Mr. Schreiber provides a very clear, well-written, and accurate summary of the election. His article (in Socialist Action) is well worth reading. This is particularly insightful.
All in all, despite the addition of a few “progressive” Democrats to Congress, the complexion of U.S. politics has changed very little since the election. The policies of the capitalist Democratic Party have not been altered one iota from the pro-corporate, pro-war, anti-environmental ones of the past.Mr. Schreiber is quite right--it is moderate Democrats who won the election--not the Progressives.
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| Photogenic Progressive, as portrayed in Socialist Action |
So does Mr. Proyect, in a piece entitled Why Democrats Are So Okay With Losing--also well worth your time. For him, "losing" means not electing Progressives, and he describes some candidates who did win.
In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve her own and the party’s interests. She told MSNBC: “As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone.”In Mr. Proyect's opinion military service is immediately suspect, and likely reveals an incipient fascist or something. Yet lots of people in this country have served in the military and they're overwhelmingly proud of their service--despite what they might have thought about the war in Iraq. I think Mr. Proyect is being uncharitable.
What Misters Schreiber and Proyect both can't seem to admit is that Progressives are a small minority in this country. They occupy about 90 seats in the new Congress, or about 20%. I think that exaggerates their actual support in the population. For all the media babble about "polarization" and "excessive partisanship," most Americans are centrists, or perhaps center-right. The far-Left will never win a general election.
Nancy Pelosi realizes that and has promised to work across the aisle if she can (though I won't vouch for her sincerity). And Trump, definitely not an extremist right-winger, has been a Democrat in the past and can become one again in the future. He could easily work with a Democratic congress if given half a chance.
Mr. Proyect reveals his Trotskyist-totalitarian tendencies in this odd passage.
In some countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973 respectively. ...Does he really think our democracy would be better off if losing political candidates were put up against the wall and shot after an election? Are we actually better served by coups and civil wars? Is Honduran civic life, where "elections have huge consequences," to be emulated in preference to the American? Are the refugees marching in the wrong direction?
Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the “losers” in 2010. Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round, Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP’s claim that seafood in the Gulf of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields. A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul Weyrich.
Fortunately Mr. Proyect realizes he's in a small minority.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson’s presidency, it is likely that a combination of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.Thank goodness there will be no such "massive shake-up of American society." Unlike Mr. Proyect, the American people are not pro-poverty. Democrat or Republican, we don't want to go the full Venezuela. We don't want to be ruled by tin-pot dictators. We don't want to forfeit our homes and livelihoods in exchange for "transit-friendly," crime-ridden tenements ruled by government thugs.
If Mr. Proyect accurately describes Trotskyist ambitions, he also correctly understands Trump.
For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. ...So there you have it--Trump is the true anti-fascist. Whereas Trotskyists and Progressives advocate government tyranny, accomplished through coups and civil wars, Trump is shrinking the power of government. He is the true opponent of people like France's Marie Le Pen, Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.
By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover “Starve the Beast” Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al.
Mr. Schreiber is less explicit about his totalitarian visions, but he alludes to them nonetheless.
[R]eal change will never be achieved from within the Democratic Party. The beginning of a new day for working people in the United States will arrive when they construct their own party, one that operates not only at the ballot box but in workplaces and in the streets, and with a revolutionary program to enable the working class to take political power in its own name and abolish the rule of the capitalists."Construct their own party" is code for following the lead of Socialist Action, the self-anointed Vanguard Party. And who is the leading Vanguardist of them all--the very Vanguard of the Vanguard? Why, that's gotta be Jeff Mackler, of course, a man who has proven his stripes during the most unambitious presidential campaign of all time.
Jeff Mackler? Surely they're kidding? No wonder real Progressives flock to the Democratic Party.
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