Why Are They Like This?

With the 2024 elections in sight, Noah Emke argues that Democrats will always choose right-wing capital over left-wing workers, making the fight against Democratic fascist-enabling essential to the fight against Republican fascism.

In the wake of the Biden administration’s disgusting disregard for Palestinian lives, the “uncommitted” campaign has yielded major returns in the Democratic primaries.¹ This protest vote aims to register discontent with Biden’s all but uncontested candidacy in order to end his support for the Gazan genocide. However, even as “uncommitted” gains ever greater share of the primary votes, prompting much finger-wagging from “anyone-but-Trump” Democrats, Biden ignores the campaign completely. At this crucial juncture, the Biden administration commits to ever more right-wing policies even as the election looms. In his recent state of the union, he proudly stated what he stands for: more cops, more persecution of migrant workers, and no end to genocide.² The uncommitted campaign and its detractors are simply a new front in the heated struggle over whether or not the Democrats are worth voting for. However, far less attention is paid to an even more fundamental question: why are the Democrats so bad in the first place? In other words, why are they acting like this? We need to be able to answer this question if we are to understand why the Democrats cannot improve, why we need a new party, and the profound dangers of failing to do so. Too many of the assumptions underlying most discourse on the “party question” are flawed, reliant on short term rather than big picture thinking. In a single election, might a particular Democrat have a slightly nicer platform than their Republican opponent? Maybe so, but the aggregate of many “pragmatic” electoral decisions add up not to harm reduction, but rather harm maximization by abandoning even the potential for alternatives. The truth is that both the Republicans and Democrats are part of a political-economic system locked in a downward spiral. As socialists and Marxist analysts of society, we need to understand how the Democrats function in that system in order to escape it. 

First of all, we need to understand why Democrats are so unresponsive to “pressure” from the left. Basically, the answer is that there is no threat behind the protests. These “uncommitted” voters are a minority, but still big enough to seriously impact the election. If every one of these voters actually abandoned Biden, he would probably lose the race. However, the campaign cannot actually stop the Biden nomination, and it certainly has no suggestions for how to prevent a Biden regime after the nomination is complete. In fact, many “Uncommitted” voters have already declared they would vote for Biden in the general, sacrificing any leverage they had just to possibly avoid some criticism from the “anyone but Trump” wing. That means this can all be safely ignored, so Biden is just taking the same gamble the Democratic establishment always takes: they simply ignore the left.

Ironically, the problem is in the name: “uncommitted.” If the uncommitted voters were to actually abandon Biden in the general, this might indeed represent real pressure. However, this is not a real protest vote, it is a possible protest vote by proxy. All an “uncommitted” victory means is that elected primary delegates do not need to vote for Biden. Ultimately, this is just a weaker version of the old Sanders campaign, Sandersism without any candidate to rally around.  The progressive left has been unable to unify and commit to a party or coalition to displace the Democrats, and until that happens, the Democratic establishment has nothing to fear.

Leftists have nowhere to go, so the Democrats do not have to worry about a threat from the left. This is a well known fact to all political strategists and politicians, and not controversial in the slightest.³ As the Democratic establishment loves to remind us, we have a two party system. Unlike in a parliamentary democracy, we cannot simply change our allegiance to a third party, as only the top two parties are ever viable at any given time. In order to make a more left-wing party relevant, it would not be enough to simply build up a third party to a respectable level. We would have to totally replace the Democrats, as the Republicans once replaced the Whig party. As soon as this struggle begins, Republicans will have a decisive advantage until the new party finally triumphs, and this is an intimidating prospect. The Democrats know this, and they take advantage of the far right political terror in order to perpetuate their own reign of terror, starving and brutalizing marginalized groups even while relying on their votes. The donors demand exploitation, so working class voters must be disciplined, not appeased. The more brutal the open white supremacists are, the less effort the Democrats must put into pleasing their marginalized base. So long as we are unwilling to commit to the long and difficult path of building a new party, the Democrats will never have to “reduce harm.”

