Preparing For Trump's 9/11 Event

As of this writing, it's been a few hours since the members of the Electoral College sealed America's fate and officially appointed Trump to be its 45th president. But there's some confusion as to just how bad this fate of ours will be; some expect Trump's term to be America's equivalent of the Third Reich, while others hold a far less extreme (and probably more realistic) view of who this man is and what he's likely to do as president.

However, the fact that Trump isn't literally as bad as Hitler comes as little comfort to me.

I've become convinced that the best year in history to compare 2017 with will not be 1933, but 2001. At that time, you no doubt remember, America elected (if you can call it that given how his opponent won the most votes) a highly incompetent and in many ways comical figure. In the first months of his presidency, his administration acted in an unpopular but politically routine fashion, causing his political opponents to easily recover from their loss in 2000 and get ready to start taking back their government in future elections.

That is, until you-know-what happened. After 9/11, George W. Bush's approval ratings went from 51% to 90%, and his party's favorability ratings went from 48% to 59%, giving his administration an opportunity to turn into something authoritarian and dangerous. Bush and Friends created a surveillance state, violated the Bill of Rights with their policies of indefinite detention and trial-less arrest, went against the Geneva Conventions by adopting torture, and used the attacks to push through numerous other less egregious but still corrupt goals, all with the consent of most people of the time.

This story is, quite seriously, that of a time when America had its bout with fascism. And as Trump enters the picture, I believe we'll need to prepare for something many times worse.

My consideration of a scenario wherein a 9/11-level terrorist attack occurs during Trump's term is more than speculation; it's a possibility that I believe has a very good chance of being realized. Michael Moore, who has a history of making fantastic but accurate predictions about Trump, has concluded this month that Donald Trump's unwillingness to attend daily security briefings is "gonna get us killed:"

So, my fellow Americans, when the next terrorist attack happens -- and it will happen, we all know that -- and after the tragedy is over, amidst the death and destruction that might have been prevented, you will see Donald Trump acting quickly to blame everyone but himself. He will suspend constitutional rights. He will round up anyone he deems a threat. He will declare war, and his Republican Congress will back him.

And no one will remember that he wasn't paying attention to the growing threat. Wasn't attending the daily national security briefings. Was playing golf instead or meeting with celebrities or staying up til 3am tweeting about how unfair CNN is. He said he didn't need to be briefed. "You know, I think I'm smart. I don't need to hear the same thing over and over each day for eight years." That's what he told Fox News on December 11th when asked why he wasn't attending the security briefings. Don't forget that date and his hubris as we bury the dead next year.

In other words, in addition to the countless other ways that Trump has failed upwards throughout his political career, his incompetence is going to bring him a great reward-a crisis which works to his partisan advantage. It's unclear just how many constitutional liberties will become irrelevant in the aftermath of Trump's 9/11, or how little dissent the government will tolerate, or how destructive the inevitable military conflict will be, but given how the Bush team looks friendly compared to Trump and his cabinet members, it's reasonable to assume that post-9/11 America's fascism will seem tame compared to what's coming.

And I'm not the only one who's anticipating this development. Anyone who acknowledges the dangerous nature of Trump and his transition team can easily imagine them doing some very frightening things in the event of a crisis, among them Chris Hedges, who believes that "The pretense of democracy will end" after Trump's 9/11 event. Another one of these political doomsday believers is Ted Rall, who has written in regards to the actions he expects Trump and Friends will take following this disaster: "Remember how, the morning of the election, the New York Times gave Trump a 15% chance of winning? Given that I’ve been saying The Donald had an excellent chance of winning for many months, maybe you should be scared when I tell you what I think there’s really a 15% chance of: another presidential election in four years."

In short, while Trump may not be as big a threat as Hitler was in that he has no plans for mass genocide, and his lack of core convictions make him unlikely to follow through with his promises to deport millions and bar Muslims from entering the country, his state of mind is similar to that of Hitler and his one core value is a desire for attention, respect and control. And should a major crisis occur during his term, his power will be greatly increased, his for now inarticulate and crude brand of fascism will take on a solid and terrifying form, and he'll turn into what could indeed be America's version of Hitler.

But just as Trump's post-crisis rise to authoritarian dictatorship will be far more substantial than that of Bush, I suspect Trump's downfall will be all the more precipitous than Bush's. America has and has been for a long a time a very liberal country, and so the attempted political domination of figures like Bush and Trump is not sustainable. In the case of the former, it only took a few years after 9/11 before Bush and his party became greatly unpopular, Democrats began to win in all aspects of electoral politics, and left-wing ideas came to dominate the debate.

And ultimately, I expect Trump and his Republican Party to meet a similar fate. Since Trump is far less popular or likable than Bush was in 2001, I believe his post-crisis approval ratings will be a lot lower than 90%, and that they'll then go back down to their current level of about 40% within only a few years. This could very well mean that, unlike Bush, Trump won't be able to win re-election. Additionally, the horrific war crimes and assaults on civil liberties that Trump and his party are sure to commit in the wake of the disaster will no doubt come to bite back at them politically, with their opponents being motivated to take an enormous amount of action to combat Trumpism and the neoliberal paradigm which produced it.

Why do I think this will be case, though, if, as Hedges and Rall say, there's a good chance Trump will gut America's system of representative democracy? Well if Trump could defy the supposed odds and win the presidency, I think the American people could very well pull off something similar and successfully fight for the preservation of their country's constitution. If there's anything Trump has taught us, it's that a 15% chance of victory is not the same thing as a 0% chance.

The Greens Aren't The Only Third Party That America Needs

In 2010, a Rasmussen poll found that 38% of Americans thought a third party president by 2020 was at least somewhat likely. And while if the same survey were taken today, that number would probably be smaller, it's looking more and more like the people of six years ago were correct.

For several decades, both major parties have disregarded the majority by pivoting towards the interests of corporations, and if they (by which I mostly mean the Democrats) don't change soon, they'll be in real danger of dying out and being replaced by a third entity. And if such a party, which has already been fairly well established in the form of the Greens, can make the right electoral moves, it will stand a good chance of defying the current party system and transforming American politics for the better.

While I support that plan, though, I don't think it's the only strategy we should invest in.

