THIRD PARTY TIME?
Rothschild, Matthew
Is now the time for a third party? That's the question of the day for progressives. Seldom in the last forty years has discontent with the two-party system been so great. Seldom have so many on the...
...The present political structure is not responsive to the needs of working people," he says...
...Certainly that's an option...
...NOW and the Rainbow can provide these, either within the Democratic Party or without...
...The progressive movement in America cannot withstand a schism between feminists and African-Americans...
...All of these various initiatives stem from deep frustration with the Democratic Party—frustrations shared by virtually everyone on the Left...
...Our side has lost, and we have internalized the values of our opponents...
...Any such progressive formation should articulate bold ecological positions, advocate citizen access, and challenge corporate power...
...Ralph Nader is talking third party, too...
...They were interested in framing the agenda...
...That is a towering historical impediment...
...One of the most bitter internal arguments in the American Left centers on whether it can somehow in-filtrate, capture, or take over the Democratic Party...
...Those without money are considered irrelevant...
...It will have its own newspapers and other means of communication...
...It could be terrible," says Piven...
...Nader's party and the Green party should be able to find their proper places within a NOW-Rainbow tent...
...Seldom have so many on the Left given serious thought to the possibility of breaking from the Democratic Party and going it alone...
...People should form third parties if they want to become even more irrelevant than they are.' —James Weinstein The Left has been debating the Third Party question for decades...
...If Jackson runs as a Democrat, he will expect—and, to a great extent, deserve— the support of those who are thinking about forming third parties...
...We're totally stifled...
...And if the women's movement and the labor movement and the Greens start forming their own parties, DSA might have to rethink the logic of its position, Ehrenreich suggests...
...Normally, the person in Jackson's situation is considered the front-runner," says Cobble...
...And the second-level goal is a victory of plurality...
...People will pay dues to it," he says...
...Eleanor Smeal responds: "NOW's exploration of a third party is absolutely not anti-Jackson in any way...
...Most of the people for a third party are issue people, not access people," he says...
...NOW, by radicalizing its agenda, deserves to be taken more seriously by the Left, and feminist issues generally can no longer be an afterthought on the progressive agenda...
...Before the progressive movement peels off into a parade of parties, some fundamental questions of analysis and strategy must be addressed...
...Once it does that, it may not even need a third party, she suggests...
...Though the possibility of a third party was rudely dismissed—or ignored— by political insiders, the mainstream media, and other women's organizations, NOW remains intent on pursuing the idea...
...she asks...
...It would be, he says, "a Congressionally chartered group, audience-controlled, that airs an hour-long prime-time TV show every week...
...The convention issued a "Declaration of Women's Political Independence," which put the Democratic Party on notice that NOW's support can no longer be taken for granted...
...Mazzocchi wants a party whose sole concern is articulating and representing the needs of working people...
...But he's not seen in '89 the way Hart was in '85...
...Along with monthly utility bills, consumers were given the option to contact the citizens utility board if they had questions or complaints about their bills or utility policy...
...Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Why Americans Don't Vote, shares some of Goodwyn's perspective...
...In the 1990s, the public is going to realize that their taxpayer dollars are going to their enemies, not to their own organizations and voice...
...the right to a decent standard of living, including adequate food, housing, health care, and education...
...the loss of power and income of working people...
...Though Jackson is unquestionably the leader, and deservedly so, of the progressive movement in America at this time, it is possible to conceive of a time when his ambitions would diverge from the interests of the progressive movement...
...For starters, he talks about the need for campaign-finance reform, defending worker rights and whistle-blower rights, reforming the law to make class-action suits easier, and establishing governmen-tally sanctioned consumer watchdog groups in such major industries as utilities, banking, insurance, and savings-and-loans...
...Goodwyn is alarmed by the "quick-fix" undertone of current third-party discussions...
...It has committed itself to working on the Left, and its issues—not just abortion rights, but health care, child care, comparable worth, and the feminization of poverty—have the potential to radicalize young and working-class women...
...He envisions the labor party as that entity and expects that at some point it would be strong enough to negotiate directly with the Government on behalf of working people, as labor parties do in some European countries...
...It's doomed," warns Goodwyn...
...With no consensus, the conference essentially decided not to participate in national electoral politics, at least in 1992...
