We have a party. Right under our noses. It's the Justice Dems, aka AOC and 'the squad' in the House and Bernie and a handful of his friends in the Senate. 'The Democrats' are not unitary, but a tent over conflicting blocs. The one named above is ours. Now build it on all levels until it reachs, say, 150 or more in the House. Then the Dem tent faces a transformative crisis. We don't exactly know the outcome yet, but our party might emerge as a new First Party, as the GOP did in 860. Call it our 'Way of the Whigs' tactic. It's the only one that ever worked under our reactionary electoral system. It has only one saving grace. The ballot line doesn't belong to parties and their money people. It belongs to the state. And any group, like the Justice Dems, can use it if they meet the start requirements.
I agree. They have a solid base in the workers of color in their districts, and some reach in Nurse United, the CWA and SEIU. Ironically Manchin challenged AOC to come to W VA and repeat her arguments. She replied 'Great. Time and place?' He backed down. AOC uses the term 'working class' over middle class' more than anyone in Congress, save perhaps Bernie. We have a hard road, full of twists and turns, but git'er done.
As a civil rights activist in my town of Ft Wayne, IN often says, " People need to get their noses out of Facebook and into real books."-- and I would add, "history books". The wealthy have been running things, including the 2 major political parties from the get-go. The way you fight them is by getting involved and fighting them for control of the existing Democratic Party. People like the great Walter Reuther understood that-- and look what he accomplished for working people-- by helping to create and then working with FDR and his Democratic coalition to build the new deal. What is missing today is people willing to work hard and sacrifice for what they believe in. If you think syphoning off volunteers & voters into yet another failed 3rd party effort will beat the wealthy-- then let me tell you about the "Green Party", who thought creating their new party would bring about a new "environmentally friendly" America....right. All they have done is make it easier for corporate America to implement their agenda-- by weaking the fragile coalition of volunteers & voters we need to "fight the right".
I hear you Randy. But I think the Dems need to feel a credible threat. The effort I'm suggesting doesn't do anything until it has a million supporters. That's more than the Green Party could amass. Reuther was able to influence the Democratic Party because labor unions at the time represented more than 30 percent of all private sector workers. Today it's only 6 percent of the private sector. So the math has drastically changed. I wish hard work along could turn it around but we also have to evaluate strategy. Trump winning twice was no accident. Something in Democratic Party politics went wrong.
Thanks for your comments and this is the discussion we should be having.
Yes, yes, YES! A third party makes the most sense when the 2 parties that have dominated are both beholden to money over people. What we need is a party that actually represents the working class, and promotes the needs of millions of Americans that have been ignored by both parties for so long. But there are already many parties out there that represent the working class. From my point of view the real work that needs to be done is to form a viable third party, made up of all the progressive factions, eg the Justice Dems, the Progressive Dems and the Working People's Party, to realize common ground and resist the barriers of allegiance to one party. A third party capable of overcoming the dominance of the two big parties will never happen until all the factions representing the working class come together.
I agree. The problem with capitalist party politics is that, so long as it takes billions of dollars to run for office, candidates must inevitably reach out for capitalist support. No one else has the money. The system was deliberately designed to make it so expensive to run that candidates would inevitably have to go hat in hand to the rich to obtain the funds to campaign. That's how a party like the GOP which historically represented a small proportion of the population, could win a majority of votes. But we live in a two-class system and the rich-- the employers, the capitalists, the bankers and so on -- have different interests than workers. The result is that virtually all politicians must become hypocrites: they need to talk one way to the workers -- support popular progressive policies like national health care, unions, environmental concerns to win the most votes, but they take a different line when they get elected because their paymasters, their bosses, the capitalists who fund their campaigns, oppose unions, social programs, pollution mitigation, and so on. That's why there's always such a huge discrepancies between what politicians promise and what they deliver. People are forever saying "Wait, I didn't vote for that." Just look at Trump. Who voted to make Ukraine our enemy and Putin our ally? Who voted to fire thousands of Air Traffic Controllers, park rangers, etc.?
