Ackerman writes: "Waged by a candidate who had never run as a Democrat before
and has declined to do so in the future, the Sanders campaign has revived hope
that a serious electoral politics to the left of the Democratic Party might be
possible."
Supporters of Bernie Sanders and the Green Party march with Cornel West in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the Democratic National Convention. (photo:
Andrew Stefan/RSN)
A Blueprint for a New Party
By Seth Ackerman, Jacobin
15 November 16
With the rise of Donald Trump, we need to think seriously about what it would
take to form a democratic organization rooted in the working class.
When Bernie Sanders announced he would run for president as a “democratic
socialist,” few believed it would amount to much. Then, against all
expectations, Sanders drew massive crowds, commanded high levels of
favorability in almost every demographic category (including overwhelming
support among young people), and raised hundreds of millions in campaign
dollars from small donors.
Not least, he came within a few percentage points of beating Hillary Clinton, a
frontrunner once assumed to be unassailable.
Waged by a candidate who had never run as a Democrat before and has declined to
do so in the future, the Sanders campaign has revived hope that a serious
electoral politics to the left of the Democratic Party might be possible.
The question is what such a politics would mean in practice.
The question isn’t new, and so far the debate has unfolded along familiar
lines. Advocates of third-party politics who backed Sanders in the primaries,
like Seattle councilmember Kshama Sawant, went on to support Jill Stein’s Green
Party candidacy. Meanwhile, longstanding opponents of the third-party route,
like democratic socialist columnist Harold Myerson, have argued that the Left
should focus on trying to change the Democratic Party from within.
Others have called for a different approach, standing neither wholly inside nor
wholly outside the Democratic Party. But few concrete proposals have been
discussed so far.
This political moment offers a chance to fill in some of these blanks — to
advance new electoral strategies for an independent left-wing party rooted in
the working class.
But we won’t get far unless we grapple seriously with the exceptional character
of the American party system, and the highly repressive laws that undergird it.
Lessons from the Labor Party
The last major effort to form a national vehicle for working-class politics was
the Labor Party (LP), founded twenty years ago. Under the leadership of Tony
Mazzocchi, president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, the party’s
organizers gathered support from other major unions and grassroots
trade-unionists and held its founding convention in 1996.
The Labor Party’s history is not well-known in the broader progressive world.
But as the most recent major effort by organized labor to form an independent
party, it is a story that should interest anyone who hopes to see a revival of
left politics, because on the Left only unions have the scale, experience,
resources, and connections with millions of workers needed to mount a
permanent, nationwide electoral project.
By all accounts it was an inspiring effort that seemed, for a moment, to
portend a renaissance for the labor-left. But the party lost momentum just a
few years after its founding. By 2007 it had effectively ceased to exist.
In a history of the party based on interviews with major participants, LP
activist Jenny Brown cited two key factors as being most important in
explaining its decline. The first was the weakening of the labor movement
itself after 2000, especially the industrial unions that had formed its
original core.
But the second, more immediate reason was essentially political: the party
failed to attract enough support from major national unions. That wasn’t due to
any great fondness for the Democratic Party on the part of the labor leadership
of the time, or because they opposed the idea of a labor party on principle. As
Mazzocchi said in 1998: “I’ve never found a person in the top labor leadership
say they’re opposed to a labor party.”
Instead, the problem arose from the oldest dilemma of America’s two-party
system: running candidates against Democrats risked electing anti-labor
Republicans. For unions whose members had a lot to lose, that risk was
considered too high.
Despite the dedication of its organizers, the Labor Party didn’t succeed. But
its founders were right to believe that a genuinely independent party, rather
than a mere informal faction of the Democrats, is indispensable to successful
working-class politics.
Today we can learn some lessons from their effort. A true working-class party
must be democratic and member-controlled. It must be independent — determining
its own platform and educating around it. It should actually contest elections.
And its candidates for public office should be members of the party,
accountable to the membership, and pledged to respect the platform.
Each of those features plays a crucial role in mobilizing working people to
change society. The platform presents a concrete image of what a better society
could look like. The candidates, by visibly contesting elections and winning
votes under the banner of the platform, generate a sense of hope and momentum
that this better society might be attainable in practice. And because the
members control the party, working people can have confidence that the party is
genuinely acting on their behalf.
But notice what is missing from this list: there is no mention of a separate
ballot line.
The Labor Party always assumed that a genuinely independent labor party must
have a separate party ballot line. That assumption was a mistake.
The assumption gave rise to an intractable dilemma: if the party took a
separate line and ran candidates against incumbent Democrats, it would destroy
relationships with Democratic officeholders who might otherwise be sympathetic
to unions, and thus lose the support of the unions that depended on those
officeholders.
On the other hand, if it didn’t run candidates — which is ultimately the path
it chose — the nagging question would arise: what’s the point of having this
so-called “party” in the first place? That question ended up spurring endless
internal debates over whether and when to run candidates. And in the end, by
not contesting elections, the party failed to give workers a reason to pay
attention to the organization in the first place.
The dilemma stands out clearly in the recollections of Labor Party veterans.
“The Labor Party had to start with the assurance that it wouldn’t play spoiler
politics and that it would [first] focus on building the critical mass
necessary for serious electoral intervention,” former LP national organizer
Mark Dudzic recalled in a recent interview. Yet, as Les Leopold of the Labor
Institute told Brown, that path ultimately led to irrelevance: “It’s not easy
for Americans to understand a party that’s not electoral. I think that that was
just a difficult sell.”
“In retrospect,” Dudzic concluded, “I think it was premature for us to coalesce
into a party formation without an understanding of how we would relate to
elections.”
“Only in the USA”
Labor Party organizers were not the first to worry about being electoral
“spoilers” — discussions of third-party politics have hinged on this problem
for decades. However, history shows that, contrary to popular belief, the
spoiler problem is not insurmountable. In fact, the trade-union activists in
other countries who organized the successful labor parties of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries faced the same dilemma: the prospect of splitting the
vote and causing defeat for more labor-sympathetic mainstream parties (usually
liberal parties).
But those activists and their allies persevered, and as labor parties gained in
strength the spoiler issue gradually became a threat to the mainstream parties.
At that point, in the interests of self-preservation, liberal parties moved to
accommodate the upstarts, either by forging defensive electoral pacts (in which
the two parties agreed not to run candidates against each other in specified
districts) or by pushing through proportional representation systems. That gave
the labor parties an initial foothold in the political system.
But the United States is different. Beneath our winner-take-all electoral
rules, we also have a unique — and uniquely repressive — legal system governing
political parties and the mechanics of elections. This system has nothing to do
with the Constitution or the Founding Fathers. Rather, it was established by
the major-party leaders, state by state, over a period stretching roughly from
1890 to 1920.
Before then, the old Jacksonian framework prevailed: there was no secret
ballot, and no officially printed ballot. Voters brought their own “tickets” to
the polls and deposited them in a ballot box under the watchful eye of party
workers and onlookers.
Meanwhile, the parties — which were then wholly private, unregulated clubs,
fueled by patronage — chose their nominees using the “caucus-convention”
system: a pyramid of county, state, and national party conventions in which
participants at the lower-level meetings chose delegates to attend the
higher-level meetings.
