[Marxism] Nader throws support to Edwards

[Marvin Gandall]

Mark Lause writes:

> Perhaps, this is an age difference?  I grew up in a blue collar union
> household in the wake of the CIO and the World War.  My parents, my
> neighbors, their coworkers were all union people.  Every election, they'd
> be involved on the edges of Democratic politics at the grass roots.

> ...The base of the Democratic Party I was discussing is that which existed
> in LBJ's day or FDR's.

> That's a very different situation than what you're discussing today.
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We've had this discussion before, so this will not be new to you. It's not
only age which separates you from your parents and their proximity to the
mass of the working class. It's your campus milieu and the politics which
you derived from it which mostly prevents you from acknowledging that US
wage- and salary-earners of all colours in all the major cities continue to
decisively support and campaign on behalf of the Democrats. The unions,
whose role in the party is relatively diminished as a consequence of their
reduced weight and power in the economy, nevertheless still spend tens of
millions of dollars to elect Democrats and 200,000 of their members
reportedly staff campaign headquarters and phone banks and knock on doors in
their neighbourhoods. The leading black and Latino organizations are
similarly involved.

In your efforts to dismiss today's Democratic base as largely irrelevant,
you effectively romanticize the party "which existed in LBJ's day or FDR's".
I have little doubt, though, that if you were active during the 30's or
60's, you'd have been as dismissive of the activity of the DP base then as
you are today. In fact, the party's social composition, program, and
electoral activity is still pretty much what it was during the New Deal and
Vietnam War, as is, notably,the anger and the desire for change of the
current generation of Democratic Party supporters and activists.

You have to look elsewhere for the failure of workers in the US and abroad
to realize their most fundamental demands for social justice and equality.
The parties they support are a reflection, rather than a cause, of that
failure.