Brad Mayer wrote:
>
> Man, the ABB crown is really showing its true colors: Screw progressive
> politics, lets court rightwing ideology instead.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Kerry had his weaknesses but he also had his strengths. He ran on a very
> progressive platform-- pro-union, anti-death penalty, pro-choice,
> pro-education-- with concrete goals to improve the lives of people we all
> care about. And he never pulled a Sister Souljah maneuver or screwed
> welfare moms as a political ploy, as Clinton-- a far better politician
> admittedly -- did to gain moderate support.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
Roughly correct, but let's keep a (possibly) important distinction. You are, I believe, quoting Nathan, and he was not an ABB, heis a _Democrat_, period. We have no particular debate with him: we can teach him nothing, nor can we learn from him.
ABB applies to those leftists (or "leftists"?) who at the beginning of the year proclaimed that while they repudiated the DP in general, this year was different, and (a frequent expression) "they would hold their nose" but vote for the DP candidate. It is true that as the campaign heated up, many (most, all?) of them increasingly argued not for "Anybody but Bush" but for "No-one but a Democrat," and implicitly more and more their arguments were not even specific to this campaign but were arguments which, if held to, will continue endlessly into the future: they will join Nathan, completely rejecting the progressive course of building a mass movement independent of the electoral arena.
The DP did, wonderfully, fulfill it's central task for the last century: it blunted and absorbed the anti-war movement, which now must be rebuilt almost from scratch.
[A real mass movement of the left obviously must be much more than purely an anti-war effort, but (as always) that "much more" is not (nor should it be) part of the initiating thrust. And (as always) we build a more comprehensive movement _within_ a Movement that Says NO!.]
And we need also to distinguish _among_ ABBs, as well as among those who, as yet, are "Democrats Period." First of all, those ABBs who really meant, and stuck to, the position that Bush represented a radical exception, these I presume will return to movement-building (which of course is all the more necessary if they were right about Bush). Let's try to keep them out of the crossfire. And secondly, at the local level, we will have to work, mostly, with Democrats -- though, one hopes, many of them are not permanently so. And from what Jan tells me about the people she works with at State Farm , many of our recruits will even be among those who voted for Bush. There has been a lot of fuss on this and other lists, raised to an extravagant level of shrillness yesterday and today, about "willfull ignorance" et cetera. That is plain bullshit as applied to the vast majority of working americans, whether they voted for Bush or for Kerry or stayed home. It isn't "willful ignorance," it is ignorance plain and simple. That is one of the reasons we have to build a VISIBLE movement (demos are the most obvious form such visibility takes, though not the only form of course) -- a visible movement which will bring us into direct _relationships_ with the UNwillfully ignorant. As I said in my first post-election post, Mao is still right: Trust the People.
Finally, the traffic on lbo, on pen-l, and even on marxism the last two days is reminding me all too vividly of a long debate extending past 2:00 a.m. that I had with Jeff Jones after he had spoken here in September of 1969. (For those who don't remember, he was one of the core leaders of the Weatherman faction of SDS.) The wails on this list about american voters (workers) have a weirdly similar content to the Weatherman rhetoric of 1969. From that position one can only move on to political quietism or to individualist violence.
Carrol
P.S. It is also weird to hear all the losers on this list wail about being "realistic." Hah! The realists have been doing nothing but lose for 36 years.