Yves here. This post provides a compact, long-term view of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class in favor of cultivating wealthy donors. Obama deservedly plays a large role in this sellout. There does not seem to be remotely enough self-recrimination among party leaders and operatives to hope for much of a course change. So what comes next?
By Leonard C. Goodman. a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and an adjunct professor of law at DePaul University .Originally published at ScheerPost; cross posted from Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
Following its crushing defeat in the 2024 election, the Democratic Party might finally face its day of reckoning. The party markets itself as the champion of the working class and a bulwark against the party of the plutocrats. But this has been a lie for at least three decades.
The Democratic Party has partnered with Wall Street donors since at least the 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, the party overturned Glass Steagall and other New Deal programs that had effectively restrained Wall Street greed for 60 years. It also sold out American workers with so-called trade deals that freed their bosses to ship American jobs overseas. It ended welfare “as we know it” and passed draconian crime bills that destroyed mostly black and brown communities, sending mothers and fathers to prison for decades in the name of a cruel and senseless war on drugs.
Into the 21st century, the Democrats continued pushing the lie that they were fighting for working people. After September 11, 2001, the party put up a token resistance to the Bush/Cheney regime of illegal regime-change wars, black sites, indefinite detention and torture. All the while, it continued soliciting campaign contributions from the arms dealers profiting from Bush’s wars.
In 2008, the party found a Black face to carry on its Wall Street-friendly agenda. Gullible Americans, myself included, were taken in by Barack Obama’s promises to end “dumb wars” and to institute a single payer healthcare system. We ignored the red flags, like the fact that Obama’s campaign broke records in pocketing Wall Street donations. It was later revealed by Wikileaks that nearly every member of Obama’s cabinet had been selected by the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup.
It didn’t take long for President Obama to crush our hopes that he was a different kind of Democrat. One of his first acts as president was to funnel trillions of dollars to the big banks that, newly freed by Clinton from FDR-era regulations, had embarked on an orgy of unbridled greed, swindling millions of Americans out of their homes and retirement savings with a scheme to sell worthless mortgage-backed securities.
Adding insult to injury, Obama saw to it that the bailed-out bank executives faced no criminal prosecutions and received their year-end bonuses. In their place, the Obama Justice Department brought federal mortgage fraud charges against thousands of poor people—I represented a half dozen of these folks—who had signed their names to the phony mortgage loans that the Wall Street bankers encouraged, packaged and sold to pension funds and other unwitting investors.
The pipe dream that Obama would be an anti-war president was also quickly dispatched. During his two terms, Obama ushered in a new era of continuous war, envisioned by George Orwell and favored by Wall Street. Obama expanded Bush’s bombing campaigns into Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Somalia. Today’s Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Republicans in its ties to war profiteers and trillion-dollar Pentagon budgets.
Obama also effectively ended the Democrats’ promise to fight for a true national health care system in which all Americans would be able to go to the doctor when sick without fear of bankrupting their families. In its place, Obama pushed through a health care plan developed in right-wing think tanks, that guaranteed profits (and taxpayer subsidies) for the private insurance industry and did little to contain costs.
By 2012, Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report was describing the Democratic Party as the “more effective evil” for using its reputation as protector of the working class to neutralize effective opposition and push through right-wing policies that the Republicans could not get passed.
In 2016, the Democrats received a wake-up call when their chosen successor to Obama lost the White House to a crude-talking New York City real estate developer and game show host with no prior political experience. But with the help of its partners in corporate media, the party managed to limp along for another eight years, first by telling the American people that President Trump was an agent of Russia, and then by claiming that Trump was Hitler who was planning concentration camps and firing squads for his political enemies.
Now after the November 2024 elections in which Trump won every swing state and the popular vote, the Democratic party is finally being forced to face some uncomfortable truths. The party’s partners in the corporate media initially tried blaming the election result on the voters for being too misogynist, too racist, or too dumb to vote correctly. But there is little trust that remains in corporate media.
The party’s corporate consultants have put the blame on the party’s excessive focus on identity politics. But the issues for the Democrats run much deeper than bad messaging. The real problem is that the party takes direction from plutocrats whose interests are antagonistic to the needs of the working people it pretends to represent. Both Democrats and Republicans are financed by the same corporate interests. Thus, there is general agreement and support for policies that guarantee high rates of return on investment capital, policies like continuous war, for-profit health care, and outsourcing jobs. This leaves few issues for the parties to fight about other than abortion and identity politics.
Fifty years ago, American capitalists still relied on American workers to build everything from cars and televisions to sneakers and light bulbs. These titans of industry had to care about things such as functioning schools, decent wages, cities and public transportation. But the times have changed. Today’s plutocrats support outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and have little concern for the condition of American workers. And while ordinary Americans want the country’s resources to be spent at home, plutocrats are heavily invested in foreign wars, and they shun diplomacy.
These contradictions could only be covered up for so long. Even with reliable partners in the corporate press, the internet has given Americans alternative sources for their news. During the last few years, in a desperate effort to keep its scheme afloat, the Democrats embraced censorship and a regime of corporate “fact checkers” to police social media and remove or punish unsanctioned speech. In so doing, the party abandoned the last of its core principles: standing up for free speech and the right to dissent.
Many Democrats argue that they had to go after Wall Street money to compete with the Republicans. In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained the strategy: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” But for this plan to work, the party still needed an actual message to take to the voters.
Forbes Magazine reports that during the 2024 presidential race, Kamala Harris’s campaign raised a billion dollars while Trump’s campaign raised $388 million. Harris’s substantial edge in fundraising allowed her to flood the airwaves with commercials. But she had nothing of substance to say to voters.
The Atlantic Magazine reports that early in her campaign, Harris gained ground by attacking Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. But then, suddenly, Harris abandoned her attacks on big business at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer.
Many Democrats, especially in swing states, opposed the Biden Administration’s unfailing support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly all of its 2.3 million residents. Harris could have gained the support of many of these voters by promising to stop arming Israel during the genocide. But her Party’s donors wouldn’t allow her to even hint at such a change in policy. Two days before the election, while campaigning in the swing state of Michigan, Harris stated, “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.” But as Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada pointed out on election night, this promise carried no weight because Harris had also promised that she would never do the one thing within her power to stop the slaughter: cut off the flow of bombs to Israel.
After decades of malfeasance and deception, it has become evident that the corporate Democratic Party cannot serve as the lone opposition party to the corporate Republicans. The American people need a viable political party that represents the interests of ordinary working people.
A true workers party will not raise as much money as the corporate Democrats. But it will have an honest message with the potential to appeal to large numbers of Americans. Further, a political party that actually represents workers will press for reforms that begin to even the playing field between the haves and the have nots.
