By Phil Wilson
November 15, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
The Democrats and those who inhabit the DNC orbit have been in a rush to skip all five stages of grief.
My Email inbox has more pieces titled, “resist,” “fight back,” “organize” than at any time since Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet. Those five stages of grief, elucidated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The patient has died. We peeled off the oozing bandages on November 5th and we all witnessed the worms, maggots and gangrene. We stared at the shriveled carcass and breathed in the odor of death. And yet I am asked to donate to the DNC, not for a coffin, but for the naked principle of Three Stooges style absurdity – James Carville wants money that I don’t have to fund something that doesn’t exist.
Do these DNC functionaries really have the temerity to beg me for cash – after I have drained my life savings for Bob Casey, Colin Allred, and Jon Tester? What did those donations get me? That’s obviously a rhetorical question – but to be transparent, I didn’t give a dime to any of these people running on the “Titanic Ticket.” But some of you did. The “Iceberg Collision Party” – the one owned by big tech, big pharma, big bombs, and Wall Street – died like a beached jelly fish due, perhaps, to my unwillingness to part with the price of a Cumberland Farms cup of coffee in a plastic cup. Nancy Pelosi emailed me again – “with your donation we can go back into the past and time-travel our way to defeat Trump last week.”
I wasted roughly six months of my sad, elderly life clicking the delete button on every Email from the DNC, the Congressional Black Caucus, and a million surrogate entities that shilled for the Biden/Harris/Walz/Weimar ticket.
The emails I get (by the thousands) proposing that we build a better, more progressive Democratic Party should not be seen as merely the garden-variety denial of Kubler-Ross – rather, we should see such expansiveness as the mirror reflection of MAGA. Both capitalist parties have become psychotic, with members drifting into a perpetually hallucinating state of paranoid fantasy. “Stop the steal” or resurrect the Democratic Party – both of these unhinged notions beg for a national shot of Thorazine.
The Democratic Party is dead – as in decomposing flesh and rigor mortis. Hold a stethoscope to the blue heart. You will hear a living Elvis singing “Jailhouse Rock” before you detect a Democratic Party pulse. If you laid the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (the world’s largest radio telescope) on the chest of that decomposing donkey, the silence would make a Buster Keaton Film seem like a primal scream. One can easily argue that the Democratic Party died decades ago, and only a collective and uniquely American variety of mass psychosis has held reality at bay.
The first act of the aspiring progressive movement has to be a funeral. The Democratic Party needs to be put in a cheap pinewood coffin (after driving a wooden stake through its heart as an act of caution), and then interred. Perhaps Liz Cheney, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi can be made to deliver the eulogies. Once that coffin is lowered deep in a suitable crevice (I am fond of the San Andreas Fault) then those of us concerned about corporate crimes, environmental collapse and human rights need to get the fuck out of the earth quake zone, fast! But where do we go?
Is there a home somewhere for people who want to transform the fetid wasteland that is the USA into something at least marginally better? Any Marxist will tell you that you go to the working class, the proletariat, the people who work three jobs to pay rent and get no vacation or sick time, and pay through the nose for private medical insurance with more holes than swiss cheese. Those working people – the ones who we haven’t seen in the Democratic base since Ronald Reagan went brain-dead and the gods of capital resurrected him as Bill Clinton – hold the key to a renewed left wing. There is no other way.
And where will you find working people in vast numbers? Uh, that may seem like a trick question, but it really isn’t. The working class is being held in custody by the Republican Party. Why are they there? you ask. Because they have been offered something to distract themselves from the empty, meaningless, tedious anomie of US life – racism, cruelty and political theatrics. Working people would rather have affordable housing, free dental care, job security, a reduced work week, sick leave, child care, a living wage and paid vacation – but no one is offering them that. When one party offers racism and the other offers nothing at all it is an easy choice. Something is always better than nothing.
And another thing that is absolutely critical – Trump told the truth on the most important issue there is – he correctly opined that life in the US sucks. He may have put that truth in fascist terms, blaming suffering on dark skinned foreigners and trans people, but the Democrats never acknowledge the basic truth. Life in the US, for many working people, teeters on the edge of a self-inflicted gunshot to the skull. On the deepest level, Trump is more honest than most all Democrats.
