Leftists for Lesser-Evil-ism

[Imperialism Inc.]

Tempest Interviews Chomsky
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=33&ItemID=5177
On the US election

Kerry is sometimes described as Bush-lite, which is not inaccurate, and in general the political spectrum is pretty narrow in the United States, and elections are mostly bought, as the population knows.

But despite the limited differences both domestically and internationally, there are differences. And in this system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes.

My feeling is pretty much the way it was in the year 2000. I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organizational function - that's important, and fine, and I support it.

However, when it comes to the choice between the two factions of the business party, it does sometimes, in this case as in 2000, make a difference. A fraction.

That's not only true for international affairs, it's maybe even more dramatically true domestically. The people around Bush are very deeply committed to dismantling the achievements of popular struggle through the past century. The prospect of a government which serves popular interests is being dismantled here. It's an administration that works, that is devoted, to a narrow sector of wealth and power, no matter what the cost to the general population. And that could be extremely dangerous in the not very long run.

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My Trek to Lesser-Evil Electoral Politics
by Howard Ryan
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=33&ItemID=5570
When I became a socialist in the mid-1970s, my electoral perspective was shaped by the Trotskyist milieu of the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP rejected any support for the Democratic Party and viewed elections primarily as opportunities to lay bare the 'shell game' of the twin capitalist parties. I remember when the party's organ, The Militant, carried a big debate between Peter Camejo and Michael Harrington during the 1976 presidential race, Harrington arguing for a Carter vote and Camejo offering himself as the SWP protest candidate. I found Camejo the more persuasive of the two, as well more entertaining, with his now-very- familiar joke about lesser-evilism--if they want us to vote for Mussolini, they'll run Hitler against him.

I remained a principled opponent of lesser-evilism when I joined the Los Angeles branch of Solidarity in 1990. Rather than run its own candidates as did the SWP, Solidarity emphasized support for progressive third parties such as the U.S. Labor Party, the California Peace & Freedom Party, and the Greens. In 1992, I worked on Ron Daniels' 'Campaign for Tomorrow' presidential candidacy, which ran on the Peace & Freedom ticket in California. I had rarely been involved in electoral work, believing (as I still do) in the primacy of non- electoral organizing. However, I responded to the appeal of other comrades involved in the campaign, who saw an opportunity to help build Peace & Freedom. The California Daniels campaign was a desultory effort by what had become a tiny left party, the only highlight being a lively nominating convention where Daniels beat out cultist Lenore Fulani to win the Peace & Freedom nomination. After the November election, I had no interest in continuing work with Peace & Freedom, which I saw as going nowhere, and I questioned the time I had devoted.
(snip)

My subsequent experience with a labor-community coalition fighting Los Angeles County budget cuts only raised further electoral questions in my mind. In 1994, with clinic doors closing and the enormous L.A. County- USC Medical Center on the chopping block due to funding shortfall, Republican governor Pete Wilson bluntly told the county, 'It's not the state's problem.' The county employees' union, SEIU, then turned to the Clinton administration, which ponied up a $364-million bailout. I understood that Democrats and Republicans alike had helped create the conditions underlying the county budget crisis. Nonetheless, the contrasting attitudes of Clinton and Wilson, that one had been subject to union pressure while the other was immune, pressed home to me the impact of party difference.

Over the next five years, I worked as a staff organizer for a union representing professional and technical employees in the University of California system. There I saw, time and again, state Democrats, and in some cases federal Democrats, help the university unions--in pressuring the university to settle contracts, in obtaining union recognition for 9,000 graduate student employees, in fighting hospital privatization, in stopping the university's widespread use of permanent 'casual' workers. After Democrat Gray Davis's election to governor in 1998, I saw my union's resources and organizing capacity vastly increase as a result of a bill signed by Davis that allowed the university unions to collect 'fair share' fees from non-members. The new law, transforming California higher education from open shop to agency shop, never would have passed under a Republican governor.

