Democrats are saboteurs in the resistance camp

Working class independence sounds good to most workers.  Try saying both parties are funded by billionaires, so our class should create our own party—you’ll get high fives.

Yet seriously arguing to break with the Democratic Party in practice is tricky, to say the least, especially in the face of today’s Republican monster.

How then to promote working class independence, and its required break with the Democrats, while not downplaying the overbearing threat of far-right authoritarian state transformation?

This piece argues that there have always been two fundamental arguments for breaking with the Democratic Party. While both of these arguments still apply to some extent, the balance between them has shifted because of the radically new danger of Trumpism. Relying on the old balance leaves too many of us who advocate a break with the Democrats out of touch with today’s political generation.

One argument (discussed in detail below) is that the relatively small policy or platform differences between the two capitalist parties translate, in practice, to neither party actually being better for our class in terms of political outcomes—particularly when our class fails to act independently of them. Many revolutionaries have long relied mainly on this argument. It’s still true at times. When it is, as with bipartisan support for genocide and slander of those in solidarity with Palestine, we should say so. But with one party now aggressively building a new authoritarian order, it is less often true, less convincing, and can blind us in complacency.

The other argument is that the Democratic Party specifically, because it is a party dominated by the capitalist class, sabotages our class’ fight against the authoritarian and reactionary tendencies of the Republicans. Capitalists, even liberal ones, cannot countenance the militant class-based methods of struggle needed to confront these tendencies. As long as our class fails to build political independence, the Democrats’ sabotage stifles class-struggle methods. Right-wing authoritarianism has always had a presence in the Republican Party, but today it is obviously no longer peripheral. It is instead dominant. Revolutionaries today need to learn to frame our arguments and struggle strategies in terms of the pressing need to defeat authoritarianism. By relying on this second argument, we can do so without succumbing to the dominant forces on the Left. These forces use the Trumpist threat to discipline and subordinate us to the Democratic enemy and saboteur. But the authoritarian danger, properly understood, increases rather than decreases the urgency for our class to break from the Democrats.

The classic case

As Hal Draper pointed out in “Who’s Going to be the Lesser Evil in 1968?,” the Republican Party gradually accepted the New Deal over the post-WWII economic boom decades. There was centrist convergence. The two parties were never exactly the same, but Johnson could campaign against Goldwater’s warmongering and then go on to massively escalate the Vietnam War. Eisenhower could use Federal troops to protect school integration in Little Rock, and even Nixon could champion Food Stamps increases, price controls, the creation of OSHA and the EPA, and the slogan “Black Power.”

Both parties (but especially the Democrats) took their electoral bases for granted. More importantly, labor, civil rights, and working-class organizations, cowed by fear of a non-existent fascist threat, refused to challenge (or even went to bat for) Democratic betrayals.

Reaganism’s move to the right only apparently increased the gap between the parties. In reality both parties began the transition toward neoliberalism starting with the 1970s economic troubles.  California Governor Jerry Brown, New York Mayor Ed Koch, and President Jimmy Carter, all Democrats, pragmatically rolled out what Reagan later promoted with ideological fervor.

In the 1990s Clintonism overtly locked in the bipartisan conservative switchover, alienating a generation of workers and planting the seeds of Trumpism. The dynamics identified by Draper dominated again, but this time on the basis of center-right convergence.

All of this amounted to the machine-like efficiency of capitalism’s political self-regulation. The whole system—the parties, the media, corporate power, and official working-class organizations— successfully marginalized first any attempt to go beyond the New Deal Order, and later (even more rigidly) to break with neoliberalism.

Decay of a stable order

But the machine broke down. The Great Recession brought to a head long-brewing working-class discontent, while plunging small-business owners off an unexpected cliff.  The Tea Party, Occupy, Bernie, and Trump successively challenged the established political borders Right and Left. Bernie had the momentum to lead a left electoral jail-break to a new party, but refused to do so. Thus Trump and the far right internationally broke through as Left alternatives failed.

Today, Trump is risking recession with capricious tariff policies and effectively weakening U.S. global imperial leadership with equally capricious posturing on the international stage. These are not rational ruling class policies, even if they respond to real world geopolitical challenges. The system’s political self-regulation, which had assured professional stewardship of capital’s economic and imperial interests within a strict bipartisan range, has broken down.