The only way out of this dilemma is, ultimately, to abolish Citizens United and establish publicly funded and only publicly funded elections (like in much of Europe). Short of that, Bernie Sanders showed that with the power of social media, a candidate like him could actually raise enough money to get elected by soliciting small donations from ordinary people. His allies in the (poorly named IMHO) "squad" have imitated that strategy and it has worked for some. But others, like Cori Bush, have been defeated by massive spending, hundreds of millions, by the GOP wealthy and PACS to defeat perceived leftists.
"Our" third party could utilize Sander's $27 funding strategy, but it should apologize to the electorate, saying that we should not have to do this: Campaigns should be funded exclusively by the government and they should not be costly at all. In Europe, governments give ree air time for public debates to all qualified candidates, they abolish private TV ads, and they limit campaign time frames to 2 months (in France for example).
That way, candidates need not be hypocrites, they can speak for their constituents and don't have to constantly be raising money for the next campaign, the day after they get elected, as in the U.S.
Of course it seems so wrong that money dominates our election processes. But that is the way it is. Though I wonder if the effect of having oligarchs run the country, slashing all of the benefit programs, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers all over the country, hugely impacting red states, might open the prospect of elections not entirely dominated by the money spent on them.
Carl, IMHO the Democratic Party (DP) is in terminal decline and Justice Dems are part of the problem not the solution. As we know, the DP was never a real working class party, never a party exclusively founded or based on labor and labor unions like the Labor Party of UK. But in the 1930s, powerful movements of workers, massive trade union organizing campaigns, sit-ins, factory occupations, general strikes -- and looming in the background, the wave of socialist revolutions in Europe and Asia -- pushed the FDR admin to enact radical historically transformative legislation favoring the working class at the expense of capital: establishing a social safety net: social security, unemployment insurance, legalized trade unions, WPA and other federal jobs programs, government regulatory agencies, and more (On all this see the Living New Deal, livingnewdeal.org). America's workers thanked him with three consecutive landslide elections and three terms in office.
From the thirties through the sixties, voters looked to the DP to provide social security, safety net for the poor, aged, the sick, to protect their health and safety. Under Johnson, extensive civil rights were enacted and the EPA founded in 1970. Medicare, Medicaid, the Clean Air bill, EPA were the high water mark of working class gains secured by the end of the 1960s. The capitalists hated all that, regarded the hugely popular FDR as a “class traitor,” (See H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class, 2008), and they've sought ever since to roll back those historic gains for the working class, for humanity, and for the environment.
It's been mostly downhill for the DP since the late 1960s. The employers offensive beginning in the 1970s broke unions, sending northern jobs south to non-union states. Then came Reagan who crushed the Air Controllers' Union. Then Clinton's NAFTA Since then it’s been down hill for the DP since the 1970s.Republican gains, bid to win the class war: tried, with some success. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. Reagan broke Air Controllers union. As weakened unions proved unable to defend workers and counter the offshoring of their jobs to Mexico and China, workers drifted away from the DP and the DP leadership rebased itself on the middle and upper classes, mirroring the GOP. Even though workers constitute the vast majority of voters, since 1968, Republicans -- the quintessential ruling class party -- have won 9 of the last 14 presidential elections. Now with Trump, they are bidding to win the class war. Bush II tried to privatize Social Security. With Trump, they hope to crush the social safety net, Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights legislation, Black, Hispanic, and feminist gains, destroy public education, return America to the pre-WWI Gilded Age of unchallenged capitalist baronial class domination under “King” Donald Trump.
Right now "socialist" Bernie Sanders is touring Republican states attacking the "oligarchy" -- the billionaires -- but not capitalism, never capitalism per se. Lots of GOP voters are turning out to hear him. But what's his message? It's "resist" and vote for the Democrats. Vote for the same party that has sold out workers since the 1970s and wholesale since the 1990s when Clinton's "New Democrats" openly abandoned the working class to rebase themselves on the educated middle classes and the same upper-class capitalist plutocrats Sanders is attacking today. Bill Clinton sold out the working class with his NAFTA WE HAFTA and his CHINA SHOCK (he lobbied hard to get China into the WTO and he succeeded. In result the US lost some 7 million industrial jobs and the more and more workers left the party that sold them out to vote Republican. HRC proposed to send more jobs to Asia with her Trans-Pacific pact. When she deservedly lost, Trump pulled out of on Day 1 of his first administration. Harebrained Harris wasted her campaign sucking up to Tech billionaires and refusing to walk any picket lines, indeed, mostly refused to even mention the word "workers."