...Jesse Jackson has taken one of the most forward-looking positions on issues generally and on issues of particular interest to women—discrimination, child care, prenatal care, comparable worth, abortion, just about any issue that affects women," Watkins says...
...We desperately need to form a third party," he says...
...If not, send a dollar to the consumer tax-reform group...
...He thinks not...
...It is, in fact, one of the most public and outspoken challenges in decades to the calcified two-party system from which many—if not most—Americans feel alienated...
...Still, Goodwyn understands the sentiments that motivate third-party proponents...
...Some structure needs to be put in place soon that can carry out these organizing tasks...
...The Democratic Party was the place we could get most attention...
...It's an ideological question...
...You can't have a coalition until you define yourself and what you're about...
...Anybody can get their own people in...
...People should form third parties if they want to become even more irrelevant than they are...
...But Weinstein says this could better be accomplished by running within the Democratic Party...
...the destruction of the environment, and the discrimination against women, blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, the elderly, and the disabled that so marks the society...
...It would be great if we had a parliamentary system, but we don't...
...What Democratic Party...
...Ralph Nader is considering the possibility of launching a third party around issues of citizen empowerment, public access, and consumer rights...
...The reasons for staying within the Democratic Party are no longer persuasive, says Smeal, who chairs NOW's national advisory committee and heads the Fund for the Feminist Majority...
...But she wonders about the strategy, especially of NOW, to pursue the third-party option...
...The party would also seek solutions to specific issues plaguing working people...
...The National Organization for Women recognizes the failure of both major political parties to address women's needs and serves notice on the parties that NOW will support and seek to elect candidates who will move toward the feminist agenda, notwithstanding party affiliation," the declaration stated...
...Smeal stresses that NOW's third party would not be a "woman's party," as it has been portrayed in the media...
...The important thing is to get the capsule launched...
...There's a huge desire for a new start," says Eleanor Smeal...
...In 1984 and 1988, Jackson did an enormous amount to validate the idea of a progressive political group moving toward political power," says Commoner...
...in 1968, George Wallace and the American Independent Party won 9,906,000 votes...
...It's a long, hard, arduous task," he says, "but anyone who's ever organized knows it's the only way to go...
...There's no sense to it," echoes James Weinstein, editor and publisher of In These Times, the independent socialist weekly...
...Even feminist columnist Ellen Goodman took NOW to task: "This is not the time for a 'feel-good' and doomed crusade of frustrated outsiders," she wrote...
...I don't see the relevancy of electoral politics," he says...
...But the Jackson campaign and the Rainbow Coalition (are they always synonymous...
...If we are to move in a serious direction, it would be as an independent party, a freestanding independent political movement that has a consciousness behind it...
...This new Bill of Rights is not limited to so-called women's issues...
...On July 23 in Cincinnati, Ohio, delegates to NOW's national convention dared to question Matthew Rothschild is the managing editor of The Progressive...
...It came unexpectedly...
...As for 1992, "it's too early to tell" what will happen, says Smeal...
...He recognizes the distinctions between the kind of issues he is discussing and those that animate the rest of the progressive movement...
...Labor needs an elevated consciousness," he says, adding wistfully that "there was a time when working people would respect a picket line...
...She, too, is "very sympathetic with the exasperation and discontent with the Democratic Party" that third-party advocates feel...
...It's a vulnerable system now, with declining voting, declining allegiance to parties...
...Citizen utility boards are the model for such groups, he says...
...For too long, the progressive movement in America has hashed and rehashed the arguments about a third party...
...Just compare the energy needed for a Jackson candidacy with the energy needed for a third party...
...But Barbara Ehrenreich, the co-chair of DSA, is no longer sure of this strategy...
...This is a change from twenty years ago...
...When the Democratic and Republican parties have so closed themselves off and locked people out, people will have no place to go but to a third party...
...What Mazzocchi's labor party would be about is taking on the power of corporate America...
...The Communist Party's best showing was in 1932 when William Z. Foster won 102,000 votes...
...Jim Hightower, the populist agriculture commissioner of Texas, agrees...
...People are disillusioned with the established order of things...
...We do have structurally a two-party system in this country...
