Burke is back!

I don’t understand this debate about how silly 3rd parties are. Of ~course~ someone like Nader is not going to go from 3 to 60% overnight and be elected president, whatever his policies are. Of course he will not easily gain enough power to reform the voting system.
But he can push the Democrats to the left, because they need his percentage points, and will make some progressive talk which otherwise they would have no incentive at all to do. After all it’s not very difficult to be to the left the Bush admin.
The role of third parties, in the absence of proportional representation, is to gain enough bargaining power to influence the big parties, which are often locked in close races.
What is childish is to see everything in a manichean way, and begrudge third parties for failing to win the vote!

Of course, wether Nader in this case will be good at this, and “forget” to urge his supporters to vote Kerry at the last minute is another problem….

Tim Burke has additional posts up at Cliopatria on Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 and on Photography and History.

The 21st Century College sounds great, but I’m already going to it. A lot of the ideas can be found at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. http://www.hampshire.edu

Actually, I don’t have disdain for all those things; as I lay it out in the proposal, shucking it all off is one part a financial necessity and one part a radical thought-experiment about how to deal with the “nanny-state” character of the modern university.

Hampshire is a good example of a philosophically coherent, daring approach to the liberal arts. I’ve always admired both Hampshire and St. John’s College even though they take opposite approaches precisely because of their clarity. My sketch is sort of a hybrid of both in some ways.

1. Why is a political party a necessity for “working through strategy and tactics”? The religious right actually seems to do a bang-up job of thinking in that way strictly through civil society, both churches and other organizations.

2. In what respect does a political party allow thinking about strategy and tactics to take place “out of the eye” of one’s enemies? What, is the hypothetical party of the Left going to have secret handshakes and such before you can come in the clubhouse and talk about strategy?

3. Who is “us”, exactly? I get a lot of sniping criticisms every time I try to talk about the very particular lineage of the American left that I find problematic–the critics observe that the left is highly pluralist and can’t be pigeonholed and that the things I find troubling are just fringe or marginal sentiments. Ok. I don’t know that I agree that the things I might criticize are marginal, but I accept that the left is pluralist. So who ought to be in Harry’s Party of the Left? Would all the possible constituencies in it regard “wealth and corporate America” as Public Enemy #1?

I wrote all this below before seeing Henry’s response. So I am speaking for myself here, not Henry, but I agree with everything he said, right down to the detail of finding Lipset and Marks to be the best, (but not flawless) account. It seems to me that people like Texiera and Joel Rogers are working to construct a ‘party of the left’ in the sense of party I use below. Anyway…

That wasn’t meant as criticism of you, Timothy — I agreed with most of what you said. But I also agreed with Matthew’s point that sometimes, especially given the realities of the US electoral system, the point of an third-party run can be to influence policy — maybe of the party next to you politically, maybe of the all parties. I’m consciously using the term ‘party’ loosely, more in the old fashioned sense of ‘grouping of the like-minded or like-goaled’ — I didn’t capitalize, and didn’t preface with ‘Political’. Partly this is because in the US context, it’s not clear to me even what counts as a political party.

When you are trying to formulate your goals and policies, strategy and tactics, it helps to be doing so without the enemy at the table with you. IN the old European social-democratic parties there were always a wide array of disagreements, and most even contained socialists who aimed to overthrow capitalism in their lifetimes. But large capital was not, usually, directly represented. It had its own party or parties. And it was in practical terms the enemy. As it still is. Even now, although Blair’s Labour Party is extremely friendly with big business, it is still fairly clear that capital does not really belong there — though that may, obviously, change, especially given the massive changes in the electoral system for most bodies other than the national parliament.

Now, I refrained from saying this because I thought of writing a post on it, but I actually think all the talk about a third party is a bit unhelpful on both sides; and I realsie that we wouldn’t be talking about this if Nader hadn’t decided to run again which is one of many reasons I wish he hadn’t. I realise the left is highly diverse and hard to define, and my own understanding of it is probably pretty narrow. But what seems to me to be urgent is to think through left policy responses to long-term policy problems. By left, here, I mean, something like ‘that would plausibly work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged 1/3rd of the population’. I.e. policies which would eliminate child poverty, more-or-less eliminate it in old age, and provide much better schooling and healthcare to those who get the worst. If you don’t see these as the most urgent goals in domestic politics, you don’t count as being on the left as far as I’m concerned. So, tax policy, education policy, health policy, social security policy, welfare, etc. I think this is much more interesting and much more important for the development of a serious left ‘party-in-the-old-fashioned-sense’. I don’t think Nader is even beginning to think about most of this, and my reading of most left-third-party efforts is that they have given these very little thought, precisely because they rightly belief that they will never be held accountable for any policy pronouncements they make because they will never win power. But other people on the left do think about these issues, sometimes even do so here. Lots of them are in the Democratic Party, some are even DP elected officials. I even believe some of them are in the Republican Party and if I had a vote I wouldn’t hesitate to use it for a RP candidate who scored better on these issues than a DP candidate. But, I think that limiting ourselves to the assumption that the DP is the only option, and that any alternative is wrongheaded by fiat is not at all helpful. (And, just to show that I can read, you didn’t make either of those assumptions, in a post which seemed mostly right to me — but if you read through previous threads here and at Brad De Long’s site you’ll see them over and over again).

bq. Would all the possible constituencies in it regard “wealth and corporate America” as Public Enemy #1?

I suppose my answer to this is definitely ‘no’. But that’s not what I implied above, just that very little if any of Corporate America likely to be in the constituency of the left as I — and henry — undertsand it.

Here’s another vote for suspicion (not to say flat rejection) of identity politics as central to, indeed often the definition of, the left.

When I defend university health services and student housing it is partially on preservation of their communitarian nature, which I suspect is helpful to the general academic climate.

My primary concern is that doing without these services merely transfers cost burdens from the university to individual students and undermines the equality that these free and reduced costs services create. Many students live in the dorms because they’re cheaper. The university would likely have to more heavily subsidize financial aid to help students with standard rents. Same for medical costs. The ethos of these programs may be all wrong, but for many students I suspect they’re more necessary than Burke & Naeher suspect.