The Standoff Between DemExit And DemEnter

As the neoliberal era enters into its final years, with the massive economic inequality that's appeared throughout the last four decades having spawned a new political era of radicalism on both the left and the right, American democracy is naturally becoming more factionalized than usual. The most glaring political divide, of course, is the one between those who support the agenda of president-elect Donald Trump and those who aim to fight him. But that hasn't meant that there isn't an equally significant split within the anti-Trump camp.

Namely, there's a dispute as to whether or not the chief anti-Trump organization should represent corporatism, militarism, and other facets of the neoliberal paradigm. Since the majority of Americans side with anti-neoliberal goals, the victory of the non-corporatist camp is naturally assured, but even within this group a dispute has appeared: whether or not the Democratic Party should fill the role of this progressive organization.

Following the Democratic leadership's sabotage this year of the Bernie Sanders campaign, a great deal of Sanders' supporters, already angered to a breaking point by the saga of betrayals that Democratic elites have perpetrated on their base, decided to finally throw up their hands and leave the party. And at first, this "DemExit" movement looked like it was going to succeed, with the poll numbers of the Green Party's Jill Stein having surged during the summer as a result of it.

But after Stein's disappointing Election Day performance of 1% of the vote, DemExit has evidently lost much of its initial steam. Apart from Cornel West and Chris Hedges, all the major progressive leaders are deciding to take the approach of "DemEnter" and try to change the Democratic Party rather than build a new one. For just two examples, Robert Reich, who used to be in the Demexit camp, is now advocating for the Democratic Party's reform, while Bernie Sanders, possibly the most powerful voice on the left right now, is doing the same, saying that the party needs a "fundamental transformation."

Indeed, it appears that because of this, DemEnter currently has more support and momentum than DemExit. But just because DemEnter is popular, it isn't necessarily the best solution; as we've seen this year, the Democratic Party, far from being an empty vessel for progressive reform, is something of a political labrynth, with many devices set in place to make it harder for non-corporatists to take control of it. As Cornel West has said regarding the idea of reforming the party, "I have a deep love and respect for brother Bernie Sanders. I always will. I don't always agree with him. I'm not convinced that the Democratic Party can be reformed. I think it still has a kind of allegiance to a neoliberal orientation."

So who's right? From an objective standpoint, the approaches of both DemExit and DemEnter have a lot of merit, as well as a lot of potential for failure, and should the currently dominant option of DemEnter fall short of its objectives going into the 2018 and 2020 elections, we'll end up with a fatally damaged Democratic Party and no viable alternative option to replace it.

And should much of the left suddenly start working towards building the Green Party between now and then, given the third party-hostile nature of America's electoral system there's a good chance that the Greens won't become a viable option by 2020, putting Trump's opposition in a similar position to the one mentioned in the previous paragraph. In either of these scenarios, the left will end up blowing the crucial 2020 election.

Those in the DemExit and DemEnter camps are competing for which group's approach will decide the next course that the left takes, and should this standoff last into the next election, the central cause of both groups will be lost.

But despite the risks that come with this competition, I believe its continuation is necessary for now. We don't know for sure which method will turn out to be the most practical and effective one, so when the time comes in 2020 to unite behind whichever approach proves to be the best, it would be wise to make it so that both are viable options by then.

In short, progressives will need to hedge their bets throughout the next three years as DemExit and DemEnter fight it out. But aside from the uncertainty of this situation, the shared goals of DemExit and DemEnter have an almost certain chance of ultimately triumphing; America's descent into its worst period of wealth inequality has created the factors for a class revolt, and when this uprising occurs sometime in the next several years, the objectives of the left will be realized regardless of which party it happens to be aligned with at that point.

So for now, I recommend that regardless of whether you're in the DemExit or DemEnter camp, you continue working towards your current approach, because when you look at the bigger picture, there's no way you'll fail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

Hillary Plays The Fiddle As The Democratic Party Burns

Aside from the small portion of the population that supported Donald Trump from the start of his presidential bid and are therefore the only ones who are truly glad to see him win (which, by the way, he only did so because of the rules of the Electoral College), all Americans can in some way agree that these last 24 hours have been a disappointing experience. From the many Republicans who thought his loss would have been for the best, to the marginalized groups who now fear for their safety, to the billions of people around the world from all walks of life who simply don't want a person like him to represent what's (for now) the most powerful nation, the results of yesterday's election were received bitterly.

There was another group of people, though, which was dismayed by the results: the 57% of Americans who want a third major political party in the United States. Though Gary Johnson and Jill Stein both had a good shot at receiving 5% or more of the popular vote, which would have qualified them for federal matching funds in 2020 and helped their parties rise to prominence, they both significantly under-performed, with Stein getting 1% and Johnson getting 3%. And since it was the irresponsible actions of the two major parties that created the factors behind Trump's success in the first place, this blow to the hopes of building a better alternative means that Trump won in two ways last night.

