Kerry Polling Lead: Electoral College Nightmare - Page 2

PIVEN: They aren't the same thing. It's true that the Democratic Party was the closer of the two parties to the civil rights movement, and to the women's movement, and to the labor movement. But the party was the reluctant target of those movements, not their point of origin. In 1933 the Democrats were regenerated by the labor movement, but that movement had been too weakened by the Depression to emerge during the 1932 campaign. Once in power, though, FDR and the Democrats in Congress were sufficiently alert to those working-class votes to include the right to organize in the first national Industrial Recovery Act. Although this right to organize was puff, and there was no enforcement, it communicated to workers the good news that someday soon they might get a real right to organize. It gave what had been a very weak labor movement a real jolt, and, as that labor movement grew, it then put pressure on FDR for further legislation.


FONER: Also, when Roosevelt came into office in '32--and obviously, anybody could have won for the Democrats in '32--there was a whole set of ideas about economic policy available to him that had been developed over the previous quarter of a century. Again, politics followed what was happening in society.


NADER: Today, though, the outside groups supporting the Democratic Party don't have any leverage at all. Groups like the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, are so desperate for Kerry to win that they are making no demands on him.


FONER: Clearly that's a big mistake. But for the foreseeable future, the Democratic Party is going to be the organization that the elements of any kind of progressive coalition will identify with politically. Whatever the desire of black voters for an alternative, they're going to keep voting Democratic. The same is true of labor--small as it is nowadays, but still important--and of the women's movement. Given the nature of our political system, it seems highly unlikely that we can re-create the circumstances of the 1850s, when one of the two major parties disappeared altogether and a new one took its place. That's the last time that such a thing happened in American history. It seems to me that progressives should be fighting for their position in the Democratic Party, because for better or worse, we're going to be stuck with it.