On 2010-02-20, at 6:26 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> On Feb 20, 2010, at 5:59 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
>> ... the core consituencies which form the Democratic base will vote for it anyway because they see it as the party which will defend their interests, however imperfectly, against the Republicans, who oppose them. This won't change until the unions and people of colour as well as other groups who have fought for equal treatment against Republican resistance themselves decide there is no difference between the two parties...
>
> But that will never, ever, happen--the Dumbocrats will always maintain enough visible differences with the Repugnicons to persuade that base to vote for them. Only one thing will change this: the "core" will abandon the Dumbos when it is clear that they can never win. And what will make that clear? Only one thing--a left "Third Party" that can consistently get enough votes to throw every election to the Repugs.
>
================
In fact, the 2000 Nader campaign effectively did that, and rather than draw rank-and-file Democrats closer, it drove a deeper wedge between them and the proponents of a third party. It demonstrated the limits of trying to build a third party by trying to assemble it from forces outside of the DP and hostile to it. It's far more likely that the main forces of any sizeable and sustainable third party in the US would come out of the DP, and only after an ultimately unsuccessful internal struggle to reform it. That's how most new parties are born. If another party on the right were to emerge, it would very likely be the product of a similar process within the Republican party. That process may have already begun in both governing parties, with the one on the right more advanced.
Finally, it always strikes me as more than a little patronizing when frustrated left-wing intellectuals attribute the party loyalty of liberal Democrats in the US or social democrats abroad to what is in effect "false consciousness" - political yokels who easily bamboozled by their more savvy leaders. If Shane is to be believed, the leadership is actually able to work this con by "maintaining enough visible differences" with the Republicans, as if these differences did not exist objectively outside of the party and were not independently recognized as such by party members, many of them trade unionists or active in other representative allied organizations where the conflicting response of the Republicans and Democrats to their demands is readily apparent.
But we've been round this mulberry bush many times, and it will only be resolved, if at all, as they say, in real life.