>This is just exceptionally weak. Labour parties that are strongly rooted
in trade unions are as common as >mud in first-past-the-post electoral
systems.
>Let's find out just how far you're willing to follow your own logic. Was
the creation of the Labour Party in >the UK a strategic error? After all,
it was achieved at the price of the near-destruction of the Liberal Party,
>and turned the Conservative Party into the party of government for most of
the twentieth century.
The Labor Party was established as essentially a caucus within the Liberal Party, much as the Progressive Caucus in the Dems now operates, although the latter has less of a formal electoral coalition. I would actually fully support labor unions, enviros and others more strategically forming a Labor-Progressive Caucus within the Dems. If at some point secession made sense, so be it. But starting with a third party wasn't how the Labour Party formed and won't work in the US.
Whether splitting from the Liberals was a strategic error or failed in its implementation is an open question-- the results were not socialism and the post-war statist policies of both France and Britain were pretty much a bi-party consensus due to the weakness of capital in the wake of the WWII.
>How can I resist mentioning that as soon as Labour decided to model itself
on our own Dems, cutting the >party loose from the TUC, they moved decidedly
to the right of the Lib-Dems?
Hardly proves your point since that rightward move was done with the full support of the labor unions that largely controlled Labour; it was often the mass membership (in the equivalent of Dem primaries) that resisted the rightward lurch. Just note the recent Livingstone race in London.
The Labour Party is probably the best support for exactly the point I was making, since the Labour Party had so much trouble building majoritarian status and only did so when it opened itself up for de facto internal alliances with sectors of capital.
In parliamentary systems, social democrats served in government in much of the post-war period, but only by making deals and alliances with bourgois-based parties.
The results have been pretty much the same, with the Scandanavians as always being the most interesting exception.
-- Nathan Newman