>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>Anyhow, can you cite any case in a capitalist democracy where a
>>party kept running candidates only for local elections for decades
>>and then eventually became a dominant political party?
>
>Who said anything running only in local elections forever?
Quite a few Democrats have been saying that the Green Party (or any other party on the left that may come into being) should focus on local elections and endorse Democrats for higher offices: e.g., "What we need over the next 30 to 50 years is progressive fusionism" (William Upski Wimsatt, "Will Your State Be the Florida of 2004?" <em>In These Times</em>, June 16, 2004, <http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/783/>). If the Green Party adopted such a course of action, it would mean signing its own death warrant. Running in only local elections (many of which are non-partisan) for "the next 30 to 50 years" would make the Green Party as a national or even state party invisible to voters, and abstaining from presidential elections means fewer voters would register as Greens and would vote for down-the-ticket Green candidates, for far more people vote in presidential election years than in non-presidential election years and far more people pay attention to parties that field prominent presidential candidates than those that don't.
>You start locally - and I'm including congressional races in local
>elections too. The hope is to build name recognition and some kind
>of insitutional presence over time.
The Green Party actually started locally, fielding three candidates -- Joel Schecter for Alderman and Richard Wolff for Mayor in Connecticut, Wes Hare for Mayor in North Carolina -- in 1985: <http://www206.pair.com/calgreen/elections/index.php?year=1985>. The Green Party waited more than ten years before running its first presidential candidate in 1996. You are recommending what the Green Party has already done as if it had not done it.
The name recognition that the Green Party enjoys today, however, was not built by running in local elections alone. Until 1996 or perhaps even 2000, most Americans didn't know that such a thing as the Green Party existed. The Green Party had three candidates in 1986, two candidates in 1988, 21 candidates in 1990, 91 candidates in 1992, 89 candidates in 1994, 86 candidates in 1996, 128 candidates in 1998, 288 candidates in 2000. It is in 2000 when the Green Party finally achieved national name recognition, stimulating the growth of registered Green voters (89,566 in October 1994; 112,199 in October 1996; 136,285 in April, 2000; 195,866 in October 2000, <http://web.greens.org/stats/>), Green Party candidates, and state Green Parties.
The nomination of David Cobb rather than endorsement of Ralph Nader in 2004 was a setback both for Nader and the Green Party. Compare the Green Party's growth between 1998 (128 candidates, 31 victories) and 2000 (288 candidates, 47 victories) and its decline between 2002 (560 candidates, 81 victories) and 2004 (435 candidates, ? victories). The Green Party needs to run a strong presidential campaign putting a well known presidential candidate on ballots in all 50 states 2008, so that it can recover from the setback of 2004.
>It worked well for the Swedish social dems - and they weren't afraid
>to do deals with established bourgeois liberal parties either.
Comparing Swedish politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with US politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is comparing apples and oranges. In Sweden, "On initiative from the strong Scanian workers movement a national congress was called upon for worker's organisations in Stockholm during Whitsun 1889. When the 49 representatives gathered in a room at Tunnelgatan they represented 51 labour unions and 16 social democratic clubs with a total membership of 3,194" (Håkan Blomqvist, "The Red Thread," <http://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/sweden/red-thread.htm>). They formed "a Swedish social democratic worker's party on the foundation of class struggle" ("Manifest till Sveriges klassmedvetna arbetare," <em>Social-Demokraten</em> 15/1, 1889, qtd. in Blomqvist), after two decades that saw the famine in 1867-68, waves of strikes, and emigration of half a million Swedes to America looking for work. The party was born long before universal franchise was granted: "To vote to the second chamber, the 'popular', you needed capital of at least 1000 Riksdaler or an annual income of 800. Only 5 percent of the population fulfilled these demands"; not surprisingly, "In the election to the second chamber 1890, the social democrats got only 749 votes although the party had almost 7 000 members. The mass of workers couldn't vote" (Blomqvist)!
Extra-parliamentary struggles -- e.g., a "right-to-vote-strike" of 120,000 workers in 1902 (Blomqvist) -- succeeded in extending franchise to "20 percent of the population" in 1909 (Blomqvist). In 1909, first a lockout affecting 100,000 workers and then a strike of 300,000 workers rocked the nation (Ken Polsson, "Chronology of Sweden," <http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/swedhis/swed1900.htm>). Though the strike ended in workers' defeat, it -- as well as continuing struggle at home and the Russian Revolution abroad -- changed the political climate. The property ownership requirement for franchise was removed and women gained suffrage in 1918 (Polsson).
In any case, what you mean by "deal[ing] with established bourgeois liberal parties" is unclear. What deal are you talking about? Sweden has a parliamentary system, which the United States doesn't. Deals are sometimes made between a major party with a minor party (or minor parties) to form a bloc (on the left or right) in a parliament elected on the basis of proportional representation (e.g., "the Social Democrats first entered government in a coalition government with the Liberals in 1917, and then became the sole governing party in 1920," [Björn Wittrock, "The Making of Sweden," <em>Thesis Eleven</em> 77, 2004, p. 54, <http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/77/1/45.pdf>]), if the major party cannot achieve an outright majority on its own; but US politics does not provide such a deal-making mechanism.
Justin wrote:
>Can you cite any case since the formation of the GOP when a third
>party campiagn for president created a dominant political party?
If there had been a new dominant party on the left created since the formation of the Republican Party in the mid-nineteenth century, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. If there had been one, the United States might not be an empire that it is today and might be even social democratic. -- Yoshie
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