There is little or no doubt in my mind that progressives – a benign euphemism for socialists and communists, has infiltrated the democrat party, the government’s bureaucracy, our strategic institutions, and much of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Acting as a fifth column to destroy America’s constitution and power from within, on behalf of our enemies, both foreign and domestic.
As with all socialist and communist experiments to date, the leadership became decadent, addicted to power and a pampered lifestyle – and would do or say anything to preserve their political positions; including sucking-up to the very special interests that they shame and claim to abhor.
Now we are seeing the progressives move away from the democrat party. Primarily because the progressive socialist democrats are more about fundraising and defending their fast-eroding position against the GOP. And, secondarily, because the party’s frontrunner, Hillary Clinton – although a Marxist – is more about the pragmatism of position, power, and above all, self-serving wealth. It is making the hardcore progressives crazy that one of their own, Elizabeth Warren, is making Hillary Clinton look like a moderate pursuing a mainstream agenda. Someone that is not likely to throw progressive bombs and call for a revolution.
The Democratic Party Keeps Screwing Up: Why Progressives Need to Be Independent of the Party
Progressives have no power in a corporate, focus-grouped, Wall Street-leaning party.
The Democrats’ conduct since the midterm debacle is as sad and sorry as the campaign that caused it. The party’s leaders are a big problem. A bigger one is the closed system of high-dollar fundraising, reductionist polling and vapid messaging in which it is seemingly trapped.
[It takes big bucks to field an on-the-ground team and pay for media advertising. High-dollar fundraising that is unavailable to the progressives because of their radical positions, call for revolution, and putting forth the type of centralized government that has been such a failure in all socialist and communist regimes.]
Some say a more populist Democratic Party will soon emerge. It won’t happen as long as these leaders and this system are in place.
[The current system, a product of decades worth of hard-fought political battles, is firmly in place. And, the type of leadership that appears to be favored by the progressives can only found with a Fidel Castro or Che Guevara spouting revolutionary rhetoric.]
Democrats are in denial regarding the magnitude and meaning of their defeat. It is a rejection not just of current leaders but of the very business model of the modern Democratic Party: how it uses polls and focus groups to slice and dice us; how it peddles its sly, hollow message and, worst, how it sells its soul to pay for it all. Party elites hope party activists will seek to lift their moods via the cheap adrenaline high of another campaign. For once, activists may resist the urge.
The vital task for progressives isn’t reelecting Democrats but rebuilding a strong, independent progressive movement. Our history makes clear that without one, social progress in America is next to impossible. For 100 years progressive social change movements transformed relations between labor and capital, buyers and sellers, blacks and whites, men and women, our species and our planet. But in the 1970s progressives began to be coopted and progress ceased. Their virtual disappearance into the Democratic Party led to political stultification and a rollback of many of their greatest achievements.
[This is exactly the same socialist/communist rhetoric you hear from union leaders and radicals whose political parties have been decimated by decades of failure.]
It also fosters denial. We know there can’t be a strong middle class absent a strong government to help create and sustain it. Social Security, Medicare, civil rights and labor laws, public education and market regulation are middle-class foundations. In the late ’70s they buckled and the middle class buckled with them.
[Again, we are seeing a lie … that all power to thrive and prosper must come at the hands of a government that fights inequality and provides incentives to “nudge” the population to equality of outcome. Unfortunately, we have seen the results of affirmative action where unqualified individuals are set up to fail when they are artificially placed in a competitive environment.]
It was around then that Wall Street began colonizing the Democratic Party and the Democrats began colonizing the left. After Jimmy Carter squashed Ted Kennedy, challenges to incumbent Democrats ceased. Grassroots movements morphed into Washington lobbies and formed their first PACs. For the sake of the Democrats in whom they’d reposed all their hopes and dreams, progressives moved their debates indoors.
[It is not so much that Wall Street began colonizing (there is that socialist rhetoric, again) the democrats; but that the democrats began to become increasingly corrupt and self-serving. Old-time democrats of principle – Pat Moynihan comes to mind – gave way to corrupt ideologues like Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, and others who sold their votes to the lobbyists who worked for the power players.]
