Rejoinder to Reynolds and Chester

I AM GRATEFUL TO DAVID REYNOLDS FOR HIS THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE to my article on the 1996 elections. His piece is useful for, among other things, the information it provides about the growing number of popular initiatives associated with the New Party. These are certainly encouraging, but their continuing political subordination to the Democratic Party is also deeply troubling -- to me, though not, evidently, to Reynolds.

Reynolds thinks that running candidates in elections can be somehow distinguished from the task of "building a political movement." What is at issue, however, is not just movements in general, like the women's movement or the gay movement -- organized groups of people that try to achieve their goals by educating the public and pressuring the powers-that-be through demonstrations and so on -- but political parties that can represent the needs of these movements. The idea that parties can be built without running candidates flies in the face of common sense.

Just because I think the New Party should put up its own candidates doesn't mean I want it to become a "candidate-centered, vote-getting machine" like the two old parties. I agree with Reynolds that we need a movement-type party, filled with activists, and democratically controlled by its membership. It should campaign systematically for its views through demonstrations, literature, speakers' bureaus, and by using forums of all kinds -- not just campaigns for elective office. I would add that it should beware of what socialists used to call "parliamentary cretinism" -- the illusion that the fundamental inequities and injustice of the profit system can be abolished by legislation.

But elections can and must be used precisely as a way of educating people to join the party and to vote for candidates who represent their interests. In fact, I would argue that putting up candidates an running for office is the most effective way to bring new people into involvement and activity and to carry the party's program to a wider audience. It builds the party and it is an indispensable means of demonstrating the party's seriousness. It also gives deeper meaning and support to people's non-electoral activism. An electoral party could provide a continuous, national political voice that would speak for movements, sustain them through the inevitable ups and downs, and connect them to each other. It would enable movements to be more than pressure groups.

Actually, it's Reynolds, not me, who conceives of electoral politics primarily in terms of vote-mongering and winning -- rather than consciousness-raising and movement-building. If the New Party were to run candidates now for congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral offices, it hardly needs to be said that we probably would not win a single one the first time around, and maybe not even the second, third or fourth. Initially, NP candidates might not get more than five or ten percent of the vote. Is it better, instead, if the NP endorses liberal Democrats, who garner much larger percentages and even win office? No, because five percent for a third party candidate represents five percent in favor of political independence, five percent who have made the extremely difficult decision to break old political habits, to "just say no" to the crippling addiction of lesser-evilism and opt for a real alternative -- as opposed to fifty percent or whatever for the same old unaccountable "liberals" who remain committed to the Democratic Party even as it moves steadily to the right on issues ranging from welfare to capital punishment, civil liberties, foreign policy and military spending. That five percent would mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of people who have taken a stand in opposition to the Establishment, as compared with the far smaller number who ordinarily take part in movement activities.

So even a relatively small vote for a third party would represent a step in the right direction; it would indicate movement toward our goal. Five percent is a start; it's something to build on. Obviously, if we somehow knew in advance that we would never get more than five or ten percent in subsequent elections, then there wouldn't be much point. But we're not clairvoyant. And indeed, there's every reason to believe, as I explained in my original article, that a mass base for a progressive third party already exists. Elsewhere, Reynolds criticizes quick-fix solutions and insists on the need for patience, for a long-term perspective, for ten or twenty-year plans; but his attitude to elections is: either we win right away or forget it.

Of course, Reynolds realizes that any new, radical endeavor, be it a political party or any other kind of movement for social and political change, may have to start small and suffer initial setbacks and disappointments. What seems to concern him most -- and this gets to the heart of our differences -- is the possibility that third party candidates will function as "spoilers," taking votes away from Democrats and thereby helping the Republicans. Now to the extent that we win over disillusioned people who formerly voted for Democrats (we would also hope to win substantial numbers of nonvoters), and we are not yet strong enough to get our own candidates elected, then Democrats may lose and Republicans may win. This is unfortunate, in a way, because as bad as the Democrats are the Republicans are generally worse (some of them are a lot worse). But how else can we reach the point where we can defeat both Democrats and Republicans?