What Sanders and the Justice Democrats don't get is that Trump and his voters were absolutely right to attack US companies that sent their jobs to Mexico and China.
Trump was also right about Biden's open borders that let some 10 million migrants in without papers. Americans are not ungenerous people. On the whole they support immigration -- but legal immigration, not Biden's open-borders free-for-all flooding border cities with immigrants from all over the world, many put up in nice hotels while homelessness is surging and, according to Bernie, 70% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Polls show that 68% of Americans say immigration is good for the country, a majority want it increased. 72% believe immigrants come to the U.S. “to find jobs and improve their lives” not to live on welfare, and 53% say immigration “is a human right.” 55% support a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants (Gallup, July 13, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/508520/americans-value-immigration-concerns.aspx).
Trump was also right that as the DP abandoned the working class, it fell down the rabbit hole of identity politics babbling neologisms like BIPOC, L.G.B.T.Q.I.+, A.A.P.I., TERFS etc., and concocting nonsensical words like "they/them," cisgender, intersex, "birthing people," "people with cervixes," "persons with vaginas" etc. that no normal person understands -- and turned into a party of scolds. AOC is particularly big on this. Biden's admin privileged trans people over women and feminism: promoting male "trans women" competing in women's sports against actual women (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/us/transgender-athletes-title-ix-biden-adminstration.html) like trans swimmer "Lia" Thomas (who, born Will Thomas, maintains that “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team." Yet, as "Lia" parades around naked displaying his penises and testicles in women's locker rooms, trans extremists and PC Democrats like Biden, Harris, and AOC dismissed women's complaints about this as "anti-trans" prejudice (https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/07/21/upenns-nomination-of-lia-thomas-as-ncaa-woman-of-year-is-insult-to-real-women/). Feminist women are right on this issue, the DP "progressives" were crazy wrong, and that's an important reason why many women voted for Trump. When Trumpets said "Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you", many ordinary working people said that this was "common sense." But not the DP. So that left the field open for the grievance-driven Trump to support the grievances of workers, women, blacks and hispanics against the DP.
The DP's refusal to support pro-working class politics going back to Clinton's sellouts, it's wide-open borders immigration policies, its PC fetish and arrogant scolding of the electorate, calling Trump's supporters "deplorables,"fascists, racists and so on (recall Obama's scolding Black men for not supporting a black woman, regardless of how awful her politics were) cost the party the election. And yet, for all evidence of all these disasters, the DP has learned nothing. It refuses to concede that it has been massively wrong on its politics going back to the Clinton years, and it refuses to change. Two days ago, DP grandee James Carville said "we don't need to change anything," just "roll over and play dead’ and Trump's terrible policies will bring the voters back to us." (https://www.yahoo.com/news/james-carville-tells-dems-best-152840312.html). Good luck on that.
Today the Democrats are lost, floundering and can't come up with a response to Trump. They can't because, today, with no working class base, they're based on the same social classes as the GOP and Trump: the upper middle classes, the rich, the capitalist billionaires, the Wall Street bankers. So long as they depend on their money to fund their exorbitant campaigns, he who pays the piper calls the tune. That's why Sanders message during the 2024 campaign was to uncritically support Harris. Same with AOC and the "squad." AOC became Harebrained Harris's leading champion. So much for the "Justice Democrats."
IMHO, the only way forward is with Leo, to found a working class based party, a party that refuses to take any money from capitalists and the rich, that supports publicly-funded and only publicly-funded elections (as in many European countries), that whole-heartedly supports the working class, unions, and environmental protections.
I would just add that while Bernie Sanders has done more to legitimize the idea of democratic socialism than anyone in living memory, and single-handedly made Medicare for All the most popular policy initiative in history since FDR's policies in the 1930s, still, he is a tragic case. Instead of working to build an American social-democratic party, he has wasted his entire career trying to push the DP to the left and worked as a lone socialist in a capitalist party. The hopeless failure of that strategy is plain for all to see today as the DP is worse than ever, a mirror image elite capitalist GOP (minus the Tea Party racism and Christian fascism). As Leo says, like Nader before him, we have two capitalist parties and no workers' party.
