ezeflyer January 19th, 2010 8:16 pm
"This whole episode proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Democrats need to be replaced by a new party."
What do you do when somebody comes and takes over your house, your family, your belongings and your dog? Do you abandon them or do you fight to get them back?
Why then would you abandon your party when conservatives come and take it over?
UNITY PROGRESS
To add to what I said earlier, non-right people can do both things at once: they can fight to retake the Democratic Party from the conservatives as you call them and they can help create a new party. There is no law you can't have allegiance to two parties at once. You don't know for sure that a new party is going to be viable until actual elections start taking place.
Then, after it is determined whether the new party is viable or not, each person can decide whether to remain in the Democratic Party or switch.
Even in the US system which is inflexible and biased in favor of the majority party, there would obviously be substantial beneficial effects from the interplay between the two parties. The new party would at least presumably prevent the Democrats from again making the blunder they made in 2009: thinking they could settle all the time for laws that make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.
As the NDP party shows in Canada, even a party that never achieves top dog status has continuing, substantial, and beneficial influence on laws and on the economy and so forth. The other two political parties in Canada are always wary of having the NDP call them out if they go too far against ordinary Canadians. They think of the NDP as a dangerous dog that you don't want to have chewing on your leg.
I'm not trying to be all high and mighty about the new party thing at all; we can and must all work together to stop the right wingers from continuing to bring everything to ruination: die hard Democrats, Greens, independents, new party enthusiasts, everyone. If we just agree that we will work together and become unified then the institutional and political stuff will work itself out automatically as time goes by. If we don't agree to unify then we will continue to flounder and continue to be considered inconsequential by the powers that be.
GUEST COMMENT
Naturally January 20th, 2010 5:09 am
I'm to the Left of both parties, and I'm with a solid majority of Americans.
That's the realization I think we must all come to.
According to polls, solid majorities want to get out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce military spending, roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, implement single-payer health care, and protect the environment at all costs. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican party wants any of these things.
Corporate media imposes a near black-out of the majority opinion on all these issues. They pretend the Left/Majority doesn't exist. Instead, they say that those unaffiliated-with-either-party independents are "centrists," for whom the Republicans are too far right, and Democrats are too far left. That's crap.
Case in point, they are now painting the Democratic loss in Massachusetts as a sea change for the Republicans. No, media monkeys, the Democrats lost because the Left/Majority had no one to vote for, so many of them didn't vote. Others held their noses and voted for the Republican specifically to kill Obama's health deform.
So, yes, there's a natural constituency for a progressive-populist party, and there should be such a party. We should be voting for progressive populists (whether they call themselves Independents, Greens or something else) whenever there's "not a dime's worth of difference" between Dem and Repub candidates. (I voted for Ralph Nader the last three times, and if a few more of us had done so we would have a solid voting block pulling Obama and the corporate Dems to the Left today.)
UNITY PROGRESS
My party doesn't exist in the US and that is the problem. I want my party to be created and I know for a fact that it could be created and be viable from the get go if it was done right. The Democrats are way too far to the right for me, even though I am in the mainstream by European and other standards. In Europe, I would (and I am more or less guessing because it's impossible to imagine exactly what my positions would be if I was in a much different political landscape) be regarded as basically left in economics but with odd Canadian and American-type overlays.
If you want to fight for the Democrats go for it; I gave up on that a long time ago. I've seen polling showing that about 25% of Democrats are voting for Brown because Obama and the Democrats have provided them with nothing but fear that things will get even worse. Roughly 75% of independents are apparently voting for Brown versus 25% for Coakley.
GUEST COMMENT
independentminded January 19th, 2010 10:46 pm
Bill Maher said that there are presently two political parties here in the United States:
The Conservative Party and the Batsh*t Insane Party.
He's right, imho.
The above was in response to this article.
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