Pseudo-Problems In Politics: What Color is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas’ Parachute?

Concerning the rich tapestry that is North American political life, very little attention is paid by Canadians and Americans to the political culture of Mexico (supposed by many to have come into existence rather recently). In particular, American leftists disenchanted with either the Democrats or electoral politics in general pay very little attention to the extremely lively Mexican left outside the “photogenic” Zapatistas. This is unfortunate, because the primary party of the Mexican left is an organization which could teach those well-meaning residents of a “developed country” a thing or two about political life. I refer to the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), founded by a faction of the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) which split off in 1988 as a protest against new levels of corruption in the PRI’s one-party rule.

The creation of the PRD predated the rise of serious competition in Mexican presidential politics, but it did not predate the rise of competition in Mexican politics; and reflecting briefly on the party’s leader, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, before going on to consider the PRD as a whole (a step rarely taken in American media, although Cardenas is known of by the smart-set). Cardenas is the son of general and maximalist leader Lorenzo Cardenas, who ruled Mexico during the 1940s to general acclaim; and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was a fairly standard PRI functionary for many years (that is, no radical within the country when he was there, but firmly “non-aligned” on questions of world politics). Furthermore, although Cardenas failed at the polls every time he ran for president during the 90s he was elected mayor of Mexico City, the first non-PRI candidate to hold a major post since the Mexican Revolution, and kept this post — a major spur to the development of the PRD.

Now, Mexican politics, like much of Mexican life for the better-off, is supposed to be a crapshoot of violence, kidnapping and charges brought by friends of the people. And since we were once accustomed to leaders going into exile, we might ask as a preliminary consideration with Cardenas: “What is his parachute? If one-party rule were to be forcibly reestablished, here would he go? What would he do?” But I mention this in the spirit of Rudolf Carnap’s idea of “pseudo-problems in philosophy”, and to cash this out for readers the answer is that he is widely admired by Mexican emigres, and those of the better sort, but this is irrelevant because the PRD – usually represented as “center-left” — are not scarlet ladies. Although the majority of party members are ex-PRI, the party absorbed the numerous Mexican Communist Party after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Does this faction constitute the left wing of the party? No? Well, if you think that describing your organization as “la opposicion de la izquierda” is more or less meaningless in today’s world, you may be missing something. The PRD is the only member of the Socialist International to have to clarify their position as being in the left wing of the organization (which on the whole is fond of roses but ambivalent about bread); the PRI joined as a “consultative” member when the PRD started up. As a result, the PRD is the only extant, currently viable electoral party in the world to conduct political critique in the spirit of the “Second-And-A-Half” International, and if Zapatista sympathizers (who also are numerous in the industrially developed parts of Mexico) think there is not much to this they should read up on the Zimmerwald Left and look at the PRD 2003 election results (doubling their congressional representation). Granted, the PRD has a yellow logo with a sun on it – decidedly funkier than the SPD’s “Erneuerung hat bei uns Tradition”, but also possibly funkier than the Green idea of Europa in guter Verfassung and certainly funkier than Dangerous Rumours.

But what do you want? And the secret of the PRD is that for Mexicans in general the answer is “not Cardenas”. Frankly, he is unelectable: although his father is fondly remembered for being big, bad, and yet somehow not managing to make boatloads of money along the way, Cardenas is an old man in a young country and a center-right figure in a party which, if it does not truly support the Zapatistas, is genuinely learning from them. But the secret of much of world politics is that this is often irrelevant, as it rather clearly is in the case of the PRD: making a good showing (definition open) in executive elections is good enough for the purposes of party-building. And if anti-militaristic leftists are not quite ready for Wesleymania , and liberals sense that Clark is not quite read for a real world which is none too real but world enough, perhaps some “non-constructive” dialogues should be occuring on the “American” left instead of “poorly-informed” Bush-bashing.