First, as to the possibility of the U.S. changing its electoral system at any time in the foreseeable future (I know this is Bill's hobby-horse): vanishingly small. Will happen about the time pigs fly out of my rear end, or the U.S. adopts the metric system, whichever comes later.
Give it up, Bill -- altering the present system is just not on the agenda in this country. And, if you and John (and Yoshie, and ... ) are right in your thesis that the big corporations have the U.S. political system all bought and sold and pull all the strings of the political puppets, you ought to realize this yourselves. After all, isn't the U.S. political system just that -- a puppet show put on to distract and amuse the gullible public? And isn't it working beautifully for this purpose just as it is? So why would the Masters of the Political Universe want to alter it an iota? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Furthermore (I think I have made this point before, but haven't received an answer), when I look at the capitalist countries that have proportional representation and third, etc., parties up the wazoo, I find that radical leftists there complain just as much as their American counterparts do about their impotence in the current state of affairs. Most of these countries are drifting right just as the U.S. is, or so I hear. So as far as practical political results are concerned, I think people who are hung up about changing the electoral system are talking about something about as consequential as changing from QWERTY to Dvorak. They might prefer other electoral systems, because they would make it easier to develop minor parties of one political hue or another, just as some people prefer one kind of keyboard to another. But in the end, everyone's typing the same stuff. I think that's basically what most Americans think, except for the very few interested in organizing third parties.
Plus, it would take at least one federal constitutional amendment (probably more) and similar amendments for all 50 states, even if an appreciable number of people wanted to do it. If you understand how hard it is to get these amendments, especially federal ones, you would understand the situation better. Actually, if such a change were to take place, it would probably start in one or more states and gradually work up to the federal level. But, as I said, I'm checking out what's happening in the environs of my Sitzfleisch for more exciting action.
So, if this is the case, what's the point of third parties? As John's experience in New Haven shows, they can be useful in certain circumstances at the local level. Heck, there were even Socialist mayors and city councils in some parts of the U.S. back in the early 20th century. (Didn't last long, of course.) On the national level, they only have two results, if any, as far as I can tell from my understanding of U.S. history: they throw elections from one major party to the other, as Nader has been accused of doing in 2000 (though I agree that Gore probably lost the electoral college mostly by his own inept campaign -- e.g., didn't even carry his home state), or they are reputed to give new ideas to the major parties, as it is said the Socialist Party did in the '30s, and Perot's party is supposed to have done with the idea of balanced federal budgets.
I don't have any quotes from professional historians handy to back this up, but I am doubtful that the Socialist Party really influenced the Democratic platform in the '30s that much. Most of those ideas, such as social security, labor law favoring union organization, and unemployment insurance, had already been in the air for quite a while, and I think it was the obvious economic crisis, not so much the number of votes the Socialist Party got, that prodded the FDR administration to adopt them.
Similarly, I don't see Democrats adopting Nader's and the Greens' ideas (desirable as a lot of them are) because they are "frightened" by having the White House snatched away from them by a big Nader vote. On the contrary, wouldn't they be even more resentful and hopping mad at the Nader supporters than they were four years ago? A big Nader vote would probably do the opposite of moving the DP to the left; it would more likely convince a lot of Democrats that they should try even harder to appeal to the centrist vote, so that next time they could beat back a Nader-like threat.
It seems to me that the key fact about the U.S. electorate is one that has gotten very little attention in this discussion: about as many eligible voters don't vote as do. Leftists like to think that the no-shows have the same world view as theirs -- they are said to be the poor, the non-white, and so on. Perfect candidates for recruitment by left third parties, right? Well, I don't see much evidence that those little parties are recruiting many of them.
Instead, I think the non-voters are mostly centrist in their political views, like the actual voters. The only thing that differentiates them from the voters is that they don't think that what they would get out of voting would be worth the effort of dragging themselves to the polls. That's the group the major parties try to appeal to. If there were a lot of potential votes on the left, you can bet that the DP would scramble to get them motivated. Instead, all the evidence available seems to suggest that what works with the non-voters, to the extent anything works, are the same mostly conventional appeals that work with the "likely voters."
Which leaves two points to consider, (1) John's sketch of how the U.S. system "really" works (what he claims I "don't get"), and (2) Bill's challenge to provide a strategy.
