Screw the Democratic Party — We Must Do Progressive Politics Without It
The DNC chair election is proof that change won’t come from within
by ANDREW DOBBS
On. Feb. 25, 2017, the Democratic National Committee chose former secretary of labor Tom Perez as its new chair.
Perez follows in the tradition of Donna Brazile, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Ed Rendell, Terry McAuliffe and other hacks for billionaire finance power outside the party — and the dominance of self-dealing, incompetent political consultants within it.
Recruited by the party’s establishment wing to prevent the election of progressive Minnesota U.S. representative Keith Ellison, Perez’s supporters argued for weeks that, ideologically, he was no different from his main opponent.
Clio Chang asked the obvious question raised by all this in her terrific New Republic piece. If Perez is no different from Ellison, “why bother fielding him at all?” As I noted in an earlier piece, it had everything to do with blocking new blood from taking power in the party despite its protracted political collapse.
The new blood might have turned things around, but only on terms that would have threatened the party’s biggest donors and most powerful operatives.
The Democrats would rather lose with the ruling class than win against them, and it is now impossible to argue that sticking with the party means anything other than compromising with injustice, an ill-advised strategic alliance with willful impotence. So what are practical progressives who want to actually build power supposed to do?
Believe it or not there are many of us who have been very active in politics and power-building for many years who have found a way to make a difference without having to be Democrats. The silver lining on Perez’s selection is that there has been no better time to bail on the party and join us in doing something different.
Now elections are, for better or worse, how we distribute most state power in this country, so it is hard to be active in fighting for marginalized communities while writing them off altogether. In most of the country, however, local elections are nonpartisan. Working on city council, mayor, school board and other local elections is a great way to win elections without the Democratic Party.
These offices make big decisions, and they usually have low turnout — in large part because the major parties often put them on the backburner — so a little bit of organizing can go a long way. That means that political independents and radicals can actually win at this level and it’s a way to build a bench of leaders and candidates for a future electoral front outside of the two major parties.
Still, most local officials really are Democrats or Republicans even if they don’t formally run on a party line, and when the party senses that someone insufficiently subservient might win they will often turn their machine on at that point. That said, it’s still the most favorable ground for beating them today.
Another option is to work on ballot initiatives and bond issues There’s no risk of them selling out or flipping on you, and while Democrats or the GOP may choose sides from time to time, they are typically rooted in political movements other than the parties.
Of course the best way to get these questions and candidates on the ballot in the first place is through grassroots organizing campaigning. Organizing those sorts of groups primarily around electoral efforts typically ensures that they disintegrate as soon as the election is over — I’ve seen it happen — but building movements that gather power in a variety of ways, deploying electoral tactics when they make sense, is the only way change can possibly happen anywhere, locally, nationally or beyond.
Now this sort of organizing is not without its risks of Democrat-like bullshit. For one, much of it is rooted in “issue-based” organizing dominated by non governmental organizations hiring professional organizers using money raised from major donors and foundation grants.
Dissecting the problems with this model could fill a book, and in fact it already has — the controversial classic The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.
The quick and dirty warning here is nonetheless pretty simple. Wealthy donors and big foundations fund these NGOs because their organizers become gatekeepers that can claim to speak for entire oppressed communities while suppressing their most militant demands and hottest anger, channeling their democratic energy into limited “issue-based” objectives that don’t connect into any larger challenge to the ruling order.
They do many good things, no doubt, but their “concrete improvements in people’s lives” are really just improvements in the functioning of the status quo, and these very organizers represent the most advanced and talented figures within these communities co-opted into ruling class approved reformism.
Supporting some of these groups is more or less unavoidable for progressives, so polite and strategic cooperation makes sense. A good alternative to this model are true grassroots groups that self-organize, are generally unfunded and have specific, confrontational goals. Neighborhood groups fighting gentrification, groups fighting polluting facilities, parent groups fighting school privatization and youth struggling against a variety of injustices — these are just a few obvious examples of what I’m talking about.
Ultimately these grassroots efforts should be networked into real movements. Re-invigorating these social movements and developing their independence is key for accomplishing the most important political task of all for progressives: building an alternative to the Democratic Party.
