Why Not Take Over the Hollowed-Out Democratic Party?
At a recent conference at Oberlin College, I tried to make the case that the Democratic brand is so tarnished that the only option left is to build a new formation —which I have been calling the Independent Worker Political Association.
One of the academic panelists, who had been a member of the now defunct Labor Party in the 1990s, argued in response that because the Democratic Party had been hollowed out, progressives should march in and take it over. This would have a better chance of success than building something new and separate, which he claimed has failed repeatedly in the past.
That’s a double-barreled critique that deserves a response. Is the Democratic Party really hollowed out? And is creating a third party really impossible?
After the conference I was forwarded an article by Philip Rocco, called Why the Democrats are So Useless, on the current structure of the Democratic Party. Rocco argues that the party has been hollowed out in the sense that it no longer has its own grassroots base, formed into clubs, precincts, and the like. That is technically true, but that doesn’t mean the space is empty. In fact, the party is chock full of non-profit groups that support very specific programs and compete for the attention of the party leaders.
Whereas once the labor movement formed the glue between the party and a mass base, today it is an assortment of non-profits with narrower concerns that balkanize, rather than hold the party together. In this group you will find hundreds of non-governmental organizations, largely foundation funded, with non-elected leaderships that fight hard for their special issues. From the Sierra Club to the ACLU to AARP, each makes sure its voice is heard. Unlike the Republicans, these siloed groups have no ideological glue that binds them all together.
In practice, this means the space is loaded with the leaders of these organizations who are uniformly members of the professional class – well-educated and decidedly not working class now, even if they were while growing up. Among them, thousands of lawyers.
Meanwhile, the upper echelon of the party provides differential access to wealthy donors who have enormous influence on which candidates are chosen and the platforms they run on.
So, taking over the hollowed-out Democratic Party is a bit like elbowing your way into a crowded subway car. You’ve got a lot of company, and it will be very difficult if not impossible to find a seat.
Don’t third parties always fail?
My next book, tentatively called “The Billionaires Have Two Parties: We Need One of Our Own,” will deal more directly with why the Labor Party failed to take root. But here let’s examine the idea that the U.S. winner-take-all electoral system does not allow third parties to succeed.
While that very well may be true at the presidential level, it sure isn’t the case at the local level. I went back and checked on the Socialist Party of America, (1897-1946). In 1911, it elected more than 1,100 local officials in 353 cities and towns. It also elected two members of Congress: Victor Berger, from Milwaukee (1910, 1918, 1922, 1924, 1926), and Meyer London, from New York City (1915, 1917, 1921). Both ran exclusively on the Socialist Party ballot line, not as fusion candidates with either the Democrats or the Republicans.
Socialist Party mayors include Danial Weber Hoan, who was unbeatable in Milwaukee, reelected repeatedly from 1916 to 1940. More than 70 Socialist Party candidates were elected mayor in the U.S. from 1901 to 1948.
The Socialist Party was successful because its platform rang true to working people. And when you look at it, it still sounds like something Bernie Sanders would pitch:
Public ownership of railroads and utilities as industries controlled by “monopolies, trusts and combines,” with revenues used to increase wages, cut hours or work, and improve services
Reduction of the hours of labor
National insurance “in case of accidents, lack of employment, sickness, and want in old age.”
Inauguration of a system of public industries for the employment of the unemployed.
Education of all children up to the age of 18 years, and state and municipal aid for books, clothing, and food.
Equal civil and political rights for men and women.
Initiatives and referendums, proportional representation, and the right to recall of representatives by their constituents.
One-party districts and states demolish the spoiler argument
Today there are 132 Congressional districts that Republicans won with a margin of at least 25 percentage points, and 112 districts that were won by Democrats with a margin of at least 25 percentage points. That means that in 244 ultra-safe districts there is only one party now!
A new progressive populist formation that chose to run against Republicans in any of those 132 districts would be a second party, not a third party. There is no way that the new party will spoil the chances of the Democrats and enhance the Republicans. There is no Democratic Party in these districts to spoil!
That’s exactly the story in Nebraska. where Dan Osborn ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris for the Senate seat in 2024. He’s trying it again in 2026, and polls show him now in a dead heat.
Osborn is a working-class independent who is not shy about taking on the billionaire class:
“Less than 2% of our elected leaders are from the working class. Special interests and billionaires own our politicians. That’s why both parties have lost touch with regular people.”
His platform is called “The Billionaires who Control Washington Have Built a Billionaire Economy.” And it is loaded with working-class positions:
Protect Social Security,
Support strong public schools,
Ban billionaires from buying elections,
End wasteful government handouts to the pharmaceutical industry,
End profiteering off senior health care.
He shows promise not just because he’s a gifted union man who still works as a manufacturing mechanic. He is running totally independent of both the Democrats and the Republicans, and that’s the key to his race. He’s running against billionaire domination of politics, and it rings true to the voters in bright red Nebraska.
Building something new won’t be easy. But it could start and grow with an association of independent working-class candidates who attack the “hollowed-out” Democratic Party, rather than joining it.
What still amazes me is the number of very committed progressives who just can’t let go of the Democrats. I guess it wasn’t easy to jump off the Titanic either.
There is one simple, basic, irrefutable reason why we won’t have a third party.
We don’t have time to build it.
Every time someone brings this idea up they overlook the single reality that stands in the way of their ambitions: the legacy parties have, at the state level, placed legal barriers to prevent precisely that from happening. Many, if not most, are the result of the challenge they received from the People’s Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the rest likely were put in place because of that Socialist Party success you addressed.
Both those parties had been active and recruiting for at least 20-30 years before they registered success. Don’t take my word for it. Read Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-populist-moment-9780195024173?cc=us&lang=en&).
Also, like others discussing the theme, you overlook the fact that the real work and power of a political party is at the local and state levels. The DNC, which you reference, is not the party. It may seem that way but only because it controls the purse strings. The party is people, and if the people hate what their fundraising arm has become—a dictatorial bunch of corporate cronies—they have the power to make that arm irrelevant.
The basic building block of a political party is the precinct chair. If you’re serious about effecting real change in the decade or less we have left, get people who detest the oligarchs and the corporate neofascists to sign up for that. And county party delegates. And state party activity.
I vigorously agree with the premise but would argue for modifying the conclusion. The financiers have created an impenetrable immune system that would prevent true representatives of working people from taking control of the Democratic Party leadership, and they have done a masterful job of aligning interest groups that should be bipartisan, like environmental groups, with the financiers' agenda of division. Further, in safe Republican districts like mine, the Democratic Party is irrelevant, so taking it over wouldn't help.
However, I contend that the strategy demonstrated by the Nonpartisan League is superior to a new party. Their strategy was to have a non-party organization of working people that selected candidates that they then pushed through the primaries of the dominant parties, Republican or Democrat, to take over the election apparatus without having to take over the party. That strategy allows working people to take control of the elections in either Democratic or Republican districts. And, if their candidates don't succeed in winning the primary, they can still run as independents with organizational endorsement. Further, this takes you outside of the financier media's game. Where they hold staged "debates" restricted to the financier Uniparty and dismiss 3rd party candidates as irrelevant and use their full resources to undercut them, the Nonpartisan League strategy defeats that by using ground-level organization to bypass the media at the primary stage and again in the general election. It makes it impossible for the media to treat financier money and Uniparty leadership endorsement as the definition of a "serious" candidate. The messaging of the Nonpartisan League strategy does not require entering into a race and saying the Democrats are wrong and the Republicans are wrong so much as saying "we represent the issues that working people care about, working people make up 99.75% of the nation, and the electoral system therefore belongs to us and our agenda."