Reader Comments - The Left and the Elections - Responses to
 Bill Fletcher & Carl Davidson

 from Michael Wafkowski, Patrick Barrett, Victor Grossman, 
 Ethan Young 
 ==========

 More tedious over thought editorial-tutorials on why we
 should all do blah and blah have long ago become nauseating
 and a waste of time and electrons.

 To those who are ambivalent about our candidate, the Dem
 Party, or exactly what the stakes are -- get lost, sit down
 and shut up or take your quaint discussions of the
 intellectual merits or problems with X to starbucks with
 your ipads.

 The rest of us...roll our sleeves and pant legs up...it's
 going to get dirty - exalt in it. it's about winning - By
 whatever means necessary.

 The rest is BS

 Michael Wafkowski

 =====

 There is much to agree with in this piece, including: the
 weakness of the left; the amazingly undemocratic character
 of the electoral system; the frightening character of the
 right; the central importance of the balance of social
 forces and the strength of social movement organizations;
 the fact that the election is not about Obama; and the
 recognition that we keep finding ourselves in a groundhog
 day scenario. However, it doesn't really offer a strategy.
 Instead, it's pretty much the same argument that is advanced
 every four years, including the claim that the November
 election will be one of the most "critical elections in
 recent history," the urgency of dealing "with the reality of
 this political moment," the promise that we'll have "more
 room to operate" and that we'll put "sufficient pressure on
 the Obama administration" this time around if he's
 reelected, and the complete absence of a strategy for
 transforming an electoral system that the authors recognize
 as a massive obstacle to change but nonetheless seem
 resigned to. In other words, like the dismal choice
 presented to us by this year's election, the analysis
 offered here also has a groundhog day feel to it, though
 without the kind of learning process that Bill Murray
 finally went through to in the film.

 For all the dismissal of people who are turned off by the
 Democrats, this doesn't offer a persuasive course of action.
 It doesn't help to dis people who decide to stay home, if
 you can't offer them a strategy that explains how this
 election is different and how voting for Obama is the first
 step in a longer-term strategy of improving their lives.
 Moreover, there's no doubt that this country is racist to
 its very core, but getting white people to ignore Obama's
 race is not likely as long as his administration and his
 party offer nothing to the white working class other than
 deeply hypocritical criticism of Romney and Ryan's
 enslavement to the 1% and the claim that things will be
 worse if R&R are elected. To the degree that the white
 working class still votes, it's not surprising that they
 vote against their interests, since that's the only option
 they have available to them. Indeed, therein lies the
 fundamental reason that the US has the lowest voter turnout
 in the industrialized world, a fact that no mainstream and
 few left commentators are willing to talk about, let alone
 confront, and which could well be the highest on record in
 2012.

 It's important to recognize the risks of this kind of very
 standard analysis, which verges on offering a novel
 strategy, but can't quite get there. It's not just that the
 electoral system is undemocratic and offers us awful
 choices. It's the absolutely essential role that the
 Democratic Party plays in perpetuating the system, and in
 enabling conditions to deteriorate. There is surely a
 difference between the Democrats and Republicans, but it is
 not a static one. These are two parties that have been
 moving to the right TOGETHER for decades. The Democrats in
 power represent one-step-forward/three-steps backward, while
 the Republicans represent four-steps-backward. And it is the
 former that makes the latter possible. In the absence of an
 opposition party, there is nothing preventing the
 Republicans from moving ever more rightward, or from pulling
 the Democrats along with them in their wake.

 For decades now, the Republican strategy has been to
 deliberately create budget deficits by cutting taxes, which
 then lays the groundwork for slashing social programs, which
 in turn destroys those programs and their ability to deliver
 to the population and thus the latter's belief in the
 government's capacity for problem-solving. The result is
 that despite the fact that a majority of the population
 wants government to address social and economic
 inequalities, they no longer have any faith in its ability
 to do so, and are therefore no longer willing to sacrifice a
 portion of their diminishing incomes in the form of taxes
 that will amount to throwing good money after bad. The
 Republicans are therefore well positioned to take advantage
 of this situation by employing their other time-honored
 strategy, which is divide-and-conquer, whether it's pitting
 private sector workers against public sector workers, whites
 against people of color, native born against immigrants,
 etc.

