The Democratic Establishment's Strange Behavior

Foreword: I recommend you read this linked article before continuing.

The Washington Post put out a column yesterday, titled Bernie Sanders' strange behavior, which expressed some adamant concerns over the need for unity among the Trump regime's opponents. But the Post, like the Democratic Party establishment that it represents, is not really helping in regards to that cause.

Over the last few years, the DNC and its media gofers have at times offered some odd comments and actions for a group pushing for party unity.

To wit:

• They actively conspired within the DNC leadership to interfere with the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, and at one point considered painting Bernie Sanders' Jewish heritage in a negative light as a way to hurt his campaign.
• They went far beyond just considering interfering in the democratic process, having rigged or allowed their allies to rig the Democratic debate schedule, the major media coverage, and even the voting system itself against Sanders.
• After nakedly attacking Bernie Sanders in both personal and ideological ways on a notable amount of occasions, the Washington Post and other pro-Democratic establishment publications like it ran a similarly disingenuous and hateful campaign against Jill Stein and then Tulsi Gabbard. They're currently working on a Bernie smear campaign 2.0, with pro-establishment liberal columnists having started to frequently put out articles attacking him and his supporters as "purists," "Russian agents," etc.
• Speaking of which, McCarthyism, McCarthyism, McCarthyism, and-wait for it-McCarthyism. 

But the most puzzling development this week is their reaction to Sanders' deciding to keep Georgia special election candidate Jon Ossoff candidate at arms length. When Sanders hesitated to endorse Ossoff (which he's done today) no doubt partly because of the favorable treatment Ossoff is receiving from the DNC and the DCCC in comparison with their abandonment earlier this month of Kansas Berniecrat James Thompson, establishment Democrats acted strangely outraged that someone they know stands against them in almost every way would be wary of jumping on their latest public outreach effort.

"It's an odd statement to make about a guy who has been running in such a high-profile race and in whom Democrats have invested so much money and blood, sweat and tears," reads said Post article about Sanders' bizarrely sensible statement on Ossoff.

Establishment Democrats qualify this baffled response to Sanders' behavior by the fact that they don't seem to really know much about what he stands for and what his mission is, so perhaps it should be taken at face value-that they truly don't know enough about Sanders to view his actions correctly. But it's an odd thing for them to do in regards to a guy who they've so happily claimed to want to be like.

Here's a tellingly strange response to Sanders' Ossoff statement from Daily Kos Elections' David Nir, as quoted from two of his tweets the other day:

"Bernie Sanders isn't helping—he's hurting. He should either endorse Ossoff and raise money for him, or keep his silence."

"On second thought, Sanders shouldn't endorse Ossoff. He should just remain silent and not hurt the efforts of those of us helping in."

Perhaps the strangest thing about this is that the Democratic establishment isn't vouching for the progressivism of more eagerly Sanders-endorsed candidates like Montana's Rob Quist, even as they're doing so for another Democrat of pretty questionable credentials. That would be how unlike Quist, Ossoff does not seem to support a $15 minimum wage despite running in one of the poorest states in the country.

As Heavy.com notes, Ossoff does want to raise the federal minimum wage from its current slavery status of $7.25, but not explicitly to $15, and only to the loosely defined extent that it's "indexed to cost of living." Indeed, there's a lot in that for progressives to be suspicious of.

Yet establishment Democrats defend their full-on support for Ossoff by noting the terrain on which Democrats are trying to win. Ossoff's more ardent supporters like to say he's simply doing the best he can to advance progressive goals while running in an area that's highly conservative, but partisan labels aside, those in the overwhelmingly impoverished southwest would probably receive a platform of populist economic reform very well.

That entire justification-we can't step outside the perceived mainstream of the political spectrum, or else voters will dismiss us as fringe-can be applied in the minds of establishment Democrats to seemingly every situation, even the one of Ossoff in the radical change-eager south. Sure, they like to reason, the majority of the country is behind Bernie Sanders on virtually every issue, but he and candidates like him just can't win because he's a "socialist" or a "radical."

It all makes the Democratic establishment's decision not to back Thompson, Quist and others even more conspicuous. Perhaps they're much more concerned, as their behavior over the last four decades or so suggests, with helping their corporate and wealthy donors than the voters they need to succeed. But they're really contradicting themselves here, creating divisions where they say they want unity by continuing to favor oligarchy-friendly candidates and goals over most of the electorate that they're counting on to bring them back into power.

Whether this is all a series of wayward comments and actions or something more targeted at Sanders' brand of progressivism, it's unlikely to help Democrats "come together" very soon. And the current Democratic leadership, perhaps unsurprisingly, is proving a questionable messenger for that cause.

