"Split or Get Off the Pot"

This election cycle, many will try to rationalize and ennoble their debasement in Philadelphia by joining an “anti-fascist” crusade against Trump – attempting to juxtapose a fool’s gold casino caricature of a fascist with the actually existing, real thing: Hillary Clinton, the personification of imperial mega-murder and domestic mass Black incarceration; the queen of international chaos and would-be warden of the world’s biggest gulag. Clearly, most “progressives” don’t know what fascism looks like in the 21st century. Here’s a clue: it listens to every communications device in the world, locks up more people, most of them non-white, than any other nation, and cackles “We came, we saw, he died” over the bodies of assassinated world leaders.

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Bernie Sanders is trying to figure out how to capitulate to Hillary Clinton and her corporatist masters next month, in Philadelphia. “The Sandernistas – now minus their commandante – can either slither into Hillary’s big corporate tent, or get down to the hard work of building an opposition, social democratic party that reflects the politics of around 40 percent of the U.S. public.” The alternative is perpetual defeat inside the Democratic Party.

  Glen Ford

Yeah, they're used to that. It's comfortable now.

Like most Americans, they have internalized the win-lose logic of the two-party system, and cannot imagine starting a third party from scratch, or building a small, existing party into a major contender.

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They want to be on the “winning” side, even if their presence is actual proof of abject defeat.

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Any excuse to remain in the Party – like non-binding platform adjustments – suffices to delay the moment of truth. They preach the gospel of merging mass social action and electoral politics, but their failure to break with the Democrats puts their mass networks at the ultimate service of what has become the uber-corporate party.

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Sanders’ remarkable campaign allowed this “progressive” constituency – mainly the white ranks, and youth of all ethnicities – to see themselves as a potentially independent social force, as numerically significant as the white nationalists that gave Donald Trump his victory on the other side of the duopoly. “Progressive” Democrats claim, cockily, that Hillary “can’t win without us” – and they are right. But, if they allow her to win, then they are not really “progressives” at all – just carping complainers whose bluffs can always be called by serious corporatists.

Jill Stein, the presumptive candidate for the Green Party, was refused permission to address the [recent People's Summit in Chicago organized by the National Nurses United union], thereby shutting the door to an actual voting choice for anti-corporatists. Sanders has never deigned to respond to Stein’s offer to share the ticket with him, in November.

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Kai Newkirk, director of Democracy Spring, schooled activists in “non-violent discipline” to prepare them to run gauntlets of police at the convention site and surrounding streets. But, to the extent that these energies are expended on pressuring the Democratic National Committee to make platform promises that Hillary Clinton cannot possibly keep, they will end up punching air. They need a new party.

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But, I am certain that a significant fraction of the 12 million will get down to the business of alternative party-building, recognizing that the rich rule through the mechanism of the duopoly electoral system.

I hope you're right.