Decades ago, one could plausibly make the argument that a third party that did not win the presidency outright, would only divide the liberal-left and insure the victory of the GOP. But today, as popular and especially worker support for the DP is collapsing, it's possible to envision a third party, a workers's party, that could actually win more votes than the DP. In any case, nowhere is it written that we can only have two parties. There's no reason an explicitly pro-working class, pro-environment party could not ally in a united front with the DP on issues that we agree with them on. A labor-enviro third party could easily, in my view, win local, state, and congressional offices outright by NOT LYING to the electorate. Say out loud, that our democracy is completely compromised by the power of big money. The bribery of politicians by funding their campaigns has to be called out for what it is LEGAL BRIBERY. We demand an end to this. One person one vote, not pay to play.
You remind me of my UAW Brothers & Sisters who always say, "Our union is corrupt. We need to decertify and bring in a new union." Unions are democracies. When they fail, it is our own fault as workers. Our 2 party civic political system works no differently. The Democratic political party is also a democracy and has historically been the party of working people. When it fails, look in the mirror. There are no barriers to participation. Stop blaming others for our own failings. If we can't even organize the existing worker party to help ourselves, what makes you think we have the ability to create and run a brand new one from scratch... Stop bitching that world's systems are too screwed up-- get up off the couch and make the one we live in better. It takes effort, but that is the way progress is always made.
Thanks for your comment but I respectfully disagree. You can't both be a party of billionaires who grow rich by destroying jobs, and a party of working people. Yes, the Dems once were the party of working people. Chuck Schumer says that's long gone and good riddance.
I also agree up to a point. That point is to question whether the Democratic Socialists aren't already a potential avenue. I realize they aren't currently organized as a political party per se. But you say, rightly, that it's best for a new party not to run candidates until it is large enough to get a meaningful share of votes. Isn't that what the DSA is doing? Also, there's some amount of support within DSA for becoming a party, or so I perceive. Might working to get them to move faster in that direction be preferable to reinventing the wheel? I'm not that active in DSA myself, because there are only so many hours in the day, and I've chosen more local activities to fill them. But it does strike me that the last thing the left needs is yet-another division.
The latest example of where splits get you: Die Linke and BSW in Germany might have gotten as much of the vote as AfD's 20% if they'd been united. Instead, the populist right looks like a success story, the left-left (as opposed to center-left) lost one-third of its parliamentary seats because BSW didn't make the 5% cutoff by 0.02%, and the Center-right will run the country.
The issue for me is the depth of DSA's connection to working people who do not consider themselves leftists. I think it has a long way to go. Many thanks for your comment.
Sarah, you make a good point. Why re-invent the wheel? I had hopes for the DSA. I've been a member of DSA since 2016 and I helped found the Ecosocialist Working Group. But the EWG dropped ecosocialism to focus on municipalizing public electric utilities under the banner of "Our Power" instead of nationalizing fossil fuels to phase them out which its own guidelines document called for in 2019.
The electoral But the problem with the DSA is that it's purposely designed to be disorganized. Every locality does its own thing. It can't agree on many things. DSA candidates run as Democrats not DSA socialists. It still functions much like the old DSA under Harrington -- as an adjunct to the DP. AOC was Harris's biggest supporter and she failed completely to criticize the anti-working class politics of the DP that let to its massive loss and, in my view, its terminal decline. The DP disaster has thus discredited the DSA too. In my view, an explicitly pro-worker pro-environment party could ally with the DSA and with the DP. No need to be sectarian. But in my experience there's little hope of changing the DSA from within, given its structural decentralization. Its fetish of identity politics also does not help and alienates it from ordinary working people who don't get the lingo and don't support biologically male "trans women" in women's sports. I don't see this changing anytime soon in the DSA either. The DSA's international politics is decided by campists who don't support Ukraine. Not my politics.
And Leo is right. The DSA has little connection to the working class, especially as compared with Solidarity (the IS up to 1978), which has many cadres working in rank and file trade union work.
I think you're exactly right, Les. The billionaires have two parties. We need one. This is Chris Hedges position, I think. We've been losing a class war steadily since the sixties. If labor wants any representation i.e. a voice, that has to be the priority.
