THE CITIZENS' PARTY

...But the analysis that inspired the Citizens' Party—that the time for electoral action is now—works for Harrington as well...

...The chapters have developed independently of one another, yet a consensus exists to emphasize local and statewide elections...

...The quixotic Presidential candidacies of Dr...

...men, as usual, readily step forward...

...Do party members have the discipline to stick to that formula...

...New York), but even in defeat the party has made respectable showings...

...Most delegates were thirty and over...

...Moreover, as spokesman for the party, he has steadily emphasized economic, peace, and foreign policy issues...

...Time and again the Left has mobilized hundreds of thousands of people for one cause or another...

...He has consistently brought his ecological insights to other concerns...

...In originally planning to organize among the near-majority who do not vote, the party had hoped to create a base of its own, but this was a romantic notion...

...Where does that movement go from there...

...That this is not the time for such a party does not automatically make party-building premature...

...Here again, party attitudes reflect common shortcomings of the Left...

...with neighborly tics to workplace and community...

...By contrast, the Citizens' Party is an electoral upstart, breaking new ground as it attempts to move beyond its limited constituency...

...It is finally doing what it set out to do: become a decentralized, democratic, progressive party...

...What...

...The prospects of the party may still turn on its ability to break the movement of its exclusive interest in direct action and woo activists to electoral politics instead...

...The future of the party lies in continuing to build a decentralized infrastructure while focusing on local and state races where respectable showings are possible without heavy media expenditures...

...The party already has strict rules requiring a balance of women and men in the leadership ranks...

...The Citizens' Party has to be taken seriously...

...In the interim, multiracial coalitions are possible, and the Citizens' Party should continue its work...

...The Citizens' Party certainly should do more work with rank-and-file and dissident movements...

...Progressive trade unionists might say the same...

...Henry Wallace's 194H Progressive Party Presidential campaign was the Old Left's last hurrah...

...Teachers, social and human service workers, small entrepreneurs, and similar "new class" occupations predominated...

...The radical ecology activists, who identify with the greens, are generally the most adamant in belittling the vote...

...In two years it has transformed itself from the "Barry Commoner Party" to an organizer's party...

...Vermont...

...In Vermont, the Burlington victory came against an entrenched and conservative Democratic machine...

...The pacifist ban-the-bombers who, during the late 1950s, revived the radical movement were ideologically opposed to electoral politics...

...They have quietly gone on to build a number of strong local and statewide chapters...

...The people it is trying to educate do not first have to be persuaded to vote...

...That leaves Michael Harrington and his democratic socialists who, virtually alone on the Left, have been committed to the electoral framework...

...In the United States, where this context doesn't exist, the green idea tends to translate into elementary environmentalism, which only reinforces the initial misconception of the party's narrow focus...

...In Atlanta, for instance, John Sweet, with the support of John Lewis and Julian Bond, won 49.4 per cent of the vote for an at-large city council seat...

...Bringing women into the party is the most immediate, important challenge...

...Seattle, and Schenectady...

...But even progressive trade unionists are not likely to join the party until it wins more elections and proves that it has the clout to do something for them...

...Local issues pale before grave matters of war and peace...

...Lobbying for a more progressive agenda at the top, Harrington's people have stayed clear of local politicking and grass-roots, socialist spadework...

...Without any charismatic figures of national stature (except for Commoner), with no history or tradition to rally its forces (even in the dullest of times, socialists can recall a heyday with Debs and Thomas and rouse themselves with "The Internationale"), with an ambiguous ideology (the party's call for economic democracy, after all, is an obfuscation of socialist ideas), and, as a result, a perplexing self-image, it's no wonder the party has been hard-put to generate much excitement...

...Rejecting the image for themselves, they worried that it was the makeup of the party everywhere else...

...As long as the Citizens' Party emphasizes party building at the grass roots (and the DSA refrains from running candidates), a rivalry need not become troublesome, or even arise...

...Unlike the Citizens' Party, the DSA, with its standing in the Democratic Party, has an established niche...

...When we are ready to move, we want you to be there," Daughtry said...

...Whether it's more fruitful to work in the Citizens' Party or to organize, as Harrington insists, within the Democratic Party can only be determined over time...

...The weakness of the national leadership and the relative cohesion of local chapters make participatory decision-making not only possible but necessary...

...But in the national arena, where media politics holds sway, the ambiguity thrives...

...Superficially, the party would seem to have little going for it...

...Organizing among feminists, trade-unionists, and politically conscious Hispanics and blacks is not the same as building mass support...

