Thanks for twisting things around, but I wasn't making any case in the abstract, nor was I arguing that PR or IRV was the only element to a campaign. I just threw something out there as a possibility and more likely focus of work. If you want to get more specific then say that, but don't atrribute to me what is not there.
> Go and talk to the kind of regular working-class Black
> voters -- poorer than Black Democratic Party stalwarts --
> who are not loyal to the Democratic Party
Yes, but once again, you've slipped into paternalism mode for you fail to understand that the person you describe above is me and many like me. We don't need you to talk to us, since we already clearly understand the situation. Why the fuck do you think I'm registered as a Green? Black people do not vote for Democrats out of loyalty, like some fucking dog, as the typical idiotic slander goes, but rather out of recognition of the realities of what is currently a two-party system.
More importantly, if, as you say, history is any guide, then the only way to draw Black people out of the Democratic Party would be to provide an alternative that speaks to their needs in a way that would make most on the Left somewhat uncomfortable, that being a progressive, possibly radical, Black political party or a party composed mostly of POC, or at the least, where POC were calling the shots. Anything else would most likely disintegrate over the power struggle that would likely ensue.
The Greens haven't even begun to contemplate what would really happen if there was in a fact a serious influx of POC into their party. The true nature of many of these folks would start to come out real quick, as Mitchel Cohen and people of his ilk exemplify.
> : e.g., "Willie May Roberts
There we go with the Negro in Absentia thing again. Folks love to do that with Black people. "Some of my best friends are Black...," "I know this Black person who thinks differently...," "My Black friend said..."
Trust me, the gulf between what is and what you imagine them to be is far bigger than what even Marx should have schooled you on by now.
> The reigning Democrats will not change the electoral
> system, much less change it in a way that facilitates
> Third-Party growth (e.g., adopting IRV and proportional
> representation), unless they feel they must do so to save
> their political lives. How do you threaten their political
> lives? By actually threatening their chances at elections
> and re-elections.
I didn't notice that anyone said that the Democrats or Republicans were going to change anything in regards to the electoral system absent a threat. Power concedes nothing without a demand (threat), as Daddy Frederick Douglass taught you.
The problem with your formulation is that it acts as if elections are a game, outside the context of the effect that bourgeois political decisions have on the objective conditions of people's lives.
Yes, we need a third (and fourth, fifth, sixth, etc.) party. A strong party will not emerge in a fucking vacuum, but only as a by-product of a movement. The Green approach, of grandstanding in Presidential elections while ignoring the need for grassroots work the other 364 days of the year, is not going to build that party.
Art