We have a party. Right under our noses. It's the Justice Dems, aka AOC and 'the squad' in the House and Bernie and a handful of his friends in the Senate. 'The Democrats' are not unitary, but a tent over conflicting blocs. The one named above is ours. Now build it on all levels until it reachs, say, 150 or more in the House. Then the Dem tent faces a transformative crisis. We don't exactly know the outcome yet, but our party might emerge as a new First Party, as the GOP did in 860. Call it our 'Way of the Whigs' tactic. It's the only one that ever worked under our reactionary electoral system. It has only one saving grace. The ballot line doesn't belong to parties and their money people. It belongs to the state. And any group, like the Justice Dems, can use it if they meet the start requirements.
I hear you. I just wish the Justice Dems had a greater presence with working people.
I agree. They have a solid base in the workers of color in their districts, and some reach in Nurse United, the CWA and SEIU. Ironically Manchin challenged AOC to come to W VA and repeat her arguments. She replied 'Great. Time and place?' He backed down. AOC uses the term 'working class' over middle class' more than anyone in Congress, save perhaps Bernie. We have a hard road, full of twists and turns, but git'er done.
As a civil rights activist in my town of Ft Wayne, IN often says, " People need to get their noses out of Facebook and into real books."-- and I would add, "history books". The wealthy have been running things, including the 2 major political parties from the get-go. The way you fight them is by getting involved and fighting them for control of the existing Democratic Party. People like the great Walter Reuther understood that-- and look what he accomplished for working people-- by helping to create and then working with FDR and his Democratic coalition to build the new deal. What is missing today is people willing to work hard and sacrifice for what they believe in. If you think syphoning off volunteers & voters into yet another failed 3rd party effort will beat the wealthy-- then let me tell you about the "Green Party", who thought creating their new party would bring about a new "environmentally friendly" America....right. All they have done is make it easier for corporate America to implement their agenda-- by weaking the fragile coalition of volunteers & voters we need to "fight the right".
I hear you Randy. But I think the Dems need to feel a credible threat. The effort I'm suggesting doesn't do anything until it has a million supporters. That's more than the Green Party could amass. Reuther was able to influence the Democratic Party because labor unions at the time represented more than 30 percent of all private sector workers. Today it's only 6 percent of the private sector. So the math has drastically changed. I wish hard work along could turn it around but we also have to evaluate strategy. Trump winning twice was no accident. Something in Democratic Party politics went wrong.
Thanks for your comments and this is the discussion we should be having.
Yes, yes, YES! A third party makes the most sense when the 2 parties that have dominated are both beholden to money over people. What we need is a party that actually represents the working class, and promotes the needs of millions of Americans that have been ignored by both parties for so long. But there are already many parties out there that represent the working class. From my point of view the real work that needs to be done is to form a viable third party, made up of all the progressive factions, eg the Justice Dems, the Progressive Dems and the Working People's Party, to realize common ground and resist the barriers of allegiance to one party. A third party capable of overcoming the dominance of the two big parties will never happen until all the factions representing the working class come together.
I agree. The problem with capitalist party politics is that, so long as it takes billions of dollars to run for office, candidates must inevitably reach out for capitalist support. No one else has the money. The system was deliberately designed to make it so expensive to run that candidates would inevitably have to go hat in hand to the rich to obtain the funds to campaign. That's how a party like the GOP which historically represented a small proportion of the population, could win a majority of votes. But we live in a two-class system and the rich-- the employers, the capitalists, the bankers and so on -- have different interests than workers. The result is that virtually all politicians must become hypocrites: they need to talk one way to the workers -- support popular progressive policies like national health care, unions, environmental concerns to win the most votes, but they take a different line when they get elected because their paymasters, their bosses, the capitalists who fund their campaigns, oppose unions, social programs, pollution mitigation, and so on. That's why there's always such a huge discrepancies between what politicians promise and what they deliver. People are forever saying "Wait, I didn't vote for that." Just look at Trump. Who voted to make Ukraine our enemy and Putin our ally? Who voted to fire thousands of Air Traffic Controllers, park rangers, etc.?
The only way out of this dilemma is, ultimately, to abolish Citizens United and establish publicly funded and only publicly funded elections (like in much of Europe). Short of that, Bernie Sanders showed that with the power of social media, a candidate like him could actually raise enough money to get elected by soliciting small donations from ordinary people. His allies in the (poorly named IMHO) "squad" have imitated that strategy and it has worked for some. But others, like Cori Bush, have been defeated by massive spending, hundreds of millions, by the GOP wealthy and PACS to defeat perceived leftists.
