Time To End The Dysfunctional Two-Party System?
Over the course of the 117th Congress Michigan New Dem Elissa Slotkin racked up the 3rd most anti-progressive voting record of any Democrat in the House. Today she is fighting for her political life, slightly ahead of election denier Tom Barrett in a district that’s a little less red (R+2) than the district she originally won in (R+3). As you can see from this ProgressivePunch screen capture, she’s down where conservative, non-fascist, Republicans and meld with conservative Democrats. And, although she still votes extremely conservatively, yesterday Liz Cheney endorsed Slotkin, the first Democrat she has ever endorsed for Congress. The anti-Choice, anti-minimum wage corporate shill said she will travel to Michigan on Tuesday to campaign for Slotkin in person. Cheney is on the House Armed Services Committee, as are Slotkin, Stephanie Murphy, Jared Golden— as other lady hawks and conservative Democrats like Chrissy Houlahan (PA), Mikie Sherrill (NJ) and Elaine Luria (VA).
Cheney: “I’m proud to endorse Elissa Slotkin. Serving together on the Armed Services Committee, I have come to know Elissa as a good and honorable public servant who works hard for the people she represents, wants what's best for the country, and is in this for the right reasons. While Elissa and I have our policy disagreements, at a time when our nation is facing threats at home and abroad, we need serious, responsible, substantive members like Elissa in Congress. I encourage all voters in the 7th district— Republicans, Democrats, and Independents— to support her in this election.”
I’m going to guess any of the conservative Democrats (“Democrats”) would want Cheney to come to their districts to campaign for them— certainly Jared Golden, Abigail Spanberger and Josh Gottheimer. I can’t wait for all them to form their own political party and let the Democrats go back to being a progressive party with a working class agenda. Time for the RINOs and the DINOs to pull out of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
So a big centrist corporate mush-in-the-middle, a fascist MAGA outfit on the right and a progressive party of the left. I know the mush-in-the-middle would start off with a huge advantage— the New Dems, the Blue Dogs, the corporate careerists, many increasingly isolated mainstream Republicans who get turned off to the MAGA overreach we’re about to see in full bloom and… the big corporate dollars. But it’ll be a good place for the progressives to fight from and eventually they’ll learn how to be a real party again and how to win elections.
There is widespread agreement that the two-party system has worn out any effectiveness it once had. Oligarch Mark Cuban denounced it two days ago and the day before that The Nation ran a piece about how young socialists are sick of it as well. “[W]ithout a national candidate to rally around and with the midterms approaching,” wrote Zurie Pope, “many Young Democratic Socialists of America members feel like the organization must clarify its role. Rather than hitching its wagon to Democratic candidates, YDSA has emphasized building its own infrastructure. Many fave “severing ties with the Democratic machine to formulate an independent socialist party, called the ‘dirty break’ strategy.”
A successful YDSA resolution says that “Despite the short-term strategic advantage of running candidates within the Democratic Party, it is not enough for us to be satisfied with such an orientation for the indefinite future.”
Along with millions of other young people, many YDSA members now see the two-party system as an unviable path forward. As the youth section of the largest socialist organization in the United States, the group feels that it will be up to the group to eventually offer an alternative. “The Democratic Party is a fundamentally regressive and capitalist organization, and in order to build a socialist future, an independent, working-class, socialist party is necessary.”
Although a Sanders supporter during the 2020 Democratic primary, Jacob Alexander Chavarria, the president of Florida International University’s YDSA chapter, is now a fierce proponent of the dirty-break model. “It’s important for us, as socialists, to build genuine political movements.” In Chavarria’s mind, the final distillation of the issue is simple: to prove that socialism can actually win on its own merits. “I think it’s not only viable. It’s necessary.”
In late July, YDSA members approved the resolution. Despite calling for a break, the plan doesn’t immediately ban candidates from running as Democrats, but urges chapters to start identifying races where socialists can run as independents. “Under concrete circumstances, it can still make sense for DSA-endorsed candidates to run on the ticket of the Democratic Party.” The end goal, of course, is still decades away. “[T]he target of our electoral efforts needs to be to build the independent, working class power necessary to forge an independent, working class, socialist party through class struggle elections and candidates.”
…Simultaneously, a proposal called the “1-2-3-4 Plan” within the New York City DSA, one of the largest DSA chapters in the country, attempts to create a “party-like structure” that would unite all endorsed candidates under a single platform. The resolution is cosponsored by Jake Colosa, a cochair of YDSA’s National Coordinating Committee. Approved candidates would share “coordinated and centralized comms,” and “common branding” throughout their campaigns. To get approved, the candidates would “explicitly, publicly, and prominently identity as Democratic Socialists.”
For YDSA, an independent socialist party would be nothing without a robust labor movement. At the summer conference, the vitality of labor organizing was discussed at length along with Resolution 2. “[W]e believe the working class is the agent of change in society through their position as producers,” reads the resolution, and “the task of the socialist movement is to organize the working class.” More than merely prioritizing labor, the proposal formulated a multistep plan for ingraining young socialists into sectors needing unionization. “[S]ocialists must take active interventions toward building shop floor power. This requires Industrialization, the active development of a layer of socialists cadre who can organize in the workplace on a day-to-day basis.”
The “National Labor Strategy” proposal was among the only resolutions to pass unanimously. “We’ve had a lot of trouble cohering around labor strategy in the past,” said Adam D’Elia, a member of City College (NYC) YDSA and a resolution cosponsor. He sees Resolution 2 as a step towards “making sure YDSA is centering labor.”
…[Cochair of Reed College YDSA, Spencer] Mann does not believe campus work is where YDSA’s role should end. “YDSA as a whole should be building towards becoming a mass youth wing of a future socialist party,” wrote Mann on YDSA’s national Slack channel, imagining a future where the organization is able to quickly mobilize thousands of students against state, local, and federal governments. Mann criticized the DSA’s lack of a coordinated national response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, citing the student protests against the Vietnam War as a historical example of coordinated masses of students pressuring the government to act. “That, to me, is the basis for a lasting mass organization.”