When Do We Have To Admit The Democratic Party Is No Longer A Vehicle For Progressive Aspirations?

At Least The Clintons, Obama & Biden Were Unable To Make Rahm DNC Chair

The lazy Senate Democrats are lumbering along confirming the last couple dozen Biden judicial nominees. Yesterday, they confirmed Embrey Kidd to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, patted themselves on the back and adjourned. Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell reported that “If the Senate confirms all of Biden’s remaining nominees— a big if— Trump will have 36 judicial vacancies to fill when he takes office. 36 more corrupt, incompetent and ideological as Aileen Cannon, what an utter failure by the White House to leave 36 open seats on the bench open for Trump!

We’ve been mentioning that centrists and corporatists inside the party are making a play to further turn the Democrats away from progressive values and policies. The worst thing that could've happened to the party would have been Rahm Emanuel taking over the DNC. He saw he couldn't pull it off and started calling his allies to say he's out and suggest they get behind Martin O'Malley, another centrist, though not an especially venal one. Yesterday Sunjeev Bery proposed an antidote tooth’s rightward drift: Take Out the Trash: A Proposal to Clean Up the Democratic Party. He began by pointing out how a corporate-friend part leadership “deserves significant blame for the return of Donald Trump to the White House [in part by] alienating core constituencies of the Democratic Party, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and failing to assign clear blame for the individuals and interest groups responsible for the economic woes of the working class. If we want a Democratic Party that can produce different outcomes, we will need to hold the current party accountable for its failures. That means matching our demands for change with the force and pressure of real accountability. The Democratic leadership must itself be targeted with campaigns that highlight the principles of electoral success while punishing those responsible for the party’s continued defeats. He’s building a campaign to do that, starting with the vote for DNC chair and turning it “into a public battle for our core values. Leaning into 2026, the elections for the House and Senate can be leveraged to call out Democratic incumbents who continue to serve as vehicles for corporate interests. Pro-Israel [and pro crypto-cartel] hawks like Rep. Ritchie Torres should be directly challenged in both the 2026 primaries and general election.”

He also advocates defining centrist Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Josh Shapiro before their publicists and the corporate media can paint heroic pictures of them and champions of the working class. Perhaps his most consequential proposal is to keep the party focused on the real enemy: corporate greed, which the party tries to sidestep. “The American working class has long been undermined by those who represent the interests of concentrated wealth. America’s corporate elites block unions, outsource U.S. jobs, cut benefits, and squeeze as much profit as they can out of America’s workers. But Democratic presidential candidates rarely run campaigns that bluntly name and shame these elites for the damage that they do to working-class lives. The simple reason why is that many state- and national-level Democrats depend on these same financial elites for the cash that fuels politicians’ expensive campaigns… When Democrats create a ‘blame vacuum’ for why working-class voters are suffering, other political opportunists are more than happy to step in. Thanks to the seduction of Trump, the white working class had already largely abandoned the Democratic Party. Now nonwhite working class voters are starting to do the same. To reverse these trends, Democrats must start assigning blame accurately for the high prices, long workdays, and stagnant wages that harm so many workers in our country.”

Not only is the senior leadership of the Democratic Party unwilling to accurately name the enemy, but in many cases, the Democratic Party is actually run and advised by the same corporate elites who benefit from the exploitation of the American working class. The current chair of the DNC is Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for Walmart, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, the coal industry, and many other corporate interests. 

Another toxic example of the pervasive corporate control of the Democratic Party is Tony West, the brother-in-law of Kamala Harris. In 2024, West took a leave of absence from his role as senior vice president and chief legal officer for Uber to advise Harris on her presidential campaign. During West’s time at Uber, the company waged an all-out war against working-class interests by using a California ballot proposition to successfully gut state-mandated benefits for overworked and underpaid Uber drivers. And before West came to Uber, he served as general counsel at PepsiCo, a company that has profited heavily from price inflation.