For example, one the most effective ways plutocrats game the political system is by flooding campaign contributions to the lawmakers who sit on the key committees that oversee their businesses. Members of Congress covet these committee chairs because they guarantee high fundraising numbers. Lawmakers who sit on the House Financial Services Committee have jurisdiction over banks and insurance companies and are targeted by those firms with campaign contributions. Lawmakers who sit on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees provide funding for lucrative government contracts and are flooded with war industry cash.
These practices are corrupt and deprive American citizens of their right to be governed by representatives free from conflicts of interest. A judge who has received political contributions from a litigant must be removed from the case. Similarly, the most important functions of government, such as determining tax and how our tax revenue will be spent, should be performed by lawmakers who have not been bribed.
In 2017, the Center for American Progress, a think tank aligned with the Democratic Party, proposed a “Committee Contribution Ban” for Congress. It asserted: “Congress should enact a law to make it unlawful for members of Congress to accept campaign contributions from entities that fall within the jurisdiction of their committees.” Unsurprisingly, this proposal never reached the floor of Congress, that I could find.
Some states have enacted similar conflict of interest rules. And Congress could certainly pass such a law, if it chose. Of course, this will never happen as long as we are ruled by two corporate parties that benefit from the corruption. But if we had a political party that represented ordinary people, countless opportunities for positive change would soon emerge.
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This was a $16 billion election. The media, the think tanks, the academy, and our history are all under the control of centralized economic power. We are an oligarchy, not a democracy as regularly conceived in all venues.
When popular forces have gained power in our history, the rulers have fought back. In the first part of the 20th Century the Palmer Raids destroyed the left, and, when the New Deal created forces an economy serving the needs of the masses, the rulers instituted a counter attack with McCarthyism and laws to limit popular power as exemplified by the Taft Hartley Act.
The activism in the 1960s also brought a reaction from the rulers. Watanuki, Crozier, and Huntington wrote of the Crisis of Democracy, too much democracy makes democracies ungovernable.
The Powell Memorandum was a call to arms of the business class. It is not mentioned in the discussions of who wins elections, but it is relevant because the $15 billion to buy the Congress and elections is corporate America responding to Powell.
The Democratic Party will not face its day of reckoning until the population not only feels anger revealed by the lack of sympathy over the murder of United Healthcare’s Brian Thompson, but combines that anger with an understanding that we live under the power of a ruling class and that the Democratic Party as the party of opposition is as much of a distraction as the invading immigrants of Trump’s denunciations.
Consolidation of a third force is the only wiggle room for the working class.
And no selling out ala Bernie Sanders, please.
> Consolidation of a third force is the only wiggle room for the working class.
Concur. It has occurred to me that a “three body problem” is one way to describe how to destroy our current oligarchy.
How true. Every mass struggle that has produced some incremental social advance is followed by an intense ruling class backlash. No social advance is ever secure under capitalism. That’s why it’s called class struggle. The main tenet of the rulers is to stop class consciousness from advancing amongst workers using all means. We face this today. A weak, compromised and corrupt labor movement needs revitalized to help instill confidence.
This is one thing that I am very very interested in drilling down more into. Are you saying that the quid pro quo is simply having enough funds to be elected? Because given congress salary levels, that seems to be pretty small potatoes. So I’m not sure how this is a direct incentive to the lawmakers (not contradicting your statement, just saying I don’t see the connection).
Is it simply the revolving door of lawmakers going to corporates and think tanks and back again into congress? Then they can depend on high salaries in these places but must suffer a haircut when they are in congress? But that’s quite a risk because if you can’t get elected for a few cycles, why would anyone invest in you?
Or is there more there? I understand, however, that there are specific rules in place that prohibit campaign funds from being paid to the politicians directly. I’m conscious that there are any number of creative accounting methods that are available to evade such rules. The lawmaker might own a company that makes a loan to the campaign for 100% interest. Or the company sells paper cups to the campaign for a 1000% mark up. But I’m only speculating here.
At the end of the day, the individual has to pay for their McMansion mortgages, the car(s), their kids’ college education, their expensive holidays…. what is the incoming cash flow that offsets these constant outgoing cash flows, and how does it come in?
The commentators on the Naked Capitalism forum are quite an informed bunch, so I’m hoping to finally hear something solid.
If you have missed the level of insider trading among Congresscritters, I can’t help you.
But aside from money, many were already millionaires before they ran. You seem to ignore the things money can’t readily buy, like high public profile and powerful people seeking you out
Yup – $500,000 for giving a one-hour speech. It’s such an obvious bribe. The corruption is obvious and pervasive. How else could the Obama’s, Clintons, Pelosi’s and the other corrupt critters have gotten so rich?
Indeed: Clinton and Obama both becoming centi-mllionaires after leaving office, and Pelosi’s offhand but revealing “this is a free market,” when asked about members of Congress unregulated trading in stocks.
Barack Obama made his fortune as a community organizer.
For Wall Street.
Post retirement many congrees-drones end up as handsomely paid lobbiests or think tank members for the interests they serve. It a whole career trajectory.
I’m not an expert on campaign finance, but my understanding is that campaign funds can be used to pay for transportation and meals and hotels while one is on campaign. Your average Congressperson isn’t driving around in a used Pinto to pick up Taco Bell and bringing it to Motel 6. And especially if you’re a Congressperson needing to get re-elected every two years, the campaign never stops. It just wouldn’t do for the plutocrats to have their elected lackeys going around looking poor, would it? And those are just the small perks. Many of these people are rich already and looking to get richer – as the article explains very well, it’s all about class.
Did it not used to be the case that candidates could take a cut of the advertising spend of an election campaign by setting up their own company to place the ads and charge a large commission for doing so? I do not know if that is still possible?
And of course there are always brown envelopes…
As a 4x D nominee for Congress in a deep R district (KY-02, I am in no danger of being elected) it’s even worse than you know on the inside. I met with a prominent Kentucky D who claimed that our D Governor Beshear was “..all about labor. Look at all these jobs.” True – Beshear has brought billion$ of investment during his terms – but I asked, “Then why are 20% of working people 3 or 4 bad paychecks away from becoming homeless, and 2/3rds live paycheck to paycheck? Do you even know someone who lives paycheck to paycheck?” The answer was, “Yes, I do! Some of my employees…”
This person isn’t a bad person, they are simply unaware, stuck in a bubble of affluence that insulates them from the realities of life on the ground. I shop at a Walmart in Leitchfield, the people at the store are my neighbors, I see how close to the edge they live. I also see how kind hearted most of them are.
I don’t complain about Rs – they don’t want to hear it from a D. All agree that both parties are screwed up, the only one you MIGHT be able to change is the one you’re in. OTOH, this is an uncomfortable road to say the least.
