Comments Elsewhere

Morgaine, I agree with almost every thing that you suggest here about the strategy that Democrats need to adopt if they’re going to get anywhere, and I agree with you that it draws on the better half of the Democratic Party’s tradition. But I’m puzzled by the way that you act as if this better half were the only history that the “mainstream” Democratic Party “leadership” has.

It’s certainly true that the Democratic Party leadership eventually came around to a position that sometimes vaguely resembled justice. But that doesn’t change the record that the Democrats racked up from their foundation right up to about 1965. When you say (emphasis mine): “Democrats always had one thing going for them” and add “It was the party that said you have to let everyone drink from the same water fountain,” it’s puzzling; puzzling because as you well know, almost every single politician who led the campaign of “massive resistance” against integration, and for militant white supremacy in the South, was a Democrat at the time (cf. Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator James Eastland, Senator Richard Russell, Governor Orval Faubus, Governor George Wallace, et al., not to mention the long history of Democratic leaders such as President Woodrow Wilson and all the way back to the chieftains of the slave power in the 19th century). Moreover, these men were not minor players in the national Democratic Party or marginalized by other Democrats. They were the Party leadership in their states, jealously guarded their power in national Party committees and the Democratic Caucus in the federal House and Senate, and in return for it were pampered and catered to by many other Democrats (such as Roosevelt or Kennedy) who did not share their beliefs, but just didn’t give enough of a damn about Black people to risk their electoral prospects on challenging them. (When Democrats wax nostalgic about the “national party” or the “solid South” that used to win them elections, they are waxing nostalgic about the congealed power of Southern white supremacy.)

When folks like the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party said “No more,” and took on the militant segregationists within the Party in 1964, mainstream Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey didn’t get their back; they were apoplectic and did everything they could to marginalize the campaign. The effort to break the back of the Klan Caucus of the Southern Democrats was won at last by oppressed people who were marginalized, disdained, and ignored by the national party leadership, quite against the will of the “mainstream Democrats.”

In a similar vein, I’m also unclear on what the Democratic Party leadership ever did to end the Viet Nam War. I do know that they started it.

If Democrats want to win they have to come out for justice. But when they do so, they will be building something substantially new, not recovering some past glory.