Ever Think About What Saving The Democratic Party From Careerist Greed Would Actually Entail?

Bernie sent his supporters an e-mail called “Tough Times,” yesterday. He noted that “The American people understand that our economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poorer. They know that we are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges. Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order. Not surprisingly, the Republicans won. Unfortunately, the ‘change’ that Republicans will bring about will make a bad situation worse, and a society of gross inequality even more unequal, more unjust and more bigoted.”

So the natural question (and conclusion): “Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media and our political life? Highly unlikely. They are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns.”

So what does the progressive movement do next. Is it time to leave the corporate Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans and start a new progressive party? I wouldn’t expect many— any?— members of Congress to make that move. But that kind of movement has to start from outside. Bernie posed a series of questions progressives need to examine now. Here are some of them:

• How do we expand our efforts to build a multi-racial, multi-generational working class movement?

• How do we create a 50 state movement, not politics based on the electoral college and “battleground” states?

• How do we deal with Citizens United and the ability of billionaires to buy elections?

• How do we recruit more working class candidates for office at all levels of government?

• Should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties?

• How do we better support union organizing?

• How do we best use social media to build our movement and combat the lies and disinformation coming from the billionaire class and right wing media?

• How do we build sustainable and long-term issue-based organizing structures that live beyond individual campaigns?

I decided to ask some political deep thinkers who had read what Bernie had to say. Just off a strong effort helping to flip state legislative seats all over Wisconsin, state Sen. Chris Larson went right to the root cause, telling us yesterday that “Bernie is asking the exact questions we need to think about as a movement. We have a broken political system where the will of voters isn’t reflected in our laws. ‘Imagine if all this money being spent on sleazy mailers and disgusting TV ads was spent on actually solving problems,’ is a common quip from Wisconsin voters sick of being bombarded by a hundred million dollars worth of division and fear. Because we don’t have publicly financed elections to fund elections the way voters actually want to see them, taxpayers instead have to pay on the backend with bad policies that favor the billionaires and corporations who finance campaigns. They see it not as funding good candidates who will do whats best for our country but instead as a massive investment that will pay huge returns when they get the candidate of their choice. Now, more than ever, we need leaders who want to build a community where everyone can thrive. To do that, they’ll have to overcome this mountain of big monied momentum that is pushing in the wrong direction. We must do it if we’re going to finally break this broken system and replace it with one where the people’s voice matters.” Larson and his colleagues targeted 4 state Senate seats and won all 4 of them.

Susheela Jayapal (D-OR) was on the same page as Larson— follow the money/corruption: “The American people are not fools. They may not know exactly what Citizens United did, but when they hear their politicians expounding about the problem with corporate power, but then taking money from corporations, they know something’s off. Last summer, I spent several days in a red, rural Oregon county. I talked to ranchers, farmers, and small business owners. One of the most consistent themes was the impact of corporate consolidation in agriculture and how that’s damaging rural livelihoods. That’s just one example of how corporate power is affecting everyday people, in red counties and blue. We have to highlight those concrete examples and then hammer on the solutions we’re pushing. We have to be focussed and disciplined in supporting politicians who walk their talk, and in holding accountable those who do not.”

I wasn’t surprised that Ro Khanna (D-CA) focussed on that same problem as well. “An estimated $20 billion was spent in this election cycle on federal and state races,” he told us yesterday. It’s no surprise that Americans are tired of the influence of money in politics and want to see change. In 2017, I created the NO PAC Caucus and introduced a bill to ban members of Congress from accepting PAC donations. Since then, support for election reform has grown as we’ve seen spending increase dramatically. My political reform plan, which includes term limits for members of Congress, a ban on PAC and lobbyist donations, and a ban on stock trading by members of Congress, will help limit the influence of money in Washington. It should be brought to the floor for a vote.” Yes, it should be... but it doesn't seem to be part of MAGA Mike's agenda.

