>I thought we were talking about left politics?
There is no "left politics" in general. "The left" is a pretty broad concept. Even among Democratic voters who voted for John Kerry, I think that there is a pretty big ideological divide between those who voted for him because they liked him (27.6% of all who voted in the 2004 presidential election) and those who voted for him only because they felt compelled to vote out George W. Bush (17.5%). That's why the Democratic Party's message is incoherent, because these two camps do not have the same political view -- as a matter of fact, their political views on crucial issues may be diametrically opposed to each other, for all we know. What works for one camp doesn't work for the other. David Cobb voters and Ralph Nader voters were slightly more coherent groups than Kerry voters, but even they didn't have enough shared political views within their respective groups, so their respective messages too were quite often contradictory.
>Carrol's concern about sandbox politics was that the rhetoric was
>useless without a social movement through which to communicate those
>ideas. Obviously. It was mentioned from the beginning. Alas, the
>Greens and other third parties have nothing on the table.
The Green Party isn't what it should be, so it can't play the role it should play in social movement organizing yet, but those who aren't wanted by the Democratic Party -- like the majority of LBO-talk subscribers, with a possible exception of Brad De Long -- might as well give it (or a new political party if the Green Party withers after 2004) a go.
>Perhaps what will happen is a social struggle *will* emerge from
>these discussions, here and elsewhere.
Not directly. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>