For a long time, I've believed voter apathy to be the main reason for the American two-party system's longevity. Provided the right factors, I figured, the Greens or another third party like it could gain enough support to become prominent. And looking at the current state of the political landscape, one would figure that my prediction is close to coming true; for around a decade, identification in the two major parties, especially the Democrats, has been in free fall. This decline has recently culminated in the electoral crisis that's befallen the Democratic Party this year.

And Green Party leaders, as well as advocates of third parties in general, are taking notice. Jill Stein thinks that there have been "major breakthroughs" this year in terms of the public's attitude toward third parties, and former Green Senate candidate Arn Menconi has said regarding his party's chances of success in the next few years, "Is this a David and Goliath fight? Of course it is. But things can change, and they can change rapidly. And David won."

The problem with the level of optimism I've often promoted for our chances of overthrowing the two-party system is that Goliath is stronger than he appears.

A past instance I've cited as proof that the political duopoly can easily be taken on is the story of the birth of the Republican Party. After being established in the spring of 1854, the GOP immediately caught fire, winning many seats in the House and the Senate during that year's midterm elections. Throughout the next few election cycles, Republicans continued to rise until ultimately replacing the Whig Party as the chief opponents of the Democrats. The reason for this rapid success for the formerly fringe Republican Party is that unlike the Whigs, it was willing to accommodate interests of the increasingly popular abolitionist movement. And the Greens, one would figure, could overtake the Democrats just as Republicans overtook the Whigs by appealing to the increasingly (and in this case, inevitably) popular economically populist movement, which the Democratic Party is largely ignoring.

If this were 1854, I would have no doubt that such a feat could be accomplished. But since then, Republicans have sadly teamed up with Democrats to try to ensure that no new third party is able to do what they once did. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American legislatures enacted rules to the electoral process that made it significantly harder for new parties to succeed than was the case in virtually every other democracy on the planet.

During that era, laws were passed which raised the number of signatures that candidates needed to qualify for running or getting on the ballot, made it easier for government officials (which were mostly either Republicans or Democrats) to determine which candidates could appear on the ballot, and created other tools that allowed partisanship to influence the electoral process. This series of attacks on democracy was especially prevalent in the early 20th century, when economically populist parties similar to the Greens were beginning to gain ground as a result of that period's extreme wealth inequality. The political establishment responded, as you can guess, by crushing those parties' chances of upsetting the corporate duopoly.

And though I hold out hope that the Greens can defy the odds now, it's important to recognize that until these actions are undone, our odds will be very steep. As electoral reform advocate Seth Ackerman wrote in a recent analysis regarding the facts above, "One lesson from this history is clear: We have to stop approaching our task as if the problems we face were akin to those faced by the organizers of, say, the British Labour Party in 1900 or Canada’s New Democratic Party in 1961. Instead, we need to realize that our situation is more like that facing opposition parties in soft-authoritarian systems, like those of Russia or Singapore."

And because as Ackerman also makes the case for, reforming the Democratic Party is about as hard as replacing it, we must seek out a strategy that's different from both of these. The plan he proposes in his piece, which is titled A Blueprint For a New Party, involves building an organization that can run and support candidates while at the same time being immune from the obstacles that the establishment has built into the electoral game.

Such an institution would not be what's traditionally considered a political party, but a group that aims to influence politics. Its candidates, says Ackerman, would be able to avoid the pitfalls of the electoral process by making it so that "Decisions about how individual candidates appear on the ballot would be made on a case-by-case basis and on pragmatic grounds, depending on the election laws and partisan coloration of the state or district in question. In any given race, the organization could choose to run in major-or minor-party primaries, as nonpartisan independents, or even, theoretically, on the organization’s own ballot line."

Thus, this "party" would be able to find the chinks in the electoral armor that the establishment has surrounded itself in. Ackerman describes this method as mounting "The electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency."

Indeed, whether or not you think building a third party is necessary, I believe that creating an organization like this would greatly help us achieve the larger mission of installing progressive populists throughout all levels of government. Such an entity already exists to an extent in the form of groups like Brand New Congress, and if we can bring them all under one roof, we'll have a national organization which influences politics in the ways that Ackerman suggests. But whichever way we'd go about founding this group, doing so appears to be the most practical way of bringing governmental reform.

The 2016 Election Is The Only Thing Holding The Two-Party System Together

In a past article, I once made a (seemingly) shocking prediction: that in the near future, the combined number of people who affiliate with the Republican and Democratic parties will make up less than half of the electorate. The reasons I give for believing this duopoly-imperiling event is on its way have to do with the fact that according to a January Gallup poll, combined Democratic and Republican identification is at 55%, and because the events of this election have left so many people alienated with the two major parties, that percentage is bound to soon drop below fifty.

However, as I recently discovered, Gallup takes their party affiliation poll a lot more frequently than I assumed, and when I looked at the most recent survey (taken in September), to my dismay I found that the combined number of Democrats and Republicans had since gone up to 59%.

How could this be, I thought. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the most disliked (and probably the easiest to dislike) presidential nominees in history. About half of both Republicans and Democrats wish that someone else were their party's nominee. Trump is driving evangelicals, women, and Latinos away from the Republican Party, while Clinton is alienating the most important part of the Democratic Party's base-progressives. These ideological rifts within the two major parties are just the latest and most dramatic in the massive decline of support that they've both been experiencing for the last several years, and there's evidently no reason to think that that trend will start to reverse. To say that Democratic and Republican membership has respectively went from 29 and 26 percent to 32 and 27 percent since the beginning of the year seems to defy all logic, or at least prove that Americans are far too intrenched in party loyalty for the two-party system to end anytime soon.

The current party affiliation polls notwithstanding, though, Democrats and Republicans are in just as bad shape as intuition would have it.

When looking at the long-term history of Gallup's party affiliation polls, one notices an intriguing phenomena: identification in the two major parties always reaches a high point around the time of presidential elections. In 2012, the poll that put independents at 33%-by far that year's lowest estimation of independents-was taken days before the election. In 2008, the poll that put independents at 32%-a notably low number for that year as well-was taken in late October. And in 2004, the two polls in a row that put independents at 27%-down from 40% at the beginning of the year-were taken in the weeks before Election Day. I know these examples are far from conclusive evidence, but they seem proof enough to me that as elections approach, people tend to coalesce around the party that they prefer will win.

