Treat A Party As Only A Ballot Line, And That’s All You’ll Get (At Best)
Author’s Note: I initially wrote a draft of this a few months ago then it sat around for a while. I don’t remember why I didn’t finish it, but I did now. Apologies if the wording is a bit off (if I’m using tenses incorrectly somewhere, remember that this was initially drafted a few months ago) but I think the topic is still a good one even though the news is less new now.
I’m intrigued by the events in Nevada earlier this year, where five DSA members mounted successful campaigns to become the new Nevada Democratic Party state party leadership. As a result, the entire party staff has resigned, but not before draining the bank account and sending all of the state’s money to Democratic Party out-of-state affiliates and consultants. The incoming leadership slate is beginning with a position of no money and no staff, and I am quite certain this isn’t the last you’ll see of the old state party leadership and staff. We can guess what comes next by the party’s behavior in 2020 and since Biden was sworn in.
The national Democratic Party is moving quickly to try to pass House Resolution 1 (HR 1), which is typically hailed as a much-needed bill to improve the elections process and make sure more people can vote. That much is true: the changes to enable easier voter registrations and processes are important, and I’m glad to see this. But these necessary changes are also a smokescreen, shielding the problems with the bill’s campaign finance section. In general, HR 1 would make it incredibly difficult to run significant national campaigns as a minor party (such as the Green Party) or as an independent, which in turn has disastrous consequences on ballot access for local and state candidates in many states (many activists do not realize that many states base their ballot access requirements on whether the party runs statewide and/or presidential candidates, so a party that cannot put a presidential candidate on the ballot is often very limited in its ability to run local candidates). HR 1 also opens the flood gates to allow essentially unlimited party money to spill into elections, effectively doing away with the already meager limits on individual donations currently in place — which not only impacts minor party and independent candidates, but also sets the stage for primary candidates to face increasingly larger waves of corporate cash backing establishment candidates. While the bill is of course officially aimed at federal campaigns, the huge amount of money the party will be able to spend will absolutely impact down-ballot races. For some more details, see for instance this response from Howie Hawkins, 2020 Green Party presidential candidate, or an editorial from Mike Feinstein, a member of the California Green Party.
In a nutshell: the Democratic Party is already laying the groundwork to further tighten its grip on the electoral system, even as progressives applaud themselves for “successes”. Progressives need to take heed immediately and react accordingly.
Democratic Party leaders might be sociopathic, but they’re not oblivious. They see the polls showing nearly two out of three Americans now wants a third major party and more choices on the ballot. It’s no coincidence that Democrats were asking for folks to vote the Working Families Party ballot line (which had conveniently endorsed Democratic candidates rather than run its own candidates), while at the same time suing in multiple states, including Pennsylvania, to kick the Green Party off the ballot. Democrats know that if folks are clamoring for a new party, they need to get out front and make sure that new “party” is really just a wing of the Democratic Party, a false “party” owned by Democratic allies that will let folks vote “third party” while still having their votes go to endorsed establishment candidates. They don’t want real choices like Green candidates, because Greens are independent and won’t support the Democratic Party’s corporate agenda. It’s a classic tactic: attack real democracy while supporting a facade that lets you claim to love democracy. Thanks to Democratic incumbent support for the Working Families Party ballot line, including from Chuck Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, WFP qualified to remain recognized as a party with a ballot line under state law, while the Green Party and others got pushed off the ballot due to state laws that greatly increased the number of petition signatures and votes necessary to remain a recognized party with ballot access. The Democrats rigged the system against independents while ensuring the party that endorses them still met the conditions.
From HR 1 and party/ballot suppression, we can infer a few things will happen in Nevada (and honestly likely spread around the country as the political system changes to pressures and capitalism adapts):
- The party establishment will revoke all resources from progressives, forcing progressives to essentially build a whole new party from the ground up (with midterm primaries already only a year away). The establishment is laughing right now because honestly they’d prefer to focus their resources into a “shadow party” like this. Now they’re off the hook for any semblance of “fair” since they’re no longer a semi-governmental state party — they’ll simply back establishment candidates from victory funds enabled by HR 1 instead of the state party, they’ll do their own fundraising through victory funds, and the DSA-run state party and DSA candidates will never see a dime yet be expected to comply with all the laws.
- In addition to lack of funding and support, and being left with the skeleton of a party, the establishment will let DSA “run the party” on paper and absorb the coming storm against Democrats due to the Biden administration’s walk-back of several key campaign promises already. Democrats are preparing for 2022 midterm losses, and the establishment will gleefully point toward DSA as the “cause” and claim the party needs to return to more “moderate” politics. Without a theory of change that separates DSA and progressives from Democratic Party electoral strength, DSA will quickly be blamed for 2022 losses by an electorate focused on “winning” against Republicans more than building a mass movement against capitalism itself. (In other words, the refusal to talk about long-term independent party building will come back to bite them as association with the Democrats becomes electorally toxic when they get blamed for midterm losses. Ironically the obsession with winning elections cycle by cycle as a way of putting down the Green Party and others will be exactly the thing that hurts them, as that rhetoric has trained people to only care about “winning” in electoralism one cycle at a time rather than looking at the long run.)
- A few more progressive districts might maintain a DSA hold; look for Working Families Party chapters to suddenly appear in those districts. This might be a bit dependent on the state (offhand, I’m unsure about Nevada since I don’t know their laws) because ballot access laws vary drastically between states. In states with more draconian ballot laws, watch for the establishment over the next few years to suddenly usher in elections update laws that will “fix” the system, but only for them (sort of like HR 1 does at the national level, makes changes that make it easier to vote corporate-funded Democrat but not anything else). Alternately, look for Democrats to suddenly start supporting Independent candidates in those one-off progressive districts, as they did in Pittsburgh when progressives took over a local Democratic committee and nominated a progressive as the official Democratic candidate but then lost the election to an establishment-backed independent.
