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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/31/17

Dems Want to Ditch Leaders and Move Left; They're Right

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A new poll shows most Democratic voters want their party to move left, with new people in charge. In other words, they want a political revolution.

They've got the right idea.

If the party establishment thinks Robert Mueller's investigation will save it, it's probably wrong. After President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew were both removed from office for malfeasance, Jimmy Carter barely eked out a win in 1976. Four years later, Ronald Reagan's victory ushered in 12 years of Republican leadership in the White House.

That's a lesson for today's Democrats. High crimes and misdemeanors don't automatically translate into enthusiasm for the other party, especially in today's murky political environment. Corruption is more likely to lead to cynicism than to citizen involvement, unless voters are given something to believe in.

A Left Majority Led By Women and People of Color

Democratic voters apparently know what they believe in. In the latest Harvard-Harris poll, a sample of the party's base voters was asked: "Do you support or oppose movements within the Democratic Party to take it even further to the left and oppose the current Democratic leaders?"

52 percent of those polled said they support those movements, while 48 percent said they oppose them. That's a call to political insurrection. These voters want to change the party's ideology. They "oppose" (that's a strong word, "oppose") the people who have been running it for decades.

If the implications for the party's upcoming races seem clear, the long-term implications are even more stark: 69 percent of voters aged 18 to 34 said they support those insurrectionary movements.

Among other things, the Harvard-Harris poll disproves the "Bernie Bros" canard so beloved by the party's establishment. Democratic insiders have repeatedly insisted that the party's left is dominated by white males. The implication is that the left is somehow sexist and/or racist.

But the poll shows that support for the left is greater among female voters (55 percent), Hispanic voters (65 percent), and African-American voters (55 percent) than it is among whites (46 percent) or men (49 percent).

Identity and Economy

It shouldn't be surprising that Democratic women and people of color are more left-leaning than their white, male counterparts. They're more likely to suffer the economic consequences of racism and sexism -- forms of oppression that are structural as well as social in nature. Some of those signs of structural oppression include:

African Americans are the only racial group in the country who are still worse off economically today than they were in 2000. Black people in this country are more likely to lack health insurance, and the black-white wage gap is worse today than it was in 1979.

Women working full-time in the United States last year earned only about 80 cents for every dollar a man made, according to the latest Census Bureau data. (The marginal decrease in the gender wage gap was due at least in part to falling wages among men.)

Black women working full-time earned only 63 cents for every dollar earned by a white male, Native women earned only 57 cents and Latinas earned only 54 cents. Households led by women were much more likely to be impoverished than male-led households.

While some Democratic leaders, along with their media backers, have tried to argue that the left's agenda is antithetical to "identity politics," that dichotomy would have been rejected by pioneers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Margaret Sanger, both of whom were leftists.

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Host of 'The Breakdown,' Writer, and Senior Fellow, Campaign for America's Future

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