(1) Everyone who isn't totally naive about politics, I think, knows that the major parties get tons of money from corporations and rich individuals (as well as labor unions and other organizations). To quote the 20th century's greatest sage, Willie Sutton, "That's where the money is." The important question is whether that is or isn't a complete explanation of what these parties do. If the only thing the movers and shakers of these parties paid attention to were the corporations and the rich, if that were the whole story of American politics, then we would really be in a hopeless situation.
The inconvenient fact, however, is that the candidates who get into office are the ones who are elected by the voters (except when they're elected by the Supreme Court, as Bush was, of course, but that's not the usual situation). So the parties' essential problem is -- as I said it was -- how to get more voters to vote for their candidates vs. the other party's candidates. It's not at all infrequent to find that the candidate with biggest bank roll is in fact beaten by a poorer opponent who proves more popular with the voters, for whatever reason. I would have thought this was an obvious point, but it seems that indeed some people don't "get it."
John complains about the real power being held by "those with impeccable Wall Street credentials." Well, I repeat: "doh!" It's capitalist parties we're talking about. It's a country with a capitalist economic system we're living in. What would anyone expect? The question is Lenin's: what to do about it? This brings us to:
(2) The grand strategy! Unlike Lenin, and some folks on this list, I don't think revolution is on the day's agenda. So we have to come up with a non-revolutionary strategy. But no strategy makes any sense without some view of what the actual situation is and what it might become. What kind of general would plan a battle without checking out the lay of the land and the kind of enemy he or she would be facing? I don't think the present situation is conducive to third party activity, but that doesn't mean it will always be so. One possible situation that would be more favorable to such activity might be, roughly, this:
(a) If the left gets lucky, a number of issues arise which get people really upset -- not just one issue, but a whole bunch of them, as in the '60s. And not just upset, but *really* upset, a lot more than in the 60s. After all, even the depression of the '30s didn't push the American people away from the two-party system; it just made one party dominant for a generation. And all the storm and fury of the '60s resulted in the country moving to the right. In short, a real political earthquake starts to build.
(b) Neither major party succeeds (as they did in the '30s and the '60s) in absorbing and channeling this upsetness. In particular, the Right doesn't succeed in channeling it to the right, as happened after the '60s.
(c) Either one party (probably the DP) gets taken over by the angry masses (consider how angry rightists have basically entirely taken control of the GOP), or a third party arises and displaces it. We still have a two-party system (as the U.S. electoral system, which I have argued above is unlikely to be changed, dictates), but with different parties.
While we're waiting for such a situation to arise, we shouldn't be sitting on our hands. There is plenty of work we can do to prepare for it. (1) Work out a new theory and vision, borrowing where appropriate from Marx and other traditional socialists, but probably not calling it "socialism" for PR reasons. In my view, we desperately need a new overall vision we can present to ordinary people -- not just the little grouplets of radicals who are already convinced of the need for a new system -- which will inspire them with the idea that another world is indeed possible, and needed. (2) Work with the movements that are presently active, helping to create solid networks which will be the background for the new political parties that will become needed if and when a situation like (a) arises. Especially work on workplace organizing and getting a decent union movement going again, something else we sorely need. (3) Use this vision and these networks to prevent any further movement to the right (see (b)), and in fact begin to roll back the rightward trend of the last 2 or 3 decades. (4) Get ready to either take over or displace a major party, as mentioned in (c). (5) Various and sundry other tasks which others smarter than I will no doubt suggest.
All of this, of course, is just a rough sketch, and is subject to modification according to future events. Someone I heard the other day pointed out a maxim of military strategy: every army goes into a war with a plan, but no plan lasts more than a couple of days.
One more point on voters and whims: I don't know how it is in Australia, Bill, but you'd be surprised what Americans say when you ask them why they voted for the candidates they chose. Quite often it has nothing to do with what politically savvy folks, such as the members of this list, think about the candidates. One way in which we dedicated leftists get woefully out of touch with other people is that we are obsessed with "positions," "issues," and all manner of other weighty theoretical considerations, while they generally vote on whether they would like to invite the candidate to a bar to have a beer with them, etc.
It's very interesting to me, for example, that Yoshie has frequently urged us to support Nader because he is running on all sorts of excellent left positions, yet at the same time she seems convinced that he will deliver a knock-out punch to Kerry because -- why? Because several key swing states have high Arab-American populations, and she predicts they will be heavy Nader supporters. And why will they be so? Because they agree with him on these excellent left positions? Because they are the nucleus for the coming revolution? No, obviously because Nader is a Lebanese-American. So much for Nader's crucial role in furthering the cause of the Left in the U.S.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.