[Marxism] Nader throws support to Edwards

[Louis Proyect]

Marvin Gandall wrote:
  > 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.

Actually, up until the witch-hunt and the Khrushchev revelations, the 
Democratic Party was influenced strongly by the Communist Party that had 
100,000 members at its height. This gave it the power to determine who 
ran and how they ran. That in my opinion was one of the reasons the 
witch-hunt was so necessary. In order for the Cold War to go forward 
against the USSR, you had to purge the DP and the labor movement. That 
was what explained Henry Wallace's campaign for the most part, it was a 
defensive reaction.

LBJ was the last president who embodied the New Deal ideals, such as 
they were. That was 43 years ago, quite a long time. The defeat of 
McGovern, the disappearance of AFL-CIO jobs, the stepped up competition 
of Europe and Japan all account for the Carter turn in the DP. Just as 
Harry Truman launched the Cold War and the witch-hunt, two policies 
associated with the Republicans, it took a Democrat like Carter to open 
up the attack on workers. In comparison to Carter, Nixon appears 
positively Rooseveltian.