The Movement Democrat (original) (raw)
Free related PDFsRelated papers
Free PDF
Free PDF
Free PDF
Free PDF
Free PDF
Cedric de Leon's interest lies in a reconstruction of the sociology of democratic party politics. Thus, he aims to ‘include the diversity of sociological approaches beyond the Columbia Model’ (p. 157). The starting point of his book is the observation of a paradox: even though political parties are important players in the history of modern politics and stand in a continuum with state and civil society, the literature on parties is ‘ill-equipped to grasp the complexity and dynamism of their subject’ (p. 2). While parties are too often portrayed as an immobile concrete block, dominant approaches in the field are voter-oriented and mostly isolated from those of the party-centred approaches (p. 4). Given this critique, it is interesting that de Leon then follows this criticized distinction with the structure of his book: The first part presents ‘voter-centred approaches’, the second part ‘party-centred approaches’. But first of all, de Leon traces this distinction of party-orientation and voter-orientation back to the 18th century and classic authors of party sociology like Edmund Burke and David Hume (pp. 4–5). He states that the ‘early American experience has numerous implications for us as we prepare to engage the rest of the book’ (p. 10), and that the ‘first debates’ would articulate a key question that is, ‘whether or not parties were a help or hindrance to free society’ (p. 11).
Free PDF
Free PDF
Free PDF
Organized for Democracy? Left Challenges Inside the Democratic Party
Socialist Register
This essay examines the relationship between the left and the Democrats by undertaking a strategic assessment of the challenges facing left political power in the Democratic Party that draws on the mixed results of various challenges the left has presented inside the party historically. That strategic assessment must be based, I argue, on an institutional understanding of the Democratic Party as an organization, requiring the development of more sophisticated analytical tools than those typically employed by scholars on the left. The fundamental point to be drawn from this analysis is that while a robust, well-organized left can conceivably exercise power inside the Democratic Party, that power is unlikely to serve socialist ends of building the collective power of the working class due to the way the party is organized. Past efforts to transform the party organization into a party of different type, culminating in the New Politics movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrate the difficultly of overcoming this problem. Coupled with the unlikelihood of producing the labour-based third party that has eluded the American left for well over a century, the analysis presented here suggests that the American left must rethink which kinds of goals can be accomplished in the realm of party politics and which cannot.
Free PDF
Free PDF
