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When Bernie Sanders announced he would run for president as a “democratic socialist,” few believed it would amount to much. Then, against all expectations, Sanders drew massive crowds, commanded high levels of favorability in almost every demographic category (including overwhelming support among young people), and raised hundreds of millions in campaign dollars from small donors. Not least, he came within a few percentage points of beating Hillary Clinton, a frontrunner once assumed to be unassailable. Waged by a candidate who had never run as a Democrat before and has declined to do so in the future, the Sanders campaign has revived hope that a serious electoral politics to the left of the Democratic Party might be possible. The question is what such a politics would mean in practice. The question isn’t new, and so far the debate has unfolded along familiar lines. Advocates of third-party politics who backed Sanders in the primaries, like Seattle councilmember Kshama Sawant, went on to support Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy. Meanwhile, longstanding opponents of the third-party route, like democratic socialist columnist Harold Myerson, have argued that the Left should focus on trying to change the Democratic Party from within. Others have called for a different approach, standing neither wholly inside nor wholly outside the Democratic Party. But few concrete proposals have been discussed so far. This political moment offers a chance to fill in some of these blanks — to advance new electoral strategies for an independent left-wing party rooted in the working class. But we won’t get far unless we grapple seriously with the exceptional character of the American party system, and the highly repressive laws that undergird it.

Lessons from the Labor Party The last major effort to form a national vehicle for working-class politics was the Labor Party (LP), founded twenty years ago. Under the leadership of Tony Mazzocchi, president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, the party’s organizers gathered support from other major unions and grassroots trade-unionists and held its founding convention in 1996. The Labor Party’s history is not well-known in the broader progressive world. But as the most recent major effort by organized labor to form an independent party, it is a story that should interest anyone who hopes to see a revival of left politics, because on the Left only unions have the scale, experience, resources, and connections with millions of workers needed to mount a permanent, nationwide electoral project. By all accounts it was an inspiring effort that seemed, for a moment, to portend a renaissance for the labor-left. But the party lost momentum just a few years after its founding. By 2007 it had effectively ceased to exist. In a history of the party based on interviews with major participants, LP activist Jenny Brown cited two key factors as being most important in explaining its decline. The first was the weakening of the labor movement itself after 2000, especially the industrial unions that had formed its original core. But the second, more immediate reason was essentially political: the party failed to attract enough support from major national unions. That wasn’t due to any great fondness for the Democratic Party on the part of the labor leadership of the time, or because they opposed the idea of a labor party on principle. As Mazzocchi said in 1998: “I’ve never found a person in the top labor leadership say they’re opposed to a labor party.” Instead, the problem arose from the oldest dilemma of America’s two-party system: running candidates against Democrats risked electing anti-labor Republicans. For unions whose members had a lot to lose, that risk was considered too high. Despite the dedication of its organizers, the Labor Party didn’t succeed. But its founders were right to believe that a genuinely independent party, rather than a mere informal faction of the Democrats, is indispensable to successful working-class politics. Today we can learn some lessons from their effort. A true working-class party must be democratic and member-controlled. It must be independent — determining its own platform and educating around it. It should actually contest elections. And its candidates for public office should be members of the party, accountable to the membership, and pledged to respect the platform. Each of those features plays a crucial role in mobilizing working people to change society. The platform presents a concrete image of what a better society could look like. The candidates, by visibly contesting elections and winning votes under the banner of the platform, generate a sense of hope and momentum that this better society might be attainable in practice. And because the members control the party, working people can have confidence that the party is genuinely acting on their behalf. But notice what is missing from this list: there is no mention of a separate ballot line. The Labor Party always assumed that a genuinely independent labor party must have a separate party ballot line. That assumption was a mistake. The assumption gave rise to an intractable dilemma: if the party took a separate line and ran candidates against incumbent Democrats, it would destroy relationships with Democratic officeholders who might otherwise be sympathetic to unions, and thus lose the support of the unions that depended on those officeholders. On the other hand, if it didn’t run candidates — which is ultimately the path it chose — the nagging question would arise: what’s the point of having this so-called “party” in the first place? That question ended up spurring endless internal debates over whether and when to run candidates. And in the end, by not contesting elections, the party failed to give workers a reason to pay attention to the organization in the first place. The dilemma stands out clearly in the recollections of Labor Party veterans. “The Labor Party had to start with the assurance that it wouldn’t play spoiler politics and that it would [first] focus on building the critical mass necessary for serious electoral intervention,” former LP national organizer Mark Dudzic recalled in a recent interview. Yet, as Les Leopold of the Labor Institute told Brown, that path ultimately led to irrelevance: “It’s not easy for Americans to understand a party that’s not electoral. I think that that was just a difficult sell.” “In retrospect,” Dudzic concluded, “I think it was premature for us to coalesce into a party formation without an understanding of how we would relate to elections.”

