By Tim O’Brien
I think it was on the order of two decades ago that I predicted to Democratic Party leaders and activists that, if the Democratic Party did not start opposing free trade instead of embracing it, that, eventually, an ultranationalist Republican would rise up and win the presidency by doing so.
Few in a position to do anything about it took what I was saying seriously at the time, and, now, as with Cassandra of mythology, my having been proven correct does nothing to ameliorate the bad things that have and surely will come from the emergence of Donald Trump to fulfill my foreboding prophecy.
You would expect that the people with the most pull in the national Democratic Party would have taken this week’s catastrophic loss to a bigoted, ultranationalist, fundamentalist, fascist, billionaire as a sign they needed to start standing up for a Democratic version of populism. But, quite to contrary, even now, greeditarian Democrats are doubling down on their attempts to get the Democratic Party to further jettison its core beliefs for the policies that truly help everyday people.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put it quite well this week when he said, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He pointed out that working class people, Black, Latino and white, alike, “are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.
– Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
The problem is what I have come to call “greeditarianism”. Greeditarianism takes a number of different forms, but its bottom line, above all other policy objectives, is to promote and justify policies that allow a small number of people to become or stay rich by bilking everyone else. Free trade is only one of many policies supported by greeditarians for this purpose. “Deregulation” is another. Opposing unions and universal health care are others. But there is more. Greeditarians appear among Republicans, Democrats and the unaffiliateds.
Greeditarians would never dream of abandoning the policies that facilitate greedy accumulation at everyone else’s expense. There is too much money in it for them!
Sen Sanders pointed out,
Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-tor weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
Greeditarian Democrats are actually not difficult to spot, if you are paying attention. The vast majority of Democrats at the national level who call themselves “moderate” or “centerist” are, in fact, using those terms to conceal their true greeditarian objectives. Why? Because, as it turns out, greed, in its own name, is not popular!
There is truly no such thing as a “moderate” or “centrist” in politics. And, if there were, why do the greeditarians get to be the ones with that mantle? They use vast money and control of the corporate press to label as “extremist” the people who stand up the strongest for everyday people, while styling themselves as “moderate”. But I think being anti-bigotry advocates for better incomes, housing, health care and other things that truly benefit everyday people should be considered moderate, if that label is to be used at all, while believing in greed should be among what is considered extreme.
Underpinning the power of greeditarians is money in politics. As a result of the 1974 Buckley v. Valeo US Supreme Court decision, and litany of other even worse decisions that followed, the purchasing of election outcomes by rich people and their corporations has fundamentally degraded and destroyed our democracy into a corrupted system in which rich people get what they want most of the time, at everyone else’s expense.
It would be easy — and correct — point to the Republican Party as in full agreement with election outcomes being purchased by rich people. But the truth is that the Democratic Party, at the national level, is controlled by greeditarians.
Take, for example, the process by which the Democratic Party chooses its nominee for president. As a rank-and-file Democrat, I never got an actual vote for who I wanted as my party’s nominee for president in most presidential election cycles. The biggest determinant for who is going to be the Party’s presidential nominee is how much money they have backing them — a fact that gives the wealthy outsized power in the decision-making of the national Democratic Party.
The rich control the entire political conversation in our country by dumping vast sums of money into political advertising and owning and controlling corporate press outlets. The spending the rich do to control election outcomes works as they desire it to. They are smart people — if it did not successfully control elections, the rich would not spend billons of dollars on it. The fact they they do proves that it works.
The Democratic Party’s national elites are disproportionately of the wealthy and privileged classes, or aspire to be, and so most have no real interest in promoting policies to achieve greater equality for everyday people. And if they deign to do so, the wealthy who control their chances of winning by spending reel them in fast. I have gone my entire adulthood watching the Democratic Party slip further from the being the party of grassroots empowerment, to being the party, at the national level, representing greed, instead.
There are three general poles of belief in politics, and recent decades have seen a shift in the party alignment around them. The Republican Party has become the party of one such pole — ultranationalist fundamentalism. The Democratic Party, at the national level, has become the party of greeditarianism.
The third pole are those who favor working together to oppose bigotry and achieve a more equal and good standard of living for everyone. There is now no major party at the national level of our country that represents that simple and good value system as its core belief.
But there should be.
People of good conscience will never win over the power the rich or the bigoted using the power of money. It will have to be won at the grassroots. Knocking on doors and other grassroots work to win elections is one important part of it. But so, too, is breaking from our reliance on elections, alone, as our once-every-few years chance to have a democratic voice. That means organizing more to demand, not ask, for good policies and using strong grassroots strategies to force the power of the rich to yield.
As Sen Sanders said,
In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.
Stay tuned.
Yes, indeed.
