Sen. Russ Feingold
What’s missing in Congress these days is real progressive leadership and real political courage.
Over the past several decades, the Democratic Party has been entirely taken over by corporate shills and money-grubbing sleazes while those who might still have some vestigial remnant of a conscience or genuine concern for the plight of the common person have been co-opted or intimidated into silence or powerlessness.
Look at Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). He says all the right things. He’s fought all the good fights. And yet after 15 years in Congress, he is chair of what? The House subcommittee on domestic policy of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Heck, his post doesn’t even merit capitalization in the AP Stylebook! And when he submits an important bill, like his articles of impeachment of both former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, he can’t even get a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.
Which, of course, is chaired by another long-standing allegedly progressive House member, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Conyers, despite being chair of the House Progressive Caucus (the largest, and least powerful Democratic Party caucus in the Congress) and despite his having served 22 terms in the House, couldn’t even manage to get “permission” from the Speaker (Rep. Nancy Pelosi–once a member of the Progressive Caucus!) to hold a hearing on impeachment during the Bush/Cheney years in the Judiciary Committee that he chairs. And more recently, he was even barred from having his own health reform proposal–an expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans–get a lousy hearing in the House.
Progressives in the Democratic Party are both joke and oxymoron.
It is time for any real progressives in House or Senate to admit the truth–that they are boxed in and effectively neutered by the Party leadership–and that if they really want to be defenders of the public interest and the progressive cause, they must give up their sinecures, cut themselves loose from the shackles of the Democratic Party, and form a new and independent national progressive party. They have a model: Bernie Sanders, the independent self-described socialist senator from Vermont. Of course, even Sanders is boxed in, given that he is alone in the Senate as an independent progressive , so that if he wants a committee assignment he has to agree to vote with the Democrats on the key issues of party control. But that is because there is nobody standing with him in the Senate.
This could change if the progressive caucus members of both houses were to quit the sell-out Democrats and form the nucleus of a new party, instead of just a caucus within the sclerotic and rancidly corrupt Democratic Party.
There is a huge ferment across the land. Americans of all political persuasions are angry, fearful, frustrated and ready for change. That’s why so many of them voted for a black presidential candidate promising “real change” in 2008. The trouncing of Democratic senate candidate Martha Coakley this week in the Massachusetts special election to fill the seat of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy was a direct result of the anger that those same voters feel at being betrayed by that president, who instead of change has given them more of the same pro-corporate, anti-common-citizen politics that they were trying to escape.
We on the left know that nothing much is going to change in America until there is a genuine people’s party on the ballot, but for years we have watched in despair as well-meaning third parties like Peace & Freedom, the Green Party, the Socialist Party-USA and others (including parties not on the left like the Libertarians) have tried and failed to become national political forces. These efforts have been stymied because American voters, sensibly, have not wanted to “waste their votes” by casting ballots for Third Party candidates who stand no chance of being elected. They have been stymied because Americans have either been forced to accept a “lesser of two evils” approach to voting, or to simply not vote.
But true progressives in Congress who have the advantage of incumbency–people like Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and others–could run as independents, or better, as third party candidates and win. And if they were to choose to run as a new third party, they would open the door for many other new candidates to run with them. They would give legitimacy to the idea of voting for something other than a corrupt Republican or a corrupt Democrat.
Americans are not stupid. They recognize that the two big parties are both acting in collusion in selling them all out to monolithic corporate interests, and that Washington is thoroughly owned by the rich and the powerful. That’s why only half of Americans even bother to vote (actually far fewer than that in off-year elections like the one coming up this November). And those who do vote, vote for major party candidates, for the most part not out of enthusiasm, but out of desperation.
If they had candidates on the ballot whom they really thought were on their side, and who really had a shot at winning, they would abandon the Democratic Party frauds in a heartbeat.
A secession by true progressives in Congress from the Democratic Party and the formation of a new party by that group of rebels–and remember, there are 80 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus–would hit the Democratic Party like a perfectly placed explosive charge detonated in the foundation of an old building slated for demolition. The whole edifice would collapse in a cloud of smoke and dust. No Democratic incumbent would be safe. Upstart candidates would come out of the woodwork to challenge them from the left in virtually every state in the country. Republican candidates too would face real challenges, not from centrists, but from real left candidates.
Too much can be expected of electoral politics, and certainly, even in the highly improbable event that every member of the Progressive Caucus were to quit the Democrats, run for re-election as an independent or as the member of some new progressive party, and win the first time out, the dominant Democrats and Republicans and the corporate lobbyists behind them could still keep the government in the hands of the existing corporate power structure.
But even if only some of the caucus were to bolt, the door would suddenly be open for a new national politics. Workers and their labor unions would no longer feel bound to support Democratic hacks, and many could be expected to shift their allegiance and financial backing to the new party, as could environmentalists, health care reform advocates, anti-war activists, education reformers and all the other progressives who have had nowhere to turn politically for years.
So here’s the call: If you have a so-called progressive as your Senator or Representative, tell him or her that you will no longer giver them your vote unless they first quit the Democratic Party.
It’s time for the Progressive Caucus in Congress to put up or shut up: Quit the party! You ain’t doing no good for nobody serving in Congress as a Democrat!
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net
Dave-some of your thinking shows a serious naivete about third party and independent electoral politics. You really need to understand the road blocks the D’s and R’s have thrown up across the country to block candidates. Read Teresa Amatos “Grand Illusion” for more info. There is a reason the Green and others do not get significant numbers of votes. Look to the 2004 efforts by the Denocrats to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot in as many states as possible.
this last decade has created a political truism. The Republicans play games with the election results and steal elections and the Democrats rig ballot line access against potential competitors to insure that no one else can run against them.