At the base of the pyramid were precinct-level caucuses: informal,
little-publicized gatherings where decisions on delegates to be sent to the
county convention were sewn up through private bargaining among a few
patronage-minded local notables.
In the 1880s and 1890s, this cozy system was disrupted by a new breed of
“hustling candidates,” who actively campaigned for office rather than quietly
currying favor with a few key party workers. When informal local caucuses
started to become scenes of open competitive campaigning by rival factions,
each seeking lucrative patronage jobs, they degenerated into chaos, often
violence.
Worse, candidates who lost the party nomination would try to win the election
anyway by employing their own agents to hand out “pasted” or “knifed” party
tickets on election day, grafting their names inconspicuously onto the regular
party ticket.
Party leaders were losing control over their traditional means of maintaining a
disciplined political army. Their response was a series of state-level
legislative reforms that permanently transformed the American political system,
creating the electoral machinery we have today.
Repression
Henceforth, state governments would administer party primaries, print the
official ballot for primary and general elections, and mandate that voting be
conducted in secret.
In the lore of American politics, these direct-primary and “Australian ballot”
laws (i.e., laws mandating government-printed ballots cast inside a private
booth) were the work of idealistic progressive reformers aiming to depose the
party bosses and enshrine popular sovereignty. In reality, they were adopted by
the party leaders themselves when such measures were deemed to suit their
interests.
Of course, there’s nothing objectionable about secretly cast,
government-printed ballots. Countries around the world were adopting such
good-government reforms around the same time. But once the job of printing the
ballot was handed over to governments, some mechanism was needed to determine
who was “officially” a candidate, and under which party label.
This is where the American system began to diverge wildly from democratic norms
elsewhere.
When the world’s first government-printed secret ballot was adopted in
Australia in the 1850s, the law required a would-be parliamentary candidate to
submit a total of two endorsement signatures to get on the ballot. When Britain
adopted the reform in 1872, its requirement was ten endorsement signatures. But
when the first US state, Massachusetts, passed an Australian-ballot law in
1888, it required one thousand signatures for statewide office, and, in
district-level races, signatures numbering at least 1 percent of the total
votes cast at the preceding election.
Yet those barriers were mild compared to what came afterward. Over the three
decades following US entry into World War I, as working-class and socialist
parties burgeoned throughout the industrialized world, American elites chose to
deal with the problem by radically restricting access to the ballot. In state
after state, petition requirements and filing deadlines were tightened and
various forms of routine legal harassment, unknown in the rest of the
democratic world, became the norm.
The new restrictions came in waves, usually following the entry of left-wing
parties into the electoral process. According to data gathered by Richard
Winger of Ballot Access News, in 1931 Illinois raised the petition requirement
for third-party statewide candidates from one thousand signatures to
twenty-five thousand. In California, the requirement was raised from 1 percent
of the last total gubernatorial vote to 10 percent. In 1939, Pennsylvania
suddenly decided it was important that the thousands of required signatures be
gathered solely within a three-week period. In New York, according to one
account, “minor-party petitions began to be challenged for hyper-technical
defects.”
“Although these statutes have been assailed on all sides,” a 1937 Columbia Law
Review article reported, “their severity is constantly being increased,
probably because the interests oppressed seldom have representation in the
legislatures.” Indeed, when the Florida legislature found socialists and
communists advancing at the polls, it responded in 1931 by banning any party
from the ballot unless it had won 30 percent of the vote in two consecutive
elections; naturally, when the Republican Party failed to meet that test, the
state immediately lowered the threshold.
By comparison, in Britain getting on the ballot was never a major concern for
the newly founded Labour Party; the only significant requirement was a £150
deposit (first instituted in 1918), to be refunded if the candidate won at
least 12.5 percent of the vote. In its first general-election outing in 1900,
the party started with a mere 1.8 percent of the national vote. Despite the
allegedly fatal “spoiler” problem, it then gradually increased its vote share
until it overtook the Liberals as the major party of the Left in 1922.
Today, in almost every established democracy, getting on the ballot is at most
a secondary concern for small or new parties; in many countries it involves
little more than filling out some forms. In Canada, any party with 250
signed-up members can compete in all 338 House of Commons districts nationwide,
with each candidate needing to submit one hundred voter signatures. In the
United Kingdom, a parliamentary candidate needs to submit ten signatures, plus
a £500 deposit which is refunded if the candidate wins at least 5 percent of
the vote. In Australia, a party with five hundred members can run candidates in
all House of Representatives districts, with a $770 deposit for each candidate,
refundable if the candidate wins at least 4 percent of the vote.
In Ireland, Finland, Denmark, and Germany, signature requirements for a
parliamentary candidacy range from 30 to 250, and up to a maximum of 500 in the
largest districts of Austria and Belgium. In France and the Netherlands, only
some paperwork is required.
The Council of Europe, the pan-European intergovernmental body, maintains a
“Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters,” which catalogs electoral
practices that contravene international standards. Such violations often read
like a manual of US election procedure. In 2006, the council condemned the
Republic of Belarus for violating the provision of the code proscribing
signature requirements larger than 1 percent of a district’s voters, a level
the council regards as extremely high; in 2014, Illinois required more than
triple that number for House candidacies. In 2004, the council rebuked
Azerbaijan for its rule forbidding voters from signing nomination petitions for
candidates from more than one party; California and many other states do
essentially the same thing.
In fact, some US electoral procedures are unknown outside of dictatorships:
“Unlike other established democracies, the USA permits one set of standards of
ballot access for established ‘major’ parties and a different set for all other
parties.”
That America’s election system is uniquely repressive is common knowledge among
experts. “Nowhere is the concern [about governing-party repression] greater
than in the United States, as partisan influence is possible at all stages of
the electoral contest,” concludes a recent survey of comparative election law.
“Perhaps the clearest case of overt partisan manipulation of the rules is the
United States, where Democrats and Republicans appear automatically on the
ballot, but third parties and independents have to overcome a maze of
cumbersome legal requirements,” writes Pippa Norris, a world elections
authority at Harvard and director of democratic governance at the United
Nations Development Program.
“One of the best-kept secrets in American politics,” the eminent political
scientist Theodore Lowi has written, “is that the two-party system has long
been brain dead — kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that
protect the established parties from rivals and by federal subsidies and
so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if
the tubes were pulled and the IVs were cut.”
Regulation and Its Consequences
These considerations cast the usual debates about third parties, particularly
on the Left, in a peculiar light.
Typically, advocates of the third-party route depict their strategy as a revolt
against a rigged two-party system; sometimes they even castigate doubters as
timid accommodationists. Yet, in the context of American law, when such
advocates speak of creating an independent “party,” what they mean, ironically,
is choosing to subject their organization to an elaborate regulatory regime
maintained by, and continually manipulated by, the two parties themselves.
This is one fundamental problem with the third-party strategy: the need to
continually maintain ballot status — an onerous process in most states — places
the party’s viability at the mercy of the legislature.
A cautionary tale unfolded last year in Arizona, where the
Republican-controlled legislature, concerned about the strength of the
Libertarian Party, passed a law effectively raising the number of signatures
each Libertarian candidate needs to appear on his or her party’s primary ballot
from 134 to 3,023. (This is in addition to the hoops the party itself has to
jump through to keep a ballot line in the first place.)
