Liberals Won’t Save You

The past few years have been pretty contentious, to say the least.
An unhinged, reactionary president and a nationalist movement pushing him. A eugenicist supreme court nominee rushed through congress with little disclosure and entirely partisan backing. A foreign policy in utter disarray, China poised to take the reigns on global hegemony. A climate pushed to the breaking point of human habitability. An economy gutted by the top 1%.
As a reaction, the Democratic party is poised to sweep to victory by large margins this November; Current generic ballot polling shows Democrats up by 14% in the house. In reaction, the Democrats are going to sweep into power, impeach the president, and pass sweeping reforms moving our country leftward.
Or are they?
Historical precedent says they will not. Even with the mandate of super-majority in both houses of congress gained by a recession and a failed war based on lies caused by their opponents, the Democrats governed from a position of compromise; Instead of implementing a single payer healthcare system or even a German-style multipayer universal, they opted to pass a heavily market-oriented bill identical to the one written by the Heritage Foundation. They failed to pass “card check”, a labor provision that labor has long backed and which would greatly improve the conditions of the working class. Instead of taking on the banks and bailing out homeowners, they bailed out the banks and did it by fishing out of the many’s pockets.
And 2 years later, the Tea Party swept to power and their majorities were wiped away.
For the left to have a future, we must govern from a position of strength, rather than compromise. To govern from a position of strength, we must break every unwritten rule in the book. To govern from a position of strength, the Democrats must be willing to play dirty — Just as the Republicans have, and will continue to do. If the next Democratic president has any desire to improve the material conditions of the working class, or even maintain the power of their own party, they must be willing to go just as far as the right historically has been and is currently going. Make Puerto Rico and DC states in the Union, pack the supreme court to 15 justices, legalize marijuana, release all arrested solely on drug crimes, reinstate the voting rights of felons, and utilize the FBI to sow discord and infighting among right-wing extremist groups like the Proudboys, Identity Evropa, and Vanguard America, just as the right has done to the far-left
For the left in America to have a future in America, we must return to our roots and abandon the rule book of liberal society. The Right Wing and the Republican party have written the rule book that we’re playing by today; the rules of civility, tone-policing, and compromise that they so flagrantly ignore themselves. Our most effective social democratic presidents — Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson — Certainly had no interest in playing by these rules.
We could learn a thing or two from them.
In Solidarity,
Quinn Albright