Some of us think of racism as a terminal, irredeemable affliction. I have an anecdote to address that idea:
In the early nineties, I worked in a group home for teens in Hayward, California. One day I did an intake on a kid I will call Tom. Tom, a white kid, began by telling me his most essential value: “I am hecka racial and if you make me live with a bunch of n*s, I am going to run away.”
Well, Tom was true to his word – he ran away that night, but he didn’t run alone. He ran off with Tony, one of our most defiant residents. The Police found Tom and Tony walking together in downtown Hayward a few days later, and brought them back. We had provided a description – a small, skinny blond kid with a tattoo of a snake winding around his wrist and a heavy set Black teen with low slung pants hanging below his boxers in the style of that era. Tom informed me brashly that he and Tony were “brothers” and that, therefore, he was no longer ‘racial.’ Tom said that Tony had told him just how badly “this place” sucked, and that he and Tony would run again. Both wound up in different programs, and I hadn’t really even thought about them until now. The point is childishly obvious. Racism, for most bigots, hangs by an ephemeral thread.
Let me restate my points thus far:
1) Racism is a place holder for the things working people really want – to be given human rights – housing, nutritious food, medical care, decent wages, security and free time.
2) The Democratic Party of college educated, comfortable suburbanites is as dead as any skunk crossing I – 95 in rush hour.
3) If progressives want to have a meaningful voice they have to migrate to the place inhabited by the working class and join forces with poor and working people.
4) The working class – much of it – can be found at the so called GOP.
5) The GOP/fascist party is an echo chamber with no access to nuance, or basic reality
Therefore????
It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that fighting fascism is contingent on a massive influx of progressive voices joining the GOP. After all, the GOP, like the Democratic Party, is owned, shaped and exploited by corporate power. If progressives gained no traction in the Democratic Party, why would they be heard in the Republican/fascist Party?
That question has no good answer – we are tossing a hail Mary – but the Republican Party has just undergone a hostile takeover from without. The neocons gave way to the fascist zombies. The idea that the “establishment” is dirty, vile and profane has been stolen from the left. We have, in some vague form, a rhetorical precedent to exploit. This was never the case inside the dead and departed Democratic Party. The Republican/fascists have torn the wrapper off of America’s secret. Those in power are indeed scoundrels and murderers, but not for allowing a few victimized asylum seekers to sneak in, but for pouring a fortune into weapons, fossil fuels and political lobbying. In the process, the elites have robbed working people to the point of suicidal despair.
Allow me to provide a caveat to my argument that racists – in droves – are eagerly waiting to be humanized, before we go further. The US is a racist nation with more racist politicians dog whistling for white votes than fish in the ocean (these days), but institutional racism and human hearts are not inevitably in sync. The racism that thrives in the human heart needs to be watered by bigoted, fear mongering media like FOX and Newsmax. These propaganda juggernauts have become the driving force of Republican fascism, and they have the ear of the working class. You might argue that the left needs its own counterattacking media sphere, but corporate money will always prevent rational ideas from being platformed on anything larger than “The Young Turks.”.
I am arguing that the most crucial task of a progressive coalition – as we reach the juncture where fascism, the climate apocalypse and nuclear war merge into a sort of narrative certainty – is to go into the mosh pit of fascism and speak to “Zombies” as if they were human beings.
Now it is time to disrupt the Republican echo chamber. Trump and his billionaire pals talk a populist anti-corporate line – Trump accused Hillary Clinton (rightly so) of being a Wall Street stooge, and the Republican choir nodded along. So let us expand the choir – imagine the Republican ranks swollen with me and you. Envision union members, communists, social democrats, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Chris Hedges and tens of millions more of us all suddenly becoming registered Republicans. We need people – passionate Republicans, of course – who can elaborate in detail about what it means to be anti-corporate, anti-establishment and opposed to the deep state. Who is putting flesh on the bones of the concept of “the deep state?” Who tells the zombified masses being held hostage in the MAGA Empire that Exxon, Tesla, Amazon, The Heritage Foundation, The New York Times, Facebook, RTX Corporation, FOX News and CNN all sit at the table of the deep state?
