If I were interested in gaining control over the Democratic Party, I
would begin a campaign to recruit like thinking men and women, and
persuade them to run for Precinct Committee positions.
In Washington State, back when I was more politically active, precinct
committee persons were elected. A young man filed as a Democrat,
running for precinct committee person in my precinct. He happened to
be an active member of the John Birch Society. The day before
election a neighbor and I printed up flyers asking voters to write my
name in as the True Democrat. I won by ten votes.
The Precinct Committee People have great power in building the Party
to which they belong. If anyone wants to move their Party one way or
another, google something like, Duties of Precinct Committee People.
If you think you could do the job, go for it.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/15/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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