Well, there I think that dems give capitalism a bad name more so than republicans.
1. since they appeal to more progressive voters as a font of progressive social change, when they don't advance progressive social change, they disappoint those folks. kewl. (one of the reasons why I disagree with carrol that the focus should be on antiwar activism is that, if his model is the sixties, then Doug McAdam has clearly shown how the roots of 60s and 70s activism were in Freedom Summer and the voter registration drive in the South. ONe of the things that got people pissed off when they participated in FS was that they were idealistic youths who believed that we could work within the system to create a better society. They figured it was already one of the most advanced societies, given the fervent America's Century ideology that dominated public discourse, but they were shocked to find out just how misleading the rhetoric was when they saw the poverty, the political repression, etc.
2. your reasoning sounds far too much like Yoshie's response the first few weeks after 9.11, http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0109/1356.html. Fuck that noise. Anti-war organizing just isn't where it's at--if you really want to build a wide-scale social movement -- that is, if you're off the mind that Marx was right when he said that what makes a socialist revolution different from all other revolutions was that it was advanced by a majority and not a minority.
kelley