because democrats can disagree...there is not the same level of purity you see in the repubs that pay homage to Scaife/Robertson money sources.....Repubs are much more teleologically driven, which allows far more means justifying the ends....destroy to win, because winning means dining with Jesus....The American Left is hardly teleological....the most you can really say is that they believe in a "just" America, but there is no singular vision, in fact there are many. The repubs basically have two: the eschataolical rantings of the Religious Right and the lassaiz faire rantings of Capital. For one group, redemption is the end and for the other the accumulation of private capital.....to date, they have been able to co-exist because the primary leaders of the religious right also believe in the accumulation of private capital....
Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:Nathan Newman wrote:
>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.
That's all very nice, but why do all these left Dems have so little influence on either policy or political discourse? Remember that great Nation cover featuring Pelosi in her "ready to rumble" pose? It was funny at the time, but now it doesn't. They've got slightly less than half of Congress, but you'd never know it.
Doug
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