Who Democratic Party Leaders Fear More Than Trump
Maurice Mitchell on what it takes to build a truly multiracial, working class coalition on the left
Something’s happening in Democratic primaries across the country that’s terrifying Establishment party leaders — and it should. Over the past few weeks, Working Families Party-backed candidates beat Democratic Incumbents in three New York Congressional races, swept DC’s Democratic primaries, and in Pennsylvania, WFP won six out of six of their targeted primaries.
These wins, and the momentum they are building for the Working Families Party, are not being celebrated by all Democrats however, and the online political chatter the past week has been dominated by the fractures that are widening in the Democratic base over these “upsets.” But according to Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the Working Families Party, this isn’t just a fight worth having in the big tent, it is essential in order to build the working class coalition he believes is needed to wrestle power out of corporate billionaires’ fists.
Merely opposing Trump and MAGA is no longer sufficient, and doesn’t open doors for Trump voters who are turning against the Republican Party to walk through. The alternative strategy, according to Maurice, has to be solidarity populism. But how do you build a genuine multi-racial, working-class coalition without ignoring real differences or letting those differences be weaponized to weaken the broader coalition? Maurice says you don’t hide them. You acknowledge they exist, but work together anyway - because when it comes to taking on a system that screws everyone but those at the top, it becomes easy to see you have more in common with your neighbor than you do with Jeff Bezos.
It’s also worth noting that the Right didn’t build its working-class coalition overnight. For decades, their entrenched media and political infrastructure convinced everyday Americans that the Republican Party was fighting for them… even when their policy agenda told a completely different story. The left is still playing catch up on this front. And it’s a gap that honestly gets wider every time the party committees decide to spend money to beat working-class progressives in primaries, instead of using all of their available resources to define and destroy the Republicans running to strip more and more of our rights. Maurice is one leader of the left who is not interested in waiting for permission to build a movement and bench of candidates who actually represent working class Americans, because they are working class themselves. And it’s a strategy that’s clearly working with voters.
Watch our full conversation and let me know what you think - even if you don’t agree with Maurice, I agree with him that this is a debate worth all of us having.
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Broad support of DSA candidates express a broadening, political radicalization in a land where anti-communism for generations held near civil religion status, and socialism was deemed permanently foreclosed.
That narrative is collapsing.
That radicalization is the initial product of anger over conditions produced by decaying capitalism, correctly seen as the source of a social crisis that on a daily basis resembles nothing so much as the four horsemen of the apocalypse who bestride the earth in the Revelation.
Itself in slow-moving, organizational collapse, the DSA is the initial beneficiary of this political radicalization.
But for its rhetoric, it remains a bourgeois party with no viable program to address the conditions of poverty, war, or attacks on democratic rights that are producing its own electoral successes.
Tied by a thousand threads to American imperialism, the Democratic Party fears naught so much as rebellion from below.
The premise that working people will come first, while banks, corporations and the capitalist state remain untouched proposes a reconciliation of the wolf and the lamb.
We know where the betrayal of mass expectations leads. Sanders promised ‘political revolution’ and threw support behind the Democratic Party establishment that helped create the political conditions for the rise of the diseased figure from the criminal underworld known as Donald J. Trump.
When DSA candidates betray the expectations invested in them now—and they will—the beneficiary must not be the fascist right.
It must be a genuine socialist and revolutionary movement of the working class independent of any and all capitalist factions. That revolution from below, the [uppercase ‘D’] Democratic Party fears above all else.
I found your post deeply offensive. To suggest Democrats don’t support working people is completely stupid—either ignorant
or sinister.