by Tommie Worrall
Less than one month remains until the 2024 primary election and the progressive political scene in this country is, to put it mildly, an utter disgrace. Would-be Marxists are being swayed by the vague and hollow promises for reform made by the status quo duo of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, while liberals and social democrats shame, slander, and cancel those of us on the left who know better than to buy into their cheap rhetoric. We are told, rightly, that many of our hard-won rights are on the line, but wrongly that they can be secured by casting our ballots for the Democratic Party.
Liberal fear-mongering would have us believe that voting for another blue candidate is the only possible way to maintain our current civil liberties and regain those which we have lost. It is implicit in this scare tactic rhetoric that the demands of social movements, such as the securing of protections for marginalised groups and the return of federal abortion rights, will be heeded, if only another democrat can win the presidency. Not only is this position erroneous, it is also dangerous: it rejects the possibility of collective action, instead depending solely on the goodwill of the principal representatives of the Democratic Party for change. This is a group which has, historically, never sided with the people uncoerced; only when the legitimacy of the Party or its executive have been up in the air has any Democrat ever genuinely endorsed reform.
When the people do organise collectively with the hope of securing rights or demanding reform, the Democratic Party panics. It cannot completely drop the progressive facade that it has so cunningly crafted for itself, but neither can it stand idly by while the masses join together to call for things it is not willing to grant: better working conditions, livable wages, investment in communities, et cetera. This would entail a moral, and, more importantly to the Democratic Party, a financial commitment to the working class; in other words, a diversion of billions of dollars from their original targets (currently, the right-wing regimes of Israel and Ukraine) to the communities at home struggling to make ends meet under the crushing weight of poverty. This would be a nightmare scenario for Democrats and Republicans alike; not only would U.S. military aid to its quasi-fascist allies cease to expand at a linear rate (thus destroying the harmonious balance of the military-industrial complex), the loss would empower the downtrodden masses whose unrelenting desperation keeps them apolitical at one end of the scale and reactionary at the other. The power balance of inequality would be completely disrupted.
The Democratic Party’s solution to this potential catastrophe has been to gradually co-opt any and all movements of mass dissent in the United States until they can be rendered impotent or be dissolved completely. Its ultimate goal is to move the peoples’ demands to the right and to replace organisation in the streets with organisation around the ballot box, substituting radical struggle for watered-down election campaigns. This was certainly the case in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. What began as a series of popular uprisings fundamentally opposed to our country’s systems of oppression (the law enforcement apparatus, structurally-embedded racism, et cetera) ended as a politically moribund crusade for the Biden campaign and cosmetic changes: corporate diversity, socially-conscious consumerism, and the like. As soon as the Democrats began openly vocalising their “support” for Black Lives Matter, it was a sure indication that the movement would no longer bear the fruits of change. Within a matter of weeks, the streets were emptied of protestors, demonstrations ceased to make headlines, and calls to replace the police with community-based organisations were relegated to comments sections on social media. Establishment co-optation had effectively put the movement down.
This sedation of the Black Lives Matter movement was not an accident of nature: its downfall can be explicitly traced back to the actions of the Democratic Party. The Democrats’ propensity for destroying social movements is something of a historical pattern; the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights movement, the Anti-War movement, the LGBTQ Rights movement…all of these movements, within their respective time periods and beyond, were, and continue to be, transformed from mass demonstrations of frustration with the system into tranquil extensions of the electoral process by none other than our bureaucrats in blue. When the American left refers to the Democratic Party as the “graveyard of social movements,” it does so knowing that this historical tradition is still alive and well with the Party’s current representatives, and that it will continue to exist if we continue to be lulled into complacency.
Rejecting the Democratic Party is thus a moral imperative for anyone who wishes to see the goals of our social movements realised before they are forever consigned to the annals of history. They are not gone yet; our demands are still ripe for acquisition, if only we are ready to reach out and grasp them. But we must do so ourselves, independent of and in opposition to the Democratic Party and the institutions of capitalism.
THE CONVERSATION PIECE 