The Democratic Party leadership remains hopelessly bound to corporate power and profits. This fatal yet indefatigable marriage goes beyond the most obvious layer of corporate PACs and lobbyists--it spans the neoliberal agenda itself.
To become a true "party of the people" that stands courageously and consistently for workers, unions, low-income communities of all colors, and our ecological future, the Democratic Party must divorce itself not only from corporate cash, but from its deeper enmeshment with corporate power.
The dynamics that propelled the Trump nightmare and that plague a Democratic Party revival are deep-seated. When Trump stumbled his way into the White House, many commentators pronounced the death of neoliberalism and the corporate centrism that defined Hillary Clinton. Yet under Trump, corporate interests and the evisceration of the public sector are of course powering on full-throttle, deepening the alienated anger and dispossession--and the racism, immigrant-scapegoating and xenophobia--that helped enable Trump.
As Cornel West assessed shortly after the November 8 election, "This lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating brought neoliberalism to its knees. In short, the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of U.S. democracy."
From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the Democrats have helped pave the path for their own demise by failing to challenge the corporate power interests. These interests, along with Republican corporate allegiances, preclude the kind of change that workers, low-income people, immigrants and communities of color urgently need.
From Carter to Clinton to Obama, the Democrats have paved the path for their own demise by failing to challenge the corporate power interests.
This doesn't mean the Democrats don't deliver some changes that benefit these communities. But the party's entrenched corporate allegiances preclude delivering the kind of change--such as universal single-payer health care, a true living wage, muscular union protections, and redistributing wealth and profits back into communities--that would uplift people's lives and mobilize people to the polls.
In short, the Democratic Party's marriage with corporate interests--even if testy and stressed at times, like any marriage--means that a bold progressive shift is not about "waking up," but about breaking up.
