An esteemed colleague, My Way of Thinking, has blogged reasons why, in his view, the Left should not support John Kerry. Oh God, are we on to this again? It’s a trope that some people on the left always argue that we should stand aside and let the latest bunch of bastards do as they like because the alternative isn’t left wing enough, or worse, that letting things get worse will lead us to a “revolutionary situation”. This is at best silly and at worse an attempt to deliberately force the people we claim to represent to suffer for our own ambitions.
Personal note: I recall meeting the Austrian writer Robert Menasse during a demonstration outside the Austrian Federal Chancellery in 2002. He announced that the FPO should be tolerated because this would force the Socialists to be better. I told him this was like cutting off your fingers to have stronger hands. Only kater did I learn that the German anarchist poet, Erich Mühsam, had written much the same about Hitler – before he was thrown in Dachau.