Imagine MAGA candidates running in Republican primaries against candidates vowing to fight for a $25 dollar minimum wage. These same anti-MAGA radical Republicans will promise a Draconian reduction in military spending, and the end to corporate campaign lobbying and spending – and how about a fierce vow to pass anti-trust legislation, and universal healthcare. We have always had a one party system – the Dog-on-a-Leash Corporate Party – but now we can have an eclectic party that questions political obedience. We will have a one party system with the complex discourse forbidden in our alleged (now rotten) two party system to date. After all, what the fuck is Trump but a symbol of disobedience – even if Trump’s disobedience is empty and merely a ruse to hide his slavish corporate fidelity.
The position we newly radicalized “Republicans” take will have to be simple, direct and focused on working class aspirations. Do we define disobedience as being nothing more than being a greedy, crass asshole, or does disobedience mean civil disobedience, with the aim of arresting and jailing those who commit environmental crimes, and extort the working class?
I am Phil Wilson and I am running for a senate seat in Massachusetts on the “Republican” ticket with the following platform – a $35 dollar minimum wage, six weeks paid vacation, universal health care, a deal with China to import low cost EV’s to be offered to working families at reduced prices via subsidies. Who will pay for it? The savings from all the bombs, drones and planes that won’t be sent to Israel and Ukraine will be given to working people. Okay, I am not cut out for the senate, but someone else will do it and I’ll knock on doors. Picture every blue state without a single Democratic official, but with “red” replacements – in the rather forgotten shade of red that terrified Joe McCarthy 75 years ago.
The “Republican” candidate that I’ll be supporting will also be introducing the idea of replacing the senate altogether with a “citizen’s assembly.” This would put decision making in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. It ought to play well on the populist right who – now that everyone is a Republican – will be forced to confront life outside of the Trumpian vacuum.
If history is a guide, being anti-capitalist inside of a fascist party will be extremely dangerous. Ask Ernst Rohm what happened to the Nazis who wanted to carry out a socialist revolution. But Rohm’s SA had a confused identity, muddied with all the eugenic nonsense that percolated in every faction of the Nazi movement. As a professional thug specializing in street violence, Rohm had no useful role to play once the Nazis came to power. It may be a stretch to compare the Nazi SA to the US progressive movement, but history provides an imperfect roadmap for political strategy. The radical faction of the Republican Party will have to do what a limited thinker like Ernst Rohm could not do – engage the erstwhile fascist masses in a peaceful, civil dialogue about populism, capitalism and the power of the working class.
Phil Wilson also writes at Nobody’s Voice.
For more on this topic, consider Lonnie Ray Atkinson’s series, Don’t Think of a Republican: : How I Won A Republican Primary As A Lefty Progressive And You Can Too.
Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker and union member. His writing has been published in ZNetwork.org, Current Affairs, Counterpunch, Resilience, Mother Pelican, Common Dreams, The Hampshire Gazette, The Common Ground Review, The Future Fire and other publications. Phil's writings are posted regularly at Nobody's Voice https://philmeow.substack.com/
The Democrats and those who inhabit the DNC orbit have been in a rush to skip all five stages of grief.
My Email inbox has more pieces titled, “resist,” “fight back,” “organize” than at any time since Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet. Those five stages of grief, elucidated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The patient has died. We peeled off the oozing bandages on November 5th and we all witnessed the worms, maggots and gangrene. We stared at the shriveled carcass and breathed in the odor of death. And yet I am asked to donate to the DNC, not for a coffin, but for the naked principle of Three Stooges style absurdity – James Carville wants money that I don’t have to fund something that doesn’t exist.
