Tag: Lance Selfa

Original article, by Lance Selfa and subtitled “The Republican Party is hoping its screeds against “big government” will catch fire as patience with Obama’s attempts to fix the crisis runs out. But that strategy may not work out the way the GOP hopes,” via Socialist Worker (US):

PERHAPS ALL we need to know about modern conservatism and its party, the Republicans, was captured in Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s nationally televised response to President Barack Obama’s February 24 address to a joint session of Congress.

Original article, an exceprt from Lance Selfa’s new book The Democrats: A Critical History via socialistworker.org:

After eight long years of George W. Bush, millions of people are counting the days to the inauguration of a Democratic president. But would a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Congress deliver on the promise of change that so many people want to see?

Lance Selfa is a SocialistWorker.org columnist and editorial board member of the International Socialist Review. His new book, The Democrats: A Critical History, documents how, time after time, the party that claims to represent ordinary people has betrayed their aspirations of ordinary people while pursuing an agenda favorable to big business.

In this excerpt from the book, Lance examines the era when Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party cemented its alliance with organized labor–with unions as the junior partner.

The Democratic Party and the Politics of Lesser Evilism, and International Socialist Organization web book, via internationalsocialist.org:

This book traces the history of the Democratic Party as a party of Southern slaveholders, a party of big business, and as a party playing on populist themes in order to win the votes of workers and the oppressed. He also looks at the party’s latest, neoliberal incarnation under Clinton and the “new Democrats.” As Selfa shows, the party has always played the role of coopter of any left alternative outside the limited framework of the two-party system. Selfa argues convincingly that the current “Anybody But Bush” mantra that has gripped many on the left has once again set back the struggle to organize a genuine independent left political alternative in the United States.