A progressive third party can only grow by seizing a sizeable chunk of the Democratic Party's current base -- I don't see how anything could be more obvious. Clearly, many people will be, at first, reluctant to vote for a third party because they don't believe it can ever become a serious force. Will this defeatism just magically disappear someday, or shouldn't we start confronting it now by giving people a clear electoral alternative? We have to convince people that we are a serious alternative, and they should vote for our party instead of the Democrats; if we fail to do this (and we may fail -- nothing is guaranteed), then this will simply mean that a third party cannot be built. In other words, a progressive third party must "do harm" to the Democrats (and Republicans), and it must frankly declare that it intends to do so.

We are living in critical times. There is unprecedented mass disillusionment with politics as usual, and especially disillusionment with Clinton and the Democratic Party among rank-and-file, liberal and left-minded Americans. Yet liberals, trade unionists, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, etc., still cling to the Democrats out of a sense of powerlessness and diminished expectations. Our job is to encourage them to realize their potential power; and this can only be done if they break their ties to the Democrats, as one of the Establishment parties. The New Party can do this job only if it is politically as well as organizationally independent of the Democrats; it has to oppose the Democrats by running against them (as well as against the Republicans, obviously).

To repeat another point I made in my article, the New Party leaders' (and Reynolds') insistence that we wait to run candidates until we're much bigger is not really an argument about size and numbers, but about the dangers, from their point of view, of directly challenging the Democratic Party as an institution. The New Party did not officially endorse Clinton, and I was wrong to suggest that it did so, as Reynolds points out. However, the views expressed by NP leaders -- Joel Rogers, Danny Cantor, and others -- did constitute a de facto endorsement of Clinton at a time when many progressives (including many New Party members) were considering other options: voting for Nader or not voting at all. Cantor disparaged Nader's candidacy (Nation, July 8, 1996), and the New Party did not call on progressives to abstain or vote for an independent presidential candidate on election day.

THE NADER CAMPAIGN WAS DEEPLY FLAWED, not least by Nader's evasion of issues like abortion, affirmative action and gay rights. But its thrust was clearly radical-democratic and anti-corporate, and it had the obvious advantage of a well-known and widely honored candidate. And, anyway, its programmatic flaws had nothing to do with the reasons why the New Party and Labor Party opposed it. As I argued in my article, the Nader campaign represented a missed opportunity for the emerging third party movement. Had the New Party endorsed Nader, this would have been an important signal to a national audience that a third party movement is in the process of formation and that it intends to put up candidates for the presidency and for every other important office.

Endorsing Nader would have been an unambiguous statement of opposition to Clinton and the Democratic Party, something the leaders of the New Party and Labor Party want to avoid -- at least for now -- partly for fear of displeasing the labor officials and liberal Democratic officeholders they wish to attract (I too hope that lots of union leaders and liberal politicians will join the movement for a third party, as long as it's clear that they're moving toward a break with the Democrats, not merely looking for some halfway house in a futile attempt to apply leverage from the outside). Missing the opportunity to do this has, I think, set us back. During any presidential election interest in political issues is at its height, even among those who are normally apathetic. At the same time, feelings of hopelessness and submissiveness are at their most intense, particularly, these days, among progressives, due to the rightward degeneration of the Democratic Party. It was imperative to challenge those feelings in the fall of 1996, to say: "lesser-evilism is not necessarily our fate, an alternative is possible, let's start making it happen." Instead, the New Party did nothing to dissuade progressives from voting for Clinton; and this simply reinforced the sense of despair and weakness that prevails among those who constitute the potential base for a third party. As a result, our job today is just that much harder.

As for "thinking globally and acting locally," I can only repeat that the issue is not local versus global or national. Reynolds tries to counterpose them in this way not because running candidates for state legislatures or even Congress is so much harder than running them for school boards or city councils (though of course it is harder), but mainly because local offices are nonpartisan. The New Party's leaders want to focus on local elections because this enables them to avoid challenging the Democratic Party directly. Reynolds goes on for paragraphs about the importance of local initiatives and grassroots activity, sentiments with which I couldn't agree more. But campaigning for high-profile offices is, as I've already argued, a very effective way of recruiting and training people at the grassroots. And most importantly, taking on Democratic congresspersons, state legislators and governors is the only way we can clearly convey our third party message to voters.

