{"id":11153,"date":"2023-09-20T22:37:39","date_gmt":"2023-09-21T02:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=11153"},"modified":"2023-10-01T23:37:35","modified_gmt":"2023-10-02T03:37:35","slug":"once-again-on-the-democratic-party-the-lesser-evil-and-the-working-class-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/09\/once-again-on-the-democratic-party-the-lesser-evil-and-the-working-class-left\/","title":{"rendered":"Once again on the Democratic Party, the lesser evil, and the working-class Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>f nothing else, the scale of the looming environmental catastrophe and ongoing social crisis suggest that we can little afford to keep postponing or subsuming the independent project of contending within the political arena for an emancipatory and socialist agenda. While this article does not explicitly answer the question of who we should vote for in the coming election, it does begin to answer the question of what we should organize for in advance of and beyond the coming election. Keith Rosenthal<\/strong> argues that alternating rule by the Democratic and Republican parties has far more continuity than discontinuity and that we cannot place our faith in the Democrats to advance the interests of the working class and the oppressed.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Could another four years of Democratic Party rule be as disastrous for the Left, oppressed social groups, and the working class generally as a fresh four-year hell of Republican Party rule? I think it is quite possible\u2014for the simple reason that, as a ruling-class political party that lacks the capacity or desire to radically alter the status quo<\/em> in favor of the less powerful and privileged, the party in power will invariably become the target of mass resentment with the status quo<\/em>. This resentment may be of a left-wing or right-wing variety; a bourgeois, middle-class, or working-class variety; or a convoluted mix thereof, but it is inevitable.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it may have been otherwise during previous moments in the history of U.S. capitalism, when it could be argued that a relatively broad consensus of satisfaction with the status quo<\/em> existed among a critical mass of the population. But the era of such a cross-class consensus is over, and with it the golden years of an (always ephemeral) alignment<\/a> of the liberal bourgeoisie and the working class in the Democratic Party. Now, the ship of state of U.S. capitalism is a tottering behemoth, badly in need of repairs and lurching toward global economic imperial decay. The growing inequality between rich and poor (and the super-rich and everyone else), persistent inflation, retrenchment in virtually all state services except repressive apparatuses, the multiplication of social crises from ubiquitous homelessness to civil strife\u2014 are all signs of capitalism\u2019s inability to meet our collective needs.<\/p>\n