My support for Ralph Nader was due in large part to the need for an anti-war candidate beyond the caucuses and primaries in 2004. I continue to believe the program he proposed is roughly the right one to advance in the USA, but one lesson I took away from 2004 is that a majority of US leftists will probably _never_ defect from the Democratic Party in the foreseeable future, so it is unlikely that there will be a sizable constituency who will actively work to carry out that program or anything similar to that.
Marx said that "[c]riticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." But nowadays most leftists, including those here, do not think people can or will or should throw off the chain and establish communist society, so their continuing to put forward atheism as a precondition for joining the Left makes even less sense than before. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>