Dem party leaders are all about data and dollars – “We can’t invest in that district because we can’t win this season” has been the approach for 2 & 3 decades in Kentucky’s rural districts. As popular as Gov. Beshear is, he did’t win my district. Without a viable party, no candidate is viable.
Re data – a business leader friend says “Focus groups tell you what you needed to know 2 weeks ago.” Or as my history prof at the University of Louisville said, “All analysis presumes a cadaver.” Data is what was true a while ago, following it slavishly makes the bad news true indefinitely. I mentioned the party had accused me of being disruptive, he said “You need disrupters, it’s how you find the future. But they are often wrong.” I can take “often wrong” over “never right”, the normal attitude party insiders present.
To be clear, I am not advocating for my campaign. I am advocating for the idea of running in un-winnable districts as a path to activism and influence; as a nominee you get a tiny little soapbox. You can’t change your party where they are strong, the opportunities are where they are weak, as Dems are in Kentucky. Beshear has already made it clear he is running for President in 2028, but without a rebuild of the party in rural and working districts I don’t see him going the distance. I have been saying to party insiders and to Rs I meet as well, we really don’t need Trump or Harris or Beshear etc. – we need a Lincoln or an FDR. A R friend said in response, “I’d take either one.”
Peace.
Best…H
Agree the dimocrats don’t need data analytics and focus groups; those are things useful for marketing products.
Dimocrats need clear, constant messaging that they are fully committed to taking down the warmongering, neoliberal, free-trading state they have constructed for their billionaire and corporate benefactors. It really began with Carter and his deregulation of airlines, railroads, trucking, electricity, natural gas and Volker’s crushing 18% interest rates and 12% unemployment. Carter got the Powell memorandum and began implementation. Dimocrats have NEVER looked back.
Pre-sheep dogging Sanders had a very clear message and didn’t deviate from it. I kinda think his campaign wasn’t filled with the likes of Robbie Mook and data analytics. In 2016 Sanders did very well in the rustbelt of upstate NY, most of which is quite red except for the rotting city cores. Hillary carried downstate and some enclaves upstate. Ditto for Harris. I can’t think of a prominent dimocrat that has clear messaging like Sanders in the 2016 primary.
The dimocratic party is anything but democratic. They are incapable of change. A Whig-like extinction is what us needed.
I know exactly what you’re saying, but to quibble just a little bit, the Democrats or whatever party might try to really change things doesn’t need just clear messaging, they need candidates who actually believe the message. That’s the problem they have now – they continue to think better PR will solve their problems, but people can see through that phoniness.
Despite the disappointment that Bernie became, I do think he really still believes what he says in regards to the warmongering and neoliberalism that has got to go, and people could feel that and showed up to see him in droves. But when the Democrat party made sure people wouldn’t be able to vote for someone like that, the majority of people realized they would not be able to get nice things they’ve been yearning for and voted for the middle finger that is Trump instead.
Bring on the extinction!
To quibble further, it really didn’t matter what Harris believed. She would have done whatever she was told if elected. The danger that the establishment saw in Trump both times is that he is genuinely independent, although certainly influenced by immediate family and their business/Israel interests. He got pooched by the establishment last time in office, by people he thought he could trust, so should be different this time.
This is one of the Dems’ problems. Experience had shown that focus-group-tested messaging is the full extent of the action that Dems are willing to take on any given issue important to voters. Meanwhile donors/oligarchs get whatever they ask for. The issue isn’t even one of trust, as most people I know completely trust that the Dems won’t do anything for them. They are still Dems because there’s no viable alternative.
Contrast that with the GOP which gets most of what the party wants even when they don’t hold the majority.
Dems need to stand for something that delivers concrete material benefits to people (not corporations or über-rich). However, that means destroying their donor-consultant business model, which isn’t going to happen. Burn it down.
As a fellow Kentuckian, that was a perfect summary of our commonwealth politically. When Geoff Young won his primary on a platform of ending foreign wars and breaking up the CIA as well as being for Medicare for all, the Kentucky Dems freaked out including Beshear who acted as though Young was some sort of crackpot spreading lies about the world. They put in a write-in candidate that Young had to compete with while trying to defeat Andy Barr. Of course, the KDP cut off every dime that could have helped Young win. Having voted for Young myself, I never viewed Beshear the same way again as he clearly put the party over the spoken voice of the voters. If Beshear runs for president, I’ll keep voting third party. I wouldn’t have said that originally, but I’ve seen enough now.
Kentucky Democrats love to put up candidates who say the right things for about a minute, then proceed to run away from everything they said they stood for especially if they’re running against Mitch McConnell. Charles Booker, the last candidate who tried did run a lefty campaign but got no more support from the Kentucky Democratic Party than Young did. A few years ago, a Dem local to me ran for reelection got an earful from me on my front porch about what was wrong with both state and national Democrats. She didn’t disagree.
What if Young and all the Youngists who understood exactly what the DemParty did to them were to have right then and there decided to form a Real Democrat Party? And start running in every jurisdiction where a Real Democrat could either win or keep the Democrat from winning?
And keep doing it till the people of those jurisdictions realized that the Real Democrats would never allow a Democrat to win, and that the people of those jurisdictions would have to choose between the Real Democrat and the Republican?
Or they could call it the Social Democrat Party, to be entirely unromantic and serious-sounding.
Or they could fund it strictly and only with Berniesque small donations. Then they could call it the Small Donors Social Democrat Party. SDSDP.
Social Democratic terminology will never go over well here, and Bernie made a mistake relying on it.
Better to stay in the American Grain and use language that has worked before; personally, I’m partial to rhetoric recalling FDR’s Four Freedoms or Economic Bill of Rights.
Bernie called himself ” Democratic Socialist”. Does that sound the same as ” Social Democrat” to mainstream people? Maybe it does . . . .
If the name ” Social Democrat” is no good, then such a wannabe-Party will have to find a more American-sounding name for itself. A serious-sounding name.
Maybe New Deal Revival Party or New Deal Restoration Party or some such thing. Maybe that would at least get people to ask: ” ‘New Deal’? What is that?” And then the Party could tell them all about it.
Young and others did just that. They formed the Kentucky Party. I think maybe NC had an early post on it. People of all states should be looking to do this. If mods are OK, here’s a piece I wrote on Substack about my vote for them.
https://dannymayer.substack.com/p/my-vote-for-kentucky
The first KY Party meeting was in Richmond over Thanksgiving. They are working on a platform to debate for what I think will be a May convention.
Hank. I agree with what another poster stated. Great read on KY politics. I’m a long-time out of District admirer. Also a Young voter in ‘22.
That sounds very interesting. If they can make it work over time and use it as a viable tire iron to beat some real benefits and improvements out of the system, perhaps like-minded people in other states might study up on ” how the Kentucky Party did it.” Perhaps it could lead to a Federation of State Parties. That Federation could work out what National level things have to be done in order to allow the State Parties to achieve what they would like to achieve in their separate states.