 The success of this strategy, however, depends entirely on
 knowing that the Democrats can't or won't offer a meaningful
 opposition to it, and that is in large part because the
 Democrats are just as beholden to big money as they are. The
 Republicans are thus free to continue pushing the envelope,
 with wild initiatives like Paul Ryan's budget proposal or
 Scott Walker's agenda in Wisconsin. But even if they lose
 the next election, they're confident that they've moved the
 entire agenda to the right, and that they will in time get
 more and more of what they want. Thus, even if Tom Barrett
 had ousted Walker in the Wisconsin Recall, you can rest
 assured that we wouldn't have seen a return to the status
 quo ante. Instead, we would have seen a new status quo,
 which while softening a bit of the blow of the Walker
 agenda, would have preserved much of it, thus laying the
 foundation for the subsequent ouster of the Democrats, and a
 new turn in the cycle, but now from a worse starting point
 and accompanied by even more aggressive Republican
 proposals. If Obama wins this November, will his second
 administration throw off its ties to Wall St. and corporate
 America, embarking on a path that will solve the deep
 structural problems afflicting the US economy and reversing
 the forty year deterioration in workers' living standards
 and mounting inequality? Or will he remain enthralled to
 those interests, thus perpetuating if not deepening the
 economy's structural problems, offering even less to
 workers, and positioning the right not only to win big but
 to advance even more draconian proposals four years from
 now?

 The bottom line is that people are hurting and angry, and
 they are especially susceptible to the right's strategy
 during an economic crisis. The 2010 Republican sweep in
 Wisconsin that brought Walker and the gang to power was
 undoubtedly fall-out stemming from disillusionment over
 Obama's failure to deliver. That disillusionment carried
 over to the Recall, especially when it meant offering up the
 same guy who lost to Walker in 2010. Even if the candidate
 didn't have Tom Barrett's dismal track record both as a
 candidate and as a mayor, and even if the candidate had
 tried to do what Ed Garvey did years ago by offering a
 populist economic message that earned him pariah status in
 the Wisconsin Democratic Party, such a message would have
 rung hollow for many working class voters, whose level of
 cynicism is so deep at this point that they no longer have
 any faith in the system as a whole and are thus much more
 open to a Tea Party message of limited government, or
 inclined to join the ranks of the non-voter.

 This means that for a growing number of voters, Democratic
 GOTV efforts will increasingly amount to pushing on a
 string, while for the Tea Party, they'll find that their
 message resonates. The solution to the problem therefore
 doesn't lie in matching or exceeding the Tea Party's GOTV
 efforts. It also won't be solved by running true
 progressives in Democratic primaries, since the real primary
 is the money primary. Even if a progressive were able to
 beat the odds and make it through the money primary, his or
 her message will ring hollow to a huge segment of the white
 working class within the general electorate and/or his/her
 financial backing from business will disappear. And that
 doesn't say anything about the obstacles to governing if
 such an individual were to be elected, which more often than
 not serves to destroy his/her credibility further (see
 Obama, or Jim Doyle in Wisconsin). Nor does it say anything
 about the disillusionment of people of color, who even if
 they opt for Democrats more than Republicans, vote at much
 lower levels than whites.

 The real problem is so much more structural and
 institutional, which is why the solution also has to be
 structural and institutional: we have to build social power
 to counterbalance the power of big business, and we have to
 force radical electoral reforms that get money out of
 elections and institutionalize a multi-party system. This is
 going to be a huge task, and it says nothing about the
 additional imperative of democratizing the larger state
 apparatus; but that doesn't make it any less necessary.
 Elections matter, but we're only going to prevail in them,
 and make them meaningful vehicles for change, if we approach
 them from a position of social strength and we democratize
 them such that they reflect our demands.