However, there's something that those who hope for the rise of a third party can take heart in: these results prove that the Democratic Party is now basically dead.

I assumed that it would be able to hold on for a little bit longer after 2016, believing, like most others, that Democrats would win the White House and the Senate. But for better or for worse, Election Day demonstrated that the political environment has been rendered uninhabitable for the party's brand.

The brand I'm talking about is centrism. Or, to put it less politely, a political strategy which is based on promising to fix the system while working to uphold it. Democrats have practiced this cynical tactic for decades, and for a while they thrived under it, but a political structure that's built on empty promises is bound to decay over time, and November 8, 2016 can be considered the day it finally grew too weak to stand.

The first signs of the Democrats' transformation into a disguised tool of the status quo came in the years between the 1968 and 1972 election cycles, when the former supporters of George McGovern worked to reform the party. Though the Democratic Party under the McGovern coalition was more anti-war and pro-civil rights than the one before it, this new version of the Democrats had left behind many of the economically populist values that the party had previously represented in order to appeal to the types of young, socially liberal members of the professional class which would dominate the Democratic base for the next several decades.

Perhaps this pivot was necessary, as it made Democrats into a valuable ally of marginalized groups and advocates of peace, but it had come at a price. In 1972, many working class whites who had used to make up the party's base realigned with the Republican Party, costing Democrats the election. This cleared the way for Jimmy Carter, the logical conclusion of the anti-worker Democratic standard that the party had adopted, to appear in 1976.

It was no coincidence that income inequality, long on the decline, then began to climb upward in the late 70's. Carter took on an elite-oriented approach to economics that none of his recent predecessors, Democratic or Republican, had come close to embracing, enacting deregulations, neglecting infrastructure and social spending, and failing to invest in jobs. Though most see Clinton as the first neoliberal Democratic president, the party had gone in that direction long before the 90's.

The Democrats' corruption has only gotten worse since then, with the party being responsible for the Wall street deregulations, anti-worker trade deals, cuts to the social safety net, and other policies which have driven economic inequality to levels unprecedented in American history. Therefore, it's no wonder that Republicans have been able to get working class whites solidly on their side since 1972, and it should certainly come as no shock that Trump was able to so successfully utilize this anger against the economic order which Democrats represent.

New Yorker writer George Packer, in an article about the disillusionment so many economically insecure people are feeling towards the Democratic Party, assesses the mindset of the early 70's McGovern Democrats as they decided to re-route their party's direction away from economic populism: "The class rhetoric of the New Deal sounded out of date, and the problems it addressed appeared to have been solved by the wide prosperity of the postwar years." This exposes the irony of the situation; the Democrats of four decades ago, forgetful of the reason their party had shifted towards economic populism during the 1930's and 40's (hint: extreme wealth inequality), saw no problem with pivoting towards big business and setting society on the same track that had led it into the great economic and political disasters of the 20th century.

And now, with the ascension of fascism which the modern era of extreme inequality has produced having triumphed in the United States, Democrats are facing the ugly consequences of their mistakes. The coalition of economically privileged liberals which defined the Democratic Party in the late 20th century now lies in ruins, with most of them having either become poorer in the last several decades or died off to be replaced by their less well-off millennial children. And because of the failure of Hillary Clinton and other establishment Democrats to address the economic concerns of their new base, Democratic voter turnout was low in this election, which may well have been the cause of the party's losses. In other words, the center didn't hold this year, and it without a doubt won't hold in 2018 or 2020 either.

However, as I said, this collapse of the center doesn't mean that it's now free game for the reactionary right. In spite of these election results, the left is very much in the majority, and the only reason this year wasn't a victory for progressivism is that there's been no viable option for progressives to unite around; Bernie Sanders, who would have beaten Trump were he the nominee, had his campaign sabotaged by Democratic officials, and Jill Stein, who would have been able to do the same if she'd had the opportunity, was held back by the fact that Greens are (for now) a minor party.

Indeed, I would say that Trump and Friends got lucky this time; the left, which was caught off guard in 2016, will have far better opportunities to mobilize and win in future elections. As Trump's presidency couples with the new financial crisis that will happen within the next few years to intensify the public's anger towards the political and economic establishment, progressives will have an enormous opening, with the vast portion of the electorate which desires positive social change being compelled to take action. And since many anti-Trump Republicans are likely to realign with the Democratic Party in the coming years (a trend which has already started), the possibility of reforming Democrats into an instrument for progressive change looks like it's bound to become increasingly remote, making the prospect of building a viable third party for the left in the near future very much doable.

But regardless of which party becomes the home of the progressive movement during these next four years, I'm more confident than not that it will succeed. Because as Robert Reich put it in an Election Night Facebook post:

It's an awful night, terrible news. If Trump becomes the next president, as seems likely, we're in for an awful ride.