Do these DNC functionaries really have the temerity to beg me for cash – after I have drained my life savings for Bob Casey, Colin Allred, and Jon Tester? What did those donations get me? That’s obviously a rhetorical question – but to be transparent, I didn’t give a dime to any of these people running on the “Titanic Ticket.” But some of you did. The “Iceberg Collision Party” – the one owned by big tech, big pharma, big bombs, and Wall Street – died like a beached jelly fish due, perhaps, to my unwillingness to part with the price of a Cumberland Farms cup of coffee in a plastic cup. Nancy Pelosi emailed me again – “with your donation we can go back into the past and time-travel our way to defeat Trump last week.”
I wasted roughly six months of my sad, elderly life clicking the delete button on every Email from the DNC, the Congressional Black Caucus, and a million surrogate entities that shilled for the Biden/Harris/Walz/Weimar ticket.
The emails I get (by the thousands) proposing that we build a better, more progressive Democratic Party should not be seen as merely the garden-variety denial of Kubler-Ross – rather, we should see such expansiveness as the mirror reflection of MAGA. Both capitalist parties have become psychotic, with members drifting into a perpetually hallucinating state of paranoid fantasy. “Stop the steal” or resurrect the Democratic Party – both of these unhinged notions beg for a national shot of Thorazine.
The Democratic Party is dead – as in decomposing flesh and rigor mortis. Hold a stethoscope to the blue heart. You will hear a living Elvis singing “Jailhouse Rock” before you detect a Democratic Party pulse. If you laid the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (the world’s largest radio telescope) on the chest of that decomposing donkey, the silence would make a Buster Keaton Film seem like a primal scream. One can easily argue that the Democratic Party died decades ago, and only a collective and uniquely American variety of mass psychosis has held reality at bay.
The first act of the aspiring progressive movement has to be a funeral. The Democratic Party needs to be put in a cheap pinewood coffin (after driving a wooden stake through its heart as an act of caution), and then interred. Perhaps Liz Cheney, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi can be made to deliver the eulogies. Once that coffin is lowered deep in a suitable crevice (I am fond of the San Andreas Fault) then those of us concerned about corporate crimes, environmental collapse and human rights need to get the fuck out of the earth quake zone, fast! But where do we go?
Is there a home somewhere for people who want to transform the fetid wasteland that is the USA into something at least marginally better? Any Marxist will tell you that you go to the working class, the proletariat, the people who work three jobs to pay rent and get no vacation or sick time, and pay through the nose for private medical insurance with more holes than swiss cheese. Those working people – the ones who we haven’t seen in the Democratic base since Ronald Reagan went brain-dead and the gods of capital resurrected him as Bill Clinton – hold the key to a renewed left wing. There is no other way.
And where will you find working people in vast numbers? Uh, that may seem like a trick question, but it really isn’t. The working class is being held in custody by the Republican Party. Why are they there? you ask. Because they have been offered something to distract themselves from the empty, meaningless, tedious anomie of US life – racism, cruelty and political theatrics. Working people would rather have affordable housing, free dental care, job security, a reduced work week, sick leave, child care, a living wage and paid vacation – but no one is offering them that. When one party offers racism and the other offers nothing at all it is an easy choice. Something is always better than nothing.
And another thing that is absolutely critical – Trump told the truth on the most important issue there is – he correctly opined that life in the US sucks. He may have put that truth in fascist terms, blaming suffering on dark skinned foreigners and trans people, but the Democrats never acknowledge the basic truth. Life in the US, for many working people, teeters on the edge of a self-inflicted gunshot to the skull. On the deepest level, Trump is more honest than most all Democrats.
Some of us think of racism as a terminal, irredeemable affliction. I have an anecdote to address that idea:
In the early nineties, I worked in a group home for teens in Hayward, California. One day I did an intake on a kid I will call Tom. Tom, a white kid, began by telling me his most essential value: “I am hecka racial and if you make me live with a bunch of n*s, I am going to run away.”
Well, Tom was true to his word – he ran away that night, but he didn’t run alone. He ran off with Tony, one of our most defiant residents. The Police found Tom and Tony walking together in downtown Hayward a few days later, and brought them back. We had provided a description – a small, skinny blond kid with a tattoo of a snake winding around his wrist and a heavy set Black teen with low slung pants hanging below his boxers in the style of that era. Tom informed me brashly that he and Tony were “brothers” and that, therefore, he was no longer ‘racial.’ Tom said that Tony had told him just how badly “this place” sucked, and that he and Tony would run again. Both wound up in different programs, and I hadn’t really even thought about them until now. The point is childishly obvious. Racism, for most bigots, hangs by an ephemeral thread.
