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Please let me preface this by saying that I am by no means a political expert, long-time activist, or historian. I'm just a guy, who was inspired by Bernie this primary to join my local DSA and get involved. I am just now learning about how to be a more involved citizen, at least more involved than reading the news, voting, and posting about it online. It's clear, however, from the incredibly disappointing way that the Bernie Sanders campaign has been treated and fared in the past two election cycles since the 2016 primaries, that the Democratic Party is virulently opposed to any progressive changes to the status quo. It does not bear repeating that the Democratic Party, and the Republican party, act in ways that are actively inimical to the cause of progress. My biggest concern is to quickly turn things around in time to avert a 3-4 C increase in global average temperatures by the end of the century. We have precious little time to act if we want to survive this century with civilization intact. That being said, Bernie has done a great deal to popularize certain ideas, such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, get a generation of young activists trained in campaigning, volunteering, and electoral work, and set in motion the seeds of a real leftist movement in America by making "democratic socialism" a phrase that is beginning to become known. This is cause for optimism! My point in this thread is to take a sober assessment of what a left movement is facing if it wants to right the ship before the iceberg hits, and to look at what obstacles it faces. Currently, the biggest obstacle is the intransigence of the American electoral system. We've seen the Democratic party lean hard against Bernie in this primary, and we've seen how blatantly the Republican party can sabotage voter turnout through gerrymandering and closing of voting locations. So to that end, I want to ask: what is the best option to move forward? Let's not poo poo up the thread by sick burns like "embrace death". I'll put out a few in the interest of discussion. Use downballot and local races to pull the Democratic Party left The "Tea Party" option. Many progressive and left-wing organizations like the DSA are working on grassroots local activism to get progressives to win in smaller, winnable races. Take for example, the Jessica Scarane Senate campaign. The theory behind this is that we can more easily run for and replace smaller local elections where the margin of victory is easier to attain, then leverage that into changing the Democratic Party en masse once we've built up enough of a consensus within the party. Advantages: - Name recognition and established power: a leftist movement that inherits the Democratic party will supplant all of the current networks and systems that the Democratic Party already has in place. Disadvantages: - Slow: Bad things are happening to people right now because of the centrist Democrats and the Republicans. We need to enact changes as soon as possible to avert human extinction-level climate change - Establishment resistance: The Democratic Party has demonstrated with Bernie's campaign that it will muster everything it can to crush progressive insurgents within the party Organize and create a leftist third party There's reason to believe that the youth turnout that Sanders was counting on to win him the primary did not materialize because the 35 and unders - the Millennials and Gen Z - are extremely pessimistic about the chances of a non-establishment figure being able to win against the power of the current establishment. It seems that this sentiment may have some merit to it. The theory behind this idea is that the Democratic Party is simply too decrepit and venial and corrupt to be changed through an intraparty insurgency. There is a significant number of Bernie voters who would not vote for Biden. AOC has said that in any other country, she and Joe Biden would not be in the same party. Bernie has built a significant and extensive grassroots coalition in all 50 states for his campaign. Could this be used to transition to create an entirely new, young party in the leftist mold that would turn out the youth vote? Advantages: - No compromise: No need to compromise or work within established power structures to get what we want. Why swim upstream against the Democratic establishment when we could create something new out of whole cloth? Disadvantages: - Getting on the ballot: A new party would have significant structural barriers to getting on the ballot in the first place. - First Past the Post: The first past the post system inherently guarantees that a third party would be a spoiler. Unless that third party could use the demise of another party to become one of the two parties within the FPTP system. This has happened before in American history when the Whig Party disappeared and was supplanted by the Republicans. Infiltration on two sides I haven't heard much talk about this idea, but I think it could work. Its a variant on the "Primary the Democrats from the left" idea. What if progressives ran on similar ideas - preventing climate change, jobs and medicare for all, etc. - but did not care about which party they registered as? Run for whichever party is most popular in your area, caucus with other progressives once in power. There might be some merit to this idea, see Brian