I have less faith that we will ever siphon off some of the 27% who oppose the TP. I would venture that they are mostly partisan Democrats who I doubt will ever move to the left of that party. These
are the folks who think we can tinker with the problems of capitalism. They will follow Obama wherever he leads them. I am beginning to think that the 40% has more potential. -------------------
I vigorously contest this. Self-described liberals with operative social democratic politics are just a structural critique away from democratic socialism. The point is to argue to these people that basic protections and the welfare state are good, but not good enough. "Progressive" forces are in the tent of the Democratic Party, but there's absolutely no reason to say they all reject a radical project, because there is hardly a visible socialist opposition movement around for them to reject. The unpoliticized, fine some of them can be "get at," but the base of any future democratic socialist movement will be liberals (students, etc). I for one am among the 27 percent and am a registered Democrat to boot.
Brad wrote:
You seem to be saying that socialist regroupment means that the left can't be growing. That we need a period of inward gazing. I don't think it should be an either or. An expanding left will regroup
itself and I think the reason we are so fractured is because we are declining, not the other way round. ----------------------------------------------
No need to be hypothetically about this, we're slowly recruiting and growing our individual little sects and grouplets, but I'm a firm believer in Lenin's old dicta that "without a Party the working class is nothing, with one it is everything." The left at the moment are duplicating each other's efforts and needs a new organizational framework to make its presence known. Not a halfway house or a petit-bourgeois front like a Labor Party or a Green Party, mind you and not an (for the near-term) electoral venture. Creating a counter-hegemonic project that rebels against the conservative "commonsense" and ingrained bourgeois ideology of Americans is going to be far more difficult than what the TPers are doing, but in the short/medium term we can lay some foundations for a small, visible, movement of the left.