Insanity is Working With Democratic Party

Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, as they say. It seems like since the late 1960s, American socialists gave up on their own relatively successful party (which was winning local/state elections and influencing the national parties) to try to work within a two-party system, and that strategy has been a massive failure. Every election, socialists try to influence the party platform and candidates, and are basically disregarded as the party picks its own candidates and ignores its own platform. For 50 years now!

This is probably one of the biggest takeaways from my most recent read, "The 'S' Word - A Short History of an American Tradition ... Socialism" by John Nichols. It's a good book that I recommend to anyone that wants a short overview of important moments in American history that were shaped by socialist ideas (sometimes those ideas were a bit ahead of their time; perhaps the better way to say is those ideas shaped American socialism?). The book covers how Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, were all influenced by socialist ideas and principles. It also is a decent short history of the Socialist Party, including the campaigns of Eugene Debs.

But the most interesting chapter to me was the last one, that talked about the socialist movement since the 1960s until today. While never a major party nationally, the Socialist Party was at its apex a very influential party that won local and state elections. In some cities, socialists were the major party, or at least the major opposition party. Socialists were often invited into Republican and Democratic administrations, as appointees or advisors. Many of the policies and programs that we know and love today - medicare, social security, five-day work week, even public water and sewer -- started as party platform demands of socialists that major party candidates adopted in order to win elections.

Unfortunately, the major parties used World War 1 (and later WW2) to stop the socialist movement. Most socialists opposed the US entering the war and spoke out strongly against it. The major parties passed laws declaring any opposition to the war as "unloyal" to the country, making it illegal with a stiff penalty of years in jail. Therefore many socialist party leaders, including presidential candidate Debs, were thrown in jail for a few years before later on having their sentences commuted. The aggressive attacks against 1st amendment speech had a chilling effect, and the party shrank. The socialist party didn't disappear because it was unpopular, it began to disappear because it was undermined by collusion between the major parties against our constitutional principles of freedom of speech. That undermining led to disagreement between factions within the socialist movement on how to best combat attacks from the major parties.

So the question is, what happened in the 1960s? There was a growing movement for the Republican party to move to the right that echoed many of the civil-war-era arguments for "states' rights". Largely the movement grew as an opposition to the expansion of civil rights, with a purposeful campaign known as the "Southern Strategy". The Republican party as we know it today -- not the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt -- was forming.

To combat that, some socialist leaders, in particular Michael Harrington (who wrote a popular book "The Other America" on poverty, which apparently influenced JFK and Johnson), decided that the best thing to do was to play electoral politics as part of the Democratic Party rather than continuing to fight on in a Socialist Party. Harrington worked with several other activists to establish what would eventually become the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which focused on putting pressure on the Democratic Party to implement policy rather than the traditional voter education goals of Socialist Party campaigns. Harrington and his activists went to the Democratic conventions to demand more socialist policy as part of the Democratic platform. They were successful getting many ideas written into the platform (at that time, the "most liberal platform in party history"), and were at first embolded by some early steps taken by Carter, but Democratic presidents have utterly failed to ever implement those socialist ideas in the Democratic platform ever since. In fact, the socialist-backed candidates were never picked, and the party instead picked pro-corporate party insiders, with candidates since Dukakis growing more and more weary of calling themselves "liberal" (we see that in today's Democratic candidates that often proudly call themselves "centrists"). With many activists moving to DSA and assisting the Democrats, the Socialist Party essentially died out nationwide (with a few holdovers here and there).

That story really stood out to me as a parallel to our recent elections. To stop Trump, Bernie and many others made the argument to hold the nose and support Democrats and vote for Clinton. Progressives were kicked out of the convention as Clinton nominated Tim Kaine, a fairly conservative Democrat, as her VP pick rather than a more progressive person like Elizabeth Warren or a socialist like Bernie. Several Bernie backers were placed on the party's platform committee earlier in the year, but Clinton-backed members defeated most proposals from the Berniecrats while the items that made it into the platform were essentially ignored by Clinton and her surrogates. Much like how in 2008 many rallied around Obama for hope and change, only to be disappointed when Obama ignored practically all of his progressive policy promises in order to implement a right-wing healthcare plan and continue much of Bush's economic and war policies.

This reaffirms my belief that attempting to work in the current money-dominated two-party system is a failed strategy for progressives and socialists. I knew that Obama and Clinton had no interest in implementing progressives policy, but I was surprised to learn it dates back much further. Progressive and socialist activists within the party have been trying to work with the Democrats for 50 years, only to watch Democrats drift further and further to the right each election. It feels insane to me to think that continuing this strategy will somehow magically work finally in 2018 or 2020, when it hasn't happened yet in 50 years.

It also confirms that third-parties can and do win; the strategy of a strong Socialist Party resisting both Republicans and Democrats has worked in the past to bring about important change. The strategy works because the major parties have to work to win the election. They have to offer better plans than you if they want to win, they cannot rest on status quo that isn't working. In a two-party system, it is too easy to be lazy and say "Well at least I'm not as bad as the other side!" and let the status quo stand, as we have seen for years now. Having third, fourth, fifth parties requires everyone to work harder, and so all Americans win with the best ideas being elected and implemented.

I view the Green Party as the spiritual successor to the Socialist Party. In fact, many Greens refer to the party as "eco-socialist", to emphasize that the Green platform is a combination of de-centralized democratic socialist economic policy with a need to practice ecological wisdom in our industries and economy (publicly-owned production that still spews out pollution is not a longer-term viable option either!). Socialists I think would find a lot in the Green platform that they would love, and probably don't even realize it! Not long ago, I had spoken with a few socialists at a rally in the early days of the Trump presidency, and asked if they'd sign to get a Green candidate on the ballot. They at first said no thanks. When I asked why, it became clear that they thought Greens weren't socialist enough for their support. As I explained the Green platform, they started to perk up, with one person saying "Oh, I didn't know that's what Greens stood for".

I think our challenge is to teach people about the history of socialism in our country - the labor movements, civil rights movement, etc. - and work to correct those misunderstandings of both socialism as a whole and the Green platform specifically. I know my goal is to help grow the Green Party into a strong champion of progressive socialist ideals in the Pittsburgh area. I think we can finish the work that Debs and others started more than 100 years ago, and work for a more just society and economy for all. I invite all others in the area to join the Green Party and help us create that vision.