I almost posted this to Politics, but since it is a call to “The Left” couched in terms of the people of the U.S. Democratic Party (rather than to its leaders), I thought it might be more suitable to Socialism.
In addition to talking about Project 2025 and the need to fracture the coalition that wants aristocracy, Doctorow writes this:
What’s more, there’s a much stronger natural coalition that the left can mobilize: workers. Being a worker – that is, paying your bills from wages, instead of profits – isn’t an ideology you can change, it’s a fact. A Christian nationalist can change their beliefs and then they will no longer be a Christian nationalist. But no matter what a worker believes, they are still a worker – they still have a irreconcilable conflict with people whose money comes from profits, speculation, or rents. There is no objectively fair way to divide the profits a worker’s labor generates – your boss will always pay you as little of that surplus as he can. The more wages you take home, the less profit there is for your boss, the fewer dividends there are for his shareholders, and the less there is to pay to rentiers
The alternative to a worker-led Democratic Party is a Democratic Party run by its elites, whose dictates and policies are inescapably illegitimate. As Hamilton Nolan writes, the completely reasonable (and extremely urgent) discussion about Biden’s capacity to defeat Trump has been derailed by the Democrats’ undemocratic structure.
To limit Biden’s harms, leftists have to take over the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, so that he’s hemmed in by his power base. To limit Trump’s harms, leftists have to identify the fracture lines in the right coalition and drive deep wedges into them, shattering his power base.
Cory, as always, “gets it”. There’s some real gems in his text - like:
Trumpism didn’t come out of nowhere – Trump is way too stupid and undisciplined to be a cause – he’s an effect.
And while I do respect his goals of reigniting the embers of American labor movement, I think I’m personally done with the current form of representative democracy. I know self-organizing autonymous communities aren’t realistic, but I think I’d rather stand outside and wait for the collapse of the status quo, than actually try to patch obviously sinking boat.
But it’s a great piece. Well worth a read.
I vote in every election. I frequently can’t find useful information about down-ballot races, but I check with the party websites and wherever else I can find information and VOTE.
I have to give hope to the idea that somehow we could get useful information about candidates that moved the populace to vote for representatives that worked for the people and the betterment of the country rather than just for big donors and power.
Like: we’re all passengers on a boat navigating the rough river of progress. Some of us might be specialists and some might want leadership, but we’re not going to get anywhere without a captain at the rudder and oarsmen to row, and we have to elect them. If they’re all getting paid off to only go left or right, we won’t move forward. They have to work for all of us or we’ll be stuck. While it seems to me that we should only and always only go left, perhaps that is because we’re already so far right. I feel like somewhere in the past there must have been at least a handful of sane conservatives that had a valid point here or there.
Anyway, I suspect our system COULD work if we could get good people to amend the Constitution to overturn the idea of Citizens United (money is NOT speech, it is the opposite: power, and that was why free speech was needed) and other horrid rulings, and we went back to forbidding monopolies, taxing the rich, and somehow got rid of tax havens such that companies could not sell stuff in the U.S. without appropriate taxation. All of it seems increasingly unlikely, I know, but I’m thankful ProPublica has outed the Supreme Court’s corruption, and maybe that can help lead to some change.
I’ve been politically active most of my life and I’ve voted (I’ve got a dual citizenship, so I can vote in two countries, which I’ve done), however, as I’ve grown older and am now nearing retirement age, I’ve realized the futility of it all. The same elite politicians are still in power. They still top their party ballots (“the big names”, “heavy hitters”) and normally get auto-elected to the parliament. They are creatures that live within the system and thus the system never changes. Issues haven’t been solved - at most we’ve reached some kind of muddled centrist consensus and agreement that “this is what it is” - there’s actually very little reform and every mandate period with sways a bit, like a wave reaching to hit the beach to wash away the sand castle but not quite reaching.
The old truism of “people being more conservative as they age” has been completely opposite for me. In my youth I was probably liberal, slightly right leaning democrat - these days I’m very firmly anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist libertarian socialist and believe in self-governance and workers’ self-management. I organize whatever I can in my local community but I’ve stopped voting (I don’t resent anyone else for voting - please do if you believe it’s useful).
When it comes to the political system in the U.S - I have opinions of course. Largely irrelevant, since I don’t live there, but I find it hard to “fix” something that wasn’t designed to be fixed in the first place. Cory alluded to it in his post, but the founding form of the union was not really intended for greater social justice, cultural realization or to allow the repressed to politically participate. It was for a small group (the political elite) to rule on behalf of wealth of the nation, and the majority’s decision-making was confined to choosing among a select number of their peers within tightly controlled elective processes.
It sort of “consensual domination” made possible by the concentration of global capital, which allows concentration of political power. I think it’s hard to fix something that was designed to sail off course. I think the better option would be to change the system.
But I don’t deny that we could make it better. Considerably so. Many of those things you list would improve and reform. But in the end it would still be the same system.
Sorry for the wall of text. Not sure if that made much sense - I hope it was somewhat coherent and not just my braincells having a spat of ADHD.
I find it hard to “fix” something that wasn’t designed to be fixed in the first place
I completely understand! The system does not want to change, but I would dearly love it if we could get better people in there to fix it from the inside instead of just letting the bastards get away with whatever they want. I would love to see a system where businesses by LAW had to be at least partially owned by current and past workers, where excessive earnings were automatically taxed away such that you might as well put that money into making a better product, and those taxes were transparently spent for the public good, why then… , then I’d be tickled pink! I’m sure we’d find more stuff to complain about, but what a start it might be!
