> As a Green-friendly anarchist in Kansas City pointed out to me last
> week, if the Nader and the Greens capitulate to the Democraps calls
> for them to unify behind Kerry, you can kiss the Green and third party
> politics goodbye for a LONG time. Because what will happen the next
> election is that the Democrats will go around to the Left and say,
> "Hey, you guys supported us in 2004, so why aren't you supporting us
> in 2008. We know that you all are really closet Democrats."
That makes U.S. politics sound like a feudal system. Nobody's swearing oaths on the point of a sword to owe eternal fealty to anyone else. In the first place, there isn't any unitary entity called "Democrats" to go around saying anything to any other unitary entity called "the Left," and in the second place these "alliances" come and go overnight -- forget about lasting for 4 years.
People who have this visceral hatred for the D. Party keep talking about it as though it were a single thing. It used to be fairly cohesive long ago (though even when it was a fairly cohesive Congressional party it was split into Northern and Southern wings), but it's long since dissolved into a lot of loosely glued-together fragments. Some of them would probably be glad to join up with a cohesive political force that was more progressive, but so far no one has been able to organize one. What we've got is a motley assortment of ideological positions and tiny grouplets that can't agree on much of anything. The closest thing we have now to a unifying force is the urge to get Bush out, but of course the Nader backers can't agree with that. And one must admit that the purely negative anti-Bush impulse is nothing on which to build a real political force.
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.