So, Hows That Major-Party Election Madness Working for Us?
No third-party guy: Sen. Bernie Sanders has rejected calls to align with a
third party and instead has steered his followers into the tired politics of
the Democrats. (Tim Pierce / Wikimedia Commons)
Paul Streets column will appear in Truthdig each Sunday through Aug. 12.
Its regular schedule will resume when Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges
returns from vacation.
The United States is full of personally decent and caring, often highly
intelligent people mired in political ignorance and delusion.
A smart and liberally inclined family doctor I know recently expressed
concern over her high-income husbands support for the malignant narcissist
and pathological liar currently occupying the White House. I can understand
him being a Republican, the doctor says, but I just dont get him backing
Donald Trump.
The problem herewhat the doctor doesnt getis that Trumps malicious
persona and politics are darkly consistent with the white-supremacist and
arch-reactionary heart and dog-whistling racism of the Republican Party
going back five decades. It was just a matter of time until something like
Trump happened: a Republican candidate who really meant the racism. Along
the way, the Republican Party has become what Noam Chomsky credibly calls
the most dangerous organization in human history because of its total
disregard for livable ecology and its dedication to destruction and
dismantlement of any institutions in place to address global warming. The
Greenhouse Gassing to Death of Life on Earth is a crime that promises to
make even the Nazi Party look like a small-time crime syndicate.
A smart and funny retired mental health professional I know is a proud
liberal Democrat. She cites reports and stories showing that Trump is a
bully, an authoritarian, a cheater, a parasite and a liar, among other
terrible things. She gets it that both Trump and the Republican Party are
supremely dangerous enemies of the people.
But she, too, is mired in delusionsmistakes and hallucinations common on
the other side of Americas tribal and binary major-party partisan divide.
For all her savviness and smarts, she cant or wont process the simple fact
that the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party put Trump in the White
House and handed Congress and most of the nations state governments over to
Trump and the Republican Party by functioning as a corporate-captive
Inauthentic Opposition Party that refuses to fight for working people, the
poor, minorities and the causes of peace, social justice and environmental
sanity.
Tell her that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were Wall Street presidents
(an easily and widely documented assertion) and she screws her face up. She
doesnt want to hear it. She wants to believe something that stopped being
even remotely true at least four decades ago: that the Democratic Party is
the party of the people.
If the Democrats take back Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020, all
will be well in her political world view: democracy and decency restored.
You betcha!
She blames Trumps presence in the White House on
you guessed it, Russia.
Like millions of other MSDNC (sorry, I meant MSNBC) and Rachel Maddow
devotees, she has let the obsessive CNN-MSNBC Russia-Trump narrative take
over her understanding of current events. The Russiagate story has trumped
her concern with other things that one might think matter a great deal to
self-described liberals: racial oppression, sexism, poverty, low wages,
plutocracy andlast but not leastlivable ecology.
(She isnt aware that racist Republican voter suppression at the state level
was a big part of how Trump woncertainly a far bigger matter than any real
or alleged Russian influence on the election. Isnt that precisely the kind
of thing that liberals are supposed to be angry about?)
But I know plenty of Americans well to her leftpeople who know very well
that Obama and the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi are neoliberal corporate and
Wall Street politicos and toolswho cling to their own major-party
electoral-political delusions. With Sen. Bernie Sanders as their
standard-bearer, they are all about boring from within an organization that
Kevin P. Phillips once called historys second most enthusiastic capitalist
party. Their fallacy is that left progressives can steal the Democratic
Party out from under its corporate and imperial masters, turn it to decent
and social-democratic purposes and democratically transform America in
proper accord with majority-progressive U.S. opinion.
A Newsweek article last fall was titled Most Americans Desperate for a
Third Major Party in the Trump Era. It cited a Gallup Poll showing that 61
percent, more U.S. citizens than ever, find the Democratic and Republican
parties inadequate and think that the U.S. should have a third major
political party. Support for a competitive third party had been above 57
percent since at least 2012, but Gallups 2017 poll marked a new high.
Nobody should be surprised by that finding given the fact that both of the
parties have drifted well to the Big Business right of majority public
opinion, with the Democrats joining Republicans in the creation of a New
Gilded Age so savagely unequal that, as Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said
repeatedly (and accurately) in 2016, the top 10th of the upper U.S. 1
percent possesses as much wealth as the nations bottom 90 percent.
The fake Independent Sanders couldnt care less about the strong majority
sentiment on behalf of a third party. He has rejected all calls for him to
jump major-party ship and tells progressives to pour their energies into
electing candidates within the Democratic Party primary process. Do what
Alexandria did, Bernie says to young Americans angry about the vicious
ecocidal white nationalists in power today. Sanders is referring to
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the inspiring young Sanders-style Democratic
Socialists of America member who took down longtime establishment Democratic
Party incumbent House member Joe Crowley in a New York City district primary
last June.
So, to ask the Dr. Phil question, hows that working out for the left?
