> any party in the US that does not fit this description, jon?
I don't know of any. If there are, they're very small and obscure. If there is one, I would seriously consider joining it, but I wouldn't do so with the expectation that it would accomplish anything in the real world.
If you're trying to bait me into saying I support the DP, I don't. I'm registered independent precisely because I *don't* want to be a part of it, even to the extent of registering Democratic.
The problem is that, shitty as it is, the DP is the only tool we have to have an effect on the real world. The radical socialist parties are even smaller than the Greens, and won't get any bigger. The Greens keep boasting about how they're growing, but they won't ever get big enough to have any real effect, except in a few local areas. Nader-type independent candidates will not accomplish anything more than he did. (All these predictions, of course, are predicated on the assumption that some sort of political/cultural earthquake doesn't occur in the US in the coming years, but such earthquakes are by definition unpredictable.)
The DP is like a rusty, dull saw which is the only tool available to perform a vital carpentering job; if we can't sharpen it up or get a better tool, we just have to get the best results we can with it.
The bottom line, it seems to me, is that the center of gravity of US politics at this point is in the "red" states (ironic, isn't it, that "red" used to mean "radical left"?). Though I am safely cocooned in a very blue area right now, I was born and raised in Indiana, so I know something about that part of the country. Everything that happens for the next few years, at least, will be governed by that mass of southern, middle-western, and western states. Leftists of all types, moderate and radical, will have to figure out how to penetrate that mass and chip off at least a substantial part of it. Building up the labor movement would be a big help, but we know how paralyzed that movement is today, don't we?
Of course, the job that Bush has set for himself is probably impossible. He's not going to get his dream democracy in Iraq. If he wants to roll into Iran or somewhere else, he'll have to pull out of Iraq to have the troops to do it. (He's probably fantasizing that he can convince NATO to help him invade Iran, but that probably is completely unrealistic. So he might try just bombing the hell out of it. But that certainly won't enhance his reputation outside of his own inner circles.) He has created an enormous deficit, and making his tax cuts permanent, plus privatizing Social Security and everything else, will wreck the economy. So most of what he wants to do he won't be able to.
Nevertheless, that mass of conservative Americans blocking the road to progress is not an illusion -- they're really there. If the Left wants to get anywhere, they will have to start taking them seriously. This means that they will have to recognize them as real human beings with functioning brains and honest convictions. Their brains don't function the way ours do, and we sure wish they didn't have those convictions. But a very large part of their furor and aggressiveness which they have just finished demonstrating comes from their belief that the Left has only contempt for them and sees them only as objects of ridicule.
I think that the Left has to do a lot of self-examination and come to the conclusion that it has been doing a lot of things wrong. You, on the other hand, and a lot of other LBO list members, think that you are entirely right, that you have made no mistakes, and only need to charge full-steam ahead on the same course (sounds eerily like Bush, eh?). I think you're on the Titanic, heading straight for the iceberg. But I may be wrong. Who knows?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt