An independent progressive movement? [View all]

[Jackpine Radical]

Offered as food for thought and discussion.

Salon / By Bill Curry comments_image 82 COMMENTS
The Democratic Party Keeps Screwing Up: Why Progressives Need to Be Independent of the Party
Progressives have no power in a corporate, focus-grouped, Wall Street-leaning party.


December 26, 2014 |


Democrats are in denial regarding the magnitude and meaning of their defeat. It is a rejection not just of current leaders but of the very business model of the modern Democratic Party: how it uses polls and focus groups to slice and dice us; how it peddles its sly, hollow message and, worst, how it sells its soul to pay for it all. Party elites hope party activists will seek to lift their moods via the cheap adrenaline high of another campaign. For once, activists may resist the urge.

The vital task for progressives isn’t reelecting Democrats but rebuilding a strong, independent progressive movement. Our history makes clear that without one, social progress in America is next to impossible. For 100 years progressive social change movements transformed relations between labor and capital, buyers and sellers, blacks and whites, men and women, our species and our planet. But in the 1970s progressives began to be coopted and progress ceased. Their virtual disappearance into the Democratic Party led to political stultification and a rollback of many of their greatest achievements.

Much is written of the rise of the right, but very little of the fall of the left. We’re apt to see the left’s decline, if we do see it, as a consequence of the right’s superior funding, organizing and messaging, of the corporate dominance of all politics, and of white backlash against government, liberalism or modernity itself.

It’s a bad analysis. The left’s fall is as much a cause as an effect of what ails us. Middle-class anger isn’t about race, taxes, social services or social change. It’s mainly about middle-class decline and public corruption. Democrats talk a lot about both problems — but if they were really trying to solve either one, we’d all know it.

The prevailing analysis fosters passivity. Whenever people speak of forces rather than choices it’s a sure sign they aren’t about to do anything. Progressives who blame their losses on globalization, white backlash or money in politics are less apt to focus on the one thing they alone control: their own choices.