Nor is the assault on bourgeois democracy in capitalism’s overall interests. Yes it benefits some sectors of capital. But it tends to create a more unstable business environment and threatens social peace. Capital of course adapts and maintains influence. But the attacks on judicial and legislative oversight and on Bill of Rights protections, the de-legitimization of elections, denigration of scientific thought, promotion of conspiracy theories, active promotion of white, cis-male, and Christian supremacy, and brazen extension of repressive force fall hardest on the working class.  To some extent they represent the weakening of the state’s role as arbiter in the class war, clearing the way for direct battle between the classes, with the capitalists largely positioned to dominate the field. Or simply the state crushing us without the pretense of legality or fairness.

Even in this situation, Draper’s dynamics still appear at times. At least initially, Trump’s spectacle of mass deportation fell short of Biden’s deportation rate. (This may have changed, or likely will change with “big beautiful” increases to the ICE budget.) Trump’s unprofessional and deranged approach creates unintended consequences that can mean failed or ineffectual policy.  That can make the intended victims—us—better off than we might have been with a competent Democrat. The Democrats still occasionally seek to outflank Republicans to the right. And workers and oppressed peoples’ mass organizations let them get away with these betrayals more than ever.

But overall it is no longer credible to argue, as I have heard from good comrades, that in practice things end up the same whichever party rules.

A new logic of class independence

Instead a less intuitive logic must come into play. It’s not that our class should divorce the Dems because they are ultimately no better than the Republicans. That leads to complacency about the GOP threat. And it would be tragic for socialists to fail to take the lead in the fight against authoritarian reaction, ceding that role to those who do not shrink to recognize the novelty and severity of the threat.

Instead, we must expel the Democrats from our ranks precisely because of the extremity of the far right danger. The resistance is fighting for our survival. Democratic hegemony in that resistance is undermining it, sabotaging it, and above all preventing working-class independence.  We need that independence to ground the orientation to class-consciousness, mass militancy, and radical social transformation required to prevent disaster.

A working-class break with Democratic tutelage would champion every victim and scapegoat—immigrants, trans people, Federal workers, students in solidarity with Palestine.  It would use protest, mass disruption, and workplace action to protect them, defend their rights, prevent their deportations, and get their jobs back. It would support struggles for unionization, higher wages, free health care, rent control, taxing the rich, etc. It would denounce Democrats for avoiding these fights and, without de-prioritizing grassroots organizing, challenge them with independent electoral candidates even at the risk of Republican wins.

The Democrats are, by and large, unmistakably better than the Republicans. But inside our movement, that very “betterness” is weaponized against our interests. It leads to stultifying compromises (like having no pro-Palestine demands on the “No Kings” protest stages) that strip us of dynamism and idealism (and arguably of numbers). It rules out campaigning for big redistributive policies-—the only ones potentially able to rouse the kind of majoritarian worker enthusiasm that could match Trump’s fervent cult. It disrupts the crucial attempt to build solidarity based on understanding “first they came for them, then they came for me,” throwing immigrants and trans people under the bus (as California Governor Newsom is aggressively doing). Democrats channel resistance energy toward reliance on courts, politicians, and elections, where they repeatedly fail and worse. Attempts to prosecute Trump for four years only increased his popularity and facilitated his campaign. Even Democrats winning at the polls (assuming the next election is not cancelled due to some Trumped-up state of emergency) ultimately feeds the far right danger. Biden’s 2020 win, touted as the end of Trump, in the long run made Trump and his movement stronger and much more dangerous.

Expelled from our ranks, the Democrats (until displaced by a workers’ or socialist party) will sometimes join the Republicans, including in persecuting workers and the oppressed. Other times, they will oppose the GOP in ways in-line with the attempt to restore capitalist stability.  From a position of independence, we can force them in these instances into playing an unwilling part in more effective and liberating resistance—the kind based on unconditional solidarity and the empowerment of grassroots self-organization. Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hope and claim they are pushing the party from the inside, but they have abjectly failed to build a potent political force because being “inside” inhibits them. They use their huge popularity mainly to direct the resistance into the next election, when organizing is needed in the urgent here and now.

Like the spy or the agent provocateur, the Democrats can only be effective by making the people they are betraying like them. The Democrats have to be actually better to succeed in steering our class away from our ultimate interests. For many comrades I know, it is a paradigm shift to acknowledge this.

But learning to frame our opposition another way—as removing saboteurs of effective resistance from our midst—entails no softening. In fact, fully recognizing the horrible “worseness” of the Republicans only indicts the Democrats more sharply. Their inveterate sabotage of the natural process of our class’ independent organization and conscientization was the prime condition of the rise of the Trumpist monster. And their 2024 electoral failure stands revealed before millions disgusted with the party as a crime—not in spite, but because of our desperate reality. And that is the mass sentiment we can build on toward our class’ independence.