Carl, if the only solution is a change of government we have to organize
to get that. Political parties are what organizing is about.
_________________________________________________________________
J.K. Rowling
“ I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing
in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist! ”
― J.K. Rowling
On 12/15/2018 11:42 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
No. A new political party will not solve our nation's ills. The only
solution is a total change of government. Who is designing suich a
replacement? How will it be put in place without allowing it to be
stolen by a new Elite? How will it be put in place without violence
and bloodshed?
I have many more questions, but very few answers.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/12/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Can a New Political Party Save America From Itself?
vfutscher / Flickr
When it comes to criticizing the Democratic Party, nothing speaks like
experience within the belly of the beast. Ralph Nader is living proof.
After
years of effectively pressuring congressional Democrats to protect
consumers
and the environment against corporate greed, he watched firsthand as the
party bowed to the demands of Big Business during the Jimmy Carter
administration.
And then there's Nick Brana, the leading activist behind the Movement for a
People's Party (MPP). Like Nader, Brana isn't content merely to expose the
corruption of the dismal dollar Democrats-a party that late political
scientist Sheldon Wolin rightly called "the inauthentic opposition." He's
looking to replace them with something much better: Let's call it an
"authentic opposition."
Don't let his tender age of 29 fool you. Brana has served his time inside
the belly of the beast that is the Democratic donkey, first as a volunteer
for Barack Obama and later as a member of John Kerry's political action
committee. These experiences gave him a front-row seat to the "quid pro
quo"
between concentrated wealth and elected officials.
Brana later served as the deputy director for voter protection of close
Clinton ally and top Democratic Party fundraiser Terry McAuliffe's
successful 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign. It was, in his words, "a
test run for the [2016] Hillary Clinton campaign." There, Brana got to know
future Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook and other high-ranking Clinton
staffers.
"I was naive," Brana recalls. He thought activists could bring about
progressive change for working people, the poor and the common good through
the Democratic Party.
Now he thinks of the Democrats and the Republicans as "two subsidiaries of
a
single corporation." While the Republicans make no serious pretense of
being
anything but an oligarchic organization, Brana says, the Democrats play a
more "insidious" and disingenuous part. Their "counterrevolutionary" role
is
to masquerade as the people's voice and function as a great "black hole for
progressive energies and passions." In his estimation, the Democratic Party
is a nefarious shock absorber for the ruling class.
While commuting to and from his job for McAuliffe, Brana began listening to
left-wing podcasts featuring iconic author and dissident Noam Chomsky,
whose
description of the U.S. as "a one-party state with two right-wing parties"
(Brana's words) resonated with his own experience.
After McAuliffe won, Brana decided not to follow him to the Virginia state
capital. Alienated by the corporatism of the party's neoliberal masters
during the Obama years, and inspired by Chomsky, he took a break from
politics before ultimately joining the campaign of progressive presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders in 2015. There he served as national political
outreach coordinator.
And yet his leftward progression remained far from complete. Sanders gave
Brana the thankless job of lobbying the Democratic Party's explicitly
anti-insurgent "superdelegates" to the national convention. The task
"showed
me definitively that the party was not materially different from the GOP,"
Brana told me two weeks ago. Ultimately, it proved to be "an eye-opening
experience." The Democratic superdelegates were "offended that we wanted to
talk to them about policy," Brana recalled.
The fact that Sanders performed far better than Goldman Sachs- and Council
on Foreign Relations-approved Clinton in one-on-one match-up polls with
Donald Trump at the end of the primary season held no interest whatsoever
to
the elite functionaries Brana tried to coax into Sanders' camp.
This experience dispelled Brana once and for all of the notion that he
could
make the world a better place through the Democratic Party. The party, he
determined, was not a political entity at all but a privately owned
business
under the command of "a committee of corporations." Thinking that the
organization's "oligarchic" nature could be undone by "some magic bullet"
candidate, Brana told me, "is like believing that a single drop of clean
water could purify a bucket of toxic sludge."
"You don't take the Democratic Party over," Brana says. "It takes over
you."
Sanders offered an alternative. The Vermont senator tantalized through a
grassroots small-donor campaign that received literally no big-business
support while skewering plutocracy and America's savage economic
inequality.
This was an extraordinary development in a primary awash in corporate
money.
Were it not for the fixing of the primaries and the Democratic National
Convention by the Clintonite "committee of the corporations" that owned the
Democratic National Committee, Sanders might well be sitting in the White
House right now. Trump would be back in his Manhattan tower, his political
life relegated to the Twittersphere.
