The author of this article, Paul Street and Chris Hedges, and who knows how
many others, are saying that the attempt to change our government by moving the
Democratic Party to the left, won't work. Instead, we need a new people's
party. I think that they may be correct. However, our laws don't permit third
parties to gain strength and power. Like the Green Party, they remain avenues
through which we can express our dissent. But how do you change a government,
a society, the whole culture of a country? It didn't work in Russia. It didn't
work in China. The cultures of those countries overtook and formed what the new
governments became.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2018 11:43 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Can a New Political Party Save America From
Itself?
No. A new political party will not solve our nation's ills. The only solution
is a total change of government. Who is designing suich a replacement? How
will it be put in place without allowing it to be stolen by a new Elite? How
will it be put in place without violence and bloodshed?
I have many more questions, but very few answers.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/12/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Can a New Political Party Save America From Itself?
vfutscher / Flickr
When it comes to criticizing the Democratic Party, nothing speaks like
experience within the belly of the beast. Ralph Nader is living proof.
After
years of effectively pressuring congressional Democrats to protect
consumers and the environment against corporate greed, he watched
firsthand as the party bowed to the demands of Big Business during the
Jimmy Carter administration.
And then there's Nick Brana, the leading activist behind the Movement
for a People's Party (MPP). Like Nader, Brana isn't content merely to
expose the corruption of the dismal dollar Democrats-a party that late
political scientist Sheldon Wolin rightly called "the inauthentic
opposition." He's looking to replace them with something much better:
Let's call it an "authentic opposition."
Don't let his tender age of 29 fool you. Brana has served his time
inside the belly of the beast that is the Democratic donkey, first as
a volunteer for Barack Obama and later as a member of John Kerry's
political action committee. These experiences gave him a front-row
seat to the "quid pro quo"
between concentrated wealth and elected officials.
Brana later served as the deputy director for voter protection of
close Clinton ally and top Democratic Party fundraiser Terry
McAuliffe's successful 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign. It was,
in his words, "a test run for the [2016] Hillary Clinton campaign."
There, Brana got to know future Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook and
other high-ranking Clinton staffers.
"I was naive," Brana recalls. He thought activists could bring about
progressive change for working people, the poor and the common good
through the Democratic Party.
Now he thinks of the Democrats and the Republicans as "two
subsidiaries of a single corporation." While the Republicans make no
serious pretense of being anything but an oligarchic organization,
Brana says, the Democrats play a more "insidious" and disingenuous
part. Their "counterrevolutionary" role is to masquerade as the
people's voice and function as a great "black hole for progressive
energies and passions." In his estimation, the Democratic Party is a
nefarious shock absorber for the ruling class.
While commuting to and from his job for McAuliffe, Brana began
listening to left-wing podcasts featuring iconic author and dissident
Noam Chomsky, whose description of the U.S. as "a one-party state
with two right-wing parties"
(Brana's words) resonated with his own experience.
After McAuliffe won, Brana decided not to follow him to the Virginia
state capital. Alienated by the corporatism of the party's neoliberal
masters during the Obama years, and inspired by Chomsky, he took a
break from politics before ultimately joining the campaign of
progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2015. There he
served as national political outreach coordinator.
And yet his leftward progression remained far from complete. Sanders
gave Brana the thankless job of lobbying the Democratic Party's
explicitly anti-insurgent "superdelegates" to the national convention.
The task "showed me definitively that the party was not materially
different from the GOP,"
Brana told me two weeks ago. Ultimately, it proved to be "an
eye-opening experience." The Democratic superdelegates were "offended
that we wanted to talk to them about policy," Brana recalled.
The fact that Sanders performed far better than Goldman Sachs- and
Council on Foreign Relations-approved Clinton in one-on-one match-up
polls with Donald Trump at the end of the primary season held no
interest whatsoever to the elite functionaries Brana tried to coax
into Sanders' camp.
This experience dispelled Brana once and for all of the notion that he
could make the world a better place through the Democratic Party. The
party, he determined, was not a political entity at all but a
privately owned business under the command of "a committee of
corporations." Thinking that the organization's "oligarchic" nature
could be undone by "some magic bullet"
candidate, Brana told me, "is like believing that a single drop of
clean water could purify a bucket of toxic sludge."
"You don't take the Democratic Party over," Brana says. "It takes over
you."
Sanders offered an alternative. The Vermont senator tantalized through
a grassroots small-donor campaign that received literally no
big-business support while skewering plutocracy and America's savage
economic inequality.
This was an extraordinary development in a primary awash in corporate
money.
Were it not for the fixing of the primaries and the Democratic
National Convention by the Clintonite "committee of the corporations"
that owned the Democratic National Committee, Sanders might well be
sitting in the White House right now. Trump would be back in his
Manhattan tower, his political life relegated to the Twittersphere.