The Clock Is Ticking For The Democrats

Throughout the four months that I've written articles on this site, the main thing I've focused on is advocating for the dissolution of the Democratic Party so that an alternative party which is capable of systemic change can arise. My central argument for this course of action has been that reforming the Democrats, though technically possible, is impractical compared to the option of scrapping this deeply corrupt party and starting anew.

However, since my greater goal is to help bring about such changes, I'm of course willing to reassess my approach if necessary, and it may turn out that I'm wrong about the need for such a plan. In the days since the election, many respected people who share my agenda have called for an effort to save the Democratic Party by remaking it. For just two examples, Bernie Sanders has endorsed leftist congressman Keith Ellison for the next DNC chair, and said that the party needs to be set on a more populist course. And Robert Reich has recommended that the party's current leadership "step down and be replaced by people who are determined to create a party that represents America – including all those who feel powerless and disenfranchised, and who have been left out of our politics and left behind in our economy."

And as I said, perhaps they're right. This year's collapse of the Democratic Party in its current form has created an opportunity for reforming it as well as replacing it, and both plans, given that they're successful, would yield equally good results.

But while turning around the party is indeed doable, the window of opportunity to do so gets smaller every day.

I'll start this analysis by assessing just how corrupt the Democratic Party is; for the past forty years, starting with the Carter Administration, Democrats have generally shown no regard to the interests of their base. They've helped lower the tax burden on the wealthy. They've enacted the so-called free trade deals that allowed for the unnecessary poverty of so many American workers. They've passed the deregulations of the financial sector that caused the Great Recession. And they've allowed for the election of Donald Trump by becoming a corporate party and thus rendering themselves politically impotent.

I could go on for a while about the failures of the party. But to address the question this article is meant to answer of whether attempting to reform it is worthwhile, we'll need to confront the level of control that corporate Democrats hold over it-and thus, how realistic the idea is of replacing them.

According to Open Secrets, Democratic politicians in this election cycle have generally taken about as much corporate campaign donations as Republicans, thus creating the neoliberal dynamic within their party. And though some of the blame for this falls upon the nature of America's campaign finance system, the rest can be attributed to the party's leadership; for many years, corporations have been the chief contributors to the Democratic National Committee. The same is true for the party's congressional and senatorial campaign committees.

Amid this eagerness of Democratic leaders to collude with neoliberal powers, it's no surprise that they're also eager to maintain their party's status quo. As Noah Rothman assesses regarding the efforts from Democratic officials to influence the outcome of the Democratic primaries:

Contrary to the presumption among grassroots conservative activists that the Republican Party is busily at work thwarting their aspirations, much of the GOP’s present disarray can be fairly attributed to the party’s desire to accommodate its restive base. The party could have taken any number of avenues that would have, for example, made it impossible for Donald Trump to ascend to the debate stage or to meet the requirements to secure ballot access at the state-level. Indeed, party officials flirted with those prospects, but cooler heads prevailed. The same cannot be said of the Democratic Party’s officials, who have been nakedly at work protecting Hillary Clinton from the scrutiny of her fellow party members.

The DNC, Rothman continues, decided to arrange the party's presidential debates in a way that helped Hillary Clinton, scheduling only six of them and putting them on days of the week where people where less likely to watch. And that article was from October of last year; the 2016 Democratic primaries, in addition to the usual undemocratic practices of closed primaries and superdelegates, was run with an extraordinary amount of bias against Bernie Sanders, with widespread voter suppression and electoral fraud having taken place.

All of these events reflect an undeniable effort among Democratic elites to keep their party's role as a tool of corporate interests by shutting out efforts from people like Sanders to reform it. And they intend to continue defending their neoliberal castle in the coming years as progressive invaders prepare to storm it. Establishment Democrats, declining Robert Reich's invitation to admit they did wrong by nominating Clinton and let genuine progressives take over the party, are blaming third party voters for their loss and backing the candidacy of corporate lobbyist Howard Dean for the next DNC chair seat.

And even if Dean or any other corporate Democrat loses their position to a Sandersist, it won't have much of an effect on the the party' agenda. Because as we've also learned from the 2016 election, the Democratic establishment has ways of crushing dissent when an outsider enters its ranks; when Hawaii congresswoman and DNC co-chair Tulsi Gabbard criticized the anti-Sanders bias of her colleagues last year, they disinvited her from one of the debates. And when she stepped down from her seat to endorse Sanders, they sent her a somewhat rude email which revealed their blatant hostility towards Sanders' candidacy, as well as their discomfort at having someone like Gabbard be apart of their group. "It’s very dangerous when we have people in positions of leadership who use their power to try to quiet those who disagree with them," Gabbard said last year. "When I signed up to be vice chair of the DNC, no one told me I would be relinquishing my freedom of speech and checking it at the door."

