This party isn't gonna get any
better
The hopes for rebuilding and
strengthening the left lie outside the Democratic Party.
October 31, 2017
TWO STORIES have gotten
attention in recent weeks as key indicators of what direction each of the major
political parties is heading in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, one
of Donald Trump's leading Republican critics, announced that he wouldn't run
for re-election after it became apparent he wouldn't win a primary challenge
from Kelli
Ward, the rabid xenophobe whose campaign is part of Steve
Bannon's master plan remake the Republican Party in Donald Trump's vile
image.
A few days earlier, Democratic
National Committee (DNC) chair Tom Perez purged a number of Bernie Sanders' key
allies from the organization's leadership posts and its rule committee.
Many of the progressives were replaced
with current
and former lobbyists for big banks and energy corporations. Also appointed
was Donna Brazile, best known most recently for using her job at CNN to leak
debate questions to the Clinton campaign--"an interesting choice for a
committee that focuses on 'rules,'" as
Branko Marcetic noted for In These Times.
Put the two stories together
and what do you have? At a time of growing polarization in which people are
moving toward both ends of the political spectrum, the Republican Party is
moving further to the right while the Democratic Party is...also moving further
to the right.
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BERNIE SANDERS' stunning
success last year as a self-proclaimed socialist running for the Democratic
presidential nomination created justifiable excitement on the left about the
prospects for socialism to finally break out of isolation after many decades in
the American wilderness.
Since then, Sanders'
popularity has only increased. A
recent Harvard-Harris poll has him as the most popular politician in either
party, with especially strong support registering among young people
generally and Blacks and Latinos of all ages.
It isn't hard to see why.
While Sanders is pushing for policies like a single-payer health care system
that would benefit the vast majority of the country, other leading Democrats
have little to offer beyond hoping that the Robert Mueller investigation of the
Trump campaign's ties to Russia will somehow lead to the president's
impeachment.
No wonder many supporters of
the Democrats are getting restless. The
same Harvard-Harris poll shows that 52 percent of Democrats support
"movements within the Democratic Party to take it even further to the left
and oppose the current Democratic leaders."
Even more encouragingly, the
AFL-CIO convention passed a resolution last week calling for labor to form
an "independent political voice" because "the time has passed
when we can passively settle for the lesser of two evils."
These expressions of
frustration with corporate Democrats are important, but they shouldn't give the
left a false sense of confidence that the maneuverings of Perez and the DNC
represent the last gasp of a clueless old guard whose time has passed.
In fact, as the outlook for
the 2018 midterm elections starts to take shape, it's looking more likely that
the party apparatus knows what it's doing in maintaining control than the
progressives who think they're reshaping the party from the inside.
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ALL THIS takes place in the
context of political volatility around the world.
Countries that have failed to
restore living standards to the level before the Great Recession of 2007-08
have seen increasing polarization, creating crises for parties of the
center--and the rise of more radical parties and leaders on both the right and
left.
In the U.S., Trump's victory
in the Republican primaries was both the culmination of a decades-long move to
the right and a dramatic shift in the GOP's internal power dynamics--to the
extent that its traditional corporate power brokers now have to accommodate and
sometimes follow the ideologically hardened nationalism and fascist flirtations
of sections of the party's base.
Jeff Flake's problem in
Arizona wasn't that Kelli Ward and Steve Bannon are wildly popular--Harvard-Harris
puts Bannon's approval rating at 16 percent--but that they increasingly
dominate a party shifting even further to the right.
The Democrats, of course, have
their own polarization to deal with. But unlike their weakened and divided
Republican counterparts, the Democratic leadership has remained united around a
vision of corporate liberalism--with political platforms that read like generic
corporate brochures about the benefits of a diverse workplace and the wonders
of retraining programs when you inevitably get laid off.
This party unity in spite of
the discontent of its base was clear last year when Sanders won 45 percent of
primary voters, but was backed by only 8 percent of the elected officials,
staffers, lobbyists and donors who made up the party's "superdelegates."
Republicans have reflected the
polarization of this period so much more clearly than Democrats in part because
there is much less room for radical left-wing politics inside parties owned by
the 1 Percent than there is room for radical right-wing politics.
The militants inside the
Republican Party have been funded by a constellation of billionaires with
overlapping reactionary agendas, ranging from libertarianism to Christian
theocracy to fascism.
These ideologues may cause
some discomfort among party donors in the boardrooms of ExxonMobil and Morgan
Stanley, but ultimately, all sides can agree on the general principle of
empowering the wealthy and keeping everyone else divided and oppressed.
This doesn't work as a
blueprint for the radical left, which has to be built by large numbers of
working people in the labor movement and grassroots organizations
"speaking with an unquestionably independent political voice," as the
AFL-CIO resolution put it.
