[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> But the bottom line is who do you want--Bush or Gore--appointing
> people to, say, the National Labor Relations Board?
If enough progressives think like this, by (say) 2012 the bottom line
will be do you want someone like Buchanan or someone like Gerald R. K.
Smith appointing the NLRB? By 2030 it will be do you want someone like
Mussolini or someone like Pinochet appointing the NLRB?
Labor, women, blacks, gays, people in general are going to have to work
out ways to defend themselves with enemies controlling the federal
government.
The train of lesser evils began in 1936 when the CPUSA supported
Roosevelt. Each election after the election of 1934 the government has
ended up in more conservative hands. And even under Roosevelt, the main
gains came not because Roosevelt "gave" them but because popular
movements (EPIC, CIO, Bonus Marchers, the growth in the CPUSA, the
existence of the USSR, etc.) moved at least parts of the ruling class
to be less rigid in their opposition. The politician most responsible
for the Civil Rights legislation in the '60s, Everet Dirksen, was at
least as conservative as Bush. Roosevelt, without pressure from outside
the electoral system, would have stuck to his campaign pledges of 1932.
He did try to talk Governor Murphy of Michigan into breaking the sitdown
strikes with the National Guard. And the Unconditional Surrender policy
was his. We would have been better off probably with Dewey in '44.
We were lucky in 1968. Had Humphrey been elected we might still have
troops in Vietnam, and would never have gotten the environmental and
safety legislation that we got from Nixon.
Carrol
