The dark truth behind the secret war inside the Democratic party

Trump’s most recent desperate attempt to change the subject from his involvement with Epstein, Iran, Netanyahu, and the billions he and his grifter sons are making with their skeezy schemes is to call progressive Democrats “communists.” He’s even gone so far as to suggest that some should be stripped of their citizenship and deported or thrown into one of his ICE concentration camps.

Meanwhile, open conflict is erupting within the Democratic Party around populist issues. So-called “moderate” Democrats are defending their dependence on corporate and AIPAC money to win elections and arguing for maintaining the status quo that Citizens United has established by legalizing political bribery.

The most recent example is how Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — whose father was CEO of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan back in the day — has endorsed Congresswoman Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed in the upcoming primary in that state. El-Sayed, a public health official, has worked for Medicare for All his entire career; he even wrote a book about it, Medicare For All: A Citizens Guide. Stevens, a recipient of corporate money, opposes the program.

El-Sayed summarized the situation with a remarkably clear and straightforward statement that highlights the conundrum facing Democratic Party leadership trying to advance elections for both factions:

“I think in this race, at the end of the day, it tends to be that candidates who generally have been funded the same way will tend to go together. Those of us who don’t take corporate money tend to stick together. Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together.”

The media isn’t helping Democrats work through this. CNN’s Dana Bash asked House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday about what the Party’s policy positions would be if they regained control of the House or Senate this fall:

“Your party is fighting over whether the path back to the majority runs through the center or the activist left who want to defund the police, abolish ICE, end aid to Israel, [have] open borders…”

Sweet Jesus. When a real, educated, credentialed reporter can’t distinguish between a teenager with a TikTok account or a looney tunes narcissist from the DSA and the positions held by actual progressive Democratic politicians, things are really grim. (Or maybe Dana is just pre-sucking-up to the Ellisons?)

Yes, the co-chair of the DSA recently went on Fox “News” this week and called for a bunch of stupid policies like abolishing the Senate, ending national borders, and shutting down all our prisons. And, yes, Republicans will be pounding on this, trying to suggest that she was speaking for the Democratic Party.

But she was not. The DSA is not the Democratic Party, and even Democratic Party candidates who endorse “democratic socialism” are not endorsing the DSA or its positions.

There’s literally not a single actual elected Democrat who’s ever called for “open borders” (that’s actually the position of the far-right Libertarian Party) and other than the occasional call for police reform following the murder of George Floyd, none are calling for “defunding the police.” Lefty icon Bernie Sanders, for goodness sake, said, “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.”

Even Republicans (Senators John Thune and Roger Wiker) are making a case for ending military aid to Israel, and a recent YouGov poll found that more than half of all Americans want to abolish ICE and replace it with a more professional and transparent agency to enforce our immigration laws.

So, let’s set the record straight. There’s not a single “far left” progressive position held by actual elected progressive Democratic politicians that has less than 50% support among the Democratic base, most have well over 80% support, and virtually all are supported above 50% by the majority of Americans of all political stripes.

This isn’t “far left”: it’s the radical middle! We’ve been “radicalized” by 45 years of neoliberal policies by both parties that have gutted the American middle class and the American Dream, and want actual fighters who’ll make our country safe for working people again.

We want politicians who’ll return us to the ideal of a single full-time paycheck, regardless of educational attainment, paying enough to buy a house, a car every few years, take an annual vacation, put our kids through college, and have a comfortable retirement.

Two-thirds of us had that when Reagan was sworn into office in 1981 and launched the Republican War on Working People™. Hell, that’s the “Square Deal” that Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on over 100 years ago, and the vast majority of Americans still want it!

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While corporate-money-dependent Democrats may oppose Medicare for All or ending student debt or taxing the rich in a meaningful way, progressive Democrats — the ones being vilified right now by Trump, the GOP, the media, and their own on-the-take peers — are clear about most all of their positions. They are that:

— Every worker should have the right to democracy in their workplace (a union), and that nobody who works full time should have to live in poverty because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in a stupid amount of time.

— Retired people shouldn’t have to pay income taxes on their Social Security (the way it was before Reagan and, no, Trump did not fix that), that morbidly rich people should pay into the system like the rest of us, that Social Security should pay enough to live modestly on, and that Medicare should cover all our expenses with minimum hassle.

— Every American citizen should be able to vote without a hassle, and taking away your vote should require a judge’s action to prove why, just like the Supreme Court has ruled it now works if a state wants to take away your gun.

— Speaking of guns, it’s obscene that the leading cause of death for our children is bullets, and we shouldn’t have to regularly terrorize our children with active shooter drills. We need rational gun control laws, like every other developed country in the world has.

— It’s crazy that one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of America (165 million of us) and he and his peers typically pay less of their income in taxes than your average teenager. If we want the general prosperity of the 1950s, we should have the same tax rate that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so loved: 90% on the morbidly rich after they’ve made their first few million dollars a year.

— Our children and grandchildren deserve a world where they needn’t fear being killed by climate-change-driven wild weather, drought, or wildfires, and the air and water are clean. And it’s nuts that we’re subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that’s preventing this.

— Every other country in the world helps their young people go to college; in most it’s as cheap as it was here in the 1960s when you could put yourself through school with a weekend job. Some countries even pay people to go to college, like the $100/month stipend my dad had with the GI Bill after WWII that built our 20th century scientific and business prowess. And it’s morally and politically wrong to cripple entire generations with trillions in student debt.

— Across the 34 richest (OECD) countries in the world, over a half-million families are wiped out every year because somebody got sick. All of those families are here in America. Healthcare should be a right, like in every other developed country in the world, instead of a privilege that depends on how much money you make.

— Starting a small family business, once the backbone of every American town and city, should once again be possible; we need to break up the massive monopolies that have come to dominate every single industry. See: Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

— Every person in America should be free to practice their own religion (or, like Thomas Paine, no religion) and raise their kids that way without government interference, government promotion, or their tax dollars subsidizing local megachurches’ religious schools. Like the Constitution says.

— People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on the quality of their minds, their work, and their integrity, not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion.

— Women should have the same rights and privileges as men, from the workplace to the boardroom to the doctor’s office to the voting booth.

— Our queer brothers and sisters should have the same rights and privileges as everybody else and be free to live their lives without discrimination or harassment.

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— America is a nation of immigrants, and we have been strengthened in every generation by the diversity of talent and humanity that have come here to participate in the American dream. We need comprehensive immigration reform to clean up our system, not a brutal regime that’s literally killing people while it tears our nation apart.

— And it’s completely insane that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court would say that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech, which is why most Democrats think Citizens United needs to be overturned.

Sadly, many of the corporate-dependent Democrats oppose many of these positions because they’d conflict with the interests of their donors. This is something the Party needs to work out, particularly as voters increasingly make their desires known in primary elections. But few of these positions would have been alien to FDR or LBJ; most are simply a call for a return to the middle.

It’s frankly astounding that Jeffries didn’t explode when Bash threw out all those disingenuous GOP talking points (I sure would have!), but he politely steered the conversation back to affordability and generally spoke well of his progressive peers and candidates. That’s his job, of course.

And it’s also our job. With the billions that’ll be spent this year to convince Americans that progressives are communists who want to abolish the police and have open borders, not to mention the billionaire-owned-media dialing the echo machine up to 11, it falls on us to educate our friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

America needs to break from the past 45 years of bipartisan neoliberalism and once again embrace the values that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson succeeded in putting into law and Republicans and corporate Democrats have been systematically dismantling since 1981 as they brag about “ending welfare as we know it” and “the era of big government is over.”

Average American voters have largely succeeded in waking up to these scams; now it’s our job to infiltrate and wake up the Democratic Party itself. Tag, we’re it!