>I largely supported Kerry in the primaries and I ripped into him
>multiple times on my blog. That's what primaries are for, to have a
>debate on the direction of the party.
What is striking about the 2004 elections is that, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, leftists are more divided and can exercise even less power than before. Mirroring the division between Nader/Camejo supporters, Cobb/LaMarche supporters (who are in turn divided by those who support them only because they are the party ticket, those who support them because they think that focusing on local elections is the way to grow the Greens, those who support the "safe states" strategy, etc.), and outright Kerry supporters inside the Green Party is the division among Dean, Kucinich, Sharpton, and Braun supporters during the Democratic caucuses and primaries. Just as the 2004 division of the Green Party into Nader/Camejo- and Cobb/LaMarche-supporters is a setback from the Nader/LaDuke 2000 campaign, the 2004 division of rank-and-file Democrats on the left into the four campaigns made them weaker than the Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988.
Nathan wrote:
>But what I've advocated for well over a decade, which Doug and other
>long-time Internet folks can attest to, since we've had this
>argument for years, is for progressives to support the Democrats
>while building their own independent organizations at the
>grassroots. And that strategy has never really been tried until
>this year. That is why I am so excited about ACT and other 527-type
>groups that are de facto taking over the grassroots infrastructure
>of the Democratic Party and building a national progressive
>organization.
ACT and other 527s are not controlled by rank-and-file Democrats on the left at all. Unlike trade unions and traditional liberal interest groups that are at least nominally membership organizations, they cannot even potentially be democratically controlled by the rank and file.
Nathan wrote:
>The basic fact is that we need 60 pro-labor Senators to get labor law reform.
Michael wrote:
>The MWM was an error, but its target was your party, not southern
>Republicans. If its organizers had had the discipline to actually
>wait until it could draw a million people, perhaps your wall of
>defenses would have taken a small blow.
If we are talking about a lawsuit, there is merit in the argument that we shouldn't file one on an important issue unless we have a clearly winnable case before a friendly court, because losing it sets a bad precedent. Fighting for reforms in streets and legislatures doesn't work like that. Holding rallies, introducing bills, having them debated, even having them voted down by partisan votes are all tools of political organizing. -- 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/>