Think about the Democrats in power--those in Congress, in state legislatures, the mayors and governors. What could they possibly have been doing all these years for their "base," their rank-and-file party members, that would convince those millions and millions of registered Democrats that they owed some kind of loyalty to their leaders? What have the leaders of either major party done for working people for the last 30 years except abuse them and deceive them and exploit them and laugh at them?
Maybe most registered Democrats--the pro-union, blue-collar loyalists and the middle-class, white-collar progressives--are still somehow tied to the Democratic Party by emotion or tradition or habit, and they just don't want to rebel. Maybe they have personal reasons for taking all that abuse and disrespect from their party leaders. I don't know. All I do know for sure is that I don't share that feeling of loyalty to the Democrats, and maybe that's because it was not drummed into me in childhood, as religion and other habits of thought are sometimes drummed into kids. And even though my Mom and Dad were both right-wingers, they were also freethinkers who believed that I should make up my own mind about politics and religion and all that. Maybe that explains why I have no sense of loyalty to the Republicans either.
I take time here to discuss the personal factor in our politics because we usually don't take it into account. I'm certainly nobody to talk, because I haven't shared my own personal history very much or very often. I guess I've always feared being rejected by other leftists, especially those who did not have all the easy breaks I had growing up, all those advantages that were mine just because of a lucky accident of birth. Maybe bringing it up for discussion will encourage others to ask themselves what their political loyalties are based on and whether or not those loyalties are justified anymore.
I hope this digression sheds some light on why I despise the phony democracy of the Democrats and Republicans. A combination of factors, I suppose, has led me to the conclusion that the two-party system is a bird with two right wings. It's clear as crystal to me that we progressives and populists and socialists need to give up on that corrupt system and create something entirely new.
A truly progressive program--one that includes full employment, Single-Payer health insurance, a $15-an-hour minimum wage (for starters), real support for labor (organized and unorganized), an end to racist policing, cutting the Pentagon budget in half, bringing the Fed under the control of the Treasury Department and out of the control of the banks, and setting the goal of peaceably bringing together all the nations of the world into one nation under one free, democratic government--a program of that kind will never become law if we leave it up to the Democratic Party. We have to do it ourselves. We need our own major party to accomplish it.
We need our own political party.
One of the great lies of our times is the idea that the Democrats and Republicans are "hyper-partisan," that they just can't agree on anything, that they're locked in some fight to the death--that they're different. But they don't really differ very much at all. They have different names and use different talking-points, but they hustle for the same bribes from the same source, the Big Business bosses. Ralph Nader said it best, way back in 2000: "The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door."
For the most part, the Democrats don't oppose the Republicans--they collaborate with them. The Democrats collaborated on the war crime known as the invasion of Iraq, the Big Bank Bailout of 2008, the destruction of civil liberties caused by such measures as the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the massive shakedown of working people known as the Affordable Care Act. These four atrocities and many others were the handiwork of that well-oiled machine we might call the Corprocratic Party, a silky-smooth blend of Republican and Democrat that provides the illusion of political choice while it works overtime for the benefit of the rich and the super-rich.
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