Third parties in this country as they stand are pointless because they do things backwards. They are founded by activists who want to start a political party, but then they scramble to try and build a social base to justify their existence. The result is that they typically only cobble together people incapable of fitting into either of the major parties, an eclectic mix of malcontents and weirdos.
Real political parties get started the other way around. The Republicans didn’t get started because a handful of guys decided they wanted a political party, it happened because there were organized constituencies — abolitionists, Northern Whigs, etc. — that had no effective vehicle for gaining the political power they needed to accomplish their goals.
Right now substantial elements of the population are waking up to the fact that the Democratic Party does not represent their interests and the GOP thinks they should not exist. Organizing these elements into coherent social movements is a key step towards building a new political party that can actually compete for power.
This is how the Right has gotten to where it is now. The Religious Right, anti-tax campaigners, Second Amendment warriors, white supremacists, corporate business interests — they all built independent social movements, typically formed around a combination of issue-based funded nonprofits and grassroots agitators aligned behind a specific agenda they forced the GOP to pursue.
The Perez selection and the DNC’s manipulation of the 2016 nomination process before that demonstrate that the second the Left grassroots shows any possible move towards doing this with the Democrats they will take extraordinary steps to suppress the effort.
The Right’s social movements benefit from pushing demands in line with the ruling class. The Left is pushing for the end of that class or at least its submission to democratic discipline. The Democrats suppress their grassroots even more often than the Republicans capitulate to theirs.
This must change, or else human civilization and all life on Earth is in trouble. Among the DNC members voting in the race this weekend were lobbyists for war profiteers, polluters, wage-thieves and financiers of all sorts of devastation. No party that collaborates with such forces should be tolerated. We must build an effort that can defeat it while taking a real fight to the reactionary GOP tyrants they enable.
Organizing in our communities, expressing that power through independent political action, connecting those efforts into broader social movements and using those movements as a base for a new political party — this is the basic task at hand right now.
The first step towards this you can do right now as you sit at your computer or looking at your phone. Think about the community where you live, the city or county or wherever. What roles does it serve in the capitalist and imperialist order? What do they need out of your community?
These roles have very specific institutions, organizations, companies that carry them out. Who are they? Where are they physically located? What resources do they need to bring into your community to do these jobs, and what do they ship out? How, physically, do they bring those things in and take them out? Where do these roles intersect — like geographically, where can you find two or more of them at the same space and time?
These are the targets for grassroots direct action, and ten people can do some things to disrupt them, 100 can do others, 1,000 can do still more. Creating problems for these targets creates problems for the ruling order. This is what we mean when we say “building power,” and doing this over and over again will create the momentum we need to build the only future we can honestly hope for.
This, finally, needs to be drawn out in our best Margaret Thatcher impression — there is no alternative. Our present trajectory is headed toward global war and ecological collapse in the lifetime of people already born. Donald Trump and his regime are dangerous accelerants for these disasters, and the Democratic Party is incapable of effectively resisting him.
They have experienced a truly historic political collapse in the last 25 years, and this weekend they reaffirmed their commitment to the policies and leadership that delivered this disaster.
Only a party rooted in and accountable to the communities most at risk from these threats and most engaged in resisting them can offer an alternative, and most Americans are desperate for such a choice. But the Democrats believe these folks should be accountable to them, and they dare to tell people whose lives are at stake that their demand for existence is “too much.” There is no choice but to build something new to serve these communities.
Make no mistake — the day in-day out grind of building the movements that can make those alternatives possible is a fuck-ton of work, and it all is more likely to fail than succeed. Ultimately all of this will have to be a means to deliver an honest-to-god revolution to this country, and that seems close to impossible.
But again, there is no alternative. We have to do the work, regardless of the odds, or we will be fully complicit in the evils to come.
If the DNC this weekend had chosen their alternative it would not have made much of a difference, but it would have made it possible to argue for good faith fidelity to the party with a straight face. They gave Ellison a role as “second chair,” a sort of Miss Congeniality prize meant to snow his most gullible supporters into sticking with the party that keeps pissing all over them.
Straight-faced, we have to do something new or resign ourselves to the consequences of our same old imperialist nightmare politics.
They made their choice, and now we have to make ours. The good news is that if you choose to fight you can start right where we are right now. It all starts, and ends, with defiance.
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