The bill’s Republican sponsor, Representative J. D. Mesnard, helpfully
explained his thinking on the floor of the state House: “I believe that, if you
look at the last election, there was at least one, probably two, congressional
seats that may have gone in a different direction, the direction I would have
liked to have seen them go, if this requirement had been there.”
Another unique aspect of American party law raises similar issues: in their
internal affairs, ballot-qualified parties in the United States are “some of
the most comprehensively regulated parties in the world.”
Normally, democracies regard political parties as voluntary associations
entitled to the usual rights of freedom of association. But US state laws
dictate not only a ballot-qualified party’s nominating process, but also its
leadership structure, leadership selection process, and many of its internal
rules (although it’s true that these mandates are often waived for third
parties deemed too marginal to care about).
In other words, when third-party activists seek ballot status, they are often
seeking to grant far-reaching control over their own internal affairs to a
hostile two-party-dominated legislature. That is a peculiar way to go about
smashing the two-party system.
Yet the perverse consequences of the system are often at their most visible
when third parties do succeed in getting on the ballot.
These parties are frequently forced to devote the bulk of their resources not
to educating voters, or knocking on doors on election day, but to waging
petition drives and ballot-access lawsuits. The constant legal harassment, in
turn, ends up exerting a subtle but powerful effect on the kinds of people
attracted to independent politics. Through a process of natural selection, such
obstacles tend to repel serious and experienced local politicians and
organizers, while disproportionately attracting activists with a certain
mentality: disdainful of practical politics or concrete results; less
interested in organizing, or even winning elections, than in bearing witness to
the injustice of the two-party system through the symbolic ritual of inscribing
a third-party’s name on the ballot.
The official parties are happy to have such people as their opposition, and
even happy to grant them this safe channel for their discontent. And if,
unexpectedly, a third party’s fortunes were to start rising, the incumbents
could always put a stop to it, simply by adjusting the law.
The Labor Party — wisely, in my opinion — adopted a strategy of not seeking
ballot status until it had built enough strength to mount a credible challenge
to the Democrats. But confronted with the dilemmas of a repressive electoral
system, combined with the more familiar spoiler problem, it never actually
reached that point. In the end, the party sought and obtained a ballot line
only once, in South Carolina (a state where ballot laws were relatively
relaxed), in a last-ditch effort near the end of its active life. But by then
it was too late, and ultimately the party chose not to wage a serious electoral
campaign in the state.
One lesson from this history is clear: We have to stop approaching our task as
if the problems we face were akin to those faced by the organizers of, say, the
British Labour Party in 1900 or Canada’s New Democratic Party in 1961. Instead,
we need to realize that our situation is more like that facing opposition
parties in soft-authoritarian systems, like those of Russia or Singapore.
Rather than yet another suicidal frontal assault, we need to mount the
electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency. In short, we need to think about
electoral strategy more creatively.
Boring From Within?
Does that mean opting for the strategy championed by most progressive critics
of the third-party route — namely, “working within the Democratic Party”?
No. Or at least, not in the way that phrase is usually meant.
It’s true that a number of sincere, committed leftists, or at least
progressives, run for office on the Democratic ballot line at all levels of
American politics. Sometimes they even win. And all else equal, we’re better
off with such politicians in office than without them. So in that limited
sense, the answer might be “yes.”
But electing individual progressives does little to change the broad dynamics
of American politics or American capitalism. In fact, it can create a kind of
placebo effect: sustaining the illusion of forward motion while obscuring the
fact that neither party is structurally built to reflect working-class
interests.
“Working within the Democratic Party” has been the prevailing model of
progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental
limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians. The liberal
office-seeker becomes the indispensable actor to whom all others, including
progressives, must respond.
Think of Ted Kennedy or Mario Cuomo in the 1980s; Paul Wellstone or Russ
Feingold in the 1990s; Howard Dean, Elizabeth Warren, or Bill de Blasio since
2000. Each emerges into the spotlight as they launch their careers or seek
higher office. Each promises to represent “the democratic wing of the
Democratic Party.” Each generates a flurry of positive coverage in progressive
media and a ripple of excitement within a narrow circle of progressive
activists and voters.
Orbiting around these ambitious office-seekers are the progressive “grassroots”
organizations exemplified by MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, or Progressive
Democrats of America. (In an earlier, direct-mail era, it was Common Cause,
People for the American Way, or even the Americans for Democratic Action.)
Run by salaried staffers, these groups monitor the political scene in search of
worthy progressive candidates or legislative causes, alerting their supporters
with bulletins urging them to “stand with” whichever progressive politico needs
support at the moment. (Support, in this usage, usually means sending money, or
signing an email petition.) Such groups generally maintain no formal standards
for judging a candidate’s worthiness. Even if they did, in drawing up such
standards they would be accountable to no one, and would have no power to
change those candidates’ policy objectives.
Although it’s too early to tell, Bernie Sanders’s recently created Our
Revolution organization seems in danger of falling into the same trap: becoming
a mere middleman, or broker, standing between a diffuse, unorganized
progressive constituency and a series of ambitious progressive office-seekers
seeking their backing.
In this “party-less” model of politics, it’s the Democratic politician who goes
about trying to recruit a base, rather than the other way around. The
politician’s platform and message are devised by her and her alone. They can be
changed on a whim. And there is no mechanism by which the politician can be
held accountable to the (fairly nebulous) progressive constituency she has
recruited to her cause.
The approach taken by the Working Families Party (WFP) is different, but it,
too, remains vulnerable to the problems of such “party-less” politics. The WFP
has built an impressive record of policy achievements in its New York State
home base, using “fusion” voting — a ballot strategy forbidden by most state
laws. (The ban on fusion is another legacy of the two-party election reforms of
the 1890s.) Under fusion, a minor party places the name of a major-party’s
nominee on its own ballot line, hoping that, if the major-party candidate wins,
he or she will feel beholden to the minor party for however many votes it
managed to “deliver.”
But the contradictions of its 2014 endorsement of New York governor Andrew
Cuomo showed how the WFP’s fusion strategy can place it in the worst of both
worlds. On the one hand, the party remains chained to the interests of
Democratic Party politicians, forced to endorse candidates that are not its
own, who run on platforms far removed from its priorities, as if it were a mere
faction of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, it still needs to worry
about keeping its third-party ballot line, leaving it exposed to the kind of
ballot-repression problems that more marginal third parties face.
At a deeper level, the “party-less” model that dominates progressive politics
today is an outgrowth of America’s lamentable history of “internally mobilized”
parties: that is, parties organized by already-established politicians for the
sole purpose of creating a mass constituency around themselves. The Democratic
Party — created in the 1830s by a network of powerful incumbents led by New
York senator and power broker Martin Van Buren — is the classic case.
This stands in contrast to “externally mobilized” parties: organized by
ordinary people, standing outside the system, who come together around a cause
and then go about recruiting their own representatives to contest elections,
for the purpose of gaining power they don’t already have.
For reasons that are not hard to guess, historical parties of the Left — true
parties of the Left — have, almost without exception, been mobilized
externally. As the historian Geoff Eley recounts in his history of the Left in
Europe:
Parties of the Left sometimes managed to win elections and form governments,
but, more important, they organized civil society into the basis from which
existing democratic gains could be defended and new ones could grow. They
magnetized other progressive causes and interests in reform. Without them,
democracy was a nonstarter.
