Doug writes:
> Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
> >The point about the Democrats pushing public discourse to the right is a
> >damn good one, no matter what they do if elected.
>
> Stonecash's book on class and party in the U.S. is interesting in
> many ways, but several points from it deserve emphasis: the
> Democratic party of the 1950s was heavily southern and rather
> conservative, and the ideological differences between the two parties
> were fairly minimal. What changed was that the Reps started moving
> massively to the right, starting with Goldwater. If your base of
> comparison is the McGovern campaign, then the Dems have moved to the
> right, but if your base is the 1950s and 1960s, they haven't really -
> and they've pretty much shed their southern reactionary wing. You
> could read this as saying that the Dems have pretty much always
> sucked, but the trope of their rightward move needs some closer
> scrutiny.
----------------------------
I agree with this account of US party history generally, and that the Dems
suck less than the Republicans, esp. on domestic issues, and have to operate
within the constraints imposed by capitalism.
But John Gulick's reference was primarily to the more-warlike-than-thou comments by Kerry and Edwards in relation to Iraq -- ie. getting more agressive in Fallujah and bringing more troops into the country -- which I think were/are entirely unecessary and, in fact, self-defeating. That's what I was addressing.
There's an interesting article by John Nichols on the Nation website which shows how criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy by Congressional Republicans is actually much more pointed than that of the Kerry Democrats. http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=1880
That may be why the election in the US is much closer, IMO, than it ought to be -- not only because of the existence of a large chauvinist voting bloc which is impervious to argument and will support the more jingoist of the two parties in any circumstance, but also because of the unconvincing efforts of the Democrats to ape the patriotism and bellicosity of the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz wing of the Republican party, which reinforces this prowar bloc.
Reaching out to the wavering middle is necessary in politics, radical and otherwise, but Nichols suggests the Democrats could do so in a more effective and principled way, consistent with the antiwar sentiments of their own supporters, by identifying with the stronger critiques of the occupation offered by Republican senators Hagel and Luger and representatives Duncan and Paul. He's right. Also, it would present opposition to the war as a bipartisan issue, further undermining support for the Bush administration.
MG