We can rebuild the Mass. (and US) left by fighting for democracy, human rights, environmental restoration, peace, and bread-and-butter economic guarantees for working people
In the first installment of this trilogy of columns on what I think the Massachusetts and US left can do to push back against the Trump administration, I called for readers to “Stay Calm And Think” to try to analyze our way out from under the vast amounts of propaganda flying at us from every point on the political compass. In the second installment, “Propaganda By Democrats Is Still Propaganda,” I focused on a very concrete example of how misinformation isn’t just being peddled by the Republicans in this period, but most definitely by the Democrats as well. All to set up this third column—in which I give my view on how the left might effectively fight the right after taking some time (but not too long) to analyze our predicament with the best and most accurate information we can find.
And why did I think it was important to discuss Democratic propaganda at some length before making concrete suggestions for a left political strategy? Because I needed to disabuse people of the idea that the Democratic Party is an even slightly left-wing political organization when looked at top to bottom … or that its leaders have any plans to “resist” Trump at present. They do not.
By global standards, the Dems at the federal level are a center-right party. And global standards are also historical standards. Because historically, the main thing that determines whether a political party or movement is left, right, or center is its attitude toward the working class (including much of what Americans consider the middle class) and the ruling or (more specifically) owning class. An organization that consistently represents the interests of working people is left wing. One that consistently represents the interests of the much smaller percentage of the population that owns giant corporations and controls great wealth is right wing. And one that tries to play with both sides is centrist.
Yet it’s absolutely the case that many, perhaps most, individual Democrats on the ground have views that are solidly on the political left in the classic sense I just outlined. Hence the party being center-right given the leftward pull of its grassroots. That it is not the center-left party it once was is a testament to the strength of monied interests that currently dominate it and the weakness of the American labor movement, sadly. By the same token, many Republicans clearly have views on the political right. Hence that party being just plain right with extremist elements trying, with obvious success, to pull it over to the hard right.
For all that, the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties are consistently representing the interests of the owning class—the rich—at this point. So, however you want to slice it, both parties are on the political right at the federal level.
If working people want to know why things just seem to keep getting worse for us no matter which party is in power, well, that’s why. The Democrats being somewhat left wing at lower levels of government like the city of Boston and the commonwealth of Massachusetts doesn’t make up for that fact.
What do the rich and powerful want? More money and more power. What party represents them? Both major parties. Which party is worse for working people? Depends on how closely you care to look.
As a socialist to the left of the Democrats, I’ve been in the camp that believes that the big parties are two sides of the same corrupt coin since I was a teenager in the mid-1980s. Naturally, I tend to have more agreement with Dems than the Republicans. But since both parties are big tents, my agreement is with grassroots Democrats at the local and state level far more than leading Dems at the national level. Because the more powerful individual Democrats become, the more they are in thrall to the rich and powerful. And the more their politics become the antithesis of mine. As a working person, my politics are the politics of working people: the politics of the left.
Thus, if you ask me what the, and let’s be real here, remnant, barely existent left wing needs to do to fight the right in this country, my answer must be to rebuild an American left.
Obviously, lots of people have been talking about doing that since I was a kid in the 1970s. Which, not at all coincidentally, is the last time the Democrats were anything like what the rest of the world calls a social democratic party. That is, a very incrementalist but very recognizably left party that put the interests of working people high on the list of its core priorities (and, sure, did a bunch of bad things I won’t dwell on here).
But resurgent Republicans took back the White House and Congress in 1981 and the Democrats began accelerating their drive to imitate the very corporate “new” Repubs (which actually began under neoliberal Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1976) as a road back to power. So when I became a socialist in 1985 at 18 years old, I was surrounded by people who were talking about rebuilding what had once been a fractious and factionalized but sometimes strong American left. A left based in huge labor unions with their own relatively independent power base capable of pushing the Democrats to better serve working families.
What the American left at its several heights never really had over the course of trade union ascendancy between roughly the 1880s and the 1970s was a large, independent “party of labor” like most other countries eventually got. So, of course, many of us on the left worked on trying to build such a party as a way to build the left. I myself worked with the proto-Green Party (which had a “Left Greens” wing I was part of) in the late 1980s and the Labor Party in the late 1990s and early 2000s for exactly that reason. Even though my politics have always hovered around the libertarian, anti-parliamentary, wing of socialism. Because I believe individual liberty is as important as a more cooperative economy and I’m unwilling to settle for one without the other. And I think of governments and political parties as necessary evils on a planet with billions of people and a nation with hundreds of millions.
But the left is so far gone that we can’t start with party building—or taking over the Democrats, for those so inclined—we have to start a step back with network building and mobilization.
To unite disparate political fragments and mobilize larger and larger numbers of people to take action toward common political goals, we need a fairly small number of such goals. Because the more goals we shoot for, the less people will be willing to work together, and the less political impact the left can have.
And we have to remember a significant problem facing any incipient left movement in the US: a growing number of working people have moved from voting Democratic to voting Republican since the 1970s, with a notable bump in last November’s contest. Plus a hell of a lot of people across the political spectrum are independents like me, as we’re simply blocked from forming new major parties by the dominant parties.
So to build a majoritarian left capable of changing local, state, and national politics, we have to pull working people back from the right—as well as independents inclined to work with us.
We can’t do that with a 50-point program. And we certainly can’t insist that every working person agree on every point on the long political laundry lists that many left factions infamously compile. It hasn’t worked in the 40 years I’ve been on the socialist left and I do not believe it will work now.
Which is why I think a new left that is trying to network a broad array of individuals and organizations together into one big, very horizontal, political front needs a minimum program based on the big universal demands that defined successful left movements of the past.
To my mind, this is the minimum program: We fight for democracy, human rights, environmental restoration, peace, and key bread-and-butter economic guarantees, including decent food, housing, jobs, transportation, education, healthcare, retirement, energy, and telecom for all.
Supporters will declare that any individual or organization that agrees with those common goals is on the left. Anyone can join by simply saying they’re joining and can participate by participating. Successful tactics will be developed from actions that have positive effect toward the stated goals and spread by constant internal and external communication—including, I hope, a revived independent press.
The particulars must always be up for discussion and debate, if our core shared value is democracy, but agreement on such a program lays the groundwork for the necessary networking and mobilization required for bigger, broader left organizing.
It allows for coalitions between many factions—and there will be many. And it most definitely allows the resulting new left to pull working people away from the right. Because it touches on all the things that matter most to them. The very things that Democratic Party leadership almost completely ignored in their catastrophically awful presidential campaign last year.
I am by no means claiming to be discovering fire here. Everything I’m proposing has been proposed before over the last couple of centuries—and in some cases acted upon successfully. So I think the minimum program strategy is worth a try. Hyper-fragmentation has been disastrous for the left. So let’s try uniting around what we can agree on and simply agree to disagree on everything else, settling those disagreements as best we can as we move forward. That’s politics, after all. And that’s democracy.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