“Kentucky Democrats love to put up candidates who say the right things for about a minute, then proceed to run away from everything they said they stood for…”
It isn’t just Kentucky…
I still think there is a better chance of changing things from the inside, particularly at the grassroots level, so I am going to every county party meeting in the 2nd that I can, explaining that the state org isn’t going to help them in the ways they need. One county in my district is looking in to setting up their own PAC, I’m part of the discussion. Any success at all will lead to other counties doing the same.
I spoke on Labor Day in Owensboro at the Labor Picnic and announced “No Unopposed Seats in 2026” as a concept. Later this month I will propose it to the State Central Executive Committee, the bod to the Ky D Party.
I haven’t dug into the details yet, but I hear NCDP Chair Anderson Clayton is doing good things in North Carolina. Two years ago they had 40 unopposed seats in their state house, this year only 3. They raised a bunch of money, used it to fund races, the figure I heard was $15k per race. That’s enough for a candidate to not go broke – they might not win but the best training is actually being a candidate.
A big piece is crossing the divide, within the party and also with Rs. As I recently told a KDP official advocating for door knocking and texting, you can’t message people you don’t know or like. You need a relationship first, then a credible alternative. If Bernie says it, I probably agree, but my basic message is higher wages, safer places to work, a schedule that lets you raise a family, and effective health care that won’t bankrupt you when someone you love gets sick. Verrrry few people, R or D have any problem with that.
I work with Brave Angels to learn depolarizing skills, mostly it’s about being willing to interact in a friendly neighborly fashion, focusing on finding agreement. When there’s disagreement you state your case, listen to theirs and move on. It’s a process – until you have had lots of experience it takes multiple interactions to truly get somewhere. I’m willing to treat even extreme Rs with respect, offer civility, at least we can talk. I recently had a long chat about abortion with a very conservative leader of a county R party, they agreed that higher wages, safer places to work and other family friendly goals would cut down on the need for abortion.
In 2022 I went to a county R party meeting on election eve. A group of us were discussing T, they said just because I vote for him doesn’t mean I like him, another said I wouldn’t want him as a neighbor, a third said I wouldn’t want him over to the house. The statewide R party was so alarmed by a D showing up at their meeting they ultimately removed the county party chair and vice-chair.
Best…H
I had been a Democrat since the time of the Republican “hardhats” in the ’60s. Never gave it a second thought until the debacle of 2016 when the party elite decided to undermine Sanders to promote their necon queen, HRC. Sanders at least had the idea of empowering the public to bring about change. Obviously, the party of the donor class could not countenance that. Afterwards, rather than reform, they circled the wagons and doubled down, and their base went along with that. They demanded nothing better and worse is what they got. Without even a whimper, they fastened a “Kick Me Again” sign on their back and carried on. Pathetic. They absolutely deserve to lose. For myself, I swore not a vote nor dime more until the election process became transparent, “super delegates” were dumped, and lobbyists were kicked out of DNC decision making. Well, that didn’t happen. In fact, with every election cycle, the ironically named Democratic Party gets worse. I truly blame the DP base for that.
Stepping back though, it seems that the basic human competence of leaders throughout the West in general has simply plummeted over the last 30 or so years to utterly ridiculous levels. Look at Europe, the UK, and all the “five eye” nations. IMO, It must be the the culture of neoliberalism that spawns them. Rather than a process for weeding out incompetent, malicious leaders, something in Western culture finds and promotes them. Is there any Western leader that you would be willing to have run your business, do your taxes, or take care of your children? Shallow, incompetent leadership has become institutionalized in the West.
Whether in peace or in war, incompetent leaders in positions of power are the absolute bane of humanity. IMO, there is no way around it nor any moving forward until the foundational issue of finding and promoting competent leaders is solved. I don’t expect any enthusiasm for this from our current political parties. Rather, I expect that they will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. If the public does not demand it, by the millions, together, with pitchforks and torches in hand, and deadly serious intent, they will never get it.
I’d suggest the senile/incompetent leadership is part of the plutocrats’ plan to disable governance.
*senile/incompetent/compromised/bought
How do you balance that view with the fact they are drowned in propaganda? I’m torn between wanting to scorn the wealthy or those that keep voting for the status quo election after election.
It’s a choice to get drunk off of MSNBC every night, CNN, or FOX. To believe the state propaganda and refuse to follow that little feeling in everyone’s gut that something is going horribly wrong.
The one sliver of hope was the election results. The working class looks to be about to dump the Democrats if they run another terrible candidate.
“I’m torn between wanting to scorn the wealthy or those that keep voting for the status quo election after election.”
I scorn both…
I don’t know about the US but, here in the UK, politics has, until now, largely been run by the press barons, who identify the politicians they like, then give them favourable publicity as ‘coming men’ or ‘coming women’. Perhaps social media means the power will now shift, but if that shift is only to Musk and friends, I do not expect matters to improve.
Politicians the press barons do not like? For the most part, they can just ensure they get no publicity. Failing that, they can run a campaign to destroy them.
Yes, I agree.
Private Eye pointed out recently that the new Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, had put Leveson 2 on ice. This would have been the proposed enquiry into collusion between the Press – you can imagine the chief suspects – and the Metropolitan Police. As Private Eye said of her, “She’s weaker than we thought”.
She was also a leading anti-Corbyn organiser and promoter of Starmer.
Labour collude with the Dems, and tend to have a Thatcherite disdain towards effective trade unionism. Both parties are drinking in the same saloon.
Interesting.
Perhaps that “something in Western culture” is the Nazi-paperclipping Deep State and its Deep State Assassin Armies?
Western Culture was perfectly capable of producing a Kennedy, X, King, Kennedy, etc. It was the Assassination Specialists of the Nazi Paperclipping Deep State which kept killing them all and has learned how to keep more from emerging.
Small plane Wellstone, anyone?
> “, It must be the the culture of neoliberalism that spawns them. ”
That’s an important part but I didn’t think it can be the whole story. How come those other countries don’t have independent policies of national interest and they are so uniformly aligned to the US? There’s a whole range of techniques of election interference going on too. In places like Ukraine, Georgia and Romania they haven’t even tried very hard to hide it.
And Moldova.
Neoliberalism was spawned as an ideology to ‘save capitalism’ by putting it on steroids. Rent-seeking financialization proceeded apace (of course, this produces the most mediocre governors in a kind of reverse meritocracy as the skillset needed to rise is perverse); as such, neoliberalism is fully compatible with imperialism, which Marx stated was the highest form of capitalism.