...Nader would like to duplicate this "check-off" option across industries and even to Federal tax policy...
...responds Weinstein...
...It's extremely difficult, Garvey says, to compete against these powers...
...Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party won 885,000 in 1932...
...Unlike European parliamentary systems, parties in the United States need to win 50 per cent of the vote before they can get any representation, he notes...
...Instead, the only time anyone heard anything about him was when he used the word 'bullshit' on his commercials...
...The working class is the only social formation that can renegotiate the fundamental social contract...
...The Citizens' Party got 225,000 votes, and they didn't even have two organizers...
...It makes more political sense to take over the Democratic Party," he says...
...But the issue is still up for grabs, and Rensenbrink, for one, believes it is crucial for the Greens to form their own political party...
...Whether the third party is Jesse Jackson's within the Democratic Party or whether a break will have to be made will become clear in a short period of time...
...If the criterion for success is winning elections, then a new progressive party may be in for a difficult, perhaps insurmountable uphill struggle...
...also that year, Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party won 1,157,000...
...The next threshold question is whether a third party can realistically expect to achieve significant success...
...Professors, journalists, the incompletely organized women's movement can't do it...
...We are trying to increase the power of feminists and progressives and stop this right-wing movement...
...I can't tell you how upsetting that speech was...
...Any worker in my industry who loses a job knows he will never find another one at $16 or $17 an hour...
...Working people are clearly alienated from the process...
...Strom Thurmond's States' Rights Party won 1,169,000 votes in 1948...
...You're up against full-time staffs of 200 people, who want to preserve their jobs...
...But if the popularity of the worldwide Green movement is any indication, the American Greens should have the potential for sizable growth...
...In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party won more than four million votes, or 27 per cent of the vote, the highest share ever by a third-party candidate...
...The time to do this organizing is now...
...the right to clean air, clean water, safe toxic-waste disposal, and environmental protection...
...Though NOW should probably subsume any Presidential ambitions for the moment, that doesn't mean it should stop exploring a third party, or at least the strengthening of a national third formation along with the Rainbow Coaltion...
...If NOW or Tony Mazzocchi or Ralph Nader or the Greens have creative ideas on how to proceed, they shouldn't have to clear them with Jackson first for fear of being tagged "racist...
...People are angry out there and are rejecting existing electoral choices by staying away...
...Progressives can't influence the Democratic Party because money is the only voice," says Ed Garvey, a populist Democrat in Wisconsin (and author of "It's Money That Matters," The Progressive, March 1989...
...He didn't refer to women's equality, women's hopes, dreams, and aspirations," she says...
...He is not interested, at least for the moment, in building coalitions...
...But whether the answer is to form a third party or not depends in part on certain basic questions of political analysis and strategy that leftists have argued about for decades...
...But Nader draws a distinction between the party he envisions and the one that others on the Left are discussing...
...Watkins thinks it's strategically unsound to bolt the party at this time...
...Who's dealing with the economic transformation...
...The first issue is one of venue: Is the electoral arena (favored by all third-party advocates except Tony Mazzocchi) the crucial place for the Left to engage in politics...
...This hugely ambitious task will not detract from any broad progressive effort on the electoral front, and Mazzocchi needs all the support he can get for an extremely valuable effort...
...The Democratic Party is controlled by the corporations...
...Sure, it's doable," he says, "but you need 1,000 grass-roots organizers full-time...
...We're going to be a very activist group...
...These are crucial constituents of the movement...
...People are ready for it," he says, and his union supports it...
...This is a promising moment for the progressive movement in America...
...We're all out of power," Smeal says...
...We don't think at this point that it's a particularly good strategy," Watkins says, though he adds that "it's an understandable reaction to the ignoring of women and women's issues by most of the leadership in the Democratic and Republican parties...
...He won't talk about our issues, and we don't get our message out...
...Once you get inside the capsule, you cease being yourself...
...And Watkins does not shy from implying that the women's movement would be racist if it supported its own candidate, rather than Jackson, in 1992...
...Millions of people in America are fed up with the two parties and hunger for alternatives...
...The need to integrate women and minorities into leadership positions in the society, the problems of the environment, the issue of the Cold War and the arms race, the inability of the Government to deal with human services, corruption in government, and decent pay for women and other working people...