Let me restate my points thus far:
1) Racism is a place holder for the things working people really want – to be given human rights – housing, nutritious food, medical care, decent wages, security and free time.
2) The Democratic Party of college educated, comfortable suburbanites is as dead as any skunk crossing I – 95 in rush hour.
3) If progressives want to have a meaningful voice they have to migrate to the place inhabited by the working class and join forces with poor and working people.
4) The working class – much of it – can be found at the so called GOP.
5) The GOP/fascist party is an echo chamber with no access to nuance, or basic reality
Therefore????
It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that fighting fascism is contingent on a massive influx of progressive voices joining the GOP. After all, the GOP, like the Democratic Party, is owned, shaped and exploited by corporate power. If progressives gained no traction in the Democratic Party, why would they be heard in the Republican/fascist Party?
That question has no good answer – we are tossing a hail Mary – but the Republican Party has just undergone a hostile takeover from without. The neocons gave way to the fascist zombies. The idea that the “establishment” is dirty, vile and profane has been stolen from the left. We have, in some vague form, a rhetorical precedent to exploit. This was never the case inside the dead and departed Democratic Party. The Republican/fascists have torn the wrapper off of America’s secret. Those in power are indeed scoundrels and murderers, but not for allowing a few victimized asylum seekers to sneak in, but for pouring a fortune into weapons, fossil fuels and political lobbying. In the process, the elites have robbed working people to the point of suicidal despair.
Allow me to provide a caveat to my argument that racists – in droves – are eagerly waiting to be humanized, before we go further. The US is a racist nation with more racist politicians dog whistling for white votes than fish in the ocean (these days), but institutional racism and human hearts are not inevitably in sync. The racism that thrives in the human heart needs to be watered by bigoted, fear mongering media like FOX and Newsmax. These propaganda juggernauts have become the driving force of Republican fascism, and they have the ear of the working class. You might argue that the left needs its own counterattacking media sphere, but corporate money will always prevent rational ideas from being platformed on anything larger than “The Young Turks.”.
I am arguing that the most crucial task of a progressive coalition – as we reach the juncture where fascism, the climate apocalypse and nuclear war merge into a sort of narrative certainty – is to go into the mosh pit of fascism and speak to “Zombies” as if they were human beings.
Now it is time to disrupt the Republican echo chamber. Trump and his billionaire pals talk a populist anti-corporate line – Trump accused Hillary Clinton (rightly so) of being a Wall Street stooge, and the Republican choir nodded along. So let us expand the choir – imagine the Republican ranks swollen with me and you. Envision union members, communists, social democrats, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Chris Hedges and tens of millions more of us all suddenly becoming registered Republicans. We need people – passionate Republicans, of course – who can elaborate in detail about what it means to be anti-corporate, anti-establishment and opposed to the deep state. Who is putting flesh on the bones of the concept of “the deep state?” Who tells the zombified masses being held hostage in the MAGA Empire that Exxon, Tesla, Amazon, The Heritage Foundation, The New York Times, Facebook, RTX Corporation, FOX News and CNN all sit at the table of the deep state?
Imagine MAGA candidates running in Republican primaries against candidates vowing to fight for a $25 dollar minimum wage. These same anti-MAGA radical Republicans will promise a Draconian reduction in military spending, and the end to corporate campaign lobbying and spending – and how about a fierce vow to pass anti-trust legislation, and universal healthcare. We have always had a one party system – the Dog-on-a-Leash Corporate Party – but now we can have an eclectic party that questions political obedience. We will have a one party system with the complex discourse forbidden in our alleged (now rotten) two party system to date. After all, what the fuck is Trump but a symbol of disobedience – even if Trump’s disobedience is empty and merely a ruse to hide his slavish corporate fidelity.
