Willing To Give The Democratic Party Another Chance?

Not the future of the Democratic Party

The self-serving Democratic Party careerists who shoved Clinton down our throats and left us with Trump— who shoved unwinnable garbage Senate candidates like Katie McGinty, Patty Judge, Patrick Murphy, Ted Strickland and Ann Kirkpatrick down out throats and left us with a Senate the GOP will control for at least 4 years and who operate the DCCC under the disastrous Rahm-rules from a past decade who guarantee continued GOP dominance of the House— are doubling down aggressively on every front. If they’re not defeated, the Democratic Party will continue to be an ineffective vehicle for the legitimate interests of working families in America. The idea that the GOP represents the top 1%— the multimillionaires and billionaires— and the Democrats represent the top 10%, the wealthy professionals, is a non-starter that just doesn’t work. It should be have been discarded long ago and the Democratic Party will never regain political dominance until it is. Why, for example, are Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rahm Emanuel, still respected and powerful members of the party? How many times will Joe Manchin have to betray core Democratic values before he’s given the heave ho? (Can anyone count that high?)

A month ago, Bernie— who would have won— was interviewed by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now! in front of a live audience in Philly. As you can imagine, he has a message and it isn’t a message about Bernie Sanders’ career trajectory, although he told her he wanted the new outreach job in the Senate leadership. “What I am going to do is use that position,” he told her and her audience, “with your help, with all of your help, to transform the Democratic Party… Right now, the Republicans control the U.S. Senate. Democrats, I had hoped—we thought we had a better than even chance of gaining control. We did not. We’ll end up with 49 seats. Democrats picked up a few seats in the House, but the Republicans will continue to control the House. Not only that, in about two-thirds of the states in this country, there are Republican governors. And in the last eight or so years, Democrats have lost some 900 legislative seats in state capitols all over this country. So I think any independent assessment, without casting any blame, says the current approach has failed. All right? When you lose, you know, it’s like they always say about the football coach: You know, if you’re zero and 10, you’re not doing well. Well, the current approach clearly is not succeeding, and we need a new approach. And the new approach, I think, is to, A, create a 50-state strategy. That means we start playing ball in states that the Democrats have conceded decades ago. But more importantly, we create a kind of grassroots party, where the most important people in the party are not just wealthy campaign contributors, but working people, young people, people in the middle class, who are going to come in and going to start telling us what their needs are and give us some ideas as to how we go forward. And I accept this responsibility as outreach chair with a lot of trepidation, but also with excitement. I’m going to be going around the country to try to do everything that I can to create a party which represents working people and not just the 1 percent.”

Bernie is all for transforming the Democratic Party into a bottom-up, grassroots party, which will mean wresting control from the careerists who have driven the party into an identity politics ditch and kept it there. When asked if Keith Ellison’s religion— he’s a Muslim— is a big factor in the support he’s giving him, he told Goodman That although he likes “the great symbolism in that,” he’s “not a great fan of identity politics, I am supporting Keith because he is a strong progressive whose whole life has been about standing up for working families and the middle class and low-income families.”

There are some people who think that everybody who voted for Donald Trump is a racist, a sexist or a homophobe or a xenophobe. I don’t believe that. Are those people in his camp? Absolutely. But it would be a tragic mistake to believe that everybody who voted for Donald Trump is a "deplorable." They’re not. These are people who are disgusted, and they are angry at the establishment. And the Democratic Party has not been clear enough, in my view, about telling those people, whether they are white, whether they are black, Latino, Asian American or whatever, women, gay, whatever, that we are on their side. And too often what we look at is identity. You’re a woman. Well, that’s good, but we need more women in the political process. We need more African Americans in the political process, more Latinos. No question about that. But we need people who will have the guts to stand up to the billionaire class and corporate America and fight for working families.

…[W]hat we have got to do now, to those people who voted for Trump, because they said, "Well, you know, this guy sounds reasonable"—Trump sent out a tweet where he says, "I am the only Republican candidate for president who will not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid." Right? Well, believe me, every American, every person in this country, if I have anything to say about it, will know precisely what is going on with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because, as you’ve indicated, they are beginning to appoint people who are typical right-wing Republicans who want to privatize and cut Social Security. And our job—and we’ve got it. We’ve got every statement that Trump made during this campaign. And we are going to hold him accountable. Every person in this country will know what he said and what he is doing. Trump said, "One of the issues that I think a whole lot of people are deeply concerned about is the high cost of medicine in this country." Trump said during the campaign he was going to take on the pharmaceutical industry. He was going to allow for Medicare to negotiate prices with the drug companies, allow people to reimport medicine from Canada and other countries, where the price is often half as much as it is in the United States. Well, you know what? We are going to remind the American people of precisely what Donald Trump said about that and many other issues.

…[T]he Republicans are many things, but they’re not dumb. And if millions of people begin to stand up and fight back, they’re going to be thinking twice about doing very bad things.

I’ll give you just one example, Amy. A couple of years ago, sad to say, not only all—virtually all Republicans wanted to cut Social Security. There were a number of Democrats who did, as well. And some of us in the Senate, organizing a defending Social Security caucus, we worked with senior groups all over this country. We got millions of signatures on petitions coming in. And you know what? They backed off. They did not cut Social Security.

Not the future

So, I think if there’s—if there’s a lesson to be learned right now, when we are fighting for huge stakes—we’re fighting for the future—future of the planet in terms of climate change. We’re fighting for the future of American democracy. We have got to mobilize people and rethink our commitment in terms of what our role is in the political process. And the message I just want to make here in Philadelphia and across this country is it is not good enough to say, "Well, hey, I vote every two years. I vote every four years." That’s fine, but that is not good enough. What we need to do is to be thinking every day the kinds of role we can play in educating and organizing and mobilizing people to defeat this horrific agenda. And I do believe that if millions of people do stand up and fight back, we can stop him from doing some really awful things. And that’s what I am trying to do right now. And we’ve got to mobilize people to do that.

There is a way forward for the Democratic Party— and it isn’t by doubling down on elitism, corporatism, Republican-lite conservatism. Bernie understands the direction Democrats have to move. Taking back the House in 2018 and winning enough state legislative seats to prevent more deadly GOP gerrymandering will depend on whether or not Bernie’s revolution succeeds in displacing the Wasserman Schultzes and Rahm Emanuels who still control the party organization.