I had three, pretty mixed, reactions to The Long Detour.

First, and maybe most relevant to potential readers, this is an extremely accessible book that covers a huge amount of ground, and about as good a short introduction to the history of American socialism as you're likely to find. It's worth reading, and is also something that can be safely given to undergraduates or others who have not made a lifetime study of the American left, but might benefit from knowing something about our past.

Second, whatever one makes of Weinstein's cramped views on the social movements of the last quarter-century, his emphasis on the importance of developing an effective progressive electoral strategy seems exactly right. Progressives need some platform for their own coordination; they need to show what they can do with government power; and they certainly need to connect with the mass public in ways that are politically meaningful. All these are either facilitated by or require electoral work, in additional to our present, largely non-electoral, organizing and advocacy. And we need to get over thinking of electoral politics as competitive with other organizing. It can be fully complementary, using power within the state to build power outside it.

And building an effective electoral strategy isn't exactly rocket science. We need a positive program for what we propose to do with government--ideally, of five or six items that could be printed on a postcard. We need to repeat that program endlessly. We need to recruit, train and run a vast number of candidates, at all levels of office, to run on it, and support them in office if they win. This is a lot of work, much of it boring, but it can be done. We just don't do it at present on any scale, much less on a movementwide basis. But we should.

I also agree with Weinstein that it's generally impossible to do these things in the United States within the organizational structure of a "third" or minor party. He does miss a very important and instructive exception to this rule--namely, the Working Families Party in New York. But the WFP is able to do what it does because of a peculiarity in New York electoral law, viz. it's allowance of "fusion" between parties on the ballot. That means that minor parties can join major ones in jointly nominating candidates, with votes cast on any nominating party's ballot line counting in those candidates' total. This permits minor party to vote their values--by voting on their own party's line--without wasting their votes or spoiling. It also permits them to build their own candidate stock, by bargaining their support for mainstream candidates on parts of the ticket for major-party support for their own people on other parts.

Fusion was critical to all minor-party efforts in the second half of the nineteenth century. It provided a distinctive answer to the question that in other systems is answered more straightforwardly by proportional representation: namely, how to give meaningful weight to minority electoral sentiment. But fusion also only survives today in a handful of states, and the ban on the practice was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1997 ruling in Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party. Proportional representation is also vestigial here. So Weinstein is basically right that under present law, third parties are a hopeless waste of time, which does indeed recommend that we pursue our electoral ambitions through something like the Nonpartisan League or Christian Coalition.

But third, and much less happily, The Long Detour is very thin on just how any of this work might actually get done, what barriers it faces and why it hasn't happened thus far. Recent history has not been kind to the prediction that Soviet collapse would renew social democracy. It hasn't because social democracy's ills have long owed less to a fear of Communism than to more mundane problems: diminished confidence in the nation-state as an effective agent (owing both to globalization and the prominence of demands not easily met by national government), changing structures of work and corporate organization, the growing imbalance between labor and corporate power, etc. About these, Weinstein has little to say. And he is almost eerily silent on recent left practice directly relevant to his own argument. He doesn't mention the third-party defeat in Timmons, even though it helps seal his argument. But neither does he say anything about recent efforts (predating the current mass efforts against Bush) to build other sorts of left electoral capacity; or the way new productive forces like the Internet are facilitating organizing (the words "Internet," "net," and "web" don't appear anywhere in his index); or changes within organized labor that show promise politically, including the voter mobilization strategies that the Christian Coalition copied, and that he so admires. And so on and so on.

The Long Detour would have been much stronger if it paid more attention to these things. Under different political constraints than in the past, with both success and failure, the American left is making its own history now no less than in the past. It is odd and disappointing that Weinstein, who argues that this particular moment is so ripe with opportunity for the American left, has so little to say about what it is actually doing.

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