Not so hot. The preponderant majority of progressive Democrats primary
victories this year have been won in strongly Republican (red) districts,
where progressives have not been heavily contested by the Democratic Party
establishment. Only a very small number of progressive candidates have won
in dependably blue (Democratic) districts and are likely to defeat
Republicans in the general elections in November.
Crowley is the sole congressional incumbent to have lost a Democratic
primary this year. His defeat by Ocasio-Cortez has been over-celebrated on
the left and over-publicized in the media. She won with incredibly low
turnout (13 percent), something that falls quite short of a leftist
landslide and reflects local peculiarities in the operation of the New York
City Democratic machine.
At the same time, as veteran left urban political strategist, activist and
commentator Bruce A. Dixon noted on Black Agenda Report, Crowley pretty
much gave up the seat: After 10 terms in Congress and with lots of corporate
friends, Joe Crowley knows he can start at seven figures, at least six to
twelve times his congressional salary plus bonuses as a lobbyist. That had
to be a powerful motivation not to campaign too damn hard.
Last but not least, the victory of Ocasio-Cortez, of Puerto Rican heritage,
reflected a combined demographic (racial and ethnocultural) and party
anomaly: the over-long presence of a white Democratic machine politician
atop a recently racially and ethnically redistricted and now majority
nonwhite and nearly majority Latinx district where the Democratic Party had
failed to cultivate a neoliberal candidate of colorthe kind of safe Latinx
or black politico the nations second corporate and imperial party has
developed across most of the nations urban minority-majority congressional
districts. As Danny Haiphong observed in the American Herald Tribune, New
York District 14 is one of the few [urban minority congressional districts]
left where neoliberal Black and Brown politicians do not dominate the
political landscape. It will be difficult to replicate Ocasio-Cortezs
victory across the country because neoliberal, Black [and Latino]
politicians in other districts are protected by the politics of
representation (emphasis added).
Other districts like Missouris predominantly black 1st Congressional
District in St. Louis, where the establishment incumbent Congressman Lacy
Clay handily crushed the progressive insurgent Cori Bush five days ago.
Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, and the Democratic
Socialists of Americathe leading progressive organizations attempting to
reform the Democratic Partyhave endorsed 60 congressional candidates in
states that have held their Democratic primaries through last week.
Twenty-three of them have won their races. But 18 of these victors have won
in red districts where there are entrenched Republican incumbents.
Only five progressive congressional primary winnersRo Khanna (California
17th), Jamie Raskin (Maryland 8th), Chuy Garcia (Illinois 4th),
Ocasio-Cortez, and the rousing Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib (Michigan
13th)have won in Democratic districts and are likely to win in November.
Two of those five (Khanna and Raskin) were already in office and were
uncontested by the Democratic establishment. One of the five (Garcia) cut a
corrupt deal with the Chicago Democratic machine and so ran unopposed by the
establishment. Nebraskas Kara Eastman is the one and only single-payer
supporter to get nominated for a competitive House race in Americas
heartland breadbasket this year.
Especially depressing for progressives hoping to reform the Democratic Party
was the crushing defeat of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan gubernatorial
primary. El-Sayed was hoping to ride the coattails of visits and
endorsements from the (in the absurd language of the corporate media)
radical leftists Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
The Democratic Party, Politicos centrist commentator Bill Scher writes,
is more liberal than it was 15 years ago, and theres no question that
shift is partly due to an increasingly vocal, confident, confrontational
democratic socialist faction. But, Scher creepily but accurately crowed,
it is still only a faction. Most Democratic nominees in competitive House
racesnot to mention incumbent Senate Democrats fighting for their political
lives in red statesare not embracing single-payer or calling for the
abolishment of ICE. They are mostly calling for improvements of the
Affordable Care Act and a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.
This overall weak performance by left-leaning Sanders-style Democrats
reflects elite business and professional-class manipulation within the party
to which so many progressives remain attached. As the pro-third-party
Movement for a Peoples Party (headed by former Sanders staffers) noted two
weeks ago:
The DNC [Democratic National Committee] and the DCCC [Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee] have systematically cheated and blocked
progressive candidates by flooding races with corporate cash, knocking
progressives off the ballot, feeding opposition research to the media,
forcing candidates to spend three quarters of their fundraising on
consultants and ads, changing the rules required to get party support,
denying access to crucial voter data, endorsing establishment Democrats,
setting party affiliation deadlines months before the primaries, blocking
independents from voting, and even giving hundreds of thousands of dollars
to Republican candidates. For more than a year after the 2016 election, the
Democratic Party denied rigging primary elections against progressives. The
party has now abandoned that pretense as it openly rigs midterm primaries
across the country and normalizes election rigging.
While the media focuses
on a handful of exceptions, the Democratic Party establishment is getting
its way in the 2018 midterm primaries.
As the primaries have taken place this year, the left historian and
journalist Terry Thomas writes me, the establishment Dems are stridently
going after the progressives. Just watch MSNBCs coverage of elections.
Theyre advancing the out of the mainstream line, implying that the few
progressive-types who won are ruining the party and setting the stage for
the Republicans to retain the House in the fall.
