> The DP as an institution or Democratic voters?
> The DP as an institution is completely debased,
> utterly in the pay of capital. Dem voters are
> another story. If there's ever going to be better
> politics in the USA, we've got to peel them away
> from this rotten party.
This reminds me of a discussion I once had in Minneapolis with a friend of my in-laws -- a rabid anti-abortionist. He heard I had lived in Cuba, so he came to provoke me -- "So, what do you think about the communists who believe that life starts at birth."
"They are wrong!" -- I said with my heavy accent. I don't know if he thought I was going to agree with him, that life begins at conception, but this is what I said next: "The communists that are right are those who believe that prototypes of life begin when lifeless chemical compounds spontaneously combine in a primal soup. This was established long ago by the Soviet scientist Alexander Oparin." After that we politely switched the conversation to the differences between Evangelican-, Missoury-Synod, and Wisconsin-Synod Lutherans.
In whichever stage of its history the U.S. left is, that's where it is. There are tasks to do.
I agree with the diagnosis that the structure of the DP is rotten. The issue is how do you peel people away from it. By increasing the decibels of our righteous denunciation of the rottenness of the DP? I don't think so.
I'll say more: Talking about "peeling people away from the DP" is not the right way of framing this. The real goal is not only to take working people out of the DP, but also -- and much more importantly -- to take the DP out of the consciousness (i.e. political behavior) of working people. Because, if today the whole structure of the DP were to implode, I bet 100 to 1 that -- by action and omission -- U.S. workers would simply rebuild it (or allow it to be rebuilt) under another name. (Witness the partial rebirth of the PRI in Mexico.)
As is, in spite of their discredit, the structure of the DP is robust, because it responds not only to the needs of this or that faction of the ruling class, but also (mainly) because it responds to the current needs of workers, at their current stage of political evolution. That is why I'm little concerned about the structure of the DP. My real beef is with the state of working people's consciousness. I don't think I need to remind radicals that the DP is a drag on the struggle.
I take that as a given.
The key question to me is how to help working people, wherever they are, to shift their consciousness in the right direction. The general approach is clear -- by fighting, by collectively fighting against whatever the hell is in the way.
Working people will start fighting from wherever they are. Unless they accept regression to a pre-human level, just to reaffirm their humanity, workers are and will be forced to put forth their needs as truly representative of the public interest -- and the needs of capital as incompatible with it. Now, since workers start where they are, I expect some workers (unionists, health care reformers, environmentalists, immigration reformers, etc.) to continue to use the rotten DP structure, until it disintegrates, which will happen when, in the perception of working people, the DP exhausts its ability to deliver even the tiniest incremental progress, workers run out of patience or effectively upgrade their demands to a point the DP cannot go. Those struggles through the DP are workers' struggles we must support.
Our squabbles about the correct form of struggling is secondary to promoting the struggles of working people as they are, to push for unity and coordination, etc. At some point, if people just keep fighting, the DP -- and, more importantly, the type of collective consciousness that enables the DP (or any political formation of its type) to exist -- will be taken care of.
How is this relevant to the Tea Party issue? Well, it is, because these people (and their sponsors) have power in vast areas of the country, and with their policies they make the lives of workers miserable. (Have you been following the news on New Mexico and Arizona, the initiatives to involve local law enforcement in kicking immigrant workers out of the country? Have you followed the news on McCain's initiative to militarize the border with Mexico?) It is also relevant, because however improbable it may seem now, the right wing can win Congress or the White House or the Supreme Court, continue to block social progress, and -- frankly -- take more direct control over the most deadly military machine ever built -- with the associated danger. And Chomsky is absolutely right that a stagnant, discredited political system increases this threat, because with a dis-functional, discredited political system, society becomes volatile and chaotic. Or, to paraphrase WL, the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution go hand in hand. It doesn't matter whether the phenomenon fits exactly the profile of historical fascism.
I'll just say one other thing that, IMO, has not been duly noted: It is not true that fighting the right wing is a distraction that plays in the hands of the DP, while the top priority is to fight the DP. In fact, it is exactly the opposite! It is only by effectively fighting the power of the right wing that the left will ever grow its power. A byproduct of this will be that, if indeed the left builds itself as an effective anti-reaction political machine, the left will either push the DP to the left, split it, or bypass it. Trotsky (and Mao and Ho Chi Minh and Che and many others) had it right -- at junctures like this, the only way leftists (or communists or Marxists or what have you) can legitimately conquer the leadership of the workers' movement (and of society) is by showing in practice, with hard work, that they are the bastions against reaction, imperial oppression, national destruction, etc. -- phenomena that are real and that crush the lives of real people, usually those at the very bottom of society. That's how the communists have *always* gained leadership -- not by being the most articulate propagandists of a better world, but being the best fighters against the most extreme manifestations of the existing world. Leftists are, of course, free to build their strategy around their anti-Obama or anti-DP sentiment. But that strategy is guaranteed to fail. The way to fight Obama most effectively is not by frontally attacking him, but indirectly, by fighting the hardest against those who question the right of a Black man to be president of the U.S. -- inter alia, of course.