TWO PATHS YOU CAN GO BY, BUT IN THE LONG RUN (Facebook November 14, 2016)
Progressives now have a choice to make – partner with the Democratic Party or leave it behind, joining forces with the Greens or with … who, exactly? Well, that helps clarify matters.
Or at least it does for me. I’m a center-Left guy, and my intention is to stick with the Democrats. I loved Barack Obama and would happily have voted to give him a third term. I thought Hillary Clinton would have made an excellent President. But folks to the left of me, who think Obama was mostly a disappointment, are going to have to weigh their options and make choices pretty quickly if they hope to have an impact on the political landscape anytime soon.
I’ve already made my position on the Green Party clear. I like their platform, I don’t respect their candidates, and I despise their strategy of hiding in the weeds until they find a new opportunity to sabotage Democrats. Sabotaging Democrats is the unwritten mission statement of the Green Party. And what has it gotten them? In 2000, it got them eight years of George W. Bush, with war in the Middle East as the main course and a global financial crisis for dessert. Now it’s gotten them Donald Trump. Enjoy your tyranny, guys.
Maybe you think that’s a little harsh. If so, show me a list of Green Party accomplishments. They’ve been around for at least 25 years. Which of their policy proposals have they enacted? Why, if Jill Stein was so much better than Hillary Clinton, couldn’t she manage to win at least as many votes as crazy Gary Johnson? Progressives who opt for the Green Party are just grandstanding. They aren’t serious about getting anything done. I have nothing to say to them.
What other alternatives might progressives have? A new independent party? That’s easier to imagine in theory than to pull off in practice. Its founders would have to be people who are much more serious than the Greens have been. And by serious, I don’t mean just sincere. Starting a new party from scratch would take years of difficult and thankless work by hundreds of people, with no guarantee of success in the end. Maybe that’s why third parties wind up with mostly unserious people.
This New Progressive Independent Party (NPID) would have to decide what the Greens did wrong, and find ways to get those things right. And then they’d have to out-compete the Greens for disaffected Bernie fans, not to mention Latinos, African-Americans, and other minorities, all of whom have thus far pretty much ignored independent progressive movements.
The hypothetical NPID would have a second challenge – the tendency that Leftist groups have to splinter into warring factions. That’s the heart of the progressive dilemma. How much compromise is too much compromise?
Some of the appeal of a third party is that it allows its members to feel like mavericks. Rebels with a cause don’t like to compromise, which is how the Judean People’s Front wound up fighting with the People’s Front of Judea.
But the biggest short term challenge for any progressive independent party is that the dominant Democratic voices in the next cycle are likely to be Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and their supporters. If its left wing steps up, Democrats will co-opt much of the progressive agenda, and they’ll have the star power to establish the narrative and steer the conversation.
Maybe Democratic leadership will marginalize the Sanders/Warren wing of the party, or maybe progressive Democrats will get their turn but fail to lead the Democrats back to power. We’ll know the composition of the new Democratic leadership team soon. How it performs won’t be clear until the 2020 presidential election is in the books. If Sanders/Warren aren’t given a chance or if they get their chance but can’t win a national election (see George McGovern, 1972), perhaps there’ll an opening for a new party on the Left.
The final wild card is that nobody knows what the Republican Party will look like in four years. Maybe we’ll be in the early days of the Thousand Year Reich, or maybe (as I hope and rather expect) they’ll screw up so badly that the GOP will dissolve into warring factions. Maybe, instead of a new progressive party, we’ll wind up with new ultra-right and center right parties.
In the long run, it just seems to me that partnering with the Democratic Party is the path of least resistance for those who are serious about implementing a reasonably progressive agenda.
More on that soon. In the meantime, always look on the bright side of life.