Nathan Newman wrote:
>It all comes down to the basics- organize, organize, organize. We now have
>an ideological terrain to rally and organize progressive forces; the only
>question is doing the hard work to make it all happen.
-So what's the goal, the central organizing principle? That it's all -about Gore getting stiffed, or that the U.S. electoral system is -deeply fucked?
The central point is the only point - democratic control by the people- which can tie together the disenfranchisement fight in Florida, the fight against the WTO-IMF, the fight against lawless police brutality, all the way on up to democratic control of the economy.
What is beautiful about the Jim Crow Five's decision is that it gives a base issue, wheat John Lewis has called the Selma of our time, that can rally a unified left on a mother-and-apple pie issue, the basics of the right to vote and to have each vote counted. Expanding the franchise, whether to those excluded by intimidation or to new immigrants or to ex-felons who have served their time, is the most basic fight the Left must always fight. And now we can tie it to the actions of a rogue Supreme Court which is issuing authoritarian capitalist decisions by the boatload, neatly tying together political, economic and social campaigns for justice.
Of course there will be tensions between our forces on exact priorities at each juncture, but the general theme of the deep radical democracy, whether at the polling booth or in the workplace, is a powerful unifying call to action. Gore is now irrelevant; maybe he'll jump on board and be a useful liberal martyr or we'll have to push his dead corpse out of the way.
The power of both the 1930s and the 1960s is that the Left was mobilizing around fundamental issues of expanding democratic voice. In the last decades, that sense of democratic vision has been largely eroded in many progressive corners in favor of issue-specific and even elitist antipopulist viewpoints. Hopefully, with elite institutions so thoroughly and clearly and illegitimately dominated by the Right, the last vestiges of that approach can give way to a Campaign for Democratic Voice that can encompass campaigns in the workplace, in our government and in the New World Order.
-- Nathan newman