The position we newly radicalized “Republicans” take will have to be simple, direct and focused on working class aspirations. Do we define disobedience as being nothing more than being a greedy, crass asshole, or does disobedience mean civil disobedience, with the aim of arresting and jailing those who commit environmental crimes, and extort the working class?
I am Phil Wilson and I am running for a senate seat in Massachusetts on the “Republican” ticket with the following platform – a $35 dollar minimum wage, six weeks paid vacation, universal health care, a deal with China to import low cost EV’s to be offered to working families at reduced prices via subsidies. Who will pay for it? The savings from all the bombs, drones and planes that won’t be sent to Israel and Ukraine will be given to working people. Okay, I am not cut out for the senate, but someone else will do it and I’ll knock on doors. Picture every blue state without a single Democratic official, but with “red” replacements – in the rather forgotten shade of red that terrified Joe McCarthy 75 years ago.
The “Republican” candidate that I’ll be supporting will also be introducing the idea of replacing the senate altogether with a “citizen’s assembly.” This would put decision making in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. It ought to play well on the populist right who – now that everyone is a Republican – will be forced to confront life outside of the Trumpian vacuum.
If history is a guide, being anti-capitalist inside of a fascist party will be extremely dangerous. Ask Ernst Rohm what happened to the Nazis who wanted to carry out a socialist revolution. But Rohm’s SA had a confused identity, muddied with all the eugenic nonsense that percolated in every faction of the Nazi movement. As a professional thug specializing in street violence, Rohm had no useful role to play once the Nazis came to power. It may be a stretch to compare the Nazi SA to the US progressive movement, but history provides an imperfect roadmap for political strategy. The radical faction of the Republican Party will have to do what a limited thinker like Ernst Rohm could not do – engage the erstwhile fascist masses in a peaceful, civil dialogue about populism, capitalism and the power of the working class.
Phil Wilson also writes at Nobody’s Voice.
For more on this topic, consider Lonnie Ray Atkinson’s series, Don’t Think of a Republican: : How I Won A Republican Primary As A Lefty Progressive And You Can Too.
Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker and union member. His writing has been published in ZNetwork.org, Current Affairs, Counterpunch, Resilience, Mother Pelican, Common Dreams, The Hampshire Gazette, The Common Ground Review, The Future Fire and other publications. Phil's writings are posted regularly at Nobody's Voice https://philmeow.substack.com/
Don’t Follow Sanders Back into the Democratic Party
Sanders is a carnival barker at the graveyard of social movements. He’s spent years cheerleading for Biden — what good is his recent criticism?
Nathaniel Flakin and Otto Fors
Sanders is a carnival barker at the graveyard of social movements. He’s spent years cheerleading for Biden — what good is his recent criticism?
Nathaniel Flakin and Otto Fors
November 15, 2024
LEFT VOICE
Photo: Jonathan Ernst
The day after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders put out a withering statement placing the blame for that loss squarely on the Democratic Party:
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.
He asks if “the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” will ever “understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing.” He wonders if they will take on the “increasingly powerful Oligarchy,” concluding “Probably not.” He finally announces that “very serious discussions” will take place, and ends with an open-ended: “Stay tuned.”
This is the Bernie Sanders people remember from his 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns, who mobilized millions of young people disaffected by the misery wrought by decades of neoliberalism. His language will resonate with the millions of people who did not vote for Harris, and the millions more who cast a ballot while holding their noses, because she ran a campaign in defense of the status quo.
Yet does Sanders think we can just forget the last four years, and everything he said until the day after the election?
Sanders: Biden and the Democrats’ Most Enthusiastic Cheerleader
Just a few months ago, after Biden’s catastrophic performance at the presidential debate, Sanders published a full-throated endorsement of Biden, calling him “the most effective president in the modern history of our country.” Sanders called on Democrats to “stop the bickering and nit-picking” and rally behind their candidate.
