These people are genuinely conspiracy brained morons.
“Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.
Seconds after Torres’ shot at “the groups” that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from … the group Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE” and “GENOCIDE RITCHIE,” attacking his support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain on the loudspeakers in the room.
The mockery was part of the point. Welcome PAC, the main organizer of the conference and one of several outfits that have emerged in recent months to try to reverse the party’s post-Obama losses, was happy to be accused of embracing a pro-growth “Abundance” agenda or attacking progressive urban policies.
“Any time someone is against something like ‘abundance,’ it means that they’re afraid of something. They’re afraid of losing power,” said Welcome PAC’s Lauren Harper Pope, a former Beto O’Rourke adviser. “If the left feels threatened by what we’re doing, then I say: ‘You’re still welcome in our coalition.’”
[…]
“If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community,” said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, defending her vote for House GOP legislation that would require proof of citizenship from every voter.
Asked about recent polling from the progressive group Demand Progress that found pro-business “abundance” ideas faring worse than anti-corporate “populism,” WelcomeFest speakers scoffed.
“It’s what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass. “It’s such a bad poll.”
Shadowy “”“groups”“” who are supposedly coordinating every protest, protestors are all on payroll or rich or unemployed so therefore they don’t count, activists and “”“groups”“” are never part of or representative of even a section of the public, and all polling showing their framing and ideas being unpopular are just bad polls. This is conspiratorial thinking, 1:1 with what conservatives and Republicans have been saying for decades.
And they’re repeadedly wrong on the polling they claim to love so much.
All because people got mad at the and demanded they do their jobs, demanded they actually stand up for people who are literally being picked up and deported for no reason besides not liking Trump or having an accent when they speak.
WelcomeFest’s less single-issue enemies have highlighted the Republican and pharmaceutical-industry pasts of some of the conference’s donors, arguing that it’s naive to think billionaire donors could save the Democrats.
The Revolving Door Project, which has campaigned to keep Democrats with corporate ties out of powerful positions, called the whole project a “self-serving crusade” against popular politics.
“A billionaire-funded movement to keep billionaires happy with Democrats by wielding only poll-tested language that billionaires are okay with is a sure path toward a President Vance,” said the project’s executive director, Jeff Hauser.
Dan Cohen, the strategist who conducted Demand Progress’ abundance-or-populism poll, said that the party wasn’t facing a binary choice and could incorporate some more pro-growth “abundance” ideas into a successful populist campaign.
“That kind of conflict is unhelpful because it’s just wrong,” Cohen said, calling for a broader focus on “strengthening a Democratic Party that’s trying to get its sh*t together again.”
OK but, hear me out: fuck the Democrats. When are we getting behind a new party; a real, actual, authentic, left-wing, coalition party? Where is the national movement to unify and overthrow the duopoly?
Why build another party? The bourgeoisie built a new power structure under feudalism.
Prefiguration is about building new power structures within existing structures.
Organizing is the tool of the Proletariat taught by Capitalism, and vanguard parties have successfully implemented Socialism many times already. Scientific Socialism is the correct method. The bourgeoisie did not prefigure society, there was large capture of resources during primitive accumulation that led to a toppling of the aristocracy, often via revolutions, as these classes came into conflict.
Never going to happen through the current electoral system, it’s carefully designed not to allow for a third party to win, and the only people who have the power to change that system through legal means have no incentive to do so. The only way it’ll happen without violence would be something close to a general strike on a national level, unfortunately I don’t see that happening any time soon either.
People are already organizing for a general strike generalstrikeus.com
Sign your strike card and if you’re able, organize. It won’t happen any time soon unless people work for it to happen.
I really hate to tell you this but 80% of the country thinks the dems are either communists or the ultimate arbiter of good.
There is very little actual criticism of the dem party from the left under current political framework.
Universal Healthcare, workers rights, and a higher minimum wage are all incred8bly popular.
Until somebody on fox or cnn says those policies are too far left and 4/5ths of the country nods in agreement.
PSL is slowly but steadily growing.
I hope it’s coming, but first people need to be educated about why the Dems suck. It’s like the sunk cost fallacy.
People keep asking why the left is attacking Democrats as if it’s disrupting unity, but I think the truth is that even though they’re okay with gay and black people, unlike the Republicans, until we tear ourselves away from that billionaire focused party, we can’t build an alternative movement without it being sucked up and dissipated by the Dems. And if we can’t build a new party or movement, we’re doomed.
These people clearly don’t understand the problems or needed solutions in front of us and are willing to throw anyone under the bus, which is absolutely horrible for coalition building.