Do what the US Left _refuses_ to do_ . Abandon the Democratic Party once and for all.
Don't look back.
Engage a _permanent_ project to create an _independent_ progressive political presence that consistently runs candidates, targeting (first) progressive districts controlled by Democrats. While we still have elections. Who needs Barbara Lee? Nobody pays attention to Lee because she's a Democrat.
That's just for starters. I'm sure that if leftists took this to heart and put their heads together, we could think of lots of surprising tactics.
Cynics might say, its' been tried, but they are wrong. I'll emphasize it again: There has never been in recent memory a _sustained_, year after year effort that encompassed the large majority of the left. Nader/Greens were only a hint of this effort. Greens are a small, and somewhat idiosyncratic, minority of the US left. Yet look at the howling response they got from the Democratic hacks.
Why do you think the Democrats respond that way? Because this prospect is a real threat to them. They know what the left refuses to see.
So, the beginning of the strategic problem is to convince the majority of US leftists to dump the Democrats forever. That means combating the American individualism and its absurd 'My Vote Counts' petty egoism that infects the US left and prevents it from leading anything.
The other side of the strategic question is, without this initial critical mass, we'll lack the organizational means to reach out to the much larger mass of politically dispossessed workers.
While we still have elections to run in. Post-defeat of US imperialism in the Middle East, which is inevitable, who knows what we'll have?
Brad Mayer wrote:
>It's the foreign policy, stupid.
So what's your strategy, big guy?
Doug