Just as the support for third party candidates always drops approaching election day while many of their former backers get behind the major party candidate that they're the least dissatisfied with, the same appears to be true for party affiliation. This theory of mine seems to be further supported in how during the primary season this year, loyalty to the two major parties began to drop with Republicans making up 25% of the electorate in April and Democrats making up 28% of it in May. And since then, after things have switched into the next phase of the campaign, the polls have generally shown a higher amount of "support" for the Democratic and Republican parties. The lack of sincerity among many of the 59% of Americans who say they side with the two major parties is betrayed in how, at the same time, 57% of Americans say they think a third major party is needed.

And when the piece of partisan glue which is the 2016 election becomes irrelevant on November 9, there will be nothing to stop that 57% of the population from acting on their wishes and changing the party system.

After the election is over and the nation's partisanship has returned to a sane level, the majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with the major parties will have an opportunity to defy them. Regardless of whether Trump or Clinton wins, Trumpism and Clintonism will retain their control over the agendas of the Republican and Democratic parties throughout the foreseeable future, and that will not sit well with most Americans. The ideological split between traditional Republicans and those in Trump's camp will likely continue to grow, quite possibly resulting in a sudden success for the Liberitarian Party or something similar to it in future elections. Meanwhile, the divide on the Democratic side between those who embrace neoliberalism and those who want to fight it (which I think is hurting Democrats more than the right's ideological split is hurting Republicans) could very well result in the rise of a populist party like the Greens.

If you think such a shift isn't realistic, keep in mind that the main factor behind the current split within the two parties, wherein most of the Republican base now embraces Trumpism and most of the Democratic base now rejects Clintonism, is the now historic amount of economic inequality which has appeared because of the pro-big business policies that the Republican and Democratic establishments have supported for the past four decades. And as the trend of growing economic inopportunity continues throughout the next four years, with Obama's likely successor Hillary Clinton presiding over an ongoing assault on the middle class and a new financial crisis, populist sentiments on both the left and the right will only become more intense, making the creation of a four-party system by 2020 a serious possibility.

So in the meantime, Democratic and Republican insiders should enjoy the increased amount of support for their parties while they still can.

The Green Party Will Succeed For The Same Reason Bernie Sanders Did

In August 2015, an article appeared in Five Thirty Eight titled "The Bernie Sanders Surge Appears To Be Over." Despite Sanders having narrowed his polling gap between Hillary Clinton by over 20 points since the start of his campaign, the author reasoned that because the members of the electorate who were most likely to favor Sanders had largely switched to his side already, it would only become harder from there for him to continue gaining ground.

Predictions like these were common among conventional polling analysts. Nate Silver came to a similar conclusion about the Sanders campaign, predicting that it would flounder in all but the most white, liberal states. Both of these political calculations, of course, were wildly off. Bernie's poll numbers continued to increase at about the same rate after August, peaking in mid-April with him being virtually tied nationally (he would most certainly have then pulled ahead had the New York primary, which looks like it was stolen from him, gone in in his favor). Sanders also did better with nonwhite voters than most people think, having won some of the most diverse states in the country. And though he lost with nonwhites overall, he was able to significantly cut into Clinton's initial support among them. Had it not been for the historically unique amount of voter suppression and electoral fraud that occurred during the 2016 democratic primaries, Sanders would have likely won.

But all of that is in the past now, and the former supporters of Bernie Sanders, along with everyone else who shares their goals for social, economic, and environmental justice, are looking for other places to go. Though all people in this vast but currently divided coalition of course intend to continue Sanders' movement through grassroots activism, there's a dispute within it as to whether their agenda's future in electoral politics will take place in a reformed Democratic Party or in a rising populist third party.

I'm going to explain why I think the latter is true.

There are a great deal of indicators involving the more direct factors in political predictions-polling, demographics, historical trends in the outcomes of elections-which lead me to believe that such a seismic event in American politics in the coming years is probable. There's the fact that millennials, the group most likely to embrace third parties, will make up 40% of the electorate in time for the next election. There's the fact that the Democratic Party appears to be headed for dissolution in the coming years, with Democratic membership having been in steady decline since 2008 and there being a movement within the Sanders coalition to abandon the party which will only become more successful as establishment Democrats continue on the path of neoliberalism. And there's the fact that the majority of Americans agree with the Green Party's agenda, as I illustrated in a past article with a list comparing the Green platform to opinion polls.

But even these factors, which I've focused on many times in previous articles, are not sufficient to make my case. When commentators like HA Goodman and Bill Curry predicted early in the race that Bernie Sanders would succeed based on how most Democratic voters as well as Americans in general agree with his agenda, similarly to how I predict a surge for the Greens, polling analysts like Nate Silver still decided to stick with the narrative that such an upset wasn't possible. And from a certain standpoint, such a pessimistic view of Sanders' chances despite the fact that his ideas had the backing of the majority was appropriate; leftist insurgents like him, such as Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, have embarked and failed in similar endeavors despite the views of Americans having aligned with their agenda for many years. So is the case with those who are skeptical of the idea that the current party system can be challenged; it's been tried before, so why should we expect it to succeed this time?

The factor which rendered the political calculating methods of Bernie Sanders' doubters irrelevant is the same one that will disprove the assumptions of those who dismiss the potential of the Green Party: income inequality.

Though Sanders technically lost with voters who had an annual income of less than $50,000, this was due to the fact that the poor tend not to vote, and outside of the electoral horse race, the lower people were on the income scale, the more likely they were to support Sanders' candidacy and his goals of a fairer economy. This can be considered the key to his success, with millennials, who overwhelmingly supported him because of how economically insecure they are, having given him the boost that he needed to become competitive. So was the case with the rest of the relatively small but crucial group of poor people who voted for Sanders; had the electorate not been as economically insecure as it is in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have easily won.

It's not clear when exactly the point was reached where poverty became so prevalent that candidates like Sanders could get as far as he did (2008 might have been the year, with Obama having been able to defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries mainly because voters were tired of her brand of neoliberal triangulation). But what's certain is that the buildup to today's political environment has been directly tied into the rising wealth gap.

