> need is a debatable point, michael. raises the issue of the traditional
> liberal pattern of co-opting left issues for self-serving purposes. the
> motives and goals of the left and the "liberals inside the system" were
> quite different. just as they are today.
>
> R
Very true. But, only to a point. The liberal I was thinking of was McGovern. Attended as a delegate in '48 the Progressive Party convention. Which was one of the major pieces of history and his left leanings (rooted in the Social Gospel, and he wrote his thesis in college on a militant labor struggle, too) that led George Meany, Tom Kahn and the rest of the AFL-CIO Cold Warriors to deny support to him.
On motives and the radical left...one orthodox Trotskyist in S.F. I've tangled with, Carole Seligman, has as one of her habitual talking points the need to abjure any outreach to liberal Democrats whether part of "the masses" or Congress critters like Lynn Woolsey. Far too many leftists fantasize like someone I admire , Staughton Lynd, that in '65 as quoted by Genovese in his classic polemic against his, "romantic, moralistic, presentist, " book on "existential radicalism," that the 30,000 activists assembled at the Washington Monument against the Vietnam War in '65 could have climbed over the White House fence in a replay of seizing the Winter Palace.
Back to my implicit point vs. mechanical marxists and other rad lefties...unspoken motive is to hegemonize "The Movement, " assert ownership rights as The Vanguard and make the Revo which will never happen...at least under their leadership...and if they did they couldn't even begin to run a complex infrastructure of communication, transportation, health care, sewage and all the rest.
The American Left does have more than a few qualified policy wonks that could do that, every four years IPS publishes detailed plans of what we should do if a progressive won the White House. But, would the Vanguard sects and unaffilated non-marxist radicals who march in rallies who I've found in decades of marching, a good third of which have very limited sources of information and couldn't identify a Laffer curve vs. a Leontieff recognize their expertise?
Winning America: ideas and leadership for the 1990s edited by Marcus Raskin & Chester Hartman Publisher: Boston : South End Press ; 1988 -- Michael Pugliese