It Won't Happen Outside Here

CNtodd, in a post hoping for the rise of a new labor party to challenge the Democrats, writes:

Unless labor unions drop their support of the Democratic Party, workers will continue to lose the rights they fought for so long ago. The Democrats need a wake-up call in 2008.

Sorta like the wake-up call Nader gave them (and the country) in 2000, right? And do you think things would be quite so bad for workers if, say, that wake-up call hadn't happened and Gore had won? If Kerry had won?

I don't.

In any case, new parties really aren't the way to go. Lipset and Marks wrote a great book called It Didn't Happen Here, explaining why socialism never grabbed hold in the States. They argue, basically, that the essential impenetrability of the two-party system killed its chances; there was no electoral space in which it could breathe. Convincing stuff, and worth a read if you're interested in that sort of thing.

A good example of why these initiatives fail can be seen on the right. Howard Jarvis, a tax-cutting zealot whose wingnut ballot propositions screwed up California for a generation, tried to parlay a failed Senate insurgency into a Conservative Party. This was in 1962, a time of remarkable conservative mobilization in California, and the new party got 60,000 members. And then, when Barry Goldwater announced his candidacy for President, it lost most all of them (as did the CA organizations in other states).

Goldwater, of course, got stomped in the general, but the activists he recruited rebuilt the Republican party into a powerhouse organization able to advocate for business as effectively as Todd wants Democrats to push for labor. But they couldn't do that from outside the traditional structure, they had to come back in to the Republican party make a difference.

We've been seeing, in the Democratic party, signs that liberal mobilization is changing things. Dean as chair of the DNC, the vote against CAFTA, the real backlash to those who betrayed consumers on the Bankruptcy Bill, the broad backing populist tracts from Thomas Frank and Rick Perlstein are receiving, and so on. This is not the time to pick up your marbles and go home. This is the time to take a lesson from the Goldwaterites and change the one institution that might actually achieve your goals. The Democrats don't need a wake-up call, they need to be shown that populism can win an election. And for those who agree with the Sirotas, Franks, Todds, and Perlsteins of the world, the next step should be finding and recruiting a presidential candidate who can prove that.

Speaking of which, what's Byron Dorgan doing these days?

Update: Todd has a response which, naturally enough, disagrees with me. We see the system in fundamentally different ways so we have fundamentally different strategies for moving forward within it. Also, David Sirota writes in to remind me of "fusion voting", a system where third parties can nominate main party candidates, thus controlling a block of votes which, in the end, can be funneled to friendly Democrats (or Republicans). New York's Working Families party has been quite successful with this; here's an explanation as to how.