it's heating up

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Oct 25 12:26:03 PDT 2000


Doug Henwood wrote:


> The party is some hybrid
> of meaningless and evil. It should be blown up.

The first sentence (as I remember it) of a book review (don't remember the book) in the *Guardian* (NY USA) back in the '60s:

Born in the blood of Indians, built on the bones of slaves, fattened on the riches of the entire earth, the American Experiment should be declared a failure and destroyed to make room for humanity.

I would assume that blowing up the Democratic Party is one reasonably crucial waystation to that eventual goal (or even to a little more decency in the short run). The question is not whether but how. I really don't know whether third-party campaigns such as the Greens are very central to the effort. If what someone posted about the Greens in California is true, I'm beginning to think a blank ballot is preferable to a Nader vote in Illiois. Since I would not vote for Gore in any case, my voting for Nader does no harm to Gore, and the California news suggests it isn't even a useful symbolic gesture.

(Incidentally, the self-destruction of the Republican Party, as almost happened in '64, would be equally effectiive -- anything to destroy the one-party with two right wings we currently have. But for Progressives to vote Democratic harms *neither* of those two right wings -- it is either meaningless or serves merely to encourage them, as an anarchist slogan in '76 had it.)

Carrol



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list