[lbo-talk] Repeating Goldwater

Shane Taylor s-t-t at juno.com
Tue Jun 10 23:11:58 PDT 2003


in the "Profiles In Spinelessness" thread, Nathan Newman wrote:
> What an encouraging comparison! That was the period when
> the Republicans did probably their greatest upsurge of
> organizing, building institutions like Young Americans
> for Freedom and other "New Right" groups that laid the
> groundwork for taking over the Republican Party completely
> and shifting national politics signficantly to the Right.

Doug Henwood wrote:
> I'm coming around to Nathan's argument that "progressives"
> should run in Dem primaries and in general try to hijack
> the party, just as the right did with the Republicans.
> What's to lose? The Greens seem more & more like a doomed
> fantasy.

Seth Ackerman wrote:
> Amen. Anyone who's interested in how the right did it in
> '64 should read Rick Perlstein's terrific book Before the
> Storm.

I read the Atlantic Monthly article Nathan cited and the first two parts of the thorough book Seth mentioned (_Before The Storm_). By my biases, the actions of the conservatives contrasts sharply with most of the progressive Democratic Party strategies I've heard before. They didn't seek a national consensus; they shattered one. They didn't approach their host party exclusively as the means of opposition; they recognized their opponents within the party ranks. They didn't simple seek the patronage of existing party leaders, but set about seizing the party apparatus (learning lessons from the Commies, no less).

The description of the Republican party at the time of their takeover sounds similar to the current state of the Democratic party. One local Green who is running thru the Democratic party for Congress spoke of the Dems as a hollow shell, where they exist in Texas. I recall Nathan saying something similar about other parts of the US.

The US is, practically speaking, a two-party state. Most Greens, wrongly, address this as a technocratic problem (i.e. offering Instant Runoff Voting as the solution), not one of power. I suspect, but can't prove, this is why early talk, after the 2000 fiasco, of abolishing the Electoral College so quickly vanished. In 1992 the votes a fifth of the populace for a third party translated into zero real votes for the Presidency. This demonstrated the utility of the Electoral College as a check on third party presidential campaigns. Perhaps this merit for the two-party system trumps the risk to either party of the Electoral College contradicting the popular vote.

If we can't get out of the two-party system, how can we get in?

-- Shane

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