Instead, we have the worst of
both worlds: hundreds of unions and civil rights organizations that have been
completely captured by a Democratic Party owned by Silicon Valley, Wall Street
and the Pentagon.
Rather than acting as
"pressure groups" inside the party, this professional left more
closely resembles, as
Jane Hamscher once famously put it in the early days of the Obama
administration, a "veal pen" that forms a left flank to protect
the party from the wrath of their own members.
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OF COURSE, this is precisely
the situation that many progressives are hoping can be changed by the wave of
Sanders supporters fighting from the inside for the soul of the Democratic
Party.
"A striking feature of
the current political moment is that many activists on the Left are flocking to
the Democratic Party, Frances
Fox Piven and Lorraine C. Minnite wrote at In These Times.
"But the Democrats are
not merely gaining voters," they continue. "They are gaining
activists, people who are committing not only to pull the party lever in the voting
booth, but who are determined to rejuvenate and transform the party, beginning
at the local level."
It's easy to see why that
scenario would be attractive to people. But the hard truth is that an
organization which has dominated American politics for as long as the Democrats
doesn't allow itself to be "transformed" without a fight--and there
aren't many indications so far that the party's left is up for even the kind of
battle that would change its current rightward direction, much less really
transform the Democrats.
The response of the Sanders
wing to the DNC purge, for example, was anything but threatening.
"I'm concerned about the
optics, and I'm concerned about the impact," complained
James Zogby, one of the purged DNC executive committee members.
""I want to heal the wound of 2016." Zogby voiced
similar sentiments on Twitter: "This doesn't bring the party together,
it deepens the divide at a time we need all hands on deck."
Not exactly a Bannon-like
threat to go to war against the party hacks who sold their souls to corporate
interests.
Zogby's comments reflect the
larger timidity of the party's left wing to wage any kind of fight that will
threaten organizational unity in upcoming elections. Unlike Bannon and the Tea
Party before him, Sanders
Democrats aren't planning to wage primary challenges against centrist House
and Senate incumbents in 2018.
The fear of continued
Republican rule in Congress in the Trump era is understandable. But as long as
that fear continues to be the primary architect of liberal strategy, Democrats
will continue moving rightward, assuming its base will follow.
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THE IDEA that progressives
have no choice but to work inside the Democratic Party in order to stop Trump
and Bannon rests on the assumption that there's nothing we can do to stop the
Republicans outside the halls of Congress.
This might be the biggest
problem with the electoral focus of the left: It's taking attention away from
the sources of our greatest power.
One professional football
player started a protest last year that has revived
a discussion of racist police murders and inspired hundreds of other players
to engage in workplace protests in defiance of their employer and the president
of the United States.
Hundreds of thousands of women
have come forward with their stories of sexual abuse, which has not only
dramatically changed awareness of the issue, but led to the investigation,
suspension and termination of dozens
of powerful executives.
These actions offer a glimpse
of the social power just of uncoordinated individuals. Imagine how powerful
those protests could be if civil rights groups called for millions of us to
kneel outside district attorney's offices until cops were arrested for killing
Black and Brown people. Or if unions organized a campaign to identify and fire
the thousands of managers guilty of sexual harassment every day.
Yes, it's possible for the
left to do protests and electoral work at the same time. But they'll only be
effective if they flow from a unified strategy, based on an understanding that
our greatest power lies outside of a rigged political system.
The fight to get Congress to
pass a "clean" DREAM Act, for example, would be greatly strengthened
if it was based less on appeals to Democrats and Republicans to do the right
thing, and more on the credible threat that there will be widespread and
sustained upheaval on many campuses and in workplaces and communities if
800,000 DACA recipients lose their legal status on March 1.
Similarly, we should be clear
that the growing support for single-payer health care will only have a chance
at becoming law when we've built a powerful movement including patients and
health care workers together.
We're, of course, nowhere near
that level of struggle. By contrast, engaging in electoral work inside the
Democratic Party, particularly at the local level, feels more productive to
many progressives at the moment. It's the path of least resistance--but people
should ask themselves why that is.
The current popularity of
Bernie Sanders and progressive politics shows that for the first time in
decades, it's possible to see a future U.S. with a genuine left-wing party,
which could have a transformative impact not only here, but around the world.
But that project has to be
rooted among people committed to building that alternative not on the
Democrats' terms, but on the explosive potential of popular struggle.
Otherwise there’s a very real
danger that we will lose a new radical generation to the doomed project of
“reshaping” the Democratic Party in much the same way that bunny rabbits
reshape a python after they walk through its open jaws: briefly.
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