But it's also an opportunity.

The American power structure -- both in the Democratic and in the Republican parties -- has been dealt a severe blow. Bernie Sanders was correct: The moneyed interests rigged our political-economic system against most Americans. And now the backlash has begun.

It was always going to be a contest between authoritarian populism and progressive populism, eventually. For now, authoritarian populism has won. That's the real meaning of Donald Trump. But if we are united and smart and disciplined, progressive populism will triumph, because it's humane.

Do not give up the fight. The real fight has just begun.

Like the ideological center, the Democratic Party went down in flames last night. Now we need to build something better in its smoldering ruins.

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.

What The Origins Of the GOP Can Tell Us About The Future Of American Politics

No, I [Abraham Lincoln] was not a 3rd party candidate in 1860. Learn some history, dammit.

Or so the condescending internet meme goes. In response to the claim from electoral reform advocates that Republicans were a third party when Lincoln was elected, supporters of the traditional political model have said the real history isn't that simple; Republicans had established mainstream support and won many seats in the House and the Senate before 1860, say the skeptics, proving that the Greens and Liberitarians should give up and let the serious people keep running things.

This argument actually proves the opposite.

It's true that Lincoln's campaign was not an insurgency. Had he run in a party that had little support or positions in other branches of government than the presidency beforehand, he would have most likely lost. As has been the case with all other third party presidential efforts since then, the political system did not change overnight. But its rise took place during a period of time that, when compared to the rest of American history, is impressively brief. And that directly parallels how the rise of another third party in the 21st century will play out.

Even then, America was locked into a two-party system. Starting with the 1828 election, wherein Andrew Jackson defeated National Republican John Q. Adams, Democrats and Whigs dominated virtually all of politics. But as the Abolitionist movement started to make serious progress during the 1850's, and neither party was willing to change their position on slavery, their futures became in doubt.

The Whigs, of course, were the ones who took the fall; after the Republican Party was founded on February 28, 1854, they filled a political vacuum of anti-slavery Whigs who decided to split with their party and helped Republicans replace it as the main opponent of Democrats during that year's midterm elections. Pro-slavery Whigs, having seen their party destroyed in only a matter of months, then realigned with the Democratic Party, which still shared their views. In 1856, Republicans staged a losing but successful presidential campaign by American military officer John Fremont, and solidified their majority over the remaining Whigs in the House and the Senate. By 1860, they had overtaken the Democrats in all three departments.

As someone who has seriously considered the future of American politics given recent events, this story sounds strikingly similar to what I expect will happen in the following years.

And I'm not the only one who might think along the same lines. In March, Robert Reich-who has had firsthand experience with the appalling neoliberalism of the modern Democratic Party as Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor-wrote a piece that predicted what would happen to American politics if Bernie Sanders did not become the Democratic nominee. He reasons that regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is the next president, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be passed, another recession will occur that prompts Wall Street bailouts, and the wealth gap will grow even bigger.

But then, omitting a lot of the details that would be sorted out later, he says that because politics "abhors a vacuum," in 2019 there will be a sudden surge of support for a populist alternative to the Democrats that he hypothetically calls the People's Party. "Americans rallied to the cause," he recounts from the future about the party's success. "Millions who called themselves conservatives and Tea Partiers joined with millions who called themselves liberals and progressives against a political establishment that had shown itself incapable of hearing what they had been demanding for years."

And finally in 2020, he says, the People's Party wins a majority in both houses of congress along with the presidency.

Political vacuums. Dissatisfaction with the parties. Major shifts of support in a short period of time. The future that Reich and I believe is more than likely and the events that created the GOP are foreboding in their parallels. And while it's impossible to say exactly how this scenario will play out, the Republican's rapid ascension proves that when voters are highly concerned with a certain issue, in that case slavery, they gravitate towards the leaders who will address it.

With the rise of the People's Party-or whatever other form it takes-there will be a number of issues that contribute to the electoral realignment. Ending the wars, softening the effects of climate change, and other important problems will of course play a part, but as Reich describes, more than anything it will be the massive economic inequality which is certain to increase in the next four years that unites Americans against the two corporate parties. Though Democrats and Republicans have enjoyed the support of most Americans for several decades despite not representing their interests, too much concentration of the economy is bound to lead to a populist uprising eventually, and these next few years will be when that point is finally reached.

What will politics look like after history repeats itself? I think the most likely scenario is that the Democrats will go the way of the Whigs, replaced by an alternative that suites the interests of their base. The Republicans might survive in the form of Trump-style reactionary populism they've taken on this year, but they won't be the dominant party.

The party that the GOP's founders created has become sadly unrecognizable from what they intended. But the methods that they used to make it come to power haven't changed, and they'll soon be put to very good use.