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.
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.
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.
Except that the neolibs (technically econ neoclassists) took over from the top down. They dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. I know. As a blue collar union activist and local D campaign mgr, I fought them. We used to win campaigns because we could turn out thousands of people starting at the precinct level. Instead of 1%er and corporate $$$.
But now $$$ is standard--therefore a Dem party supporting financial deregulation, the WTO, and trickle up. After 40 years, we the working class majority do not trust them! The D name is deeply tarnished, as the results of the Rust Belt study clearly show. The name is also an oxymoron; the superdelegates, the rigged rules structure, and the anointment of the last presidential candidate are evidence why.
You aren’t going to accomplish anything through the democrats. They are a capitalist party of the colonial empire. A third party won’t accomplish anything either. The only way to save the US and the world for that matter, is to overthrow the gov and put the globalist elite on trial. The longer you wait the less chance you have of winning. The surveillance state and AI are about to tighten the noose all the way.
DSA has put more than 1500 socialists in office going through the Democrats, because unlike the people who think they’re going to create a successful third party overnight they bothered to study the history and legalities that govern reality.
Also, I have heard every one of those social media-scripted slogans more times than I care to count, and they don’t get any more sensible with repetition. If you want to have a revolution, be my guest, but experience and history have shown over and over they never achieve what those who think they want one think they will.
Just take your mindless chanting of what you think is Marxism and go back into your silo. There hasn’t yet been one successful revolution that has resulted in the kind of stable, economically viable society because they are either taken over by an elite cadre and turned into authoritarian dystopias or strangled by the capitalist juggernaut it would require a global revolution to eliminate.
Try reading some actual history instead of just swallowing whatever some ideologue who appeals to you tells you.
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."
You're definitely onto something here. An inherent instability has worked its way into the Democratic party, by way of the outsized influence of large financial supporters. It's bound to fall at some point. The smart move may be to position oneself to nudge which way it topples, and be ready to organize the biggest chunks where they land!
The Rust Belt poll results are a stinging indictment of the Dem party of the last few decades. The one taken over by neolibs who dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. These corporate lite supporters of econ trickle up thought us worth nothing more substantial than "the lesser of two evils." Their contempt for us made obvious by "a basket of deplorables."
Recently, I was where (ugh) Fox News playing. The segment was about how the Dem party is elitist and doesn't care about the working class majority. Well, yeah. Akin to those Occupy Wall St. pins saying "we are the 99%." Not so! We're the 80%--the D party only represents the 20% administrative and professional class. People whose incomes haven't flatlined, who don't worry about being bankrupted by healthcare bills, and to whom we're invisible.
The Ds bailed out Wall St. after 2007-08, but the millions who lost jobs, pensions, houses, got nothing. That the Rust Belt is deaths of despair central is unimportant to the Ds. Go to nice liberal Dem sites and see whom they blame for Trump being in office: stupid people who got fooled by the Rs. Strongly implies a disgusting lack of empathy and a belief it's all the fault of the uneducated working class. An insistent denial of reality by D party loyalists regarding the horrid results of the econ policies of people they elected. Yet their fantasy is if Trump were gone, everything would reset to beneficence. As if last 40 years never happened. Why should we forgive this?! Of course we're angry.
Clearly the only way the D party elite will listen is for us to come together as the majority voting bloc we are. If they want to win, let them align with us. Let them commit to a Dem party like the one once ours--the staunchly pro-worker, pro-small business, pro-small farmer New Deal.
As an Oberlin College grad (1969), I have complete empathy with what you are about here, Les. However, until Citizens United is repealed and people become people again, I remain skeptical.
"Money talks and the people walks" was never truer than it is today, unfortunately,
A workers party made of Phds? A big tell is no mention of 10 million low wage imported workers from the Biden admin. What do you intend to do about that? Every attempt to woo the working class vote falls short on the subject of scabs.
Need I really repeat the Team D response to the lawsuit over rigging the 2016 primaries?
"There's no such thing as a democrat!" and "We're a private club not obligated to follow our own rules or due process! We can cheat if we want to, and anyone dumb enough to donate deserves whatever abuses he gets!"
Anyone who thinks Team D would allow itself to be taken over needs to put the crack pipe down.
Great article, Les, and many good comments and suggestions from the Readers.
