On 2012-02-15, at 4:52 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
> Marv
>> The working class and its allies need legislative, agency, and judicial representation to defend their interests against the Republicans, and have been forced by default to rely on the DP as the (imperfect) vehicle for doing so, causing them to vote for it with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Many trade union, black, Hispanic and other movement activists may even be more sympathetic to the Greens, Labor Party, etc. but in the end they balk at supporting these alternatives to the left of the DP because they are rightly perceived as powerless, with little prospect of meeting the immediate needs of working people. The conundrum, of course, is that no potential third party formation will ever be in a position to attract trade union and other activists until the activists see it as a realistic alternative to the DP.
>
> A structural problem. If there are grassroots organizations in place
> genuinely strong enough to get a candidate elected (a big if) what is
> wrong with running genuinely left people in Democratic primaries.
Nothing so far as I can see. If enough Democrats are aggrieved enough to mount primary challenges to candidates favoured by the leadership, that is more than they are doing now. I don't agree with Shane, Lou Proyect, Carrol and others that this would defeat the purpose of getting DP members to break with the party. I think any rank-and-file mobilization which highlights the shortcomings of the party leadership is a step in this direction rather than one away from it. Of course, if a group of liberal Democrats announced they were going to jump to a third party candidate running against an DP establishment candidate, that would also be a positive development, although they'd run the risk of being perceived as "disloyal" by other activists who would otherwise be sympathetic to them mounting a primary challenge inside the party. But any leftwards political motion in the party is better than none at all.
On 2012-02-15, at 5:10 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> On Feb 15, 2012, at 4:52 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
>> ...in circumstances where it makes sense to run candidates, what
>> is the advantage of running 3rd party as opposed to in Democratic
>> primaries?...
>
> If anyone perceived as "leftist" stole a Dumbocrudic nomination, the Dumbos and Repugs would gang up to make sure of the right general election result. Ask Joe Lieberman to explain to you how that's done.
No need for Lieberman to explain it. If the Republicans felt they couldn't win even with split in the DP ranks and that the defeated Establishment candidate was friendly to them and willing to run as an independent supporting their presidential candidate - and the DP tops were ok with this - the Republicans would do as they did in Connecticut and vote strategically for another Lieberman. So the candidate favoured by the DP ranks, like Ned Lamont, wouldn't win in these circumstances, which were arguably exceptional. So what? Better that the Connecticut Democrats should not have mobilized to get rid of Lieberman?
In any event, I'm not persuaded it is better to stand outside trade union and DP gatherings and denounce the "Dumbocrats" as a bourgeois party like the Republicans. That tactic is older than you and I, and has had no more success than challenges to the leadership from inside the party, and less if measured by the number of party supporters who have left in response to purely propagandist calls to do so from outsiders they perceive as hostile to "their" party.
That is the point, no? Until members lose confidence in a party they still regard as their own, they will typically defend it against attack and try to reform it before they contemplate leaving it to join or start a rival formation. It will they will require more than vituperative denunciations from the outside to persuade them to leave the party. They will more likely have to learn from their own experience that the party is no longer willing or capable of even a minimal defence of their interests, and that they will - of necessity - have to labouriously build a new one from the bottom up. My strong sense is that they've not reached this point yet, and that that a further deepening of the current crisis and the rightward motion of the party will be required for wider numbers of DP supporters to see this contradiction.
But I could be wrong, and circumstances may already be such already such that a Green Party bid with someone like Roseanne Barr or Rocky Anderson could siphon off a lot of support that would otherwise go to the Democrats, resulting in a viable third party. I'd welcome that as a positive development, though perhaps with not as much excitement as others on the US far left who are plumping for it. The Green Party is a left liberal bourgeois party, after all, which, were it to grow, would likely move to the right to capture the DP's constituencies. But the break of large numbers of DP supporters with that party would undoubtedly be a step forward, just as primary challenges to the DP leadership from within would be a lesser step forward, but a step nonetheless. Either step would be part of the same process, though you'd never know it from the heat this issue generates on the US left whenever there is an election cycle.
Being mainly determines consciousness, not the other way round.