There were other important differences between Davis and his Republican predecessors. For example, Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot measure passed by California voters that would have denied welfare, school, and non- emergency public health services to undocumented immigrants, had been blocked in the courts pending a decision on its constitutionality. Both Pete Wilson and his attorney general Dan Lungren (Lungren lost to Davis in the 1998 gubernatorial race) supported Prop 187 and aggressively pursued its defense in the courts; Davis, however, opposed the measure and dropped the state's court appeal seven months into his governorship.

It was in the 1998 election that I finally changed my electoral philosophy, voting for Davis rather than the Solidarity-endorsed Green candidate, Dan Hamburg. In January 2000, I announced my new political stance within Solidarity by writing a discussion bulletin article critiquing the organization's electoral principle. My paper included a first-year assessment on how labor had fared under California's Democratic-controlled government. In a comparison of voting records on 19 labor-related bills, I found that Democratic legislators had individually voted pro-labor 98 percent of the time, while Republicans had voted against labor 96 percent of the time (see www.howardryan.net/dems.htm). My paper challenged the prevailing electoral wisdom of revolutionary socialists, reasoning that:

* Our first and foremost question with respect to an election must be, Which position best meets the needs of the progressive movements?

* Under current U.S. conditions, a lesser-evil stance generally better serves the movements than does supporting a marginal protest candidate (relying here on my California empirical evidence as cited above).

* Third-party projects should be launched when the movements are strong, not when they are weak as they are today.
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When Bonesmen Fight
by Tom Hayden
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=37&ItemID=5577

I hope some journalist has the guts to ask John Kerry (Skull and Bones, 1965) and George Bush (Skull and Bones, 1967) whether they have any qualms about belonging to a secret, oath-bound network since their college days. Did they discuss Skull and Bones in code when President Bush called Senator Kerry to congratulate him on his primary victories? Will they agree not to leave the room if the reporter blurts out "322", coded references to Demosthene's birthday and Skull and Bones' founding.

Am I scratching the blackboard yet, dear reader? Or are you smugly dismissing these questions as paranoid and unsophisticated?

I don't consider myself a conspiracy nut, but is it really all right that four decades after the egalitarian Sixties, and some 225 years since the Declaration of Independence, the American voters' choices in 2004 are two Bonesmen?

The lesson is that aristocracy still survives democracy.

(snip)
It seems like a lifetime since those days, but we still suffer from many gaps based on privilege. The political system is a moneyed oligarchy underneath its democratic trappings. The vast majority of voters are like fans in the bleachers: We participate from the cheap seats, supposed to enjoy our place, and vote for whichever Bonesman we prefer. Our taxes even subsidize their corporate box seats.

Sometimes Bonesman fight over status. For instance, about 75 years ago, Dwight Davis, U.S. secretary of war, created the Davis Cup, and George H. Walker, grandfather of George W., volleyed back by establishing the Walker Cup. The differences today between Bush and Kerry are about as serious as they get, short of a duel. Karl Marx (London School of Economics) would describe the split a contradiction in the ruling class. Bush is the unilateral builder of empire, while Kerry stands for the multilateral alliances long preferred by most Bonesmen. Though both the Cowboy and the Brahmin may be quarreling members of the same old club, their differences are existential for the rest of us.

Ralph Nader doesn't see this. Instead, he argues that the two parties are a duopoly within the same plutocracy. Maybe Nader is nursing resentment over not being tapped himself, but his is a dangerous blindness.
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Left Politics and Posturing in the Presidential Race
The Deed or the Word
by Michael Hirsch
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=33&ItemID=5739

Voting is a drag. John Kerry will get my vote in the November elections, and I’ll give it with the same grudging, wintry discontent that I did in the last two presidential elections, when I backed Ralph Nader. In those races, I made statements. Now I want to beat Bush.

But that’s not what this piece is about. It’s not why a vote for Kerry is inevitable in a year when Bush is vulnerable. It’s also not about renouncing my left-wing apostasy or embracing sobering lessons learned in Florida in 2000. Because Nader did not singularly cost Gore the election. It was Gore’s inept campaign in Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada and states other than Florida that cost Democrats the election, too.

