[lbo-talk] Tea Party: less than meets the eye

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Mon Nov 8 15:02:50 PST 2010


Marv: "In my view, the administration mistakenly tried to split the Republican party and expand its foothold in traditionally Republican states by wooing Republican moderates and blue dog Democrats with policy choices palatable to them. This was incompatible with bolder measures required to resolve the jobs, housing, health, environmental, and foreign policy crises which its Democratic and independent supporters, whose support the administration (again, mistakenly) took for granted, were expecting, and whose consequent alienation contributed to a right-wing Republican revival."

[WS:] You may be right on that, but I also think that you are overly optimistic on what was possible for Democrats to do about bad economy. I agree that they should have been more aggressive about Repug attacks but beyond that I do not think there was much more they could have done. This is pretty much Krugman's point - more should have been done to stimulate the economy, but that was not politically feasible at this time.

Marv: "Class considerations are also absent from your analysis."

Au contraire, class struggle underlies my analysis. Capitalists won, working class lost, and Democrats know this darn well. Unions liberal intelligentsia etc. do not carry enough clout, not even close, to procure electoral victory in a first-past-the-post electoral system, except in a few districts where they form clear majorities. And any political process is always full of contradictions - so that is nothing new or unusual. The point is not the presence of contradictions, but how they are resolved in the political process - and that depends on the power of players. The power of capitalists is at its zenith at the present time, while the power of working class, their unions and their intelligentsia is at its nadir. So expecting that any political party would defy this law political gravity is believing in miracles.

Marv: "In retrospect, that was my miscalc!"

[WS:] And may I ask what other options you had? You could either vote Repug, or waste your vote by either voting for some granstanding buffoon earning 1% of the popular support or not voting at all. So what is there to miscalculate? It is a no-brainer, really. It costs you nothing to vote, voting Repug is surely bad, wasting your vote surely gets you nothing, and voting Dem has a slight chance of bringing some good, even if minimal, so you are better off by voting Dem. It is like getting a free lottery ticket on your birthday - I would not count on it to solve my financial woes, but I would not throw it away either.

Wojtek



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