THE PARTY'S OVER

...Barbara won 36 per cent in the Democratic primary and 11 per cent in the general election as a candidate of the Unity Party...

...By contrast, neoliberals, led by New Jersey's Bill Bradley, cheerfully ally with the likes of Jack Kemp in efforts to restore the gold standard and create a flat-tax program that would further erode the vestiges of a progressive code...

...This is the fundamental problem of third-party candidacies that are not dedicated to building a new political force...

...The Democrats have moved steadily to the right, pounded by reactionaries and neoconservatives who have revived ideological politics...

...This is the rule of popular leftist politics...

...The mirage of a progressive Democratic Party dissolves all the more readily in the face of the Party's existing ideology...

...The labor movement of the day had placed its fate in the hands of the Liberal Party but found, as the empire declined, that Liberals were in no mood for reform...

...stepping up the campaign against apartheid and U.S...

...Those who entered the apparatus of the Democratic Party and tried to change it from within were crushed after George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon...

...Similarly, the mass black movement of the 1960s impelled the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations to recognize black demands...

...THE PARTY'S OVER *Farewell* to the Democrats BY STANLEY ARONOWITZ American politics thrives on myths, and perhaps none is so great as the myth that the Democratic Party is the party of and for workers, blacks, women, peace activists, and environmentalists...

...Blacks, women, unionists, and leftists are being told to go along with the program of neoliberalism or get packing...

...And in recent years, many large corporations have begun to hedge their bets by contributing to both parties...

...And the rush toward accommodation is as evident among Democratic office-holders who are black as among those who are white...

...Democrats recently joined one of the Party's renegade members, Texas Senator Phil Gramm, in cosponsoring and passing a bill obliging the Executive branch to enforce a balanced budget by 1991 even if Congress were unable to make the necessary cuts...

...fighting to make schools places where kids can learn critical thinking...

...the mayors of Burlington and Berkeley are avowed socialists...

...Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Burlington, Vermont...

...Unfortunately, the Unity Party failed to outlive the election, partly because many of its adherents were still committed to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and used the race primarily as a way to protest Koch's conservative administration...

...While conservatives championed the free market and identified it with freedom itself, the Left languished in single issues, tactical alliances, and the old politics of incremental change...

...Only the black movement shows any life, galvanized by the South African freedom struggle...

...The important effort to democratize the Democrats and lead the Party leftward has failed...

...Such scurrying continues...

...Despite the best efforts of trade unionists, social activists, and black leaders, the Democrats are moving inexorably to the Right along with the rest of the country...

...The post-election record of the Congressional Democrats simply affirms the defeatism that pervades the Party...

...More and more, as real estate and commercial development overcomes America's farmlands and urban areas, the Democrats are allying themselves with those interests...

...It is no better on the local level...

...The anti-intellectual, programmatic orientation of many groups has been unable to stem a well-financed, bold conservative effort to shift the agenda of American politics...

...It took an independently organized mass workers' movement to pressure Franklin D. Roosevelt to become, for a brief period, a reform President...

...Only a new ideological direction for social movements can hope to defeat the Right...

...A Democratic Party composed of such groups would have to be anti-corporate, if not explicitly anti-capitalist, and that's not possible within the Democratic Party...

...In 1924, the American Federation of Labor supported Robert LaFollette's Progressive Party in the Presidential campaign, and LaFollette won four million votes...

...We can be sure that his consultants persuaded him there was no other choice, and so Mondale was backed into the corner of advocating higher taxes to reduce the budget while Reagan took the old-time progressive line that taxes should be reduced...

...Party chairman Paul Kirk has disbanded the last remnant of the McGovern movement, the interest-group caucuses...

...Conservatives are setting the agenda, with the smiling approval not only of the business sector but also of the Democratic Party...

...The turnaround, accompanied by obligatory outrage, was really just an excuse to join the "mainstream," to come in out of the cold...

...The fabled alliance, which many radicals and progressives place at the core of the Democratic Party, has simply never existed...

...So it is with the Democratic Party today...

...The traditional way to strike out independently is to start a new party and run candidates on a solid radical program—or, given the rightward drift, a program of structural reform—that would include: national health insurance, a shorter workweek, staunch defense of the social welfare state, limitations on capital mobility, a forthright anti-interventionist foreign policy, and uncompromising support for the demands of minorities, women, and ecologists...

...Until the Left decides to forge an independent political vehicle, it has no chance of placing even a reform agenda on the front burner of American politics...

...Mondale ran his campaign on the conservative plank of balancing the budget...

...it offers no home for progressive social movements...

...A liberal Democrat, Walter Mondale, facing the ultra-right Republican incumbent, capitulated on most major issues, from the economy to intervention in Nicaragua...

...Little room remains for radicals and progressives within the Democratic Party...

...It is probably too early to expect many of those socialists who are inclined to represent themselves as left-wing Democrats to abandon hope and make the break...

...What should radicals and progressives do...

...Wolff and the Green Party gathered 10 per cent of the vote in the general election after running in the New Haven Democratic primary...

...The real power of a popular Left is its capacity for direct action: mass lobbies in behalf of extending abortion rights to poor women...

...The Center and the Right in the Party closed ranks around the Party professionals, who have tightened their grip ever since...

...But most of us should read the signs...

...Equally impressive was economics professor Richard Wolffs Green Party mayoral race in New Haven, Connecticut, last year...

...If Congressional Democrats are something less than lions in the people's interest, then state and municipal Democrats have been pussycats...

...The message is clear: The old pragmatic liberal formula for social and economic gains is dead...

...But first we need a national debate on political alternatives for the Left...

...Now is the time...

