For example, a related meditation: Julian Bond used to tell me that the difference between the left and the right is that they've got the money, but we've got the numbers -- if we can just organize them. But how does that equation change when the right strategically expands its control of the media, controlling the message our "numbers" get to hear, and in fact is able to turn most TV networks into bully pulpits for rallying the masses around their agenda?
I do not think it is true. If you define Left as anything Left to the Democratic Party - the numbers are certainly NOT there. That can be evidenced by the tiny number of people who vote for left alternatives to the Democratic party. The usual excuse that these numbers are not represenative because Lefties not want to "waste" their vote or are discouraged and do not even bother to register do not sound very convincing in the light of the fact that Ross Perot attracted some 8 percent of the votes, and the voters newly registered thnaks to the motor voter bill predominantly registered as Republicans.
The reason why the Left has no numbers should be no brainer to anyone on this list - there is no institutional basis for Left politics. In Europe such basis developed because suffrage was stratified by class - so working class organizing had to include formation of their own political parties to gain political representation. In US - by contrats suffrage was based on race and gender which allowed cooptation of select segments of working class movement to the political machine. Consequently, the unions which elsewhere were the institutional nucleus of Left politics, became a part of the political machine run by the Democratic party. Combined with rampant racism that splits the US working class and the dominance of petit bourgeois mentality - this is a prescription for undermining any potential instituional base for Left politics that typically exist in Europe, such as social democratic, socialist or communist parties. It is not that European capitalists were less vicious than their US colleagues in repressing the labor, but that the labor in the US was more fragmented and easy to coopt than their European counterparts.
Without institutional base, people who otherwise might be attracted to Left politics drift elsewhere and become disillusioned Democrats or plain malcontents, such as myself.
Wojtek