[lbo-talk] Activistism & the Democratic Party (Kerry: America First!)

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Feb 7 10:04:50 PST 2004


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>Hasn't that _always_ been true, though, since FDR? That's an
>argument for ABR (Anybody But a Republican), not for ABB (Anybody
>But Bush).

The Rep party has gotten worse. 43 is far more awful than his father.


>You complain of US activist culture mirroring "the pragmatic
>empiricism of the dominant culture," with few interested in works of
>such theorists as Bakunin, Marx, and Fanon (Liza Featherstone, Doug
>Henwood, and Christian Parenti, "'Action Will Be Taken': Left
>Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents,"
><http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html>). It's no wonder,
>however, that pragmatic empiricism dominates activist culture, for
>it is _the_ philosophy of submission to the hegemony of the
>Democratic Party. You don't need any radical theory to keep
>supporting the Democratic Party empirically and pragmatically as the
>lesser evil.
>
>The Democratic Party = the Death of Theory.

The party itself doesn't even represent the death of theory because it never had a living one that I can remember.

I have to ask the same questions of you that I just did of Carrol. What theoretical subtlety is there to a position that finds it incomprehensible that one could vote for a Dem yet maintain a long list of reservations and criticisms - many of them little different from yours? This kind of either/or binarism seems one-dimensional and bordering on the boneheaded.

I wish one of you would respond to my argument that a Dem president provides a better discursive and organzing environment for more radical critiques of The System. That hardly strikes me as panicked passivity or surrender - it's just the opposite.

Doug



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