...I favor just access and empowerment issues to advance substantive issues—basically, an across-the-board citizen access to knowledge, power, and the exercise of responsibility...
...in 1980 John B. Anderson won 5,719,000 running as an independent candidate...
...That same year, Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Party won 900,000 votes...
...In 1924, Robert M. LaFollette and the Progressive Party won 4,822,000 votes...
...Smeal, Mazzocchi, Nader, and Green activist John Rensenbrink all highlight this less conventional goal...
...And then, in his campaign, he submerged our issues, he ran from them, and still he lost terribly...
...In 1976, Nader supported Jimmy Carter for President...
...Is there a constituency for such a party...
...Otherwise, the Bushes and the Gores will co-opt the important ecological issues of the day...
...Watkins says the time is not yet ripe...
...I'm trying to create a party within a party to re-estabish the fundamental principles of populist-inspired politics that go back to James Madison and Patrick Henry...
...in fact, it's already getting late for 1992...
...The rationale to go along makes no sense," she says...
...Smeal still smarts from the Dukakis campaign, which she calls a bitter disappointment...
...Originated in Wisconsin, California, and Illinois, citizen utility boards came into existence after state legislatures granted consumer groups the right to solicit members through the billing mailings that industries send out to consumers...
...In the Twentieth Century, third parties have not fared well in Presidential elections...
...That will become apparent in a few years...
...I'm very sympathetic to the crisis these people feel, and I don't want to appear like more dead weight around the ankles...
...you need an ideology...
...And what's a third party without minority representation...
...But he parts company on the question of electoral politics...
...The fundamental issues of our day have been dodged, evaded, and rationalized in our society...
...NOW is still at the exploratory stage, she points out, and Jackson hasn't made an announcement yet...
...I want to frame the nature of the debate...
...We need an instrument that can negotiate with the State.' —Tony Mazzocchi But he knows the party won't succeed the first time out...
...The right wing after 1964 didn't get involved in electoral politics but in espousing ideas...
...A third party," as Nader puts it, "would be a way of steering the Democratic Party back to basic values...
...And at the moment, the working class can't perform this role because of its own history...
...Power has shifted incredibly to 'Progressives are repeatedly told that you have no place to go...
...I don't know...
...Third parties can capture the imagination and affect the agenda and direction of the country," she says...
...I see people who understand that their kids will never have it as good as they do, and the level of expectation has incredibly reversed," he says...
...Says Cobble: "I don't understand how what NOW is doing differs from what Jackson and the Rainbow are doing...
...They need to continue articulating a vision, but they also should begin the nuts-and-bolts organizing: fielding candidates on an explicitly progressive-feminist agenda all across the country at the state and local level...
...But nobody wanted to do that, and that was a mistake...
...So long as Jackson seems committed to the Democratic Party, third-party efforts will split progressives in the United States...
...A labor party may also be in the offing...
...The perpetual quest for money puts good Democrats figuratively if not literally in bed with the very rich, only a few of whom are in politics for innocent or civic reasons," writes Kuttner, who believes in working within the Party...
...A third party in the United 'lf all the different issue groups represent seeds on a desert, I want a third party to irrigate the desert.' —Ralph Nader States faces a mountain to climb no third party in Western Europe faces...
...We need to withdraw health care, sick leave, and vacations from the collective-bargaining arena...
...Commoner agrees, at least in part...
...Suppose Jackson would win the most votes, and then they took it away from him...
...And anything that stirs the pot up is going to help all of us...
...Then there's the money: incumbents, no matter the party, routinely receive huge amounts of money from corporate PACs and the rich...
...That's why half of them stay home on election day...
...Abandoned by Michael Dukakis last fall, enraged by the Supreme Court's abortion decision in the Webster case this summer, delegates were in no mood to roll over and play dead...
...Credit the National Organization for Women (NOW) for bringing the issue out into the open...
...When a third party will evolve, it will have a certain naturalness to it," he says...
...There was a friendly strategic disagreement," he says...
...You run for office by getting signatures...
...It would be perceived in a certain way...
...A third party may not be the best way to do it...
...The political question of our time," he says, "is not how to build a third party but how to build bridges between the working class and the middle class...
