Jon Johanning wrote:
>
> On Sunday, July 13, 2003, at 08:16 PM, Shane Taylor wrote:
>
> > There are major difficulties in
> > building a third party and forming a progressive constituency that are
> > unanswered by dismissing the "lesser evil".
>
> Does any supporter of third parties have a good refutation of the
> conventional argument against the possibility of such parties: that the
> non-parliamentary, winner-takes-all nature of the U.S. system makes them
> impossible as practical political projects?
This assumes that the only alternative to working in the two-party system is to build a third party (or "take over" one of the existing parties). This is not true.
Social and political gains in the u.s. during the 20th century were _formalized_ by elected officials from one or the other of the two major parties, but this was _never_ primarily, if at all, the result of electoral activity by left movements. The Wagner Act (somewhat like the invasion of Haiti) formalized _some_ of the gains of the union struggle of the '30s but also circumscribed those gains sharply. (And gains that depend on legislative action -- i.e., are gifts from the ruling class -- can be taken away as easily. The Taft-Hartley Act, only a decade later, eliminated the crucial weapon of the secondary boycott.) Dirksen was as important as, perhaps more important than, Lyndon Johnson in giving us the civil-rights act. Nixon was the president who gave us whatever we still have of the gains of the '60s. Carter began chipping away at those gains.
Real gains can only come from mass movements -- and if one can build such movements it becomes relatively inconsequential what the politics are of those in power. (Roosevelt wanted Governor Murphy of Michigan to call out the national guard to smash the sitdown strikes. But in public Roosevelt was declaring neutrality -- a plague on both their houses.)
The votes of subscribers to lbo are not going to make any difference regardless of how they vote. Their activity (or inactivity) in building a mass anti-interventionist movement (including a struggle against the Patriot act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) might make a real difference in history -- both shortrange and longrange.
Carrol