Many pro-Democrat progressives will contest this, claiming that the Democratic party is indeed capable of moving left. After all, they might say, the Republican party moved to the right under pressure from the Tea Party movement. However, the situations could not be more different. This false equivalence derives from the liberal assumption that the left and right are essentially the same. “Right” and “left” are misnomers in many ways. In reality the former is the extension of the power of private capital, the latter is the build-up of countervailing power. Conservative or reactionary policies are inherently more compatible with the pre-existing conditions of the system, and on the whole more desirable to the ruling class. Reactionary social policies, popular with the conservative base, are totally compatible with the demands of capital. A politician like Trump can easily rally public support with bigoted policies while pushing through more tax breaks and public service cuts.⁴ The two go hand in hand. That means that Republicans are free to take ever more drastic moves to the right without alienating their big donors.

Meanwhile, the policies supported by the Democrats’ leftist base are in stark contradiction to the will of their own corporate donors. Increasingly, the broad base of progressive voters demand reforms with serious economic consequences for the capitalist class. Universal healthcare, funding for education, restrictions on oil and gas: all of these things will cut directly into the profit margins of private business. Defunding the police and reversing imperialist foreign policies would have less immediate and obvious effects on the bottom line, but they are equally unthinkable to long-term capitalist strategy. Both parties are essentially businesses: they provide the service of gathering votes from their base to acquire political power, which they then “sell” to their donors, who provide them with the funding they need. Unlike the Republicans, however, the Democrats must choose between their base and their donors, and the “customer” is always right. The Democratic Party has clearly assessed the situation and realized they will be more profitable as a weak conservative party than a winning progressive party. The implications of this are twofold: not only will the Democratic party be increasingly right-wing while in power, it will be increasingly incapable of even holding power away from the Republicans. No matter what “pragmatic” socialists have to say about the matter, more and more working class people are noticing the Democrats’ right wing corporatism and deciding not to turn out for them on election day.

This is proven in practice by the Democrats’ stubborn conservatism in the face of lower and lower approval ratings. Changing the Democrats has been tried many times over since the Clintonian rightward lurch, and every attempt has decisively failed. The Justice Democrats, an organization created for just this strategy, has been discredited and gutted.⁵ Isolated candidates brought to power by democratic socialists are persecuted until they can be assimilated, the best example being AOC, who abandoned any socialist and anti-imperialist ideas she once possessed under pressure from the party and state apparatus.⁶ When insurgent progressives took control of the apparatus itself, winning power in the state Democratic committee of just one state,⁷ it self-destructed. In other words, we have seen every possible iteration of this same strategy, and they are all dismal failures. Most damningly, we have sheer policy results. Not only did the Democrats not move left, they are further right than ever. Governor Hochul sends the National Guard into subways, Biden bypasses Congress to support the Gazan Genocide, a Democratic city government arrests Stop Cop City fundraisers,⁸ and the federal government sits idly by while local Republicans restrict bodily autonomy.

This right-wing turn has and will increase so long as the Democrats are allowed to function as half of the political duopoly. Every active progressive has excitedly noticed the workers’ and youth’s radicalization to the left in recent years, but capital is radicalizing too, ramping up its repression, surveillance, and exploitation in response to narrowing horizons. US imperialism is weakening,⁹ unable to continue its occupation of Afghanistan and noticeably more hesitant to actively enter new conflicts, while environmental degradation is materially destroying the Earth’s resources.¹⁰ This is a desperate time for the capitalist system, which requires not just stability, but active economic growth in order to function. In order to manufacture consent for war, surveillance, and austerity, an increasingly desperate oligarchy is tapping into the narratives of insecure white Christian Americans, playing on the fears of the most short-sighted and bigoted. Democrats are not combating this, but following suit, using alarmist rhetoric about criminal immigrants to justify more police and less of every other service. There is no migrant crisis,¹¹ there is no woke conspiracy, and there is no crime wave,¹² but these are the “issues” that frame the debate between Democrats and Republicans, because the real issues cannot be solved without disrupting capitalist interests. In other words, it does not matter how radical the working class becomes, as Democrats will always choose radical right wing capital over radical left wing workers.

