On 11/3/06, Sandwichman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 11/3/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We've all said or heard criticisms of the Democratic Party. I'd like
> some things that are a little different.
>
> * An overview of the process that led to the emergence of the Liberty
> Party, the Free Soil Party, and eventually the Republican Party in the
> 19th century, and the rise and fall of the Populist Movement, with a
> view to drawing lessons from both processes for the benefit of those
> who want to overcome the Democratic and Republican Parties.
I would just like to mention "The Rise and Fall of the White Republic"
by Alexander Saxton. Below is a review by Kiyohiko Murayama that
appeared in the African American Review, Summer, 2004.
<snip>
The framework of the book, however, is constructed upon a descriptive
history of the rise and fall of political parties. It is small wonder
that the book deals primarily with the speeches and writings of
political leaders. In delineating the basic movement in the politics
of nineteenth-century America, the terms of dialectics are used:
National Republican thesis, Jacksonian antithesis, and Republican
synthesis. The three-term sequence governs the structure of this study
so felicitously that the tripartite organization of the book helps the
reader frame an overview of the nineteenth-century history of the
United States. Though this terminology might give the impression that
the formulation should be under the spell of the grand Hegelian
design, it is actually free from such a restraint. As the author takes
pains to note, this method of argument is employed here in order to
trace the process that "developed not automatically but within a
shaping matrix of historical continuities, which remained contingent
to, yet prior to and independent of, that sequence."
Elucidating the interaction of such historical events as territorial
expansion, industrialization, and immigration, among others, Saxton
reveals what was needed for the ruling power to retain hegemony.
Speaking for a coalition of landholding and commercial affluence,
National Republicanism leading to the Whig party, for instance,
resulted in anti-Indian racism whether "soft racial policies" were
preferred or not. Rivaling the Jacksonian Democrats in the power
struggle, it was compelled to abandon the politics of deference, vying
for popular support indispensable for party politics and co-opting
David Crockett as their popular hero. The Democrats in turn strove for
the alliance of urban working people with the planter interest in the
South. As the power structure invariably found it necessary to build a
class coalition, the class politics of each stage ended up with a
newly adjusted system for the exclusion of people of color from Native
Americans to African Americans to Mexicans and Chinese.
I haven't read this book yet (I'd like to soon!), but racism and
nativism don't quite explain the absence of a social democratic party
or any other kind of mass party on the Left in the USA.
There is a relatively clear hierarchy of welfare states in the West,
the quality of the welfare state descending in the following order:
1. Nordic social democratic states
2. Continental European corporatist states
3. UK, Anglo settler colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand), and Japan
Within the West, being in the Anglo-American sphere, wedded to its
political and economic liberalism, certainly brings down the quality
of life!
But there are differences even within the Anglo-American sphere.
The USA and the other Anglo settler colonies have shared the history
of oppression and marginalization of indigenous peoples. And Brazil
practiced chattel slavery longer than the USA: the US Civil War ended
slavery in 1865; and slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888.
Australia practiced worse immigration policy than the USA for a longer
time than it. But the other Group 3 countries have social democratic
parties (such as they are), and so does Brazil.
It may be more useful to attribute the persistence of racism in the
USA to the absence of a social democratic party (as well as the
American political leaders' refusal to incorporate abolition and
racial equality as an integral part of the American struggle for
independence) than try to explain the absence of social democracy by
racism.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
