[lbo-talk] Does the DP have a base?

[Marvin Gandall]

There's some musing on Louis Proyect's Marxism list about the possibility of
former DP Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and ex-DP activist Cindy
Sheehan teaming up on the Green Party presidential ticket. It probably won't
happen, but a third party ticket headed by them would be worth watching if
only to gauge the depth of internal dissatisfaction with the Democratic
Party's leadership and direction -particularly within the antiwar movement
and the black and Latino communities - and to what extent other activists
drawn from these constitutencies would be inclined to follow their lead and
regroup politically in a sustained way outside the DP.

I thought a comment by one of the contributors, Fred Feldman, was
particularly relevant. He saw the two women, each in their own way, as
"representing RECENT MOTION,  out of recent struggles against capitalism.
They DO represent motion and differentiation within the popular base of the
Democratic Party today, and the differentiation has a clear class, national,
and international character" (his emphasis).

That seems to me to be a more accurate portrayal of the inner life of the
party than the dismissive (and politically self-serving) one by Carrol,
shared by others of like mind on the outside, that the DP is, in effect, a
zombie party without a base.