...Another is American history...

...But the party is emotionally committed to taking on all Democrats...

...It was at Commoner's initiative that the party sought to identify itself with the "green" or ecology parties of the European Left...

...The need to make the party visible and raise progressive issues must be weighed against the possibility of spoiling the victory of a liberal whose vote on specific issues (El Salvador, abortion) might be critical...

...Sanchez has been active in the New York chapter but now devotes herself to organizing in the Puerto Rican community...

...The absence of labor support remains a pressing problem...

...that minority groups first have to organize themselves...

...The party has the choice of guilt-tripping itself for its pallid complexion, as is customary on the Left, or continuing to organize where it's most capable...

...What's important is how to become credible to the mass of American people...

...The Left in the United States has long been indifferent to electoral politics, and any party that intends to enter the electoral flow has to wade upstream...

...Whether or not to challenge a liberal Democrat is best decided on the local level...

...It is groundwork time now...

...On the local level, where party members can articulate their positions face-to-face, confusion over what the party stands for is not a problem...

...At the New York convention, the delegates voted to fund a national organizer's position to recruit women...

...And, until the Citizens' Party, the Left showed no sustained interest in local elections...

...Another twenty or so candidates are planning to run for the U.S...

...Many leftists who believe in third-party politics are aloof from the Citizens' Party because it lacks a base in the traditional working class...

...Participation in electoral politics must become part of movement strategy...

...But the grass-roots perspective encourages pragmatism...

...At the national convention, Yolanda Sanchez and Herbert Daughtry were virtually the only representatives of minority groups in sight...

...The Left was indifferent...

...But it has never been able to translate crowds into permanent organizations that can compete for power...

...Local issues are detail-ridden and rarely invite emotionally satisfying radical solutions...

...This attitude toward political action has been reinforced by the Left's own electoral experience over the past twenty years...

...Only a patient and sustained effort can politicize them...

...Mostly, they are resigned and apathetic, alienated from politics of every kind...

...The local chapters are in control...

...As for Commoner, pigeonholing him as an environmentalist has always been unfair...

...labor, minorities, and the poor barely knew the party existed...

...There was a brief reconciliation in 1972 with the McGovcrn campaign, hut party regulars vowed that New Left forces would never wield power again Independent third parties, meanwhile, proved utterly inconsequential during this period...

...It was only at the national convention in New York this past May (the first nationwide gathering of party stalwarts since the 1980 founding convention) that members were able to take a true measure of themselves...

...The party's one achievement was to involve a core group of experienced activists in chapters around the country...

...This November, the party is planning to contest (at mid-summer count) more than eighty local and state races in at least twenty states...

...The 300 or so delegates from thirty states were distinguishable by their rooted-ness and age...

...Going after liberal Democrats is problematic, especially on the Federal level...

...Seen from this angle, much of what appears to be weakness in the Citizens' Party turns out to be a seedbed of strength...

...But fact is fact: The Democratic Party (as the DSA might argue) is the labor party and there is no evidence that the AFL-CIO is ready to make a historic break from the Kennedys and Mondales of this world...

...indeed, he was one of the first environmental scientists to work with labor on workplace safety...

...The Citizens' Party cannot be accused of radical chic...

...It has won some victories and has set up chapters that show every sign of growing...

...What drew these activists into the Citizens' Party was not the Commoner ticket, but the conclusion that alternative or coun-tcrcultural politics, single-issue organizing, and direct-action campaigns (demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience) were in themselves no longer enough to build a radical movement...

...Politically, members have been Democrats, Marxist-Leninists, and everything in between...

...In the meantime, the party does not block the way for a labor-based party...

...A case in point, perhaps is the June 12 disarmament rally in New York, when more than 800,000 people marched for the nuclear freeze...

...He is on the Vermont state committee of the Citizens' Party...

...Yet, he has also tried to distance himself and the party from the more traditional Left...

...Speaker after speaker denounced working with liberal Democrats though, characteristically, when a vote on the matter was taken, pragmatism won out and the party resolved to "discourage" rather than "prohibit" cross-endorsements...

...The only other course is electoral activity to influence the Democratic Party or build an independent third party...

...Rock stars and media personalities have not taken to the hustings on the party's behalf...

...People who don't vote don't go to demonstrations, either...

...Despite the 1980 debacle, these people remained committed to the idea of a third party...

...But there was also a smattering of blue-collar workers, indicative of a newly proletarian-ized, downwardly-mobile middle class...