And so, barring a drastic shakeup in the Democrats' leadership sometime soon, reforming the party will be a largely uphill battle that takes several election cycles to fully win. And in the meantime, the party's appalling corruption is sure to make it difficult for Democrats to reboot in time for the 2018 and 2020 elections, at which point they may already be fatally damaged.While a senior Democratic aide remarked on the day after the election that the party's current crisis "Could get worse before it gets better," I'd say there's also a possibility that it will just keep getting worse from here.

Thus, though I'm eager to see the activism outside of electoral politics which Sanders and Reich will do in the next four years, I intend to seek a different approach than theirs of rebuilding the broken Democratic coalition: trying to rally it around a different party that isn't already corrupted by corporate interests. And such a party, which by default will most likely be the Greens, is already making some encouraging gains, with Green ballot access being at its highest levels ever, Green membership growing in places like Colorado and the Bronx, and Jill Stein having received almost three times the amount of votes this year than the last time she ran on the Green Party's presidential ticket in 2012.

However, this isn't to say that I think we should abandon the idea of reforming the Democratic Party entirely, just as those who want to reform it shouldn't abandon the idea of building a third party. Both of these plans have a good chance of failing, and should either of them prove to be the more difficult one, everyone should be prepared to unite around working towards the most realistic strategy.

Time will tell which approach is better. But in the meantime, I believe those in both of what are coming to be called the "Demexit" and "Dementer" camps should, to an extent, support the other group's cause; Demexiters, for instance, ought to help Keith Ellison become the next DNC chair and vote for down-ballot progressive Democrats in future elections. And Dementerers ought to help the Green Party gain ballot access and vote for any viable Green candidates they encounter. In the 2018 midterms, such a unity between the two camps will be crucial in order to stop the Republicans.

It's in 2020, though, that the fate of progressives who object to the Democratic establishment will likely be determined. If the Dementerers can replace enough of the Democratic Party's leadership by then to put it on track for long-term survival and reform, I'll gladly join their cause. If the Demexiters can build the Green Party into a viable option by then, Democrats should join our cause.

In either case, the Democratic Party as we know it is doomed. What remains to be seen is whether the party itself will be able to evolve before it's too late, or diminish to irrelevance and be replaced by the Greens via natural selection. What's ironic about all this is that Bernie Sanders, who's willing to run in 2020, may become part of whichever scenario comes to pass; if he hasn't been able to reform the Democratic Party at that point so that his campaign won't be sabotaged like in 2016, a third party run will probably be his best option. And if the opposite is the case, he'll of course be able to safely run as a Democrat.

The one certain thing, though, is that four years from now the establishment Democrats who mistreated progressives in 2016 will no longer have nearly as much power as they once did.

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.

Joke's On You, Democrats

Obama with Debbie Wasserman Schultz at a September 2008 campaign event

I'd guess that by now everyone has tried to block out their memories of 2008. That year was supposed to be the new beginning of history, when the illegitimately elected war criminal was chased out of office by a flying shoe and a man who's very skin color proved that the country had changed would make things right.

It's needless to mention the many ways that that hopeful feeling has been shattered by Obama and the rest of the Democratic elte since then, but as of today, as their decision to stay on the same old Clintonian path is made official, there's no chance it will be back for this year. This is a party that no longer represents their own supporters or the democratic principles that political institutions are needed to be based upon in order to hold power legitimately, and whether you plan to vote for Hillary Clinton this year, they have no long-term future.

But what many are failing to see is that this is a good thing.

Let's delve into some political science fiction: it's earlier today, and the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia are doing their role call vote on who to pick for the nomination. Against expectations, the superdelegates actually consider their votes from the standpoint of someone that wants to help the future of their party. They think of the polls that show Donald Trump gaining on Hillary Clinton both nationally and in battleground states, the millions of angry Sanders supporters that plan to never take part in their organization again, the clearly illegitimate primary results, and the overwhelming public will towards real change, and at the last minute, they nominate Bernie Sanders.

The establishment Democrats object in every way they can, claiming that it was a coup and demanding a revote, but in the end, they're the ones that need to fall in line. Bernie Sanders beats Trump by about ten points as Democrats take the overwhelming senate majority and membership in the Democratic Party suddenly rises from 29% to around 35%. It only gets more popular from there during his administration.

But eight years later, President Sanders, despite having ended America's perpetual wars and passed several notable reforms to health care, energy, education and the financial sector (and also, of course, blocked the TPP), he has not changed the Democratic Party. He remains one of the only politicians with the moral convictions to not accept donations from big business, and despite his repealing Citizens United, the political system is still very much controlled by private interests.

