The Failure of Progressive Democrats is Now Complete

The story of a political experiment gone wrong

Democrat Senator Joe Manchin said today on Fox News Sunday that he will vote No on President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. Given the united opposition of Republicans, the last of Joe Biden’s promises to progressives has joined the rubbish heap of broken Democrat promises going back to Bill Clinton in 1992.

After the Democratic Party rigged the primaries for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to defeat a wave of support for an old insurgent New Deal Democrat from Vermont, a group of people on social media and the up-and-coming YouTube who were generally in favor of European-style Social Democracy got together and launched something called Justice Democrats.

Aware of the corruption enshrined by the corrupt Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision declaring that money was speech, the stated goal of Justice Democrats was to support progressive candidates who refused corporate money but supported health care for all, an increase in the minimum wage, ending imperial wars and many other Good Things, in Democratic primaries.

Their reasoning was that the two major capitalist political parties had rigged the system so as to make it impossible for third party candidates to win, so progressives could only elect their own via primaries in order to change the Democratic Party from within and to form a bloc in Congress which, much the way the Republican Tea Party did, would obstruct their own party’s legislation until they got a few of the Good Things they said they were for.

Eventually, they hoped, this would build a movement to get a Bernie Sanders or some other version of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or a domestic Lyndon Johnson nominated for President, and then maybe we could at least have FDR’s Second New Deal become a reality. In my opinion, it was worth a try, and I and millions of others pitched in as best we could, and the Squad was born.

The experiment failed. Oh yes, a few outsiders with progressive talking points like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib did get elected in 2018 and 2020, but they never had the chance to actually conduct the experiment until the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House.

The Squad was first revealed as the Fraud Squad by a self-described pothead comedian in his basement, one Jimmy Dore, when the latter started something called #ForceTheVote after the Democratic victory in the November 2020 elections. The idea was for the Squad, who now numbered at least 8 members, to refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House unless she publicly promised a floor vote on Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All. Since the Democratic majority was less than 8, Dore figured, Pelosi would at least have to make the promise if the Squad stood firm.

Somewhat to Dore’s surprise, methinks(I might be wrong; ask him) the movement was extraordinarily popular, took off, and even got attention from the corporate media. Squad members were asked about forcing the vote, and all of them said it was a very bad idea. They and their supporters, sycophants, and fans in social media screamed outraged abuse at Dore and anyone else who thought that applying political pressure to Pelosi, which is just basic parliamentary politics, was anything other than a crazy idea. How dare anyone question the integrity of the Holy Squad! In the end, every single so-called progressive Democrat voted for Nancy Pelosi, who is a real, live oligarch worth hundreds of millions of dollars in her own right, with a proven track record of blatant corruption, and an outspoken opponent of Medicare for All, for Speaker of the House.

After Joe Biden introduced his pathetically inadequate Build Back Better infrastructure plan, the Democratic Progressive Caucus announced they would not vote for it until what was left of progressive policy ideas that Biden had endorsed, such as daycare subsidies for working families, had been signed into law. They even stood firm for a few months, as more and more things that would actually help at least some working class people were removed from the bill, one thing at a time. Kind of a legislative death of a thousand cuts.

Last month, Pramila Jayapal, head of the Progressive Caucus, announced that progressives would vote for Biden’s infrastructure deal, without all of the social policy goodies, in the House because they trusted Joe Biden to make sure it passed in the end. By doing that, she and every single other progressive Democrat gave away all of their remaining political leverage, and guaranteed that they would get absolutely nothing from the Biden Administration.

With Joe Manchin’s announcement today, those few progressive policy proposals are as dead as the proverbial door nail. Yet I guarantee you that these same progressives in Congress will continue to promise leftists the moon while soliciting cash donations on a regular basis, or perhaps going to millionaire galas wearing bold slogans and signifying nothing except their own acceptance into what C. Wright Mills once called the power elite.

What have Justice Democrats accomplished? Nothing. What will they accomplish? Nothing, except their own celebrity and their own improved standard of living for themselves and their families, but not for yours or mine.

The first thing one does when one realizes that one has dug oneself into a hole is to stop digging. The lesson I have learned from the failure of Justice Democrats is that the Democratic Party will change progressives, not the other way around, every time. I will never vote for a Democrat, any Democrat, ever again. I will not send any of them any money ever again. Neither should you if you are to the left of Joe Manchin.

I am a Marxist, and freely admit that other Marxists were right and I was wrong when they said there was absolutely no hope that a capitalist party as corrupt as the Democrats would ever do anything to ameliorate the worst effects of that heinous economic system, yet I still held out hope. I think Justice Democrats and Bernie Sanders were worth a try, but that try has failed on the merits, and it is time to move on.

Move on to what, you ask? That’s a fair question, and I’ll do my best to provide some answers, and maybe even some hope, in the future. Thank you for reading. Stop sending money to Democrats if you haven’t already. Good night, and good luck.