But then, how did the Democratic Party become “left” in the first place? The question is worth asking, as U.S. democratic socialists are now consciously trying to emulate the Democrats’ initial consolidation into the only viable “progressive” party. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt revolutionized U.S. politics with his “New Deal,” incorporating moderate social-democratic policies into the Democratic Party’s platform. This shaped the Democrats’ strategy for the remainder of the 20th century, and the Party remains associated with the labor movement and more robust social programs even now, long after the party settled into its Reagan-lite, right-wing turn.¹³ However, Roosevelt’s New Deal did not come from reasoned, internal struggle within the party. On the contrary, it only developed at a time when competition from the left was at its most threatening! The Socialist Party was a viable third party in the Great Depression, made less successful only because the Communist Party was climbing to the heights of its own popularity. It is not a coincidence that the Communists had their highest presidential election results the same year FDR first won the presidency,¹⁴ and it is clear that the specter of organized populist and socialist movements outside the Democrats had an influence on his administration. Measures like social security, the WPA, and many other “alphabet soup” programs were only created because these other parties were offering workers something similar, but more radical. From these results we can see that even if a return to a kinder Democratic Party was truly preferable to a socialist party, the only way to make that happen would be to build a new party anyway!

However, the truth is the New Deal was never such a good deal after all. We should remember that it was World War II, not these meager reforms, which ended the Great Depression and elevated the wealth of 20th century U.S. workers. While white workers benefited from these programs enough to survive the Great Depression, they were hardly as transformative as the war would be, and non-white workers were all but completely excluded.¹⁵ Besides, even by the logic of Keynesian economics, these programs did not go nearly far enough.¹⁶ We should not bet our futures on another massive leveling of the capitalist world, and certainly not another triumph of U.S. imperialism. Instead, we need to be a bit more ambitious, and look back further to another historical moment to be our guide.

 In a time of similar political turmoil, a broad, messy, flawed coalition built the Republican party to combat the threat of slavery. Now we must gather up the courage to build a new party if we are to combat the myriad threats facing our world. This article will doubtless elicit a general rebuke claiming the threat of fascism too great, too close, to worry about the Democratic party. Their premises would be completely correct, their conclusions totally wrong. Fascism is too close, too great, to waste any more time. The best time to do this would have been 2016, but for eight years we have been paralyzed by fear. This is not the intelligent caution of a thinking person, but the instinctual fear of someone confronted by a wild beast, so frozen by terror that they cannot move even to take up their weapon. 

A recent letter in Cosmonaut warned that “barbarism is on the ballot this November,”¹⁷ and this fact is obvious. What seems to escape that author, however, is that barbarism is the only thing on the ballot. The Democrats represent barbarism on the Mexican border,¹⁸barbarism in Georgia,¹⁹ barbarism in Palestine,²⁰ barbarism in Ukraine,²¹ and barbarism for our planet’s future.²² This issue is too often framed as a matter of “purity politics,” when in reality the fight against Democratic fascist-enabling is essential to the fight against Republican fascism. Voting for Democrats may indeed be “tactical” in some cases, but it is certainly not strategic. It is the job of Marxists to strategize, not react blindly to immediate threats. When we look at the big picture, we find that failing to oust the Democrats will have the same result as supporting Republicans: political, economic, and ecological collapse of civilization. The quick, open thrust, or the slow, hidden stab: which one is less painful? Such depressing questions are best not discussed until after the knife has been dodged or parried, and that work is well ahead of us. All progressive individuals and groups must face these facts and unite into a party, coalition, whatever it takes to forge an alternative to the dystopian future presented to us by the two major parties. While things may seem dark, there is no way out unless we can be brave and move.

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