It has been widely reported that West advised Harris to embrace wealthy corporate elites instead of blaming them for America’s economic woes. This disastrous advice led Harris to cater to high-net-worth interests and muddle her message. This may have helped Harris attract the $1.6 billion in contributions that backed her campaign, but her lack of a clear message on the economy left her with millions fewer votes than Biden received in 2020. She failed to energize the Democratic Party base, including working-class voters, and she lost her campaign. 

…Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all have a long history of undermining progressive and populist movements in the Democratic Party. All three should be greeted by Democrats with the same deep skepticism that Trump supporters have shown George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Instead, they are still showered with deference and reverence by many.

In different ways, all three have aligned with the very corporate and financial elites who should be named as our political enemies. Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA, the job-destroying free-trade agreement that was opposed by labor unions. Hillary Clinton served on the board of Walmart and voted for Bush’s disastrous Iraq War. Obama avoided naming and shaming the Wall Street elites most responsible for the recession that brought him into power. And while in power, Obama  bailed out financial institutions instead of focusing on working people.

Once out of office, these three senior Democratic Party voices have continued to undermine the possibility of a successful Democratic Party that can mobilize its base and appeal to the working class. In 2020, Obama intervened behind the scenes to block Sanders’s campaign for president and put the aging, arrogant, and politically inept Biden in the Oval Office, an intervention that essentially set the stage for Trump’s return to power. Obama also wrote the script for bragging about America’s increased oil and gas production, a posture that both Biden and Harris would later adopt as they, too, alienated climate voters. And this year, the Clintons and Obama all gaslit the Democratic voters most concerned about Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza…

As Israel accelerates its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Democratic Party support for Israel’s military will continue to splinter and break apart the Democratic base. It will take time to more deeply investigate the question of why as many as 10 or 11 million of Biden’s 2020 voters didn’t show up to support Kamala Harris in 2024. But it is likely that some percentage of those voters were deeply anguished by Biden and Harris’ full-fledged support for U.S. military funding for Israel. Despite the misrepresentation of mainstream media, this anguish is not limited to Arab and Muslim voters, nor is it limited to voters in Michigan.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel campaign and advocacy organizations all care little about the prospects of the Democratic Party. They are single-issue organizations that are happy to reward or defeat any elected official who stands with or against them. By keeping a home for single-issue pro-Israel networks in the Democratic Party, the party hollows itself out by allowing those same networks to push out prominent progressive and populist legislators, along with the voters who back them. 

One ugly result of this is the emergence of an extraordinarily hollow form of representational politics. While anti-worker Black voices like Harrison and West take on informal and formal leadership roles in the party, populist and progressive Black members of Congress like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are targeted for defeat by the very pro-Israel networks who back Biden and Harris. Even the supposedly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J-Street contributed to Bowman’s defeat.

This week, the Senate will vote on Bernie’s resolution to halt $20 billion in offensive arms “sales” to Israel. I’ll be surprised in half a dozen senators vote for it. There are just 3 co-sponsors: Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Brian Schatz (D-HI), even though an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters support ending offensive military aid to Israel.

Also this week, House Democrats will be voting on their chief messenger (DPCC chair). Debbie Dingell (D-MI) is facing an unexpected challenge from Jasmine Crockett (D-TX). Dingell is 70; Crockett 43. Some consider Crockett, a freshman, too junior and inexperienced for the post but Mica Soellner and Max Cohen reported that “Crockett, who has quickly risen on the national stage, argues she’s an effective communicator who is the best fit for the position. Crockett added that Dingell has already served two terms as co-chair and the party should allow for a fresh perspective. ‘You’re talking about people that haven’t had a chance to really fully develop and show the caucus what all they can do,’ Crockett told us. ‘This was the best space I can occupy to potentially really put that extra jolt in communications, and this is the post I am running for.’ Both contenders have been actively seeking the support of various caucuses and individual members, while Dingell is seen by lawmakers as the strong favorite. Notably, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who declined to directly weigh in, said Dingell has done a ‘great job’ and he’s worked closely with her as DPCC Chair. Dingell said she’s contacted every member of the House Democratic Caucus either by phone, in person or via text. Crockett said she’s been working to sway key groups such as the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus— both of which she is a member.”