Posted to OpEdNews
2/03/2016
By Scott McLarty
Mr. McLarty discusses the Democratic Race between Clinton and Sanders, and reaches the conclusion that the likely candidate will be Clinton.
Will the Sanders insurgency grow or will everything snap back to business as usual in the coming months? What will Bernie Sanders’ supporters do if the Clinton Juggernaut crushes him between now and mid summer? They’ll be faced with a choice: migrate over to the Clinton camp or find a way to keep alive the political revolution that Mr. Sanders claims to represent throughout the rest of 2016 and thereafter. If Mr. Sanders is bounced from the race, all the best things he stands for will be banished from public discussion in the contest between Ms. Clinton and the Republican nominee.
Therefore, he discusses a Post-Bernie Contingency, then goes on to discuss other political parties besides the Democrats and Republicans.
Political revolution requires changing the landscape so that the field isn’t forever limited to the two parties of war and Wall Street. It means banishing the fantasy that one of the two parties can be rehabilitated if we just vote for the right Democrat.
Alternative, Independent, Permanent
One hundred years ago, Eugene Debs and his fellow socialists understood that the crises of the time demanded an independent movement with a strong electoral component. The parties they organized had enormous influence, even though they didn’t survive laws enacted by D and R legislators to weaken alternative parties and Cold War hostility towards the left.
The New Deal was based on ideas advocated decades earlier by socialists and others outside the two-party establishment. President Roosevelt knew he had to enact them during the Depression or he’d see a mass exodus from the Democratic Party.
The legacy of alternative parties in the U.S. includes abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the eight-hour workday, workers’ benefits, public schools, unemployment compensation, the minimum wage, child labor laws, direct election of senators, and programs like Social Security and Medicare. All of these were introduced by alternative parties and adopted decades later by one or both of the major parties.
The virtual disappearance of such ideas in the last few generations is one of the great unmentioned reasons for the triumph of the right wing in U.S. politics.
When the two corporate-money parties were left alone on the field to be each other’s sole competition, it was inevitable that they’d slide to the right. While sharp differences exist between Ds and Rs, their leaders tend to agree on premises: privatization and “free trade” globalization are good for America; no health-care reform is permissable unless insurance companies help draft the legislation; the U.S. may attack any country at will, even in the absence of provocation; too-big-to-fail banks must never suffer punishment for their criminal recklessness, or even face adequate restraints.
Genuine systematic change is always called unrealistic and too radical to be taken seriously, as the political mainstream’s critical onslaught against Bernie Sanders proves. The history of progress in the cause of justice and freedom in the U.S. is the history of parties whose ideas were both marginal and indispensible.
An effective alternative party is one that builds its base of support among those who’ve seen their ideals betrayed and rejected by the two major parties, by those who’ve realized that neither of the two big parties serve their needs, and by those whose alienation from the two parties has kept them away from voting booths. It engages working people and people of color in a way that enables them to represent their own interests and encourages their leadership within the party. It runs candidates at all levels, from school board to city hall to statehouse to Congress to the White House.
Alt-party presidential candidates use their campaigns to carry the banner for popular movements and for state and local candidates. Green Party nominees since Ralph Nader in 2000 have all promoted down-ticket Green candidates (some of whom have won) and helped state parties achieve ballot status. In 2012, Jill Stein’s campaign assisted Green ballot-access efforts in enough states (37 including the District of Columbia) to place her name in front of 82% of voters in the November election.
Green, Libertarian, and other alt-party contenders have overcome the prohibitively difficult ballot-access requirements designed by D and R legislators to privilege their own candidates and hinder others. Voting for an alt-party presidential nominee pushes the party forward regardless of his or her chances of winning the White House.
There’s no greater evidence of panic among establishment Dem politicians and pundits about Bernie Sanders than their reactions to his call for Medicare For All (single-payer national health care). Paul Krugman in The New York Times upbraids those who support single-payer, while Hillary and Chelsea Clinton spout misinformation about it.(2)
The Green Party and its national candidates support Medicare For All and will continue to do so long after the summer conventions and Election Day. The demand for national health care is too important to let die after July 2016. We’ll only win it with a persistent citizens’ movement combined with the election of Congress members willing to vote for it. Democrats in Congress, even those who say they support it, have little motivation to enact Medicare For All as long as Republicans are their only competition during election years.
The two major parties and their One Percent sponsors fear, more than anything else, permanent and well-organized alt-party competition. They have nightmares about finding new parties seated in legislatures.
Read the full article here.
Scott McLarty has served as media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States and for the DC Statehood Green Party. He has contributed tomany progressives sites, and resides in Washington DC.
We are building a coalition of those who understand the imperative of Constitutional rule of law.
Assuming Clinton wins the nomination, the GP vote will certainly be bolstered by Sanders supporters this year. Still, in hindsight it appears as if an opportunity may have been missed. Rather than the one-sided portrayal of Sanders as a “sheepdog”, the GP has an org should have taken a more nuanced approach to the success of the Sanders campaign. There should have been a call for active Greens to attend Sanders meetings and infiltrate the Sanders campaign in a manner similar to how Socialist Alternative has proceeded. Leading Greens ought to be calling for Sanders to leave the DP and run as a Green…..this option ought to be kept open (even if Sanders refuses to consider it) all the way to the convention. The point is not necessarily to draft Sanders, but to make it clear to people that Bernie’s Dem-only strategy is fatally flawed.
What we need is a broad based 3rd party that works in the interest of the 99% and which is explicitly democratic-socialist and anti-imperialist in terms of ideology. The GP as it is has the potential to be the base of such a party, but to make it happen there needs to be outreach not only to Sanders supporters, but also to BLM activists and anti-imperialist activists at its next national convention.
Insofar as we critique Sanders, the basis of our critique should the need for an honest assessment of imperialism and a more courageous stand against it. And how anyone running for the DP nomination is basically gagged from calling this imperialism out.
It is true, of course, that the American GP’s anti-imperialist credentials happen to be quite strong. But there is also an argument to be made that allying ourselves with the “Green” movement internationally is to some extent a problem in this respect, since so many “Green” parties involved seem to be so cozy with NATO, the World Bank, and other instruments of either financial or military imperialism. Maybe young people, both here and around, would take the GP more seriously if it renamed itself as a Left Party, or Justice Party, or Socialist Party, and explicitly allied itself with working class anti-imperialist struggle on an international level.