====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
On 2010-12-07, at 8:58 AM, Louis Proyect wrote: > > Obama: On the way to a failed presidency? > By Katrina vanden Heuvel > Tuesday, December 7, 2010; > > Ronald Reagan famously quipped that the Democratic Party left him > before he left the party. Like many progressive supporters of > Barack Obama, I'm beginning to have the same feeling about this > president. > > Consider what we've seen since the shellacking Democrats took in > the fall elections. > > On Afghanistan, the administration has intimated that the 2011 > pullout date is "inoperable," with the White House talking 2014 > and Gen. David H. Petraeus suggesting decades of occupation. On > bipartisanship, the president seems to think that cooperation > requires self-abasement. He apologized to the obstructionist > Republican leadership for not reaching out, a gesture reciprocated > with another poke in the eye. He chose to meet with the > hyper-partisan Chamber of Commerce after it ran one of the most > dishonest independent campaigns in memory. He appears to be > courting Roger Altman, a former investment banker, for his > economic team, leavening the Goldman Sachs flavor of his > administration with a salty Lehman Brothers > veteran. > […] The subject line is another easy cheap shot at disillusioned liberals which misses the larger point that the article is further evidence of the rapidly growing distance between the Democratic leadership and the base of the party, particularly its important layer of more politically aware activists and public intellectuals. Krugman, Reich, Stiglitz, Frank Rich, Eugene Robinson, Olbermann, Maddow, vanden Huevel and others speak for a constituency larger than themselves, which at the present time is of more interest to me than their personal foibles, past histories, or to-be-expected illusions about reforming the Democratic party. Pity there is no longer a working class socialist left in and around the Democratic party, a bourgeois reform party supported by the unions and their various allies, with the connections, understanding, energy and organizational skills needed to advance the process further. Rather than delight in the dashed hopes of liberal public intellectuals, a more serious approach would pay careful attention to their political trajectory as a reflection of developments at the base. In this vein, I was struck by a recent comment from another angry disillusoned liberal, the economist James Galbraith: "The Democratic Party has become too associated with Wall Street. This is a fact. It is a structural problem. It seems to me that we as progressives need — this is my personal position — we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership." A third party of any significance is not presently on the agenda, and won't likely be without a preceding faction fight inside the DP, or so it seems to me, but this is very strong language and the fact that the idea is even being floated in leading liberal circles suggests that something deeper and unprecedented is going on in the party than I had reason to believe. But to find this material - much more interesting, IMO, than the predictably boring denuciations of the DP leadership and ridicule of public liberals so prevalent here - you have to look for it, and with a mind open to all possibilities. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
