Dear Cindy,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my first open letter to you (see URL) about the necessity of breaking with the Democratic Party. You didn’t mention whether you wanted your reply made public so I’ve decided to quote the key point with which I disagree rather than just repeat the whole letter.

I hope you don’t mind me publicly noting that, on one hand, you “...agree with my letter 100%” yet you later state that you “...think we need to support their feeble attempts. they have a strong and large organization that has lots of power...moving them to the left can only be good, and if they fail, there is nothing lost, because they are centrists at the best”.

Some history: The Democratic Party (DP) has always been and will always be a capitalist and imperialist party. The Great Depression threw millions of people into intense, miltant struggle against the rich. The reforms implemented by the New Deal, by satisfying some of the peoples’ immediate needs, averted revolution and recast the DP under FDR as the party of labor and minorities. Of late, this facade has been wearing quite thin, especially because of the Democratically-controlled Congress’ support of the atrocity that is the war in Iraq. Honest, democratically-minded (little “d”) people are right now defecting from the DP in huge numbers and are trying to figure out how to assert their political will. THIS IS A GOOD THING AND NEEDS TO BE ENCOURAGED. However, the only way your remarks could possibly be interpretted is that people should stick around since maybe the DP will develop a better facade to fool the people.

I know that this is not how you feel because you have made it clear many times that you are for the growth of the mass movement and for people asserting their will in the streets. As a leader of the anti-war movement, you are in a position to play an enormous role in helping people overcome their illusions that the DP and the American political system, which are irrevocably tied to the interests of the corporations and the rich. The longer you fail to resolve this contradiction in your thinking, the more you hold the movement back. I’m sorry to state this so harshly but there are clearly many lives at stake.

Thanks very much for taking the time to hear my views. I’m quite interested in what you think of them.

--Ira Jones, Seattle (irajon (at) gmail.com)