“Only in the USA” Labor Party organizers were not the first to worry about being electoral “spoilers” — discussions of third-party politics have hinged on this problem for decades. However, history shows that, contrary to popular belief, the spoiler problem is not insurmountable. In fact, the trade-union activists in other countries who organized the successful labor parties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced the same dilemma: the prospect of splitting the vote and causing defeat for more labor-sympathetic mainstream parties (usually liberal parties). But those activists and their allies persevered, and as labor parties gained in strength the spoiler issue gradually became a threat to the mainstream parties. At that point, in the interests of self-preservation, liberal parties moved to accommodate the upstarts, either by forging defensive electoral pacts (in which the two parties agreed not to run candidates against each other in specified districts) or by pushing through proportional representation systems. That gave the labor parties an initial foothold in the political system. But the United States is different. Beneath our winner-take-all electoral rules, we also have a unique — and uniquely repressive — legal system governing political parties and the mechanics of elections. This system has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Founding Fathers. Rather, it was established by the major-party leaders, state by state, over a period stretching roughly from 1890 to 1920. Before then, the old Jacksonian framework prevailed: there was no secret ballot, and no officially printed ballot. Voters brought their own “tickets” to the polls and deposited them in a ballot box under the watchful eye of party workers and onlookers. Meanwhile, the parties — which were then wholly private, unregulated clubs, fueled by patronage — chose their nominees using the “caucus-convention” system: a pyramid of county, state, and national party conventions in which participants at the lower-level meetings chose delegates to attend the higher-level meetings. At the base of the pyramid were precinct-level caucuses: informal, little-publicized gatherings where decisions on delegates to be sent to the county convention were sewn up through private bargaining among a few patronage-minded local notables. In the 1880s and 1890s, this cozy system was disrupted by a new breed of “hustling candidates,” who actively campaigned for office rather than quietly currying favor with a few key party workers. When informal local caucuses started to become scenes of open competitive campaigning by rival factions, each seeking lucrative patronage jobs, they degenerated into chaos, often violence. Worse, candidates who lost the party nomination would try to win the election anyway by employing their own agents to hand out “pasted” or “knifed” party tickets on election day, grafting their names inconspicuously onto the regular party ticket. Party leaders were losing control over their traditional means of maintaining a disciplined political army. Their response was a series of state-level legislative reforms that permanently transformed the American political system, creating the electoral machinery we have today.

Regulation and Its Consequences These considerations cast the usual debates about third parties, particularly on the Left, in a peculiar light. Typically, advocates of the third-party route depict their strategy as a revolt against a rigged two-party system; sometimes they even castigate doubters as timid accommodationists. Yet, in the context of American law, when such advocates speak of creating an independent “party,” what they mean, ironically, is choosing to subject their organization to an elaborate regulatory regime maintained by, and continually manipulated by, the two parties themselves. This is one fundamental problem with the third-party strategy: the need to continually maintain ballot status — an onerous process in most states — places the party’s viability at the mercy of the legislature. A cautionary tale unfolded last year in Arizona, where the Republican-controlled legislature, concerned about the strength of the Libertarian Party, passed a law effectively raising the number of signatures each Libertarian candidate needs to appear on his or her party’s primary ballot from 134 to 3,023. (This is in addition to the hoops the party itself has to jump through to keep a ballot line in the first place.) The bill’s Republican sponsor, Representative J. D. Mesnard, helpfully explained his thinking on the floor of the state House: “I believe that, if you look at the last election, there was at least one, probably two, congressional seats that may have gone in a different direction, the direction I would have liked to have seen them go, if this requirement had been there.” Another unique aspect of American party law raises similar issues: in their internal affairs, ballot-qualified parties in the United States are “some of the most comprehensively regulated parties in the world.” Normally, democracies regard political parties as voluntary associations entitled to the usual rights of freedom of association. But US state laws dictate not only a ballot-qualified party’s nominating process, but also its leadership structure, leadership selection process, and many of its internal rules (although it’s true that these mandates are often waived for third parties deemed too marginal to care about). In other words, when third-party activists seek ballot status, they are often seeking to grant far-reaching control over their own internal affairs to a hostile two-party-dominated legislature. That is a peculiar way to go about smashing the two-party system. Yet the perverse consequences of the system are often at their most visible when third parties do succeed in getting on the ballot. These parties are frequently forced to devote the bulk of their resources not to educating voters, or knocking on doors on election day, but to waging petition drives and ballot-access lawsuits. The constant legal harassment, in