Nathan writes:
>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 you're saying that conservatism and racism are inherent to a convention or -caucus selection process? Interesting. Yet the U.S. has probably the most -conservative 'left opposition' party in the developed world.
It's not inherent in any system, but there is a tendency on the left to look to "process" to solve problems that mostly need more organizing. And I actually don't buy that the Democrats are the most conservative left party; what's most remarkable about the US is how rightwing our conservative party is.
But I seriously doubt you would on policy find much difference between Nancy Pelosi and a French Socialist, a German social democrat or an English Labour Party member.
>So progressives demanded, sued and fought
>for open primaries where any candidate could run. And they won.
--This was probably an unfortunate compromise, although I'm sure it was hard to -tell at the time...Nathan, it's your party, why don't -you tell me why it's veered to the right?
Because it hasn't. As I've noted, the party has probably moved to the left, but they don't have the numbers they had thirty years ago-- partly because they've moved to the left, especially on race, abortion and gay rights issues.
Nancy Pelosi is far to the left of old Rayburn and a good deal to the left of Tip O'Neill on social issues, yet she easily won election as majority leader. I could point to the median voter in the Democratic caucus and their leftward move from decades past.
But I know folks will continue to maintain that you should measure the party by its most rightwing members like John Breaux and Zell Miller or Lieberman, but that's like saying that the GOP is the party of Lincoln Chafee.
>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.
-So, you think it's really pretty easy for a progressive to get a nomination -in the Democratic party, as evidenced by the last three Democratic -presidential primaries, perhaps.
Who did progressives run? I mean in the sense of putting as much energy into the nomination as they've put into organizing antiwar protests? Were there any mass meetings to discuss candidates and create a strategy? No. A few individual progressives like Tom Harkin ran in 1992, but no serious progressive even ran in 1996 or 2000. You can't win if you don't even try.
Dean is working on collecting antiwar votes but I'm curious if antiwar activists will put real energy into his campaign. It doesn't involve all the fun and funky rallies but boring door knocking and such. It's definitely not easy to win the nomination but that's because public opinion hasn't swung as hard antiwar yet-- but who knows by next February?
-- Nathan Newman