Jerrad Christian, a Navy vet and father of one in central Ohio, ran for Congress in a pretty red area. He has his own way of saying many of the same things Bernie is talking about. He didn’t win but he did get to experience how broken the system is. “It’s rigged to keep the rich getting richer while working families fight just to keep their heads above water,” he told us. “People are tired of it— angry, even. And who can blame them? When one side promises to smash the status quo, even if their idea of ‘change’ makes things worse, it’s not shocking that folks cling to it. But let’s be clear: what we’re seeing isn’t real change. It’s a power grab that leaves inequality, injustice, and hate burning hotter than ever. We must move forward. If the Democratic Party must break free from billionaire donors and corporate interests and stand with working people. If they won’t change, then it’s on us to make that change happen. We’ve got to build something bigger— a movement rooted in everyday folks, not consultants or campaign war rooms. That means backing working-class candidates at every level, fighting to overturn Citizens United, supporting unions, and creating organizations that live on well past Election Day. We can’t keep waiting for someone else to do it. This fight starts in our neighborhoods, in every state, and it’ll take all of us to win it.”

Last week, Kate Aronoff put together put together the best campaign autopsy I’ve seen so far— and what she tackled were the systemic problems haunting the party once dominated by FDR, when it dominated America for a generation. “It’s entirely possible,” she admitted, “that Harris still wouldn’t have won if she’d listened more to progressive interest groups’ messaging advice; she might even have done worse. That’s partly because the Democratic Party’s problem isn’t messaging so much as the fact that its highest-profile leaders (including Harris) don’t seem to believe anything they say— centrist, progressive, or otherwise. In the lead-up to this election, Harris and other leading Democrats decried Trump and MAGA Republicans as an existential threat to American democracy; now, newly elected House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pledged to find ‘common ground’ with them. That waffling and incoherence is less of a comms issue than a structural one. The ‘Democratic Party’ isn’t a distinct entity to be won but a somewhat random collection of politicians, staffers, and consultants aligned behind the loose goal of their own gainful employment, either via winning elections or telling people how to do so. Even if Democrats did have more institutional integrity, they would still find it challenging to simultaneously be a party of big business and organized labor, as they’ve long aspired to be. They would still struggle to turn out Arab voters in key swing states while sending Israel weapons to bomb their families in the Middle East. More often than not, these constituencies’ interests are fundamentally opposed to one another; no amount of smart messaging, or berating voters, can fully solve that.”

She began her analysis by talking about two odd-ball Dems, Massachusetts conservative Seth Moulton and anti-progressive, corrupt Bronx scumbag Ritchie Torres, an entirely owned subsidiary of AIPAC and the crypto-cartel.

The Democratic Party is looking for a scapegoat for its disastrous 2024 election performance. As ever, no shortage of pundits and party operatives are punching left. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres accused his colleagues of “pandering” to the “far left.” Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton scolded the party for, apparently, being too considerate of trans kids, whom Republicans targeted with at least $17 million worth of ads. “I have two little girls,” he told the New York Times for a November 7 story on how the party was relating to its losses. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Adam Jentleson, a former staffer for Harry Reid and John Fetterman, recently expanded this line of argument into an op-ed for The Times, earning plaudits from former Obama speechwriter and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau. He argues that Democrats are “crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power,” and too eager to please “liberal and progressive interest groups” that “impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal.” As examples, he cited positions on trans rights and immigration that Harris adopted during her presidential primary campaign in 2019, that had been advocated for by the likes of the ACLU and the Sunrise Movement, and that Republicans ran attack ads about this cycle.

Jentleson’s prescription for Democratic victory boils down to resisting the influence of groups like Sunrise and the ACLU and running campaigns that avoid unpopular messages. Democrats should stick to “tried and tested” pitches like protecting Social Security, lowering prescription drug prices, and protecting abortion rights. “In politics,” he writes, “winning elections is the moral imperative. You go into this business to change people’s lives for the better. That means changing policy, and to change policy you have to win.”

The irony here is that Jentleson is describing a campaign that looks a lot like the one that Harris ran, and lost. As progressives quickly pointed out in response, in 2024 Harris did indeed say no to the kinds of groups he mentioned, leaning on celebrity endorsements and vague pronouncements of “joy.” The special interests that were most influential this cycle weren’t progressives but AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACS, and Uber, whose former chief counsel Tony West (Harris’s brother-in-law) urged the candidate to moderate her message so as to better appeal to corporate interests.

As journalist Dan Denvir wrote before the election, Democrats this cycle fell back on an old playbook of trying to outflank Republicans on immigration. They championed a bill chock-full of the right’s preferred policies, like expanding ICE detention capacity and restricting asylum, then campaigned on the fact that the GOP voted it down when Trump told them to. Having previously called Trump’s border wall a “medieval vanity project,” Harris then pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building it. As Denvir writes, “Given the choice to pander to reactionaries or shore up the party’s left wing, Democrats tend to prioritize the former. The result is a dangerous asymmetric polarization: Republicans radicalize on immigration, while Democratic elites chase after them. The ‘normal’ position on immigration moves ever rightward.”