turn, ends up exerting a subtle but powerful effect on the kinds of people attracted to independent politics. Through a process of natural selection, such obstacles tend to repel serious and experienced local politicians and organizers, while disproportionately attracting activists with a certain mentality: disdainful of practical politics or concrete results; less interested in organizing, or even winning elections, than in bearing witness to the injustice of the two-party system through the symbolic ritual of inscribing a third-party’s name on the ballot. The official parties are happy to have such people as their opposition, and even happy to grant them this safe channel for their discontent. And if, unexpectedly, a third party’s fortunes were to start rising, the incumbents could always put a stop to it, simply by adjusting the law. The Labor Party — wisely, in my opinion — adopted a strategy of not seeking ballot status until it had built enough strength to mount a credible challenge to the Democrats. But confronted with the dilemmas of a repressive electoral system, combined with the more familiar spoiler problem, it never actually reached that point. In the end, the party sought and obtained a ballot line only once, in South Carolina (a state where ballot laws were relatively relaxed), in a last-ditch effort near the end of its active life. But by then it was too late, and ultimately the party chose not to wage a serious electoral campaign in the state. One lesson from this history is clear: We have to stop approaching our task as if the problems we face were akin to those faced by the organizers of, say, the British Labour Party in 1900 or Canada’s New Democratic Party in 1961. Instead, we need to realize that our situation is more like that facing opposition parties in soft-authoritarian systems, like those of Russia or Singapore. Rather than yet another suicidal frontal assault, we need to mount the electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency. In short, we need to think about electoral strategy more creatively.

Boring From Within? Does that mean opting for the strategy championed by most progressive critics of the third-party route — namely, “working within the Democratic Party”? No. Or at least, not in the way that phrase is usually meant. It’s true that a number of sincere, committed leftists, or at least progressives, run for office on the Democratic ballot line at all levels of American politics. Sometimes they even win. And all else equal, we’re better off with such politicians in office than without them. So in that limited sense, the answer might be “yes.” But electing individual progressives does little to change the broad dynamics of American politics or American capitalism. In fact, it can create a kind of placebo effect: sustaining the illusion of forward motion while obscuring the fact that neither party is structurally built to reflect working-class interests. “Working within the Democratic Party” has been the prevailing model of progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians. The liberal office-seeker becomes the indispensable actor to whom all others, including progressives, must respond. Think of Ted Kennedy or Mario Cuomo in the 1980s; Paul Wellstone or Russ Feingold in the 1990s; Howard Dean, Elizabeth Warren, or Bill de Blasio since 2000. Each emerges into the spotlight as they launch their careers or seek higher office. Each promises to represent “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” Each generates a flurry of positive coverage in progressive media and a ripple of excitement within a narrow circle of progressive activists and voters. Orbiting around these ambitious office-seekers are the progressive “grassroots” organizations exemplified by MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, or Progressive Democrats of America. (In an earlier, direct-mail era, it was Common Cause, People for the American Way, or even the Americans for Democratic Action.) Run by salaried staffers, these groups monitor the political scene in search of worthy progressive candidates or legislative causes, alerting their supporters with bulletins urging them to “stand with” whichever progressive politico needs support at the moment. (Support, in this usage, usually means sending money, or signing an email petition.) Such groups generally maintain no formal standards for judging a candidate’s worthiness. Even if they did, in drawing up such standards they would be accountable to no one, and would have no power to change those candidates’ policy objectives. Although it’s too early to tell, Bernie Sanders’s recently created Our Revolution organization seems in danger of falling into the same trap: becoming a mere middleman, or broker, standing between a diffuse, unorganized progressive constituency and a series of ambitious progressive office-seekers seeking their backing. In this “party-less” model of politics, it’s the Democratic politician who goes about trying to recruit a base, rather than the other way around. The politician’s platform and message are devised by her and her alone. They can be changed on a whim. And there is no mechanism by which the politician can be held accountable to the (fairly nebulous) progressive constituency she has recruited to her cause. The approach taken by the Working Families Party (WFP) is different, but it, too, remains vulnerable to the problems of such “party-less” politics. The WFP has built an impressive record of policy achievements in its New York State home base, using “fusion” voting — a ballot strategy forbidden by most state laws. (The ban on fusion is another legacy of the two-party election reforms of the 1890s.) Under fusion, a minor party places the name of a major-party’s nominee on its own ballot line, hoping that, if the major-party candidate wins, he or she will feel beholden to the minor party for however many votes it managed to “deliver.” But the contradictions of its 2014 endorsement of New York governor Andrew Cuomo showed how the WFP’s fusion strategy can place it in