I wrote this for the PEN-L list, but it seems to fit thc current thread on the election. Carrol enilsson@csusb.edu wrote: > But the bottom line is who do you want--Bush or Gore--appointing > people to, say, the National Labor Relations Board? If enough progressives think like this, by (say) 2012 the bottom line will be do you want someone like Buchanan or someone like Gerald R. K. Smith appointing the NLRB? By 2030 it will be do you want someone like Mussolini or someone like Pinochet appointing the NLRB? Labor, women, blacks, gays, people in general are going to have to work out ways to defend themselves with enemies controlling the federal government. The train of lesser evils began in 1936 when the CPUSA supported Roosevelt. Each election after the election of 1934 the government has ended up in more conservative hands. And even under Roosevelt, the main gains came not because Roosevelt "gave" them but because popular movements (EPIC, CIO, Bonus Marchers, the growth in the CPUSA, the existence of the USSR, etc.) moved at least parts of the ruling class to be less rigid in their opposition. The politician most responsible for the Civil Rights legislation in the '60s, Everet Dirksen, was at least as conservative as Bush. Roosevelt, without pressure from outside the electoral system, would have stuck to his campaign pledges of 1932. He did try to talk Governor Murphy of Michigan into breaking the sitdown strikes with the National Guard. And the Unconditional Surrender policy was his. We would have been better off probably with Dewey in '44. We were lucky in 1968. Had Humphrey been elected we might still have troops in Vietnam, and would never have gotten the environmental and safety legislation that we got from Nixon. Carrol
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