Likely as a combination of quarantine boredom, the recent general election results & my genuine curiosity towards politics, in the abstract, as a career route, I probably think about politics too much. And with these thoughts I’ve come to a pretty clear and resounding conclusion: The Democratic Party must be destroyed, is currently in the process of destroying itself, and that this is the only true way to create any sort of real opposition to the powers that be in this country.
Now this is a pretty broad proclamation, so allow me to explain first by taking a few steps back, to a weird phrase I see thrown around and people’s political perception built around the phrase. Many Americans are probably familiar with the phrases “red states” and “blue states,” states that imply the voters always swing hard republican, or hard democrat. New York, Massachusetts and California are blue, while Alabama, Wyoming and West Virginia are red. Along with this can sometimes come writing off of entire populations based on how their states vote, people looking at videos of mile long food banks in Dallas, Texas and saying “well maybe you don’t vote for Trump next time,” which is absurd and a broken-brain worldview if I’ve ever heard one. But on top of this red-blue dynamic creating liberal hatred of poor people, it is also only a recent historical development of American politics. While it’s true that Southern and Appalachian states have not voted democrat in presidential elections for at least two decades, this neglects lower level political party control. Only twelve years ago, after the results of Obama’s 2008 election, the democrats had control of the state assembly AT LEAST in the following states: Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana and Iowa, while Oklahoma and Missouri had a democrat governor. These majorities were no fluke caused by Obama’s first election landslides either, as many of these states had held democratic majorities for decades beforehand. Nowadays, all of those states not only voted for Trump by extremely large margins, but also have extreme red state legislatures, oftentimes supermajorities(2/3s held by one party) with only two of them, Kentucky and Louisiana, having a democrat governor. So what exactly happened?
The answer to that question could be a number of things: racism, the decline of American farming, the decline of American manufacturing, the success of the “grassroots” tea party, etc. But none I find more compelling than one grounded in our real material circumstances: the democratic party failed to deliver what their party had been meant for, and chose instead to stand for nothing. For a little bit of context, Obama got elected in a landslide mostly due to the spectacular housing market collapse which sparked the Great Recession, maybe with the added benefit of an extremely unpopular war in the Middle East. This makes sense when considering what the democratic party had done up to this point, it was the party of FDR, of Civil Rights and the Great Society. Essentially, if there was a such a massive failure of our society, or it’s economic order, one would assume the democrats would be the ones capable of truly lifting the population out of it, I mean how else should a party act that had such ingrained ties to labor unions?
So what exactly did Obama and the democrats do once they got into power? (Oh, and with a democratic trifecta in house and senate, so there was no feasible way they couldn’t pass progressive legislation truly bailing out homeowners, or re-regulating the financial economy, or a federal jobs program) Well, uhhhh, they didn’t do much, choosing to continue the bailout of the banks perpetuated by Bush, and offering pittance of bailout to homeowners by means-testing, essentially doing as little as possible to help the people most hurt by the recession. And it wasn’t just the recession that had the working class hurting. Job outsourcing, wage stagnation and the breakdown of essential infrastructure were all things that such an inspiring democratic president was going to fix, but none of these changes materialized. So what exactly is the appropriate response when the party in your country, who for years stood for economic mobility, social welfare and unions suddenly does nothing to actually help people when needed most? Well, you lose.
Here, of course, we should bring in the republicans, who in all of their open contempt for the poor, managed to be a thousand times better at politics than the democrats. This I say for two reasons. One: If there is no longer any difference between your political parties on economic grounds when people suffer the most, it only makes sense that people would, broadly speaking, vote by anger and choose the party that directs that anger towards any sort of amorphous and foreign other. In a narrow minded sense, when you are hurt, it’s easy to direct that pain out onto other people. In many of the states that are nowadays deep red but used to hold democrat majorities, there is a serious growth in poverty and job loss as our welfare state is stripped away and the union jobs move to other countries. Left with no viable alternative, the former Appalachian states, once heavy with coal mining work and their unions to back them, choose in anger to punish. Same likely applies to southern and certain rural states, now riddled with opioid addiction and crumbling public infrastructure. But the democrats did not help when they should have, that was their purpose for existence, at least that’s what I and I think many others thought. That’s gone, and the opposing party won’t fix this either, but at least the opposing party will give me that joy of watching those less fortunate than me suffer, if I can’t have bread and milk, why not have blood and thunder. (note: this obviously does not occur with all groups, case in point black Americans who face poverty in equally if not more drastic numbers, and post 2008 have turned out less and less to vote at all)
Now this is a debated point, but I believe that even if these people are deeply racist, hold deep contempt for government expansion and burst a blood vessel at the sight of the word socialism, enough of them would truly not care and vote democrat if they knew the party would actually deliver on economic distribution and not just continue to be an empty vessel, it’s not like these people voted blue that long ago. But the opportunity to actually achieve this came and went with Bernie Sanders. As badly as he was beaten in the 2020 primary, especially after doing better in 2016, makes me extremely skeptical of anyone else running in the 2024 primary and actually taking over the Democratic party. This is coupled with the fact that Biden’s 2020 victory is not a sign of good things to come, as a republican senate will allow even less to get passed in a time of crisis than what the democrats passed in 2009, leading to a 2022 midterms that could be just as disastrous for democrats as the 2010 midterms that saw them lose all those “deep red” state houses. So all in all, things look bleak.
But in reality, this could be an opportunity. Bernie’s failure to gain nomination is the latest instance of democrats literally deciding to abandon their core principles to gain some mythical moderate voter, but it’s also a sign that we should simply let go of this party. Not embrace the republicans, as they are just as much austerity hawks and raving psychopaths as usual, but instead let them exterminate the democrats in 2022. Maybe I am wrong, but I suspect the democrats coalition of remaining working class support and white suburbanites will fall apart as they continue to offer no alternative to our collapsing economic order and Trump no longer exists as a counter mobilizer, working class people will continue to identify with blood thirsty, punish-your-enemy republicans and suburbanites will choose sensible and moderate republicans, it’s already happened in places like Maine this year. If all goes well, a democratic party so utterly defeated and still unable to move left will provide a short window of opportunity, one in which there’s a chance for the growth of a third force, one altogether different from the equally catastrophic democrats and republicans but instead focused first and foremost on what the left now knows is essential: Organizing and movement building outside of the electoral structures. Such a party, I believe, could go toe to toe with democrats in California and New York, while also bucking the white grievance politics of appalachia, the south and the midwest, favoring instead state job programs and universal healthcare for the immiserated people in those areas.
Such a thing occurring is very unlikely(a sign I probably think about politics too much), and would involve on the ground organizing at the local level(which we should all do), but the thought of it is the only viable signs of hope left in this country, and because of that all should strive toward it.
