Ten Practical Reasons to Get Out the Vote and Get the Republicans Out

[IndianaGreen]

Ten Practical Reasons to Get Out the Vote and Get the Republicans Out

By Norman Markowitz

There have been several crucial off year elections in U.S. history, and 2006 certainly has the makings of one of the most crucial.

In 1858 for example, the new Republican Party won a decisive victory in the North and gained control of Congress. This was a defeat for the administration of James Buchanan, which had supported slaveholder terrorism in the Kansas territory and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which defended slavery as a system anywhere in the Republic. At a time when there was enormous despair among reformers of all kinds about the increasing strength of the slaveholders and the futility of fighting them through the political system, the 1858 victories helped the anti-slavery coalition elect Abraham Lincoln and fight and win a revolutionary civil war that abolished chattel slavery and greatly strengthened capitalist democracy.

Seventy-two years later, the elections of 1930 signaled that right-wing Republican "cultural politics" – support for prohibition, chauvinistic emphasis on "100 percent Americanism" and support for fundamentalist Protestants in a "culture war" against urban Catholic and Jewish populations – would have a harder time dividing the working class. The election gains set the stage for Franklin Roosevelt's victory in 1932 and the eventual creation of a center-left New Deal coalition, which enacted the most significant program of labor and social legislation in U.S. history. This included Social Security, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, the 40-hour week, the right of workers to form unions under the NLRB, the since-eliminated Aid to Families with Dependant Children, protection of bank accounts, public power under the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) administration depositors under the FDIC and limited forms of public housing.

Off-year elections in the post World War II era have so far played a destructive role for progressive forces in U.S. politics. Corporate financed conservative forces have taken advantage of both the cold war (and its Korean War and Vietnam War manifestations) and failed anti-progressive policies of Democratic presidents. In 1946, the Truman administration's shift to the right and development of early cold war policies led to a sweeping Republican victory, which enabled Republicans to enact the anti-labor Taft-Hartley law and expand the activities of the House Un-American activities committee.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/4355/1/218/