What precisely might Harris have said to better convince voters that she would be adequately tough on immigration? And if her fatal flaws in Jentleson’s view mostly come down to things she said in the 2020 primary, does that mean that all candidates should ignore the realities of the race that they’re currently in— including in relatively progressive seats— so as to avoid Republican blowback if they run for something else in the future? The trouble with the “moderation” pitch isn’t just that it ignores the reality of the election that just happened. It also leaves Democrats playing catch-up in debates whose terms are perpetually set by Republicans, whatever the real-world consequences. The demand that the party embrace whatever positions happen to be popular at the moment imagines public opinion as exogenous to the work of politics. What precisely is the “moral imperative” to win elections if Democrats are merely choosing the correct position among the options that the right lays out for them?

Those punching left aren’t making an original argument. Way back in the 1970s, the so-called Watergate Babies— Gary Hart, Al Gore, Paul Tsongas, and more— decried the Democratic Party’s allegiance to the special interests who pushed for and were aided by Great Society programs, including feminist groups and labor unions. It’s telling that this jab is always squarely aimed at the left. Jentleson approvingly cites Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a “Blue Dog” Democrat who won an impressive reelection fight against her far-right Republican opponent in the Portland suburbs. What works well in certain districts isn’t a national strategy, though. Less than 10 percent of House districts are now considered competitive. Centrist and right-leaning Blue Dogs have also steadily lost seats since the 2010 midterms, when just 23 of that coalition’s 54 members were reelected. Prior to this year’s election, the caucus had just 10 members.

It’s worth noting that Perez’s opponent, Joe Kent, is far from a “normal” conservative Republican. This one is a full-on fascist who she should have dispatched without breaking a sweat. But narrowly defeated him— 214,727 (52%) to 198,326 (48%)— and only won 2 of the district’s 7 counties. She has one of the most conservative voting records of any Democrat in Congress; only 7 Democrats have worse records. One was her co-chair of the Blue Dogs, Jared Golden of Maine who had one of the closest reelection efforts in the country, up by 2,706 votes (after ranked choice tabulations) and still just a 0.69% win. Maybe if he voted a little less conservatively he would have done better. No one I know in Maine voted for him. The third Blue Dog co-chair, Mary Peltola (D-AK), whose voting record was nearly identical to Perez’s. Lost her seat to right-wing Republican Nick Begich by 2 points. She was in Alaska for the vote on giving Trump the power to shut down non-profits he doesn’t like but, of course, Perez and Golden voted with the Republicans in favor of it.

It’s also worth mentioning that all the candidates endorsed by the Blue Dogs and running on their platform lost: Rudy Salas (CA), Will Rollins (CA), Janelle Stelson (PA), Whitney Fox (FL), Rebecca Cooke (WI), Lanon Baccam (IA), Jennifer Adams (FL), Adam Frisch (CO) and Jonathan Ne (AZ). There is one undecided race, pitting Adam Gray against GOP incumbent John Duarte, and it is too close to call but Duarte is currently ahead by 204 votes, a fraction of a point. Unless Gray wins, the Blue Dog caucus will be down to 8 members, one of whom, Henry Cuellar, is on trial for taking bribes from other countries and is likely to wind up in prison this year, unless Trump pardons him.

“Orienting the party toward winning over particular sets of so-called moderates every four years,” wrote  Aronoff, “seems unlikely to help the end goal of building a durable governing majority— yet that’s precisely what Democrats have done. As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer put it before Trump was elected, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Harris— who tacked right on immigration, campaigned with Liz Cheney, and boasted about booming oil and gas production— proceeded to lose all of the states Schumer mentioned except for Illinois. Roughly the same number of registered Republicans voted for her as had voted for Biden in 2020... Continuing to tack right, blame the left, and then tack even farther right as a corrective— hemorrhaging reliable Democratic constituencies along the way— doesn’t seem like a promising solution. If the Democratic Party is to have any kind of future, it can’t just keep doing battle on fields Republicans choose; voters who want to vote for the GOP’s positions will vote for the GOP. Democrats will need to convince ever-growing majorities why it’s better to be governed by them every single year, at all levels of government— not just why the alternative is scarier. To do that they’ll have to influence public opinion rather than just respond to it.”