[lbo-talk] This time it's a September Surprise on Romney

ken hanly northsunm at yahoo.com
Sun Oct 7 15:00:06 PDT 2012


 Maybe its time to return to Marcuse's Relevance of Reality

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/69RelevanceReality.pdf

  Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html

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From: Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sunday, October 7, 2012 8:48:03 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] This time it's a September Surprise on Romney

On 2012-10-06, at 5:42 PM, Shane Mage wrote:


> ...the election of 1936, which an outspoken populist would have won had he not been oh-so-conveniently shot dead by a lone nut.

You realize you're implicitly endorsing a strategy that is anathema to you, Shane. If Long in this scenario would improbably have won, he would have done so by gathering his forces within the Democratic Party as a prelude to a split and the formation of a third party with some meat on its bones. :)

"Long instead planned to challenge Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1936, knowing he would lose the nomination but gain valuable publicity in the process. Then he would break from the Democrats and form a third party using the Share Our Wealth plan as its basis. He also hoped to have the public support of Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and populist talk radio personality from Royal Oak, Michigan; Iowa agrarian radical Milo Reno; and other dissidents. The new party would run someone else as its 1936 candidate, but Long would be the primary campaigner. This candidate would split the progressive vote with Roosevelt, causing the election of a Republican but proving the electoral appeal of Share Our Wealth. Long would then run for president as a Democrat in 1940. In the spring of 1935, Long undertook a national speaking tour and regular radio appearances, attracting large crowds and increasing his stature."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long#Presidential_ambitions

But I'll grant you that was then and this is now, with a far different political climate shaped by the disappearance of the anticapitalist states and worldwide socialist movement. More recent generations of workers have lacked the consciousness, combativity, and organization to produce  a militant left wing within the DP or the European social democratic parties, much less mass anticapitalist parties to the left of them. The trend has been all in the other direction, and it's far from clear that Occupy, the Arab Spring, Venezuela, the anti-austerity protests in Europe, etc. represent the beginning of a break with it. That's why the heated disputes on the US left about how to displace the Democrats, which erupt regularly in accordance with the biennial electoral cycles, seem so untethered from reality. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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