The Democratic Party We Knew Is Over. Something Fresh Must Take Its Place.

The US desperately needs a political party that will stand up for workers, average people, and the planet -- and confront Trump's pro-corporate agenda.

After watching the results of the presidential election, I am convinced that the Democratic party in the US as we know it needs to be completely restructured if we are to create the kind of just society we deserve.

First, a bit of history. I've voted in 11 elections and over that time I've seen the Democrats slowly abandon the working class to the point where the party is now further to the right than the Republicans were in 1980, when Ronald Reagan swept into office. There is simply no political party left in the US truly representing working people that can win a national election. This presents a serious challenge. Those upset by Trump’s victory (and I am among them) must start by recognizing it.

Many of you are too young, but I have the benefit of having voted in presidential elections for 44 years. I remember how Bill Clinton abandoned the working class by supporting NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the first major "free trade" agreement that led to the loss of millions of jobs and seriously undermined wages in the United States; I saw how Barack Obama came to office with a huge mandate but quickly caved to the health care industry and never pushed for a national health care plan. The party never has fought tenaciously for a federal minimum wage or to raise society security payments, two key components of a pro-worker agenda. Nor has the party tried with sufficient vigor to reign in the planet-destroying fossil fuel industry or the public subsidies that help produce historically-high profits. President Biden's failure to stop my unprecedented private corporate criminal prosecution after winning the Ecuador pollution case is an example of a broader capitulation to corporate power.

The Democratic Party leaders also have started to undermine democracy itself. Party elites all but cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination in 2016 by rigging the nominating rules in favor of Hillary Clinton. This year, party elites refused to hold a real primary with debates where several creative independent candidates (among them Jill Stein, Marianne Williamson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Cornel West) could have made their cases directly to the people. Kamala Harris offered no concrete plan during her campaign to put money in the pockets of the people who most need it. She also did virtually nothing to distance herself from the party's support of the person who I believe has become the world's leading human rights violator, Benjamin Netenyahu.

The old Democratic Party — the one with the broad coalition assembled by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression — is officially gone. That was the coalition that saved capitalism from its own destruction via massive employment programs and government subsidies. The new Democrats are tepid about supporting unions and worker rights. Like today’s Republican Party, they are largely tied to the billionaire class and the interests of industry. And they care little about creating a national health care plan, increasing the minimum wage, or protecting American manufacturing jobs.

It thus should be no surprise that millions of voters flocked to Trump and his promises to help working people. Say what you want about Trump — and remember he staged a coup against the US government — but at least he connected with the voters emotionally. He also had a plan called Project 2025, written by the Heritage Foundation (and edited by Paul Dans, one of the Chevron lawyers who tried to take me down). This plan is frightening, authoritarian, and lays the foundation for the destruction of much of the government’s ability to regulate corporations and keep our environment clean. But it is a plan. The Democratic Party never created a plan. My guess is that it could not create one to lift working people while also appeasing the corporate donors who now dominate the party.

The only viable path forward in my view is to build something new out of the failure of the Democrat Party. In my view, a coalition of working-class people, climate activists, and progressives needs to create in this country a European-style multi-party democracy where the most effective policy innovations can actually get a public airing and be pushed by independent elected officials. And we need reforms to create an actual democracy — reforms like passing a law where the candidate who wins the popular vote actually wins the election. Limiting our choices to the two major parties is in my view leading to societal decay and the risk that we lose what’s left of our fragile democracy. We can and must to better.

Trump was successful because the Democrats failed to defend the working class. It gave him an opening that would not have been there had the party been truly protecting working class interests for the last three decades.

Whether we succeed in building something new that is responsive to the needs of the majority is largely in our hands. Let’s start by envisioning what it might look like.

-Steven