>In this case, Nathan doesn't understand thay many people would like to
>see the Democratic Party die a slow painful death.
Doug piles on:
>A quick death wouldn't be so bad either. But this is the point: like
>the IMF, the Dems are essentially unreformable. They're the problem,
>not a potential solution. A Gore defeat would be good news, since it
>would throw the party into confusion and despair.
>Speaking of the party, what does it mean to be a Democrat, anyway?
What might lead to some interesting political conversation, and break with these stale pronouncements of breaking with bourgeois political parties, is the recognition that there are no longer mainstream American political parties in any meaningful sense of the term (i.e., organizations with coherent political platforms which they attempt to enact once in office) but quasi-state institutions, lines on a ballot, which various organized interests struggle to influence and control. What the hell does it mean to break with the Democrats, other than to eschew any role in the struggle over that institution, to leave the field even more open for corporate interests. Nathan's real crime to his electoral critics on LBO is that he lives in the political present, not a mythical past, and doesn't pretend that a "real political party" of the left is about to burst upon us. Hell, it didn't emerge when the left, both organized and mass, was a 100 times stronger than it is today.
Defeat for the Democratic national ticket will only produce what the Reagan-Bush years did: defensive struggles for our very life. That may not matter much to academics and freelance intellectuals, but it matters a helluva lot to people who person the trenches of those struggles.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --