Is it smart to vote for a left 3rd party? -- in 1984, a group did and enabled the whole nation to be yanked rightward

You have a Democratic senator who introduces a bill to curb multiculturalism in public schools. He then introduces a U.S. Constitutional amendment to make English the nation’s official language.

And to boil your blood even more, he votes for aiding the Contras (after previous “no” votes) in their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

And Walter Huddleston is the Democrat. That was his record in 1984. Pretty hardball against then left, wouldn’t you agree?

So when he ran for re-election in November 1984, the Louisville-centered left in Kentucky wasn't going to let Huddleston's rightest sins go un punished.

They had the perfect opportunity that fall to send a message to the Democratic Party that it would lose progressive votes if its politicians went that far to the right.

For the previous eight years, the Socialist Workers Party, a left wing Trotskyist party had been operating a Louisville chapter. The national SWP had been formed in the 1930s when pro-Leon Trotsky Communists walked out of the United States’ Communist Party because of that party’s strict alliance with Stalin.

Though the left in Louisville in the 1980s was eclectic and civil-liberties oriented, giving it little natural affinity with Leninism or Trotskyism, the Socialist Workers Party’s decision to field party member Dave Welters of Louisville as a candidate in the 1984 U.S. Senate race made the perfect way to display progressives’ anger with Democrat Huddleston.

So the Welters Walkout was on!

Progressive groups got the word around rapidly: we’re voting for Dave Welters the socialist this year, not Walter Huddleston the oh-so establishment Democrat.

We’ll show the Democratic Party not to harbor anti-multiculturalism and hostility to non-English speakers!

Well, support for the Socialist Workers candidate certainly stopped in its tracks Walter Huddleston’s constitutional amendment making English the official language. Trouble is, that amendment wasn’t going anywhere - with Huddleston in the Senate or not. Neither was his attempt to cut multicultural education.

But the Welters Walkout did stop a lot that was moving forward -- like campaign finance reform and a congress free of PAC money. And an independent judiciary. And a Republican Party whose members were free to vote their conscience, even if that meant voting for a Democrat President’s health care programs and Supreme Court nominees, as Kentucky Republican Senators Marlow Cook and John Sherman Cooper had.

No more. You see Huddleston lost that 1984 race to the obscure Executive of the county government of Louisville. He lost by 5,269 votes. The progressives who ordinarily would have voted Democrat (and who still have reason to wish they had in 1984) cast 7,696 votes for Dave Welters.

Numbers don't lie -- the radical left made Senator McConnell

And that obscure county government Executive who was made a Senator that night via the Welters Walkout was Mitch McConnell. So, to do battle with a dead-on-arrival and therefore harmless English language amendment, we permanently empowered a corporate money-run Congress, right wing court packing, regular and unapologetic shut downs of government, and massive negative campaign ads which ignore issues while falsely demonizing opponents, a TV method McConnell pioneered in that ‘84 race. The race he would have lost without the Walters Walkout.

Choose your battles carefully, American progressives.

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Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, where he has sought to vote for the most progressive outcome possible, not necessarily for the most progressive party.