Let me answer that last question. A _Democratic_ Senator (with a 'liberal' reputation) who does not oppose that program is of immense use -- to the U.S. ruling class. You know, Steve, that progressive action in the United States depends on the growth of mass movements _outside the electoral arena_ -- and that in fact, any good things that happen _inside_ the electoral arena occur also as the result of such mass movements. (And even then, the "good" things are usually a bit suspect: e.g., the Wagner Act was not so much a victory for the CIO as a way of putting a ceiling on the victory it was winning on its own.) And you should also know that the primary function of the Democratic Party in the u.s. political scene is to bar the development of such mass movements. Every vote for the Democratic Party is a vote for the continuation of U.S. imperial crime.
I am attaching at the end of this post a post I recently sent to the psn list, on this very subject of the role of the DP in u.s. life.
Carrol
Steve Philion wrote:
> A letter from today's Minneapolis Star Tribune to Liza Featherstone's
> column critical of the Greens' candidate for senator Ed McGaa, who is
> running against incumbent Paul Wellstone and Republican Norm Coleman. I
> thought Liza's article was right on, a one hour program with McGaa on
> Minnesota Public Radio a month ago was enough to convince me he is the
> worst possible candidate for the party and enough to get me registered
> to vote for Wellstone. The response in the letter below is written by
> someone who really seemed to not have read Liza's criticisms very
> carefully. Much of her letter is just a defensive response and an
> attribution of positions to Liza that I think it's fair to say she
> didn't take in her opinion piece.
===============
Subject: Re: this was predictable
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:16:18 -0500
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
To: "psn at csf.colorado.edu" <psn at csf.colorado.edu>
Timothy Mason wrote:
>
> Your constitution notwithstanding, the USA has a solid tradition of
> disregard for individual rights.
I want to take a round-about approach to this.
Imagine that in the late 1920s & early 1930s in Germany the left had campaigned furiously against the restoration of the Kaiser, and to avoid that horror had made alliances with the Nazis.
Imagine that in 1920 the left in Italy had focused all its attention on a military threat from the Papacy to reestablish its rule throughout Italy, and to avoid that danger had made an alliance with the Fascists.
Other mistakes (or just plain unavoidable working-class weakness) allowed fascism & National Socialism to triumpth at that time. But one of the problems of "learning from history" is that one always tends to prepare for the last war. Suppose that in 2002 leftists fear above all the threat of that ancient "ism" fascism, and to avoid that threat make alliances with the Democratic Party.
The threat in the United States is not "fascism" or anything that resembles fascism any more than Hitler resembled Louis XIV. The threat in the United States comes from the ordinary (that is extreme)repressive powers of the capitalist democracy. Who needs fascism when a "leftist" president can arrange for the passage of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Who needs fascism when increasingly for 50 years the NLRB has failed almost completely to control illegal firings of union supporters in companies large and small all over the U.S.
This is still the U.S. that tolerated (i.e., encouraged and defended)Jim Crow & lynching in the south for 70 years and in which extreme police brutality (torture) was laughingly referred to as "the third degree."
It is the U.S. in which a president, while masterminding the deaths of two to three million Vietnamese, could assert that if one wished to understand u.s. policy abroad all one needed to do was to examine u.s. policy at home.
Carrol Cox