[lbo-talk] RE: Nader and His Detractors

[Michael Dawson]

Nice try, Nate.  Doug is right.  The anti-war movement disappeared after the
invasion started.  Personally, I think the biggest factor there was the fact
that the movement was barely a movement to start with, and once its
pipe-dream of preventing an invasion went up in smoke, the participants went
home and licked their wounds.  The biggest obstacle to making an anti-war
movement happen, in my experience of those pre-invasion meetings, is its
leaders' inability to agree on a coherent set of explanations and demands.
Mostly, that's because of the PC fear that attacking Israel is somehow
anti-Semitic.

The "organizing" you think you see among liberals, meanwhile, is not
movement organizing.  It's vote-canvassing.  Huge difference.

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Nathan Newman
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2004 10:20 AM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] RE: Nader and His Detractors

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brad Mayer" <gaikokugo at fusionbb.net>

-Evidence: Where was the antiwar movement in this election year?

Most of it was out trying to get rid of the guy who started the war.

That may seem like a roundabout strategy to some folks who think standing
around with a few thousand people in D.C. is the only real politics, but
many folks who are passionately against the war see eliminating Bush as the
first step to more comprehensive changes for peace and justice in the
world.

The basic fact is the electoral antiwar movement is putting hundreds of
thousands of people in the streets working to dump Bush, many of those
people travelling great distances to swing states for that effort.

The anti-electoral faction of the antiwar movement could muster only a tiny
number of people for their efforts.

Even if you think electoral work is not a sufficient strategy, those
abandoning it are cutting them off from the mass movement of antiwar
activists.   Something like 400,000 people EVERY DAY are visiting
www.dailykos.com, a decidedly antiwar site that is also electorally focused
on dumping Bush.

It is pathetic that no leftwing website probably gets one-hundredth as much
traffic every day, but the militant liberals are kicking the left's ass on
organizing right now.

Nathan Newman

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