsistent with what I'm talking about.
>
> I'm not sure why you seem to think that there are residual grains of
> decency in a party which spawned the AFDC horror, welfare deform, assorted
> missile strikes on impoverished 3rd World countries and luscious capital
> gains taxes for Wall Street, to name only a few of the crimes of the
> Clintonites.
Because the Clintonites are not the party. Also, to an important extent, the stuff you're talking about was supported by the public, not forced down their throats.
> Realpolitik is neither real nor especially political, it's
> simply conforming to the status quo; any genuine Left opposition (let
> alone threat) to the rentier hegemony has got to take the risk of making
> its own mistakes and fighting its own battles, instead of assuming that
> nice shiny politicos from the DNC are always preferable to the
> flat-taxers. In 1998, the Republicans are merely larval Democrats, who
> haven't yet figured out that the state exists in order to ensure that the
> rich get richer (but generally do, once they get elected).
Like LP, you seem to think we need new politicoes. What we really need are new organizations which create the environment from which politicoes get their signals.
If you think I'm talking about trying to persuade existing politicoes of this and that, I have failed completely to make clear what I mean to say. It wouldn't be the first time.
MBS