Is there an effort to take over the Democratic Party by someone outside of our Party?

[Ken Burch]

122. For whatever it's worth, I've never alerted on any of your posts.

I don't think you SHOULD be censored. While we disagree, you've said nothing that to my mind deserves censure.

What I'm saying is that the changes we should make as a party are not about Bernie, or Hillary, or any individual.

They are about a small number of common sense realizations and ideas.

All of us here, I think start from the realization that women, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants and religious minorities are in danger, that there is a climate of hatred rising all through this country and that we need to stand with them and with each other against all forms of repression and persecution. We are right to center that.

But we ALSO need to acknowledge that a lot of people, of ALL races, genders, orientations, identities, got the shaft in a massive way with the Reagan and Bush economic changes(none of which were necessary to the achievement of any greater good), and that we, as a party, have a special obligation to reach out to and heal the wounds of those who were the victims of those changes.

We can't recreate the exact way things were in the industrial areas of this country, but we, as a party, need to intervene to at least give those who were cast aside, those who were thrown out in the cold, those who were treated as if all they had done in the workplace was of no value, and create something that brings them back in and restores, to as great a degree as possible, what was taken from them.

We will need to be open to intervention in the economy, to support for efforts to humanize the economy from the bottom up, and even to take some aspects of the economic structure out of the short-term-profit-for-the-few-at-all-costs.


And by that I mean restore it in the economic and human dignity sense, and, despite the myths, not in any sense at all what was changed by the end of Jim Crow.

There were two backlashes that happened in this country in the second half of the twentieth century and the early part of this century:

1) A white male backlash, on both the grassroots AND institutional levels, against the social gains made by those not white and male;

2) A corporate backlash against the relatively modest gains made by working people as a result of the rise of the labor movement, in which the wealthy manipulated and deliberately inflamed the first backlash to prevent their victims from uniting against them.



What OUR task is as Democrats is to be the party that fights BOTH backlashes, that rejects the idea that those not white and male should have to defer to those who are, AND also the idea that those not lucky enough to be wealthy should live at the mercy of those who are.

This doesn't mean assuming that both groups of backlash victims suffered equally-it means that there can be alliances between both groups on issues of common interests, and coalition between both groups in which each would mutually support the other groups particular causes.

If we can reshape the party in this way, we can create a long-term alliance of the many against the few.

And if you don't like Bernie, it can be done without him.

We can come together and do it ourselves, from below.