In other words: capitalism and the political establishment aren’t going to give up that easy. They’re going to fight. The Democrats don’t actually believe all their non-sense about “spoilers”; they will absolutely run candidates as WFP or even independents if it gets them what they want, and they’ll be able to do it because they have the media contacts and money to get the name-recognition to win. Democrats like AOC are already trying to sell this idea, such as when she told folks to vote on the WFP line in 2020 because, paraphrasing, it allowed folks to ensure Democrats get elected while still registering that they’re unhappy with the party leadership. Yeah, like electing the same party leaders will change anything just because you ticked WFP instead of Dem — they’re still getting elected, and so don’t care. And in the extreme case that a progressive gets hold outside of a “deep blue” district, they can use WFP as cover to say that the socialist candidate can’t win the general election, and so you’re going to vote WFP to make sure the Republican doesn’t get in right? They’re committed Democrats that are just running as WFP to keep the Republicans out, you see, while those meanie-head socialists want to screw everything up when no one wants to vote for them. You might be laughing, but it’s coming.
DSA is ultimately left having to build a party from scratch without Democratic Party support, which means next comes the hard part of building a party free of corporate donors, strategists, and consultants, with its own stream of funding, and against waves of media suppression and money. (If they were to start hiring strategists and seek donors, they would effectively just become the Democratic Party anyway.) In other words, they’re almost attempting to build a third party, except within the confines of a Democratic Party national apparatus that is aligned against them and will use internal rules to stifle independent action in addition to what the unfair ballot access laws do. Even more crucially, they’re essentially building a third party while disavowing third parties, further entrenching two-party politics and undermining their own points rather than raising demands for a new kind of politics. They’re teaching people not to build their own infrastructure, but instead put all their eggs in the Democratic basket, making it easy for corporate-backed candidates to easily take that infrastructure “back” in the future.
We’re not going to win systemic change by playing into the system’s expectations on how elections and parties work. We have to win cultural change before we can get systemic change — which means acknowledging we do not have democracy in the US. One of the surest signs we do not have real democracy is that we are not free to associate with the party of our choosing and run for office without ridicule or threats. It is not freedom or democracy when party and voter suppression runs rampant, and anyone that thinks such suppression only applies to third parties but will not hurt them within the “major” party is living in some illusion world.
While the road to a working class Green Party is a tough one, it is also a more permanent cultural victory rather than a transient electoral win. When folks overcome decades of gaslighting and propaganda to declare that they will never again support today’s system and instead put all of their energy into building a new system — that is, build a real democracy — you’ve now built a resilient, unbeatable machine for change that won’t fall for fear tactics and other propaganda the system will launch at us as we organize and grow. You’ll have a true mass movement that won’t give up until there’s system change — real system change putting power into the hands of the people, via direct democracy, rather than begging the ruling class for action. And this mass movement must declare its independence from the ruling class and the state, and declare its loyalty only to the working class and the people, or folks will find false solutions in Working Families Party or other parties that arise which are focused so extremely on electoralism as it exists today that they leave themselves wide open for co-optation by the system.
Ultimately: DSA must raise its own funds and recruit new staff because it surely won’t get help from the Democratic Party, but if it must do so, why not do so as a completely independent movement?
The Green Party movement is not merely a movement for electoralism, but a movement to call out the lack of real democracy in our system today, and work to change it. One of the surest ways we can show the lack of real democracy is to show how much the system is afraid of us simply having a fair shot at winning elections. We do this not to win Congress and legislate eco-socialism into effect from the top down — not only is the system rigged precisely to prevent that, but it would go against our values of direct democracy. Instead, we must build a bottom-up movement for a new system — a grassroots system we grow bottom-up ourselves via dual power movements and local organizing for direct action and municipalism. This isn’t to say that some electoral work isn’t worthwhile; it may be in some districts, and certainly running can help raise voter consciousness about issues and the lack of democracy in the system. But rather it asks a more general question about strategy and tactics: What good is revolution if we must dictate it to others and become the new authoritarian monarchs, rather than create real grassroots democracy?
“The working class must emancipate the working class,” Eugene Debs once said. Also: “I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it.”
The only way to create a lasting eco-socialism is to have a cultural revolution, for the people to demand real democracy and socialism and implement it themselves community by community. There is no shortcut. Any attempt at finding a shortcut either leads to authoritarianism in the name of socialism (which quickly leaves behind any real sense of democracy in socialism), or encourages a fascist demagogue to “lead you out” toward an extreme right-wing concept of revolution. This is why political education is such an important part of organizing. We live in a place of intense propaganda upholding capitalism and its two-party electoral system. If even the socialists have trouble talking about the systemic problems and why we need system change, and instead try to walk folks back into electoralism within capitalist parties, then no wonder no socialist revolution has been successful yet.
I can only conclude that DSA does not have this same vision. While many claim DSA is only “using the ballot line to get elected,” I have not seen much evidence of this in practice. Nearly all the DSA-backed candidates, especially at the Congressional level, have very clearly aligned themselves with the Democratic Party once in office. There seems to be no effort for them to form their own caucuses to push for bills, or for them to change their registration/party affiliation to some type of independent once in office. As such, it seems clear to me that DSA has little interest in severing ties with the party and building an independent movement, and “using the ballot line” is only an excuse to cover over the fact there is no plan to build something independent toward real cultural revolution.