Those who think that inequality isn't a problem, insisting that the ones affected by it can simply overcome their poverty by working harder, are ignoring a basic rule of economics, which is that people's potential for success tends to depend on how much opportunity they have. And the facts of the modern U.S. economy very much illustrate that principle.

The top 0.1% of earners (not to be confused with the 1%) own almost 90% of the wealth in America, while the bottom 90% have 22.8% of it. This disparity, which can largely be explained by the dramatic inconsistency between the amount of labor that most workers have contributed throughout the last several decades and the amount of compensation that they've received, has had very real consequences for the vast majority of the country. The rate of unemployment, which is widely misrepresented as being at around 5%, is in fact around twice that number at 9.7%. Half of Americans can be considered poor, as reflected in how about that same amount of them rely on government aid (many of them are social security recipients, but such a number is still worth noting.) And overall, 81% of Americans are living on an income that's been either stagnant or declining in the past decade.

We've been hearing about rising income inequality and a shrinking middle-class for many years, though. What makes it worth talking about now is that when you look at the long-term history of wealth distribution, you can only conclude that the general population is on the verge of staging a successful revolt against the economic elite.

All the past cases of increasing economic unfairness, from 18th century Franch to 20th century Scandanavia, have resulted in massive, effective efforts on the part of the lower classes to reverse the trend of inequality. And the levels that we're seeing today closely resemble those of other such times in history. In 2013, income inequality reached a size about the same as that of 1928 (the last instance where it reached a peak), and since then it's grown to a scale that may be unprecedented.

Chris Hedges, going by this observation, explains just how close he thinks 21st century America is to an uprising of its own: "It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place."

How this relates to my prediction of the rise of a third party for the people, as you may have guessed by now, has to do with the fact that neither major party serves as a place to channel that overwhelming populist will. Though Republicans have begun to shift their rhetoric to something more economically populist, and their 2016 presidential nominee has a pro-worker stance on trade, they are of course still just about as neoliberal as ever with next to no hope of reform. And though the Democratic Party is technically in a better position to change into something capable of systemic change, since more Democrats than Republicans agree that wealth should be more evenly distributed, I can't see any way its redemption will be possible anytime soon. If Hillary Clinton wins in November, her neoliberalism will alienate a great deal of the Democrats' base in the coming years, leading to a severe loss for Democrats in the 2018 midterm election, making Clinton the main representative of her party and giving her and the rest of the Democratic establishment an opportunity to retain their dominance over the party's agenda. And if Donald Trump wins, his brand of reactionary, far-right politics will continue to take over the Republican Party, alienating the more traditional Republicans and driving many of them to realign with the Democratic Party, which already resembles the older version of the Republican Party in many ways.

In short, the established party system is incompatible with the intensely populist political environment that accompanies periods of extreme wealth inequality. And though electoral politics is by no means the only home for this redistributionist movement, whose success is inevitable from a historical perspective, when it effects our political system it will likely take the form of a third party. This spring HA Goodman, someone whose predictions are evidently worth paying attention to, wrote that if Bernie Sanders did not become the nominee, the resentment that his supporters and others feel towards the Democratic establishment will "reach a boiling point," saying that "The formation of a third political party is a near certainty if Clinton is nominated."

And the growth of such a party, which luckily already exists in the form of the Greens, is already happening. Colorado is one of the first places where a shift away from the current party system can be observed, wherein a notable number of voters have moved to the Green and Liberitarian parties, more state and local candidates than in most other areas have decided to run third party, and Jill Stein and Gary Johnson respectively have 7 and 16 percent of the support. It's events like these, which are happening to a lesser extent all across the nation, that have apparently given some Green and Liberitarian officials hope that they can overturn the American party system post-2016. And while such a feat won't be easy, when the respected economist and former Washington insider Robert Reich agrees that the rise of a populist third party in the next few years is possible, trying to realize such a goal is certainly worth the effort.

However, though the current economic conditions may well lead to a victory for Bernie Sanders' movement in this and other areas, inequality also tends to produce negative societal changes.

It's no coincidence that the rise in income inequality, which has afflicted not just America but the rest of the industrialized world, is being accompanied by an increase in ethnic nationalism. Some of the most horrific political developments in history, such as Russian communism and the Third Reich, were caused by widespread economic insecurity, and the success of neo-fascist movements that we've witnessed in the past several years is proof that civilization has again entered a stage of demagoguery and extremist politics. And the question that we'll be facing in the coming years is whether the situation will get as bad as it did in the instances I mentioned.

It's impossible to determine how far this neo-fascist trend will get in the many countries that it's taking shape in, but as for the U.S, I imagine its future looks like this: after Donald Trump's likely loss, there will be a short period of time where the vast majority of Americans who disapprove of his agenda will be able to breath a sigh of relief, but then a second, far bigger wave of American fascism will appear. In future elections, Trumpism-though that label may feel outdated by then because of how relatively mild Trump himself will seem compared to the demagogues that come after him-will make a comeback.

Whether the new political paradigm that the trend in inequality produces will be one of the far left or the far right is yet to be determined. But what's already certain is that it won't resemble the old norm of centrism. Ideological extremes, for better or for worse, are bound to dominate politics during periods of economic unfairness, and while the 2016 election looks like it will result in the victory of yet another centrist, after this year the established facade of power that Hillary and Friends represent will no longer be able to dam up the growing body of populist outrage. 

And by that time, I expect, the kinds of polling analysts who predicted Bernie Sanders would fail will be very surprised indeed.

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.

If The Greens Were In The Same Position As The Democrats, Republicans Wouldn't Stand A Chance

Thanks to Donald Trump's terrible performance in the first presidential debate, along with his recent bizarre behavior on Twitter (where else?), he's quickly losing any advantage he might have had the potential of gaining in national polls, with recent surveys from key states reflecting a similar trend. If Trump doesn't restrain from further antics, the landslide loss for him that Robert Reich has been expecting could very well come true this November.

There's just one thing, though, that might allow him to defy the odds: the fact that he's running against a Democrat.

