That is because, _for the Left_ (= those who seek to abolish capitalism & establish a system of production for human needs & desires, not for profits, ranging from anarchists, left-wing feminists, left-wing social ecologists, religious leftists, revolutionary black nationalists, to Marxists of various stripes), "electoral outcomes" _in themselves_ have little to teach us. We can't get what we want electorally -- participation in electoral politics is for political education.
>The Goldwaterites drew from defeat the lesson that they needed to
>work from the ground up to alter the political climate, to shift the
>center of gravity of American politics in their direction. This
>meant digging in for a protracted effort to change the terms of
>political debate, to redefine and reframe key issues in ways that
>would make their interpretations and programs seem reasonable to a
>potential electoral majority.
The Left naturally should & _has been_ engaged in "a protracted effort to change the terms of political debate, to redefine and reframe key issues in ways that would make their interpretations and programs seem reasonable" (which is the ABC of the Gramscian tradition, though I would not use the word "reasonable" which sounds ominously technocratic to me); but we should _not_ try to make ourselves seem "reasonable to a potential electoral majority." A large number of potential leftists -- poor black men -- have been _legally disfranchised_ due to the war on crimes & drugs, with consent of the electoral majority. Regular voters are _much whiter & richer_ than all residents of the USA. I speak "residents" -- not voters, not citizens -- purposefully here. A good number of actual & potential leftists in America are illegals & foreigners without voting rights.
What "seems reasonable to a potential American electoral majority" within the bounds of the Empire of capitalism is _not_ reasonable to the poor in general, much less to poor blacks & illegal aliens, to say nothing of foreigners.
Our programs & interpretations should be written with workers of the world in our minds, not just working-class members of "a potential electoral majority" of the USA.
>The right built a cohesive alliance, rooted institutionally in the
>Republican Party, that joined what often seemed to be disparate, if
>not incompatible, interest groupings into a singular political force.
The Right can do so because their concerns can be addressed within the bounds of the Empire. The Left's concerns do not fit within the same bounds. In fact, we have to break the bounds to make the centerpiece of our program -- the abolition of production for profits -- culturally hegemonic, to say nothing of practical.
>How has the right been able to maintain this kind of disciplined
>solidarity while we haven't?
We have _no party_, so we have _no partisan discipline_. We are all individualists by default.
>Despite their tremendous advantages, conservatives face a major
>obstacle that we don't: Their task has been to sell a big chunk of
>the American population a bill of goods, to convince them that their
>interests and concerns are best served by supporting political
>initiatives and programs that are sharply skewed to benefit
>corporations and the rich at their own expense.
Within the aforementioned bounds, a left "electoral majoritarianism" that Reed seems to advocate can only speak of political initiatives & programs that are only less "sharply skewed to benefit corporations and the rich" at our own expense -- perhaps something like "social imperialism." The reason why left-Keynesianism fell & the Third Way triumphed is primarily economic (stagflation of the 70s, whose only practical "cure" within the capitalist Empire was neoliberalism -- lower interest rates, bust unions, cut social programs, restore profit rates, shore up "investor confidence"), only secondarily cultural.
>No, the right has been so much more effective at cultivating and
>maintaining a disciplined political alliance mainly because it has
>harnessed that alliance to a larger goal of pursuing national power.
>This is the foundation of their solidarity; they are united around a
>vision of governing the society, of becoming its dominant political
>and ideological force. While we've fallen into a defeatist cycle of
>mobilizing intensely around only defensive struggles, accepting and
>exaggerating the inadequate options offered by the Democrats, and
>indulging a penchant to replace strategic political action with a
>shortsighted-though no doubt personally gratifying-politics of moral
>gestures and bearing witness, they've pursued relentlessly the
>objective of winning what most of us are now even too embarrassed to
>refer to as state power.
State power, yes, and let's consign the Democrats to the dustbin of history, but we can't ditch defensive struggles (e.g., opposing imperialism). I add this point, because I recall Reed's dismissive remarks on Mumia, etc.
>We need an entirely different, more tactical and less
>candidate-centered, approach to electoral action. We need to
>confront the electoral arena much more as the Goldwaterites did
>post-1964: that is, not simply as a venue for making immediate
>statements but as the setting for a triumph yet to come if we do our
>work well.
Political education should be defined by principled strategies, not just tactics of the moment, however.
>The other lesson is that we can hope to do either only by talking
>and fighting explicitly for what we want by offering people a clear,
>practical, alternative vision of how the country should be governed
>in their interests. Only through generating grassroots-level
>discussion around such practical alternatives can we create an
>activist base deep and broad enough to break the
>rightwing/neoliberal dominance of public debate, withstand the
>aggressive and dishonest opposition of the powerful interests
>aligned against us, and mobilize support for the kind of society we
>all know we need.
I think what the Labor Party stands for -- an economistic program of social democracy, avoiding the mentions of actually or potentially divisive topics -- is utopian & impractical. Social democracy is gone -- _gone with the USSR_. Economism doesn't even mobilize a lot of people for actions (the Gramscian Right knows this fact very well), aside from practicality. One might learn from the Popular Front which had a wild & sprawling Cultural Front (e.g., "communist dances" for which all the Jazz greats played).
Yoshie