Neoliberalism is a word applied retrospectively to a number of things. Apart from Lambert’s two Simple Rules, I especially like David Harvey’s description of a set of policies put together in the 70s to improve the rate of return on capital by rolling back the New Deal discipline of the capitalist class. Accumulation by dispossession, as Harvey likes to say. And yes, it does produce crummy leaders because in the end it’s just thievery.
While I think this is a very important part of what changed, at the same time there were other forces in play: the irresistible imperatives of the American imperial bureaucracies. Often these aligned with those of neoliberalism but they were not coming from the same sources. One is the massive bureaucracies of the state, that have a life of their own, the other the private sector businessmen and bankers. How did Europe become so uniform, disciplined, vehement, and obedient in its “pro-Western” ideology? That was coordinated and it was not incompetent.
Biden is doing his part to increase the loathing. Until some cooler heads begin articulating a decent and clear vision, by telling the truth, the Dem future is bleak.
if you take Latin America as a template, it isn’t a given that “the people” automatically veer (nominally) left during income inequality (as DC Dems. assume).
The ball is in Trump’s court now. No war + decent real income growth = 20 more years of Trumpism.
Not holding my breath, given the big structural problems and Trump’s political ADHD and DC Establishment’s big target on Trump.
But given the shambolic nature of DC Dems….Trump may pull a hat trick.
A lot of those Latin American elections featured US meddling. Without that happening things might have turned out differently.
Milei is a perfect example of what Louis Fyne speaks of. But more generally is goes as described by playón. Elections in Uruguay are an exception in that this country is the most stable in South America in terms of economy, politics and culture. Things are calm and peaceful here and whichever party wins, Uruguayans can be confident that the country will be well managed. More than anything Uruguay is like stepping back in time to a better, calmer life were things made sense. I was losing my mind in the US…
Now I buy my meat from the butcher, most food at the Farmers market, walk and ride buses to get around, and enjoy good affordable health care and housing. Yeah.
I don’t think Trumpism will continue, JD Vance will evolve it into something else. Unless he is killed I expect that he will form the next political movement and it will persist beyond his 8 year presidency. He is a far more attractive candidate than anyone on the horizon who could only be beat by a true populist candidate of the people. Just my opinion
Great wrap up of what went wrong.
The only solution is the natural solution — death —, and it can’t happen soon enough for the Dem Party.
Many of us have found that US politics has been gamed thoroughly. Other than electing Trump (or any seeming “strong-man” figure) change that betters the life of the average USA-an won’t happen. As St. George Carlin quipped long ago in his beautiful rant on American politics “the game is rigged” and it is rigged more than it was when he uttered that statement some decades ago. We are, de facto an oligarchy that I hope may morph into an aristocracy where ruling-class people will display some minimal noblesse oblige or that we similarly morph in some new and more dynamic version of feudalism rather than the totalitarianism the Democrats favor as the ultimate end to their dreams of power. What the Democrats do or don’t do at this time is irrelevant because, as I’ve said, the game is rigged and that game is a pure Machiavellian one and since we no longer have the possibility of fulfilling Jefferson’s dream of being independent thoughtful citizens not forced to live by corporate wages (most people wouldn’t have any idea what that even means) my two ultimate choices remain.
We North Americans just can’t stand any kind of reality–we can’t seem to face that we are NOT the good guys but the exact opposite force in the world. We spread chaos, war, division, and what I can only describe as evil, around the world in our “leaders” mad quest for world-conquest and spreading what has now become “American values” of money, money, and money as the final and ultimate moral arbiter of all questions. Forget Democrats, there is not even a possibility of reforming that crooked band of hustlers like Obama, Biden, Clinton and so on. Our only hope is with someone who actually says he wants to put America first–we’ll see how that works out.
Yes. One of the saddest things about this situation is we have no rich and powerful people stepping up to steer the ship in a sane direction. We’ve had a few quixotic campaigns from well-meaning ego cases. But we need, unfortunately, a ‘committee of correspondence’, a club of billionaires who have the stroke to say ‘enough is enough, this kleptocracy thing is not working’, and the fortitude to plan and work together to achieve something. The rest of us are just pawns in the game.
From Goodman’s lips to the ears of the gods and goddesses. Yet I doubt that the Democratic Party in its current avatar is capable of self-reflection and of reform. So many of its leading figures, including Hillary “Chief Warmonger” Clinton, think that everything is a-okay so long as the money is rolling in. There is no indication that Nancy Pelosi senses a problem.
We’re not actually waiting for leadership from people with moral compasses like Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth “Bernie’s a Sexist” Warren, and the incredible faded 172-year-old Steny Hoyer, now are we?
As the saying goes, the Democratic Party is where social movements go to die. I will await the Democrats trying to revive politics (rather selling “I’m Speaking” swag).
Wake me when:
–The Democrats propose the repeal of Taft-Hartley and all state “right-to-work” laws.
–The Democrats will even admit that ACA / Obamacare was a great disaster and a barely acknowledged factor in their defeat in 2024. Only with the arrival of Luigi Mangione have some politicos picked up on a wee bit of discontent about health insurance.
–The Democrats disavow Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, and “Toria” Nuland.
–The Democrats come out for a 20 USD / hour minimum wage.
–The Democrats admit that Joe Biden is a corrupt disaster and war monger and that Project Ukraine was a source of their defeat, let alone the effect that the massacre of Palestine had in places like Michigan.
–The Democrats admit that the Russia Russia hysteria has now made a major casualty of Romania. (Or do they consider the Romanian constitutional crisis a success?)
I’ll wait.
What if some people were to try starting and growing a party to run on those things? Or at least some of them?
It could be a New Deal Party or a New Deal Revival Party or a New Deal Restoration Party or a Social Democrat Party or a Lower Class Majority Party or some such thing.
Any people who start or join such a Party should remember that events are moving faster than a new Party can grow and build power. And events will keep moving faster than a new Party can move. So people in such a Party should focus on Survivalism first, both personal and neighborhood and perhaps even local and regional and only devote their spare time to a Party which may not emerge fast enough to head anything off.
I am glad to read that Mr. Goodman did not restrict himself to Obama. Bill Clinton learned the art of the short con when he was governor of Arkansas but that was through relatively small-time money laundering of the profits from the Mena operation. After he was elected President, Terry McAuliffe showed him how do the long con and focus on big business. I re-watched the movie The Grifters last week, a movie based on the book of the same name by Jim Thompson. It talks about the difference between the short and long cons.
Overturning Glass Steagall and selling out American workers with NAFTA had immediate rewards to him, rewards greater than any small time grift. Clinton was a product of the carney circuit out of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Obama was a creature of the CIA. There is a big difference between them.
The important shared characteristics of the Clintons and Obamas are elite academic credentials and the ruthless pursuit of personal power and riches. As long as universities fail to evaluate the character of their graduates, they are nothing more than training academies for mercenaries of the plutocracy.
