Red Star: The lesser weevils

“We’re capitalists,” Nancy Pelosi told a young voter at a town hall last year, to the jeers of the thirteen million people who voted for a socialist in the 2016 primaries. Pelosi’s statement, the election of Tom Perez as DNC Chair and the Democrats’ strategy of resistance by surrender show one painful truth: the party will not and cannot save us.

Whether refusing to support Democratic Socialists, passing a disastrousHeritage Foundation white paperfor a health program, bombing seven countries or passing a stimulustoo small by half, the Democrats have proven uniquely incompetent, both in governmentand resistance. Democrats have chosen center-right market pathseven when their base demanded social democratic reform. They rely on fear of the Republicans — see the Alabama Senate race where a cardboard cutout narrowly defeated a gun-totingpedophile — to win elections. There are two reasons for this: an anti-democratic party structure and class interests.

With party leadership agitating for a new Cold Warbecause thirteen dudes destroyed democracy by convincing lifelong Fox News viewers that Hillary was bad, the Democrats are busy blowing the political opportunity of a generation. Just like they did in 2009–2010. Instead of digging in on DACA and the Wall, they offered Trump a deal, which he rejected, because the Republican party knows how to get its base stoked. The fate of those kids now lies in the courts. Pussy hats and pablum are all the Democrats have left. They offer tiny subsidies and tax tweaks to fight historic income inequality and apocalyptic warming. The major resistance victories came from grassroots organizing (airports, ACA, anti-racist activism) while all its defeats (taxes, immigration, refugees round two, net neutrality) happened when democrats failed to offer a positive vision or even the sort of determined resistance that galvanizes people.

There’s real energy on the left. It will go nowhere if it’s channeled into a party where all the money, the posts and the power are controlled by an unelected clique of operatives and officials no more than a few thousand strong. The Democrats are undemocratic. You can’t vote for a party leader, can’t join a mass organization or read a formal party magazine, the way you can in a socialist party. Power flows from the donors, and the democrats will do nothing to offend them, hence the lack of social democratic reforms in their platforms, the bland battalions of John Ossoffs and the fetishism for an army beyond public input.

These arrogant cowards even rehabilitated the vilest mass murderer of the 21st century, George W. Bush.

Vote, I guess, it takes five minutes. Maybe campaign for some Social Democrats. But to defeat the center-right, we must break their game. Join unions, organize reading circles, build a political life that is social, interpersonal and radical. Protest, occupy, give direct mutual aid, join a socialistparty, demand a good wage. Don’t put your faith in the Democrats, they don’t have faith in you. The people will solve this crisis. The Democrats will continue their death march, chewing through a whole society, heedless of the consequences.

Voting blue is no solution; let’s build a revolution.