It is true that the progressive Democrat Sanders came tantalizingly close to
defeating the ultimate corporate Democrat, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016
presidential primariesan amazing accomplishment for a small-donor candidate
who received no funding from the corporate and financial establishment.
But imagine if Sanders had sneaked past Clinton in the primary race. Could
he have defeated the billionaire and right-wing billionaire-backed Trump in
the general election? Theres no way to know. Sanders consistently
outperformed Clinton in one-on-one matchup polls vis-à-vis Trump during the
primary season, but much of the big money (and corporate media) that backed
Clinton would probably have gone over to Trump had the supposedly radical
Sanders been the Democratic nominee.
Even if Sanders had been elected president, moreover, Noam Chomsky is
certainly correct in his judgment that a President Sanders couldnt have
done a thing because he would have had nobody [on his side] in Congress,
no governors, no legislatures, none of the big economic powers, which have
an enormous effect on policy. All opposed to him. In order for him to do
anything, Chomsky adds, he would have [needed] a substantial, functioning
party apparatus, which would have to grow from the grass roots. It would
have to be locally organized, it would have to operate at local levels,
state levels, Congress, the bureaucracyyou have to build the whole system
from the bottom. None of those things would be remotely forthcoming from
the Inauthentic Opposition Party.
It might well have been worse than not being able to do anything,
actually. Even as he loaded his administration with corporate and imperial
centristsas he certainly would have been compelled to do to mollify the
nations unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empirea
President Sanders would have been faced with a capital strike: with severe
market instability and declining business confidence raising the specter
of a financial meltdown.
With little prospect of the economic tumult subsiding during his 11-week
transition period, the political scientists William Grover and Joseph
Peschek wrote in the summer of 2015, a Sanders presidency:
would face enormous pressure to calm the fears of the market by announcing
the appointment of moderates to hold Cabinet positionsnon-confrontational,
non-ideological people who would be acceptable to political and economic
power holders. No radicals for the Treasury Department, no thoughts of Ben
and Jerry as Co-Secretaries of Commerce, no union firebrand to head the
Labor Department, no Bill McKibben leading the Interior Department. Only
nice, safe choices would sufficepersonnel decisions that would undermine
the progressive vision of his campaign. In short, the economics of capital
strike would threaten to trump the verdict of democracy.
A President Sanders would also have been compelled to engage in an
aggressively imperial foreign policy. He would have faced what Bruce Dixon
calls immense pressure to demonstrate his unwavering hostility toward the
Russians and his fealty to empirepressure to which Bernie the Bomber
would certainly have caved. (Dixon adds that hes notoriously squishy on
empire as it is
as are pretty much all the Berniecrats.)
Meanwhile, many of the Dems corporate and professional class elites would
have attributed Sanders victory to Russian interference while joining
hands with ruling-class Republican brothers in undermining Sanders
supposedly far left (mildly progressive) agendaand his political
viability in 2020. The nations paranoid, white Christian and
proto-fascistic right would have gone ballistic, its underlying
anti-Semitism on appalling display with an ethnoculturally Jewish
democratic socialist (and purported atheist) from Brooklyn in the White
House.
Sanders oligarchy-imposed failures would have been great fodder for the
right-wing and neoliberal disparagement and smearing of progressive,
left-leaning and majority-backed policy change. See, the reigning
plutocratic media and politics culture would have said, we tried all that
and it was a disaster! It might well have been a real train wreck for
everything and anything progressive.
None of which is to mean that third-party politics hold the keys to
progressive change. Its status as corporate media notwithstanding, Newsweek
isnt lying when it notes that the structure of Americas electoral
systemespecially campaign finance regulationsmakes it extremely hard for
third party candidates to run and win.
Its not just about campaign finance. Its also about winner-take-all,
first-past-the-post elections and the absence of
proportional-representation rules that would allot representation in accord
with vote shares for parties that cant yet field candidates capable of
winning pluralities in contests with the long-established major parties
contenders.
It goes way back. Theodore Roosevelt is the only third-party candidate who
ever came remotely close to winning a presidential election. In 1912, he
came in second with 27 percent of the vote atop the Progressive Party.
The biggest political delusion of all is in the U.S. electoral politics
itselfthe Election Madness that tells us that (in the sardonic words of
the late radical historian Howard Zinn) the most important act a citizen
can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the [small number of ]
mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. Real progressive change
requires popular organization and great social movements beneath and beyond
the empty promises of the nations ruthlessly time-staggered major-party,
major-media, big-money-candidate-centered ballot box extravaganzas (please
see Chomskys classic 2004 essay on The Disconnect in U.S. Democracy). The
peoples movements we desperately need to formperhaps it is my delusion
that rank-and-file citizens can and will ever do soshould include in their
list of demands the creation of a party and elections system that deserves
passionate citizen engagement. The oligarchic system (beyond mere
plutocracy) now in place in the U.S. is worthy of no such thing.
Paul Street