"Our" third party could utilize Sander's $27 funding strategy, but it should apologize to the electorate, saying that we should not have to do this: Campaigns should be funded exclusively by the government and they should not be costly at all. In Europe, governments give ree air time for public debates to all qualified candidates, they abolish private TV ads, and they limit campaign time frames to 2 months (in France for example).
That way, candidates need not be hypocrites, they can speak for their constituents and don't have to constantly be raising money for the next campaign, the day after they get elected, as in the U.S.
Of course it seems so wrong that money dominates our election processes. But that is the way it is. Though I wonder if the effect of having oligarchs run the country, slashing all of the benefit programs, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers all over the country, hugely impacting red states, might open the prospect of elections not entirely dominated by the money spent on them.
Agreed. How do we get this petition going? Every good idea starts with the first step
It's got to start with a labor union trying it with their own members.
Carl, IMHO the Democratic Party (DP) is in terminal decline and Justice Dems are part of the problem not the solution. As we know, the DP was never a real working class party, never a party exclusively founded or based on labor and labor unions like the Labor Party of UK. But in the 1930s, powerful movements of workers, massive trade union organizing campaigns, sit-ins, factory occupations, general strikes -- and looming in the background, the wave of socialist revolutions in Europe and Asia -- pushed the FDR admin to enact radical historically transformative legislation favoring the working class at the expense of capital: establishing a social safety net: social security, unemployment insurance, legalized trade unions, WPA and other federal jobs programs, government regulatory agencies, and more (On all this see the Living New Deal, livingnewdeal.org). America's workers thanked him with three consecutive landslide elections and three terms in office.
From the thirties through the sixties, voters looked to the DP to provide social security, safety net for the poor, aged, the sick, to protect their health and safety. Under Johnson, extensive civil rights were enacted and the EPA founded in 1970. Medicare, Medicaid, the Clean Air bill, EPA were the high water mark of working class gains secured by the end of the 1960s. The capitalists hated all that, regarded the hugely popular FDR as a “class traitor,” (See H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class, 2008), and they've sought ever since to roll back those historic gains for the working class, for humanity, and for the environment.
It's been mostly downhill for the DP since the late 1960s. The employers offensive beginning in the 1970s broke unions, sending northern jobs south to non-union states. Then came Reagan who crushed the Air Controllers' Union. Then Clinton's NAFTA Since then it’s been down hill for the DP since the 1970s.Republican gains, bid to win the class war: tried, with some success. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. Reagan broke Air Controllers union. As weakened unions proved unable to defend workers and counter the offshoring of their jobs to Mexico and China, workers drifted away from the DP and the DP leadership rebased itself on the middle and upper classes, mirroring the GOP. Even though workers constitute the vast majority of voters, since 1968, Republicans -- the quintessential ruling class party -- have won 9 of the last 14 presidential elections. Now with Trump, they are bidding to win the class war. Bush II tried to privatize Social Security. With Trump, they hope to crush the social safety net, Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights legislation, Black, Hispanic, and feminist gains, destroy public education, return America to the pre-WWI Gilded Age of unchallenged capitalist baronial class domination under “King” Donald Trump.
Right now "socialist" Bernie Sanders is touring Republican states attacking the "oligarchy" -- the billionaires -- but not capitalism, never capitalism per se. Lots of GOP voters are turning out to hear him. But what's his message? It's "resist" and vote for the Democrats. Vote for the same party that has sold out workers since the 1970s and wholesale since the 1990s when Clinton's "New Democrats" openly abandoned the working class to rebase themselves on the educated middle classes and the same upper-class capitalist plutocrats Sanders is attacking today. Bill Clinton sold out the working class with his NAFTA WE HAFTA and his CHINA SHOCK (he lobbied hard to get China into the WTO and he succeeded. In result the US lost some 7 million industrial jobs and the more and more workers left the party that sold them out to vote Republican. HRC proposed to send more jobs to Asia with her Trans-Pacific pact. When she deservedly lost, Trump pulled out of on Day 1 of his first administration. Harebrained Harris wasted her campaign sucking up to Tech billionaires and refusing to walk any picket lines, indeed, mostly refused to even mention the word "workers."
