I suppose tired is as tired does, and the argument you don't like that you hear all the time is the tired argument. What I find tired is the notion that despite failed attempt after failed attempt, virtually all undertaken in far more propitious circumstances than the current context, this time we will find success with a third party that seeks fundamental change. It is the same arguments I heard and believed in 1968 when Nixon was elected, and the same arguments I heard and half-believed in 1980 when Reagan was elected; I may be a slow learner, but to hear the same proposition again and again, only to see reaction triumph from its application, leads me to seek a less undesirable result. What I find tired is the discussion of "party" politics that persists in ignoring -- hell, in consciously defying -- the changes in American political culture which have made the very concept of a 'Democratic' or 'Republican' PARTY an anachronism. What I find tired is the pursuit of a political strategy that has never produced a meaningful mass movement in American politics.
Doug again: << The hard-headed-trench-dwellers vs. the academics-and-freelance-intellectuals binary is also tired, and insulting too, especially coming from someone who draws a paycheck from one of the most conservative unions in the country, joined at the hip to the D branch of the status quo. >>
Hey, if the fatigue fits, go to sleep: with the politics you advocate, you might as well be in dreamland. What is tired for me is the assumption of "true representation" to folks who are accountable to no one and represent only themselves, and the snide dismissal of everyone ever elected to leadership in a democratic mass organization -- be it trade union, or feminist, civil rights/anti-racist and gay/lesbian organizations -- who doesn't want to follow the freelance political lemmings off the cliff.
It would be nice if you got close enough to a trade union, any trade union, to actually know what it did or did not do; then I might take this stuff about conservative trade unions just a mite bit more seriously. But right now, all you are operating on is some fourth hand, dare I say tired, accounts of ancient battles. I know, I -- and the AFT -- are nothing but unreconstructed cold warriors and anti-Communists. NEWSFLASH: the Cold War is over, done, fini, and guess what, the Stalinist/Communist regimes lost and are completely and entirely discredited. What is left of Communist Parties with any mass following have remade themselves, either into social democratic facsimiles on the democratic left, or into xenophobic, ultra-nationalist and racist parties on the right.Wallow in that shit for the rest of your political life if you want. But accusing me of being an unreconstructed Cold Warrior and anti-Communist has all the power of accusing me of being an unreconstructed Union supporter in the Civil War or an unreconstructed supporter of the Allied Powers in W.W.II. As far as I am concerned, it is completely irrelevant to the business of rebuilding a left that might have some impact on the real choices and world of American politics.
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 --