Why is Bernie Sanders ducking the central Progressive strategic debate? Question: Should Progressives stick with the Democrats or form a new party?
Sure Sanders states his views to TV and Youtube hosts who don’t grill him, but he’s ducking debate with other Progressives. Progressives are people who demand honest elections, an end to global-corporate welfare and aggressive war, social justice, protection of the natural world, restoration and updating of the socialist democracy that gave the U.S. the largest middle class in world history, and swift action on global warming. They strongly oppose corporations financing candidates and officials. Combined, they would form the nation’s supermajority party. People with Progressive views are 66% of U.S. voters. Yet they have had no representation in 40 years, ever since global corporations bought the government by buying the Democratic and Republican parties.
Once, decades ago, when most Democrats were Progressives; Democrats outnumbered Republicans sometimes seven to one.
As Professor Noam Chomsky demonstrates however, Neoliberals beginning in 1993 with Bill Clinton drove the Democratic Party hard right and the party dwindled. With the party 25 years later moving still farther right, Republicans and Democrats have long since merged. We are stuck with a one-party system dotted with billionaires’ Dark Money groups, controlled by global corporations which buy politicians. Progressives still make up 80% of the Democratic Party, but have no power within it. Since November 2016, the majority of U.S. voters — and 91% of U.S. voters 28 or younger — have wanted a new party.
Voters are moreover on the move, leaving the Democrats and Republicans. With registrations dropping since 2004, each of the old outfits is down to one-fourth of U.S. voters. The Democrats and Republicans are already minority parties. A new supermajority Progressive party -- by refusing to accept politicians who take corporate “donations” -- could snap the lines of corporate control of our government, restore our commitment to the common good and get us going on climate change.
Bernie Sanders’ strategy therefore, to put it mildly, warrants public debate.
In order to “unify” the deeply divided Democratic party, which is at best 28% of the registered voters, and to which he does not belong, Bernie is urging his supporters to remain Democrats. This is dividing Progressives who are two-thirds of registered voters, just when they’re trying to start the new party.
Progressives representing a myriad of groups met in the first Convergence in DC on September 8-10, 2017. A petition inviting Bernie Sanders, with 50,000 signatures from his own supporters, was hand-delivered to his Senate office on September 8, with a month of advance notice. Word of Sanders’ plans not to attend the debate on September 9 got back to the Convergence, not through any direct, courteous method but when Sanders supporters called Sanders schedulers to ask if Sanders was going to show. Although his schedulers said that there was no conflict, the answer was no.
Ducking all aspects of this is so contrary to Sanders’ image of “the compassionate populist tough guy willing to go anywhere and debate anything with anybody” as to raise concerns about alien abduction.
Sanders has over the past years repeatedly uttered some variant of, “If you don’t have the guts to face your constituents, you shouldn’t be in politics.”
Surely, he should therefore by his own rule have the guts to face them, to debate.
The pressure among Progressives to unite their groups and found a vast new party, with or without Bernie, meanwhile remains intense. This month, they came together, convened by Draft Bernie for a People’s Party, Progressive Independent Party and Socialist Alliance with people from some 20 other groups responding, forging links. As one of the Convergence organizers Laura J. Irwin puts it, “I won't spend my time resisting or reforming. I will use my time to create and form something new!”