[lbo-talk] Beyond the Bipartisan Hegemony

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>>Grant Lee wrote:
>>>
>>>>One of my politics professors, a Marxist, used to tell his students that he
>>>>always voted for centre-RIGHT parties, because things had to get worse
>>>>before they would get better.
>>>
>>>Yeah, but is that really true? In the U.S., the left got hammered 
>>>during the Reagan years. The Clinton years saw the rise of the 
>>>anti-sweatshop movement (which was stimulated by the admin's 
>>>absurd corporate whitewash front), the "Seattle" coalition, etc. 
>>>Going further back, the Eisenhower 50s were a disaster, but the 
>>>JFK-LBJ 60s were the opposite.
>>>
>>>Doug
>>
>>I don't think that things have to get worse before they get better; 
>>I also don't think that it's a fruitful line of inquiry to ask 
>>whether things have to get worse or better before they get better. 
>>That's a futile question as far as economic booms and busts are 
>>concerned, as you can vote for neither a boom nor a bust.
>
>Booms are usually better than busts, but that's not what I was 
>talking about. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan were Republicans; 
>Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton were Democrats.
>
>Doug

It seems to me that if upsurges in social-movement organizing 
happened to coincide with Democratic administrations in the 
post-Great Depression decades, that only means that they coincided 
with boom years in economy, for which Democrats aren't responsible.
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendars of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, 
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>