Eric wrote:
>If the hope is that a growing Green Party--and a 5% Nader vote--will help
>things down the road, just remember what happened to the (at the time)
>very popular movement started by Ross Perot and the Reform Party. Where
>does it stand now?
it sure influenced Clinton and Gore, who are now born-again
balance-the-budget fanatics (along with the misguided orthodoxy in
macroeconomics).
BTW, we should remember that elections happen every day in Washington DC.
An election not an every-four-years or every-two-years event (a regular
plebiscite). It involves the flow of tremendous amounts of dollars to
influence the politicians at every point. To a small extent in recent
years, there's been some grass-roots movements counteracting the money game
(and their phoney-grassroots "astroturf" movements). The hope of the Nader
movement is that it will strengthen those movements. Nader seems to be
attracting a lot of grassroots support, especially among those much younger
than I am. I'm hoping that the veterans of this movement will learn their
lessons well.
in a different message, Eric writes:
>... the Reform Party itself has crashed and burned (which was my
> point). Might not the same fate befall the Green Party?
Of course, but no event is predetermined. Even Gore might come out in favor
of democracy, instituting real campaign finance reform, appointing people
who aren't stamped by the "new Democrat" mold (like Lieberman), eschewing
the corporate domination of politics and the technocratic myth that
expertise is enough. But that's a total dream, one less likely to be
realized than the collapse of the Greens.
I wonder if people who were organizing big anti-war [in Vietnam]
demonstrations, big Civil Rights demos, big movements for the Equal Rights
Amendment or for the strengthening of abortion rights worried _ahead of
time_ that their movements would "crash and burn." It can be argued that
all of those movements actually did crash and burn (to different degrees
and different ways). Does that mean that no-one should have tried? does
that mean we should give up, taking no risks?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