In his classic book (at the time) Professor Ferdinand Lundberg of Columbia University wrote 'The Rich and the Super-Rich' published in 1968 by Lyle Stuart, he said, as I remember, "There is one political party in the U.S., the "property party" with two functioning parties, the Republican and the Democrats, whom I've come to call the Repulsive and DemoRAT parties as, and you all know, in spite of the facade they both support War, Wall Street and Israel. The Repulsives are, and have been vehemently anti-labor and the disingenuous DemoRATS aren't much better in protecting the working-class decades ago, not one of them, to my knowledge, ever brought up repealing the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 or 48. Then in 1980, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy deregulated the transportation industries (trucking companies, airlines and railroads) and during the 1980's, many of the largest trucking companies and airlines went "bankrupt" or just shutdown altogether, in order to get away from collective bargaining contracts, the goal of which is to make this a "union-free" nation and lower the living standards of the average worker but enriching the corporate bosses and the stockholders of non-union companies. And just a few Decembers ago,when railroad workers wanted to go on strike for pathetic working conditions AND because they didn't even have paid sick leave days, two DemoRATS, Joe Biden and the treacherous Nancy "impeachment's off the table" Pelosi threatened the railroad union officials with using the archaic Railway Labor Act of 1926 for punishment if they struck. Consequently, they didn't, and to my knowledge, still don't have paid sick days.
I've been hearing so-called "progressives" talk about reforming the Democrat Party since the stolen election of 2000, and in the past quarter of a century, we've lost millions of unionized jobs in various industries because of the "one-party system" we have.
As the former union official, successful contract negotiator, and Professor of Political Economy, Dr. Jack Rasmus, (jackrasmus.vcom) once said, "before you can have progressive change, you have to change the political system." Words to that effect, which is the focal point of Les' article.
Unfortunately, sporting events and entertainment venues are more important to the average blue-collar worker in America than their livelihood and future, plus the never-ending indoctrination of the greedy unionized workers, in comparison to the hard-working super-achievers of the billionaire oligarchs running this country whom we are supposed to look up to.
How many unionized households shop at notoriously anti-union companies like WAl-Mart, Amazon/Whole Foods rather than boycotting them?
I like your enthusiasm, but you've failed to answer the (accurate) objection that winner-take-all systems will always tend toward two parties. It is disingenuous to say Dan Osborne "is running totally independent of both the Democrats and the Republicans." His strong showing is a direct result of Democrats' indirect support, by not fielding their own candidate. If they had, his numbers would have cratered.
The Democrats did something similar in Utah, declining to field a progressive Senate candidate in favor of Independent Evan McMillan, a former policy director for the House Republicans and CIA operative. He's not a working class guy, but he outperformed Harris/Walz by 5 points.
I know you really want a third party - and you're not alone - but math doesn't care about your feelings. Winner-take-all equals a two party system.
Les, I’m confused. On the one hand you often call for a workers’ PARTY to contest the ruling class duopoly of the capitalist DP and GOP. But here, as in your recent zoom with Shawn Fein, you stop short of that and call instead for a workers’ ASSOCIATION. What is that, and how does that differ from a party?
I still don't get it Les. Why would workers join your "association" that's neither a union nor a political party? Why bother? A party could run candidates for offices. But what can such an association do, except talk?
Dan Osborne needs a progressive populist workers' social Democratic Party. Independents scattered across the country running on their own will never change or defeat the DP, never overcome the power of the capitalist financial backers who dictate its politics. Look at Bernie Sanders. For 35 years he's run as an independent hoping to change the DP and where has it gotten him? They sabotage him, they red-bait him, they sideline him when he was the most popular politician in the country in 2016, 2020, 1nd 2024. But the DP would rather lose than nominate a socialist. He should have built an independent SD party decades ago. Independents need a coherent ideology, a vision to replace the bankrupt DP, a platform that unites them and their supporters across the country around a political program in a political PARTY. As you say, the capitalists have two parties; the workers have none to represent their interests. Why didn't you ask Shawn Fein, "Would you help launch and even lead a workers' social democratic party?" IMHO we should not be beat around the bush. We should be bolder, put that proposal out to unions, to the public, to everyone who's interested, go after and recruit Dan Osborne and other working class people who are trying to run for office on their own, help them see the need to unite with others, to be part of a bigger movement, and launch a movement party. As the polls you cite and I cite and Howie cites, the working class public is sick of the DP, crying out for someone, some party to represent their interests. If we on the left don't take on this task, who will?
Unfortunately, we are running out of time. The first step to thwarting Trumps agenda is taking back the house and making progress in the Senate in 2026. Splitting into competing non-MAGA parties will ultimately fail. We need a grassroots "Take back the Democratic party" movement. My hope is that movement will allow the party to change the ridiculous presidential primary system where we let Iowa and New Hampshire voters choose who will be the candidate. The first primary should be a "super Tuesday" block of states so we get a better representation of American voters.
Think have to take over for now but one of the things need to do in order have a functioning democracy once have power is make parties less institutional gatekeepers in a myriad of ways.
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.
Except that the neolibs (technically econ neoclassists) took over from the top down. They dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. I know. As a blue collar union activist and local D campaign mgr, I fought them. We used to win campaigns because we could turn out thousands of people starting at the precinct level. Instead of 1%er and corporate $$$.
But now $$$ is standard--therefore a Dem party supporting financial deregulation, the WTO, and trickle up. After 40 years, we the working class majority do not trust them! The D name is deeply tarnished, as the results of the Rust Belt study clearly show. The name is also an oxymoron; the superdelegates, the rigged rules structure, and the anointment of the last presidential candidate are evidence why.
You aren’t going to accomplish anything through the democrats. They are a capitalist party of the colonial empire. A third party won’t accomplish anything either. The only way to save the US and the world for that matter, is to overthrow the gov and put the globalist elite on trial. The longer you wait the less chance you have of winning. The surveillance state and AI are about to tighten the noose all the way.
DSA has put more than 1500 socialists in office going through the Democrats, because unlike the people who think they’re going to create a successful third party overnight they bothered to study the history and legalities that govern reality.
Also, I have heard every one of those social media-scripted slogans more times than I care to count, and they don’t get any more sensible with repetition. If you want to have a revolution, be my guest, but experience and history have shown over and over they never achieve what those who think they want one think they will.
Revolutions are the only way people have broken the chains of capitalism and imperialism.
Just take your mindless chanting of what you think is Marxism and go back into your silo. There hasn’t yet been one successful revolution that has resulted in the kind of stable, economically viable society because they are either taken over by an elite cadre and turned into authoritarian dystopias or strangled by the capitalist juggernaut it would require a global revolution to eliminate.
Try reading some actual history instead of just swallowing whatever some ideologue who appeals to you tells you.
Liz, are you reading my stuff? I’m the last person you’ll find who swallows anyone’s ideology or theology and isms.
Take a look at Wall Street’s War on Workers and see more clearly how do history and analysis. thx
Nobody from the DSA is socialist. They are firmly neoliberal
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."
You're definitely onto something here. An inherent instability has worked its way into the Democratic party, by way of the outsized influence of large financial supporters. It's bound to fall at some point. The smart move may be to position oneself to nudge which way it topples, and be ready to organize the biggest chunks where they land!
The Rust Belt poll results are a stinging indictment of the Dem party of the last few decades. The one taken over by neolibs who dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. These corporate lite supporters of econ trickle up thought us worth nothing more substantial than "the lesser of two evils." Their contempt for us made obvious by "a basket of deplorables."
Recently, I was where (ugh) Fox News playing. The segment was about how the Dem party is elitist and doesn't care about the working class majority. Well, yeah. Akin to those Occupy Wall St. pins saying "we are the 99%." Not so! We're the 80%--the D party only represents the 20% administrative and professional class. People whose incomes haven't flatlined, who don't worry about being bankrupted by healthcare bills, and to whom we're invisible.
The Ds bailed out Wall St. after 2007-08, but the millions who lost jobs, pensions, houses, got nothing. That the Rust Belt is deaths of despair central is unimportant to the Ds. Go to nice liberal Dem sites and see whom they blame for Trump being in office: stupid people who got fooled by the Rs. Strongly implies a disgusting lack of empathy and a belief it's all the fault of the uneducated working class. An insistent denial of reality by D party loyalists regarding the horrid results of the econ policies of people they elected. Yet their fantasy is if Trump were gone, everything would reset to beneficence. As if last 40 years never happened. Why should we forgive this?! Of course we're angry.
Clearly the only way the D party elite will listen is for us to come together as the majority voting bloc we are. If they want to win, let them align with us. Let them commit to a Dem party like the one once ours--the staunchly pro-worker, pro-small business, pro-small farmer New Deal.
As an Oberlin College grad (1969), I have complete empathy with what you are about here, Les. However, until Citizens United is repealed and people become people again, I remain skeptical.
"Money talks and the people walks" was never truer than it is today, unfortunately,
A workers party made of Phds? A big tell is no mention of 10 million low wage imported workers from the Biden admin. What do you intend to do about that? Every attempt to woo the working class vote falls short on the subject of scabs.
Need I really repeat the Team D response to the lawsuit over rigging the 2016 primaries?
"There's no such thing as a democrat!" and "We're a private club not obligated to follow our own rules or due process! We can cheat if we want to, and anyone dumb enough to donate deserves whatever abuses he gets!"
Anyone who thinks Team D would allow itself to be taken over needs to put the crack pipe down.
Great article, Les, and many good comments and suggestions from the Readers.
