The Self-Defeating Argument That The Democratic Party Represents Meaningful Change

Both morally and politically, the Democratic Party has failed after forty years of pivoting to the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and a great deal of people are now taking action to fix that. Bernie Sanders, despite having been prevented from becoming the new face of the party last year by pro-Clinton Democratic leaders, he and others are making another go at reforming the Democrats. And should this effort fail, these progressives will still have the option of letting the already sinking ship which is the Democratic Party go underwater and rally around an alternative organization.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the Democratic base appears to be satisfied with their party's current form. During the 2016 campaign, more Democrats were found to be satisfied with Hillary Clinton than there were Republicans who felt the same about Donald Trump, and 56% of Democrats feel that their party represents them. While that latter figure would no doubt shrink to less than 50% if it were to include all of the left-leaning individuals who no longer affiliate with the party, an overhaul of the currently neoliberal Democratic leadership will be difficult for as long as so many Democrats remain unaware of what their party represents.

So in this piece, I'm going to attempt to change the minds of those who believe the Democratic Party in its current form represents a serious threat to the corporate state. I've made this argument many times before, but in those cases a mistake I might have made is focusing only on the actions of the party's leaders. A more effective way of proving the Democratic establishment represents the oligarchy is pointing out the fact that the oligarchy works to accommodate it.

The reality is that if Democrats were a party of the people, the political system in its current form would not allow them to have any power. When Bill Clinton said at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone," had he meant this genuinely, said forces would have immediately started doing everything to sabotage him. His campaign would have been attacked and/or ignored by the corporate media, he would have been shut out of the presidential debates and had a difficult time getting onto all of the ballots, and either Bush or Perot would have prevailed. So is the case with every other corporate-funded Democrat like him who claims to want systemic governmental change.

Just look at what's happened to the few politicians in the last several decades who have actually tried to bring about what Clinton promised. When Ralph Nader tried to enter a 2000 presidential debate simply as a member of the audience, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization run by evidently very partisan representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, barred him from entering the area. Something similar happened to him in 2004 when Democratic officials hurt his campaign by filing pointless and resource-draining lawsuits against it. Nader wasn't the only candidate like him who was sabotaged during that election cycle, as evidenced by the successful attempt by the corporate media to wreck Howard Dean's campaign. Another instance of this systemic effort to block out non-corporatist candidates occurred in 2012, when the NYPD, which has a history of attacking those who threaten the neoliberal order, arrested Jill Stein for trying to enter the site of the New York presidential debate.

But never has the oligarchy-friendly nature of the modern American electoral process been made more apparent than in 2016. While some have tried to claim the fact that the DNC officials who expressed bias against Bernie Sanders had little control over the results of last year's primary proves the contest wasn't rigged, WikiLeaks' findings were only one part of the picture.

Throughout the primaries, pro-Hillary Clinton election officials often went out of their way to sabotage Sanders, starting with the first contest in Iowa wherein widespread reports surfaced of voter suppression and a highly suspicious "re-staged" vote count took place. Similar (and successful) efforts to rig the primary against Sanders occurred in Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, the Nevada State Democratic Convention, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and California. Lesser but still consequential instances of electoral fraud took also took place in many other states, as evidenced by the numerous statistically impossible Democratic primary vote models which favored Clinton in every case. Another way Sanders was felled by a corporate-controlled political process, predictably, was the media blackout which plagued his campaign.

And then, to add insult to injury, Sanders' ideological successor for the 2016 election Jill Stein was sabotaged as well, with the corporate media having launched a smear campaign against her and the Commission on Presidential Debates having deliberately chosen polls which underestimated her support while deciding who could participate in the debates.

Judging from these and other ways the oligarchy has rigged our electoral process to benefit candidates and parties that represent it, one can only conclude that the best way to tell if a candidate or party doesn't intend to protect the people's interests is to see whether or not the media and the major political institutions are trying to get them out of the picture. And clearly, the Democratic Party fails this test simply because of the fact that it's succeeded in the current political system.

Fortunately this sad state of affairs, wherein one can only trust a politician to uphold the popular interest if they're being shut out of the political process, will have a good chance of changing in the very near future. Economic inequality is now at a level not seen since the late 1920's, right before the public rose up to bring about the New Deal, and a similar event is certain to take place within the next few years. But in order to make this overthrow of the corporate power structure effective, we'll need to take a firm stand against the corporatists who currently control the Democratic Party.

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.

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.