TOWARDS A PERMANENT MINORITY:

Ralph, Don't Run (RONNIE DUGGER, December 2, 2002, Nation)

[T]he Bush disaster and the corporate scandals provide a historic challenge and a chance to return the Democratic Party to what it should be. Attempting to do this by electing Bush to a second term is an option that is neither rational nor safe. Our job is to resist Bush, not to elect him.

The months ahead should be devoted to building nonviolent resistance to Bush's policies and his election. We need to build at once an Internet-based communications network (not an umbrella organization) among progressive, populist, labor, youth, civil rights, women's and religious organizations and individuals. The resistance must take many forms: local protests, sit-ins, teach-ins and, yes, marches on Washington, perhaps even Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 idea of a people's encampment in the city, in 2004--all the tactics that we know matter in building an opposition force and making that opposition heard. And we may hope that in the midst of the pressures and dynamics of the next year and a half, we will focus a substantial portion of our energies on securing the Democratic nomination for a true progressive.

Even if the candidate backed by the progressive coalition does not ultimately take the nomination, this effort alone will contribute to restoring progressives as a permanent force to be reckoned with inside the party. It will enable us to influence the platform so that it includes reformist planks that might, for openers, include IRV, national health insurance, public funding of elections, federal chartering of large interstate corporations, repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and new laws to prevent media monopolies and diffuse the ownership of radio and TV licenses. Other planks might include no attack-first wars, no first use of nuclear weapons, no Star Wars and no weapons in space, a Marshall Plan for the world's poor, a commitment to renewable energy sources and conservation, and a strengthened, not a sabotaged, UN. A strong and coherent left working for such ends within the party should also enable us to influence what the candidate advocates, even if he or she is not our original choice. That is the way Democratic Party politics have usually worked. Even FDR was compelled to defer to his left wing.

The electoral component of our resistance is critical. Progressives should be assembling and talking to one another now about how we can do it right this time. Michael Moore is correct: We can take over the moribund Democratic Party infrastructure. Local activists in every state should begin at once to master the laws and details of the electoral deadlines, the procedures of each precinct, locality and state. The central requirement for the venture to work is that progressives run for the chairships of their Democratic precincts. As the historian and populist theoretician Lawrence Goodwyn says, "Two years is time enough, and the people to do it are out there." But to clear the route back to a liberal-progressive Democratic Party and the kinds of fruitful relationships the likes of Michael Harrington and Tom Hayden had with the party's moderates in the 1970s, the planning and the work have to start now.

The scenario that Mr. Dugger outlines is precisely how the conservative movement recaptured the Republican Party. Of course, the problem that Mr. Dugger fails to reckon with is that the Left's progressive ideas are anti-American and they'll drag the Democrats far out of the mainstream, whereas the Conservative Revolution brought the Republican Party back to the traditional orthodoxy that had made it America's governing party. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 4, 2002 7:27 PM