Why the DNC Left the Left
After years of dominating Progressive politics, Democrats are embracing the Right in a desperate attempt to crush Leftist organizing.
Watching the way in which Liberals (the so-called Left in US politics) have resorted to self-victimization in their attempts to self-coronate a Neoliberal monarch truly exposes just how far the Democratic establishment is willing to go to stop the resurrection of true Leftist ideology within their own base. Over the last 30 years, the DNC has been able to adopt progressive language as a counterbalance to the increasing nationalism and protectionism of the right-wing, using issues of social justice to soften their own imperialist tendencies and desires.
Today, however, times and contexts have changed as an increasingly activist youth demographic has found their patience stripped bare by the bumbling, anti-social practices of the geriatric state apparatus; two generations of economically disenfranchised voters are demanding real answers to their problems and looking to their traditional leaders for recourse in vain. We demand substantive solutions to the issues plaguing our society from housing to education to labor to healthcare, and what does the DNC do? Bash us as stupid, naïve, overly optimistic, and unrealistic.
In fact, the establishment Democrats have done much worse, shedding any presuppositions of their Progressivism and exposing themselves for the blood-thirsty, virtue-signaling imperialists they have always been. They have rolled out attack after attack against socially-minded individuals who so much as admit they have moral misgivings with the status quo, forging false organizations and ties in an effort to fracture the burgeoning Left.
Ask the pro-Palestinian activists of the UAW how the DNC has assumed ideological control of their own institutions. Ask the members of the Democratic party who have been ostracized for demanding justice, who have had their candidates/candidacies defunded or undermined for having a progressive morality in the face of genocide, apartheid, and borderlands terror both at home and abroad.
To anyone who thinks this is new, that the DNC is reacting out of the best intentions for you , your family, and your community, look to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Sudan to see what Democratic values are. Ask the Yemenis how socially minded our Liberals are; ask Doctor’s Without Borders, Red Cross/Crescent.
The truth is that the Liberals were never a part of the Left. They are not progressive and are definitionally reactionary, focusing on the consolidation of their own power while allowing the administrations of both “parties" to strip away the hard-won victories of true Social Movements of the past. In case you don't remember: the Democratic establishment had the power, impetus, and mandate to create social change under Obama. Instead, they bombed weddings and hospitals across the Middle East, failed to enshrine our human rights at home, and built ISIS to further destabilize Syria and further legitimize Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
Photo: Fred Mason - Liberation News Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
