Jack McMillin’s anti-third party column argues that voters cannot be entrusted with choice on the ballot because Democrats will lose. To illustrate, he argues that Democrats lost the 2000 election not because Al Gore ran a cowardly, rightwing campaign, not because Gore himself handed the election to Bush rather than putting up a fight, not because thousands of Florida voters were illegally stricken from the voter rolls, and not because the Supreme Court stopped the counting of ballots and installed Bush as president, but because foolish voters had been given more than two choices. In point of fact Gore won the election. Democrats like McMillin don’t care to remember that “inconveniet truth” because it would involve confronting Bush and the right, and they haven’t the intestinal fortitude. Much less troublesome to bait the Greens and despise the electorate.

McMillin asks us to suspend our disbelief again by arguing that the Democratic Party would have averted the war in Iraq. Yet Democrats authorized Bush to make war and have signed off, without dissent, on its continuation to this day, squandering hundreds of billions in the process. Leading Democrats are every bit as culpable as the Bush administration in a war crime of world-historical proportions – the launching of a war of aggression that has killed 650,000 Iraqis and killed and wounded thousands of American youth. Workers and students need to renounce all illusions that the Democratic Party offers an alternative to war and social reaction – or that the political establishment can be pressured from the left, as the Greens and other radicals advocate – and build up their own party. It is for this reason that the Socialist Equality Party and Joe Parnarauskis are standing in this election.

Tom Mackaman

Students for Social Equality

Graduate Student