...In the Twentieth Century, the American Left has divided on the issue of whether an independent political vehicle is necessary to attain its short-term as well as long-term goals...

...His books include "Working Class Hero: A New Strategy for Labor" and (with Henry Geroux) "Education under Siege: Radical, Liberal, and Conservative Debates About Schools," recently published by Bergin & Garvey...

...Unless the economy dives or some international catastrophe befalls Reagan, the 1986 mid-term election is likely to produce few gains for the Democrats...

...After the debacles of the Progressive Parties of the 1920s and 1940s, many concluded that the proper electoral arena was the Democratic Party...

...intervention in Africa and Central America...

...Even a cursory look at the history of the two major parties shows that each has represented a different segment of capital...

...Harrington condemns the rightward direction of mainstream Democrats and asserts that a new party might be necessary "when the smoke clears" to bring the Democratic Party back to its liberal tradition...

...In fact, the Democrats are not an alternative to the Republican conservatives...

...The compliant, sweet, cooperative Democrats are settling in for a long stay in the minority, their chief task to prevent a major breakaway among their constituents on the Left...

...Beyond these relatively modest short-range items, the party would introduce proposals for long-term economic and social reconstruction in education, urban infrastructure (particularly housing, water, and roads), and a visionary ecological program that would entail selective municipalization and nationalization of crucial energy and industrial resources...

...The Party has become just another vehicle for corporate political action committees, which can outspend social movements any day of the week...

...progressive forces are demobilized: Trade unions continue their steep descent into economic and political impotence, and the peace movement seems at a dead end...

...Another way for radicals to establish an independent political force is simply to focus on building mass-based social movements, for movements—not political parties—are the source of change...

...Wolff followed Frank Barbara's example in the 1981 New York City mayoral race against incumbent Ed Koch...

...With the exceptions of the Congressional Black Caucus and such outsanding individuals as Tom Harkin and Henry Waxman, the progressive flank of the Democratic Party is in full retreat...

...After a last-ditch attempt to halt the Administration's dangerous aggression in Central America, the Democrats caved in when Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega visited Moscow for aid...

...In the spring, the Democratic Agenda, a forum organized in the 1970s by Harrington to influence the now-defunct midterm issues convention of the Democratic Party, will hold a national conference, and members of diverse social movements will be in attendance...

...For most liberals, these gifts have made an anti-corporate stance difficult to sustain...

...Though I won't claim that low voter turnouts in recent Presidential elections stem entirely from the Democrats' ersatz politics, the 48 per cent who refused to cast ballots in 1984 certainly had little to choose from...

...In the past decade, this tactic has met with limited success at the local level...

...The 1984 Presidential election illustrated the futility of working within the Democratic Party...

...We are in a situation reminiscent of turn-of-the-century British politics...

...Convinced that proposing a drastic reduction in the arms budget would expose him to the risk of being labeled "soft" on defense, Mondale was content to nip at Reagan's heels...

...Wave the flag of jobs in a local politician's face and he'll salute every time...

...At best, they slow down the most retrograde aspects of the GOP program...

...But after the election, the Federation resumed its nonpartisan stance and other LaFollette supporters returned to the Republicans...

...he couldn't even project the image of a loyal opposition, much less of a serious alternative...

...Community forces that try to stay the hand of "development" have learned the hard way that the Democrats are, after all, a party of "progress"—which often means displacement and gentrification...

...As a result, Stanley Aronowitz is a member of the sociology faculty at the City University of New York...

...At best, they might want to emulate the New Haven Greens, raising radical issues during Democratic primaries and then running on a separate ticket in general elections...

...The point is not to enter the Party apparatus but to retain political independence...

...The Left's responsibility remains to fight for the merger of class, race, and sex interests and help form alliances of these movements against the common enemy...

...Radical politics must return to the social movements that find themselves thwarted by current economic and political power...

...Above all, social movements must create their own party in the near term and plan every move to achieve that goal...

...Though the strategy brought a certain amount of success in the mid-1930s and mid-1960s, it has not achieved a major legislative breakthrough in at least fifteen years...

...Socialists and leftists have won city council seats in Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley, California...

...Corporate political action committees have been big contributors to many Democratic legislators...

...This ought to be the signal that the grotesque romance between some social movements and the Democratic Party is over...

...Their record on military procurement and foreign aid mirrors, and at times exceeds, the gro-tesqueries of the Republicans...

...Perhaps this is the place to begin the national leftist debate on electoral politics, to consider independent political action, and to help forge a new political vehicle...

...Even Ted Kennedy, long the darling of liberals and some radicals, refrains from blasting these departures because he, too, has come over part way, spouting the silly doctrine of budget-balancing...

...no reasonable and credible force from the Left can contest the perception of a conservative consensus...

...at worst, they bestow legitimacy on conservative goals, leaving their constituents bothered and bewildered...

...Chances are they won't win back the Senate, and if they do, it will be on the basis of the kind of campaign waged in 1984 by Paul Simon of Illinois, who managed to persuade the voters he was a better conservative than his Republican opponent, Charles Percy...

...This agenda prescribes the limits of debate...

...A recent article in Democratic Left, the organ of the Democratic Socialists of America, by co-chair Michael Harrington raises the issue of independent political action...

...The truth is that the business of government is business, and the task of pleasing business carries no party label...

...Consequently, leaders of social movements—trade unionists, feminists, peace activists, black and other minority leaders—entered the Democratic Party or allied with its liberal wing to achieve specific legislative objectives...

...During the Reagan Administration, it has toed the line on the need to trim the welfare state, to maintain huge arms expenditures, and to temper labor and civil-rights demands...

...They are the me-too party, playing to the hilt the role of junior partner...