Nathan Newman writes:
>It is an inescapable fact that the most productive years of liberal
>legislation, 1936-38 and 1964-66 were periods of massive Democratic party
>majorities-- more than two thirds of the House and about the same in the
>Senate were Dems in those two periods.
-You forget in 1976 under Carter where both house and senate had a veto-proof -Democratic majority and the labor movement couldn't even get a simple -picketing reform through.
No I don't forget-- and you could mention the defeat of the broader labor law reform bill in 1978. But two big things going on in that period. First, while the House had large majorities, the Senate had a much narrower margin and the Senate filibuster kiilled labor law reform. Secondly, this was the period when southern Democrats were on their way over to the GOP, not yet changing their registration but voting more and more as a block with the GOP. The picketing reform you mentioned was limited largely to the building trades, who had almost zero constituency in the south, so every southern Democrat voted No. On broader labor reform, the Dems picked up far more southern Democrats (29 voted yes, 53 voted no) and it passed by significant margins with 36 northern Republicans as well. But labor law reform could only get 58 votes in the Senate, dying due to the GOP-southern Dem filibuster. But at the time, top AFL-CIO officials admitted that the Carter administration could not have done more to pull over anti-union GOPers and southern Dems.
Notably, the character of southern Democrats are far more progressive today on average--- Zell Miller to the exception, they generally voted with labor on issues like Homeland Security. So it would actually take a lower number of Democrats elected today to get strong majorities. The hardest hurdle will always be the Senate where we would need probably 63 Dems to deal with the inevitable defections but that's better than in the past.
>My view is that the real answer is to elect more Democrats, since periods
>of large numbers of Democrats in office coincide with better legislation
>passed. But you don't like that answer and prefer to analyze rhetoric, as
if that's
>far more important than anything as piciyune as actual voting power.
-Nathan, most people don't vote. If they had something to vote for, they -might do so.
The lowest voting totals are in the most progressive districts. Some of the highest voting percentages are in the most rightwing districts. Do you really want to go with this time-worn argument. Greens and other leftwing third parties often run in those poorer progressive districts and I've seen little evidence that they significantly change the voting percentages.
The reality is that most people don't vote in the US because our system is so gerrymandered that the results are almost a foregone conclusion. Proportional representation might kick up voting totals but third parties in a first-past-the-post gerrymandered system do very little.
>The Democrats continue to make sure that that doesn't happen by
>being so tepid, rhetorically and actually, not because they lack moral
fiber,
>but because they are beholden to corporate cash and because the Democratic
>party has less discipline than a three year-old's birthday party. Whyn'cha
>start selecting candidates by convention, rather than by primary? That way
>if the party's position is no war, they'd *all* have to vote that way.
Yeah-- do it through a convention or causus, not a primary. Damn, why didn't they think of that? Oh yeah, they did and they used to exclude blacks from it and at the Presidential level progressives complained it gave too much power to party "bosses." So progressives demanded, sued and fought for open primaries where any candidate could run. And they won.
And now progressives wimper that it's just too hard to run in the primary and beat actual opponents, so they just want to run symbolic third party races that are meaningless.
The only discipline needed is broadbased movement activity in party primaries. Unions are doing that increasingly, knocking off in safe districts in primaries incumbent democrats who ignore their issues. The antiwar movement is making lots of noise, but how many are organizing for primary challenges to the one-third of Democrat House members who voted to authorize the war in Iraq?
-- Nathan Newman