Brana favors the metaphor of a burning house. "When your home is on fire,"
he says, "you run for the exits. If the door on the left is closed, you'll
run for the door on the right." Think of the house as the U.S. political
system. Think of the fire as neoliberal capitalism, engulfing the country
in
precarity and inequality. The "left" exit to which Sanders beckoned was
blocked by the unelected dictatorship of money atop the Democratic Party,
leaving voters to choose between a flame-throwing centrist and a racist,
misogynistic reactionary. Trump ultimately claimed the populist mantle that
Clinton openly disdained, outperforming his Democratic opponent with small
(middle-class and working-class) donors. Resentment abhors a vacuum.
Proving the axiom that the Democratic Party resents the progressive left
more than it does an increasingly dangerous right, establishment Democrats
accused Sanders of nasty things like "voodoo economics," "unicorn politics"
and unrealistic "pie-in-the sky" prescriptions. Bill Clinton himself
stooped
to accusing Sanders of stealing voter data and calling his supporters
"sexists" who smeared anyone who "disagreed with them as part of the
establishment."
Sanders took these attacks in distressingly self-effacing stride. He sucked
it up like a good party man, reserving his barrel-chested thunder for Trump
and the Republicans. Just as Green Party activist, election strategist and
former Democratic Party insider Bruce Dixon predicted, Sanders kept his
head
down and campaigned obediently for the "lying neoliberal warmonger" Hillary
Clinton.
He did so while knowing full well she was in deep trouble, thanks to her
remarkable unpopularity, her related corporate conservatism and her
stunning
failure to run on a serious policy platform.
Sanders feared a Trump presidency, and with good reason. But what about the
decimated opposition party his election victory left in its wake?
Just weeks after the totalitarian was inaugurated, Brana and seven former
Sanders staffers launched Draft Bernie for a People's Party. The new
organization pressed the democratic socialist to follow his original
instinct to run for president as an independent-a decision that Bernie's
senior advisers Tad Devine and Jeff Weaver ultimately talked Sanders out of
in 2015. Brana and his comrades asked Sanders to honor the Eugene Debs
poster that hangs on his Senate office wall by bringing his database of 13
million voters and small donors on board for an authentic popular
opposition
party, beyond the corporate duopoly.
In September 2017, they delivered 50,000 petition signatures to Sanders'
Senate office in Washington. The petition arrived during a left-progressive
Convergence Conference in which famed academic Cornel West referred
indirectly to Sanders' deafening silence on the American war machine, and
how its cost canceled out his social-democratic policy agenda. "You can't
have a democratic experiment if 53 cents on your dollar are already headed
to the military industrial-complex," West said at the time.
With Brana sitting directly to his right on a stage with socialist Seattle
City Council member Kshama Sawant and left-wing comedian Jimmy Dore, West
wondered aloud if "our dear brother Bernie Sanders [has] become too
comfortable and adjusted to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, the
Schumers and the Pelosis and the Hillary Clintons."
"Brother Bernie may not last long in the corporate Democratic Party," West
said, "so I've got a hunch he may come running [out of the party] many
months from now. But you cannot proceed predicated on what he does!"
In the months since, Sanders has shown no signs he intends to run as an
independent. The self-proclaimed democratic socialist has spurned his
petitioners, tailoring his political revolution to the parameters of a
two-party system. And how is that working for ordinary Americans when three
individuals (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) now possess more
wealth among them than the bottom half of the nation, and the 1 percent
holds the same net worth as the nation's bottom 90 percent?
The answer should be obvious. Corporate forces have since solidified and
enhanced the power of anti-democratic superdelegates, many of them
corporate
lobbyists, while moving to eliminate party caucuses, seen as too friendly
to
progressive insurgents in the Sanders mode. They have also imposed a
neo-McCarthyite "loyalty test" that empowers the DNC to advance-veto any
presidential nominee deemed insufficiently faithful to the Democratic
Party.
All of these steps and more aim to further insulate the party from another
dreaded populist insurgency.
For the 2018 congressional midterms, the "CIA Democrats" fielded an
unprecedented number of military and intelligence veterans as candidates.
Of 107 contenders originally fielded in the primary season with
endorsements
from Sanders' "Our Revolution" organization, just 44 made it to the general
election, most of them in bright-red (Republican) districts where they
hardly stood a chance. Twelve won their general elections. Of those 12,
five
were incumbent officeholders and five more were longtime party politicians
in line for higher office. Only two insurgent Sanders-supported candidates
opposed by the party went on to unseat establishment Democrats in their
primaries-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of
Boston.
And just how left-wing are these two new congresswomen? Despite their
instant "radical" celebrity, Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley both endorsed the
multimillionaire arch-neoliberal Nancy "We're Capitalist and That's Just
the
Way it Is" Pelosi as the House speaker. Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Pressley
spoke out when Pelosi marked the Democrats' midterm victory on election
night by promising to advance "a bipartisan marketplace of ideas" with the
creeping white-nationalist Republicans and their horrific, creeping-fascist
president.
Sanders' recent "Ten Point Plan" for Democrats contains desirable
progressive measures, including progressive taxes, "bold action on climate
change" and "a path toward Medicare for All." But Brana is certainly right
to predict the Pelosi-led Democratic majority will make little if any
progress toward advancing a single one of these proposals.