What Sanders and the Justice Democrats don't get is that Trump and his voters were absolutely right to attack US companies that sent their jobs to Mexico and China.
Trump was also right about Biden's open borders that let some 10 million migrants in without papers. Americans are not ungenerous people. On the whole they support immigration -- but legal immigration, not Biden's open-borders free-for-all flooding border cities with immigrants from all over the world, many put up in nice hotels while homelessness is surging and, according to Bernie, 70% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Polls show that 68% of Americans say immigration is good for the country, a majority want it increased. 72% believe immigrants come to the U.S. “to find jobs and improve their lives” not to live on welfare, and 53% say immigration “is a human right.” 55% support a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants (Gallup, July 13, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/508520/americans-value-immigration-concerns.aspx).
Trump was also right that as the DP abandoned the working class, it fell down the rabbit hole of identity politics babbling neologisms like BIPOC, L.G.B.T.Q.I.+, A.A.P.I., TERFS etc., and concocting nonsensical words like "they/them," cisgender, intersex, "birthing people," "people with cervixes," "persons with vaginas" etc. that no normal person understands -- and turned into a party of scolds. AOC is particularly big on this. Biden's admin privileged trans people over women and feminism: promoting male "trans women" competing in women's sports against actual women (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/us/transgender-athletes-title-ix-biden-adminstration.html) like trans swimmer "Lia" Thomas (who, born Will Thomas, maintains that “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team." Yet, as "Lia" parades around naked displaying his penises and testicles in women's locker rooms, trans extremists and PC Democrats like Biden, Harris, and AOC dismissed women's complaints about this as "anti-trans" prejudice (https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/07/21/upenns-nomination-of-lia-thomas-as-ncaa-woman-of-year-is-insult-to-real-women/). Feminist women are right on this issue, the DP "progressives" were crazy wrong, and that's an important reason why many women voted for Trump. When Trumpets said "Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you", many ordinary working people said that this was "common sense." But not the DP. So that left the field open for the grievance-driven Trump to support the grievances of workers, women, blacks and hispanics against the DP.
The DP's refusal to support pro-working class politics going back to Clinton's sellouts, it's wide-open borders immigration policies, its PC fetish and arrogant scolding of the electorate, calling Trump's supporters "deplorables,"fascists, racists and so on (recall Obama's scolding Black men for not supporting a black woman, regardless of how awful her politics were) cost the party the election. And yet, for all evidence of all these disasters, the DP has learned nothing. It refuses to concede that it has been massively wrong on its politics going back to the Clinton years, and it refuses to change. Two days ago, DP grandee James Carville said "we don't need to change anything," just "roll over and play dead’ and Trump's terrible policies will bring the voters back to us." (https://www.yahoo.com/news/james-carville-tells-dems-best-152840312.html). Good luck on that.
Today the Democrats are lost, floundering and can't come up with a response to Trump. They can't because, today, with no working class base, they're based on the same social classes as the GOP and Trump: the upper middle classes, the rich, the capitalist billionaires, the Wall Street bankers. So long as they depend on their money to fund their exorbitant campaigns, he who pays the piper calls the tune. That's why Sanders message during the 2024 campaign was to uncritically support Harris. Same with AOC and the "squad." AOC became Harebrained Harris's leading champion. So much for the "Justice Democrats."
IMHO, the only way forward is with Leo, to found a working class based party, a party that refuses to take any money from capitalists and the rich, that supports publicly-funded and only publicly-funded elections (as in many European countries), that whole-heartedly supports the working class, unions, and environmental protections.
I would just add that while Bernie Sanders has done more to legitimize the idea of democratic socialism than anyone in living memory, and single-handedly made Medicare for All the most popular policy initiative in history since FDR's policies in the 1930s, still, he is a tragic case. Instead of working to build an American social-democratic party, he has wasted his entire career trying to push the DP to the left and worked as a lone socialist in a capitalist party. The hopeless failure of that strategy is plain for all to see today as the DP is worse than ever, a mirror image elite capitalist GOP (minus the Tea Party racism and Christian fascism). As Leo says, like Nader before him, we have two capitalist parties and no workers' party.