By contrast, not a single externally mobilized party has ever attained national
electoral significance in the United States. “The major political parties in
American history,” writes Martin Shefter — who first introduced this taxonomy
of party mobilization — “and most conservative and centrist parties in Europe,”
were founded “by politicians who [held] leadership positions in the prevailing
regime and who [undertook] to mobilize and organize a popular following behind
themselves.”
“Modern democracy,” in E. E. Schattschneider’s classic formulation, “is
unthinkable save in terms of the parties.”
Popular, working-class democracy, on the other hand, is unthinkable without
parties mobilized from outside the political system — that is, by people
organizing around common goals.
What Is a Democratic Party?
In a genuinely democratic party, the organization’s membership, program, and
leadership are bound together tightly by a powerful, mutually reinforcing
connection. The party’s members are its sovereign power; they come together
through a sense of shared interest or principle. Through deliberation, the
members establish a program to advance those interests. The party educates the
public around the program, and it serves, in effect, as the lodestar by which
the party is guided. Finally, the members choose a party leadership — including
electoral candidates — who are accountable to the membership and bound by the
program.
It might seem obvious that those are the characteristics of a truly democratic
party. Yet the Democratic Party has none of them.
Start with the most fundamental fact about the Democratic Party: it has no
members. A few months ago I was flattered to receive a letter signed by Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, in which
she urged me to consider sending a donation, thereby “becoming a DNC member,”
in her words.
Was she proposing to let me vote on the Democratic primary schedule, or its
mode of selecting convention delegates — or, for that matter, the next DNC
chair? Obviously not. Mere “members” aren’t allowed to influence such decisions
because, fundraising letters aside, there are no real members of the Democratic
Party: “Unlike these [British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand]
democracies, where members join a political party through a process of
application to the party itself, party membership in the United States has been
described as ‘a fiction created by primary registration laws.’ ”
Just as the Democratic Party has no real membership, it offers only the most
derisory semblance of a “program”: a quadrennial platform usually dictated by
an individual nominee (or occasionally negotiated with a defeated rival) at the
height of the election-season frenzy, a document that in most years no one
reads and in all years no one takes seriously as a binding document. (At the
state level, party platforms often reach hallucinatory levels of detachment
from real politics.)
It’s true, of course, that in a constitutional democracy there’s never anything
stopping an elected representative, once elected, from doing the opposite of
what he or she had promised. And in the history of left-wing party politics
it’s not hard to find instances where elected politicians have gone turncoat.
One famous example was Ramsay MacDonald, a founder of the British Labour Party,
who betrayed his party after becoming prime minister by joining with the
Conservatives and pushing through drastic public spending cuts in the midst of
the Depression.
But since MacDonald was accountable to a democratically organized party, he
could be repudiated and expelled from that party — as he was in 1931, while
still a sitting prime minister. For generations afterward, he was reviled
within Labour Party circles, his name synonymous with betrayal.
Suppose, by way of comparison, that some onetime liberal Democratic hero — say,
a senator — decides to flout the promises he or she initially made to
MoveOn.org, or Democracy for America, or their constituents. Those groups’
staffs — whom no one has elected anyway — would have no power to meaningfully
discipline, let alone expel, them.
To whom, then, is the senator accountable? An electorate, in theory, come
reelection time. But no party.
This is the treadmill we need to get off.
A Party of a New Type
The widespread support for Bernie Sanders’s candidacy, particularly among young
people, has opened the door for new ideas about how to form a democratic
political organization rooted in the working class.
The following is a proposal for such a model: a national political organization
that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a
leadership accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nominated at
all levels throughout the country.
As a nationwide organization, it would have a national educational apparatus,
recognized leaders and spokespeople at the national level, and its candidates
and other activities would come under a single, nationally recognized label.
And, of course, all candidates would be required to adhere to the national
platform.
But it would avoid the ballot-line trap. Decisions about how individual
candidates appear on the ballot would be made on a case-by-case basis and on
pragmatic grounds, depending on the election laws and partisan coloration of
the state or district in question. In any given race, the organization could
choose to run in major- or minor-party primaries, as nonpartisan independents,
or even, theoretically, on the organization’s own ballot line.
The ballot line would thus be regarded as a secondary issue. The organization
would base its legal right to exist not on the repressive ballot laws, but on
the fundamental rights of freedom of association.
Such a project probably wouldn’t have been feasible in the past, due to
campaign-finance laws. For most of the last four decades, the Federal Elections
Campaign Act (FECA), along with similar laws in many states, would have left
any such organization with little alternative but to fundraise through a
political action committee (PAC). That PAC would have been limited to giving a
maximum of $5,000 (the current threshold) to each of its candidates per
election, and barred from taking money from unions or collecting donations
larger than $5,000 from individuals. That kind of fundraising could never
support a national organization.
All of these restrictions would be waived if, like the DNC or RNC, the group
registered as a “party committee.” But there’s a catch: a group can only
register as a party committee if it runs the ballot-access gauntlet at the
state level (a requirement from which Democrats and Republicans are exempt),
then wins a ballot line and runs its candidates on it. (Here we find one of the
many reasons scholars have described the FECA as a “major-party protection
act.”)
In the years leading up to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision,
these regulations were already being eroded by the emergence of so-called “527”
groups, which evaded the laws by taking unlimited donations to finance
“independent expenditures” on behalf of candidates.
But in the wake of Citizens United (and subsequent rulings), the restrictions
no longer pose a serious obstacle at all. Today, a national political
organization could adopt the “Carey” model of campaign finance, validated in
2011 by the Carey v. FEC federal court decision. In this model, the national
organization would incorporate as a 501(c)4 social welfare organization,
permitting it to endorse candidates and engage in explicit campaigning, while
accepting unlimited donations and spending unlimited amounts on political
education. (It would also, of course, be free to adopt rigorous self-imposed
disclosure rules, as it should.)
In addition, it would be allowed to establish a PAC that maintains two separate
accounts: one permitted to donate to, and directly coordinate with, individual
candidates (though subject to FECA contribution limits and allowed to actively
solicit contributions only from the organization’s own members); and the other
allowed to accept unlimited contributions and make unlimited independent
expenditures on behalf of its candidates (though not donations to candidates
themselves). A separate online “conduit” PAC, on the ActBlue model, could
aggregate small-donor hard-money fundraising on a mass scale to finance the
individual campaigns.
With a viable fundraising model patterned along these lines, all of the
organization’s candidates nationwide, up and down the ballot, would be able to
benefit from its name recognition and educational activities. It could sponsor
speakers, hold debates, establish a network of campus affiliates, and designate
spokespeople who would be recognized as its public voices. In the media and on
the internet, voters would be continually exposed to its perspective on the
events of the day and its proposals for the future.
To put the electoral possibilities of this approach into perspective, consider
a few numbers. In 2014, there were 1,056 open-seat state-legislative races
(races where no incumbent was running). The median winner spent only $51,000,
for the primary and general elections combined. Two-thirds of the races cost
less than $100,000. And in 36 percent of all state-legislative races that year
— almost 2,500 seats — the winner had run unopposed.
I think this model can work. But like any blueprint, it’s not a panacea. Simply
filing the paperwork to create such an organization is not going to magically
conjure a large and successful movement into existence. To make it work, it
needs to be a real vehicle and voice for working-class interests. And that
means a significant part of the labor movement would have to be at its core.