...The chances of recapturing the party "are very improbable," says Garvey...
...Contrary to conventional wisdom (and the unrestrained hopes of right-wing Democrats), Jackson is likely to run for President as a Democrat in 1992, whether or not he becomes mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1990...
...For years, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) urged members to work within the Democratic Party...
...Believing in the tooth fairy is more realistic...
...Instead, he appeals to so-called Reagan Democrats-white, Southern, conservative men...
...Feminists are saying we do have some place to go.' —Eleanor Smeal corporations," he says...
...NOW needs an outlook and a program to reach working-class and poor women...
...Goodwyn asks...
...We need a party that is clearly identified as a workers' party," he says...
...There's a peculiar American need that once you discover a problem, you need to propose some kind of an instant solution...
...If a third party succeeds, it succeeds because it raises issues so forcefully as to cause significant numbers of people to leave a major party and thus forces that party to address their issues...
...Mazzocchi envisions a formally structured organization...
...their concerns need to be taken into account...
...Smeal has heard all the objections to third parties, but she remains convinced that they can serve an important role...
...The movement must always be more than any particular leader...
...You need 1,000 organizers...
...It doesn't make a lot of sense to bypass a potential vehicle that could win the nomination and the Presidency to do something that's a very difficult task...
...NOW may have to give some ground here...
...They have full-time staffs and party campaign committees that serve at the pleasure of incumbents...
...I'm still believing it's more productive and easier to take over the Democratic Party than to create a third party," he says...
...they are pushing it all back on working people...
...We've got the issues, the leadership, and the beginnings of a mass base to alter the shape of American politics...
...We are at a moment of great flux and ferment, but we must sort this issue out, for it could affect the prospects of progressive change well into the next century...
...A large part of the labor party's task would be to formulate and promote an expressly anti-corporate ideology in an effort to reinstitute a working-class consciousness in America...
...Smeal says that the women's movement has "worked very, very closely" with Jackson in the past and that she and Molly Yard have already discussed the issue of NOW's third-party plans with Steve Cobble...
...Do we still think the Party is so permeable...
...But if the criterion for success is not winning elections but shaping the political agenda, third parties may have a role...
...There's a real feeling of scandal and discontent...
...It also committed NOW to "form an exploratory commission to investigate the formation of a new party dedicated to equality for women and an expanded Bill of Rights for the Twenty-first Century...
...One group said it would be doing local and state electoral politics, but that it would be leaving national politics until later," says John Rensenbrink, a political science professor at Bowdoin College, who coordinated the conference...
...After focusing for twenty years on building grass-roots organizations and serving as a one-man anti-corporate lobby in Washington, Nader is seriously considering the need for a third party that deals with the issue of public access to power...
...Everything should not be left to the Presidential sweepstakes...
...Let's not blow it...
...It would wipe out all the progress that has been made in recent years to bridge the gaps between what is perceived as a white, middle-class women's movement on the one hand and a black male movement on the other...
...But it is serious...
...That's the reality that is so overwhelming...
...It's time to get on with it...
...I'm very committed to that down here...
...He also believes Jackson has earned the support of the women's movement...
...Yet he has no illusions about the party's ability to succeed in the short run...
...It includes: ¶ freedom from all forms of discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation...
...THIRD PARTY TIME...
...I have to say my perception is a little jaundiced...
...We don't know until we try," he says...
...Who has a program to confront the new economic problems of downward mobility and deindustrializa-tion...
...need to give ground, too...
...Such a party is feasible, he contends, especially when you consider the potential of all the people who don't vote...
...BY MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD the sanctity of the two-party system...
...Some 350 Green activists met in Eugene, Oregon, in June to discuss strategy and policy...
...That is the hidden chip...
...They split over the question of whether to form a third party...
...Nader has other idiosyncratic ideas ranging from civic-training courses in schools to the need for what he calls an "audience network...
...We can't provide health care to our members by negotiating with individual corporations...
...In hindsight...
...Tony Mazzocchi, secretary-treasurer of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, has laid plans for organizing workers into their own political party...
...Jackson's chances are being discounted for 1992, just as they were for 1988, says Steve Cobble, who heads the Keep Hope Alive PAC, which Jackson founded in 1988...
