[Marxism] Nader throws support to Edwards

[Marvin Gandall]

Louis wrote:
>
> 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.
================================
The above is all largely true, and again underscores for me that the period
rather than the party is the more important determinant of government
policy, whether that party be liberal or conservative. Nixon governed at the
tail end of the period between the New Deal and the Vietnam War, one which
was marked by the expansion of social programs and the growth of the labour
movement, while Carter, as you point out, was tasked with presiding over the
beginning of the assault on unions and living standards which has continued
to this day.

It's worth noting in the same vein that the evolution of the labour and
social democratic parties in Europe and elsewhere has pretty much paralleled
that of the Democratic party, except that the DP has had the additional
"bipartisan" responsibility of administering an empire - with its attendant
domestic xenophobia and militarism - giving it a more reactionary character
than these other liberal worker-based parties.