the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, the party remains chained to the interests of Democratic Party politicians, forced to endorse candidates that are not its own, who run on platforms far removed from its priorities, as if it were a mere faction of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, it still needs to worry about keeping its third-party ballot line, leaving it exposed to the kind of ballot-repression problems that more marginal third parties face. At a deeper level, the “party-less” model that dominates progressive politics today is an outgrowth of America’s lamentable history of “internally mobilized” parties: that is, parties organized by already-established politicians for the sole purpose of creating a mass constituency around themselves. The Democratic Party — created in the 1830s by a network of powerful incumbents led by New York senator and power broker Martin Van Buren — is the classic case. This stands in contrast to “externally mobilized” parties: organized by ordinary people, standing outside the system, who come together around a cause and then go about recruiting their own representatives to contest elections, for the purpose of gaining power they don’t already have. For reasons that are not hard to guess, historical parties of the Left — true parties of the Left — have, almost without exception, been mobilized externally. As the historian Geoff Eley recounts in his history of the Left in Europe: Parties of the Left sometimes managed to win elections and form governments, but, more important, they organized civil society into the basis from which existing democratic gains could be defended and new ones could grow. They magnetized other progressive causes and interests in reform. Without them, democracy was a nonstarter. By contrast, not a single externally mobilized party has ever attained national electoral significance in the United States. “The major political parties in American history,” writes Martin Shefter — who first introduced this taxonomy of party mobilization — “and most conservative and centrist parties in Europe,” were founded “by politicians who [held] leadership positions in the prevailing regime and who [undertook] to mobilize and organize a popular following behind themselves.” “Modern democracy,” in E. E. Schattschneider’s classic formulation, “is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.” Popular, working-class democracy, on the other hand, is unthinkable without parties mobilized from outside the political system — that is, by people organizing around common goals.

What Is a Democratic Party? In a genuinely democratic party, the organization’s membership, program, and leadership are bound together tightly by a powerful, mutually reinforcing connection. The party’s members are its sovereign power; they come together through a sense of shared interest or principle. Through deliberation, the members establish a program to advance those interests. The party educates the public around the program, and it serves, in effect, as the lodestar by which the party is guided. Finally, the members choose a party leadership — including electoral candidates — who are accountable to the membership and bound by the program. It might seem obvious that those are the characteristics of a truly democratic party. Yet the Democratic Party has none of them. Start with the most fundamental fact about the Democratic Party: it has no members. A few months ago I was flattered to receive a letter signed by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, in which she urged me to consider sending a donation, thereby “becoming a DNC member,” in her words. Was she proposing to let me vote on the Democratic primary schedule, or its mode of selecting convention delegates — or, for that matter, the next DNC chair? Obviously not. Mere “members” aren’t allowed to influence such decisions because, fundraising letters aside, there are no real members of the Democratic Party: “Unlike these [British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand] democracies, where members join a political party through a process of application to the party itself, party membership in the United States has been described as ‘a fiction created by primary registration laws.’” Just as the Democratic Party has no real membership, it offers only the most derisory semblance of a “program”: a quadrennial platform usually dictated by an individual nominee (or occasionally negotiated with a defeated rival) at the height of the election-season frenzy, a document that in most years no one reads and in all years no one takes seriously as a binding document. (At the state level, party platforms often reach hallucinatory levels of detachment from real politics.) It’s true, of course, that in a constitutional democracy there’s never anything stopping an elected representative, once elected, from doing the opposite of what he or she had promised. And in the history of left-wing party politics it’s not hard to find instances where elected politicians have gone turncoat. One famous example was Ramsay MacDonald, a founder of the British Labour Party, who betrayed his party after becoming prime minister by joining with the Conservatives and pushing through drastic public spending cuts in the midst of the Depression. But since MacDonald was accountable to a democratically organized party, he could be repudiated and expelled from that party — as he was in 1931, while still a sitting prime minister. For generations afterward, he was reviled within Labour Party circles, his name synonymous with betrayal. Suppose, by way of comparison, that some onetime liberal Democratic hero — say, a senator — decides to flout the promises he or she initially made to MoveOn.org, or Democracy for America, or their constituents. Those groups’ staffs — whom no one has elected anyway — would have no power to meaningfully discipline, let alone expel, them. To whom, then, is the senator accountable? An electorate, in theory, come reelection time. But no party. This is the treadmill we need to get off.