I believe that AOC might be similar to Obama in that way. She majored in international affairs and economics – seems like a CIA dream hire.
I was fooled for quite a while by the Democrat Party – co-founded a Democratic Club in 2003 and registered over 1800 voters; caucused for Obama in 2008; and caucused for Bernie in 2016. Now I’d sooner go to the dentist than vote for ANY Democrat party candidate. I consider the people who run the party to be the lowest scum, pure filthy corrupt liars and influence peddlers, utterly depraved traitors. Them and their paid liars in the media disgust me.
Was thinking early that after the Democrats stuffed up the responses to East Palestine and Hawaii, they had one final chance. Hurricane Helene tore into places like South Carolina and it was a full bore disaster. Biden and the Democrats could have redeemed themselves by saying that the full might and power of the US will go to aiding all those people in need of help. They could have shown that they were competent at such things and people would have appreciated it at the ballot boxes. Instead they fobbed it off in general terms and turned instead to getting the latest aid packages off to the Ukraine and Israel. South Carolina? Where’s that? They had their chance but they could not bring themselves to helping out ordinary Americans. They just didn’t care. And even just a few days ago old Joe was still trying to get $24 billion to the Ukraine. He should have sent some to places at home instead.
Why would they care?
They lost, sure, but there are few if any personal consequences for the leadership which ru(i)ns the party – they are all wealthy and safe in the knowledge that a third party gaining real traction is very unlikely given their control of the narrative and all the procedural hurdles (just ask the GP), and that 70+ million people still voted for them despite their horrible record and candidate. It will be their turn again at some point; meanwhile they can fundraise off the evil Trump and Rs, and enough people will still be gullible enough to buy the charade.
Simply put, there’s no real accountability.
Besides, a third working class party isn’t “viable”, because voters typically say that “not enough people will vote for it”, and so they won’t, either.
How do we even know it was the donors? Seems more likely Kamala knew of the plan for Israel to take over the middle-east with US support, couldn’t say anything.
The best and the brightest, like Yves, are recruited as elite soldiers for the plutocracy. As they get older and wiser, they are replaced by the next wave of young warriors thrilled at receiving the pay and prestige awarded to those who guard the interests of the powerful. Every year, a fresh crop of brainy and industrious graduates enter the workforce. Most of them join the ranks of the plutocrat army, e.g., law firms, Wall Street, consultancies, and mass media. Simply put, most of the brightest among us are or were willing to serve the The Powers That Be.
Thanks for the kind words, but I was not recruited (at least until the second year at HBS, after I had gotten a Wall Street summer job). I wanted to have a good job and make a good income. I was making career choices in the 1970s and early 1980s, when women were not welcome. At the end of my summer stint at Salomon, I had James Wolfenohn, then head of investment banking, later head of the World Bank, tell me why did a want such a job, it would be easier to marry an investment banker.
Similarly, when I was a senior at Harvard, no one would hire me despite the fact that I got into every law and B school program I applied to (Harvard, Yale, and Columbia law, Harvard and Stanford B-School). Employers deemed me to be unserious by virtue of having majored in an elite liberal arts program (only 1/3 of applicants admitted; program members got a LOT of faculty attention) as opposed to economics. This despite also having had a summer job during college at Boston Consulting Group. Ironically the only restriction my father had placed on me in going to college was that I not major in economics or sociology: “They won’t teach you how to think and they won’t teach you how to write.”
The one that came closest to hiring me in college was Citibank. Their money markets trading operation said I very much reminded them of one of their best traders. But she had quit to become an actress, which led them to decide to ding me.
So landing as well as possible seemed sound given the high odds of shortfall v. aims, particularly given what happened when I tried to get a job as a college senior.
Smart dad too!
Thanks for sharing the story, Yves.
Below is a link to Ralph Nader’s latest weekly email. Part 2 of this email republishes an October 21, 2022 essay in which Ralph imagines Donald Trump dining with two political advisors. Some excerpts:
“Hey guys, know why the GOP is ahead in the polls?” “Why?” the two advisors replied in unison. Donald responded, “Because the Democrats are busy losing all by themselves, backtracking out of fear. Fearing a Party they are supposed to be fighting is what I call ‘beating themselves.’”
“Tell us more,” urged the two advisers.
“The Democrats are beyond stupido. They’ve contracted out their campaigns to consultants who, with their loyalties to their other corporate clients, have sold the Dems a strategy of caution – otherwise known as cutting off your cajones. Candidates without balls can’t think for themselves and just follow the script. Lots of Dems don’t want to appear with Bernie Sanders – the one guy I didn’t want to debate – who gets huge votes in conservative Vermont. What chickens!”
“This is all so beautiful, so gorgeous for us. Dems without balls means they campaign every day with their political antennae flailing, afraid they’ll say the politically incorrect phrase and upset the word police or deviate from their consultant’s finger-waving “no-no’s” if they want to rake in big money.”
“Imagine me contracting out my run to a consultant. ‘Donald, say this, don’t do that, do this, don’t say that.’ And paying them big bucks. Never! My people want the unfiltered Donald. That’s why they turn out in standing-room-only droves compared to the empty-seat Dems.”
https://mailchi.mp/nader/need-for-anticipatory-strategies-for-oncoming-trumpism?e=8ca5f5a28d
I am curious about this from the other side—does the donor class still have an incentive to support the Democratic Party?
The George Clooney op-ed was a signal from high-end donors that they were dissatisfied with Biden. Their firehose of cash didn’t begin until Harris became the nominee. Did they really get what they paid for? Is this party worth any future investment from them?
The Democratic candidate for president probably won’t raise a billion dollars in the last ten weeks of the campaign next time, but the Democrats still have an important function earlier in the campaign – kneecapping third parties. You can bet that will be fully funded.
Exactly. The Democrats aren’t going anywhere, and they not only know it, but they act like it.
Imagine someone running for public office for the working class. What would happen to them? The super-rich will do everything in their power to obstruct them or try to buy them off. They can choose not to give in, but then only political or biological death awaits them.
It’s not the super-rich that block new voices seeking public office. It is the Democratic Party structure itself. My town had a talented mayor who, after years of local political success, sought wider political influence (state legislature). The D-Party refused to give her any support as her views were, let’s say. ‘independent’. And she would have been a popular challenger to an ol’ time Dem crony. I’ve lost contact with her and imagine she’s moved on with her life.
Well isn’t the D-Party’s attitude completely controlled by the super-rich? No point in grooming candidates who won’t be good puppets.
