At 10:25 AM -0400 10/22/04, Doug Henwood wrote:
Ralph Johansen wrote:
And Yoshie has it about right: if 1% of the vote is small in terms
of a presidential poll estimate, it's not small in terms of a
nucleus behind progressive change. It's simply cynical and witless
to see his support, as several here did, as probably composed in
any significant number of spooks and cranks, who will vote for any
dissident, without knowing for what that candidate stands. I would
be interested to know the number of hits on his website, for
instance.
I most especially appreciate Yoshie's proposition: how many would
end up in Nader's support if the three platforms, Democrat,
Republican and Nader-Camejo, were set side by side without the
candidates' names, and people were then asked which set of
principles and practices they supported.
But that's not the way things work in the world we live in. We have
to deal with existing legal and institutional constraints.
Isn't the point of politics on the left to change the world we live
in, pushing against legal and institutional constraints? Slavery,
genocide of American Indians, disenfranchisement of women, Jim Crow,
etc. were once perfectly legal and institutional. Should leftists of
the past have said, "that's the way things work in the world"?
--
Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