Matlock, Republican Socialist. Advantages: - The Republican Party may in fact be more amenable to insurgents, and have less party discipline than the Democrats. It might be possible for progressives in already left-leaning areas to concentrate on unseating Democrat incumbents while allowing progressives in Republican areas to compete for marginal/vulnerable Republican seats by running on a left-populist agenda, like in the Rust Belt. The average voter is pretty uninvolved and pulls the lever for whichever party they have become used to seeing, without taking a deep look at particular policy positions and agendas. Disadvantages: - Same as for the first one, but swimming against the current in two different parties instead of just one Local activism, Leninist vanguard cadres Perhaps the electoral system is fundamentally broken to the core, and there's no hope in trying to achieve victories within a democratic framework. Perhaps leftists and left-leaning progressives should concentrate on working with their local communities and preparing the groundwork for a revolution. It at least helps the spirit a great deal to achieve what you can achieve on a local scale. Local bonds will also help individuals to prepare and weather some of the worst effects of climate change. Advantages: - Concrete Results: Small local victories often impact peoples' lives much more significantly. Leftists doing active work to benefit the community helps bring brand association and good will in a concrete and attainable way. - Resilience: Tight-knit communities create self-supporting networks that are critical to maintain cohesion and a semblance of normalcy and order in the event of major disasters or social collapse. - Grassroots: If a large-scale popular uprising occurs, a leftist organization that is well-networked in local communities, essentially having built a state-within-a-state, can commandeer the momentum to rise to the top. Disadvantages: - Time: The time that it takes to organize locally in this way may not be sufficient to build a large-scale movement to have the large-scale effects we need. - Fragmentation: Dispersing amidst a myriad of local activist groups makes coordination on a national scale difficult. We require national-scale mobilization to blunt climate change, and there is only so much that can be done on a municipal or state level. Anyway, those are some options I'm throwing out for now. Let's discuss the merits and disadvantages of these and any other options and ideas that you may have.
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Mar 18, 2020 19:01
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My worry is that, judging by the average time it took for various rights movements to make a real impact in American society -- the Civil Rights movement, for example, started around the 40s and only managed to get desegregation going by the late 60s -- it would take on the order of ~20 years for something like this to take hold. We might not have 20-30 years to wait, as catastrophic effects from climate change, if the insane wildfires in Australia and California are any indication, are starting to happen right now.
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Mar 19, 2020 16:38
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Silver2195 posted:I'm skeptical that what remains of democracy in the US can withstand 4 more years of Trump, though. Congress, the courts, the permanent bureaucracy, etc. have limited him to a point, but he (and other Republicans, including ones outside of Congress) is still finding new ways to do damage, including damage to the electoral system; the end result may well be a permanent Republican seizure of power. And on climate change (which matters to foreigners too!), Biden would still mostly likely be inadequate in several ways but wouldn't be actively making the problem worse to anywhere near the degree Trump is. In which case you're talking about that the only avenue left for rapid, extensive change is through revolution. Let's talk about revolutions. There have been many models for revolutions in the past, not all of them violent. I think some political scientists did a study where they found that if only at least 3% of a nation's population gets on board, revolutions tend to succeed, and nonviolent ones more fully than violent ones. Looking at what causes revolutions (again, I'm no historian or political scientist), it seems that the common themes are 1) major economic crises, 2) youthful population that is in a state of unrest, 3) a political establishment unwilling to back down, 4) incompetence in the part of the political establishment, and 5) a triggering major event. Taking an assessment of what's going on in present American society, I think we're seeing at least 3 out of the 5 preconditions. Could there be a revolution in the USA impending? If there IS going to be one in America, I would very much hope for it not to be the violent kind, as I feel that a violent revolution could easily spiral in today's contexts into the kind of incredibly destructive multi-way civil war that we saw go down in Syria. America is just too big and diverse for neat lines to form like in the first civil war - here I reference "It Could Happen Here: the Second American Civil War" podcast
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Mar 20, 2020 00:42
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