Brana favors the metaphor of a burning house. "When your home is on fire,"
he says, "you run for the exits. If the door on the left is closed,
you'll run for the door on the right." Think of the house as the U.S.
political system. Think of the fire as neoliberal capitalism,
engulfing the country in precarity and inequality. The "left" exit to
which Sanders beckoned was blocked by the unelected dictatorship of
money atop the Democratic Party, leaving voters to choose between a
flame-throwing centrist and a racist, misogynistic reactionary. Trump
ultimately claimed the populist mantle that Clinton openly disdained,
outperforming his Democratic opponent with small (middle-class and
working-class) donors. Resentment abhors a vacuum.
Proving the axiom that the Democratic Party resents the progressive
left more than it does an increasingly dangerous right, establishment
Democrats accused Sanders of nasty things like "voodoo economics," "unicorn
politics"
and unrealistic "pie-in-the sky" prescriptions. Bill Clinton himself
stooped to accusing Sanders of stealing voter data and calling his
supporters "sexists" who smeared anyone who "disagreed with them as
part of the establishment."
Sanders took these attacks in distressingly self-effacing stride. He
sucked it up like a good party man, reserving his barrel-chested
thunder for Trump and the Republicans. Just as Green Party activist,
election strategist and former Democratic Party insider Bruce Dixon
predicted, Sanders kept his head down and campaigned obediently for
the "lying neoliberal warmonger" Hillary Clinton.
He did so while knowing full well she was in deep trouble, thanks to
her remarkable unpopularity, her related corporate conservatism and
her stunning failure to run on a serious policy platform.
Sanders feared a Trump presidency, and with good reason. But what
about the decimated opposition party his election victory left in its wake?
Just weeks after the totalitarian was inaugurated, Brana and seven
former Sanders staffers launched Draft Bernie for a People's Party.
The new organization pressed the democratic socialist to follow his
original instinct to run for president as an independent-a decision
that Bernie's senior advisers Tad Devine and Jeff Weaver ultimately
talked Sanders out of in 2015. Brana and his comrades asked Sanders to
honor the Eugene Debs poster that hangs on his Senate office wall by
bringing his database of 13 million voters and small donors on board
for an authentic popular opposition party, beyond the corporate
duopoly.
In September 2017, they delivered 50,000 petition signatures to Sanders'
Senate office in Washington. The petition arrived during a
left-progressive Convergence Conference in which famed academic Cornel
West referred indirectly to Sanders' deafening silence on the American
war machine, and how its cost canceled out his social-democratic
policy agenda. "You can't have a democratic experiment if 53 cents on
your dollar are already headed to the military industrial-complex," West said
at the time.
With Brana sitting directly to his right on a stage with socialist
Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant and left-wing comedian Jimmy
Dore, West wondered aloud if "our dear brother Bernie Sanders [has]
become too comfortable and adjusted to the corporate wing of the
Democratic Party, the Schumers and the Pelosis and the Hillary Clintons."
"Brother Bernie may not last long in the corporate Democratic Party,"
West said, "so I've got a hunch he may come running [out of the party]
many months from now. But you cannot proceed predicated on what he does!"
In the months since, Sanders has shown no signs he intends to run as
an independent. The self-proclaimed democratic socialist has spurned
his petitioners, tailoring his political revolution to the parameters
of a two-party system. And how is that working for ordinary Americans
when three individuals (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) now
possess more wealth among them than the bottom half of the nation, and
the 1 percent holds the same net worth as the nation's bottom 90 percent?
The answer should be obvious. Corporate forces have since solidified
and enhanced the power of anti-democratic superdelegates, many of them
corporate lobbyists, while moving to eliminate party caucuses, seen as
too friendly to progressive insurgents in the Sanders mode. They have
also imposed a neo-McCarthyite "loyalty test" that empowers the DNC to
advance-veto any presidential nominee deemed insufficiently faithful
to the Democratic Party.
All of these steps and more aim to further insulate the party from
another dreaded populist insurgency.
For the 2018 congressional midterms, the "CIA Democrats" fielded an
unprecedented number of military and intelligence veterans as candidates.
Of 107 contenders originally fielded in the primary season with
endorsements from Sanders' "Our Revolution" organization, just 44 made
it to the general election, most of them in bright-red (Republican)
districts where they hardly stood a chance. Twelve won their general
elections. Of those 12, five were incumbent officeholders and five
more were longtime party politicians in line for higher office. Only
two insurgent Sanders-supported candidates opposed by the party went
on to unseat establishment Democrats in their primaries-Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Boston.
And just how left-wing are these two new congresswomen? Despite their
instant "radical" celebrity, Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley both endorsed
the multimillionaire arch-neoliberal Nancy "We're Capitalist and
That's Just the Way it Is" Pelosi as the House speaker. Neither
Ocasio-Cortez nor Pressley spoke out when Pelosi marked the Democrats'
midterm victory on election night by promising to advance "a
bipartisan marketplace of ideas" with the creeping white-nationalist
Republicans and their horrific, creeping-fascist president.
