At some point, I got on the mailing list of David McReynolds, who ran for US Senate from New York on the Green Party line in 2004. I don't agree with everything he says all the time. He's a socialist. I'm not. But too many on the left let themselves get hung up on microdifferences. I find a lot of his stuff thought provoking and that's really what matters to me.
He sent the following essay on the reason smaller parties are important to the American political process, even when the don't necessarily win elections. I realize I'm one of those naive people who believe that ideas should matter in politics, that gaining power is utterly pointless unless it's to advance a set of positive ideals and goals. I realize that's outside the mainstream of American politics, which is more focused on image, scaremongering and ad hominem... because those things, not ideas, apparently win elections. I thought his essay was interesting enough to post here, which I do with his permission.
He writes:
[W]e sometimes forget that the greatest victories of the past half century were not won through the ballot, only ratified there.
The Civil Rights movement was necessary because neither the Republicans nor the Democrats could take it on. (After all, at that time the South was solidly Democratic, and solidly racist, and John F. Kennedy's role during that period was pretty awful). It was achieved in bloody battles - the blood being shed by African Americans, the violence being inflicted by mobs of racists. It was the courage, the dignity, and the nonviolence of that movement which gave us all a new America.
The massive Vietnam peace movement had to take place outside of the major parties because the Democratic Party was the party which got us into Vietnam - the peace movement eventually brought the issue into the electoral arena, when McCarthy ran in the primaries and drove LBJ out of the campaign for re-election.
The women's movement was also "above and beyond" the major parties (as was the gay liberation movement). The same is true of the environmental movement (which often has strong support from some conservatives).
This is why I want again to stress the value - the imperative role - of "ideological centers" as being as crucial to social change as running candidates, and why I think the Socialist Party, Democratic Socialists of America, and Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism are important not because they can field successful candidates, but because they can field essential ideas. I half expect that the Socialist Party's sectarian caucus may bring me up on charges for urging greater and more favorable attention to the Greens, but my job is to speak the truth as I see it.
Having made these really crucial points - the value of organizing outside of the major parties - I also think there is a great deal of nonsense within the left, as it bears on conspiracy, on underestimating the role of elections, and most of all on failing to see the "dialectical relationship" between movements in the street in actions in Congress. Congress cannot, ever, lead - it can only follow. But it remains vital for us to see the struggle for political power as valid, to recognize that the power of the Civil Rights movement forced the Democrats to take action, and laid the basis for the genuinely good civil rights acts which LBJ got through Congress. Our work "in the streets, in the school rooms, in the churches, in the unions" is finally reflected in the halls of power. On Vietnam, for example, only half the battle was won by the Vietnam Peace movement - the other half was won by the Vietnamese people, who put their lives on the line to fight the invaders, and lost three million lives in the process.
Because the US lacks any form of Labor Party (which, if it existed, would be as imperfect as the Greens, as ideologically complex and confused), we have seen the various interest groups - environmental, labor, womens, etc. etc. - look to the Democratic Party and it is easy to forget that the real power for social change is not in either major party but in the independent actions of radical formations outside the political structure. Roosevelt turned to labor because, in 1932, labor had already
become a radical force outside of existing parties and the Democrats need their support. So while I believe in electoral action (my God, I've run for office a half dozen times), I believe even more strongly in the power of ideas, and the need to use the electoral arena as one place to put those ideas into the arena of discussion.
No comments:
Post a Comment