Matt Gonzalez was a lifelong Democrat, but decided to run as a Green in SF. He got 47 percent of >the vote, a very good indication of what is possible.
John Gulick says:
Regardless of what disposition Marxists, radicals, left-liberals, etc. take toward electoral politics in general and conjunctural support for Democratic Party politicians in particular, this analogy doesn't wash for a number of reasons.
1) The demographics of San Francisco are highly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, most notably the uniquely left-leaning character of its popular political culture. 2) The Democratic Party machine (in bed with big downtown business service capital) is the "establishment" in San Francisco. There is no significant Republican bloc to speak of in the local ruling class, and there is no significant "angry white male" mass base to woo with authoritarian populist appeals. Hence Marxists, radicals, left-liberals, etc. are not confronted with the specter of "lesser evilism" -- the DP machine is clearly and obviously the "greatest evil." 3) I have not seen a detailed disaggregation of the voting results, but my sense of things is that Gonzalez rode to near victory on the back of the huge population of left-liberal twenty- and thirty-something college graduates and post-graduates in San Francisco -- not the working class (especially the African-American black working class, disgusted with but still well-folded into the DP machine by virtue of Willie Brown's cronyistic 8-year reign).
Here in "flyover country" (southern Appalachia) things really _are_ so different. Regardless of occupation/income etc., in this neck of the woods something like 5 out of 6 white men who actually voted in the 2000 President election pulled the lever for Dubya. DLC centrist nostrums, John Edwards-style pseudo-"economic populism," or third party class appeals are not going to bring these critters back into the fold.
John Gulick Knoxville, TN
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