We know these things but we don’t connect them and so we miss the chain of causation that runs from the left’s fall to the fall of the middle class and finally, the triumph of the right. Nor do we connect the left’s fall to its own choices. It has a victimization story worthy of a Fox News anchor, but in truth the left dismantled itself. Progressives traded their independence for a seat on the far end of the Democratic bench. Progressives turned their movements into mailing lists. Progressives put aside proven weapons of reason, passion and conviction for the shallow techniques of corporate marketing and modern electoral politics.
[The chain of causation begins with self-interest corruption and proceeds to unworkable socialist theories that demand an increase in the centralized command and control of the government – backed with the force of law and the coercion of government funding initiatives. When it comes to the middle class, the progressives were taking money out of the middle class with their larger government, higher taxes, wealth redistribution schemes to non-citizens, increasing entitlements to purchase political power, and the unions which serve as a hidden tax on all productivity in America – demanding increasing wages, perks, privileges, benefits, and retirement packages without a corresponding increase in productivity.]
Our problem isn’t partisan gridlock but the stagnation of a political ecosystem imbalanced by the slow extinction of liberalism. In the shutdown Ted Cruz bestrode the world like a colossus till the Kochs, of all people, rode to the rescue. Wall Street was a major player but labor was invisible and progressives said barely a word. Their silence didn’t strengthen Obama, it weakened him. It was a perfect tableau of politics in our time. When the left goes AWOL, the right goes crazy.
[The slow extinction of liberalism comes from the revelation that progressive policies do not work anywhere they have been tried and that the progressives, as a political class, are not only corrupt, but tend to be more self-serving as they peddle their toxic ideology.]
Democrats think they need more money, better ads and a bigger computer. They gripe about Republican wedge issues, but have their own; immigration for Latinos, choice for women, student loans for students. What they need is a blueprint for solving problems that matter to everyone. Since the 19th century, progressive movements have created the blueprints and the public groundswells needed to enact them. Can progressives build such a movement in this century?
[Wedge issues? The democrats capitalized on “triangulation” and the co-opting of GOP issues courtesy of Bill Clinton and Dick Morris. Since talk was cheap, it cost them nothing to sound fiscally prudent and socially responsible – even while knowing that their progressive programs were rife with waste, fraud, and abuse and were likely to be counterproductive to society as a whole, and the middle class in particular.]
They can do it but they’ll have to take a time-out from electoral politics. They must declare their independence from the Democratic Party, its ineffectual politics and its current, clueless leaders. In the fall liberal pundits chastised Democrats who “ran from Obama.” Democrats lost because they couldn’t run from themselves. What they really needed to do was assure voters they saw the flaws in Obama’s program and had a plan to fix it. They didn’t have a plan because progressives never gave them one.
[Is a progressive author pointing our that the Administration’s policies, both foreign and domestic, are failures and that the current Administration is corrupt, inept, and incompetent? And, that they must campaign in such a manner as to distance themselves from failure while promoting a new age of “hope and change” that morphed into hopelessness and change for the worse? Keeping their failed ideology and moving forward in spite of having a Marxist in the White House and Marxists layered throughout the government?]
Democrats in Congress seem bent on mass suicide. After their landslide loss they reelected all their leaders without challenge. After the Senate confirmed two utterly unqualified Obama donors as foreign ambassadors, they caved on a budget that opened more sluices for the rich to pour money into politics and hollowed out Dodd/Frank to let Wall Street cover its bad bets with depositors’ money. In 2013 Obama said he wouldn’t “pay ransom” to pass a budget. In 2014 he did just that.
[Interestingly enough, this could be said for both sides of the aisle. The GOP got crybaby Boehner back. The same tough-talking Boehner who promised us reform and spent his time fighting the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party rather than crafting fiscally sound legislation. Caving into a pork-laden budget moments before the Christmas recess – although they knew all of the issues, the timeframes, and the necessity to produce a bi-partisan bill. So why wait until the last minute, unless it was all a sham – where both parties could return to their districts and bemoan the fact that it was rush, rush, hurry, hurry so if we didn’t get your specific pork, donate for the next cycle and we will take care of you.]
