How to save the human species by re-inventing politics in the USA

American Progressives--it's time for a third political party in the USA.

The Republican party is falling apart, and the Democrats are drowning in their own bullshit and corruption.

The USA has numerous small and ineffective leftist organizations. Many of these organizations are taking donations from ordinary working people. 

This is getting us NOWHERE. We need ONE effective leftist organization: a new Left international.

In the meantime, all small donations from individuals should be going to the same leftist organization. As it stands today, American working progressives are trying to fill a bucket which has too many holes!

This new overarching leftist organization should have the kind of influence on Congress that lobbyists for corporations have today. If corporations can do it, leftists can do it too. And if hackers anywhere want to influence elections, they need to assist American progressives, instead of populist scumbags!

If we rely only on democratic procedures (Bernie Sander's plan), progressives will continue to lose--in the long run--to corporate Democrats and populist Republicans.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/10/28/slavoj-zizek/democracy-is-the-enemy/

Why are democratic procedures inadequate to initiate the change that is needed? Slavoj says it best:

We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to people's control.

Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera.

Unless this is understood—no matter how radical our anti-capitalism—the solution sought will involve applying democratic mechanisms (which, of course, can have a positive role to play).

But these mechanisms—one should never forget—are themselves part of the apparatus of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction.

In this precise sense, Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy."

It is the "democratic illusion" the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Left#2000_to_present

[...]

2000 to present [edit]

Further information: Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, 2016; Black Lives Matter; Occupy movement in the United States; and Protests against Donald Trump

Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who runs as an independent,[66] won his first election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981 and was re-elected for three additional terms. He then represented Vermont in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1991 until 2007, and was subsequently elected U.S. Senator for Vermont in 2007, a position which he still holds.[67][68][69] He lost the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton but won the fifth highest number of primary votes of any candidate in a nomination race, Democratic or Republican.[70]

In the 2000 presidential election, Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke received 2,882,000 votes or 2.74% of the popular vote on the Green Party ticket.[71][72]

Filmmaker Michael Moore directed a series of popular movies examining the United States and its government policy from a left perspective, including Bowling for Columbine, Sicko, Capitalism: A Love Story and Fahrenheit 9/11, which was the top grossing documentary film of all time.[73]

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protests demanding accountability for the financial crisis of 2007 and against inequality started in Manhattan, New York and soon spread to other cities around the country, becoming known more broadly as the Occupy Movement.[74]

Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council as an openly socialist candidate in 2013.[75][76][77]

Explanations for weakness [edit]

Academic scholars have long studied the reasons why no viable socialist parties have emerged in the United States.[78] Some writers ascribe this to the failures of socialist organization and leadership, some to the incompatibility of socialism and American values, and others to the limitations imposed by the American Constitution.
[79] 

Lenin and Trotsky were particularly concerned because it challenged core Marxist beliefs, that the most advanced industrial country would provide a model for the future of less developed nations. If socialism represented the future, then it should be strongest in the United States.[80]

Although Working Men's Parties were founded in the 1820s and 1830s in the United States, they advocated equality of opportunity, universal education and improved working conditions, not socialism, collective ownership or equality of outcome, and disappeared after their goals were taken up by Jacksonian democracy. Gompers, the leader of the AFL thought that workers must rely on themselves because any rights provided by government could be revoked.[81] 

Economic unrest in the 1890s was represented by populism. Although it used anti-capitalist rhetoric, it represented the views of small farmers who wanted to protect their own private property, not a call for collectivism, socialism, or communism.[82] Progressives in the early 20th century criticized the way capitalism had developed but were essentially middle class and reformist. However both populism and progressivism steered some people to left-wing politics. 

Many popular writers of the progressive period were in fact left-wing.[83] But even the New Left relied on radical democratic traditions rather than left-wing ideology.[84]

Engels thought that the lack of a feudal past was the reason for the American working class holding middle-class values. 

Writing at a time when American industry was developing quickly towards the mass-production system known as Fordism, Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci saw individualism and laissez-faire liberalism as core shared American beliefs. According to the historian David DeLeon, American radicalism, unlike social democracy, Fabianism, and communism, was rooted in libertarianism and syndicalism and opposed to centralized power and collectivism.[85]

The character of the American political system, which is hostile toward third parties has also been presented as a reason for the absence of a strong socialist party in the United States.[86]

Political repression has also contributed to the weakness of the left in the United States. Many cities had red squads to monitor and disrupt leftist groups in response to labor unrest such as the Haymarket Riot.[87] 

During World War II, the Smith Act made membership in revolutionary groups illegal. After the war, Senator Joseph McCarthy used the Smith Act to launch a crusade to purge communists from government and the media. 

In the 1960s the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program monitored, infiltrated, disrupted and discredited radical groups in the U.S.[88] 

In 2008, Maryland police were revealed to have added the names and personal information of death penalty opponents and anti-war protesters to a database which was intended to be used for tracking terrorists.[89]

[...]

But for the real true explanation of the weakness of the American left, refer again to Slavoj’s remarks:

We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to people's control.

Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera.

Unless this is understood—no matter how radical our anti-capitalism—the solution sought will involve applying democratic mechanisms (which, of course, can have a positive role to play).

But these mechanisms—one should never forget—are themselves part of the apparatus of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction.

In this precise sense, Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy."

It is the "democratic illusion" the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations.