Democrats Have Nothing To Lose And Everything To Gain By Leaving Their Party

For reasons not necessary to name, a great deal of the American population has been forced to reassess its priorities in the past several weeks. It is now the responsibility of everyone who opposed Donald Trump during his run to continue fighting him and his agenda, because the alternative to inaction is increased economic exploitation, the destruction of civil liberties, and what will quite possibly be the end of hope for preserving a habitable climate.

And naturally, as people seek out ways to defy the coming tyrannical presence, they're looking to leaders and organizations that can help their cause. And there are many such groups that intend to fight Trump, such as the ACLU and the Sierra Club. But among them is one which I believe is just as important to resist as it is to resist Trump himself: the Democratic Party.

We should resist the party because though it of course positions itself as an anti-Trump force, it is in fact one of Trump's biggest assets. Due to the Democratic leadership's sabotage of the Bernie Sanders campaign, all the party could offer to counter Trump was an unacceptably militaristic, corporatist, and in many ways corrupt figure who stood little chance in the general election. And this was just the tale end of a deeper, decades-long series of missteps that Democrats have made which contributed to Trump's victory, namely their responsibility for the economic factors behind his rise. Indeed, Robert Reich has charged the Democratic Party with being one of Trump's three biggest enablers.

Helping Trump is the latest in a four-decades-running succession of disservices the Democratic Party has dealt to the people who have kept it in power. Since the Carter Administration, the party has very much embraced the neoliberal economic approach, having enabled Republican presidents to pass tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulated the financial sector, pushed so-called free trade deals, participated in the corrupt campaign finance system, and much more. The leftist writer Michael Sparks was right to declare last June: "Dear Democratic Party, I'm leaving you and I'm taking the kids."

But I could go on about the Democratic Party's past failures for a long time. A better thing to focus on when attempting to persuade Democrats to leave their party is what I believe the future holds for it-and for the future of our chances of replacing it with something better.

What's important to first establish is just how bad a position the Democratic Party is in. The party's crushing electoral losses on November 8 did not just have to do with the routine phenomenon of a party experiencing defeats after eight years of holding the presidency; what the Democrats are experiencing is a once-in-a-century political event that threatens to ruin its future as a major party.

I believe Democrats are in such a crisis not just because they haven't been this diminished electorally since 1928, but because they are, as Bernie Sanders, once said, ideologically bankrupt. And in turn, they're also well on their way to going bankrupt in terms of support. As we've seen time and time again, in the instances of elections from 1994 to 2010 to 2016, Democrats tend to lose when they pivot towards big business interests, because that is not a good way to rally their base. The majority of Democrats, like the majority of Americans, are opposed to the amount of power that corporations hold over society, and after forty years of working to uphold the current economic order, the Democratic Party has dug itself into a political ditch.

Anyone who acknowledges the largely anti-neoliberal nature of the American electorate should have no problem understanding why the Democratic Party isn't doing well. And if current indications are correct, its problems will not end here.

As I elaborated on in a previous article, the approach of trying to reform the Democratic Party is not as easy as its advocates prefer to admit. What has become especially apparent this year with the blatant efforts from Democratic leaders to undermine Bernie Sanders' campaign is that the neoliberal wing of the party has many devices in place to protect its organization from reform. And even as a great deal of progressive activists aim to change it, though I don't doubt they'll make some progress, given the change-resistance nature of the Democratic Party, there's little chance that it will be sufficiently reformed in time for the extremely important 2020 election.

And that obstacle to reforming the party may well prove to be the final nail in its coffin. After forty years of increased economic exploitation, the public's patience for neoliberalism has grown very thin, and unless major changes soon occur within the Democratic Party, it will doubtless become diminished to near irrelevance. Even Robert Reich, who is currently working to reform the party, has written that if Democrats don't manage to remake themselves into something capable of systemic change, they will "be supplanted by another organization."

What I think Reich is wrong about, though, is what kind of organization should replace the Democratic Party in the event that it collapses. While he wants an alternative political organization that operates outside of the electoral process (as do I), he's said that he doesn't advocate for a third party because he's worried that doing so would help elect more Republicans through the spoiler effect.

I'd say his fear is mistaken. The Democratic Party, as he's made the case for, will likely become irrelevant if it continues on its current path, which means that if a third party arises, it will only be at odds with the Democrats for a brief period of time. After that, the Democratic Party will have become the smaller entity and thus their roles will be reversed.

And if current trends continue, such a political event is already on its way. While the Democratic Party has suffered historic losses in 2016, the Green Party, which will likely be the form that this third party takes, has achieved significant gains. Though the party's presidential nominee Jill Stein only received 1% of the vote, she was the most successful Green candidate of all time in that she was able to gather enough signatures to achieve the highest ever levels of Green ballot access. The party also gained future ballot access for state-level Green candidates in Pennsylvania and Missouri, as well as grew their number of officeholders  from 86 before the election to 139 afterwards.

Especially after what happened this year, a great deal of self-identified Democrats, like most Americans, feel that neither major party represents their interests. But thanks to Donald Trump, Democratic leaders have an opportunity to use fear tactics to retain the loyalty of their base. If you are a Democrat who's disillusioned with your party but feels hesitant to leave it, I hope I've been able to convince you that no risk comes with seeking an alternative option.

The hull of the ship which is the Democratic Party has been damaged quite possibly beyond repair, and the time has come to abandon it.

The Perils Of Remaining Loyal To The Democratic Party

For many people, the time between the end of the 2016 Democratic primaries on June 7 and when Bernie Sanders all but formally ended his campaign on July 12 by endorsing Hillary Clinton was a moment when they faced decisions which would define their character. The dilemma of Sanders supporters was whether to start supporting Clinton or to try to continue fighting for their candidate's nomination (which, for at least a time, was worth a shot). But despite the fact that the results of the primaries were utterly fraudulent, the media, the Democratic establishment, and Clinton's supporters agreed that she had won the nomination, which presented them with a different kind of character test.

Theirs was a position of illegitimate, but widely accepted, victory. And how they acted towards their candidate's former challenger and his supporters during this moment of advantage would say everything about what kinds of people they were. According to Shane Ryan in his June 29 piece The Psychology of Why Hillary Clinton Supporters are Still So Angry at Bernie Sanders, the majority of them behaved just as immaturely in such a situation as the title implies. After giving some examples of pro-Clinton pundits expressing disdain for Sanders because of his momentary refusal to concede, Shane talks about the mentality among Clinton's supporters:

Now, getting past the mainstream media minds, there’s the widespread anger among her supporters on social media, the lesser blogs, and IRL at Bernie’s actions. They use the same arguments—why can’t the arrogant loser accept that he lost?—and fail to understand how he’s maximizing his leverage while he’s still got it, which won’t be for long. They also fail to understand that the slow negotiations [a reference to Sanders' attempts to influence the Democratic platform] actually make it more likely that his supporters will come around, since he’s creating the perception that Clinton has to “earn” his vote.

The reasons he gives for why they refused to give Sanders any credit or respect even though they no longer perceived him as a threat can be described as follows: in spite of largely holding progressive views on the economy, foreign policy, and other issues that Hillary Clinton is in a lot of ways a Republican on, Clinton's supporters chose her because of identity politics relating to her gender and her superficial "progressive" image. But as Bernie Sanders challenged their comfortable assumptions with his exposing of Clinton's ideological inconsistencies, their only logical (or, actually, illogical) response was to accuse Sanders of being the source of their discomfort instead of facing their own mistakes.

This wasn't just a failure among them to express humility, though, but a sign of something far more troubling.

The Democratic electorate, including those who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, is overwhelmingly left-wing, with more Democrats than ever identifying as liberals, more than 80% of them thinking that the wealth distribution is unfair, over 70% of them wanting a single-payer universal health care system, and far more of them than Republicans or independents thinking that withdrawing from Iraq in 2011 was a good idea. Though some try to de-emphasize how progressive the party's base is, the polls-and the fact that Democratic candidates tend to lose elections when they move right-prove that Democrats are generally very far to the left.

But if one pays much attention to what the Democratic Party actually stands for, they find that its actions do not match up with the wishes of its supporters. Its leadership, under the control of wealthy oligarchs, is unwilling to pass the systemic economic reforms needed to reverse income inequality, as demonstrated in how it's increased under Obama's policies. The necessary (and completely realistic) idea of universal health care is rejected by the Democratic establishment in favor of the costly, profit-based system which is the so-called Affordable Care Act. And most notable among these and other key issues that Democratic leaders lean right on is foreign policy, which they've taken a highly militaristic approach on in the past few years.

And increasingly, Democrats are waking up to these ideological inconsistencies. The Democrats who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries-which make up half of the party, according to Sanders' polling history-are largely seeking to distance themselves from the organization after it sabotaged their candidate, as reflected in their "Demexit" movement. This is just the latest part of the exodus from the Democratic Party that's taken place among progressives in recent years, illustrated in how Democrats made up 35% of the electorate in 2008 but now make up only 29% of it. This means that since the start of Obama's presidency, his party has diminished by over 17%, a number that's sure to keep going up as the left continues to be alienated by Democrats in the years to come. This could easily lead to the rise of a populist third party post-2016 which overtakes both Democrats and Republicans.

I'm confident that as Bernie Sanders' Democrats abandon the party and join the already vast population of independents, they'll have an excellent opportunity to advance progressive goals. What worries me is what will become of Hillary Clinton's Democrats, who are certain to remain in it.

As was illustrated in that account of Clinton supporter's behavior after the primaries ended, they tend to twist themselves into increasingly complicated logical knots when they'd rather not admit that they're wrong about their candidate and their party representing progressive values. The more corrupt their party becomes, the more otherwise inexcusable actions they condone by continuing to make excuses for it; "everything is morally relative to Clinton supporters," writes HA Goodman. "If Bill and Hillary Clinton receive $153 million from Wall Street since 2001, then it’s viewed as money to battle Republicans. If Clinton voted for Iraq, or was Secretary of State during Obama’s worst mistake of his presidency, then attention shifts to future Supreme Court nominees."

And as the Democratic Party itself remains an institution which represents such values without any hope of reforming it, the progressive views which its loyalists largely hold could shift to the right as well.

If the idea of Democrats doing an ideological 180 doesn't sound believable, consider the history of the Republican Party. Though Republicans seem to have always had some hostility towards what they consider reckless government spending, for a time they were actually the more liberal party. As we all know, their very origins involve the abolitionist movement, which meant that at one point Democrats, not Republicans, were the ones with race war-advocating militia members and secessionists in their ranks. Under Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans became the party of environmental protection-a position that they maintained for a long time afterwards, as was made apparent in Richard Nixon's similarly green policies. They were even more economically populist than the Democrats for some time as well, with Roosevelt breaking much of the power that large corporations held over the economy during the 1900's.

But then, of course, came the Republicans' fall from grace. Because Republicans did little else to help racial progress after ending slavery, Democrats eventually became the party of marginalized groups. Starting in the 1920's, Republican leaders shifted their agenda away from that of Roosevelt and adopted the same pro-big business, "small government" rhetoric that they've used ever since. And after the end of the Cold War, Republican leaders decided to start mobilizing their base with outrage towards environmental regulation rather than communism, effectively reversing the roles of conservatives and liberals as the party that cared about ecology. Then followed the Republican Party's descent into the kind of anti-intellectualism and divisive rhetoric which helped produce Donald Trump.

In short, during the past century or so, Republicans went from the relatively left-wing party to one who's current presidential nominee advocates barring Muslims from entering the country. The main reason the Republican electorate is more conservative, it seems, is because their party leadership's lurch to the right began several generations ago. And though the Democrats have only been on such a path for about one generation, beginning with the centrist shift that took place in the party during the 1980's and 90's, there are signs that the Democratic electorate itself is starting to become more aligned with the beliefs of their representatives.

In May, columnist Lucy Steigerwald assessed the eagerness among Clinton Democrats to excuse her foreign policy record-and thus their eagerness to embrace war in general:

Clinton also has the nomination because war doesn’t bother Democrats. They like to think it does, when they remember it exists, but they will risk no political capital whatsoever on making sure it stops, or making sure a warmongering candidate isn’t nominated or elected.

During the last few decades, any semblance of an antiwar movement has withered under Democratic presidents. Not since “hey/hey/LBJ/how many kids did you kill today?” has a warmonger from the left side of the isle provoked ire. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have much blood on their hands, but not enough to push people into the streets. There are encouraging exceptions, as there are to all rules. Code Pink and other activist groups come out and protest Democrats, and don’t seem to have any plans to stop. However, it seems the anti-Iraq, antiwar movement of the early 21st century was a Dubya blip and nothing more. Part of that may be the public’s feeble attention span for atrocities far away. But it certainly appears that another aspect is that polite Democratic wars are easier to accept than grand Republican ones. Even if they both lead to the deaths of innocent people.

This disturbing trend towards hawkishness among Clinton Democrats can also be illustrated by how, during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, General John Allen's aggressively pro-war speech was met with enthusiasm from most of the Clinton delegates. It's just one incident, but it seems to reflect how much the group is being influenced by the rhetoric of their leaders.

Though foreign policy is the main issue which the Democratic base is being pushed to the right on, trade seems to be not far behind; though Americans are largely hostile towards anti-worker trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, polls indicate that supporters of Clinton (who supports the TPP) are generally in favor of them more than others. Just as troubling is how Democratic leaders, whose embrace of money in politics and Citizens United should be regarded by the party's base as clear evidence that their leaders are on the side of the oligarchs, is largely being written off as acceptable on the grounds of "pragmatism."

This rightward shift among Clinton supporters and supporters of the Democratic establishment in general was assessed by Walter Bragman in his piece Hillary Clinton's Democrats are America's Next Republicans:

They’ve been called the “post-hope” Democrats by Jacobin Magazine, but a more accurate term for many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters would be “New Republicans.” After the primary, and several more election cycles, these voters will likely end up representing America’s conservative party.

Hillary’s Democrats tend to be older and more affluent. Many have decidedly negative views of Bernie Sanders, and the kind of economic populism he is promoting. Not only are they turned off by his class-driven rhetoric — viewing it as too radical, divisive, and disruptive — they are also wary of too much government action. Clinton’s Democrats, consciously or otherwise, hold to some of the main tenets of the Reagan Revolution.

That said, these are not the New Democrats of the 1990’s, though that is where their roots are planted. Socially, they identify as progressives — hypersensitive to privilege and prejudice — but outside those issues, their ideology rests on the belief that nuance dictates moral ambiguity, and is beyond the understanding of common folk. Such sentiment gives deference to authority, and assumes that every side must have a valid argument in the face of impenetrable complexity.

As I said, these people do not represent the future of American politics. Outside of this insulated, diminishing group of largely older, upper-class Democratic loyalists, the political environment is changing, with millennials set to dominate the electorate in time for the next election amid extreme levels of income inequality-the latter factor being historically proven to result in populist uprisings. But despite all of these things, the damage to those already enamored with the Democratic establishment has already been done.

The Democratic Party's Demise Began Long Before Obama

This year will be the last wherein Shaun King plans to remain a registered Democrat. He announced his decision to abandon ship this May, when it was becoming apparent that the Democratic primaries had been stacked against Bernie Sanders too much for him to go into the convention with the majority of delegates. The reasons he gave for doing so, though, were bigger than him simply being disappointed with the results of an election; "Right now, the Democratic Party, which I have called home my entire life," King wrote, "is deeply in love with money. Consequently, its leaders have supported and advanced all kinds of evil, big and small, in devotion to this love affair."

I'm not the only one who agrees with him. Prior to this year's movement among many other Sanders supporters to leave the party after what its leaders in both the top and the lower levels did to undermine democracy, Democratic membership has been in free fall since 2009, with their numbers having dropped by 6% since then and independent identification having soared. This is no doubt the consequence of the fact that, despite the overwhelming public opposition towards corporate power in the midst of record income inequality, Obama and the rest of the Democratic elite have very much failed the poor by passing Wall Street bailouts, anti-worker "free trade" deals, a profit-based health care plan, and even cuts to the social welfare system. King and the millions of others who have left the party in recent years are right to think that the Democrats do not represent the interests of the people.

But the Democratic Party's abandonment of its base, and its base's abandoning of it, has been going on for a lot longer than seven years.

Though Democratic membership dropped and rose many times prior to 2009, there's another, perhaps even more important, way of determining a party's success: how many state legislatures its members hold. And according to this Washington Post chart from last year, when examining the recent history of that factor, a striking decline for the Democrats is noticeable.

This decline can partly be attributed to the rightward shift that occurred in American politics and culture during the 1980's, but a factor that can't be ignored is how this was when Democrats began to shift to the right themselves.

As I talked about in my last article, after Carter lost, Democrats began to shift their economic agenda towards something more elitist, letting Reagan pass his upper-class tax cuts and business deregulations despite holding the majority in Congress throughout his entire presidency. And though these things evidently drove away parts of their leftist base, causing them to lose some of their former hold on the majority in state legislatures, this was only the beginning of their fall.

As you can see, Democrats saw a drop during the mid 90's that ended their half-century period of electoral dominance. After the party's drastic pivot to the right in the 1992 election, they lost the Senate and the House in 1994. Again, while that wasn't the only factor that caused the Democrats to lose, it very much played a role.

And then came the 2000 election, wherein Ralph Nader revealed to many the hypocrisy and corruption of the Democratic Party as it had come to be. This contributed to their loss of the House that year, and their loss of both the House and the Senate in 2004. While the public's overwhelming disgust with the Bush Administration during the end of his term bought Democrats four brief years of hope with their taking back the legislative majority in 2006 and 2008, their refusal to move away from the right as their base was moving increasingly to the left has since caused that trend to be reversed.

While the dirty tactics that Republicans have employed in recent years such as voter suppression and gerrymandering have played a large part in the Democrats' decline since 2008, the evidence is undeniable: Democrats have been sowing their own gradual doom for the past thirty-five years or so by shifting to the right and creating voter apathy among their base.

And as this phenomenon is expected to continue in this and future elections, which will make America more vulnerable to being taken over by the dark, neo-fascist brand of populism that the Republican Party is becoming a vessel for, the solution is clear: scrap the unreformable Democratic Party and work towards the rise of a third party for the left. The Democratic ship has been sinking for decades, and when it finally goes under in the next few years, we'll need to find another one, or drown.

The Fascism Of The Democratic Party

Now that I've drawn you in with that headline, I'd like to be clear that I'm choosing to describe the Democratic Party in such a way out of complete seriousness.

The type of fascism I'm going to be analyzing, though, is not the classic brand of dictatorial nationalism utilized by the likes of Donald Trump, as that would indeed be hyperbole. The fascist governing model that I'm going to discuss, which I think every self-identified Democrat should be aware of, involves not reactionary demagoguery but something called "inverted totalitarianism."

Before I explain what that is, let's take a look at the current state of America. Since 1978, income inequality in the U.S. has been steadily increasing. During that year, the top 0.1% of the population owned a mere 7% of the nation's new income, and today that number is 22%. As a result, half of the American population is under the poverty line, nine to twelve percent of Americans are unemployed, and nearly half of Americans are living on some kind of government assistance. 

The factors that caused this are no accident. During the past forty years, free trade deals, upper-income tax cuts, and business deregulation have worked to redistribute a possibly unprecedented amount of wealth towards the top. The same is true for the unstable geopolitical situation in the middle east, and the staggering amounts of resources that the U.S. military uses to try to control it; the government itself has brought about these affairs, all in order to serve its governing partners in big oil and the weapons industry. The collusion between corporation and state is behind most of the other problems our country is facing, from climate change to the health care crisis to, naturally, the dismantling of American democracy itself.

Though some have differing views on the exact cause of this crisis for liberty in America, pretty much everyone is aware of it. 71% of Americans feel the economy is not working fairly for them, just 19% think they can trust their government all or most of the time, and 65% believe the country is on the wrong track.

And yet, even as the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize corporate power to be the cause of their problems, Democrats, the party which always tries to represent itself as the solution to the issues mentioned above, are failing to sufficiently address them.

They used to be such an institution, but after the reformation of it that occurred during the 1980's and 90's, as Robert Dreyfuss explained in 2001, "Today is not your father's Democratic Party." In spite of recent victories for genuinely populist Democrats who seek to move it back to its roots, the party is deeply corrupted by corporate interests. This is a party who's top contributors in recent years have included Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, and other major entities that are known for typically backing Republicans. This is a party which has gone so far to the right that it's actually trying to reach out to Republican leaders and voters. This is a party who's top officials actively worked this year to undemocratically nominate Hillary Clinton-someone who's foreign policy approach may be more hawkish than that of many Republicans, who's record on trade consistently contradicts the promises she's made to protect workers, and who's ties to Wall Street do the same.

The problem, though, is not that the Democratic Party is corrupt. It's that its base doesn't care.

As I discussed in my previous article, thanks to the increased corporate control over the media and the educational system that occurred during the 1980's, most young people, progressives, and independents became disengaged with the political process, which allowed the appalling neoliberalism of the Clintons and their changed Democratic Party to go largely unscrutinized by the populous. What I didn't mention was that such a political dynamic has a name which you may be able to guess: inverted totalitarianism.

This term, coined by the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, is meant to describe an oligarchical system wherein the citizenry, kept relatively unexposed to the source of their oppression, believe to be living in a democracy. I'm sure it comes as no surprise for you when I conclude that America is such a society. Indeed, as Chris Hedges assesses in his essay on Wolin's worldview, "Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent."

The Democratic Party perfectly fits this model. Though given the events of this year's Democratic primaries, the apathy among the electorate that we saw in the 90's has largely disappeared, the Democratic leadership continues to use inverted totalitarianism as a way to hold onto support. It's become clear in recent years that Democratic voters are more progressive than ever, with the majority of them identifying as liberal rather than the once-popular "moderate." Additionally, 60% of them want to break up the large financial institutions, over 75% want a single-payer health care system, and 86% think that the wealth should be more equally distributed. These and other statistics serve as proof that the Democratic electorate overwhelmingly desires to end corporate rule. And yet, because of the subtle propaganda that inverted totalitarianism employs, they continue to prop up an entity whose goals are essentially opposite to theirs.

In other words, Democrats are being asked to pledge allegiance to a system which works against their interests, which is a clear (if not, as I said, classical) sign of fascism.

And if this continues, the nation will pay an ironic price: the implementation of the other type of fascism.

The embodiment of Democratic fascism Hillary Clinton, in spite of experiencing a setback in the polls in recent weeks, has begun to regain her edge over Trump according to the latest poll. But even if she manages to win this year against the current manifestation of the neo-fascist movement that her neoliberal policies have created, she'll only be facing a new version of Trump in four years. Either way, as the pivotal 2020 election approaches, Americans will be faced with the challenge of defeating a very dangerous politician who uses the degenerate populism of the far-right to their advantage. And given how the Democratic Party will be greatly diminished by then, along with how it will be unable to energize its former base, the incumbent President Clinton or whichever other Democrat running in 2020 will be no match for this candidate.

Fascism cannot win against fascism. Evil cannot beat evil. We must build a genuinely progressive alternative to the Democrats before the next election cycle, or inverted totalitarianism will give way to something even worse.

Yes, It Is Time To Leave The Democratic Party

In a Salon article titled "Bernie's big lesson: Socialists should occupy the Democratic Party, not abandon it," optimistic person Daniel Denvir makes an argument for propping up the DNC that appears perfectly sound if you take it at face value. He dismisses Jill Stein's pleas for building another party for the 99%, saying that Bernie Sanders' unexpected success proves we can turn the Democrats into such an organization. He's convinced that with just a little more patience and work within the party, it can be reformed.

There are three good reasons that that approach is wrong.

1: The party can't be reformed by trying to beat it at its own game

Though Denvir acknowledges that the Democratic electoral system is rigged, he misrepresents just how corrupt it is. He argues, "Let’s not give Debbie Wasserman Schultz more credit than she’s due: the leaked DNC emails reflect sad griping more than coherent conspiracy. Though the debate schedule was stacked against Sanders, Clinton simply won more votes, which means the left, despite historic gains, still has more work to do to win majority support."

They did a lot more than manipulate the debate schedule.


Aside from the lack of media coverage making things harder for the Sanders campaign, as well as Hillary Clinton's inherent advantage in name recognition alone, there is no question that the DNC played a large role in his loss. And I'm not just talking about the voter suppression in Arizona, New York, Puerto Rico, as well as my home state California along with numerous others, or the untold millions of political independents who were excluded from voting in the primaries, or even the 84.3% of eligible voters who were either unable or discouraged from participating in the process.

Even after you discount all of the factors that make the results of the primary seem implausible from any reasonable standpoint, there is undeniable evidence that the Democratic leadership manipulated the vote.

The next paragraph may look like wishful thinking to someone who doesn't understand its context, so I recommend you first read this article and this article. But omitting the long explanation beforehand that's included within those links, I present to you a line from math genius Richard Charnin which summarizes all the reasons why Sanders rightfully won the primary:

It is important to note that Sanders’ exit poll share exceeded his
1) recorded share  in 24 of the 26 primaries. The probability is 1 in 190,000.  
2) recorded share by greater than the margin of error in 11 primaries. The probability is 1 in 77 billion. 
Is the exit poll shift to Clinton just pure luck? Or is something else going on?
TRUE VOTE MODEL BASE CASE ASSUMPTIONS
1.Sanders won the caucuses with 63.9% 
2.  10% of voters  were disenfranchised  (voter rolls, provisional ballots, etc.) .
3. Sanders won 70% of uncounted votes 
4. 15% of Sanders’ votes flipped to Clinton.

After adding that to the official primary results of Sanders having won 45.7%, of the votes, it shifts to him having actually won 52% of them. (Note: though it's not certain that Charnin's estimate of 70% of the manipulated votes are for Bernie Sanders is accurate, since the DNC singled out Sanders voters for disenfranchisement, it's clear that at least 50% of them are for Sanders, making his victory mathematically obvious.)

It may not be as dramatic or easy to prove as Bush v. Gore or other stolen elections, but the fact remains that the people have not been represented in this primary because of the DNC. Therefore, voters have every reason to believe that if they try to "reform the system" with their votes, as long as the process is controlled by party bosses who are beholden to the interests of their donors from above, it will simply not be possible.

This unfortunate truth can be likened to that picture on the top of Democratic National Convention protestors at the gates of the fence that was built around the Wells Fargo Center in July; they're trying to get the  superdelegates to nominate Bernie Sanders and change the party for the better, but they'll never be able to get inside both the misled minds of the Democratic elites, or the wall that's keeping them out.

Even so, people like Denvir might think, this doesn't mean the powers that currently run the party are immovable. Surely, even with such manipulations currently taking place, no institution is inherently resistant to change-just look at all of the Berniecrats that are succeeding this year.

There's a problem with that too.

Of course, it's not impossible in every case for genuine progressives to win elected positions within the Democratic Party. The primaries take place over several months and involve many different contests, making them easy for the DNC to influence in that since the results are determined through such a broad means, no one can find a simple way to dispute the results. The state and local-level contests that are fought for lesser positions than the presidency are almost always run fairly, because since they take place in one day, it would be a lot harder for the party to manipulate them without being inescapably caught doing so.

But there is another, larger obstacle to reforming the Democratic Party: no matter how many progressive Democrats hold positions other than the presidency, they will always be forced to support the more powerful forces in the party.

Though presidents and presidential nominees don't hold all of the power, they're key players in the DNC's game; first of all, no matter how progressive any politician is, as long as they're members of the Democratic Party, they will have to support its presidential  nominee, who, as this primary has made clear, will always be beholden to the corporate and banking interests. Second of all, even if genuine progressives take control over the other branches of government than the presidency, any actual progress will be prevented by the president's veto power. And third of all, as we've seen at this year's Democratic convention, the DNC has made it clear that they'll always find ways to keep progressives in their place during the presidential nominating process, and therefore in any other case where it will have the ability to do so.

"The establishment," says Denvir, "awash in corporate money and snarky emails, is neither omnipotent nor cunning. It is feckless." Though part of that may be true, as the Democrats are not exactly a tightly-run cabal ruled over by calculating masterminds, they've developed a nearly foolproof method for stopping change. And even with the best efforts from liberal activists, we won't truly see reform of it any time soon.

2: The party won't be reformed

That can't be the end of it, though; the Democratic Party is an organization, not a person, and it's not inherently incompatible with the influence of the people. Eventually, with enough determination, change can be achieved.

The question, though, is not whether reform is possible; of course it is. The question is whether reform is likely to take place, and the answer to that has already come.

The reality is that it's simply too late for the Democratic Party. The combined electoral majority of young, far-left, and independent voters that it needs to survive have given up on it for good after what's happened this year, and if it has any chance of changing in a way that brings them back, because of them that will never happen. The corruption runs so deep that such a radical shift would take at least two election cycles at the very least, and  the historical trends from before the "Demexit" movement even started show that Democrats are on their way to becoming irrelevant, or at least severely weakened, well before then.

The Democratic Party is a ship that's sinking rapidly, and no amount of attempting to repair its damaged hull can save it from going under.

And as anyone who isn't completely beholden to it can see, that's a good thing.

3: We shouldn't try to reform the party

After considering those first two reasons, another fact becomes clear: the world can't afford to invest itself in the possibility of changing the Democratic Party. The climate is rapidly deteriorating, and the level of economic inequality and corporate control over politics has reached a formidable level. If the two-party system is allowed to continue, if any action is taken on these issues, it will happen sooner than later, and by then it will be too late. We need profound, almost immediate governmental reform if we are serious about solving our problems, and that cannot happen if we're tied down to an almost incurably corrupt and rigid political institution.


And what Denvir is most wrong about is that such reform is possible. Though he acknowledges that more radical organizations should be maintained outside of the DNC on at least local levels, his rationale ultimately falls into the old Democratic defense that a serious alternative shouldn't be considered, as doing so would be joining a minority group with no hope of winning. That may have been true in recent history, but much of the country has woken up to the possibility that third parties can win if they support them, and soon enough, an electoral tipping point will be reached.

I'm going to conclude this with a story from this year's Democratic convention. In her acceptance speech for the nomination, Hillary Clinton included a historical anecdote so appropriate for the moment that it had to have been mentioned because of it:

My friends, we've come to Philadelphia – the birthplace of our nation – because what happened in this city 240 years ago still has something to teach us today.
We all know the story.
But we usually focus on how it turned out - and not enough on how close that story came to never being written at all.
When representatives from 13 unruly colonies met just down the road from here, some wanted to stick with the King.
Some wanted to stick it to the king, and go their own way.
The revolution hung in the balance.
Then somehow they began listening to each other … compromising … finding common purpose.
And by the time they left Philadelphia, they had begun to see themselves as one nation.

This was most likely an attempt to assess the current situation of her own supporters, who wanted to stick with the king, and the Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted to stick it to the king. It's a clever analogy, but her saying it is ironic, because when those revolutionaries were faced with the choice between remaining with the oppressive establishment and breaking from it, we all know what they did.

Face It, The American Party System Is A Form Of Divide And rule

For me to explain that there's a partisan divide in this country is almost an insult to the reader's knowledge of politics. As of this year, possibly because of the two contemptible presidential nominees that Republicans and Democrats have acquired, the majority in both parties hold a highly unfavorable view of the other group. Outright fear of the other side is at 49% among Republicans and 55% among Democrats. The number of Republicans who cite the policies of the other party being destructive as a "major reason" for their affiliation is 55%, and Democrats aren't far behind at 51%.

We can talk about division between the two all day. But what, exactly, are they fighting over?

The reason seems clear: they disagree with each other on an almost fundamental level. And at least generally speaking, the worldviews of the two groups do indeed differ greatly. The main problem with the American party system, though, is bigger than that of the Democrats not representing the populist interests of its base; it's that because of the highly competitive attitudes between the two parties, Americans from both groups are being manipulated into supporting the status quo.

Though most Democrats and Republicans of course have favorable views of their parties, the sad irony is that their main reason for supporting them has little to do with actually liking their party's goals. Continuing the statistics from the first paragraph, just 30% of those in the GOP say that its policies are a major reason for their support of it, and that number for the Democrats is 34%. This underscores an uncomfortable truth: many Americans affiliate with certain political groups simply because they see the alternative as intolerably worse.

The only real differences between the two parties, which they both use to make themselves seem appealing, are the ones that have nothing to do with the larger issues of neoliberalism and oligarchy; gun control, abortion, gay marriage, and other such areas of debate. These (relatively) inconsequential but deeply dividing subjects are what made the religious right strongly on the side of the Republicans, and what keeps most women, LGBTQ individuals, and other disadvantaged groups on the side of the Democrats.

Despite their different ideological approaches, most self-identified liberals and conservatives alike want the economy to be stronger, money out of politics, and their own interests secure. During the formation of the modern two-party system, though, non-elite conservatives were misled into supporting an economic system that favors those on top with promises from Republican leaders to protect their traditional values, and liberals of a similar position were duped into supporting a party that favors the same economic system with the promise of helping socially progressive goals. This is somewhat of an oversimplification, and sadly there are many in these two groups that still believe their parties care about their financial well-being, but this is a short explanation of the methods these two institutions have used to build their support.

The result of this dynamic can best be summed up by Philip of Macedonia in his term "Divide and rule;" in this case, the ruling corporate powers are in control of both main political groups from behind the scenes, and the people, who are enamored with the groups they choose to identify with, are kept preoccupied with fighting each other instead of uniting against their true enemy.

It's a shameless and manipulative strategy. But I'm sad to say it's worked on us, and for a long time now. However, the one flaw in this game is that sooner or later, it reaches a breaking point, and that's happened this year. The divisive and irrational rhetoric that Republican elites have used to keep their support, along with the economically damaging policies they've pursued, has produced Donald Trump, a semi-fascist demagogue who's driving more and more people away from the party. (Though their main problem is even bigger than Trump.) And on the Democratic side, the refusal of party leaders to allow an insurgent candidate a fair chance or change their message and agenda in a way that serves populist interests is once again costing them an invaluable demographic in a realignment that I expect will do them in for good.

Indeed, the only card the two parties have left to play at this point is the one they've always been playing, which is fear of the other side. In the case of Trump's bigotry and hatred, some of that fear may be legitimate, but whoever you think is worth voting for this year, after this little charade is over the country will be able to move on.

Though partisan animosity is unlikely to cool down among Democrats and Republicans, soon there won't be enough support within the two groups to make that relevant. People are walking away from this tiresome game of fighting the other side in the hopes that it will solve the country's problems, and never seeing anything being solved regardless. There's no telling exactly what the political landscape will look like after the two major parties lose their dominance, but when Americans are freed from them, whatever happens, unity, not polarization, will be what defines us.

A Message For Jill Stein And The Green Party

Well isn't this interesting. Thirteen months ago we all thought that this would be the most change-free election cycle of all the other change-free elections before it, with the two modern incarnations of past change-free politicians Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush competing for who could enact the least change. And then a series of plot twists appeared that turned it into what appears to be the opportunity for a revolution.

And not just the revolution of social, economic and environmental justice that we've been pushing for for so long, but one of regression and irrationality. Had Bernie Sanders been nominated, Donald Trump's chances would be virtually ruined, but the Democratic leadership refused to play fair, and though this may well soon destroy the party of fake liberalism, this has greatly increased the danger of us having a president that's not too dissimilar to Hitler.

Some background on who's writing to you: at some point in the past year, I emotionally invested myself in the Bernie Sanders campaign. I thought that everything hinged on him winning, and it was very dismaying for me to see the endless efforts from the media to convince me that he had no chance. And though I soon learned to ignore their propaganda, as the primaries went on, it really started to look that way.

But as I continued to examine the political situation, which I had never done too closely before, I started to see signs of hope that no events in any election could discourage; the number of political Independents was at an unprecedented high, public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of environmental protection, wealth redistribution and social equality, and these appallingly rigged primaries would only speed up the inevitable revolution to come.

And so when Sanders prematurely endorsed his opponent, I was completely undeterred. I shrugged it off, kept on fighting, and immediately dedicated myself to aiding the rise of the populist third party that the country so desperately wanted and needed.

And that's where you come in. To ask you to win this year would be unreasonable, but at this point there's nothing the establishment can do to stop your momentum in future election cycles.

So as the slogan goes, it's in your hands. You are what will decide this election, and most likely a lot of elections beyond it. The major media and the powers that control them are ignoring the profound shift that's happening in your favor, and they'll fight you every step of the way, but I know that you'll be able to overcome whatever obstacles they put in front of you. These are just a few words of encouragement from someone who's been on the front lines of this movement; things are changing, and I refuse to give up now after we've come so far. The future belongs to you, and all that needs to happen now is for it to arrive.

The Case Against The Democratic Party

The scene during Hillary Clinton's infamous "white noise" incident.

It was April 9, 2016. Hillary Clinton was holding an outdoor fundraising event at the house of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. As the Democratic icon talked to the group of government and big business insiders, for some reason, the reporters couldn't hear a thing she said despite being within ear shot.

This was because she and her associates wanted the words spoken there to heard by themselves alone, and had installed white noise machines around the event.

In a democratic society, this story would make every average citizen in the country deeply suspicious; why would you go out of your way to conceal the words of a speech from the public, especially one being given to such powerful individuals? Come to think of it, why would you associate with such types in the first place?

But this is not a democratic society, because human beings are not born with Democratic values. They are born with tribal values, which means that when someone that identifies with their group violates the group's rules, their first reaction is not to turn against the traitor but to try to excuse their behavior.

If you're a Democrat who is proud to be affiliated with your party, I can guess your thoughts when coming across this article; I'm dissatisfied with my only option. I'm not scared enough of the Republicans to want to unite with you. I'm acting like the mistakes that the Democrats have made define the party in general.

Well, let's take a good look at those "mistakes."

When I say that the Democratic Party is not a force for good, I'm not talking about the party that started social security, or put a maximum 90% tax rate on the wealthiest of citizens, or fought for civil rights. I'm not talking about the Democratic Party that started and helped prolong the war in Vietnam, either, because for better or for worse, those eras are too far back for us to call it the party as it currently exists. A good place to start is in November 1991, when Wal Mart founder Sam Walton sent out a memo to all of his corporate managers to donate to Bill Clinton's campaign.

Walton was planning on voting for Bush in the general election, but he had singled out who he wanted the Democrats to nominate. The political system was already very much influenced by corporate donors, of course, but while it didn't seem like it at the time, Clinton was the choice that would advance that influence the most.

After saying at the Democratic National Convention "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time is up," Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. In case you're wondering, this was a huge deal, both literally and figuratively. It allowed companies in Canada and the U.S. to export their labor to Mexico where the minimum wage is far lower, which since then has cost nearly 700,000 jobs.

And then, of course, came the advancement of the war on drugs, and then so-called welfare reform, and then catastrophic deregulation of Wall Street, and much more. But you can go to those links to read about those things, and I can go on forever about Bill and Hillary. The point is that for 25 years, they have helped make their party into something that no real liberal would ever want to support (Though it can't all be blamed on them).

Loyal Democrat, I hear your objection. You need to work with the opposition if you actually want to get things done. You can't expect too much from Democrats when they're under such fierce opposition.

And to an extent, I agree with you.


Fifty years ago, the political system was not nearly as dominated by big business interests. The political parties were less centralized and organized more by local members, making change easier. But as income inequality has increased, so has the wealthy elite's control over politics. And it's become very hard to pass meaningful reform. But the problem is that the Republicans are not are not the only ones who have been bought.

Democratic leaders like Harry Reid have of course tried to divert attention from their party's soft money connections, such as in 2014 when he more or less claimed that Democrats have no billionaire backers. This was debunked in a June 23, 2014 Politifact article:

We cross-checked the Open Secrets list of the top 100 individuals donating to outside spending groups in the current election against the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and found that, as of June 19, there were 22 individuals on the Open Secrets list who were billionaires. Of those 22 billionaires, 13 -- or more than half -- gave predominantly to liberal groups or groups affiliated with the Democratic Party. The other nine gave predominantly to conservative groups. (A list of billionaires and how much they donated can be found here.)

And while it is true that overall, Democratic politicians recieve less donations from special interests, that's beside the point. The point is that the political system has been bought out by the few, and the Democrats are very much part of that system-just look at how the DNC itself raises most of its money. If you believe that they care about the people, you need to ask yourself a few honest questions:

If they care about the people, why did they stand by as Bill Clinton did almost nothing but do the bidding of the banks and the corporations?

If they care about the people, why did they vote for the Patriot Act  almost identically with the Republicans in congress?

If they care about the people, why did 29 Democratic senators vote for the invasion of Iraq despite clear evidence that the WMD claims were false, making it a 77 to 23 decision in favor of the war instead of the 52 to 48 decision in favor of not starting it that would have come to be had all the Democrats done the right thing?

If they care about the people, why did they knowingly embrace a completely impractical and destructive Wall Street bailout while actually having to convince the Republicans in to agree with them?

If they care about the people, why did they fail to pass universal healthcare in 2010 despite having the majority in congress? (Just so you know, 33 million Americans are still without healthcare.)

If they care about the people, why did they propose to cut social security?

If they care about the people, why did they go out of their way for a pointless military intervention in Libya?

If they care about the people, why did they extend the Bush tax cuts?

If they care about the people, why are the vast majority of them determined to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

If they care about the people, why did they nominate for president someone who is funded by Wall Street, the Walton family, Monsanto, and prison lobbyists, pushed for the TPP dozens of times before claiming she was against it in addition to having supported every other right-wing policy that the Democratic party has embraced, and relied on voter suppression to win?

And finally, if the Democrats care about the people, why haven't they spent all these years fighting for reform like they actually mean it? Why haven't they tried to raise taxes on the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, expand health care and employee benefits, end the war on drugs, and regulate carbon consumption and unethical business practices, with real determination and persistence? The Republicans aren't the only reason America isn't the same as many other developed countries in it's distribution of wealth and welfare of the citizenry.

What you're surely thinking at this point, loyal Democrat, is that I'm not being reasonable. It doesn't work that way, your leaders have told you, and you can't expect too much change in such a change-resistant government.

I remember you saying a similar thing earlier, and my answer to that is to look at such a mindset more closely.

The so-called incremental method of progress, whether it's even being used as an excuse to push the party to the right or not, has proven time and time again to be ineffective. And the Affordable Care Act is no exception; Democrats had every opportunity to go much farther, and they didn't. The same is the case for every other inadequate step forward they've taken; when it's time to fight, for whatever reason, they always back down.

I'll leave Jacobin writer Matt Karp (in a quote from his piece Against Fortress Liberalism) to properly explain what I am saying, for risk of simply repeating his argument:

The simple truth is that virtually every significant and lasting progressive achievement of the past hundred years was achieved not by patient, responsible gradualism, but through brief flurries of bold action. The Second New Deal in 1935–36 and Civil Rights and the Great Society in 1964–65 are the outstanding examples, but the more ambiguous victories of the Obama era fit the pattern, too.
These reforms came in a larger political environment characterized by intense popular mobilization — the more intense the mobilization, the more meaningful the reform. And each of them was overseen by an unapologetically liberal president who hawked a sweeping agenda and rode it all the way to a landslide victory against a weakened right-wing opposition.

In short, the Democratic Party is not progressive, it is owned by corporations, and it has no excuse for not holding up to liberal goals.

And then comes the loyal Democrat's last ideological defense: "it's not like they're better than the Republicans. They don't blatantly and totally promote an agenda of greed, bigotry and war, and to stop supporting the Democrats is to help their truly awful opponents."

This is the one notion that's held back America's majority left-wing population from getting their way for many, many years. It's the idea that there is simply no way to change the party system, making the Democratic party our only alternative to outright madness. But once you look beyond the media propaganda, you see that the Democratic Party is just that: a party. People can leave it whenever they please, and the more people leave it the less relevant it gets. Democrats are already in fact a minority, with the most recent estimate putting it at 29% compared to Republican's 26%. That's 45% that affiliates with neither of these incurably corrupt institutions. And where this will have lead by the time Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump's first term is finished can only be imagined.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by putting the Democratic Party behind you and joining the real movement to put power back in the hands of the many. And if anyone tells you differently, it's just white noise.

Why The Revolution Won On Tuesday

So that's that. As of today, 2016 will officially be a race between the two most despised presidential nominees in American history. One is a consistently neoliberal and militaristic moderate conservative approved by Charles Koch and Dick Cheney that claims to be the best choice for the country's self-appointed liberal party, and the other is, well...you know enough about him.

The circumstances that made this possible are appropriately bizarre; one of these candidates won through manipulation of the electoral system like has never been seen before and outright defiance of the law, and the other one won legitimately, but through arguably even more unethical means.

But moving beyond the limited scope of presidential politics in the US, things aren't looking good. The climate continues to move towards catastrophic instability, with the majority of people in control of the government of the country that needs to address the problem most either adamant that it isn't an issue at all or convinced that it isn't too important an issue.

After a period of roughly forty years of tax reductions for the wealthy, free trade deals, nearly perpetual military efforts, and cutting of aid for the lower classes on the part of both parties, the legacy of the last Democratic Socialist Americans elected in 1932 has been effectively demolished. Even with the Affordable Care Act, 33 million Americans are living without health care. Any limits to the amount of influence the super-wealthy can have on the electoral system through campaign contributions are now irrelevant. Six major corporations control 90% of the media that Americans are exposed too. As of this month, income inequality in America has reached a point never before seen in the history of the country, with the top 0.1% owning as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. And worldwide, the top 0.1% own as much as the bottom 50% of the population, up from 40% ten years ago.

And aside from all that, there are things happening which uncomfortably resemble the state of the world in 1932; starting five years ago with President Assad's overly aggressive response to the Arab Spring uprisings, Syria's civil war, along with the war in Iraq caused by the rise of ISIS, 65 million people have been displaced worldwide. That's more refugees than at any point in history.

The way societies in North America and Europe are reacting to the influx of desperate people is equally disturbing, with millions of white, mainly poor or working class individuals in many countries accepting the nationalistic, xenophobic manipulations from Trump and others as a way out of their non-immigrant related problems. And whether such a degenerate brand of politics will come out on top this November in spite of the American electorate's increasingly remote resemblance of colonial times very much remains to be seen; Hillary Clinton has forever lost the respect and potential support of millions of voters, not just former Bernie Sanders supporters, who were appalled by the massive suppression of votes during the primaries and her legal invincibility. She needs those voters, and they're not going to help her when Trump starts to surpass her in important swing states and maybe even in national polls.

And meanwhile in the economy, there are strong signs that a recession is coming sometime this year. The confirmation of imminent disaster may have come on June 23, when Britain voted to leave the EU; the size of the eventual ramifications aren't clear, but the decision will very soon result in many investors around the world looking to their governments for financial support as the economy weakens. It was predicted on June 24 by Chris Hedges that this will lead to the Democratic Party being hurt in November. As it was in 2008, says Hedges, Republicans in the senate will reject any bailout of Wall Street because it's against the ideals of the free market, while the Democrats will ignore the objections of both the populists and the capitalists and help push for such an entitlement.

When this happened eight years ago, Obama's victory was all but guaranteed with his support for the bailout in September 2008 because of the awkward and incoherent way John McCain had objected to it during It's proposal on the senate floor. Should history repeat itself with another financial collapse, the exact opposite will occur this year. “The Democratic Party, by rescuing Wall Street,” wrote Hedges in his piece in Truthdig.com, “will be unmasked as the handmaidens of the financial elite.”

As 1932 more or less repeats itself, with the rise of reactionary politics and maybe even outright fascism in many parts of the world, economic catastrophe, and an environmental crisis to make the Dust Bowl seem minuscule, there will not be another FDR to become president and help fix things in the years to come. The state of our electoral and legal systems have changed too much since then, and we're just not going to get salvation that easily.

And so you all, of course, immediately know the reaction appropriate: laughter.

That's right, laugh at it all. Laugh at the media manipulation. Laugh at the DNC's deliberate limitations of the number of debates. Laugh at the voter fraud, voter exclusion, and refusal to count exit polls. Laugh at the contempt so many Democratic leaders have expressed for Bernie Sanders and his ideas. Laugh at the disregard for the law FBI director James Comey displayed in his dismissal of Hillary Clinton's obvious criminal activity. Laugh at every defender of the unjust system of the two pro-war, neoliberal parties, because what you've seen for the past year or so (or maybe decades farther back,) has been a big joke.

It was a joke whose punchline goes as follows: the fate of a country is not determined by what any kind of conventional wisdom imposed by the political and economic establishment says about how a certain person has “lost that election,” or how an idea “isn't realistic,” or how millions of people who are seeing the ruling class destroy their democracy and their planet should simply “fall in line” and allow the old paradigm of inequality, lack of accountability, and endless excuses to continue.

What happened in these past five-and-a-half months can most simply be described as a group of people, after being given a lot of money and power and other toys for adults, were confronted by the population that gave them these toys about their abuse of them. We tried to take their toys away, but they of course refused, and now it's time for them to face the consequences.

Inadvertently, through the last several decades, as the banks, the corporations and the politicians have carried on with their little game, the device that they use to control the world has grown weak. And it's about to get a lot weaker.

To bring up an almost obligatory subject when talking about American political revolutions, let us think back to the election of 2000. After eight years of a Democratic president that was called by Michael Moore “the best Republican president we've ever had,” politics had grown disturbingly tribal; despite all the evidence that Ralph Nader was vastly superior to Al Gore on progressive issues, most liberals saw him as an enemy, a benefit to Bush, a disturber of the peace, and even an extremist. Not everybody thought this, but the party's corporate masters very explicitly did, falsely accusing Nader of costing them the election and shutting him out of the audience of one of the presidential debates despite him having a ticket to it.

And they could do so from a comfortable perch, too; their pseudo-progressive party was currently enjoying the membership of 33% of the electorate, with 29% of the rest political Independents and 28% Republicans. With support like that, it was easy to marginalize those who genuinely wanted to fix the system with a smug “we're Democrats, and we don't care what some radicals think, because we're the only alternative to the very worst option.”

There's no telling where this could have lead if Gore had been allowed to succeed Clinton as the “liberal” representing a neoliberal party, but we know where Bush took us; aside from the historic debt, massive violence, and undermining of the constitution, the following years brought some new hope. By 2007, Democratic membership was still at 33%, but many Republicans had left their party, and Independents were at 34%. The incredibly destructive conservative administration had also driven the Democratic Party to the left, with the centrists among it no longer able to criticize liberalism from the right (at least not explicitly.)

But then something interesting happened; after all the Obama fervor died down (the electorate was 35% Democratic in 2008, with only 31% of it Independent), and the reality of he and the rest of the Democratic leadership's resistance to change was made apparent, Independents again edged them out in 2009, with 35% to their 34%.

And here's where it gets scary, Hillary and friends; since then, the gap has only been growing larger. When the Democrats failed to pass universal health care in 2010 despite having the majority in congress, their membership compared to Independents became 33% to 36%. When the Obama administration proposed cutting social security in 2011, that gap was at 32% to 37%. When Obama was was re-elected in 2012 still without having ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that gap had not changed from the year before. When Obama wanted to prosecute the defender of the constitution Edward Snowden and listened to his militaristic Secretary of State's advice to start a disastrous series of attacks on Libya in 2013, that gap was at 32% to 38%. When Republicans took firm control of the senate in 2014 because the alternative option had discouraged so many liberals who would have otherwise participated, that gap was at 32% to 39%. In 2015, when the president embraced a free trade agreement that, should it pass, will be more destructive than NAFTA, that gap was at 30.4% to 40.1%. And this year, when Democrats have created a platform that's halfway as conservative as that of the Republican's, oversaw a primary election arguably more offensive to Democracy than Bush v. Gore, and nominated a proven criminal for president, that gap is at 29% to 43%.

And that almost doesn't compare to what's happened to the Republicans. The last time they even had the majority in electoral membership was in 1995, with 31% to the Democrat's 30%. And the year in which they've more or less since been in decline is an interesting one: 2003. Republican popularity had been rising, though never exceeding that of the Democrats or Independents, since 2000. The number of Democrats had also drastically fell since 2001, with the implementation of a vast pro-Bush Administration propaganda campaign post-9/11 undoubtedly playing a role. With the help of a compliant corporate media and largely pro-war Democratic leadership, the GOP had started the invasion of Iraq with more than seventy percent of public support, and their other policies went nearly unchallenged by the left.

But most of the country was not really behind them. As of that year, 57% of Americans supported a woman's right to choose. 73% wanted mandatory background checks on those seeking to purchase guns. Half believed that gay and lesbian couples should receive the same benefits as heterosexual couples. Eight in ten of them wanted universal health care. 62% wanted nonviolent drug offenders to be rehabilitated, instead of sent to prison. 72% thought that the problems in corporate America were due to greed, instead of “the consequences of a free market.” And perhaps most importantly, 83% of them agreed with the goals of the environmental movement.

The consequences of these ideological inconsistencies began to materialize the year after, when Democratic membership rose to 33% and Republican membership fell to 29%. How Bush was then re-elected is anybody's guess. Then in 2005, when the Republican-run government took two days longer than necessary to start rescuing the victims of Katrina, those numbers remained the same. When the Bush Administration considered the use of nuclear weapons on Iran in 2006, the gap went to Republicans 28% and Democrats 33%. When a worldwide financial meltdown started in 2007 because of the failure of Republicans to regulate Wall Street, that gap was 25% to 33% (though thanks in part to Wall Street having originally been deregulated by Bill Clinton, independents were at 34%).

And their slight rise since then to 26% is of little comfort to them. As of this year, 54% of Americans support taxing the wealthy to aid the poor. 63% are in favor of a $15 minimum wage. 86% want mandatory police body cameras. 76% are against sending conventional ground troops to fight ISIS. Well over half want to replace Obamacare with a single-payer system. The overwhelming majority of Americans, including Republicans, are against Citizens United. And majority support for the goals of the environmental movement is clear, even among Republicans themselves.

Stepping back from the media's portrayals of a thriving electoral system, it's not looking good at all for both parties. 55% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton, while 7 in 10 dislike Donald Trump. Only 68% of Republicans have a favorable view of their party, and going by the most recent estimates, 50% of Americans disapprove of the Democratic Party. Twenty-one percent of voters from both parties are backing neither of their nominees, and that number is sure to grow. (13% would prefer a giant meteor hitting the earth to both of them-at least it would be honest in its intentions.) When comparing the combined votes the two nominees (officially) received in the primaries to the 219 million eligible voters in America, they were only picked by 15.7% of those capable of voicing an opinion.

And finally, on a somewhat related note, only 29% of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction.

These are the numbers and facts you should be paying attention to. Not biased polls about Hillary's support reported in a way that makes it seem as if the left is submissive as ever to the will of the corporate DNC. Not claims that progressives who oppose the Democratic party are mainly just privileged young people (which is a group that's becoming increasingly rare). Not smug assertions from representatives of the established party system that our objections are irrelevant because Bernie Sanders supposedly lost. The buildup has been long, but the two parties have reached a point where their support, their common agenda, and their reasons for self-justification are doomed.

Devin Reynolds, someone who very much recognizes this fact, summed up the reason for this in a June 20 Medium.com article:

“The divide between the top 1% and the top 10% makes our political system look competitive, and there are legitimate diverging interests between those two classes. That said, in practice, our two political parties split the vote for the working class, then both ignore it in favor of their primary constituencies. The simple reality of this dynamic is that the majority of the population’s interests go unrepresented. While Republican members of the working class are exploited by their low-information status into voting for policies that benefit the top 1%, the Democratic members of this group allow themselves to be browbeaten into supporting policies that largely benefit the top 10% based on the dubious supposition that those policies are “better than Republican policies.” With one half of the working class deceived into voting Republican and the other half treated like it has no choice but to vote Democrat, 90% of the population has its interests treated like an afterthought. Bernie’s entire campaign was an attempt to change that.”

When you're talking in terms of nine out of ten Americans being left out of the interests of the political system, and of that minority acting like the system should be accepted as normal, it's only a matter of time before the majority takes it's power back.

As Democratic elites dismissed us as young white “Bernie bros,” and booed our candidate for saying that his goal is not to win elections but to transform the country, and claimed that our ideas for making this as sane and just a society as the rest of the developed world were based on fantasy, these same old obnoxious attacks were quietly but surely losing their validity, assuming they had any to begin with.

The national sentiment has changed. It's changed in the direction of rationalism, it's changed in the direction of self-interest, and it's changed in the direction of common sense. No longer do most Americans believe that poverty is caused by laziness, or that endless war is the consequence of perpetual security threats, or that environmental problems should simply be ignored. And perhaps even more importantly, no longer do we believe that any politician should be excused for working against the interests of the people because of the title of the party they're affiliated with, or that dishonesty and corruption should be accepted because that's “the only way to survive in politics,” or that any given person, no matter how powerful, should not face the consequences if they commit a crime.

Come to think of it, we never even really believed these things at all.

All the real statistics support one fact, which is that we are headed for a profound transformation as a nation and even as a civilization. And I'm not just talking about protests, petitions and other types of activism, which have always been occurring, if not on the scale that we're seeing today, but real, lasting change within our government.

Sometime very soon, maybe even at the next opportunity, Americans are going to go to the polling places and make a statement to the same people that worked to suppress their votes in the Democratic primaries this year: no, we do not think that the current economic system is acceptable. Yes, we do believe health care, food and housing are the right of all people, not just a group of the wealthiest citizens. No, we are not satisfied with what the two parties have had to offer in terms of real change. To put it succinctly, enough is enough.

If you heard a loud voice with a Brooklyn accent at some point during that last paragraph, it proves that Bernie did not go away at all when he conceded, and that he never will.

So we have the support, we have the historical advantage, and we have the moral high ground to pull off the rise of a genuinely populist third party that actually wins elections, but will the system allow for us to do so? That is unfortunately worth considering, seeing what the oligarchy has done to the first real threat to them in a long time during these past few months.

The answer to that is both no and yes. The powers that run the the way our democracy functions-therefore not making it a democracy at all-will try to stop us at every turn. But the future of American politics will be a whole new game, one where we'll be free to run candidates and promote our agenda within parties that are not controlled by the billionaires. As soon as we unite the millions of voters not enamored with the dying establishment behind a third party with a serious chance to win elections, most of the battle will be won, and undemocratic obstacles like the Electoral College will have quite a lot to worry about should they decide to deny us a victory outright. As long as democracy is even more or less intact, we will be able to win.

And in fact, we've already started to. Several genuinely progressive politicians across the country have won their primaries because of Bernie Sanders' efforts, and while we may not see much change from this election cycle, it will without a doubt be very different the next time around; there's no telling how far these new types of leaders will get in the elections of 2018, or 2020 for that matter. And I'm certainly not the only one who will be helping them along the way.

As for the present situation, I personally see the Green Party's candidate Jill Stein as the best option, but whatever you choose to do is no concern of mine and ultimately won't matter too much. The media wants you to ignore it, but a change has occurred in this country that Bernie's concession in New Hampshire only made even more sure to have influence on the future.

But above all, keep in mind that I am not talking about some kind of fun little club that disappointed former Bernie Sanders supporters will put together so that we can meet with like-minded people. Yes, I am ideologically very progressive and supported Bernie for as long as there was any hope for him to win, but if this movement were only for people like me, we would slowly fade into irrelevance. This will be a movement for every American to be apart of who is concerned about the massive inequalities, injustices, and threats to our planet that absolutely must be addressed. This movement's base will be made up of every person who cares about the needs of the many, and not the wants of the few. A new party for the people does exist; it's just waiting to find an organization to help advance it's great power. To repeat a line from a different revolution, both ironically speaking and not, yes we can.

No, the revolution was never meant to be easy. But as of now, it will only get easier.