The Only Path Is Left
The Democratic Party is in disarray. In 2008, Barack Obama came into the White House with a commanding mandate: more popular votes than any Presidential candidate in history, a majority in the Senate, a majority in the House of Representatives and control of 27 state legislatures.
In eight years, the Democratic Party has lost all of those majorities. Its anointed candidate was defeated in the electoral college by an unqualified and deeply loathed con man. It has shed 42 House seats, 11 Senate seats, and now sees the Republicans with a stranglehold on the governments of 31 states. Not since the 1920s has the Democratic Party been at so low an ebb.
Liberalism, specifically the modern neoliberalism that grafts an empty form of identity politics onto exploitative laissez-faire economics, has been thoroughly rejected.
Neoliberalism is an ideology of the wealthy. Despite a false varnish of meritocracy, it is focused almost solely on the preservation of capital within the hands of the ruling class and expansion of their control over all productive elements.
Neoliberalism promotes privatization and deregulation of socially necessary sectors like education, healthcare, utilities and public transport. For those programs which it cannot own, or from which it cannot profit, neoliberalism imposes austerity and spending cuts. It seeks to exploit the poor around the world through free trade and anti-union activities. It uses human rights and global security as pretext for wars to establish control of natural resources. It is utterly indifferent to environmental devastation.
Neoliberalism promises that prosperity will trickle down from the capital-controlling class and their professional service class to those classes below: the life expectancy of Americans is declining for the first time in decades while the purchasing power of their paychecks has been stagnant for half a century. The people know this. The industrial heartland voters that were once the bedrock of progressivism were abandoned by the Party. They in turn abandoned it, and Donald Trump is now the President.
If neoliberalism is gone, then good riddance. As an economic program in its own right, it has been found wanting. As an antidote to reactionary politics, to fascism, to corporatism, it has failed or been complicit.
There is only one way forward if the Democratic Party is to survive Trumpism and regain national preeminence: it must engage in socialist politics.
The ideals of socialism are simple to understand. No one should be poor. No one should be hungry. No one should be homeless. Education and healthcare are universal rights. We must liberate all vulnerable groups from oppressive systems. To achieve any or all of this, we must come together and rely on our collective strength.
The great blindness of neoliberalism is the assumption, based on desire for it to be true, that politics are best carried out by experts employing technically superior policies, maximizing investment of resources for the greatest return of GDP growth. If superior education and technology were more powerful than ideology and organization, the United States would have won its imperialist wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Effective socialism goes beyond policy. It must be organized, not in the sense of getting out the vote on election day and then letting the government do its job, but in the constant creation and reinforcement of community bonds at all levels, and across lines of identification. It must look to the two great popular political moments of the 20th century, those demanding labor rights and civil rights, that were co-opted and blunted by neoliberalism. Politics must be engaged in on a daily basis, in our daily lives and in our communities as well as our legislatures.
Our socialism must be re-distributive. It must shift control of wealth away from the capital class which facilitates economic activity and towards the working class which produces that activity. It must especially liberate African-Americans, whose ancestors were robbed of ownership of and agency over their labor by slavery and subjugation, even as that labor created much of this nation’s material wealth.
Our socialism must be inclusive. The labor movement must support police reform. Black activists must fight for a woman’s right to choose. LGBTQ advocates must demand and end to the persecution of undocumented migrants, and all must oppose the bourgeoisie and its capitalist, imperialist agenda.
Our socialism must be unflinching. We may look to our compatriots abroad for inspiration. Our struggles, fate willing, will never be as dire as those of the YPG in Rojava, the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, or the Republicans in the north of Ireland during the Troubles, but we can offer them solidarity as we draw strength and inspiration from their examples. We must work through every channel. We must write, we must organize, we must take part. If civil disobedience is required, if the riot is a necessary tactic to can stem the tide of darkness, then so be it. When our grandchildren ask questions of us, we will not be afraid to look our history in the face.
Under the impending Republican domination, life will become very difficult for many. The conservative party and its attendants are at best indifferent to the poor and at-risk. Too often, they cannot conceal their outright contempt, and delight in the suffering of the marginalized. The Democratic Party must become militant. It must become a truly mass movement, dedicated to social justice and the well-being of all, or it will be cast aside.