Decades ago, one could plausibly make the argument that a third party that did not win the presidency outright, would only divide the liberal-left and insure the victory of the GOP. But today, as popular and especially worker support for the DP is collapsing, it's possible to envision a third party, a workers's party, that could actually win more votes than the DP. In any case, nowhere is it written that we can only have two parties. There's no reason an explicitly pro-working class, pro-environment party could not ally in a united front with the DP on issues that we agree with them on. A labor-enviro third party could easily, in my view, win local, state, and congressional offices outright by NOT LYING to the electorate. Say out loud, that our democracy is completely compromised by the power of big money. The bribery of politicians by funding their campaigns has to be called out for what it is LEGAL BRIBERY. We demand an end to this. One person one vote, not pay to play.
You remind me of my UAW Brothers & Sisters who always say, "Our union is corrupt. We need to decertify and bring in a new union." Unions are democracies. When they fail, it is our own fault as workers. Our 2 party civic political system works no differently. The Democratic political party is also a democracy and has historically been the party of working people. When it fails, look in the mirror. There are no barriers to participation. Stop blaming others for our own failings. If we can't even organize the existing worker party to help ourselves, what makes you think we have the ability to create and run a brand new one from scratch... Stop bitching that world's systems are too screwed up-- get up off the couch and make the one we live in better. It takes effort, but that is the way progress is always made.
Thanks for your comment but I respectfully disagree. You can't both be a party of billionaires who grow rich by destroying jobs, and a party of working people. Yes, the Dems once were the party of working people. Chuck Schumer says that's long gone and good riddance.
I also agree up to a point. That point is to question whether the Democratic Socialists aren't already a potential avenue. I realize they aren't currently organized as a political party per se. But you say, rightly, that it's best for a new party not to run candidates until it is large enough to get a meaningful share of votes. Isn't that what the DSA is doing? Also, there's some amount of support within DSA for becoming a party, or so I perceive. Might working to get them to move faster in that direction be preferable to reinventing the wheel? I'm not that active in DSA myself, because there are only so many hours in the day, and I've chosen more local activities to fill them. But it does strike me that the last thing the left needs is yet-another division.
The latest example of where splits get you: Die Linke and BSW in Germany might have gotten as much of the vote as AfD's 20% if they'd been united. Instead, the populist right looks like a success story, the left-left (as opposed to center-left) lost one-third of its parliamentary seats because BSW didn't make the 5% cutoff by 0.02%, and the Center-right will run the country.
The issue for me is the depth of DSA's connection to working people who do not consider themselves leftists. I think it has a long way to go. Many thanks for your comment.
Sarah, you make a good point. Why re-invent the wheel? I had hopes for the DSA. I've been a member of DSA since 2016 and I helped found the Ecosocialist Working Group. But the EWG dropped ecosocialism to focus on municipalizing public electric utilities under the banner of "Our Power" instead of nationalizing fossil fuels to phase them out which its own guidelines document called for in 2019.
The electoral But the problem with the DSA is that it's purposely designed to be disorganized. Every locality does its own thing. It can't agree on many things. DSA candidates run as Democrats not DSA socialists. It still functions much like the old DSA under Harrington -- as an adjunct to the DP. AOC was Harris's biggest supporter and she failed completely to criticize the anti-working class politics of the DP that let to its massive loss and, in my view, its terminal decline. The DP disaster has thus discredited the DSA too. In my view, an explicitly pro-worker pro-environment party could ally with the DSA and with the DP. No need to be sectarian. But in my experience there's little hope of changing the DSA from within, given its structural decentralization. Its fetish of identity politics also does not help and alienates it from ordinary working people who don't get the lingo and don't support biologically male "trans women" in women's sports. I don't see this changing anytime soon in the DSA either. The DSA's international politics is decided by campists who don't support Ukraine. Not my politics.
And Leo is right. The DSA has little connection to the working class, especially as compared with Solidarity (the IS up to 1978), which has many cadres working in rank and file trade union work.
I think you're exactly right, Les. The billionaires have two parties. We need one. This is Chris Hedges position, I think. We've been losing a class war steadily since the sixties. If labor wants any representation i.e. a voice, that has to be the priority.
Thanks for your kind words. Now if only we could get some traction.
The idea has to take hold. I never thought I'd put labor issues or solidarity ahead of the Earth's biosphere, but investors are terrible stewards.