Was this just a momentary slip up in the final stretch of a campaign, when the Vermont senator was terrified by the prospect of a Trump presidency? Far from it: Sanders has been an integral part of the Biden administration, first as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, then as chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Every time Biden and the Democrats threw workers and the oppressed under the bus, Sanders was there putting his leftist rubber stamp on Biden’s policies. He wrote no scathing rebukes when the Biden administration ran to Trump’s right on immigration, abandoned demands like a $15 minimum wage, ramped up fossil fuel production, and voted to break the railway strike. In fact, Sanders, with his reputation for saying it like it is, repeatedly lies about the president’s supposedly pro-labor record, claiming that “Biden wants to make it easier for workers to form unions.”
But that’s not all: Sanders, along with other progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, was a Biden dead-ender, standing with him even as more and more Democrats called on him to step down. When Biden finally left the stage, Sanders praised him as “the most pro-working class president in modern American history.”
When Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, she cozied up to billionaires and made clear that she lacked even Biden’s purely rhetorical commitment to the labor movement. Yet Sanders remained a loyal cheerleader.
In a delusional search for votes from “moderate” Republicans, Harris began campaigning with the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Her father Dick Cheney was the principal architect of the Iraq War, a cynical intriguer whose company was raking in billions from forever wars that killed millions of people. The Cheneys might be the most bloodthirsty war hawks in the rogue’s gallery of U.S. imperialism. And Sanders? He stood with the war hawk — “I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy,” allowing Donald Trump, a first-rate imperialist, to present himself as an anti-war candidate.
The Democrats Have Never Been on Our Side
The Intercept has claimed that “Bernie would have won,” given his “credibility” from “spending decades consistently fighting doggedly for the working class.” This is, unfortunately, pure amnesia, as Sanders spent the last four years defending an administration attacking the working class. And he has been plainly dishonest. Was Biden a champion of the working class, as Sanders claimed just half a year ago? Or did the Democrats abandon workers, as Sanders says now?
The Democratic Party has always been a party of the bourgeoisie, and Sanders has been part of it for almost 50 years, even while formally an independent. Despite his left-wing credentials, he has a long track record of supporting almost every U.S. imperialist intervention, while voting for trillions of dollars for weapons. Sanders is nothing but a social democratic fig leaf for a capitalist political machine. He is a carnival barker at the entrance to the graveyard of social movements.
You might also be interested in: Trump is President. Which Way Forward for the Labor Movement?
The tragedy of Sanders campaigns is that he indeed inspired millions of working-class and young people with progressive demands — and then led them into a party that could only betray them. We see Sanders channeling the movement for Palestine into working with the imperialist state as well. Across the country, leftists are rallying Democrats to support Sanders’s arms embargo measure — as if the institutions of the imperialist state could deliver an end to the genocide in Gaza. This is just a microcosm of Sanders’s role in the Democratic party, and how he works to keep outrage from developing into a serious challenge to the system.
Given the astounding failure of the Democratic Party (it’s actually kind of impressive that they managed to convince millions of workers that Donald Trump was less hostile to working people!), huge swaths of people realize we need a political alternative. Unfortunately, many will follow Sanders’s advice, and continue to try to change a party run by billionaires.
It’s not that Democrats lost their connection to working-class voters — the Democrats have never been on our side. Even in the supposed glory days of FDR, the Democratic Party was trying to save capitalism. Sanders, as a more or less official democrat, is part of the problem — even if he founded his own party, it would be a party loyal to U.S. imperialism. Workers in the United States need our own party — one completely independent of billionaires, war hawks, and all their political hacks.
Nathaniel Flakin
Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.
Instagram
Otto Fors
Otto is a college professor in the New York area.
The day after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders put out a withering statement placing the blame for that loss squarely on the Democratic Party:
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.
He asks if “the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” will ever “understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing.” He wonders if they will take on the “increasingly powerful Oligarchy,” concluding “Probably not.” He finally announces that “very serious discussions” will take place, and ends with an open-ended: “Stay tuned.”
This is the Bernie Sanders people remember from his 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns, who mobilized millions of young people disaffected by the misery wrought by decades of neoliberalism. His language will resonate with the millions of people who did not vote for Harris, and the millions more who cast a ballot while holding their noses, because she ran a campaign in defense of the status quo.
