Death of Liberalism

To The Editors of the Crimson:

The "Anti-Reagan" demonstration at Harvard's Memorial Church on 5 November reeked of liberal hypocrisy. Speakers bemoaned Reagan's war-mongering, racism and anti-communism. But would there have been a demonstration if Jimmy Carter had been reelected? Judging by the number of Carter/Mondale buttons and the pro-Democratic Party DSOC members at the rally, it's obvious that a Carter victory would have been hailed as a victory against the "New Right." One speaker even went so far as to claim that the "left" was was destroyed by Reagan's victory. Sorry, but Reagan's victory was the destruction of the Democratic liberal coalition which the anti-Reagan demonstrators hope to resurrect.

The whining refrain, "Where have all the liberals gone," is baloney. They have gone to the White House, to the Khyber Pass, to vote against school integration in Congress, to the Pentagon. It was Carter's bellicose administration that paved the way for Reagan. Under Carter's aphorism of privilege "life is unfair," working people, Blacks and the poor faced grinding inflation and unemployment while the government pushed for war with the Soviet Union, making the U.S. political climate "safe," indeed welcome for Ronald Reagan.,

Trying to "fight against the right" by working within the Democratic Party--the party of "ethnic purity" Carter, anti-busing bigot Louise Day Hicks and Klansman Tom Metzger--is a loser strategy. Reformist organizations like DSOC who hope to pressure the war-makers and strike-breakers in the Democratic Party offer no solution to the racism and economic misery endemic to capitalist rule. The fundamental task of revolutionaries in the United States is to break the ties that bind labor to the capitalist parties and build a party that expresses the independence of the working class.

Spartacist League candidate for San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, Diana Coleman, ran on an explicitly socialist program; the only alternative to the "lesser evil" shell game of bourgeois politics. And the labor movement and minorities in San Francisco enthusiastically responded with over 7000 votes for Coleman. Unlike the liberal despair expressed at the "anti-Reagan" rally at Harvard, the labor movement in San Francisco rallied around Coleman's campaign slogan: "Enough! It's time for a Workers Party!" Barry Kallio