Actually, I don't disagree with this point- people who RUN for office are marginalizing themselves in a lot of ways. But we aren't talking about spending 24/7 as an elected official. We are talking about what people do with one hour of their time every two years, namely deciding how to vote to get the marginal gains folks get from the electoral game.
And folks who run for office on the Green ticket or the Labor Party ticket are just as marginalized. Anything they accomplish symbolically could have been accomplished just as well in a non-electoral manner, probably better. And if they win office, they'll end up playing the same game as the progressive Dems.
I'm not making a big case for the revolutionary gains from voting Democratic. All I'm arguing is there is no revolutionary gain from voting alternatives and there are non-revolutionary losses in the marginal reforms progressive Dems are able to pass on occasion..
Folks keep attacking the limits of Dem politics and I can only nod my head. But no one on this list has ever made a convincing argument for getting any revolutionary gains from third party voting. Hell, the only person that has an argument I respect as intelligible is ChuckO who argues against voting altogether- at least its intellectually consistent and has some sense on its side, even if I disagree with it. But all the posturing for the revolutionary potential of voting Green just seems silly. There is no historical basis for its success and all you need do is look at the Greens in power in Germany to see that there is no international basis for vaunting its revolutionary potential.
So why should anyone take voting Green seriously as a revolutionary act of any kind? And if you can't justify it, then why shouldn't people vote Dem for the marginal gains in reform we do get?
It's not enough to keep bashing the Dems; you need to justify the potential success of the alternative. Folks do infinite amounts of the former and almost none of the latter.
-- Nathan Newman
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