That seems to assume that "ordinary" US-ers (sorry, but 'Americans' means also Canadians and Mexicans, not to mention Latin Americans) would change their minds if the were presented with a better left story. I disagree. Popularity of an ideology is a product of the strength of social and political institutions that repesent it - and the US does not or has not ver had any such institution that would legitimate a grnuinely left ideology. The main reason is that such brand of ideology is rooted in the notions of social solidarity rooted in European societies (especially France, Spain, Norway, or Jewish communities) - and solidarity was the first victim of immigration. It was replaced with the "I-can-too-be-rich" individualism.
Another reason is that during the formative years (18th and 19th centuries) of the left movements in Europe, European societies were the stage of intese political, philsophical and theological debates that resonated in all social strata, especially the urban classes. The US was cut off of these debates save for a narrow elites whose intellectual influence was rather confined. The waves of peasant immigrants were more strongly influenced by religion, which also was cut off major theorlogical debate, and thus degenerated into infantile and simplistic moralizing.
So the US society lacked two crucial ingredients that created the European left - social solidarity and intellectualism. Instead it was dominated by infantile religiosity and hedonistic individualism characteristic of small-town petit bourgeoisie. This petit bourgeois philistinism cum individualism became the dominant weltanschauung of the US society. While the European labor movement was more recpetive to philosophically oriented left ideologies based on the concept of social solidarity (such as universal rights or universal access to services) - US-ers found such notions alien. Thus, the left movememnts esposes the concept of individual rights and lifestyles rather than that of social solidarity and collectivbe mobilization.
After the state bureaucracy learned how to deliver individual services to keep individuals happy (the "great society" programs) and how to use mercenary army instead of conscripted population, the individual-right based message of the US left lost any of its popular appeal outside the academia.
The chance of the left (aka social democracy and its offshoots) gaining any meaningful political institutional presence in the US is close to nil. There might be an occasional upsurge of individual-rights based movement -such as rights of this or that narrowly defined group - but these movement will extinsguish as soon as the individuals in these groups receive some of the services to which they claim a "right." The civil rights of feminist movements are cases in point. Although they were relatively broad based movements (i.e. involving a rather large segments of populations) they disintegrated as soon as some or even most of their members received, as individuals, some of the services or privileges demanded by the movements. Contarst that with social movements in Sweden or Norway which demanded, and won universal programs (such as national welfare system).
That is why I see any attempts to organize any left-based movement, includinmg the peace movement, in the US as essentially futile. The piece by David Cortright in the last issue of The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=cortright is a case in point. What this piece proposes is meaningless blabber organize-organize-organize without giving any specifics. It is as if someone went to East Africa and told the peasants that to solve their AIDS problem they need to abstain from sex, start taking their AZT pills regularly, and join an internet support group.
If any serious peace movement is to emerge int his country it will only happen if the ongoing war threatens individual rights of the substantial number of US-esers, e.g. by re-instating conscript or by quadrupling gasoline prices. Otherwise, the best thing we can hope for is a celebrity figure flashing a finger at Bush or anti-war slogan on tee-vee. If anything is going to happen, it certainly will not happen here.
Wojtek