Doug writes:
>
> On Oct 5, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> One Wellstone does more for
>> the right than 20 Liebermans.
>
> Carrol, you undermine a useful point with hyperbole like this. By the
> standards of American politics, Wellstone was a decent guy who tried to
> do some good things. You don't think that were there 20 Wellstones in the
> Senate and just 1 Lieberman, things might be a tad different? Can nothing
> happen until the transformative revolution, whose arrival we can't even
> imagine?
==============================
Lamont is not as important as the antiwar movement which formed under him,
of which he is only the expression. A Lamont defeat will demoralize and halt
it. A Lamont victory, and others like it, would sustain and encourage it.
Carrol feels otherwise. He favoured a Bush victory as a lesser evil on grounds the Democrats promote "illusions" and "disarm" the masses. He doesn't accept that the antiwar movement was running through the Democratic Party - the kind of people represented by Cindy Sheehan - and that Bush's victory demoralized and took the steam out it. That would have been less likely to happen had Kerry won and dithered about ending the war. The antiwar movement would have taken credit for and felt its power in getting rid of Bush.
Unfortunately, Carrol doesn't seem to appreciate that movements, like individuals, build their confidence and advance through victories - even small ones - rather than defeats. Historically, that is why the Marxist left encouraged reform movements and mass participation in "bourgeois democratic" politics, recognizing at the same time that it promoted the illusion that power and property relations could be fundamentally changed within that framework.
Whether US leftists want to work inside the DP or the Greens is a tactical matter for them to decide. But to mock the efforts of progressive Democratic politicians and their supporters from the outside, as Carrol routinely does, seems nuttily sectarian to me.