In his classic book (at the time) Professor Ferdinand Lundberg of Columbia University wrote 'The Rich and the Super-Rich' published in 1968 by Lyle Stuart, he said, as I remember, "There is one political party in the U.S., the "property party" with two functioning parties, the Republican and the Democrats, whom I've come to call the Repulsive and DemoRAT parties as, and you all know, in spite of the facade they both support War, Wall Street and Israel. The Repulsives are, and have been vehemently anti-labor and the disingenuous DemoRATS aren't much better in protecting the working-class decades ago, not one of them, to my knowledge, ever brought up repealing the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 or 48. Then in 1980, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy deregulated the transportation industries (trucking companies, airlines and railroads) and during the 1980's, many of the largest trucking companies and airlines went "bankrupt" or just shutdown altogether, in order to get away from collective bargaining contracts, the goal of which is to make this a "union-free" nation and lower the living standards of the average worker but enriching the corporate bosses and the stockholders of non-union companies. And just a few Decembers ago,when railroad workers wanted to go on strike for pathetic working conditions AND because they didn't even have paid sick leave days, two DemoRATS, Joe Biden and the treacherous Nancy "impeachment's off the table" Pelosi threatened the railroad union officials with using the archaic Railway Labor Act of 1926 for punishment if they struck. Consequently, they didn't, and to my knowledge, still don't have paid sick days.
I've been hearing so-called "progressives" talk about reforming the Democrat Party since the stolen election of 2000, and in the past quarter of a century, we've lost millions of unionized jobs in various industries because of the "one-party system" we have.
As the former union official, successful contract negotiator, and Professor of Political Economy, Dr. Jack Rasmus, (jackrasmus.vcom) once said, "before you can have progressive change, you have to change the political system." Words to that effect, which is the focal point of Les' article.
Unfortunately, sporting events and entertainment venues are more important to the average blue-collar worker in America than their livelihood and future, plus the never-ending indoctrination of the greedy unionized workers, in comparison to the hard-working super-achievers of the billionaire oligarchs running this country whom we are supposed to look up to.
How many unionized households shop at notoriously anti-union companies like WAl-Mart, Amazon/Whole Foods rather than boycotting them?
I like your enthusiasm, but you've failed to answer the (accurate) objection that winner-take-all systems will always tend toward two parties. It is disingenuous to say Dan Osborne "is running totally independent of both the Democrats and the Republicans." His strong showing is a direct result of Democrats' indirect support, by not fielding their own candidate. If they had, his numbers would have cratered.
The Democrats did something similar in Utah, declining to field a progressive Senate candidate in favor of Independent Evan McMillan, a former policy director for the House Republicans and CIA operative. He's not a working class guy, but he outperformed Harris/Walz by 5 points.
I know you really want a third party - and you're not alone - but math doesn't care about your feelings. Winner-take-all equals a two party system.
Then the Dem Party needs to be burned to the waterline and its donor class besotted misleadership defenestrated.
The one party argument is not a point I had previously considered. Interesting indeed.
Les, I’m confused. On the one hand you often call for a workers’ PARTY to contest the ruling class duopoly of the capitalist DP and GOP. But here, as in your recent zoom with Shawn Fein, you stop short of that and call instead for a workers’ ASSOCIATION. What is that, and how does that differ from a party?
Got to walk before we run
I still don't get it Les. Why would workers join your "association" that's neither a union nor a political party? Why bother? A party could run candidates for offices. But what can such an association do, except talk?
To run more Dan Osborne Why did 57 percent of Rust Belt voters support the idea and its progressive populist agenda?
Dan Osborne needs a progressive populist workers' social Democratic Party. Independents scattered across the country running on their own will never change or defeat the DP, never overcome the power of the capitalist financial backers who dictate its politics. Look at Bernie Sanders. For 35 years he's run as an independent hoping to change the DP and where has it gotten him? They sabotage him, they red-bait him, they sideline him when he was the most popular politician in the country in 2016, 2020, 1nd 2024. But the DP would rather lose than nominate a socialist. He should have built an independent SD party decades ago. Independents need a coherent ideology, a vision to replace the bankrupt DP, a platform that unites them and their supporters across the country around a political program in a political PARTY. As you say, the capitalists have two parties; the workers have none to represent their interests. Why didn't you ask Shawn Fein, "Would you help launch and even lead a workers' social democratic party?" IMHO we should not be beat around the bush. We should be bolder, put that proposal out to unions, to the public, to everyone who's interested, go after and recruit Dan Osborne and other working class people who are trying to run for office on their own, help them see the need to unite with others, to be part of a bigger movement, and launch a movement party. As the polls you cite and I cite and Howie cites, the working class public is sick of the DP, crying out for someone, some party to represent their interests. If we on the left don't take on this task, who will?
Unfortunately, we are running out of time. The first step to thwarting Trumps agenda is taking back the house and making progress in the Senate in 2026. Splitting into competing non-MAGA parties will ultimately fail. We need a grassroots "Take back the Democratic party" movement. My hope is that movement will allow the party to change the ridiculous presidential primary system where we let Iowa and New Hampshire voters choose who will be the candidate. The first primary should be a "super Tuesday" block of states so we get a better representation of American voters.
Think have to take over for now but one of the things need to do in order have a functioning democracy once have power is make parties less institutional gatekeepers in a myriad of ways.