My regulars know that I am not a fan of the Democratic Party or Dems in general. In my opinion they are nothing more than the other side of the conservative coin.
The only Dems I have any respect for are those that are of a different party but caucus with the Dems….
But what went wrong?
The Democratic Party once imagined itself as the engine of meaningful American transformation. First FDR revamped the relationship between the government and the people, then, in 1944, in his “Second Bill of Rights,” he proposed economic guarantees that would have rewritten the country’s legal and economic foundations. This would have entailed a huge structural change as the role of government would have moved further from a mere defender of freedoms to a guarantor of economic well-being.
Every American was to have the right to a job, the right to housing, the right to medical care, the right to education and the right to protection from economic fear. FDR stated that people in economic need could not fully participate in a democracy and we needed economic reform to ensure everyone had the economic security to participate in democratic governance and move the country in a humane direction.
But the Second Bill of Rights died with Roosevelt, so Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society then attempted to attack poverty, racial segregation/injustice and inequality at their structural roots, closely following many of Roosevelt’s proposals. The Great Society was however, hampered by congressional resistance, the budgetary and political drain of Vietnam and white backlash to civil rights.
There were victories, however: the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which sent federal funding into public schools serving low‑income children; Head Start; the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act enforcement mechanisms, which dismantled Jim Crow; the Higher Education Act, which opened college access to working‑class students through grants and loans; the creation of public broadcasting; the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and major environmental laws like the Clean Air and Water Quality Acts.
Yet, despite these victories, we did not see real structural change because the Great Society was only allowed to alter the symptoms of American inequality without changing the underlying power arrangements that produced those symptoms. It expanded services but did not redistribute power and it created programs for the poor but left the economic order that manufactured poverty fully intact. The result was apparent progress without real transformation and reforms that improved lives while leaving the basic mechanisms of injustice standing.
At one time the Dems were considered the “Left”….and in some less informed circles they still refer to them as the Left…but they are far from any representation of a true Left ideology.
Why?
Many years ago they abandoned the class struggle…..the working class.
That tradition began with a sharp diagnosis. Karl Marx argued that capitalism rests on a class relationship in which those who own the means of production extract surplus value from those who own only their labor power. One did not have to accept the inevitability of revolution to accept the centrality of class, and Bernstein did not. He kept the analysis and changed the method, betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy.
That bet defined what the old left stood for. It was not merely taxing the rich and redistributing the proceeds, the liberal project of John Stuart Mill and later John Maynard Keynes, but democratizing economic decision making itself. The New Deal and the Great Society were humane achievements, yet they were state capitalism for the benefit of the many and left the boardroom intact. The democratic socialist asked a harder question: who decides what gets built, where capital flows, and whose work disappears?
Put most simply, the socialist project was about extending democracy into the economy. We accept that the people should govern the state, that no king or boss may rule a polity by private right. The socialist asked why the same principle stops at the factory gate, why the firm that shapes a person’s waking life should remain a little monarchy exempt from the democratic rule we demand everywhere else.
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/what-is-wrong-with-the-american-left-the-abandonment-of-class/
We need a true Left in this country…..what we have now is just two corrupt parties that are for sale….the people meant absolutely nothing the the Congress as a whole.
We need a Left Party!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”