Or at least, the kind of Democrat that the party's leadership prefers. Had the Democrats' electoral system allowed Bernie Sanders to be their nominee, Trump would likely now be behind by at least ten points, and Democrats would be in a good position to take back the Senate. Instead, despite Trump's utter awfulness as a candidate, the Democrats are stuck with someone who is only 3.1 points ahead in the Real Clear Politics polling average and has a good chance of losing that lead. Meanwhile, despite a general assumption among Democrats that they're favored to take back the Senate, it looks like Clinton is costing them that victory as well, with CNN giving Republicans a 69% chance of retaining their majority in the Senate. (Democrats aren't likely to retake the House, either, but that's a different story).

Intuitively, this makes no sense. This is 2016, when the electorate is the most diverse in American history (Michael Moore summarized just how lonely Republican-leaning voters are last year by stating that the electorate is "81% women, people of color, and young people"). The polls show that most Americans disagree with Republicans on virtually every issue, and despite the emergence of Trump's right-wing reactionary politics, the progressive movement is in a very good position. In their December 2015 issue, the Atlantic magazine portrayed the situation that Republicans are in with a drawing of a sad old elephant standing on the top of a crumbling little rocky peak, with a donkey standing comfortably on its back.

So why aren't Republicans losing? I'll put it this way: that donkey may feel safe, but just like the elephant, it's standing on unstable ground.

By this, as you may have guessed by now, I mean that Democrats essentially share the Republicans' agenda. In a recently leaked audio tape of Hillary Clinton's remarks at a private fundraiser earlier this year, the party's leader sums up her agenda-and how she views those who disagree with it:

It is important to recognize what's going on in this election. Everybody who's ever been in an election that I'm aware of is quite bewildered because there is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there's just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn't gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know,  go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don't know what that means, but it's something that they deeply feel. So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don't have much company there. Because it is difficult when you're running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is—I don't want to overpromise. I don't want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.

Aside from the condescending nature of those statements, they make apparent everything that's wrong with the Democratic Party.

First off, it seems that Clinton is the one who doesn't know what it means to go as far as Scandanavia. Unlike Clinton, who thinks that single-payer health care will "never, ever come to pass," 58% of Americans support such a measure according to the latest poll. (And as the costs from the inadequate, profit-oriented health care option that she and her party supports continue to accumulate in the coming years, public demand for single-payer will most certainly mount.) Additionally, 62% of Americans want college to be tuition-free, a goal that Clinton's plan for the matter does not, despite the claims associated with it, even come close to meeting.

Aside from these relatively minor (but still important) problems with Clinton and the Democratic Party, there are others which should trouble anyone who cares about the terrible grip that banks and corporations hold over our government and our economy. The Democratic National Committee, like their presidential nominee, is, as the New Republic puts it, "one big corporate bribe." Its top donors, which have included such champions for working people as Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs, play a core part in its existence and thus hold a certain degree of power over the entire party (who's members in the House and the Senate are largely corporate-funded as well). It would be dangerously naive to assume that none of this effects how Clinton and the her party approaches economic issues, because as Tony Wilsdon writes in regards to this all:

However, the sometimes sharp contrast with the Republicans on social issues does not change the fact that the Democratic Party is a political party of the 1%. President Obama is only the most recent example. Despite the enthusiasm he built up when promising a break from Bush’s policies, his first move was a trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street banks. The main thrust of his policies have been aimed at reviving U.S. capitalism – not providing for the needs of the 99% who are still suffering the effects of 30 years of neoliberal policies. His failure to enact a serious jobs program, provide real relief to homeowners and renters hit by the housing crash, or to dismantle mass incarceration and the drug laws, are telling — as are the record numbers of deportations and drone bombings on his watch.

To move onto perhaps an even more important point, the title of that article is Can The Democratic Party Be Reformed? The conclusion that Wilsdon comes to when asking this question, which is one that cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no," is basically "yes, but it's not worth it."

The Democratic Party is not a vessel that can be filled with new progressive content. It is a brutal instrument that has been honed by the corporate elite to deliver its policies. The corporate elite, alongside the entrenched Democratic Party leadership, are not about to give up control of a corporate party that served it so well, and if they need to break a few rules that will not deter them. The power given to the unelected super delegates is a clear example of the lengths the leadership will go to when necessary to defend the interests of their corporate sponsors.

In short, now that the Democratic Party has undergone its fall from grace, there is no reclaiming it. Though I appreciate the efforts of Bernie Sanders and others to save it, that ship has sunk. Sometime since the Atlantic illustrated the position of the two major parties last year, it appears that the donkey, in its delusion of being immune from harm, has jumped off of the elephant's back. And now the elephant is savoring its position as the last one on top of that teetering rocky tower, happily waving the American flag that it's holding in its tail and gloatingly sounding its trunk at the Atlantic writers who once assumed that it was going to fall off the precipice.

Most likely, I believe, this scene is going to play out in real life as follows: this November, Republicans will retain their majorities in the House and the Senate, which, even if they don't take the White House, means that they'll be in control of the government. For two or four years, they'll keep their footing on that rocky peak, but before long, the ground will finally fall out from under them and they'll lose their power. But unless that donkey has made a miraculous medical recovery by then after foolishly jumping to its near-death, the party that replaces the GOP will not be the Democrats.

Given the facts that I've mentioned, many are seeing the rise of a genuinely populist alternative on the horizon. Among them is Counterpunch writer David Rosen, who has very believably predicted that "The election’s winner, whether Democrat or Republican, is likely to usher in a period of unexpected instability, even disruption, as the parties seek to regain control over the electoral system, the American voter. They may fail. Both parties are poised for possible break-up, but along very different ideological lines."

You can look to nearly every other one of my articles on this site for elaboration on why I believe that America's two-party system is soon to give way to something better. But as long as we're getting into the realm of the hypothetical, consider the following scenario:

It's 2028, and like the Democrats in 2016, the Greens (a very good third-party alternative to the left's former standard-bearers) have been in control of the White House for the past eight years. After winning all three branches of government over the course of the last decade, they've been able to enact radical changes for the country, having passed universal health care, a breakup of the big banks, a return to Roosevelt-era taxation levels on the wealthy, and many other much-needed goals. As a result, they've been able to for the most part dominate politics because of their overwhelming support from millennials, a generation that now makes up the majority of the electorate.