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Supporters of Bernie Sanders and the Green Party march with Cornel West in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the Democratic National Convention. (photo:
Andrew Stefan/RSN)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-ackerman/https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-ackerman/
A Blueprint for a New Party
By Seth Ackerman, Jacobin
15 November 16
With the rise of Donald Trump, we need to think seriously about what it would
take to form a democratic organization rooted in the working class.
hen Bernie Sanders announced he would run for president as a “democratic
socialist,” few believed it would amount to much. Then, against all
expectations, Sanders drew massive crowds, commanded high levels of
favorability in almost every demographic category (including overwhelming
support among young people), and raised hundreds of millions in campaign
dollars from small donors.
Not least, he came within a few percentage points of beating Hillary Clinton, a
frontrunner once assumed to be unassailable.
Waged by a candidate who had never run as a Democrat before and has declined to
do so in the future, the Sanders campaign has revived hope that a serious
electoral politics to the left of the Democratic Party might be possible.
The question is what such a politics would mean in practice.
The question isn’t new, and so far the debate has unfolded along familiar
lines. Advocates of third-party politics who backed Sanders in the primaries,
like Seattle councilmember Kshama Sawant, went on to support Jill Stein’s Green
Party candidacy. Meanwhile, longstanding opponents of the third-party route,
like democratic socialist columnist Harold Myerson, have argued that the Left
should focus on trying to change the Democratic Party from within.
Others have called for a different approach, standing neither wholly inside nor
wholly outside the Democratic Party. But few concrete proposals have been
discussed so far.
This political moment offers a chance to fill in some of these blanks — to
advance new electoral strategies for an independent left-wing party rooted in
the working class.
But we won’t get far unless we grapple seriously with the exceptional character
of the American party system, and the highly repressive laws that undergird it.
Lessons from the Labor Party
The last major effort to form a national vehicle for working-class politics was
the Labor Party (LP), founded twenty years ago. Under the leadership of Tony
Mazzocchi, president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, the party’s
organizers gathered support from other major unions and grassroots
trade-unionists and held its founding convention in 1996.
The Labor Party’s history is not well-known in the broader progressive world.
But as the most recent major effort by organized labor to form an independent
party, it is a story that should interest anyone who hopes to see a revival of
left politics, because on the Left only unions have the scale, experience,
resources, and connections with millions of workers needed to mount a
permanent, nationwide electoral project.
By all accounts it was an inspiring effort that seemed, for a moment, to
portend a renaissance for the labor-left. But the party lost momentum just a
few years after its founding. By 2007 it had effectively ceased to exist.
In a history of the party based on interviews with major participants, LP
activist Jenny Brown cited two key factors as being most important in
explaining its decline. The first was the weakening of the labor movement
itself after 2000, especially the industrial unions that had formed its
original core.
But the second, more immediate reason was essentially political: the party
failed to attract enough support from major national unions. That wasn’t due to
any great fondness for the Democratic Party on the part of the labor leadership
of the time, or because they opposed the idea of a labor party on principle. As
Mazzocchi said in 1998: “I’ve never found a person in the top labor leadership
say they’re opposed to a labor party.”
Instead, the problem arose from the oldest dilemma of America’s two-party
system: running candidates against Democrats risked electing anti-labor
Republicans. For unions whose members had a lot to lose, that risk was
considered too high.
Despite the dedication of its organizers, the Labor Party didn’t succeed. But
its founders were right to believe that a genuinely independent party, rather
than a mere informal faction of the Democrats, is indispensable to successful
working-class politics.
Today we can learn some lessons from their effort. A true working-class party
must be democratic and member-controlled. It must be independent — determining
its own platform and educating around it. It should actually contest elections.
And its candidates for public office should be members of the party,
accountable to the membership, and pledged to respect the platform.
Each of those features plays a crucial role in mobilizing working people to
change society. The platform presents a concrete image of what a better society
could look like. The candidates, by visibly contesting elections and winning
votes under the banner of the platform, generate a sense of hope and momentum
that this better society might be attainable in practice. And because the
members control the party, working people can have confidence that the party is
genuinely acting on their behalf.
But notice what is missing from this list: there is no mention of a separate
ballot line.
The Labor Party always assumed that a genuinely independent labor party must
have a separate party ballot line. That assumption was a mistake.
The assumption gave rise to an intractable dilemma: if the party took a
separate line and ran candidates against incumbent Democrats, it would destroy
relationships with Democratic officeholders who might otherwise be sympathetic
to unions, and thus lose the support of the unions that depended on those
officeholders.
On the other hand, if it didn’t run candidates — which is ultimately the path
it chose — the nagging question would arise: what’s the point of having this
so-called “party” in the first place? That question ended up spurring endless
internal debates over whether and when to run candidates. And in the end, by
not contesting elections, the party failed to give workers a reason to pay
attention to the organization in the first place.
The dilemma stands out clearly in the recollections of Labor Party veterans.
“The Labor Party had to start with the assurance that it wouldn’t play spoiler
politics and that it would [first] focus on building the critical mass
necessary for serious electoral intervention,” former LP national organizer
Mark Dudzic recalled in a recent interview. Yet, as Les Leopold of the Labor
Institute told Brown, that path ultimately led to irrelevance: “It’s not easy
for Americans to understand a party that’s not electoral. I think that that was
just a difficult sell.”
“In retrospect,” Dudzic concluded, “I think it was premature for us to coalesce
into a party formation without an understanding of how we would relate to
elections.”
“Only in the USA”
Labor Party organizers were not the first to worry about being electoral
“spoilers” — discussions of third-party politics have hinged on this problem
for decades. However, history shows that, contrary to popular belief, the
spoiler problem is not insurmountable. In fact, the trade-union activists in
other countries who organized the successful labor parties of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries faced the same dilemma: the prospect of splitting the
vote and causing defeat for more labor-sympathetic mainstream parties (usually
liberal parties).
But those activists and their allies persevered, and as labor parties gained in
strength the spoiler issue gradually became a threat to the mainstream parties.
At that point, in the interests of self-preservation, liberal parties moved to
accommodate the upstarts, either by forging defensive electoral pacts (in which
the two parties agreed not to run candidates against each other in specified
districts) or by pushing through proportional representation systems. That gave
the labor parties an initial foothold in the political system.
But the United States is different. Beneath our winner-take-all electoral
rules, we also have a unique — and uniquely repressive — legal system governing
political parties and the mechanics of elections. This system has nothing to do
with the Constitution or the Founding Fathers. Rather, it was established by
the major-party leaders, state by state, over a period stretching roughly from
1890 to 1920.
Before then, the old Jacksonian framework prevailed: there was no secret
ballot, and no officially printed ballot. Voters brought their own “tickets” to
the polls and deposited them in a ballot box under the watchful eye of party
workers and onlookers.
Meanwhile, the parties — which were then wholly private, unregulated clubs,
fueled by patronage — chose their nominees using the “caucus-convention”
system: a pyramid of county, state, and national party conventions in which
participants at the lower-level meetings chose delegates to attend the
higher-level meetings.
At the base of the pyramid were precinct-level caucuses: informal,
little-publicized gatherings where decisions on delegates to be sent to the
county convention were sewn up through private bargaining among a few
patronage-minded local notables.