...Politics flows from the bottom up and the party will go wherever its members choose to take it...

...It can also up the ante with militant tactics, but risk losing moderate supporters...

...The Left in the United States has long been indifferent to electoral politics, and any party setting out in the electoral flow has to wade upstream These limitations would be inherent in any new movement, but special difficulties for the Citizens' Party are grounded in the popular misconception that it is the Barry Commoner Party, an environmentalist claque composed mainly of granola-munching ecology activists...

...Still, it was apparent at the national convention that the party had matured...

...Their philosophy of direct action, nonviolent or otherwise, and alternative politics—building a new world in the shell of the old...

...There were few students— little effort had been made to recruit them...

...Much the same can be said with regard to the organizing of blacks, Hispanics, and other minority groups...

...To the degree that the broad Left finds electoral politics useful (and I would insist that it is the only direction the moyement can possibly go), the Citizens' Party and Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are likely to become the most visible and effective players...

...One obvious reason is the party's own enigmatic evolution...

...Marty Jezer is the author of "The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960" (South End Press), reviewed in this issue...

...But on the national level, where the Citizens' Party is bound sooner or later to go after DSA-backed candidates, the two organizations will have to agree to disagree in this limited field while making conscientious efforts to cooperate in every other respect...

...Instead, party members have been slogging it out in the boondocks, meeting America on its own terms...

...The party constitution mandates affirmative action, but it is unlikely that party leadership, in the foreseeable future, can be racially balanced...

...More telling, the campaign failed to galvanize the constituencies it had tried to reach...

...This was made clear at the national convention when the question of cross-endorsements was up for debate...

...Its Presidential ticket of Barry Commoner and I aDonna Hams had run _ with the exportation of winning 5 per cent of the popular vote, but finished with less than 1 per cent, a dismal showing...

...Senate and House...

...To be sure, this was a perception that many in the party held...

...The fine line between economic democracy and democratic socialism is not a raging issue...

...The Citizens9 Party cannot be accused of radical chic-its loyalists have been slogging it out in the boondocks, meeting America on its own terms More serious than racial imbalance is the party's male predominance...

...Benjamin Spock and Dick Gregory left no on-going organizations...

...But, can an organizer's party be an authentic citizens' party in the absence of a radicalized base...

...But where the rules have been followed, women have had to be recruited...

...Even the party's dreary image has a brighter side...

...But their support of the Democratic Party and their tactical approach to work within the party have isolated them from the activist-oriented Left...

...From the podium, both made essentially the same points—that the Citizens' Party should not expect to organize successfully in minority areas...

...exclaimed one Bay Area delegate, "We can't support Ron Dellums...

...It would seem, then, that an electoral party of the kind we have in the United States (as opposed to the European parties with their social and cultural components) is not the best consciousness-raising tool except, perhaps, where the Citizens' Party has so far been most effective—on the local level...

...as the Wobblics once put it—has been a persistent if not dominant influence in the American Left...

...The Citizens' Party is overwhelmingly white...

...direct action by itself is a dead end...

...Voter registration coexisted with direct action during the early days of the civil rights movement, but the radicals of the New Left saw the Democratic Party's refusal to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Atlantic City national convention as an unforgivable betrayal The police rampage at the 196X national convention in Chicago and Hubert Humphrey's refusal to break with Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy merely confirmed the New Left's estrangement from the Democrats...

...These were veterans of the radical movement-, of the 1960s and 1970s...

...Daughtry is head of the city's Black United Front...

...The absence of compelling personalities creates openings for new leadership...

...At this point, it is important only that the Citizens' Party and the DSA do not compete...

...Elsewhere, the party has attracted 10 to 40 per cent of the vote in locales where left-wing parties never before counted for anything This is encouraging, for it means that a radical third party committed to serious door-to-door campaigning can appeal to a nonradical electorate But the party is still attracting little attention—much less support—from the Left...

...It can beg the question and call for a second, larger demonstration...

...Conservative and moderate Democrats are the most likely targets...

...This gives the party an international dimension, akin to DSA's participation in the Socialist International, but the European greens come out of a sophisticated, electorally oriented, mass-based Left...

...Its triumphs, such as they are, are substantive...

...no longer part of a transient subculture isolated from mainstream America, they were settled now...

...Consequently, candidates tend to prefer hopeless national races (where they can raise the big issues) and shun local races where personal canvassing counts and the issues are relatively mundane...

...A few surprising victories have been won (in Burlington...

...Only time will tell whether the party will ultimately become the electoral arm of the American Left...