You are right -- my expression was a shorthand (I've said more about it in a previous post).
At 5:47 PM -0500 1/3/03, Nathan Newman wrote:
>As with this past election, where the left was so divided that Le
>Pen got more votes than the Socialists, letting the rightwing go into
>the runoffs as the only liberal alternative to Le Pen.
Running no less than _three_ Trotskyist candidates was the dumbest thing possible to do (I'm not into sectariana, so I don't even know what the differences among them were), especially in that there was a good deal of support for positions to the left of the Socialists that they could have consolidated. I'm not against the French Left to the left of Socialists; I'm just against them being so inexplicably divided (though the division may be explicable for those who know more about the history of the French Left than I do).
At 5:47 PM -0500 1/3/03, Nathan Newman wrote:
>But the Right in Europe, from Austria to the Netherlands to France
>have happily copied the Republicans in coopting racism and
>nationalism. In fact, they may be doing it more systematically than
>the GOP on issues like immigration. As the Trent Lott affair
>shows, Republicans may make coded appeals to racism, but they
>can't make explicit appeals, which has become pretty pro forma
>among right-of-center parties in Europe.
I have no doubt that we would hear more public and explicit expressions of racism, xenophobia, etc. if we had proportional representation here. As far as rhetoric is concerned, the two-party first-past-the-post system with no instant runoffs seems to tame both the far right and the far left. By taming the far right and coding racism, the Republicans seem to achieve more on the class struggle front than their right-wing counterparts in Europe, and victories on the class struggle front more effectively victimize the overwhelmingly working-class blacks than a straightforward bid for white supremacy ever could. -- Yoshie
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