Getting Ready For A New Left

The Sanders candidacy was never supposed to be anything more than a protest against business as usual. That it attracted so much support is a miracle.

By this time next week the race for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States will be over.

The vitriol in both wings of the Democratic party may not subside, as the Left has a wonderful habit of tearing itself apart along the lines of its fragile coalition.

Instead of being amazed and humbled by the energy that has been generated by a part of the electorate long thought moribund, the center-left wing of the party has chosen to hector and mock the activist-left by cracking jokes about how they are incapable of math. They scoff at the idea of Sander’s rhetoric about a political revolution, ignoring the fact that what he describes looks an awful lot like the Tea Party in 2010, and the Obama for America organization in 2008.

Such structures confuse and terrify the established Democratic Party. They threaten their command over the levers of power.

That’s one reason why OFA was dismantled after the ’08 election. This was the Original Sin of the Obama Administration. The mistake was seized upon by Dick Armey of FreedomWorks and Ryan Hecker, who summoned up the activist right and transformed it into the Tea Party. That organized assault on Congress and the statehouses pushed the conversation in America even further to the right than the neoconservatism that followed Reaganism did.

To pretend that a similar effort on the Left would not be effective is the exact kind of anemic collective confidence that allowed the will of American Progressives to erode under Bill Clinton. The Clinton’s arrival in Washington was met with joy and a sense that the extreme swing to the right under Ronald Reagan was going to corrected. Instead it turned into a holding action against the most extremist elements of American Fundamentalism, a mission that has continued to this day.

Little wonder, then, that a siege mentality should exist amongst the Establishment Left that has Hillary Clinton as its champion.

The Sanders candidacy was never supposed to be anything more than a protest against business as usual. That it attracted so much support is a miracle. That it nearly succeeded in toppling Clinton from the top of the ticket should be a wake-up call that America is hungry for change. Perhaps even more-so than it was in 2008 when Obama ran on the premise.

The danger now is what will happen to the political will that has been summoned when the campaign falls short of the Democratic nomination. There are Clinton supporters who — assuming they are not paid conservative operatives working away at some social media spin shop in Chattanooga — have the audacity to say that the Democratic party doesn’t need the independents and radicals that Sanders has attracted. Such statements are the product of myopic minds.

The Democratic party thrives on broad coalitions brought together through common interests. The major mainstream media criticism of the Sanders campaign is that his coalition was too narrow. Yet there has been a passionate cross section of Americans of all colors and creeds who have been a part of the Sanders campaign from the beginning. The states which vote first in the moronic primary system are almost comically demographically polarized.

The strength of the response to Sanders, which has some mirroring in the radical Right’s adoption of Donald Trump as a standard bearer, is evidence that too many Americans feel disenfranchised. There are those who would turn against Clinton not because she is a woman, but because she has been a part of the system for a quarter of a century that has seen income inequality grow, the racial divide get worse, and climate change be treated as something for the next generation to worry about. (And yes, there are those who do turn against Clinton because she is a woman. These people are assholes.)

That Clinton might actually want to do something about all this is beside the point. The American electorate has been conditioned by both major parties and the media to think of Presidential candidates in totemic terms. Clinton benefits from this in her long standing as a feminist icon, and she suffers from it because of her “pragmatic” stance during the run up to the Iraq war. Clinton is both progressive crusader and a typical politician susceptible to the popular, even when horrifically wrong, will of conventional wisdom.

It is the unhealthy relationship with the figure of the President that the American electorate has which ultimately needs to be addressed.

If there’s one lesson from the past six years it is this: the legislature can invent influence where there was none. The unprecedented obstruction involving the Supreme Court this year is proof that the balance of power in America lies with Congress. It should chill the blood of every Democrat that neither Clinton nor Sanders regularly sounds the drum for dismantling the Right’s hold on the legislature.

Yet it is no easy task. For the GOP holds the keys to statehouses across the country. Through that they control the apportionment of districts. Through that they control who is and is not a viable candidate for the House of Representatives. It is a systematic hold on the levers of power by a party whose primary interest appears to be the privatization of power to those with money.

There are those in the Democratic party who long ago decided that “if you can’t beat them, join them.”

It was that attitude that drove away the activist Left. Instead of building a third party — in the form of the Green Party — that would challenge the two party hold in the trenches, however, the activist Left has been chasing its own tail by focusing on the soapbox of the Presidency. Jill Stein’s candidacy is a fine way to disseminate ideas, but it will do nothing to change the oligarchical hold on power in America. For that the Greens — indeed any party — would have to run candidates for school boards, county commissioners, state representatives, and Congress along with a totemic figure at the top of the ticket. Anything else is no more effective than the protests against the Iraq War were: a fine way to exchange and refine ideas, but largely impotent on the level of policy change.

When Sanders shrugged off his “Independent” label — after caucusing with the Democrats in the Senate forever — and joined the party he gave the activist Left a rallying point. He did an invaluable job of bringing progressive issues into the national discussion, of making the word “socialism” something less than a toxic slur. If it were not for the carnival sideshow that the GOP nominating race devolved into we would be having a very different discussion in America right now. Yet devolve it did. Donald Trump is the perfect boogie man to keep the electorate locked into the status quo. He is honestly too capricious to allow into power. Bravo, K-Street.

Now the work before his supporters is decidedly less sexy: it is to rescue the Democratic party from the inside out. To cut away the cancerous tissue of Wall Street money and K-Street power brokers and grow new Progressive structures within the old husk. It will be to keep pressure on candidate — and if we are lucky President — Clinton to not disguise capitulation as compromise with rhetoric.

There are those who think that a third party is an option. A third party that did not fall into the Executive trap could help, but if the Tea Party proved anything it is that the entrenched parties can be radically reconstituted in record time.

2018, after all, isn’t that far away.

— Yours in hope,

NeoSinister

P.S. If you are one of those people who think that Sanders supporters should have laid down their banners before now: I hope your 401(k) gives you great comfort at night. There are millions of us out here who are not so lucky. And if you can’t understand what that means, then you’ve got some thinking to do.