What are Progressives Waiting For?
By Dave Lindorff
The Democrats in Congress last Spring voted $120 billion to continue funding of the War in Iraq, saying that they had been sandbagged by the administration, with its so-called “surge” strategy. They promised that come September, though, they’d take a stand and end the war.
In August, the Democrats in Congress, who had been mouthing criticisms of the administration’s five-year crime spree of illegal wiretapping and internet monitoring by the National Security Agency, caved in under administration pressure and passed a “temporary” bill, authorizing that warrantless spying on Americans by the NSA. They promised, though, to “fix it” after they returned from summer recess.
And still progressive Democrats are standing by the party, afraid to say NO.
A few weeks ago, I published a call for progressives to quit the Democratic Party. I said at that time that after 50 years of being dissed, ignored, and, in the end, taken for granted, by the Democratic Party, and after half a century of trying to “work from within” to remake the party in its old New Deal progressive style, it was time to realize that only a serious threat to withdraw our support had a chance of working.
My idea is simple. Progressives should simply quit the party. Not silently and individually, but in a mass movement—loudly, visibly and as a group. I envision mass marches on city hall voter registrars’ offices, long lines at Democratic Voter registration drives, and rallies at Democratic Party headquarters, at which people would fill out new registration forms, changing their registration from Democrat to independent.
As I wrote at the time, if several hundred thousand, or millions, of progressives would quit the party enmasse, it would have an electrifying effect on the ossified and corrupt Democratic Party leadership. They would see clearly that they could no longer count on the automatic support of progressive voters next election day. And if they didn’t get the message on their own, local Democratic elected officials would. They depend on those Democratic registration lists for their money mailings and their get-out-the-vote campaigns. Without those lists, local Democrats, for whom turnout of the faithful is everything, would be dead in the water, and they’d be hounding national party officials for action to bring progressives back.
If we left by the hundred of thousands, all saying our bottom line was ending funding for the Iraq War, and initiating impeachment hearings against Bush and Cheney, you can bet that those things would start to happen.
The immediate response to my little campaign was 1000+ people going to my website's quit the party page, and signing the petition.
Progressive websites like Common Dreams, Truthout, DailyKos, and the like, have not taken up the campaign. Without broad support to spread this message far and wide, it won’t happen.
And unless progressives don’t take an action like this, the Democrats in Congress have made it clear they will do nothing of consequence for the rest of Bush’s term of office, and most certainly will do nothing to end the war or hold the administration to account, through impeachment hearings, for its many high crimes and misdemeanors.
While most progressives who have heard this call to quit the party, have expressed excitement about the idea, there are some who raise the same tired and discredited objections: We need to stay in the party to keep our voices heard, reform takes time, if we quit, we leave the party to conservatives, if we quit, we hand victory to the Republicans in 2008. And we need to vote in the primaries.
Let’s take those one by one.
First of all, we’ve all been trying in one way or another to move the Democratic Party to the left for 50 years, during which time, with the one exception of 1972, it has moved the other way, such that today, Richard Nixon would be considered too liberal to be a viable Democratic candidate! And we don’t have another 50 years to keep trying this approach.
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