Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> At this point, anyone who says there's
> no difference between the two parties won't get taken very seriously
> by more than a handful of people - and not just in the U.S.
Doug, you have a very bad habit of making up positions to attack. The result is that the core content of most of your criticism of politics is large void: nothing there to be supported or criticized. I'm not going to rehash now my reasons for not working for any candidate (and my reasons for thinking it a mere triviality how lbo-posters & lurkers vote), but they have nothing to do with whether or not the parties are "different." Nor has Yoshie made any claims of "no difference."
> I don't
> think it's an exaggeration that billions of people around the world
> want Bush evicted from the White House.
So? Billions believe in all sorts of things. Millions of people in the U.S. who are being harmed by Bush support him. So? It seems to me that we have had exchanges in the past in which you were all for independent thinking while I expressed some scepticism. But now you seem to want us merely to echo the opinion of billions of people without subjecting the issues to any kind of analysis. Or perhaps you just tossed in the billions for filler of some kind?
> I've said a million times I have low expectations from any Democratic
> regime. You don't have to convince me of that. As I've also said a
> million times, I expect marginally better policies and a significantly
> better discursive and organizing environment for more radical politics
> with a Dem in the Oval Office. The modern Republican party is a nest
> of bigots, idiots, and loons who are a threat to civilization. All I'm
> looking for is getting back to a baseline of normal capitalist horror.
You and Lisa keep saying that supporting ABD and working on political organizing are either/or choices; that one can do both. Perhaps that is so, but I've never seen it happen is all. (I would like to see a way worked out in which actual political work could be done during electoral periods; but again, if one spends one's time emphasizing that 'this' election is important, even thinking on the other problem gets left by the wayside.) And if you're still only talking about how non-DP leftists should vote and not about how they should spend their time and money between now and November, then the whole debate is so much triviality.
Carrol