“The two major parties in this country rest on a contradiction,” Chris Morrill wrote on Truthout 12-15 in an article entitled “Intentionally or Not, Progressives Are Coaxing Us Back Into a Corporate Party.” Morrill says, “their mass bases are working- and middle-class people, but they get funds from and answer to a tiny elite at the top. It’s obvious with the Republicans. They whip up racism, heterosexism and other social issues to get people to vote against their economic interests. The Democrats masquerade as the ‘party of the people’ (appealing to workers, making progressive proposals), but act in the interests of the rich (lowering workers’ expectations and implementing policies that benefit their wealthy funders). Over the past 40 years, Democrats have actually implemented and overseen attacks on workers and marginalized groups. Joe Biden and Bill Clinton delivered crime bills that caused mass incarceration to skyrocket. Clinton hollowed out social programs in the name of ‘welfare reform.’ Barack Obama deported more people than Trump has, despite running in 2008 as a champion for immigrant rights. These years have created an even greater gulf than usual between the Democratic Party’s popular base and the corporate class to whom it answers, especially since the Great Recession and Obama’s indifference to those who suffered under it. Movements have sprung up against the trend: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Standing Rock, along with a serious shift to the left, especially among those under 45.

Candidates like Biden and, in another fashion, Pete Buttigieg and former contender Beto O’Rourke, have acted like none of this ever happened, continuing to push the same moderate positions that Hillary Clinton did. Biden’s honest about it, while Buttigieg and O’Rourke have offered the same ‘hope and change’ trappings of Obama ‘08 and Clinton ‘92 to hide their centrist politics. Other Democrats, seeing the writing on the wall, have staked out more progressive positions and rhetoric, not to transform the country or build a progressive movement, but to win votes and revive the corporate Democratic Party. In the leadup to the 2020 campaign season, Cory Booker, one of the top three Senate recipients of campaign money from insurance companies last time he ran for office, signed onto Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. Kamala Harris marketed herself as an anti-racist, challenging Biden’s record on busing and school desegregation in her most dynamic debate moment. She pitched herself as a fighter ‘for the people,’ despite an extensive record of jailing and prosecuting mainly Black and poor folks. Elizabeth Warren is similarly trying to thread the needle, albeit more to the left than Booker or Harris. She’s positioning herself left enough to capture Sanders’s base, but right enough to not alienate moderates and her billionaire contributors. She offers Medicare for All with asterisks and hedges: a public option for kids, the poor, and middle-aged first, then real single-payer (supposedly) two years later. As Tom Moran wrote, praising Warren’s plan, ‘This isn’t the year for Democrats to take a risk like this, and Warren seems to understand that.’ She’s not for socialism but for ‘saving capitalism.’” Sanders, the only real progressive candidate, seems “strident” at times in his responses. I doubt the Democratic establishment will allow him to be nominated, even though I think he could beat Trump handily, because, as I’ve written time and time again, I think Trump was elected at least partly because Americans want real change, whatever it looks like. If by some miracle Sanders was elected, Congress – or at least the Senate – would block him at every turn. (As I’ve also written many times before, this is how the system was designed – to avoid “mob rule” (democracy). The whole thing needs to be completely revamped, and maybe Sanders’ election could be the beginning of that. I still think, however, that his movement would have been stronger if he’d run (both times, if a second time would have been necessary) as a third party candidate, the undisputed head of a progressive movement.

In addition to Sanders, as Morrill indicates, “the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” as represented by recently elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or, in the past, Dennis Kucinich), “recognizes the widening gulf threatening the party’s future, and is trying to save it, while facing opposition from the party’s still-dominant right wing. Obama, for example, recently admitted he’d seek to stop Sanders’s nomination if he got too close to victory.

During the debates, many progressives watch with the hope that Warren or Sanders get the jump on Biden or Buttigieg. The problem is, intentionally or not, these progressive candidates are coaxing us back into a thoroughly corporate party, with no guarantees we won’t face the same disappointments as ever. Far from leading us out to found a new party that’s accountable to ordinary people and not just the rich, these candidates are trapping us in.”

Sorry to be so depressing and “cynical,” but this is the reality. If we don’t face it and do something about it, we’ll end up with the same old shit. Aren’t you, like me, tired of that? Let’s stop wasting our limited energy on a false political map.