One can't deny that you do give a lot of concrete and specific argument about what the Dems do. I don't agree with it all. For example, you give all credit for the 1991 Civil Rights ACt to the DEms, I think that is demonstrably wrong, it was mainly Bush I's counterproposal to the Dems' admittedly better 1990 Civil Rights Act. (And youignore the ADA, a Bush I initiative.) More in my my reply to your previous. But you deserve credit for offering specifics.
while responding with intellectualized
>sweeping statements that never, ever once justify how an alternative to
>hard
>step-by-step organizing in Dem primaries will lead to a better result.
Is that fair to me, at least? I put my time in, eight years. You said that wasn't enough. I said I don't have an extra lifetime to spend on this, I'd rather work in movements.
>
>I've pointed out that European Green parties have merged into governing
>coalitions there, so there is clear evidence that any sufficiently
>successful third party becomes indistinguishable from existing left
>factions
>of existing parties.
Talk about apples and oranges! And talk about ignoring context! Put the situation of the Greens in parliamentary system, which have not got, in the context of the global class war of capital against labor and the left, Nathan. It's not inevitable.
>
>As I noted to Justin, are black folks in the US just stupid, in that they
>rate Clinton as the best President of the 20th century? Or maybe they are
>the ones who respond to concrete reality, while it in the intellectuals on
>this list that live with abstraction.
>
This is a cheap shot, Nathan. And look at what Clinton did for Black folk, compared to Kennedy's real but reluctant support for the civil rights movement, sending Justice Dept supervisors to stop lynchings and bombings, or Johnson's Great Society and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or even Nixon's (and he was a racist pig) expansion of welfare and creation of affirmative action. Clinton shut down AFDC, gave us the expanded drug war that has put 1 million black men in prison, and the Anti-Terrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act, effectively repealing habeas so they can't get out, rammed through NAFTA and GATT thus contributing to the decimation of the industrial base on which the black working class depends. Clinton is not personally a racist, but neither was Bush I (he was just socially awkward outsidethe country club set, remember the pork rinds?); neither, I would surmise, is Bush II. Yea, I think the black sentiment that admires that fat lecherous fraud is deluded, same as I think the white working class sentiment that admires Bush is deluded.
jks
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