On 2012-04-03, at 9:21 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Apr 3, 2012, at 9:14 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
>> What the research shows is simply that if you add up
>> the the votes, rated on a liberal/conservative scale, then
>> even a Blue Dog has a lower lifetime right-wing batting average
>> than the most liberal Republican. Mmm. So what does this
>> imply, exactly?
>
> Nothing, clearly. I give up.
I still maintain that if you're a relatively comfortable intellectual whose involvement with other people's struggles, while sympathetic, is detached, it's not surprising you will see little difference between the parties, especially in the realm of foreign policy, where the differences are narrowest and the Democrats share equal responsibility for the brutal administration of the Empire. Michael, Carrol, and a good part of the US left belong to this constituency.
On the other hand, if you're low-income and dependent on government benefits, a person of colour, a trade unionist, a feminist, an environmentalist, etc., and especially if you're active in these and other movements, you'll experience a significant difference in how the two parties relate to your concerns in the realms of taxation, spending, and regulation. I doubt many of these folks think the Democrats are perfect - politicians are held in low esteem, and it's widely seen as a truism that the parties will depart from their promises when elected - but even the most loyal Democrat among the party's supporters has fewer illusions about US political life than those Bolsheviks de salon who hold that the DP is more threatening to their interests and organizations than the Republicans on the conservative right.
Sometimes I think of the visceral Democrat- and liberal-haters on the US left as simply ex-Democrats and ex-liberals who have never quite gotten past their embittered youthful disillusionment with the party to think objectively about these issues. Much like the anarchists with respect to the church in the Spanish civil war or ex-CP'ers in the 50's and ex-SWP'ers today who are often unable to view their old allegiances dispassionately. So you get someone like Carrol, who likes to think of himself as having rejected moral categories in politics, referring to the Democrats as the greater, ie. more effective "evil", and Michael, willfully blind to the differences between the two parties. No wonder you're not making any headway.