> > I would love to see the same fervor by left activists in taking
> > over the > Democratic apparatus, but most seem far more
> > entranced by the useful exercise of building marginal, spoiler
> > Green parties that can wield no power but make them feel good
> > with their righteous no-compromise no-success purity.
You know, Nathan, I and a bunch of comrades and coworkers (movement activists) in Ann Arbor attempted this through the 1980s. The party was happy to have our labor, but totally iced us out of any policy input. Thjese were super-liberal Democrats, not DLC types. We would go to party meetings, and after a bit, when we started to insist on our views, we were (a) attacked by the regulars in the press for "packing" meetings with "activists" who were not "real Democrats" (there were no official membership requirements), and (b) iced out of the closed door meetings with the hacks and bosses and big donors where the real policy was made, and (c) had the resolutions we got passeda t the open meetings unhdemocratically ignored, and (d) faced with real meeting packing when the bosses brought in boatloads of union bureaucrats from Ypislanti and other places who didn't even live in AA to defeat our resolutions, and (e) outmanuevered by parliamentary bullshit such as declaring meetings adjourned when we arrived, and so forth. Moreover, when we got a genuinely multiracial and radical Rainbow Coalition going in 1984, the black millionionare who funded the Michigan RC pulled the plug on it, setting up a rival RC, and both of them went down. Most of the people I worked with in this endeavour were so totally disgusted that they gave up on politics altogether. The lesson I drew was that the Dems were not reformable. I joined Solidarity. You think I should have kept plugging away? After seven years of trying--isn't that a respectable run?--with nothing tos how for it, I figured it was time to fish or cut bait. jks
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