Establishing boundaries

In the process of confronting corruption in U.S. politics, this new electoral infrastructure is clarifying what it means to be a progressive.

OR, BNC and JD restrict the candidates they endorse from accepting corporate PAC donations. They do allow donations from union and other non-corporate PACs, based on a vetting process.

Candidates endorsed by these groups and WFP must also agree to the organizations’ platforms, which are all strongly progressive. (People’s Action is currently drafting such a platform and considering restrictions on corporate donations.)

The first item in the JD platform is a ban on private donations to politicians and the creation of a “clean public financing system … to end the takeover of our government by corporations and billionaires.” The group concedes, however, that under the system we have, getting elected requires money from private donors. In other words, to have any hope of reforming that system, you have to play by the rules of the game.

Other items on JD’s platform include abolishing the death penalty, enacting police and immigration reform, ensuring paid sick time and family leave, investing trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects, raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, and implementing a single-payer healthcare system. BNC’s platform is broadly similar and includes a call for “getting money out of politics,” though it’s short on details, and endorses “a constitutional amendment that gives the federal government and states more control over campaign finance, and ceases to consider corporate money the same as speech.”

Support for some or all of those positions is common among Democrats, of course, and the gap between establishment Democratic Party politicians and progressive demands has narrowed rapidly over the last two years, at least in theory. A majority of Democrats in the House are now co-sponsors of a Medicare-for-all bill, for example. Support for a $12 or $15 federal minimum wage is now common, as is support for some version of free college or trade school. It’s often been noted that the 2016 Democratic Party platform was the most progressive major party platform in U.S. history, one concrete legacy of Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid.

The great fault line between establishment Democrats and the new electoral infrastructure comes down to corporate influence. It’s partly an issue of optics—it just looks bad that Democrats get so much money from corporate PACS. But it goes deeper. It’s also a question of passion, and the capital that Democrats are willing to invest in reforms, such as regulating big banks, that would benefit their constituents but are opposed by their donors.

Voters have noticed the disconnect between Democrats’ words and deeds. “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis,” a report commissioned by progressive groups to assess the party’s failures in the 2016 election, found that the party “appears to be losing ground with its most reliable voting bloc, African-American women.” The percentage of black women who believe that neither party represents their interests rose from 13 percent to 21 percent from 2016 to 2017, according to a poll conducted by Black Women’s Roundtable ntergenerational Public Policy Network and the Essence Festival. A September 2017 NBC News poll of young adults found that 31 percent of African Americans and 37 percent of Latinos believe the Democratic Party “does not care about people like them.”

“It’s not only a question of credibility, but a sense of commitment and passion,” says Norman Solomon, a co-author of “Autopsy.” “There’s a very passionless affect, not only in the presidential ticket last year but in the current Democratic National Committee and the House and Senate leadership. But being aspirational is how we get things done. Sometimes much faster than people could imagine.”

By making the corruption currently inherent in our politics a central issue—as Donald Trump did in 2016—the groups in the rising progressive electoral infrastructure acknowledge what everyone knows to be true but many Democratic politicians shy away from saying because they’re enmeshed in and dependent on that very system. The party’s progressive wing aims to point the way forward by showing that a political party that actually listens to and serves the people is still possible.

In the People’s Action candidate trainings for example, “we talk a lot about co-governance with the movement and with your community,” says Laurel Wales, the group’s director of movement politics. “Once you’re elected, the people who are able to see you day in and day out are corporate lobbyists. So we push our candidates to understand that that’s what’s going to happen. If that is the case, what are you doing back home, in your community, to hear from the regular voters and constituents that you represent? We push candidates to think: What structures are you setting up to hear from your people?”

Breaking the unholy alliance

“This is a very big historical moment,” Trump adviser Steve Bannon told the New York Times in November 2017. Bannon is the force behind much of Trump’s economic populism, including his opposition to trade deals and calls for massive investment in infrastructure projects. Bannon’s media operation, Breitbart, is also the beating heart of the Trump administration’s deep racism. “The revolt by the Democratic Left and the progressive Left against the Wall Street ownership of the Democratic Party,” Bannon said, “you can see it coming.”

For all his toxicity, Bannon is politically savvy. He knows that the populism he preaches has been used to powerful effect in our history—both the right-wing racism he peddles and his left-wing focus on the corrupting influence of corporations. And he understands very well that we’ve been at this crisis point before.

The People’s Party of the 1890s—the original Populists—rose up as a cross-racial alliance focused on the concentration of wealth and the rapidly rising power of corporate interests in the last third of the 19th century. The Democratic Party neutralized the People’s Party challenge through a program of race-baiting, intimidation and co-option of the Populists’ rhetoric and parts of their platform. But the Populists’ critique of inequality and corruption survived in the fledgling progressive movement of the 1900s and 1910s, and it found concise and powerful expression in the Progressive Party platform of 1912.

The Republican and Democratic parties, the platform said, “have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”

The Progressive Party’s nominee, Theodore Roosevelt, did better than any third-party candidate in U.S. history, gaining 27 percent of the vote. In 1912, nine Progressives were elected to the House, and the party also had a down-ballot presence. Though it lost the presidential election, the party made the corruption of the system a central issue in national politics, and its mobilization for the election lent momentum to the early progressive movement, which was building the infrastructure to push through reforms at the state level. New York, in particular, served as the testing ground for the workers’ rights and social insurance legislation that would become federal law in the New Deal.

Theodore Roosevelt, in Chicago for the Progressive Party National Convention, rides in a procession along West Jackson Boulevard Aug. 6, 1912. (Photo by Chicago Daily News/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)

The overarching political story of the last four decades has been the assault by the Right, not just on specific New Deal achievements, but on its vision: the idea that high levels of public sphere investments, through a highly progressive tax structure, create a more stable and more just society—with more opportunities for everyone. A central theme of that story has been the rising influence of corporate money in politics, and how it has been used to overwhelm and dismantle that New Deal vision.

So, as Bannon rightly noted, this is “a very big historical moment.” The great question facing us is not so much whether progressives can push Democrats left. It’s whether traditional methods of political influence and progressives’ emerging electoral infrastructure—operating essentially as a third party within a party—can pull the rest of the Democrats into the movement’s orbit.

One uncertain aspect of our current crisis is the fate of the Democratic Party. In the Democrats’ better days, the left-wing populism that created the Progressive movement was also the party’s heart and soul. Without that soul, Democrats’ policy platforms ring hollow. Fundamentally, what’s on the line is whether the unelected corporate “invisible government” that has allegiance only to profit will reign unchallenged, and corporate interests will fully control the levers of government.

The last time this story played out, it took nearly five decades and a crisis of capitalism—the Great Depression—for the early vision and agenda of the Populists and Progressives to find broad expression at the national level as the New Deal.

We can’t know what will come of the seeds of reform being planted now, or how long they may take to bear fruit. Or if they ever will. All we know with certainty is that the story doesn’t end well if we fail.

“The first task of the statesmanship of the day,” read the Progressive Party’s 1912 platform, “is to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.” That remains our first task today.

Theo Anderson has contributed to the magazine since 2010. He has a Ph.D. in modern U.S. history from Yale and writes on the intellectual and religious history of conservatism and progressivism in the United States.

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