In the 1880s and 1890s, this cozy system was disrupted by a new breed of
“hustling candidates,” who actively campaigned for office rather than quietly
currying favor with a few key party workers. When informal local caucuses
started to become scenes of open competitive campaigning by rival factions,
each seeking lucrative patronage jobs, they degenerated into chaos, often
violence.
Worse, candidates who lost the party nomination would try to win the election
anyway by employing their own agents to hand out “pasted” or “knifed” party
tickets on election day, grafting their names inconspicuously onto the regular
party ticket.
Party leaders were losing control over their traditional means of maintaining a
disciplined political army. Their response was a series of state-level
legislative reforms that permanently transformed the American political system,
creating the electoral machinery we have today.
Repression
Henceforth, state governments would administer party primaries, print the
official ballot for primary and general elections, and mandate that voting be
conducted in secret.
In the lore of American politics, these direct-primary and “Australian ballot”
laws (i.e., laws mandating government-printed ballots cast inside a private
booth) were the work of idealistic progressive reformers aiming to depose the
party bosses and enshrine popular sovereignty. In reality, they were adopted by
the party leaders themselves when such measures were deemed to suit their
interests.
Of course, there’s nothing objectionable about secretly cast,
government-printed ballots. Countries around the world were adopting such
good-government reforms around the same time. But once the job of printing the
ballot was handed over to governments, some mechanism was needed to determine
who was “officially” a candidate, and under which party label.
This is where the American system began to diverge wildly from democratic norms
elsewhere.
When the world’s first government-printed secret ballot was adopted in
Australia in the 1850s, the law required a would-be parliamentary candidate to
submit a total of two endorsement signatures to get on the ballot. When Britain
adopted the reform in 1872, its requirement was ten endorsement signatures. But
when the first US state, Massachusetts, passed an Australian-ballot law in
1888, it required one thousand signatures for statewide office, and, in
district-level races, signatures numbering at least 1 percent of the total
votes cast at the preceding election.
Yet those barriers were mild compared to what came afterward. Over the three
decades following US entry into World War I, as working-class and socialist
parties burgeoned throughout the industrialized world, American elites chose to
deal with the problem by radically restricting access to the ballot. In state
after state, petition requirements and filing deadlines were tightened and
various forms of routine legal harassment, unknown in the rest of the
democratic world, became the norm.
The new restrictions came in waves, usually following the entry of left-wing
parties into the electoral process. According to data gathered by Richard
Winger of Ballot Access News, in 1931 Illinois raised the petition requirement
for third-party statewide candidates from one thousand signatures to
twenty-five thousand. In California, the requirement was raised from 1 percent
of the last total gubernatorial vote to 10 percent. In 1939, Pennsylvania
suddenly decided it was important that the thousands of required signatures be
gathered solely within a three-week period. In New York, according to one
account, “minor-party petitions began to be challenged for hyper-technical
defects.”
“Although these statutes have been assailed on all sides,” a 1937 Columbia Law
Review article reported, “their severity is constantly being increased,
probably because the interests oppressed seldom have representation in the
legislatures.” Indeed, when the Florida legislature found socialists and
communists advancing at the polls, it responded in 1931 by banning any party
from the ballot unless it had won 30 percent of the vote in two consecutive
elections; naturally, when the Republican Party failed to meet that test, the
state immediately lowered the threshold.
By comparison, in Britain getting on the ballot was never a major concern for
the newly founded Labour Party; the only significant requirement was a £150
deposit (first instituted in 1918), to be refunded if the candidate won at
least 12.5 percent of the vote. In its first general-election outing in 1900,
the party started with a mere 1.8 percent of the national vote. Despite the
allegedly fatal “spoiler” problem, it then gradually increased its vote share
until it overtook the Liberals as the major party of the Left in 1922.
Today, in almost every established democracy, getting on the ballot is at most
a secondary concern for small or new parties; in many countries it involves
little more than filling out some forms. In Canada, any party with 250
signed-up members can compete in all 338 House of Commons districts nationwide,
with each candidate needing to submit one hundred voter signatures. In the
United Kingdom, a parliamentary candidate needs to submit ten signatures, plus
a £500 deposit which is refunded if the candidate wins at least 5 percent of
the vote. In Australia, a party with five hundred members can run candidates in
all House of Representatives districts, with a $770 deposit for each candidate,
refundable if the candidate wins at least 4 percent of the vote.
In Ireland, Finland, Denmark, and Germany, signature requirements for a
parliamentary candidacy range from 30 to 250, and up to a maximum of 500 in the
largest districts of Austria and Belgium. In France and the Netherlands, only
some paperwork is required.
The Council of Europe, the pan-European intergovernmental body, maintains a
“Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters,” which catalogs electoral
practices that contravene international standards. Such violations often read
like a manual of US election procedure. In 2006, the council condemned the
Republic of Belarus for violating the provision of the code proscribing
signature requirements larger than 1 percent of a district’s voters, a level
the council regards as extremely high; in 2014, Illinois required more than
triple that number for House candidacies. In 2004, the council rebuked
Azerbaijan for its rule forbidding voters from signing nomination petitions for
candidates from more than one party; California and many other states do
essentially the same thing.
In fact, some US electoral procedures are unknown outside of dictatorships:
“Unlike other established democracies, the USA permits one set of standards of
ballot access for established ‘major’ parties and a different set for all other
parties.”
That America’s election system is uniquely repressive is common knowledge among
experts. “Nowhere is the concern [about governing-party repression] greater
than in the United States, as partisan influence is possible at all stages of
the electoral contest,” concludes a recent survey of comparative election law.
“Perhaps the clearest case of overt partisan manipulation of the rules is the
United States, where Democrats and Republicans appear automatically on the
ballot, but third parties and independents have to overcome a maze of
cumbersome legal requirements,” writes Pippa Norris, a world elections
authority at Harvard and director of democratic governance at the United
Nations Development Program.
“One of the best-kept secrets in American politics,” the eminent political
scientist Theodore Lowi has written, “is that the two-party system has long
been brain dead — kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that
protect the established parties from rivals and by federal subsidies and
so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if
the tubes were pulled and the IVs were cut.”
Regulation and Its Consequences
These considerations cast the usual debates about third parties, particularly
on the Left, in a peculiar light.
Typically, advocates of the third-party route depict their strategy as a revolt
against a rigged two-party system; sometimes they even castigate doubters as
timid accommodationists. Yet, in the context of American law, when such
advocates speak of creating an independent “party,” what they mean, ironically,
is choosing to subject their organization to an elaborate regulatory regime
maintained by, and continually manipulated by, the two parties themselves.
This is one fundamental problem with the third-party strategy: the need to
continually maintain ballot status — an onerous process in most states — places
the party’s viability at the mercy of the legislature.
A cautionary tale unfolded last year in Arizona, where the
Republican-controlled legislature, concerned about the strength of the
Libertarian Party, passed a law effectively raising the number of signatures
each Libertarian candidate needs to appear on his or her party’s primary ballot
from 134 to 3,023. (This is in addition to the hoops the party itself has to
jump through to keep a ballot line in the first place.)
The bill’s Republican sponsor, Representative J. D. Mesnard, helpfully
explained his thinking on the floor of the state House: “I believe that, if you
look at the last election, there was at least one, probably two, congressional
seats that may have gone in a different direction, the direction I would have
liked to have seen them go, if this requirement had been there.”