Yet does Sanders think we can just forget the last four years, and everything he said until the day after the election?
Sanders: Biden and the Democrats’ Most Enthusiastic Cheerleader
Just a few months ago, after Biden’s catastrophic performance at the presidential debate, Sanders published a full-throated endorsement of Biden, calling him “the most effective president in the modern history of our country.” Sanders called on Democrats to “stop the bickering and nit-picking” and rally behind their candidate.
Was this just a momentary slip up in the final stretch of a campaign, when the Vermont senator was terrified by the prospect of a Trump presidency? Far from it: Sanders has been an integral part of the Biden administration, first as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, then as chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Every time Biden and the Democrats threw workers and the oppressed under the bus, Sanders was there putting his leftist rubber stamp on Biden’s policies. He wrote no scathing rebukes when the Biden administration ran to Trump’s right on immigration, abandoned demands like a $15 minimum wage, ramped up fossil fuel production, and voted to break the railway strike. In fact, Sanders, with his reputation for saying it like it is, repeatedly lies about the president’s supposedly pro-labor record, claiming that “Biden wants to make it easier for workers to form unions.”
But that’s not all: Sanders, along with other progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, was a Biden dead-ender, standing with him even as more and more Democrats called on him to step down. When Biden finally left the stage, Sanders praised him as “the most pro-working class president in modern American history.”
When Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, she cozied up to billionaires and made clear that she lacked even Biden’s purely rhetorical commitment to the labor movement. Yet Sanders remained a loyal cheerleader.
In a delusional search for votes from “moderate” Republicans, Harris began campaigning with the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Her father Dick Cheney was the principal architect of the Iraq War, a cynical intriguer whose company was raking in billions from forever wars that killed millions of people. The Cheneys might be the most bloodthirsty war hawks in the rogue’s gallery of U.S. imperialism. And Sanders? He stood with the war hawk — “I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy,” allowing Donald Trump, a first-rate imperialist, to present himself as an anti-war candidate.
The Democrats Have Never Been on Our Side
The Intercept has claimed that “Bernie would have won,” given his “credibility” from “spending decades consistently fighting doggedly for the working class.” This is, unfortunately, pure amnesia, as Sanders spent the last four years defending an administration attacking the working class. And he has been plainly dishonest. Was Biden a champion of the working class, as Sanders claimed just half a year ago? Or did the Democrats abandon workers, as Sanders says now?
The Democratic Party has always been a party of the bourgeoisie, and Sanders has been part of it for almost 50 years, even while formally an independent. Despite his left-wing credentials, he has a long track record of supporting almost every U.S. imperialist intervention, while voting for trillions of dollars for weapons. Sanders is nothing but a social democratic fig leaf for a capitalist political machine. He is a carnival barker at the entrance to the graveyard of social movements.
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The tragedy of Sanders campaigns is that he indeed inspired millions of working-class and young people with progressive demands — and then led them into a party that could only betray them. We see Sanders channeling the movement for Palestine into working with the imperialist state as well. Across the country, leftists are rallying Democrats to support Sanders’s arms embargo measure — as if the institutions of the imperialist state could deliver an end to the genocide in Gaza. This is just a microcosm of Sanders’s role in the Democratic party, and how he works to keep outrage from developing into a serious challenge to the system.
Given the astounding failure of the Democratic Party (it’s actually kind of impressive that they managed to convince millions of workers that Donald Trump was less hostile to working people!), huge swaths of people realize we need a political alternative. Unfortunately, many will follow Sanders’s advice, and continue to try to change a party run by billionaires.
It’s not that Democrats lost their connection to working-class voters — the Democrats have never been on our side. Even in the supposed glory days of FDR, the Democratic Party was trying to save capitalism. Sanders, as a more or less official democrat, is part of the problem — even if he founded his own party, it would be a party loyal to U.S. imperialism. Workers in the United States need our own party — one completely independent of billionaires, war hawks, and all their political hacks.
Nathaniel Flakin
Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.
Otto Fors
Otto is a college professor in the New York area.
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