Democratic political strategy
I volunteered for Bernie Sanders. His two runs for President (along with a long career) are probably as close as you can find to what a modern progressive party would look like.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00000528
He raised a lot of money, had very large rallies, and a lot of very passionate volunteers. But lost, and there’s two reasons why.
- First past the post spoiler effect - Bernie had to run as a Democrat within the Democratic Party primary system. If he had run as progressive or democratic socialist he would have split the democratic vote. In a first past the post system Duverger’s Law mathematically guarantees 2 party rule.
Any progressive alternative would split the democratic vote, and ensure that, at least for a while, the republicans would win every election. You can see on Lemmy and Reddit and all other kinds of social media the amount of anger and infighting this causes on the left. This is a strong disincentive for anyone to start an alternative party.
- The donor class - the Democratic Party is largely funded by big money donors. Big money donors have a lot of money because of how things are currently arranged. If the way the country works today has made you fabulously wealthy, even if that means a lot of people suffer, you tell yourself “they suffer because they don’t work hard like me” and want things to stay the way they are. So you donate to both parties to control them and make sure that whatever particular apple cart you’ve cornered doesn’t get overturned.
Every problem the American people face is a profit generator for some fuck face. Rent too high, some landlord is enjoying record profits. Can’t afford medicine, some pharmacy CEO is buying their third yacht. Those people have enough money to buy politicians, ads, political parties, media networks, social media companies, etc. They aren’t just going to sit back and let you fuck up their money making machine, they will deploy those assets against anyone that threatens the status quo.
Here’s a particularly egregious example coming from MSNBC during Bernie’s last run when his reforms threatened their wealth https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/chris-matthews-bernie-sanders-public-executions-949802/
So that’s what any progressive party is up against. The mathematical certainty that they would lose until they could unseat the current Democratic Party, something that would take some number of election cycles. The donor class wanting to thwart any change. And let’s say they do overcome both of those things. That party then becomes the thing the donors try to buy next. Your party starts with high minded ideals but one by one the members of your party get big paydays from the billionaires and suddenly they want to soften this reform and maybe hold off on that reform and… oh look they are holding the exact same positions as the current Democratic Party. Because those positions are the positions of the people that own the party, and they will happily buy another.
I’ve seen some interesting speculation that the Republican party’s embrace of Trump will be the death of the party once Trump passes on, and I’ve wondered what will happen. The US has always had 2 parties since the country’s conception, so I genuinely wonder if the Democratic Party will flip conservative again and either the Republicans will attack from the left as “New Republicans” or a new party will fill in the left-leaning gap they’ve left.
This makes sense at a macro scale but I simply can’t imagine a scenario at the micro scale that makes that happen. Most realistic scenario I can think of is that the Republicans fail to elect anyone (might get a seat or two still but not enough to be a viable party) for a cycle of two, the Democratic party stops trying as more career politicians move over from the Republican party and some popular Democrats splinter off to form a new party. But the things that have to happen for each of those steps to occur are pretty insurmountable.
Idk it’s an interesting thought experiment especially when trying to stay realistic and not just be a wet dream
“The progressive alternative would split the Democratic vote”
But people keep talking about electors voting for the Democrats not by choice, but because it’s the only option left of the Republicans. If there are so many people who do it (or don’t vote due to a lack of option) like people keep repeating, then removing the Democrats from the equation shouldn’t be an issue, right? Budget or not, people choose where they put a checkmark.
What I’m getting at is that I don’t think there’s as much appetite for a progressive party in the USA as some people like to believe. There’s a far right party and a conservative party and, even though nature doesn’t like a void, no one bothers actually trying to fill up the empty space on the left. Hell, Sanders and AOC keep getting elected yet even they aren’t trying to get a Progressive party started, AOC is a Democrat and Sanders is an “independent” that keeps showing up at Democrat’s events.
We have data so that we don’t have to go with our guts
You can check out the vote totals
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
I would argue the 2016 is a better reflection, in 2020 there was a sort of coordinated drop out of centrist candidates on Super Tuesday as the establishment wing of the party threw their weight behind Biden.
But in either case the answer is that the Democratic Party is basically a coalition party of centrist Dems that seem to be fine with shifting further and further to the right and more progressive voters. In 2016 it was pretty evenly split so there is appetite just not enough for a viable party.
Ok, where’s the Progressive party then? If the existing parties are leaving such a huge part of the population without a party (based on what people are saying) then it should be a guaranteed win, right? Why don’t the progressives Democrats (and left wing independents) get together and tell the rest of the Democrats to fuck off? Sanders has a ton of support, you just proved it!