There's no bold call in this plan for massive, desperately required
reductions to the Pentagon's budget, which swallows up billions of taxpayer
dollars required to implement the environmental and social democratic
programs Sanders claims to support. And just last week, Bernie chatted up
corporate "New" Democrats Beto O'Rourke and Cory Booker as possible 2020
hopefuls on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert."
Brana isn't interested in forming the next third or fourth party on the
margins of the America's zero-sum elections system. He believes
independent
parties have a role to play in forcing major parties to change their tune
on
certain matters, but there's a limit to how far they can go. Instead, the
MPP's goal is to replace the Democrats as the nation's second major party
altogether-one that will fulfill its predecessor's declared mission of
fighting for working people against corporate power. Curiously enough, the
model here is not the original Populist Party of the 1890s, which
splintered
into the William Jennings Bryan Democrats and Eugene V. Debs Socialists.
Instead, their template is the Republican Party of the 1850s, which stepped
into the vacuum following the demise of the Whig Party-a ship that had
crashed upon the shoals of sectionalism and slavery.
The neoliberal post-New Deal Democrats have been shipwrecking for decades
by
corporate class rule and plutocracy. The Carter-Clinton-Obama-Pelosi Dems
need to give way to a new People's Party like the Daniel Webster-Winfield
Scott-Millard Fillmore-Zachary Taylor Whigs gave way to the Republican
Party
of John Fremont, William Seward, Horace Greely, Salmon Chase and Abraham
Lincoln in the mid-to-late 1850s.
When might this happen? Brana has no illusions about an overnight
realignment, but he thinks two coming "shocks" to U.S. progressives and the
nation at large could create the climate for a political realignment.
First, Sanders, now 77, will run again for president as a Democrat and be
defeated all over again by corporate Democrats who will rig the contest
just
as before, despite his groundswell of progressive support and his status as
the most popular politician in the country. Brana believes the Democrats
may
nominate Joe Biden, 76, who is laughably billing himself as "the
anti-populist." Second, the U.S. economy will tumble into its next
recession. This, in turn, will supercharge calls for serious regulation,
even nationalization of the leading U.S. financial institutions, and for
bringing our overgrown corporate oligopolies under public control.
So do we simply wait for these developments and hope for the best in the
meantime? Hardly. Endorsed by an impressive roster of progressive
personalities, the MPP has rallied for climate justice with Zero Hour,
demonstrated for peace with the Women's March on the Pentagon, boycotted
Driscoll's berries on behalf of exploited farmer workers, picketed with
striking teachers and hotel employees, promoted the public banking
movement,
backed the impressive independent congressional candidacy of Tim Canova in
Florida, participated in civil disobedience with the Poor People's
Campaign,
and helped institute Ranked Choice Voting in Maine. The fledgling party's
Labor-Community Campaign has also won the support of unions representing
tens of thousands, along with AFL-CIO executive council members and state
presidents.
Brana and his comrades are committed to working with the labor movement,
which still has 15 million members and spends more than $100 million on
elections each year, making it a natural base for progressive political
action in the country.
Their timing is impeccable. Thanks to a decades-long corporate takeover of
the Democratic Party, the labor movement is more primed for independent
political action now than it has been at any time in the last century.
Consider these two remarkable resolutions passed at the 2017 AFL-CIO
Convention: (1) "whether candidates are elected from the Republican or
Democratic Party, the interests of Wall Street have been protected and
advanced, while the interests of labor and working people have generally
been set back," and (2) "the time has passed when we can passively settle
for the lesser of two evils politics."
Encouraged by these remarkable statements on the part of the nation's
preeminent labor federation, MPP activists have consulted with leaders of
the Labor Party of 1996-2007. Two lessons they take from their experience
are the needs to run independent candidates outside the Democratic Party
and
to forge strong community alliances beyond the workplace and the union
hall.
Brana thinks the economic and political earthquakes will be "watershed
moments for an independent party to build a labor-community campaign" that
could eventually sweep the Democrats off the national stage and open the
door for a new progressive populism.
Ultimately, Brana's vision may be our last, best hope of saving America
from
itself. The current political alignment is leading us over authoritarian
and
ecocidal cliffs, raising the distinct possibility that there will be no
historians to record the politics of the neoliberal age, or whatever
dystopian age comes to succeed it.
In the meantime, the so-called "blue wave" of the midterm elections could
prove useful to the MPP's cause. As I have long argued, the Democrats are
most able to effectively and deceptively pose as a popular opposition party
and to claim that the solution to the nation's problems is to vote them
into
power. They expose their corporatism when they hold key elected positions
and reveal themselves as entirely inadequate to the task of representing
the
people.
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University.
He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban
League. Street is also the author of numerous
