(1) What is social democracy if not an alliance between a historic bloc in which labor has great weight and the "smart wing" of capital?
(2) If we're not going to take our political lessons from the Bob Dahl school of pluralism (a school that Bob hasn't attended for a number of years himself), then we ought to remember that the power of capital operates not just by winning on the issues that become contested, but by keeping the most important issues off the agenda. Ergo, simply voting right on "the issues" doesn't qualify your century club of "good" Dems as social democrats, since social democracy is not on the agenda.
(3) That leaves your Progressive Caucus, which might plausibly be called social democrats. Certainly the four Chicago-area folks who are probably in the caucus (Rush, Jackson, Davis, and Schakowsky) are social democrats at best.
Presumably you want the Progressive Caucus to achieve dominance within the Democratic Party. How is this strategy more plausible than DSOC's ca. 1978?
Michael McIntyre
>>> nathan at newman.org 03/01/01 18:46 PM >>>
* the conservative wing of the Dems * do fit the model of representing the "smart wing" of business capital that finds alliances with certain labor issues convenient. *
*
There is a basic social democratic core of the Dems in the House of about 100 candidates. That is the number who supported single payer health care, voted against welfare deform, and generally vote right on almost any issue you can name. There is another core of about half that number, the rough membership of the Progressive Caucus, that will push even harder for relatively innovative and progressive legislation.
That works out to about 25% of the House being social democrat or better and within that aout 10% of the House that would be considered Left in most countries. Because of the nature of party campaigns in first-past-the-post systems - coalitions formed during primaries rather than after elections - the rhetoric of internal factional divisions in the Dems is not as clear, but the actual voting patterns are pretty distinct.
-- Nathan Newman