Another unique aspect of American party law raises similar issues: in their
internal affairs, ballot-qualified parties in the United States are “some of
the most comprehensively regulated parties in the world.”
Normally, democracies regard political parties as voluntary associations
entitled to the usual rights of freedom of association. But US state laws
dictate not only a ballot-qualified party’s nominating process, but also its
leadership structure, leadership selection process, and many of its internal
rules (although it’s true that these mandates are often waived for third
parties deemed too marginal to care about).
In other words, when third-party activists seek ballot status, they are often
seeking to grant far-reaching control over their own internal affairs to a
hostile two-party-dominated legislature. That is a peculiar way to go about
smashing the two-party system.
Yet the perverse consequences of the system are often at their most visible
when third parties do succeed in getting on the ballot.
These parties are frequently forced to devote the bulk of their resources not
to educating voters, or knocking on doors on election day, but to waging
petition drives and ballot-access lawsuits. The constant legal harassment, in
turn, ends up exerting a subtle but powerful effect on the kinds of people
attracted to independent politics. Through a process of natural selection, such
obstacles tend to repel serious and experienced local politicians and
organizers, while disproportionately attracting activists with a certain
mentality: disdainful of practical politics or concrete results; less
interested in organizing, or even winning elections, than in bearing witness to
the injustice of the two-party system through the symbolic ritual of inscribing
a third-party’s name on the ballot.
The official parties are happy to have such people as their opposition, and
even happy to grant them this safe channel for their discontent. And if,
unexpectedly, a third party’s fortunes were to start rising, the incumbents
could always put a stop to it, simply by adjusting the law.
The Labor Party — wisely, in my opinion — adopted a strategy of not seeking
ballot status until it had built enough strength to mount a credible challenge
to the Democrats. But confronted with the dilemmas of a repressive electoral
system, combined with the more familiar spoiler problem, it never actually
reached that point. In the end, the party sought and obtained a ballot line
only once, in South Carolina (a state where ballot laws were relatively
relaxed), in a last-ditch effort near the end of its active life. But by then
it was too late, and ultimately the party chose not to wage a serious electoral
campaign in the state.
One lesson from this history is clear: We have to stop approaching our task as
if the problems we face were akin to those faced by the organizers of, say, the
British Labour Party in 1900 or Canada’s New Democratic Party in 1961. Instead,
we need to realize that our situation is more like that facing opposition
parties in soft-authoritarian systems, like those of Russia or Singapore.
Rather than yet another suicidal frontal assault, we need to mount the
electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency. In short, we need to think about
electoral strategy more creatively.
Boring From Within?
Does that mean opting for the strategy championed by most progressive critics
of the third-party route — namely, “working within the Democratic Party”?
No. Or at least, not in the way that phrase is usually meant.
It’s true that a number of sincere, committed leftists, or at least
progressives, run for office on the Democratic ballot line at all levels of
American politics. Sometimes they even win. And all else equal, we’re better
off with such politicians in office than without them. So in that limited
sense, the answer might be “yes.”
But electing individual progressives does little to change the broad dynamics
of American politics or American capitalism. In fact, it can create a kind of
placebo effect: sustaining the illusion of forward motion while obscuring the
fact that neither party is structurally built to reflect working-class
interests.
“Working within the Democratic Party” has been the prevailing model of
progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental
limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians. The liberal
office-seeker becomes the indispensable actor to whom all others, including
progressives, must respond.
Think of Ted Kennedy or Mario Cuomo in the 1980s; Paul Wellstone or Russ
Feingold in the 1990s; Howard Dean, Elizabeth Warren, or Bill de Blasio since
2000. Each emerges into the spotlight as they launch their careers or seek
higher office. Each promises to represent “the democratic wing of the
Democratic Party.” Each generates a flurry of positive coverage in progressive
media and a ripple of excitement within a narrow circle of progressive
activists and voters.
Orbiting around these ambitious office-seekers are the progressive “grassroots”
organizations exemplified by MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, or Progressive
Democrats of America. (In an earlier, direct-mail era, it was Common Cause,
People for the American Way, or even the Americans for Democratic Action.)
Run by salaried staffers, these groups monitor the political scene in search of
worthy progressive candidates or legislative causes, alerting their supporters
with bulletins urging them to “stand with” whichever progressive politico needs
support at the moment. (Support, in this usage, usually means sending money, or
signing an email petition.) Such groups generally maintain no formal standards
for judging a candidate’s worthiness. Even if they did, in drawing up such
standards they would be accountable to no one, and would have no power to
change those candidates’ policy objectives.
Although it’s too early to tell, Bernie Sanders’s recently created Our
Revolution organization seems in danger of falling into the same trap: becoming
a mere middleman, or broker, standing between a diffuse, unorganized
progressive constituency and a series of ambitious progressive office-seekers
seeking their backing.
In this “party-less” model of politics, it’s the Democratic politician who goes
about trying to recruit a base, rather than the other way around. The
politician’s platform and message are devised by her and her alone. They can be
changed on a whim. And there is no mechanism by which the politician can be
held accountable to the (fairly nebulous) progressive constituency she has
recruited to her cause.
The approach taken by the Working Families Party (WFP) is different, but it,
too, remains vulnerable to the problems of such “party-less” politics. The WFP
has built an impressive record of policy achievements in its New York State
home base, using “fusion” voting — a ballot strategy forbidden by most state
laws. (The ban on fusion is another legacy of the two-party election reforms of
the 1890s.) Under fusion, a minor party places the name of a major-party’s
nominee on its own ballot line, hoping that, if the major-party candidate wins,
he or she will feel beholden to the minor party for however many votes it
managed to “deliver.”
But the contradictions of its 2014 endorsement of New York governor Andrew
Cuomo showed how the WFP’s fusion strategy can place it in the worst of both
worlds. On the one hand, the party remains chained to the interests of
Democratic Party politicians, forced to endorse candidates that are not its
own, who run on platforms far removed from its priorities, as if it were a mere
faction of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, it still needs to worry
about keeping its third-party ballot line, leaving it exposed to the kind of
ballot-repression problems that more marginal third parties face.
At a deeper level, the “party-less” model that dominates progressive politics
today is an outgrowth of America’s lamentable history of “internally mobilized”
parties: that is, parties organized by already-established politicians for the
sole purpose of creating a mass constituency around themselves. The Democratic
Party — created in the 1830s by a network of powerful incumbents led by New
York senator and power broker Martin Van Buren — is the classic case.
This stands in contrast to “externally mobilized” parties: organized by
ordinary people, standing outside the system, who come together around a cause
and then go about recruiting their own representatives to contest elections,
for the purpose of gaining power they don’t already have.
For reasons that are not hard to guess, historical parties of the Left — true
parties of the Left — have, almost without exception, been mobilized
externally. As the historian Geoff Eley recounts in his history of the Left in
Europe:
Parties of the Left sometimes managed to win elections and form governments,
but, more important, they organized civil society into the basis from which
existing democratic gains could be defended and new ones could grow. They
magnetized other progressive causes and interests in reform. Without them,
democracy was a nonstarter.