What's given them such an advantage, though, and continues to give them one in the 2028 election cycle, comes not from the methods that the Democrats employed when they were in this position. They are not winning because they decide to take massive amounts of donations from banks and corporations. They are not winning because they employ Hillary Clinton's tactics of appealing to the center without regard to consequences that this has. And most of all, they are not winning because they act like accomplishing essential  systemic reforms is unrealistic.

The reason they're winning is that unlike the Democrats, they understand that you aren't truly running against an opponent when you've decided to become like your opponent.

Clinton Is Hurting Democrats More Than Trump Is Hurting Republicans

The Reagan/Bush years were not a good time for the Democrats. The liberal trend in public sentiments created by the New Deal and the Cultural Revolution had receded, and the vast majority of the electorate was so swept up in Cold War patriotism and memories of Carter's handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis that they were willing to take offensive caricatures of "welfare queens" and baseless accusations of the left being subservient to communism seriously. This was most apparent when the mere use of the word "liberal" as an attack against Michael Dukakis in 1988 served as a major factor in his loss.

And so when the Clintons, the Third Way political think tank, and the Democratic Leadership Council sought to take over the party and shift it to the right, they had the perfect excuse: it's simply the only way to survive against the Republicans. And at the time, it sadly appears, this was true.

But then the unthinkable began to occur: after years of supporting policies which increased the wealth gap, more Americans started to notice that they were becoming poorer themselves. This of course led to a comeback for the left. By 2003, 63% of Americans thought that wealth should be more equally distributed (which is as much as they do today), 63% also thought that those with the highest incomes weren't paying their fair share in taxes, and though at least 70% supported the War in Iraq at the time it started, that number was quickly narrowing.

And the effects of this on the Democratic establishment were very much apparent. Starting with the success of Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign, the left was rebelling against its self-appointed standard bearers, and in time for the 2004 election cycle, they were ready to take the Democratic Party back. Howard Dean, the anti-Iraq War, crowdfunded Vermont Governor who advocated a serious effort to defeat corporate rule, was propelled to the front of the Democratic presidential nomination ticket.

And then came the backlash. In addition to the media's calculated attacks on Dean, past Democratic nominees and the rest of the party's corporate wing were eager to not just publicly oppose him but to undermine his campaign. Since the left hadn't yet gathered enough strength, this quickly killed his chances, leaving corporate Democrats free to continue asserting their political dominance while ignoring or marginalizing the populist wing of their base.

But they could only get away with it for so long.

Since 2008, the Democratic Party has experienced a period of decline unprecedented in the history of party affiliation. After the fervor of Obama's first presidential campaign died down and Democrats actually came into power, Americans began to dislike the party more and more. Especially with the great recession, the vast majority wanted a system that held corporate America accountable, allowed a much more equal amount of opportunity, and took care of those in need. And given the Democrat's embrace of the Wall Street bailouts, failure to sufficiently raise taxes on the rich, and rejection of universal health care, it was clear that the party did not represent these goals.

And yet in the year 2016, when income inequality (which has actually increased more under Obama than it did under Bush) is once again at a level which puts us in one of history's great phases of revolt among the lower classes, the Democratic Party leadership is still stuck in the same mindset that it was in the early 90's.

Though evolving public sentiments on issues such as abortion and gay marriage has prompted the Democratic establishment to become somewhat more progressive since then, with the installment of Hillary Clinton as the leader of the party, not only has its agenda failed to change to something more populist, but it's in fact moving further to the right.

In March, 121 prominent neoconservatives signed an open letter regarding their rejection of Donald Trump's candidacy and policies, which stated among many other things that "His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle." This meant that though they did not approve of his pandering to the extreme right on social issues and civil liberties, they saw him as a threat to the consistently hawkish foreign policy model that they embraced. And so, having also said that "We commit ourselves to working energetically" to keeping Trump out of office, Clinton and the Democratic Party was now the new home for their agenda.

And the desire for such bipartisan merging has been mutual. Despite the usual hostility among most Republicans towards Hillary Clinton still being prevalent, Trump is creating an opportunity for the Democratic and Republican parties to essentially become one. Clinton's eagerness to reach out to dissatisfied Republicans, which has involved tactics such as creating a conservative outreach group called Together for America, accommodating the Republicans who have endorsed her, and working with Paul Ryan on combating poverty (a worthy goal, but still a signal that the ties between her and the GOP are strengthening), has caused some to actually speculate that she wants Republicans to keep the majority in congress.

Democrats under Clinton are also making inroads in parts of the GOP's base, with their cynical campaign having won over nearly half of New York Republicans. She isn't doing that well with them in most other regions, but nationwide, the number of Republicans who support her (8%) is larger than the number of Democrats who support Trump (5%). While that doesn't sound like much of a difference, if the situation were reversed, Trump would be comfortably in the lead.

What we are seeing this year is the logical conclusion of the electoral strategy which Hillary and Friends put into play more than twenty years ago-appeal to as many people as possible regardless of their ideology, and you're sure to receive the (sometimes reluctant) backing of most Americans. Making two major parties into one is the ultimate form of such political triangulation, and it's only going to get worse. If Trump is the next president, he will further alienate the old-guard Republicans, and more of them will realign with the pro-free trade, pro-war Democratic Party. A president Clinton would of course try to create a similar situation by governing the same as Obama on trade and to the right of him on foreign policy. HA Goodman describes this dynamic as "the foundation of fascism, when both parties unite on war and liberals defend neoconservative principles."

The good news is that this won't last. As I stated before, we have reached a point where income inequality is so extreme that the vast majority quite literally aren't able to afford to support status-quo politicians, and as the Democrats continue to pivot towards the interests of the elite, I fully expect a broad swath of their former base to rally around a genuinely populist third party in the next few years. There are signs of this already in the fact that the beliefs of Americans are highly inconsistent with the goals of the two major parties, and in the major surge in support that the Green Party has received this year. In a country with today's economic conditions, those who fail to address the concerns of the people are destined to fail politically, and the irony is that while Trump's brand of reactionary populism has hurt the Republican Party, it's still a more sustainable strategy than the one the Democrats are using.