Sanders' recent "Ten Point Plan" for Democrats contains desirable
progressive measures, including progressive taxes, "bold action on
climate change" and "a path toward Medicare for All." But Brana is
certainly right to predict the Pelosi-led Democratic majority will
make little if any progress toward advancing a single one of these proposals.
There's no bold call in this plan for massive, desperately required
reductions to the Pentagon's budget, which swallows up billions of
taxpayer dollars required to implement the environmental and social
democratic programs Sanders claims to support. And just last week,
Bernie chatted up corporate "New" Democrats Beto O'Rourke and Cory
Booker as possible 2020 hopefuls on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert."
Brana isn't interested in forming the next third or fourth party on
the margins of the America's zero-sum elections system. He believes
independent parties have a role to play in forcing major parties to
change their tune on certain matters, but there's a limit to how far
they can go. Instead, the MPP's goal is to replace the Democrats as
the nation's second major party altogether-one that will fulfill its
predecessor's declared mission of fighting for working people against
corporate power. Curiously enough, the model here is not the original
Populist Party of the 1890s, which splintered into the William
Jennings Bryan Democrats and Eugene V. Debs Socialists.
Instead, their template is the Republican Party of the 1850s, which
stepped into the vacuum following the demise of the Whig Party-a ship
that had crashed upon the shoals of sectionalism and slavery.
The neoliberal post-New Deal Democrats have been shipwrecking for
decades by corporate class rule and plutocracy. The
Carter-Clinton-Obama-Pelosi Dems need to give way to a new People's
Party like the Daniel Webster-Winfield Scott-Millard Fillmore-Zachary
Taylor Whigs gave way to the Republican Party of John Fremont, William
Seward, Horace Greely, Salmon Chase and Abraham Lincoln in the
mid-to-late 1850s.
When might this happen? Brana has no illusions about an overnight
realignment, but he thinks two coming "shocks" to U.S. progressives
and the nation at large could create the climate for a political realignment.
First, Sanders, now 77, will run again for president as a Democrat and
be defeated all over again by corporate Democrats who will rig the
contest just as before, despite his groundswell of progressive support
and his status as the most popular politician in the country. Brana
believes the Democrats may nominate Joe Biden, 76, who is laughably
billing himself as "the anti-populist." Second, the U.S. economy will
tumble into its next recession. This, in turn, will supercharge calls
for serious regulation, even nationalization of the leading U.S.
financial institutions, and for bringing our overgrown corporate
oligopolies under public control.
So do we simply wait for these developments and hope for the best in
the meantime? Hardly. Endorsed by an impressive roster of progressive
personalities, the MPP has rallied for climate justice with Zero Hour,
demonstrated for peace with the Women's March on the Pentagon,
boycotted Driscoll's berries on behalf of exploited farmer workers,
picketed with striking teachers and hotel employees, promoted the
public banking movement, backed the impressive independent
congressional candidacy of Tim Canova in Florida, participated in
civil disobedience with the Poor People's Campaign, and helped
institute Ranked Choice Voting in Maine. The fledgling party's
Labor-Community Campaign has also won the support of unions
representing tens of thousands, along with AFL-CIO executive council
members and state presidents.
Brana and his comrades are committed to working with the labor
movement, which still has 15 million members and spends more than $100
million on elections each year, making it a natural base for
progressive political action in the country.
Their timing is impeccable. Thanks to a decades-long corporate
takeover of the Democratic Party, the labor movement is more primed
for independent political action now than it has been at any time in the last
century.
Consider these two remarkable resolutions passed at the 2017 AFL-CIO
Convention: (1) "whether candidates are elected from the Republican or
Democratic Party, the interests of Wall Street have been protected and
advanced, while the interests of labor and working people have
generally been set back," and (2) "the time has passed when we can
passively settle for the lesser of two evils politics."
Encouraged by these remarkable statements on the part of the nation's
preeminent labor federation, MPP activists have consulted with leaders
of the Labor Party of 1996-2007. Two lessons they take from their
experience are the needs to run independent candidates outside the
Democratic Party and to forge strong community alliances beyond the
workplace and the union hall.
Brana thinks the economic and political earthquakes will be "watershed
moments for an independent party to build a labor-community campaign"
that could eventually sweep the Democrats off the national stage and
open the door for a new progressive populism.
Ultimately, Brana's vision may be our last, best hope of saving
America from itself. The current political alignment is leading us
over authoritarian and ecocidal cliffs, raising the distinct
possibility that there will be no historians to record the politics of
the neoliberal age, or whatever dystopian age comes to succeed it.
In the meantime, the so-called "blue wave" of the midterm elections
could prove useful to the MPP's cause. As I have long argued, the
Democrats are most able to effectively and deceptively pose as a
popular opposition party and to claim that the solution to the
nation's problems is to vote them into power. They expose their
corporatism when they hold key elected positions and reveal themselves
as entirely inadequate to the task of representing the people.
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University.
He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago
Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous