U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks during the Tribal Nations Summit at the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 9, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo
Each day the Democrats are outraged about another outrage coming from Trump and his enablers—stomping on immigrants, undermining the courts, attacking Canada, claiming Ukraine started the war, violating campus free speech, destroying the EPA, firing forest rangers—and on and on and on.
But why the surprise? Did anyone doubt that Trump would act on his anger and his resentment, and then follow through executing the detailed plans laid out in Project 2025? Did anyone believe he would turn the other cheek at those who tried to impeach him and send him to jail? Surely every single elected Democrat knew that Trump’s election would be a disaster for everything the party claimed to stand for.
Nevertheless, the Democrats handed Trump the election on a bitcoin-plated platter. They stuck with Biden—make that sucked up to Biden—until it was too late to run primaries and find the strongest Democratic candidate. (I’m not saying Kamala Harris necessarily was the weakest one, but four years earlier she flunked out before the first presidential primary. Just saying.)
Why the hell did they do that?
I’m no political genius, but nearing Biden’s 81st birthday, in November of 2023, I begged him not to run again. It was clear to me, based on polling, his lack of energy, and my own intuition, that he had no business running again.
I was alone, but not entirely so. Obama’s campaign maestro, David Axelrod was pounded for suggesting Biden wasn’t the best candidate. That so successfully quelled any dissent that it wasn’t until six months later (July 2, 2024) that Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) became the first sitting Democratic congressman to ask Biden to withdraw. Profiles in courage, the Democrats were not, including all the governors lining up for 2028.
If I could see the trainwreck coming why couldn’t the Democrats?
I think I know why. They didn’t get upset about it because they were blinded by power and wealth.
Biden represented power. You cross him and you lose access to that power even while his grip on reality is diminishing. You become a target for party loyalists, and risk losing credibility in the party if you call for him to step down. You become an outsider. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) didn’t want to lose their influence over Biden’s pro-worker agenda as they continued to support his candidacy until the bitter end.
The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it.
The attraction to wealth is an even bigger problem. Far too many Democrats are enamored by the rich and famous. They went to school with them. They lean on them for campaign funds. They plan to join them when they leave public office. The wizards on Wall Street and in corporate America form the class they see themselves as part of, or in the class they aspire to.
It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the Democratic Party has become the representatives of the managerial class. Too many party members with working-class roots tore them out long ago.
Many probably discounted their worries about Trump, thinking that the rich and powerful would tame him. Because that’s where the Democratic Party thinks real power lies. The financial class wouldn’t let Trump wreck the economy, would it? Surely, the corporate class wouldn’t back down on DEI programs or forgo their access to inexpensive immigrant labor. The wealthiest Democratic law firms aren’t going to cave, right? Wouldn’t the elites prevent Trump’s excesses the way they did last time? Hmmm.
Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism. Which is why many modern Democrats found it easy to cavalierly go along with the worst political decision since Nixon taped himself committing crimes during the Watergate scandal. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for why working people abandoned the Democrats, and visa vera.)
Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism.
Biden clearly did not have the capacity to run again. The Democrats knew that even before he proved it to the world during his disastrous June 2024 debate with Trump. But they didn’t care enough to oppose his decision, publicly, where it would matter. He told his advisors during the 2020 race that he wouldn’t run for a second term, he would be 82 years old by his second inauguration, but the party refused to hold him to it when he changed his mind.
The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it. They can’t be reformed into a working-class party, because that’s not who they are or what they want to be. From my perspective, reforming them is an utter waste of time and energy, an exercise in window dressing and spin. Instead, we need a new party, an Independence Party that comes with the slogan: The billionaires have two parties, we need one of our own!
Stop with the Spoiler Argument
All I hear from friend and foe is that third parties are impossible in America, that they only serve as spoilers and can never succeed.
Ralph Nader’s run, they tell me, elected Bush. We can argue about whether that’s true, it might be, but there’s very little argument against the idea that Biden’s run in 2024 elected Trump—for the second time!
So, we start with identifiable targets. There is nothing to spoil if we concentrate on running independent working-class candidates in one-party Congressional districts of which there are many!
In 2022, five out of every six races were decided by more than 10 percentage points, according to FairVote.org. One out of every 13 races went entirely uncontested! These districts are where the battle should be joined. The call for a new Independence Party is a call for a vibrant second party, not a third!
Dan Osborn, a former local labor leader, was surprisingly competitive in the 2024 Senate race in Nebraska, running against an unopposed Republican and far ahead of Kamala Harris. Bernie Sanders always runs as an independent as well, and he has now come out urging others to do the same.
The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent.
There’s a hunger out there for something new, but it will take courage and guts to create it. That can only happen when key labor unions decide to do what their membership has been telling them to do for a generation – get away from the corporate Democrats!
Private sector unions, diminished as they may be, are still the seat of worker power in the U.S. And they can galvanize the working class around an agenda that enhances the well-being of all working people. They are key to building a new political formation that protects us all from Wall Street-driven job destruction.
The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent. The opportunity is there staring us in the face, if only we have the nerve to grab it.
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