I’d go a little further, and add some detail, such as seeing Obama as a ‘high road’ industrial policy capitalist and multipolar globalist–just read his Cooper Union speech a while back. Clinton is a garden-variety corporate liberal capitalist, which got her on the board of Walmart for years. And McCain is a US hegemonist and an unreconstructed neoliberal capitalist–’state all evil, market all good’–that kind that says ‘We’re in business to make money, not steel, so we’ll gut these plants and speculate in oil futures, and the workers and towns be damned.’ In other words, the ones who ‘cut taxes’ by putting everything on the China Visa card and got us into this mess. Then add in the Lou Dobbs/Pat Buchanan right wing nationalist-populists, and you have a fairly complete picture of the US political class today, at least at the top.

No matter. This changes over time. But Smith’s piece has the virtue of being a concrete analysis, rather than just repeating formulas.

I’ve done an examination of leftists and progressives in our history, starting with my experience in the New Party in the mid-1990s (where we first interviewed a young kid from Project Vote named Obama, when he was seeking the Illinois statehouse) and it’s use, and fight for, the ‘fusion’ tactic, which we took to the Supreme Court, and lost, at least in that round. The remnant of that effort is the Working Families Party in New York, one of the few states allowing fusion tickets, whereby, for instance, one could vote for Obama for president on the WFP line, and that vote would go to his total, but you could vote for WFP candidates running against Democrats in local races, and perhaps defeat them.

This tactic allows fledgling third parties to gain strength. Fusion voting used to be common in the U.S. The populist parties also the West grew through its use, as did the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs in its early days, with Debs himself once running as a Democrat. But that’s also why a reactionary wave of ‘election law reform’ took it away from us by the 1920s.

One very interesting tactic to get around this was developed by radical farmers in several states, the Non-Partisan Leagues. They would develop a platform and then proceed to recruit a ticket of all candidates they found somewhat trustworthy regardless of what other party they might be members of, if they were with any at all, so long as they pledged to the NPL program planks and ticket. In many areas, the endorsement of the NPL was what counted among most voters, and other affiliations were secondary. They were rather successful, taking over several states for a time.

I’ve been arguing that we might want to draw a lesson here as a starting point, rather than simply starting with a call for a new mass party. The reason? Getting new parties to have a shot requires a change in the election laws in almost every state. Our current law is the most reactionary in the modern world, but it’s not chiseled in stone. Instant runoff, preferential balloting, proportional representation, open primaries and a few other changes all serve as a prolegomena to any decent multi-party system, and a more representative and participatory democracy.

But to get these changes, you need a ‘democracy movement’ to get them WITH, and one willing to fight the battle between elections, not just in the period before an election is coming up.

That’s where a modern-day non-partisan grassroots progressive alliance might be the best next step forward. What’s to stop, say, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Labor Party activists (where it’s still alive), the ‘Tom Hayden Democrats’ (Obama’s term) in the PDA, the more pragmatic Greens, the DSA, CC-DS, CPUSA, even PSL, not to mention non-affiliated leftists and progressives–all from forming a common platform of deep structural reforms needed in given cities and states, getting local political candidates, leaders and elected officials to sign on to it, and then building the organizations of the alliance in the context of both electoral struggle and mass action? When you organized your precinct and registered voters, the Alliance would keep the lists and resources, rather than turning them over to the local Dems.

This way you’re actually constructing the building blocks of a mass progressive party starting where you are, then networking those efforts with similar efforts across the country. And you gain some experience about what works and what doesn’t in the process.

My guess is that the radical mass parties from our history probably went through something similar, and didn’t just erupt on the scene, full blown, because someone put out a call for it.

In any case, that’s something that some of us in ‘Progressives for Obama’ are thinking about, but you don’t have to be behind that particular candidate to see a common cause and common effort here.

Regarding Jack A. Smith’s article, it’s good, though it does make me miss James Weinstein. Like with the INDUSTRIAL Workers of the World, there’s only the barest mention in passing of the Socialist Party. Not only did the Populists elect public officials in the Progressive era, the Socialists did likewise. Even later, the Socialist Party under Norman Thomas has been credited for the program that FDR largely stole for the New Deal. One minor point, when arguing that the war in Yugoslavia was unjust, greater clarification is needed so that, for example, one doesn’t come across as a pro-Albanian apologist.

Ah generation of betrayal,
of surrogate, indecent men,
generation of leftovers, we’ll be swept away-
never mind the slow pace of history-
by children bearing rocks.

–Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998), “Children Bearing Rocks

Half of all women are married to conservatives and right-wingers, and many of them are actively engaged in movements like the pro-life movement that are openly antagonistic to their own gender. Most of these, as well as many “liberals” are so vested in the materialism of the status quo that they have no interest in seeing it changed. Case in point: Hillary Clinton as a hero of alleged liberal and progressive women.

Many blacks (and other minorities) have been co-opted by the easy access to affordable status symbols like SUVs and Bluetooths, and identify with the ruling class (and dream of being part of it themselves). The proof is in the prevalence of these symbols even in working class neighborhoods like mine. If you’d like to argue that poor people in this country would rather be more free or work less than drive an Escalade, I don’t think you spend much time around poor people. Likewise, popular black “religious leaders” like Kreflo Dollar and T.D. Jakes focus on obedience to authority and “prosperity” messages in their evangelism.

Workers are now invested in the system through the stock market, and benefit from the exploitation of other workers by saving at WalMart or wearing clothing and shoes produced by companies like Nike under slave-labor conditions as status symbols, so they have no sense of solidarity with other workers, here or in other countries. Many of them now work benefit directly or indirectly from the military-industrial complex either by working for military contractors or being dependent on income from a family member serving the establishment in the military.

These three groups organized in the past largely to advance their own self-interest, and they represented enough of a threat to the system to demand change. What large group will step forward in this country now to demand justice for the victims of U.S. imperialism, or to indict corporate capitalism? Until it becomes a matter of self-interest, the way that it took $4.00 a gallon gas to reduce the number of trendy gas-guzzlers on the road when environmental and humanitarian concerns were completely ignored, I think it’s magical thinking to imagine a mass mobilization like those responsible for the successful social movements of the past.