A Progressive Declaration of Independence is a risk, but it’s safer than idling about on deck as the Democrats’ ship goes down. Movement building is arduous work. Builders must agree on an agenda, finance and organize a base, communicate their vision, and help people apply the pressure needed to make change. It’s a huge task. If it hadn’t been done so many times before you’d think it was impossible.
[I see the announcement of a Progressive Declaration of Independence as tantamount to announcing the reformation and reemergence of the American Communist Party – a party that exists solely to serve as a fifth column within America to bring about the radical transformation of the United States into a democratic socialist state. Ruled by an enlightened elite for the benefit of the collective; managing resource for future generation, and becoming increasingly totalitarian to prevent a revolution over shared misery in a time of technological wonder.]
Some progressives will spend 2015 trying to lure Elizabeth Warren or some second or third choice into a run for president. Some will make their peace with Hillary. Some will take other paths. A public debate among progressives will unearth some disagreements on policy and a more fundamental divisions over strategy.
Some say the Democratic Party is beyond saving. Others say it’s our last hope. I see progressives taking leave of Democrats not as abandonment but more like tough love. In the end it may be the only thing that can save Democrats or for that matter progressives, whose reputation has been tarnished by the party that betrayed them. In any event it’s better for both parties for all future business to be conducted on an arms’ length, cash-for-carry basis.
[There are some democrats left who see what Barack Hussein Obama and his cadre of progressive socialist democrats has wrought in the land … as they ignore the majority of ordinary Americans and weaken our military, decimate our economy, inject pain and suffering into our healthcare system, and make us the laughingstock of the world. These are the democrats who are starting to come together in a bipartisan manner to solve real problems, not just further the socialist agenda. Pretty much the reason the progressives need to leave the democrats – drastically reducing their numbers to force them further left into socialism.]
My guess is that if you can’t take over the Democratic Party, you can’t take over the country — and that a declaration of independence should be followed by an actual rebellion. The Tea Party has shown you can work within a party and yet be highly independent. But whether to work within, against or apart from the Democrats is a call for later. Building a strong progressive movement is work we must do now. Obama had this right in 2008. We are the change we’ve been waiting for.
[There it is, in plain language, clear as a bell. The desire of progressives to take over the democrat party and then the country – creating a rebellion if they do not get their way, and a rebellion if they do get their way. If you had any doubts that President Obama was a Marxist/Communist, it should be dispelled at once.]
Progressives once provided Democrats with policies. Now Democrats provide them with slogans. Progressives say Democrats lack backbone and a bottom line, but progressives used to provide those too. Want politicians to get the courage of their convictions? It’s simple. First, get some convictions. Courage will follow.
[Again, this could be said about both political parties. With special emphasis on the GOP who appears to have few core convictions other than getting elected and indulging in an orgy of self-destructive crony capitalism. There was a time when the GOP had it all – House, Senate, and Presidency – and squandered the opportunity. Likewise, there was a time hen the progressive socialist democrats had it all – House, Senate, and Presidency – and used it to takeover healthcare. Giving the progressives a comprehensive dossier and real-time tracking of all Americans and control over their future.]
Source: The Democratic Party Keeps Screwing Up: Why Progressives Need to Be Independent of the Party | Alternet
The ugly truth is that there is little difference between the corrupt parties as they battle to take over America’s wealth and natural resources. The pretty lie is that the political parties and their politicians give a damn about the individual American and their freedoms.
Wake up people, it’s our country and we are losing it to vocal radicals who do not wish us well. They are campaigning 24/7/365 and using the mainstream media to condition the people to receive their messages. Study the candidates, call out their lies, withhold donations from corrupt politicians – and above all, support the Constitution that has kept us a free people for 238 years, since 1776.
