THERE HAS been a long and valiant effort for many decades to reform the Democratic Party. But the party has a built-in kill switch that it created in 1972 after George McGovern won the primaries as a peace candidate.
They changed the internal party system to insure that grassroots candidates would never be elected again. This included creating the superdelegates in order to empower the party insiders to call the shots. The superdelegates are about 30 percent of the total needed to win the nomination, so it's a very powerful firewall. Likewise with the the Super Tuesday primaries. So it's a doomed struggle, right from the outset, to try to reform the party.
You only have to look back to the era of the civil rights movement to learn this lesson. That movement was as powerful a movement as we have seen in modern history and, together with the labor movement, which was much more powerful than it is today, there was an attempt to organize what was called "realignment" inside the Democratic Party.
It did succeed in getting the conservative Southern Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party, but that's as far as it got. It completely floundered on the effort to create a social-democratic party out of the Democrats. Why was that?
Specifically, it was the war in Vietnam that made it essential to be an imperialist or pro-war if you wanted to have the "credibility" to critique the Democratic Party. This basically shot that reform movement -- in the foot, you could say! Because at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is funded by war profiteers, predatory banks and fossil-fuel giants. So this is not where we are going to create that party of revolution. It is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary party.
About the spoiler effect, I'll say a few things. First of all, just to put it to rest. It's a myth that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the presidential election in Florida in 2000. It was the U.S. Supreme Court that stopped the vote re-count, which Gore would have won had it continued.
But beyond that, the problem is that millions of Florida Democrats didn't come out to vote for Gore. Nader's votes in Florida were a tiny fraction of the Democrats who either voted for Bush or stayed home. Blaming Nader is a self-serving fear campaign that the Democrats use to silence their opposition.
Blaming Nader or other third-party candidates is a strategy to intimidate people into a politics of fear that tells you to vote against what you fear instead of voting for what you believe. But in fact, the politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of.
We can list all the reasons people are told to silence themselves and vote for a lesser evil candidate: we were afraid of jobs going overseas, the climate meltdown, expanding wars, the attack on our civil liberties and on immigrant rights, expansion of the prison state, etc. Look around. This is exactly what we've gotten -- much of it under a Democratic White House with two Democratic houses of Congress.
Take the Wall Street bailout. Obama did that with a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress in 2009. That's when that all occurred. So the politics of fear delivers what we're afraid of. The lesser evil is not the solution. It merely paves the way to the greater evil. It ensures that the Democratic Party base gets demoralized and doesn't come out to vote. So the greater evil wins. We've seen this time and again.
-- All of this news about Stein has attracted the attention of David Brock's troll brigade, and they have swarmed. As Clinton tacks harder right, picking up disaffected Republicans and their fat checks, we'll see more of this.
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