Whatever the motives, the effect of counterposing local community action to national politics is to forego any real challenge to the centers of power, which are, of course, national and indeed increasingly international. Fighting to keep fundamentalists off school boards is important. But is there any hope for our schools without a national fight to shift resources from the military to education? Only a fool would look to the Democrats for such a benefaction. One reason the far right is so strong at the local level is that it has national leaders and spokesmen like Pat Buchanan, who can demagogically excoriate corporations, and pundits who denounce liberal "elites." Nothing would more effectively sow confusion among the rightists and expose their pretensions than the appearance of a third party that was in no way constrained, as the Democrats are, in its ability to condemn corporate power and champion working people.

Reynolds blesses with equal fervor the Minnesota New Party's support for an independent Green candidate for state assembly (who got 25 percent of the vote, please note) and efforts by labor-community coalitions in New England to work within the local Democratic organizations, and he treats the question of whether or not to run in the Democratic primaries as merely a matter of which "label" you want to use. I see no point here in going back over all the reasons why the Democratic Party is not just some "label," but rather a powerful and highly efficient machine for bolstering corporate power and for coopting and neutralizing potential opposition. The Democrats used to do a better job of concealing their real nature; in the age of Clinton, though, the mask has become so transparent that there's no longer any excuse for not seeing through it.

But I do want to address one common, related misconception which Reynolds seems to share. One often hears progressives say that we should imitate the rightwing Christians who, starting at the grassroots, settled into a long-range boring-from-within strategy and succeeded over the years in permeating and eventually winning decisive power within the Republican Party. The problem, however, is that while the Republican Party is accessible to the far right, the Democratic Party is not, by its very nature, accessible to those who do not accept the priorities of corporate America. Outlawing abortions, imposing school prayer, persecuting homosexuals -- these things, and much worse, are quite compatible with a corporate agenda. An anti-imperialist foreign policy, massive cuts in military spending, a real war on poverty and racism, full employment, national health insurance, a shorter work week are not. These things can only be won by mobilizing, in open political struggle outside and against the two parties, those (the vast majority) who do not have a vested interest in the status quo. So, yes, the strategy of building a third party is totally incompatible with that of using Democratic primaries and trying to transform the Democratic Party from within. You really can't have it both ways.

ERIC CHESTER'S REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF FUSION is a useful antidote to the New Party's cheerful nonsense on this subject. His discussion of the Populist Party experience in the 1890s is particularly telling. Reynolds, while allowing that the Populists' use of fusion was "not without risk," completely fails to understand that fusion, as Chester notes, is precisely what destroyed the Party in 1896. But Chester goes much further and basically writes off budding third party movements like the New Party and the Labor Party; I think this is a terrible mistake.

While every effort should be made to repeal the undemocratic anti-fusion laws, using fusion to endorse Democrats is wrong, in my view. I believe my article made it abundantly clear that I'm against fusion with Democrats because it compromises a third party's political independence -- not on "tactical grounds," as Chester charges. And suggesting that a third party might push the Democrats to the left is not the same thing as saying that putting pressure on the Democrats should be "the primary purpose of electoral activity." I was merely making a prediction: to the extent that a third party succeeds in drawing away Democratic voters, the Democrats will probably attempt to win them back by shifting somewhat leftward -- just as they did in response to the Populist threat in 1896 and the British Liberal Party did to meet the challenge of Labour after the turn of the century.

Chester thinks the New Party and Labor Party are "on course" to fade back into the two party system. This may happen eventually, and probably will unless they alter their course, but it's not inevitable. There's no reason at this stage to foreclose a different outcome. I know from contact with rank-and-file members of the New Party and Labor Party that there's considerable impatience with the leadership's reluctance to run candidates -- which, as I've argued, would be the clearest statement of the parties' intention to break away from reliance on the Democrats.

Fairly few activists in the third party movement would call themselves socialists today. But to the degree that a progressive third party emerges, it will create a new and vital political space in which, for the first time in 60 years or more, socialist ideas will have relevance for millions of Americans, and not just minuscule sects. Inconsistent and hesitant though they are, the New Party, Labor Party and other third party initiatives have the potential to develop further in an independent direction. As long as independence is their declared aim and is an actual possibility, socialists can and should take part in them as loyal and active members, arguing for a clean break with the Democrats and criticizing every backward step away from that goal. To criticize from the outside, and to counterpose to this living movement of people in political transition a set of "explicitly socialist" candidates is, in effect, to say -- what you're doing is worthless; drop it and adopt socialist politics now!

Contents of No. 23