...The strategy must not be to win 51 per cent of the vote," he says, "because it would be too easy to get discouraged that way...
...We need an instrument that can negotiate with the State," he says...
...That's where the real discussion takes place," he says, and he cites the example of Barry Commoner and the Citizens' Party of 1980...
...I categorically reject that notion," says Mazzocchi...
...Lawrence Goodwyn, professor of history at Duke University and author of The Populist Moment, believes that focusing on a third party puts the cart before the horse...
...That would be the basis" for starting a third party...
...And the American people understand that they are not being offered real choices...
...NOW merits a center place at the table, and it will settle for nothing less...
...It will be an educational and analytical forum...
...But if the Democratic candidate always fails anyway, what's the point...
...Or, switching metaphors, "If all the different issue groups represent seeds on a desert," Nader says, "I want a third party to irrigate the desert...
...It's so bankrupt it doesn't matter if it wins any elections," he says...
...We are trying desperately to have a progressive-feminist strategy" that would help those working for change both inside and ouside the Democratic Party...
...He is trying nothing less than to reconstitute the labor movement in America...
...A third party needs a texture of discussion beyond the usual leap," he says...
...Too often, the Left waits too long—until just a few months before the election—to start thinking about these issues...
...On your 1040 form, citizens should have a check-off: Do you like the way your taxes are being spent...
...They haven't cut us in enough that we have anything to lose...
...He expresses irritation with Greens "who are saturated with the '60s outlook that national politics is the devil," he says...
...The most obvious avenues to serious social change are blocked off...
...There are, however, certain barriers to entry, chief among them money and incumbency...
...Jackson's support is in a growth pattern...
...Progressives are repeatedly told, 'You have no place to go.' Feminists are saying, 'We do have some place to go.' " Tony Mazzocchi has a different conception of a third party...
...the overwhelming dominance of the economy by huge, unaccountable corporations...
...Is the discussion of a third party a logical first step to creating a democratic movement in America...
...But it won't be a think tank...
...They're all gut issues, empowerment issues," Nader says...
...What happened in 1980 [with the Citizens' Party] was you had fifteen single-issue groups clamoring for the revolution and then self-destructing...
...With the notable exception of Jesse Jackson, the leadership of the Democratic Party has more in common with Republicans than with progressives...
...in that same race, Barry Commoner and the Citizens' Party won 234,000 votes, and Ed Clark and the Libertarian Party won 921,000 votes...
...NOW—and others on the Left, for that matter—cannot be held hostage to the Rainbow Coaltion...
...You need tunnels through the granite...
...My hope was that the Citizens' Party would run a dual campaign in the Democratic Party and then as an independent," Commoner says...
...That's what the civil-rights movement did...
...He has in mind a labor party without candidates, but with ideas and a mass base...
...They consist of about 200 loosely affiliated local groups and, at most, 5,000 activists...
...What makes the question particularly vexing this year, however, is Jesse Jackson...
...The Republican and Democratic parties are public institutions...
...look at the LaRouchies in Illinois...
...But if the constituents are bolting, that argument might no longer make sense...
...Mazzocchi starts from the same point as Smeal and NOW...
...Mazzocchi senses that such a party would have popular appeal among workers...
...We need to take a long view...
...One old DSA argument was that we should stay within the Democratic Party because that's where our constituency is...
...No, I've got to work in the civic area," he says...
...Many thoughtful voices doubt the value of the third-party push...
...Yet today, the issue is even more complicated: Any third-party move must take into consideration Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition...
...That's the dilemma that confronts us...
...Now he's given up on the Democratic Party...
...Jackson's the most talented spokesman for the kind of politics a third party would raise," says Frances Fox Piven...
...Movements do that too...
...The other group was quite impatient with the reluctance to think about planning for a national political campaign...
...Dukakis said in his acceptance speech that it was not a matter of ideology, but of competene...
...For years, says Smeal, feminists have been told by the Democratic leadership to be loyal team-players, to sit quietly until a Democrat is elected President because then feminists will get what they want...
...Labor needs its own instrument, an entity that can respond effectively...
...It's doing us no good this way...
...I've heard it for forty years...
...We want a party dedicated to the problems of the day," she says...
...There is no reason why they need to go their separate ways...