 Unlike liberals, the right understands that politics is
 fundamentally about the balance of social and political
 forces and the institutional terrain on which they operate.
 It understands that if one expects to prevail, it's
 necessary to build a social force more powerful than one's
 opponents and to deploy it both to transform political
 institutions so that they serve one's interests and to
 attack the social power of one's opponents. For the right,
 it's become a virtuous circle of ever greater wealth and
 power; while for the rest of us, it's become a vicious one.
 More threatening still, though, is that there is no rational
 limit to the accumulation of wealth and power. In the
 absence of a countervailing force, the right will take us
 all over a cliff, whether economic, ecological, some
 international conflagration, or a combination of all three.

 However we vote in the upcoming elections, it's far less
 important than getting to work on these other two fronts:
 building strong independent social movements (especially but
 not only labor); and democratizing our political
 institutions (including our party and electoral systems).
 The right gets it. We'd better get it too. The Democrats
 certainly don't. In fact, they're actively working against
 these goals. So yeah, vote for Obama in November, but have
 no illusions what his reelection would represent.

 Patrick Barrett Madison, WI

 ==========

 Even here in distant Berlin I, like everyone in the world,
 must follow US-developments. And then, too, I am also an
 absentee voter. Thus  I was very grateful for the Fletcher-
 Davidson analysis. Though lengthy, it is a MUST, the
 clearest, wisest, best analysis and strategy I have seen
 anywhere. It's convincing arguments should put to rest all
 the very understandable but fruitless, self-defeating calls
 to boycott the election. Of course Obama is no progressive.
 How could he be at that address? But with him in office we
 can (and must) go on the offensive; with Romney and Ryan we
 would be on a constant defensive, perhaps a rear-guard
 defensive, against forces whose odors, here in Berlin, begin
 to stir up terrible recollections. The worst racists hate
 Obama. That alone forces me to vote and even work for him -
 or actually not for him but with our program against a far
 worse menace. Then we can and must say "la lucha continua".
 Thank you, Fletcher and Davidson!

 No pasaran! Pasaremos!

 Victor Grossman

 ==========

 How can political independence be won? Do we 'build'
 movements in opposition to those that intersect with the
 Dems? Or just try to split them away from the Left and
 Center-Left pols and voters who are tied to the Dems?

 Movements have a life of their own, and reflect the
 political landscape in which they grow. Historically, when
 experience (and not propaganda groups) dictates that they
 move to form a political alternative, they do so. In the
 meantime they struggle to advance their constituents'
 interests, and to survive. They consider the vote an
 important weapon, and they're right.

 They have to pick and choose their friends very carefully.
 Will they get sold out? Pretty certain. Will some of their
 leaders get corrupted? For sure. But they are the
 protagonists - the political Left has to come to grips with
 the movements' limited choices, as thousands of people fight
 for what they need.

 Whether or not you see the need to back Obama against
 Rom/Ryan, saying they are the same thing is the height of
 irresponsibility - recognizing the rising influence of the
 virulent Right among both owners and workers, at the very
 least. Folks need to be prepared. One would conclude when
 looking at the balance of forces - unstable Center, rising
 Right, incoherent Left - that we would have more political
 space in a 2nd O term, and we'll be sitting ducks under R/R.
 One would be right, whether or not they identify with O.

 That gets us to the question: where will that independent
 Left come from. Does it start when the isolated, powerless
 political Left breaks from the Dems? No, that's just
 retreating to the margins. When the thousands who work in
 social movements, or the millions who identify with Glenn
 Beck's dreaded 'social justice' abandon the Dems? That ain't
 happening for a long, long time, no matter how many
 socialist or anarchist sites get clicked, or how many new
 recruits temporarily join this or that sect. Taking to the
 streets is not a strategy. Furthermore, giving up on voting
 is a move AWAY from politics, revolutionary or otherwise -
 it's a gesture of defeat.

 Consider instead that it starts in the Left as it is,
 struggling toward political coherence - in the social
 movements, in the political groups and circles, and in the
 intelligentsia. All three groups bring some gifts and a lot
 of baggage. If we can break through our cubicle walls and
 cohere, and build democratic structure for working out
 strategy, tactics, goals, coordinated electoral and non-
 electoral action - that's when we move to challenge the
 Center-leaning-Right, inside and outside party politics. A
 lot to chew on, but I think that's a more realistic basis
 for achieving a Left party than standing firm for abstention
 in a crisis situation.

 ethan young

 ==========

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