The DNC, which refused to support his goals from day one, eagerly pushes a corporate Democrat to replace him in the 2024 primaries. From then on, the Democratic Party leadership quietly distances themselves from the most popular president they've ever had, going right back to their neoliberal past and destroying Sanders' legacy over the next several decades. Things return to the old, destructive paradigm of two utterly dominant parties fighting each other to create the illusion of choice while working to serve their donors at the top.

Another unintended consequence of having one activist representing the Democratic Party is that it would make most of the other activists, the ones outside of politics who really have the most power when they are united and committed, to not be as motivated. Aside from doing his best to change the system from within, a President Sanders would become a tool for the rest of the party leadership to keep the people from wanting to help change it from the outside. Because as far as the average person can see, with a Democratic Socialist as president, there can't be much work left for them to do, right?

At that point, it starts to sound a lot like a repeat of Obama's presidency.

To be clear, I very much believe that a Sanders administration would hold positive results. I'm merely saying that no one person, however much integrity and principle they have, can redeem something so fundamentally corrupt as the Democratic Party. In terms of long term change-and I'm talking about fifty or a hundred years from now-it may well be better at this point to let the DNC continue on the path of corruption so that it will implode as soon as possible, making way for a third party alternative.

In short, when you move beyond the notion of having a messianic figure taking over the system and changing everything, which I admit is what I imagined a potential victory for Bernie Sanders would be like to a certain point, it was never meant to be. Given the behavior of the DNC officials, the media, and the rest of the establishment during this rigged contest, to take it over would make no sense.

Our best option, which, it turns out, was always our only option, is not to work with the DNC but to fight it. Vote for the moderate Republican that they've forced on us if you want, but after this election is over, the game will be different. The enormous absence of a Bernie Sanders-like figure that the Democrats caused, as well as the absence of support for both major parties, will lead to the rise of a party which truly focuses on the needs of the people and the planet.

The idea of a Bernie Sanders Democratic nomination is, in spite of all his differences from Obama, a desire to relive that moment of hope we all felt eight years ago. But as long as true progressives try to achieve change by taking control of the Democratic Party, they won't really succeed.

There was an ironic genius in what Bernie Sanders did, though, because while he created a movement that will end up destroying the Democratic Party, he could only reach this point by running for president as a Democrat.

The repeat of 2008 we've all been wanting is in fact here. It just doesn't involve any Democratic presidential candidate.

The First Wave

Sometime last year, according to an interview, Jane Sanders was with her husband discussing his choice to run for president. "How can you win? We're from a small state," she said to him. "I know the issues are important, but isn't there another way for these issues to be discussed? Can't you write a book? Can't you start an organization? Can't you go on a speaking tour?" To which he replied, "Yes, I can do all of those things, and it's not going to matter at all. It's not going to change the conversation."

Bernie Sanders's original mission, though he's denied it, was not necessarily to win the presidency but to change the country. In spite of the DNC's best efforts, he's done just that, and more than in the realm of public discourse. He has helped several citizens who are as concerned as he is about inequality, perpetual war, and the environment to succeed in directly changing the political system.

A popular label for this new breed of politician is "Berniecrats." They're Democratic officials who either supported Sanders in the primaries or are backed by him now. And though the future of progressive politics-and American politics, for that matter-is most likely in a third party that hasn't been corrupted by corporate interests, it's important to support them in this election cycle. Here is a list of all of them, along with links to their campaign websites or pages with information about them:

Tim Canova

Keith Ellison

Tulsi Gabbard

Jeff Merkley

Alan Grayson

Zephyer Teachout

Ron Varasteh

Josh Brannon

Peter Jacob

Tim Sheridan

Patrick Malloy

Dimitri Cherny

Arik Bjorn

Justin Bamberg

Terry Alexander

Robert Williams

Joseph Neal

Cezar E. McKnight

Wendell G. Gilliard

Peter Welch

Pramila Jayapal

Tom Fiegen

Bao Nguyen

Preston Picus

Jim Keady

Richard Mcfarlane

Lorna Phillipson

Jane Kim

Misty Snow

Misty Plowright

If this list is incomplete, please let me know in the comments below, but its current length should encourage you.

When Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton, it revealed that he thinks the Democratic Party is still fixable; he could have continued to compete all the way to the convention two weeks afterward, trying to expose every bit of voter suppression that occurred during the primaries and explaining how James Comey's decision not to indict his opponent was utterly wrong. But he chose to give the Democrats one last chance to redeem themselves, most likely because he very seriously fears a Trump presidency. You can be the judge of whether he made the right decision, but in terms of helping progressives in the short term, he may indeed have.

The establishment Democrats would have been hurt had he exposed their incurably flawed organization, but so would have those genuine progressives listed above. They are some of the first in a series of populist leaders that will go on for decades, the "first wave" in the movement that was started this year.

So before the Democratic Party is replaced by something better post-2016, let us try to salvage the best parts of it.

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.