by ANIS SHIVANI
This moment, leading to the doom that awaits Democrats in the midterm elections six months from now, seems as good as any to revisit my argument against hoping for democratic change from within the Democratic Party, which was the whole basis of the two Sanders campaigns endorsed by Jacobin magazine and allied millennial “socialists.” Since Biden’s election, not a single one of Sanders’s legislative priorities has come close to becoming reality, while House progressives recently spurned Nina Turner herself, almost the avatar of who their ideal candidate should be, to endorse her corporate Democratic opponent. Rather than the Democratic Party showing the slightest inclination to shift leftward on debt, housing, or wages, we are rapidly moving toward the familiar policy rostrum of deficit reduction, fighting inflation by hurting workers, and protecting Wall Street elites at the cost of everyone else, the agenda faithfully duplicated in the Carter/Volcker, Clinton/Rubin, and Obama/Geithner presidencies. The hipster socialists’ predictable response to the latest ignominy, the potential erasure of Roe v. Wade, is entirely along the lines of the fatalism enumerated in this essay, quickly accepting the fait accompli and moving on to notions of activism that take the absurd reality as given: “Going forward, we will be more reliant on self-managed abortion and sending abortion pills by mail. As for surgical abortion services, we will need to support organizations that help people traveling to abortion-friendly states to receive care. Find your local abortion fund and donate what you can, and share info on local funds with your friends and followers.”
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The progressive movement laid all its eggs in one basket, the Democratic Party, rather than looking to create any alternative means of translating ideas into action. Or rather, not the progressive movement but a small band of self-proclaimed “socialists,” often young and urban and hip, many of them offspring of the Occupy movement, who found a convenient sheltering place in Bernie Sanders’s latest campaign, which they succeeded in reshaping toward their own ideological ends, utilizing forms of flattery and hero-worship the wily old campaigner from Vermont should have been more wary of. Anyway, the inevitable denouement—i.e., the crashing and burning of Sanders’s second Quixotic charge—has already transpired, the encouragement of the Sanders faithful to get in line behind the neoliberal candidate of the moment is in full flourish, and the question that begs to be answered, in the wake of the catastrophe, is this: Can the Democratic Party be reformed? Can it serve as an agency for “socialist” (read progressive) policy changes? Should activists and thought leaders spend time and energy working to reinvent the party, or should they look for new outlets?
Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, staff writer and managing editor respectively for Jacobin magazine (which since 2015 has been a major Sanders propaganda medium), insist in Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism (April 28, Verso) that there is a democratic road to socialism and that it lies straight through the heart of the Democratic Party. Though they wrote their book in the months preceding the conclusion of the primary, they’ve composed it in a manner that the inevitable cataclysm at the end can fit into their broadly flexible thesis that the Democratic Party is the only possible apparatus for social change at this moment. Indeed, the same absence of self-criticism evident in the book has been obvious in various recent interviews given by the authors, not to mention editorials at the magazine where they continue to put the most optimistic spin on the manifest recent failure of their thesis.
Just so I’m not fighting a strawman, let me lay out the gist of their argument, which is that: “We need to make good use of the democratic structure and processes available to us (and to improve and expand them) in order to advance our cause.” What they mean by this is to deploy the existing Democratic Party structure in order to give what they call a “class-struggle character” to electoral fights. Another way to characterize it is as “the dirty break,” meaning going through the two-party system rather than around it, as opposed to what would be “the clean break” (advocated by others but not the particular ideological clique latched on to Sanders as the savior), meaning leaving the Democratic Party altogether. The dirty break, in the last five years of “socialist” discourse in America, has also been called “the inside-outside strategy” and counts on sharpening the contradictions between workers and the Democratic Party elites.
These contradictions played out in real time in the last five years to a greater extent than anyone might have imagined possible. And what exactly happened after the eye-opening in which Day and Uetricht place so much faith? Could there be anything more eye-opening than the Democratic Party’s open rebellion against Sanders’s limited social democratic proposals in 2015, and its preference to double down on the neoliberal ideology that had lent Trump credence in his first presidential campaign? And could there be anything more eye-opening than the Democratic Party anointing (it’s called “consolidation” in polite party-speak) the last neoliberal vice president in the middle of a health care and unemployment crisis that all but begs for the kinds of social welfare policies socialists are demanding? Biden “won” his last set of primaries while decrying Medicare for All and explicitly rejecting any of the universal programs the authors of this book rightly characterize as the essence of social progress.
How much more clarity can there be? How much more intensification of the contradictions can we sustain? How much more conflict can be exposed between the interests of workers (suffering from mass unemployment in the midst of a pandemic) and the Democratic Party elites (who offered them crumbs in a so-called “stimulus” bill while gifting trillions to undeserving oligarchs)?
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