| Now, before I begin, I just want to point out that I agree with much of what Paul Rosenberg wrote in his most recent blog entry, as well as the one that spawned it. I'll have more to write about these two entries, especially the first one, in a bit. Right now I want to promote a "third" political party for Progressives to rally around, one that has been around since 1912 and has a long and commendable record of achieving tangible political results. That, of course, is the Progressive Party of the United States.
In Vermont and Washington, the organization reformed and has gotten things done in a surprisingly short amount of time, relatively speaking. In the former state, the party has a small but significant presence in the state legislature and not only has a sort of representative in the U.S. Senate in the form of Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with Democrats), but last year ran a candidate for the House of Representatives. Washington has enjoyed similar successes at the local level.
The point of this entry is not to make some vague talk of a "third" political party that exists now solely in the imaginations or wishes of American progressives. It is to promote one that has been around nearly a century and that, with enough time, effort, and people, can rise again to political prominence. The foundation, as it were, is already there, We need only to rebuild upon it. I highly recommend getting in touch with the Vermont and Washington chapters to inquire about starting or joining local organizations in your areas. Take all those progressive values you hold dear, good readers, and transform them into solid platforms around which you can rally and that you can use in elections.
Now I come to the part regarding Mr. Rosenberg's entry from today, and how it pertains to this one. In it, he wrote:
Party fragmentation is a very real political threat. However tantalizing it may be to dream of a party that purely represents us and only us, there is no precedent for such a party in American history--although there are brief moments when it does appear otherwise.
He goes on to state:
American political parties are not so much homes as they are arenas for conflict, or "sites of struggle" as they say in the trade.
...
But if you try to make the party--any party--the be all and end all of your political activism and political identity, then you are bound for disappointment at best, and may well find yourself lost and abandoned as the forces of history have shown themselves quite capable of tearing parties apart, and scattering their pieces to the wind.
I happen to agree, at least to a point. I do believe very strongly that we can and will eventually build a new dominant political party from the ashes of the current two. As the emergence of the Democrats and Republicans proved, this can happen and it has done so in the past. But even when it doesn't, the "fragment parties" helped to vastly reshape the political landscape. For example, when Theodore Roosevelt led progressives to form their namesake party in 1912, the resulting split not only helped him defeat GOP incumbent William Howard Taft in a three-way presidential election (although Democrat Woodrow Wilson was the actual winner in that contest); it began the shifting of the Democrats from the party of Southern bigots still sore over the Civil War to that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Dealers.
Where I part ways with Mr. Rosenberg is in my belief about the current political situation. It seems to me that he underestimates just how fed up the public is with the two major parties. It wants, no, DEMANDS representation in the halls of power. Progressives, organizing into a single cohesive and powerful political movement, can and will fill the void left when the two larger bodies finally disintegrate.
Having said that, we should be realistic about certain things - our short- and long-term goals, and what it will take to achieve them. We must recognize that tangible results will not appear overnight. We must start locally, work up to regional and state, and then progress to national-level politics. The Greens tried to do this in reverse, and the results have been less than stellar to put it mildly. Let's face it: it's going to take at least a decade, perhaps even an entire generation, before a revitalized Progressive Party is built up enough to challenge the two-party system and win. And throughout all that, we'll have to be ever vigilant to ensure that we do not, as the Democrats did, compromise our values for the sake of power.
The trick, from where I'm sitting, will be in deciding who and what we want to be, what our aims are, and how we're going to achieve those aims. At the very least, we should - as Mr. Rosenberg cautions - have as our goal the total ideological realignment of one of the two major political parties to the left and keep it there (and if that has the consequence of causing a new dominant political party to emerge, that is icing on the cake - but it should not be our first or only goal). Granted, this will be no easy task, and we must be equally as realistic about what we'll be up against as we must about what we hope to accomplish, but it is not impossible to make into reality.
We have before ourselves a choice. We can continue the failed strategy of complaining about how bad Democrats have become while doing nothing of substance to hold them accountable, or we can make the necessary break. One way guarantees the continuing weakness and disorganization of the American left. The other represents real prospects for altering the nation's political dynamic. As long as we keep a realistic vision of what it is we're trying to achieve, I am confident we'll do well. |