...Rather, it would advance all the issues set forth in the declaration adopted at the convention...
...the plight of the poor...
...But we can't punish ourselves for thinking, for God's sake," she says...
...What I'm proposing is a nonelectoral party for working people," he says...
...You become a member by registering to vote...
...Tony Mazzocchi is on to something different, something more difficult, something more radical...
...That's way too late...
...And I don't see how it couldn't hurt the Rainbow...
...You don't need a party to do that...
...First of all, you can't defeat an incumbent...
...I don't know of any political entity dealing with it...
...The point is not so much whether NOW takes the third-party route, but whether it builds a coherent mass base," she says...
...He won three-and-a-half million votes in 1984 and seven million votes in 1988—more than any second-place finisher in history...
...any split between them would have far-reaching and searing consequences...
...My views haven't changed for years, but for the first time, people are saying, we think it's a good idea...
...Robert Kuttner, in his book, The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond, shows how the pursuit of campaign funds corrupts even progressively oriented Democrats...
...They're not going to get anywhere up against granite...
...Hardly anyone took NOW's approach seriously...
...These fundamental demands, coupled with the challenge to the two-party system, were too much for the media and Democratic Party operatives, who belittled, ridiculed, and otherwise trashed the idea as a scatter-brained scheme concocted by a few feminists out of touch with mainstream America...
...They want to be heard...
...Jackson's people are already wary of the NOW idea...
...And members of the nascent American Greens are considering forming an independent party...
...This consciousness, he says, would have two essential elements: "to change the definition of growth from profit maximization to meeting the needs of people consistent with the environment," and "to relocate power away from the elites and the Federal Government and return it to the community level...
...People want a voice...
...The Democratic Party is run by the money people," says Ehrenreich...
...Jackson does have a legitimate claim on women's support, and he is the stan'So long as Jesse Jackson seems committed to the Democratic Party, third-party efforts will split progressives.' —Frances Fox Piven dard-bearer of the Left...
...If Jackson decided to run again in 1992, it would not sit well in the African-American community to have the women's movement not supporting an African-American candidate who has the most progressive position in history on women's issues...
...There is no Democratic Party to capture...
...Too few Democratic elected officials hold on to their progressive values after years in this fund-raising milieu...
...We're not going to be a Heritage Foundation," he says...
...Most polls show him as the front-runner in 1992," says Frank Watkins, a long-time Jackson aide...
...Does Ralph Nader want to run for President...
...The first-level goal should be 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the vote nationally and success at the local level—a victory of leverage to spell the difference between the two parties...
...If NOW or some other third party were to run its own candidate, it could cause tremendous, almost catastrophic, tension within the progressive community...
...The American Greens are not yet a party and barely even a movement...
...Reagan was an outgrowth of this...
...They don't want to fool around with the parties anymore," said Molly Yard, president of NOW...
...it is not going to challenge the major corporations in America...
...I don't think the potential for working within the Democratic Party has been exhausted...
...The Socialist Workers' Party has never received more than 0.1 per cent of the vote...
...The Democratic Party has run from the basic issues that concern progressives: the arms race...
...We're organizing a movement of working people...
...The lesson she draws is simple: "We have nothing to lose," she says...
...In 1988, Lenora Fulani and the New Alliance Party won 217,000 votes...
...We need a party that is clearly identified as a workers' party...
...NOW broached the idea of a third party at its Cincinnati convention in July...
...Molly Yard and NOW's past president Eleanor Smeal were roundly accused of being "silly...
...There's no sense to it...
...the right to be free from violence, including freedom from the threat of nuclear war...
...Jackson has articulated a position that most women would be happy with...
...they understand that politicians in both parties don't speak to their concerns...
...It was not thought of in that way at all...
...They're damn sick of being told by corporations what to do...
...The remedy is historically disproven because of the structure of American politics...
...If Commoner had run in the Democratic primaries, he would have been in every debate on national television, and he might have done well, and he would have been taken seriously...
...They're fed up...
...Barry Commoner, who believes "the Citizens' Party was a stage in the development of the Rainbow Coalition," agrees that progressives need to stand by Jackson, even if Jackson remains committed to running within the Democratic Party...
Vol. 53 • October 1989 • No. 10