This past (local) election cycle I worked on several campaigns for county and state-level candidates. Here in Wisconsin, we have two state representatives who are democratic socialists. I was a part of founding a group of electoral socialists with them, and volunteered on their campaigns. One of those efforts seemed to exemplify what the ruling class will do when threatened, even rhetorically, as well as how individuals respond to this pressure, compromise by compromise making themselves amenable to the interests of capital – if they are relevant at all. I don’t mean to self-promote, but, as it would be long-winded of me to reproduce all the evidence and the argument here, I’ll link a bit of writing I did about this phenomenon: https://vickycookies.substack.com/p/on-the-noble-oxpecker
Good writeup, Vicky, thank you for sharing. False hope is a terrible drug.
Thanks seconded, if only for introducing me to a George Galloway quote I’d missed: his asking (rhetorically or not) if Kamala Harris is “so stupid she thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus”. That’s the sort of well-written, quote-worthy sentence that stands proudly up with DEATH’S immortal (ahem) conclusion about humans in the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s “Hogfather”:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8270917-all-right-said-susan-i-m-not-stupid-you-re-saying-humans
I like this substack a lot. A great illustration of how the corruption of national politics filters down to the grass roots.. “But this country, whose contributions to human achievement include … 12-year old Pakistani girls who are now afraid of clear skies, is hardly fertile ground for social democracy.”
I appreciate the optimistic headline, but the Democratic Party absolutely does NOT face a day of reckoning, just a period of embarrassment.
This is the fundamental resilience of the uni-party. One wing or the other is always doing things that anger the public and rapidly revives the fortunes of the other wing of the party that’s been summarily thrown out of power.
All the Democrats have to do is wait for the Republicans to screw up (as happened in 2006 and 2018). The Republicans always screw up because they follow orders from the donor class and what the donor class wants is fundamentally at odds with what the public wants.
Exactly my thinking; what reckoning? As Lambert points out frequently, the modern party competency is control of the ballot line. When Trump fails to deliver a Great America again, and with incoherent policies, and moar deregulation and tariffs, I don’t see a Great America in the offing, Democrats will once again have their shot in the spotlight. The game of ping-pong continues.
It won’t continue indefinitely, simply because the problems that America, and the World, face from Climate and an ongoing Pandemic will eventually blowup the entire fabric of society. Fun times.
Right! In 16 and 20 it was clear they’d rather lose the election than lose all the donors by allowing voters to choose Sanders.
So there is no reconning. Winning the election with the wrong platform is worse than losing.
Rotating villains, by design.
As has been pointed out before by many others, the main job of the Dems is to keep the actual working class left down and out.
If the Democratic Party did not exist the Republicans would have to invent it. Its the perfect tool for embedding the changes made by the Republicans (never a rich man’s tax reduction reversed!), doing neoliberalism under the cover of “Democrats” (Clinton was very good at this) and sheep dogging the people who would otherwise much more actively attack the oligarchy.
As the ex president of Tanzania said “the US doesn’t have a one party system, its so rich it can afford two of them”.
There will be no reckoning, the Democratic Party is successfully carrying out its main function.
Correct. The Dems are the pawl in the Uniparty ratchet which ensures that neoliberalism can never be repealed.
Thanks. The signs of the coming Dem sellout were to be seen even back to Reagan times and before. Jesse Jackson tried to revive the party’s left faction but was pushed aside.
But America itself has changed and the MAGA driving around in their gigantic and very expensive pickup trucks don’t exactly strike one as the struggling poor. Those last have been memory holed by both parties. Arguably “woke”–much beloved by wealthy movie stars–is just a way of pretending the left still exists when it doesn’t.
In the u.s. we can vote for the Corporate Republicans, flavored with hatter madness, or the Corporate Democrats, flavored with spookiness and wokeism. The days of the lesser Evil are gone. These are days when we are allowed to select between the interests of one conglomerate of self-serving Corporate interests and a second conglomerate of self-serving Corporate interests. Unfortunately, neither party serves the interests of the Populace. Sometimes it is said the u.s. has the “Best government money can buy”. The time has come to modify that saying. The u.s. government has already been bought and sold.
Sadly, the government Corporate money owns, badly serves even Big Money Corporate interests that extend past next quarter’s profits report. That government is running the u.s. Empire like a u.s. Corporation in the hands of a private equity holding company intent on extracting the last penny of profit before casting off the exsanguinated Imperial corpse.
This post elaborates the many ways the Democratic Party failed in its efforts to win control for its Corporate factions. The winning Republican Party is working to achieve slightly different accomplishments of ruin, perhaps opening the door to a Democratic Party comeback in 2028 when it can work the ruin of whatever might be left.
I was thinking that Democrat’s betrayal started with Taft-Hartley. It prevented unions from combining in strikes and took away probably the biggest tool workers had against corporations who combine against workers.
Then the McCarthyites who made sure socialists were eliminated from union leadership while Dems sat on their butts or even participated.
It was downhill from there.
Once Roosy was dead, the war was on to contain workers.
I’d place it a bit earlier, when Henry Wallace was replaced as the VP candidate in 1944.
The real, real problem is that the Democratic Party takes its primary direction from cognitive elites who appear incapable of recognizing their own biases. What if it is the case that the better educated we are the more prone we are to tribalism, extremism, virtue signaling, and dogmatism? What if the better educated we are the less accurately we perceive our own ideologies?
Please see the brilliant essay on symbolic capitalists by Musa Al-Gharbi “Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling,” (Dec. 3, 2024).
Thanks very much for this.
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
I’m definitely buying his book.
Excellent article that perfectly articulates the problem. I voted 3rd party all the way this time around after that disgusting display by Congress to Netanyahu. What disappointed me most was how few voted for Stein for President. I had no illusions about her winning but when all the Democrats offered was a senile old man and a wind up toy who promised the same terrible policies, surely the base understood that a protest vote was in order. The Dems have sunk so incredibly low and aren’t even bothering to polish up their image with charmers like Clinton and Obama. I really thought this election would mean the end of the Democratic Party, but clearly they are going to continue along the road of the Lesser of Two Evils and to scare their constituencey into voting for their team.
I too voted for Jill Stein and Butch Ware… not with any illusions, but with a naive hope of 5%, dreaming 10. What was it, 1.1%?
The policies struck me as credible, practical and principled. Just the commitment to stop the arms and political cover for Israel seemed powerful enough to provide a rallying focus for the fed up and disillusioned.
She herself seemed more straightforward and likely to stay the course than Bernie or, even worse, AOC and the quad.
It seems a good place to start a discussion about alternatives and third parties. What was missing? Apart from cash. Mass Labor and TU support? Media support of course.
There’s a similar problem in the UK, my home, where Greens and pro-Palestine independents made a dent in the recent election.
Or, perhaps the third party in reality will be mass mobilisation, street action and disobedience?
Regards.
What was missing was more voters supporting them.