The strangest part of this is that the Democratic elite apparently has no idea they're marching towards their doom. Last year, the Third Way (which has direct ties to Hillary Clinton) published an essay titled "Ready For The New Economy." It gives Democrats the advice of shifting away from a populist message (something that the author is unaware they did a long time time ago), the argument for which it presents in a way that couldn't be any more detached from reality:

Moreover, the narrative of fairness and inequality has, to put it mildly, failed to excite voters. In each of the last three election cycles, Democrats—the self-styled party of the middle-class—have lost the middle class by an average of seven points, a combined margin of defeat of 20.4 million votes.²² In 2014, this margin was 11-points,²³ indicating once again that the “fairness” agenda and narrative Democrats offered did not connect well with middle income voters. Between 2008 and 2013, party registration for Democrats shrunk (-428,687) as Independent registration surged (+2.5 million).²⁴ And, at the sub-presidential level, Democrats are in their deepest hole in nearly a century. Democrats today hold fewer House, Senate, and governors’ offices than at any time since 1930. When state legislative bodies are included, Democrats now have the smallest number of legislative majorities since Reconstruction. These trends should compel the party to rigorously question the electoral value of today’s populist agenda.

This is how the Democratic leadership views their base-people who would actually prefer to have their economic interests hurt. That is the political equivalent of an abusive relationship, and it can't last. When Howard Dean tried to redeem the Democratic Party, it could afford to reject him. Now that it's done the same to Bernie Sanders, there's no hope left for it.

A Five-Step Plan For Building A Successful Third Party

 

The picture above is a witness's sketch of the 1856 Republican National Convention. You wouldn't be able to guess it from looking at the image, but this was the party's first one ever.

As I've written about before, the GOP's origin story is proof that political upsets of party-sized magnitude can happen under the right conditions. The Republican Party was born out of the growing success of the abolitionist movement in the 1850's, wherein only months after their founding on March 20, 1854, they managed to largely dislodge the pro-slavery Whig Party in that year's midterm election. By 1856, they had replaced the formerly immovable Whigs altogether, all because they had an agenda that spoke to the deep and growing concerns of the American people.

And a similar situation is expected to play out soon in the 21st century. With income inequality once again at a crisis level, and the Democratic Party in a worse position than ever to address it, all the signs point to many Democrats (and some Republicans) leaving their party and working towards the rise of a third one that isn't corrupted by corporate interests, which will most likely be the Greens.

And especially with the coming economic collapse which will expose Democrats as the party of Wall Street when the Obama Administration pushes for bailouts, I believe that a large surge in support for the Greens is inevitable. But their victory won't happen on its own; we'll need to fight for it.

So in the interests of letting you know what you can do to make us achieve such reform-and most importantly, keeping you motivated-I'll present to you a somewhat idealistic, but entirely possible, projection of the next four years should we make all the right moves. The first one of those moves is...

1: Gather early support

Robert Reich, a longtime friend of the Clintons who nonetheless promotes an agenda far to the left of theirs, is one of the first people who had the vision of a third party upset post-2016. In March, during the height of competitiveness in the Democratic primaries, he authored a piece that succinctly imagined a surprisingly plausible scenario: the end of the two-party system in 2020 if Bernie Sanders did not become president in 2016.

And this wasn't just fanciful speculating. Reich now seriously plans to build an alternative to the two major parties in future elections. And I look forward to working with him on that, directly or indirectly. The one part of his strategy that I disagree with, though, is how he plans to embark on the project after the November election. "The day after Election Day," he said in a July 26 Democracy Now interview, "I am going to try to work with Bernie Sanders and anybody else who wants to work in strengthening a third party—and again, maybe it’s the Green Party—for the year 2020, and do everything else I was just talking about. But right now, as we lead up to Election Day 2016, I must urge everyone who is listening or who is watching to do whatever they can to make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president, and not Donald Trump."

Aside from my minor disagreement with Reich on whether Hillary Clinton is worth voting for, I'd recommend a different approach: start promoting the idea of a party-sized upheaval right now. 

During the time between the end of the primary contests on June 14 and Bernie Sanders' endorsement of Clinton on July 12, when it was uncertain as to whether my candidate would become the nominee, I had been contemplating Reich's predictions quite a lot. And by the time it was all over, I was fully ready to begin working on plan B. Hours after Sanders surrendered all the hopes of his campaign, I had started cultivating new hope in his supporters by creating See You In 2020 and publishing an article that explained why this was far from over (which, I admit, I had started to write in advance).

In short, I started preparing for 2020 as far back in advance as possible. And if you haven't begun doing so yet, please start now; tell everyone you know about the political opportunities ahead. Talk on social media about building a third party. And if you have any kind of voice in the media or run a blog of your own, use it to spread the message. Time is of the essence, and Trump or no Trump, we can't afford to waste it by remaining silent on this issue.

2: Gather early support from within the establishment

Here's where the fun starts: the day after the election. Well, actually, it won't be all that fun when we experience it firsthand. A massive financial crisis is coming (see the link in the fourth paragraph), and in spite of the uncomfortable effects that most of us will be feeling from it, at least we'll be able to watch the political thriller that it results in.

If the crash hits before the end of Obama's term, which I believe is highly likely, the Democratic Party will be effectively detonated. As was the case eight years ago, Obama will pursue a bailout for the largest financial institutions after they start to go under, which will be just as unpopular as the ones from last time. But unlike in 2008, Obama and the other Democrats who support such actions will not be let off in the court of public opinion. As the middle class rapidly deflates under the policies of a Democratic president, not only the types of liberals who supported Sanders in the primaries but the ones who supported Clinton will largely be jolted out of the notion that their party represents their interests. 

Since Hillary Clinton herself will no doubt be on board with the bailouts in addition to being responsible for creating the foundations of this crisis by supporting the last ones, if the collapse happens before November 8, the election could very well be handed to Trump. But no matter what comes of this in the short term, it will leave us with a major opening for future elections.

Again, imagine it's November 9. The system of big money in politics, unregulated capitalism, and extreme economic concentration has wholly proved itself to be unsustainable, and almost everyone is aware that neither of the major parties is able to fix the problem. It's now when Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, and the rest of those who know what must be done to fix this mess will need to get to work. 