Nowhere in my piece do I suggest that creating a progressive third party would be easy. That, Jack, is your imagination. I do think, however, that in the unlikely event that a significant number of the genuinely progressive members of Congress quit the Democratic party, it would give a jolt to efforts to form a mass national progressive party, and would also be a huge blow to the Democratic Party, hollowed out and disliked as it is by those who have been disconsolately voting for its candidates.
I find the kind of negativity that you demonstrate here to be one of the enduring infirmities of the left. Do you honestly believe that the old ward bosses back in the Thirties and Twenties made it any easier for third parties like the Socialists? And yet they managed to become quite a force in some jurisdictions, and even at times on the national stage. They didn’t whine about how hard it would be, or how powerful the two parties were.
And by the way, do you honestly believe that things have been easier for the people who elected Aristide in Haiti, or Bachelet in Chile, or Morales in Bolivia. Jeez, we have it so easy here in the Belly of the Beast, and yet people are going around saying we can’t win.
There’s enough negativity on the left. I don’t need more.
We should be pushing for real progressives to quit the party in Congress, and should be warning them if they are our representatives, that we aren’t going to vote for them anymore on a Democratic ticket.
Dave
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
This idea — that well-established congressional Democrats have the potential to jumpstart a progressive third party — is excellent, Dave, and deserves wide circulation. As you point out, we have a model in Bernie Sanders; and steadfast, but disempowered, progressives like Kucinich have little to lose, and a whole country to gain.
As a followup, perhaps you can pick through the existing left-wing parties and anoint the most worthy? We wouldn’t want the eighty-something progressives in the House and Senate to split off into as many factions — a distinct possibility given the proclivity of lefties to quarrel over minor differences.
As it becomes increasingly clear that the two major parties are nothing more than “two names on the same checking account,” there is more and more “talk” on the web about a third party revolt. But, in none of this talk does one ever encounter an actual endorsement of an EXISTING party! If you choose to followup on this idea, Dave, as I hope you do, I suggest this is the way to go.
Rather than trying to anoint one existing party like Peace&Freedom or Green Party as the way to go, why not urge all the left parties and progressive special interest parties around the country to rally together and unite to form a non-ideological, non-special-interest, broad-based party of the left. It could meld the Greens (environmentalist, social justice) with Peace&Freedom (anti-war), Socialist (economic justice), NARAL, NOW (women’s rights), Labor party (workers issues) etc. into one mass-based party of the left, which might be called the American Progressive Party, or Progressive America Party, or Progressive Party of America.
Dave
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
I did not go negative Dave. I only pointed out a serious weakness in your argument. (one of several.) If you are going to discuss ballot access laws, it would help if you actually knew of what you speak.
I speak not in negativity but in reality, in facts, not misty eyed pollyanna solutions.
you also need to recognize that those ‘;former Dem progressives would not gat a pass to the ballot line by virtue of being former dems. They would still have to pass the gate just like any other third party or independent candidate.
Again-I am not being negative-only facing reality-the parties today do not need those old ward heeler bosses because they have re-written the laws for ballot access all across the country. Why rough someone up, unless it is only a campaign worker, when you have the force of laws you wrote and judges you put into office on your side.
If you knew much of the history of the third party and independent candidacies of the early part of the last century you would find the names of many members of Congress who were not D’s or R’s. That is my point and obviously you missed it again.
I think you are the one whining here, in your inability to accept criticism.
An interesting idea. I have my own pet idea, and that is to organize left wing activist groups under a political umbrella, the political piece to be the sharp end of a united progressive/liberal political action stick.
If our two ideas were to meld, we might have an unbeatable combination.
It would, however, take some significant amount of time to negotiate, I think, so we would need an intermediate level to work from, as the elections of 2010 and 2012 are critical, as the US is now in ICU, courtesy of those 5 conservative judicial activists.
If more independent congressional candidates could get their name on the ballot in time for the next election next November (while making it clear they are not a nut or a crackpot) they should stand a good chance of winning just by virtue of having their name on the ballot. Shouldn’t they?
Every state is different. In Florida, closing date for the petition process (the cheapest way of doing it) is March 29th – you have to get 1% of the registered voters in your district to sign a petition on your behalf and pay 10cents each to have the signatures verified. (A modest grassroots effort should be enough to accomplish that.) In Texas, I believe, the ballot may have already been closed. It might already be too late in most states to mount a serious independent effort.
But I believe people like Mr. Lindorff, with his name recognition and speaking ability (wherever he lives or might move to for strategic reasons) would be a shoo-in for Congress if he could get his name on the ballot. There is talk that Ralph Nader might run for Senator in Connecticut. There should be others…
If enough new independent candidates were to get elected that would be soon enough to start third party negotiations… (Political parties, after all, are part of the problem not the solution.)
Anybody who wants to run as a true unaligned independent progressive from the 10th District of Florida (a gerrymandered major portion of Pinellas County) – five thousand verified signatures is all you will need… One of them could be mine (and I might even help you get more if you aren’t a nut).
While corporatocracy runs a muck… and sometimes it is certainly hard to tell the difference between the parties… The GOP appointed corporate sponsored Supremes by turning corporate money loose in elections have very clearly spelled out to anyone that is paying even the slightest bit of attention that there is indeed a difference….