By contrast, not a single externally mobilized party has ever attained national
electoral significance in the United States. “The major political parties in
American history,” writes Martin Shefter — who first introduced this taxonomy
of party mobilization — “and most conservative and centrist parties in Europe,”
were founded “by politicians who [held] leadership positions in the prevailing
regime and who [undertook] to mobilize and organize a popular following behind
themselves.”
“Modern democracy,” in E. E. Schattschneider’s classic formulation, “is
unthinkable save in terms of the parties.”
Popular, working-class democracy, on the other hand, is unthinkable without
parties mobilized from outside the political system — that is, by people
organizing around common goals.
What Is a Democratic Party?
In a genuinely democratic party, the organization’s membership, program, and
leadership are bound together tightly by a powerful, mutually reinforcing
connection. The party’s members are its sovereign power; they come together
through a sense of shared interest or principle. Through deliberation, the
members establish a program to advance those interests. The party educates the
public around the program, and it serves, in effect, as the lodestar by which
the party is guided. Finally, the members choose a party leadership — including
electoral candidates — who are accountable to the membership and bound by the
program.
It might seem obvious that those are the characteristics of a truly democratic
party. Yet the Democratic Party has none of them.
Start with the most fundamental fact about the Democratic Party: it has no
members. A few months ago I was flattered to receive a letter signed by Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, in which
she urged me to consider sending a donation, thereby “becoming a DNC member,”
in her words.
Was she proposing to let me vote on the Democratic primary schedule, or its
mode of selecting convention delegates — or, for that matter, the next DNC
chair? Obviously not. Mere “members” aren’t allowed to influence such decisions
because, fundraising letters aside, there are no real members of the Democratic
Party: “Unlike these [British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand]
democracies, where members join a political party through a process of
application to the party itself, party membership in the United States has been
described as ‘a fiction created by primary registration laws.’ ”
Just as the Democratic Party has no real membership, it offers only the most
derisory semblance of a “program”: a quadrennial platform usually dictated by
an individual nominee (or occasionally negotiated with a defeated rival) at the
height of the election-season frenzy, a document that in most years no one
reads and in all years no one takes seriously as a binding document. (At the
state level, party platforms often reach hallucinatory levels of detachment
from real politics.)
It’s true, of course, that in a constitutional democracy there’s never anything
stopping an elected representative, once elected, from doing the opposite of
what he or she had promised. And in the history of left-wing party politics
it’s not hard to find instances where elected politicians have gone turncoat.
One famous example was Ramsay MacDonald, a founder of the British Labour Party,
who betrayed his party after becoming prime minister by joining with the
Conservatives and pushing through drastic public spending cuts in the midst of
the Depression.
But since MacDonald was accountable to a democratically organized party, he
could be repudiated and expelled from that party — as he was in 1931, while
still a sitting prime minister. For generations afterward, he was reviled
within Labour Party circles, his name synonymous with betrayal.
Suppose, by way of comparison, that some onetime liberal Democratic hero — say,
a senator — decides to flout the promises he or she initially made to
MoveOn.org, or Democracy for America, or their constituents. Those groups’
staffs — whom no one has elected anyway — would have no power to meaningfully
discipline, let alone expel, them.
To whom, then, is the senator accountable? An electorate, in theory, come
reelection time. But no party.
This is the treadmill we need to get off.
A Party of a New Type
The widespread support for Bernie Sanders’s candidacy, particularly among young
people, has opened the door for new ideas about how to form a democratic
political organization rooted in the working class.
The following is a proposal for such a model: a national political organization
that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a
leadership accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nominated at
all levels throughout the country.
As a nationwide organization, it would have a national educational apparatus,
recognized leaders and spokespeople at the national level, and its candidates
and other activities would come under a single, nationally recognized label.
And, of course, all candidates would be required to adhere to the national
platform.
But it would avoid the ballot-line trap. Decisions about how individual
candidates appear on the ballot would be made on a case-by-case basis and on
pragmatic grounds, depending on the election laws and partisan coloration of
the state or district in question. In any given race, the organization could
choose to run in major- or minor-party primaries, as nonpartisan independents,
or even, theoretically, on the organization’s own ballot line.
The ballot line would thus be regarded as a secondary issue. The organization
would base its legal right to exist not on the repressive ballot laws, but on
the fundamental rights of freedom of association.
Such a project probably wouldn’t have been feasible in the past, due to
campaign-finance laws. For most of the last four decades, the Federal Elections
Campaign Act (FECA), along with similar laws in many states, would have left
any such organization with little alternative but to fundraise through a
political action committee (PAC). That PAC would have been limited to giving a
maximum of $5,000 (the current threshold) to each of its candidates per
election, and barred from taking money from unions or collecting donations
larger than $5,000 from individuals. That kind of fundraising could never
support a national organization.
All of these restrictions would be waived if, like the DNC or RNC, the group
registered as a “party committee.” But there’s a catch: a group can only
register as a party committee if it runs the ballot-access gauntlet at the
state level (a requirement from which Democrats and Republicans are exempt),
then wins a ballot line and runs its candidates on it. (Here we find one of the
many reasons scholars have described the FECA as a “major-party protection
act.”)
In the years leading up to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision,
these regulations were already being eroded by the emergence of so-called “527”
groups, which evaded the laws by taking unlimited donations to finance
“independent expenditures” on behalf of candidates.
But in the wake of Citizens United (and subsequent rulings), the restrictions
no longer pose a serious obstacle at all. Today, a national political
organization could adopt the “Carey” model of campaign finance, validated in
2011 by the Carey v. FEC federal court decision. In this model, the national
organization would incorporate as a 501(c)4 social welfare organization,
permitting it to endorse candidates and engage in explicit campaigning, while
accepting unlimited donations and spending unlimited amounts on political
education. (It would also, of course, be free to adopt rigorous self-imposed
disclosure rules, as it should.)
In addition, it would be allowed to establish a PAC that maintains two separate
accounts: one permitted to donate to, and directly coordinate with, individual
candidates (though subject to FECA contribution limits and allowed to actively
solicit contributions only from the organization’s own members); and the other
allowed to accept unlimited contributions and make unlimited independent
expenditures on behalf of its candidates (though not donations to candidates
themselves). A separate online “conduit” PAC, on the ActBlue model, could
aggregate small-donor hard-money fundraising on a mass scale to finance the
individual campaigns.
With a viable fundraising model patterned along these lines, all of the
organization’s candidates nationwide, up and down the ballot, would be able to
benefit from its name recognition and educational activities. It could sponsor
speakers, hold debates, establish a network of campus affiliates, and designate
spokespeople who would be recognized as its public voices. In the media and on
the internet, voters would be continually exposed to its perspective on the
events of the day and its proposals for the future.
To put the electoral possibilities of this approach into perspective, consider
a few numbers. In 2014, there were 1,056 open-seat state-legislative races
(races where no incumbent was running). The median winner spent only $51,000,
for the primary and general elections combined. Two-thirds of the races cost
less than $100,000. And in 36 percent of all state-legislative races that year
— almost 2,500 seats — the winner had run unopposed.
I think this model can work. But like any blueprint, it’s not a panacea. Simply
filing the paperwork to create such an organization is not going to magically
conjure a large and successful movement into existence. To make it work, it
needs to be a real vehicle and voice for working-class interests. And that
means a significant part of the labor movement would have to be at its core.
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