I agree that no consensus on the question has emerged on whether the Democratic Party can be counted on or can serve as a vehicle for even the most minimal defense of a progressive agenda. This does not imply that the debate is irrelevant. The opposite is the case. Rather, the interesting and relevant question is why it is so difficult to achieve consensus on this point. Specifically, why is it so difficult, even given overwhelming evidence, to convince its defenders that the party is beyond reform, hopelessly compromised by its institutional relationships to some of the most reactionary segments of corporate capital.
I have mentioned my suspicions that cynical opportunistic motives of the sort which Adolph Reed has written on enter into the equation. This is not a subject anyone here seems to be interested in talking about. Again, the issue is not relevance, rather that there are those who would prefer that the issue be considered irrelevant.
> I suspect that if there is some topic that would make a difference, it would
> be some topic that neither you nor I could guess in advance would have
> any relevance to the debate over the DP (or anything else). That's my
> basic complaint about judgments of relevance. They are usually misleading.
> Hence my charge of arrogance in an earlier post.
>
I agree that it would be arrogant (not to mention stupid and counterproductive) to preordain any particular issue which will lead to a viable and effective progressive movement. A good indication of why no one here should be setting him or herself up as a commissar is that none of us here could have predicted that focussing on globabalization and the WTO would be the winner that it has turned out to be, particularly given Doug's withering and convincing criticisms of those who have attempted to make it an issue the past couple of years.
On the other hand, if one is, in Doug's words, tired of being irrelevant, one has to ask the question not so much what issues are relevant to a movement, which ones seem almost certain to be irrelevant. From your other posting you seem to agree with me that conspiracy theory thread fails this test. This is not the only issue of this type which gets a look of band width here.
> You will notice that most of the defenders of the DP on this list
are > among those who offered defenses of populism. Is that a relevant
> fact for either debate?
>
Actually, I have not noticed this correspondence. I thought the populist debate revealed interesting schisms on the list:
You are correct that the DP defenders found attractive the traditionalist/reformist strain of populism. But its not clear to me that populism is by its nature reformist in the sense that they seemed to assume.
Those with authoritarian Marxist tendencies were threatened by the potential of populism to advance a form of economic radicalism not grounded in the sacred doctrines. Furthermore, policy wonks of all stripes found (or at least should find) threatening populism's suspicion of expert opinion and intellectuals generally.
I would guess I speak for some of us in finding attractive a non-reformist, rationalist variant of populism, if such a thing were to exist.
John