On that day, I plan to start both privately and publicly contacting the politicians who make up a substantial part of the Democratic Party, called the Berniecrats, and advising them to leave their party. Having collectively pledged to vote for Hillary Clinton, they have somewhat of an obligation at the moment to remain registered Democrats, but after the election is over and the Wall Street bailout fiasco has played out, I'm sure that many of them will be glad to break ties with the DNC. If we all lobby them through some means (writing letters, calling their offices, authoring opinion pieces) to abandon the Democratic Party, our movement could soon have a lot of influential figures backing it.

The winter of 2016 will be a bleak one. But spring will be on its way, and the world will be turning Green.

3: Lay out the foundations for a government takeover

It's 2017, and the cracks in the two-party system are becoming ever more visible. New polling data has been released on party affiliation that shows combined Republican and Democratic membership has dropped to below 50%, and as Americans are struggling to recover from the financial Armageddon that resulted from their past support of these parties, this fact is making a lot of people re-evaluate their political strategy.

And the leaders of the Green Party (assuming that another party with similar goals doesn't arise to compete with it) are taking notice. As the 2017 local elections (or what I like to call the mid-midterms) approach, Greens across the country who are running for positions like mayor, county supervisor, and school board are enjoying a notable increase in support with a public that's both deeply alienated with the parties of those candidates' competitors and has the encouragement of many political leaders to seek out alternatives.

I believe that this surge will be inevitable. But the amount of influence it has over the structure of our government when the time comes to vote will largely depend on how hard we work for these candidates. Living in Humboldt County, California, one of the state's top three Greenest counties and the first place where Greens won a majority of seats in a city council, I'll have front-row seat to some of the races where they're most successful. Other parts of the country won't be as easy, though; judging from the map of Jill Stein's success in the 2012 election, we can expect that while the Green Party will do well in Alaska, Hawaii, the northeast, the west coast, and the northern midwest, they'll face challenges in most other regions.

But even if you live in Georgia (the Green Party's historically worst-performing state), I urge you to promote, volunteer, and most importantly vote for the Green candidates running in your area next year. And if they're expected to be absent from any places on the ballot, fill that void by running as a Green yourself. Because though a Green sweep in local elections won't have much of a direct influence on the issues that affect the country most, it will leave a great deal of communities familiar with the Greens, and feel empowered to vote for them when the stakes are higher.

4: Take it to Washington

I'm sad to say that no Green has ever won a position in the U.S. government's parliament. But when examining the historical record of the amount of votes the Greens have received in past elections, one era stands out: the year 2000.

"Green Party Grows (So Does Democrats' Dismay)", reads a headline from 1998 that we'll no doubt see a new version of in 2018. For several years between then and the turn of the millennium, it looked like the Greens were slowly on their way to overtaking the Democratic Party. After Bill and Hillary Clinton's appaling remaking of the Democrats into another version of the Republicans, many voters were ready for a change. That, and the nomination of yet another uninspiring candidate Al Gore in 2000, propelled Ralph Nader to a symbolic victory of 2.74% of the vote and gave the Greens running for Senate an unprecedented 0.90% of it. Congressional Green candidates also experienced an increase in support from previous elections, with 0.26% of the vote.

The trend of growing success for the Greens didn't last, but it made something apparent: when the public doesn't like the options in front of them, there's no reason they won't switch to something better.

That's what we'll see again-this time magnified-in the 2018 midterms. With the Greens (hopefully) having won a large number of seats in local races across the country, and the latest poll numbers for the Democratic Party showing that it just doesn't have enough support to be taken seriously, they're ready to compete on a higher level. I'd say the worst case scenario for 2018, assuming we succeeded enough in 2017, will be that the Green candidates running for the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the governorship will not win any elections, but still take an amount of the vote relative to their opponents that would have been unheard of two years before. The best case scenario (which, as far as we know, will be the case) is that Greens defy the attacks that the media and the electoral establishment throw at them and actually win several, if not many, seats in parliament.

Then begins the long slog to you-can-guess-where...

5: Take it to Washington-and then take it over.

It's the beginning of 2019, and the Greens have made historic gains in a very short period of time. They have the backing of many prominent individuals, a substantial number of Americans now choose to side with them over the Democrats (which are still shrinking), and though they still don't control the government, they're now very much a mainstream party.

Now comes their greatest challenge: winning the White House. Despite hostility from the corporate media, they enjoy a lot of support from the American people during the first months of the 2020 campaign season, with their presidential frontrunner experiencing a steady rise in the polls. And after the Greens take over more of the country's local governments than ever in November of 2019, the game is on.

With much of the left now with the Green Party, the Democratic base and leadership is almost entirely made up of corporatists, which means that the Greens have an edge. If Hillary Clinton is the next president, they'll find themselves running against one of the worst Democratic candidates imaginable, and if she isn't, the 2020 Democratic nominee will most certainly be just as politically unappealing as her. For this reason, I think the Greens will have a good chance of surpassing the Democrats in both membership and the polling numbers of their presidential nominees in 2020.

The final face-off before November, though, will likely be between the Greens and the Republicans. If Donald Trump is the next president, we'll be competing with someone who harnesses the same kind of anti-establishment, populist sentiments as we do-but twists it into a reactionary, neo-fascist direction rather than towards the politics of peace and equality that we promote. The same will be the case if Trump loses, as a new, probably even worse version of him will easily step in and take his place four years later. So ultimately, the choice that Americans will face on November 3, 2020 will come down to this: do you want  your future to be defined by the politics of fear, or by the politics of courage?

Given the demographic shift that will have taken place by then, we have good reason to believe that courage will win in that scenario. But that's far off; right now, we need to get started on creating the factors that will make it all possible. 

As for 2016, I'll continue to write articles here that promote setting those events into play, and help Greens win in the races currently within their reach. (For anyone who also lives in Humboldt County, you'll have two local Greens to vote for in November: Arcata City Council candidates Paul Pitino and someone named Valerie Rose-Campbell. Let's make this a good year for them.) The future that I envisioned is fantastical, but if we're willing to work for it, it could very well become reality.

And what if we don't succeed in 2020? If that happens, as we've learned this year, nothing should ever deter us from continuing the fight. History shows that change always comes, regardless of the direction of electoral politics. And secondly, remember that the Republicans lost in 1856. However long it takes for the Greens to do what the Republicans did, we'll one day get a Lincoln of our own.