Mark Rickling wrote:
>
> On Jan 11, 2008 3:50 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > The strongest statement I ever made was that
> > some things are marginally better when a D is in the WH than an R.
>
> You think this doesn't hold true today? What's changed?
I would assume it holds true today -- but it's not relevant.
For one thing, that difference steadily erodes and does not compensate for the immense damage that the Dems commit every so often -- e.g., Carter appointing Volcker to the Fed. The "marginally better" acts as a fog to obscure those blows. Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism; Whizzer White to the Court; NAFTA; bombing & sanctions on Iraq; Yugoslavian war (which went to dissolving the "Vietnam Syndrome"; Albright as Sec. of State; election of Reagan*; undercutting of WPA (a DP gift which the DP hurriedly neutralized); Red Terror (initiated by Truman but falsely labelled the "McCarthy Era."
That's secondary.
The central point is that THE FUNCTION of the DP for well over a century has been to absorb & neutralize mass movements by any means necessary -- see Grace Boggs on Black Leadership. We won't make a real dent on imperialism, on institutional racism, on health care, on poverty until a extra-electoral movement AT LEAST the magnitude of the CIO, the Black Liberation Movement, or the Anti-Vietnam War movement arises. Such movements can only arise under rather special and upredictable historical conjunctions BUT even then they do not occur with great force unless a decent core of people has been striving all along to make them happen. In other words, without the SLP, without the SWP, without the populist movement, without Homestead Strike, without the long series of defeats in the coal mines, without 40+ years of mostly futile struggle, it is doubtful that the upsurge of the '30s would have occurred. The Depression alone would not have magically done the trick.
Without those of us who fought and lost in CISPES;, who futilely tried to build an anti-war movement against the first Gulf War, without hundreds of such mostly futile struggles, the minimal anti-war movement we have at present would be a NOTHING. That anti-war movement is going to fail, but that is no excuse not to build it.
And you can't do any of these things unless you get the fucking DP out of your system.
Carrol