Common sense needs to inform those on the left that hitching our collective and individual aspirations to the Democratic Party is like throwing oneself under a proverbial bus and expecting to come out of the catastrophe unscathed. The latter happens with about the same regularity and predictability as trains that ran during Mussolini’s rule.
After witnessing the decades of abandonment of left causes and ideals by the Democratic Party establishment, we need to have learned a lesson. The political duopoly in the U.S. is nothing less than a great and spectacular failure. The party that says it is the champion of both the working class and middle class is full of more hot air than a balloon.
The latest example of the failure of Wall Street interests and the permanent warring class within the Democratic Party is the presidential campaign of 2016. Rigged from the beginning within the Democratic National Committee, the idealism and energy that fueled the Sanders campaign never had a chance. The neoliberals who supported Hillary Clinton would not allow the Sanders campaign to be successful at the polls. And indeed with the forces of neofascism in play, the outcome of a matchup between Sanders and Trump would have been completely unpredictable.
And now we have the unity campaign of the Democrats, with the deputy chair of the DNC, Keith Ellison, and Bernie Sanders working their way across the country at rallies and stops in support of candidates they believe can win elections throughout the country at all levels of government, which is also one of the objectives of Our Revolution, a spinoff of the Sanders campaign.
On one stop of the “Unity Tour,” Senator Sanders rallied for Heath Mello, a candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Mello, who as a state senator in Nebraska supported a bill requiring that women be informed that they have a “right” to a fetal ultrasound before having an abortion. At least the favored words of the antichoice right, “unborn child,” weren’t in the bill.
In Nebraska, the politics of the traditional base of the Democratic Party and the party’s leadership clashed like the storms of spring.
Readers would do well to read Ashely Smith’s May 2015 article in the Socialist Worker, “The problem with Bernie Sanders.” The article is prescient and accurately predicts much of what would happen in the presidential campaign of 2016. Of particular interest is Smith’s cataloging of Sanders’ record on war and peace. This is especially important to consider when the warmongering that has gone unabated since the September 2001 attacks is front and center once again in the Trump administration:
His foreign policy positions are to the right of many liberal Democrats. Sanders voted in favor of George W. Bush’s original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that gave the administration a green light to launch the war on Afghanistan. While he did vote against Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he repeatedly supported funding resolutions for both U.S. occupations. He is also a Zionist who supports Israel consistently, even after its recent escalations of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
In fairness to Senator Sanders, when issues were presented to him that diverged from the traditional cant of the Democratic Party establishment, he did, to a degree, incorporate those policy positions in his 2016 presidential campaign. He was the only candidate not to appear at the 2016 American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference (“Bernie’s bold move: Sanders only candidate to skip AIPAC pro-Israel conference, Salon, March 18, 2016). Sanders remains the most popular politician in the U.S. today according to a Harvard-Harris survey (“Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular Politician in the Country, Poll Says,” Mother Jones, April 2017).
In a Democracy Now interview (“Cornel West & Former Sanders Staffer on Movement to Draft Bernie for a New ‘People’s Party’ in U.S.,” April 25, 2017), Professor Cornel West and former Sanders staffer Nick Brana make an impassioned case for a People’s Party to challenge the duopoly in the 2020 general election. The appeal makes perfect sense except for the fact that the two-party system is hardwired into most people’s mindset and it merits noting that false economic populism and fear mongering carried the election in 2016. Without a multiparty tradition in the U.S., and candidates success, to an extent, dependent on fear and loathing that is underwritten by the two-party system, the ideal of a People’s Party is a very, very distant prospect.
The track record of third-party candidates on the left has not been promising. Candidates like Ralph Nader and Jill Stein faced daunting obstacles in their campaigns, while third-party candidates on the right have done much better.
The daily outrages of the Trump administration continue ad nauseam, and the Democratic Party would like people to believe that Wall Street and individual donors from the 1% are the only source of campaign funding. The Sanders campaign proved that the latter is not necessarily so.
