“Progressive” Dems Ought to Divorce the Duopoly, Not Badger Greens

The signers reveal themselves to be as fearful for the fate of the duopoly as the corporate shills they claim to oppose.

“The Lords of Capital maintain their monopoly over electoral politics in the United States -- except for the Greens.”

The recent open letter urging the Green Party to bow out of the 2020 race in every state that matters in deference to whoever the corporate Democrats nominate, shows that the “progressive” signers value the Party over the human species and the planet. It is essentially an “anybody blue will do” appeal – an arrogant and insulting demand that all politics be limited to that which is harmless to the two-corporate-party rich man’s arrangement.

In their haste to demobilize the Greens, or anybody that might be considering going Green, the signers reveal themselves to be as fearful for the fate of the duopoly as the corporate shills they claim to oppose. The general election is still nine months away and not a single primary vote has been cast. We have not yet witnessed the full fury of corporate capital, which will deploy every dirty device that money can buy -- and that its henchmen in the national security state can provide -- to maintain the Democratic Party as the main firewall blocking popular mobilization against austerity (the Global Race to the Bottom) and endless war. Yet the letter-writers are already pointing demonizing fingers to their left, blaming Jill Stein’s Greens for Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and George Bush’s win in 2000. They haven’t yet won a single victory over the all-but-hegemonic corporate forces in the Democratic Party, but are already scapegoating Greens as dupes of Trump.

“It is essentially an ‘anybody blue will do’ appeal.”

The folks that claim to be the progressive opposition to corporate dominance of the Democratic Party are sounding just like corporate hacks, kissing cousins of the Clintons. Indeed, their argument against the Greens as objective agents of Trump, is essentially the same as Hillary Clinton’s indictment of Sanders.

Clinton wrote this whole script back in 2016, with Donald Trump as the starring character. As revealed by Wikileaks, the Clinton-run Democratic National Committee was urging its operatives and friendly media to encourage and abet Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination and leadership of the GOP. Not only was Clinton convinced that Trump was the easiest Republican to beat, she thought they could defeat him without promising voters anything that might upset the austerity regime or Obama’s military offensives around the world. She was eager to run against Trump as the personification of the old, bad, racist America, allowing the Democrats to (falsely) position themselves as the new, diverse, forward-looking America, while resisting every substantive proposal to lift the 40-year austerity regime and end the forever wars, to which the Lords of Capital are unalterably committed.

“Their argument against the Greens as objective agents of Trump, is essentially the same as Hillary Clinton’s indictment of Sanders.”

Clinton got what she wished for – and so did Trump, who won with $6 billion in free media, thanks to the Clinton strategy. Trump trounced the established, dog-whistling Republican leadership and solidified a majority of whites in the re-energized White Man’s Party, thus further imprisoning the Black vote in the corporate Democrats’ stultifying embrace.

Clinton’s corporate comrades are still wedded to the same strategy, and super-plutocrat Michael Bloomberg has committed a billion dollars to ensuring that the Party does not deviate from the corporate, warmongering “center.” Bloomberg’s dollar-drenched entrance signals that the oligarchs will not allow the other half of the ruling duopoly to be captured by non-corporate forces. If they can’t salvage the Party as an instrument of the Lords of Capital, they are preparing to engineer and finance a split, rather than allow the Democratic Party to become an incubator of popular, anti-corporate power.

“Bloomberg’s dollar-drenched entrance signals that the oligarchs will not allow the other half of the ruling duopoly to be captured by non-corporate forces.”

That’s fine with me. Whether the split comes from the Right or from legions of leftish Democrats furious at corporate dirty tricks to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination, there is no possibility of electoral solutions to the multitudinous crises of late stage capitalism and the global warming this system has set in motion, unless voters have a non-corporate institution to support. There would be no Green New Deal on the Democratic presidential menu without the Green Party (it still does not exist as an action item of the corporate Democratic leadership). Human civilization, and all of our dreams of creating a just global society, can only be salvaged by wresting control of the commanding heights of the global economy from the corporations that have poisoned it – and quickly! The urgency of the climate emergency cannot accommodate the “progressive” letter-writers’ incrementalist agenda.

The letter-writers could at least have waited to see if the Democratic Party’s corporate overlords would tolerate a Bernie Sanders capture of the presidential nomination before demanding that the Greens commit institutional suicide. Their haste in blaming the Greens for the corporate Democrats’ sins is quite revelatory: they have made defeat of Trump, by anybody with a Democratic imprimatur, the all-encompassing priority. Drop everything, abandon the movement for social justice and planetary survival, but save the Democrats, no matter how corporate-bought. These guys don’t want a Green New Deal, they want to suck the Greens into their deal with the corporate Democrats. They can’t live without the duopoly; they just want to occupy a little corner of the corporate edifice.

“There would be no Green New Deal on the Democratic presidential menu without the Green Party.”

Black folks want protection from the wild white hordes, but they won’t get it from the corporate Democrats that passed preventive detention without trial (Obama); allowed the FBI to re-fashion COINTELPRO with its “Black Identity Extremist” category (under Obama); oversaw the loss of half of (already miniscule) Black household wealth (Obama); saved the multinational banking dictatorship with free money for the oligarchs (Obama), allowing parasites like Bloomberg and Bezos to become capitalist super-predators (and Democrats) whose class is cleansing urban America of its Black and brown populations (both parties, but mostly Democrats); and set in motion a New Cold War regime that censors left publications (like Black Agenda Report) and surveils everyone under an alphabet soup of spies and assassins joined politically at the hip with…Democrats.

But, purported progressives say the Green Party is a mortal danger because: Trump. It is true that Trump is a fascist of the white settler state variety, a product of the world’s first totally racially-regimented society, which served as a model for the fascisms of 20th century Europe. Multinational, late stage capitalism has produced another form of fascism that has learned to wear the garments of “diversity” at home while simultaneously erecting the most thoroughgoing police/mass incarceration state in human history, filled mainly with Black and brown prisoners, all the while murdering millions of non-whites in the imperial killing fields, abroad.

“Late stage capitalism has produced another form of fascism that has learned to wear the garments of ‘diversity’ at home while simultaneously erecting the most thoroughgoing police/mass incarceration state in human history.”

These two manifestations of fascism interact and contradict, but they both serve white supremacy and Capital. In 2020, one of them is headquartered in the overwhelmingly white Republican Party, and the other in the largely Black and brown Democratic Party – both of which are instruments of Capital. The political battle is to isolate the racists of the GOP and force them to choose between dwindling white material and “psychological” privilege and the health and welfare benefits of a socially just society and peaceful, breathable world.

No such choice is presented by the corporate duopoly to the white “deplorables” of the GOP, or to the minority of whites and the great bulk of Blacks, Latinos and Asians in the Democratic Party. The Lords of Capital maintain their monopoly over electoral politics in the United States -- except for the Greens.

And now a gaggle of purported progressives want the Greens to promise to bow out in November and throw away their hard-won ballot presence. This would doubtless be very comforting to the corporate Democrats, who could continue to serve their masters without worry about defections from the monopoly brand. Corporate Democrats would continue to define what “Green” means, while the clock ticks faster and faster to irreversible Hot House Earth.

For the record: This writer is not a member of the Green Party. I voted for Jesse Jackson in 1984 and ’88, and for Greens in 2000 and every succeeding presidential year – but never for a corporate Democrat, since that party is the hands-on, most immediate instrument of rich white men’s rule over Black America and a tag-team partner with the GOP in imperialist crimes.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

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