Stein and Ware were on the ballot in a number of states. Being an actual citizen (instead of a passive consumer of political mass media / propaganda) requires doing a certain amount of homework on candidates and their policies. The elite-owned media are not going to cover them except to discredit them and/or to persuade voters not to vote for them.
best one yet Thomas, many many thanks.
1993 was the year,
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/18/the-clinton-monster-that-wont-die/
“In the end, this Janus-faced Machiavelli had it both ways. On one hand, he maintained a rhetoric of empathy for the poor, the blue-collar worker, the paycheck-to-paycheck laborer, and never hesitated to express his sympathies on his whistle-stop tours. Tears crept into the crow-footed corners of faces in the crowd. He felt our pain. On the other hand—or with the other hand—he palmed check after check from large corporate interests, assuring them, in deed if not word, that his rhetoric was little more than a ruse to retain the progressive vote.
In office, Clinton pursued Republican objectives. He launched a prison-building empire, gutted welfare, deregulated the financial markets, produced astonishing tax breaks for the rich, passed a trade bill that destroyed American jobs and wrecked Mexican agribusiness, and decided there was no good reason to maintain a wall between the unscrupulous capitalist investor and unwitting depositor. After all, as the Nineties refrain went, banks can police themselves. All the while, of course, he continued to peddle his sincerest sympathies to Main Street.
America hasn’t been the same since. Not least because the very deregulatory policies Clinton approved gutted the global economy in 2008. From an electoral perspective, the Democrats need only shade slightly left of the Republican insurgents to appear like even-keeled moderates and win the liberal vote. This is the platform and plan of Hillary Clinton, too. Another neoliberal corporate presidency. Obviously the Clintons think their strategy can still prevail. After all, as Bill Clinton gleefully said of disillusioned progressives he knew would eventually return to the fold, “They have nowhere else to go.””
prior to 1993 with carter and reagan, were of course bad, but reversible. what bill clinton did is not really reversible under the current government.
Good reminder of how bad Bill Clinton was for the country. This is off the election topic, but the sanctions his administration imposed on Iraq that that the World Health Organization reported resulted in 500,000 deaths of Iraqi children from diarrhea and other diseases from the polluted water from destroyed public water systems, still upsets me. When exceptions for medicines were made, the delivery was irregular and deadly. If it weren’t for Monica Lewinsky, Clinton might have added Social Security to his wins for the rich.
Here is a WawPoo story I saw on reddit ( can’t get past the paywall) called: Trump Eyes Privatizing US Postal Service, Citing Financial Losses. Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1he1x8s/trump_eyes_privatizing_us_postal_service_citing/
Just one more reason I voted for Harris this time around.
If we could somehow get Obama and Clinton both to praise the idea of privatizing the US Postal Service on Prime Time TV, maybe Trump will decide not to pursue it. Does anyone think Clinton or Obama care enough to go on TV to give it their Kiss Of Death?
This would be the Dem Senators’ big chance to filibuster any law to “make it so.”
And here’s a little item about all the people sending money to The Adjuster’s legal defense fund, from the MurderedByWords subreddit. ( Perhaps we should all start referring to him as Saint Luigi the Adjuster.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/1he3ofh/heres_to_free_speech/
Wouldn’t it be neat if all million-or-so of Bernie’s one-time once-a-month small donors began small-donoring again to the Saint Luigi Legal Defense Fund? Maybe if the band could get itself back together, it could keep itself together with self-supplied mass-distributed diffuse leadership.
The author, imo, makes a strong case for a new political party and what amounts to “A true workers party” and “with the potential to appeal to large numbers of Americans.” Yet, the feedback seems more about doubling down on DP faults than piling on to a new party.
If you need inspiration, you can find it in the creation of the Republican Party. Founded in 1854, the Republicans were rapidly successful, more so in fact, than any party before or since. In just two years, they made a respectable showing in the 1856 presidential election against DP candidate James Buchanan. In the 1860 election, they took the White House with a relatively inexperienced but politically savvy Abe Lincoln. And they did it in six years not by tacking to the center but by confronting the most polarizing subject in American history; the expansion of slavery. Moreover, turnout of eligible voters was 79% in 1856 and 81% in 1860.
The DP can’t be reformed. I think the potential exists for a new political party to replace the Democrats by taking on the most polarizing issues like healthcare, climate change, wealth inequality, cost of living, and on. And like the Republicans of 1854, they will likely attract many experienced members of both parties who believe the time has come for the country to make progress for all the people.
Reading on the Dem Party kicking workers out of the lifeboat, led me to thinking about labor unions, their uglification in the 1970’s, and earlier, and thus the removal of a training ground for working class leaders who might then move into local, state and national politics.
Which reminded me of Marty Walsh (whose name, as a former Bostonian, I pronounce, correctly, as ‘Maah-ty Walsh,) who rose from the ranks of labor leader, to Mayor of Boston, then to Biden’s Labor Secretary. He left that post, halfway through his term, to become head of the National Hockey League Players’ Association. Last March, Walsh was nominated by Biden to serve on the USPS board of governors. Biden withdrew the nomination after the November election.
Was he too rough-hewn to serve in national politics? Did he ruffle feathers? Or was he totally incompetent? Wait, on second thought, incompetence does not bar one from serving in top government posts. Just wondering.
I am a great fan of self-reflection after suffering a political defeat. I’ve engaged in about 45 years of such reflection after the complete defeat of the so-called New Left in the 1960s/1970s and still don’t completely understand what happened. However, I believe it is quite worthwhile to start by questioning our own political views and the means by which we arrived at them. If nothing else, this type of self reflection helps to generate a small degree of intellectual humility.
The Democratic Party of Clinton and his New Democrats did more than court Wall Street for donations. While abandoning the working class, they turned to what some sociologists call the Professional Managerial Class (PMC). This class redefines the typical class understanding of ‘working class’, ‘middle class’, and ‘owning class’. The PMC march in between workers and owners, exploiting workers while managing the affairs of the owners. They make up members of the government, business, media, and education, et al, and are composed of anyone who gets a salary but does not believe they are workers. The very skillful and very faithful can transcend PMC and become owners themselves, people like Joe Biden or Jamie Dymon. And they are the bulwark of the current Democratic Party.
“The party’s corporate consultants have put the blame on the party’s excessive focus on identity politics. But the issues for the Democrats run much deeper than bad messaging.” I’m one of those consultants, a brand consultant to be specific. While I agree with much of the article, the dismissive tone of the above quote sounds like cultural denialism to me. Identity politics turned the screws on much of the population at a historic level, overshadowing the cultural toll of McCarthyism. To get a better perspective on that, I recommend visiting The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression website. Clearly the distancing of identity politics messaging during the Harris campaign wasn’t enough to free her of the bad taste left by the cultural excesses endorsed by her party.