>I appreciate your comments, but don't understand some of them. The LP
banned cross-endorsement and fusion politics, to the scorn of some
activists. >
WS:
Sorry for not being clear. All I was saying was that the LP strategy of not running candidates of its own, but instead endorsing the labor friendly candidates from either party - was a very good choice, given the nature of the US election system. Since at least 50% of votes is required to get elected at any level, splitting that vote among sever parties on one side of the political spectrum is a sure way to lose the election. That is a well known fact, which left the progressives with the choice between a "lesser evil" (i.e. voting for Democrats) and having some, if limited, political clout, or sticking to their principles by voting for a candidate they truly like and having no political clout at all.
The LP strategy overcame that dilemma by saying that we can throw our weight behind any candidate, Dem or Rep, who is labor friendly. That could tip that candidate's chances for being elected, especially in close elections. I contrasted that with the PR systems in Europe, where a very different strategy is appropriate - namely, you try to split the vote as much as you can BEFORE the election, because the more you split, the greater your potential proportional share of the parliamentary seats. Then, after you get your seats, you offer your votes to support other parties. In the US, by contrast, you reverse that. First you offer your support of other parties, thus maximizing their chance, and then you split the vote if that party does not deliver, thus reducing its chance for re-election.
Of course, that strategy depends on the LP's capacity to procure votes - which I understand was not that great, for several reasons. First, many paleo-lefties do not believe in voting at all, so they simply did not count in that strategy. But more importantly, the rank and file in this country is pretty conservative and tend to vote on social and cultural issues - such as guns, anti-gay, anti-abortion, ant-feminist, anti-tree-hugging, or anti-liberal-elite than on economic issues. Therefore, they tend to reject unions and their voice altogether, or ignore the union (and by extension LPs) endorsements. The visible presence of the paleo-lefties (e.g. Trots - which stands for Trotskyites or proponents of a "direct action" instead of a political process) certainly did not help. Third, accommodating those socially conservative views cost the LP loosing many of its potential allies who simply had no stomach for this kind of Archie Bunker style politics.
As a result, the LPs strategy, although brilliant could not muster much political clout, mainly because of the knee-jerk social conservatism of blue collar labor. The "divide and conquer" strategy of the Republican party works extremely well in the US.
Wojtek