Labor Party in the USA
Many in the newly reborn American socialist movement fervently hope that someday, in the face of numerous structural barriers, they can get a viable new party off the ground. But unfortunately, we can expect unions to be among the last to get on board with such a party.
Suffrage Procession, Wash[ington] D.C., May 9, 1914. Library of Congress
The most beloved Canadian of all time is not Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, or another hockey star. It’s not Pierre Trudeau, John Macdonald, or any of the country’s prime ministers. It’s Tommy Douglas, Saskatchewan’s socialist premier who led the fight for Medicare in Canada. For decades he was a leading figure of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP). These parties have served as the Canadian labor movement’s independent political arm since the 1940s.
Douglas gave his famous “Mouseland” speech to a CCF party conference in 1944. It’s a funny and poignant political parable that lays out in popular terms why working people need their own party. In Douglas’s telling, Mouseland was a world of hardworking and civic-minded mice who, every four years, marched to the ballot box to elect a government of black cats. The cats did their job and passed good laws — but good laws for cats, not mice.
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