[WS:] These are social movements, not political parties. As I said before, the US electoral system does not have room for a third party by which I mean an institution that get people elected to political offices.
Have you ever asked yourself the question why is it that despite a tremendous diversity of the US society and and the abundance of powerful social movements - none of this led to the emergence of a political party representing their interests? The US is a liberal democracy with the freedom of assembly fairly well established, so it is reasonable to expect that some of the movements and marches that you so fondly remember would lead to the emergence of a political party, no?
And please do not give me the bullshit about the DP absorbing and demobilizing these movements, because it only begs another question - why did these movements choose to join the DP instead of forming their own party? These were smart, politically savvy people, they knew what they were doing, no?
The answer to this question is that the US electoral system based on the first-past-the post and winner-takes-all principles effectively assures that no political party representing minority interests will get elected. And since the only reason for the existence of a political party is to get elected - this electoral rule makes it necessary for political factions representing different interest groups to form broad coalitions that have a statistical chance of capturing the plurality of votes. And by Hotelling's law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling's_law this basically means a duopoly of two large parties with little substantive differences between them. It is pretty much similar to an attempt to form an alternative political party in the former USSR - it is assured DOA.
So if you are upset that lefties are not represented by the DP - which is to be expected because they are a very junior partner who does not have much money to play, so it is only natural that they are outbid by better endowed members of the coalition - blame the electoral system and call for changing it. Failing to do so will lead to history repeating itself as a bigger and bigger farce - successive social movements, both on the left and on the right, will get absorbed to either of the two parties where they eventually fizzle out.
Wojtek
On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> It doesn't seem as though W has ever seriously read _any_ u.s. political
> history, his declarations aboat it being so off the point.
>
> The Republican Party began life as a "Third Party," and the background to
> it's ultimate success includes a great deal of non-electoral activity.
> Alternative histories are always extremely iffy -- but it's arguable that
> were it not for Jhn Brown the DP would not have split. But Brown's strategy
> was, in fact, not merely nutty -- and the Southern slaveocracy was driven
> batty by the nightmare of a slave insurrection. Perhaps W can't see ana
> anything but final products in the form of legislation, but that is an
> utterly empty way of understanding history. If you focus merely on the two
> parties, you won't understand the origins of Social Security. The '30s are
> not intelligible if you leave out Huey Long, Townsend, the Bonus marchers,
> the CPUSA, and a number of other events and organizations the existence of
> which cannot be incorporated into an understanding of "formal" political
> events of the period.
>
> Incidentally, I suspect that there is no evidence that popular "opinion"
> _ever_ had significant impact on legislation.
>
> Carrol
>
> On 6/16/2011 10:54 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jun 16, 2011, at 10:12 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
> As opposed to third parties which, as we all know, achieved stupendous
> political successes in the US history.
>
> Though they haven't won, they've changed the discourse - from Debs to Perot.
>
> Doug
>
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