My strategy for defeating DJT is about putting pressure on the Democratic Party to shift to the left and offer policies demanded by considerable majorities of Americans — POPULISM (minus the racist demagoguery of Trump and the GOP): Medicare-for-All, a $15 minimum wage, free public university, justice reform, gun control, and a Green New Deal, including the modernization of our infrastructure… for starters.
“Hold their feet to the fire!”
The only way we can do that is if we get the Democratic Party’s most progressive members — Justice Democrats, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (the largest caucus in Congress for many years, now, far larger than the Tea Party), the Congressional Black Caucus, and even AOC — to defect, en masse, to a party with an actual progressive platform, and which promises to help the ACLU, SPLC, EFF, Sierra Club, NARAL, Color of Change, Human Rights Watch, and a host of other progressive outfits advance their respective agendas.
These Democrats could defect to the Green Party, which has a bold progressive platform that most Americans would embrace. But the Democratic Socialists of America also seems worthy. And I like what Nick Brana’s been doing with his “People’s Party” organization, giving labor a voice again…
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter *which* progressive party these nominal lefties declare for. Mass-defections would force corporate Democrats to either shift to the left for real or admit that they are the Republicans they’ve been acting like over the last few decades.
(Any honest examination of the last few decades of policy reveals that Democrats have been far more successful at advancing the right-wing/corporate/MIC agenda than their GOP counterparts. They are literally the all-time champs of the far-right’s agenda — not the “lesser,” but the more effective evil, as Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford has asserted… Their rightward lurch explains how Democrats lost the working class and independents.)
The best thing about my strategy is that THE LEFT DOESN’T HARM ITSELF IN THE LEAST if these progressive defectors jump ship but continue caucusing with the Democrats against the GOP.
This hypothetical, principled left — a “Blue” coalition including a number of genuine progressives — would retain its majority in the House.
It’s also a reasonable expectation that the Green Party/DSA/third parties, generally, would get back into the presidential and congressional debates — taking the conversation in an anti-establishment, leftward direction — following a generation of lurching to the right after the Anheuser-Busch Corporation took the debates away from The League of Women Voters.
(We could again conduct an actual conversation, instead of a corporation-programmed “debate” farce: Trump vs. Clinton, reality TV at its worst!)
Infiltration, #DemEnter, has proven a spectacular failure. The Dems keep shifting rightward, making no concessions to the party’s base. If the last two years tell us anything, it’s that #DemEnter has literally no hope of getting the policies that liberals and progressives, both (and a bare majority of conservatives), want advanced. The Democrats are still — more than ever — pledged to the Corporatocracy, permanent war, and fossil fuels.
And “PayGo” guarantees that none of the progressive agenda can pass.
It’s time to stop the wishful thinking — “Next time Hope & Change will be real” — without ever holding the Democrats accountable for the way they tack further and further to the right. It’s time to actually hold the Democrats’ “feet to the fire.”
America desperately needs a strategy for pressuring corporate Democrats to move the party leftward and reform it — while also strengthening the progressive alternatives.
I’ve laid out mine.
(If you’ve got a better strategy for reviving the left in the Age of Trumpism, I’d love to hear it.)