It’s about how liberals and leftists on both sides of the Kerry-Nader divide can get rabidly exercised about other people’s campaign choices, when they both know that power does not come out of an election booth. It comes out of the economic and social movements poised to hold officeholders accountable. It’s about never forgetting that the left — the only hope for humanity (and do I exaggerate?) — is not built by electoral struggle but by building the social movements, before, during and after elections.

It is the weakness of those social movements that forces poor choices on us. Beyond the facility of corporate Democrats to co-opt movement leaders into precinct captains or the fecklessness of radicals to form lasting electoral and structural alternatives, a centrist Democrat is sadly our last best shot for ending the White House occupation because no social movements are strong enough to move the country left.

That simple fact hasn’t stopped sides from forming up for intramural color war, with the loudest drumming from the punditry. When Nader announced his third run, the usually measured Michael Tomasky, for one, called his supporters “left-wing lions of ideological chastity” and counseled the Democrat primary contenders, to a man, to “attack Nader right now, and with Lupine ferocity.” He told American Prospect readers how Nader was “a megalomaniac whose tenuous purchase on present-day reality threatens to cancel out every good thing he’s done in his life,” which, if true, would be a cancellation on the order of the original Star Trek.

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[Octafish]

1. Read what a REAL journalist has to say.

For those who don't know, Parry and his brother helped break a bunch of the stories detailing the treason of the BFEE. They THANK John Kerry for helping expose the BFEE - from BCCI to Iran-Contra drug running. That's a LOT different than Bush and his enablers in the BFEE.

Bush-Kerry: Meaning the Same Thing?

By Sam Parry
June 18, 2004

t has become a staple of the national press corps’ “conventional wisdom” that George W. Bush and John Kerry really aren’t very different on many issues, if one looks past the rhetorical tone to their actual policies. But this supposedly tough-minded analysis may be just one more example of the news media’s sophomoric political thinking.

The core fallacy of this “tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum” analysis is the assumption that Bush actually means what he says, when his record is that he often says what is convenient to the moment or what may stir up Americans but turns out to be untrue. Indeed, if there’s one lesson the news media should have learned in the past three years, it’s that Bush isn’t the “straight-shooter” he pretends to be.

On both little and big issues, from his petty shifting of blame for the “Mission Accomplished” banner to his momentous false claims about weapons of mass destruction, Bush has demonstrated that his comments can’t be taken at face value. So, it makes little sense for national pundits to compare the words of Kerry and Bush as a meaningful measure of how similar their policies are.

An example of this approach appeared in an influential article – entitled “Despite Rhetoric, Bush, Kerry Agree On Many Issues” – by Washington Post political writer Jim VandeHei. The May 9 article, whose theme has been repeated endlessly on TV pundit shows, concluded that Bush and Kerry have nearly identical policies on a wide range of issues, from the budget to taxes to Iraq.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/061804.html

[Imperialism Inc.]

3. Just curious, did you actually read any of what was posted?

[Octafish]

5. Yes. The sources support the idea the DEMs aren't much...

... different than the pukes. I disagree with that argument, no matter how well stated. My reply supports the idea that the DEMs are a world better than the pukes. It also makes clear the superiority of the Democratic candidate over Bush.

A Liberal whose role model is John F. Kennedy, John Kerry, should he be elected, will make an outstanding President. I'm going to expend ALL my efforts to make that a reality.



John Kerry, left, sails with President John F. Kennedy
aboard the 62-foot Coast Guard yawl Manitou
in Narragansett Bay on Aug. 26, 1962.

[K-W]

2. Kerry as Bush-lite is highly inaccurate.

A moderate democrat is not in any way shape of form right wing wacko conservative-lite. Bush is a radical pretending to be a moderate. Kerry is a moderate. The difference is huge.

[Imperialism Inc.]

4. Yep. That is the whole point of the articles I posted.

Except perhaps Chomsky's statement.

They also provide real life examples of differences between the parties in general and the necessity of building movements first, parties second.

I only hope people will read them before jumping to conclusions. Bashing people that think Kerry is only Bush-lite or denying it totally isn't going to work (not that that is what you were doing). But solid examples and reasoning from people who might share that view might.

Like it or not there are plenty here with that view and some that are probably considering a vote for Nader or a Green.