It’s time to carjack the Democratic Party

I am finally totally fed up with the last lame remnants of the Democratic Leadership Council corporate cheerleaders who still occupy the center of gravity in the national party.  How do they remain the agenda-setters for the path of the Democratic Party?  How many elections do we have to lose before we fire the management team that has run the professional Democratic Party strategic apparatus for the last 20 years?  Their track record is dismal.  We need a new front office for this franchise.  The President needs to dump the Beltway conventional wisdom crew.

Obama’s biggest defect is the desire to look respectable.  He needs to go large or go home in defeat here in the fourth quarter of his presidency.  On this side of the ledger, we must keep up the heat on Obama lest he fall prey to his other political vice, the desire to accommodate his inflamed opposition with weak deals that demoralize his constituency and buy him no love from his opponents.  No deal is better than a bad deal.  Sharpen up the veto pen and buckle in for a rough ride.

The New Democrat technocratic vision of governance as the skilled management team for the corporate state, lacking a deep and morally grounded ideology, and focused on the minutiae of the day-to-day political news cycle, is a failed project.  That shallow, tactical orientation does not inspire confidence.

They distance themselves from what’s left of the labor movement and triangulate against their own base.  The Republican Party embraces their base, and feeds it rhetorical red meat on a regular basis.  You may not like their program, but you’re clear on what it is. That sense of ideological conviction is a big selling point in and of itself.  It is disgraceful that so many Democrats ran from the record of the President, who has managed to stay calm and carry on in the midst of global crises and an opposition party that is bordering on treasonous in the hot pursuit of their sabotage of any initiative from his Administration.

Unfortunately, he has hurt his own cause by falling under the spell of the centrist Democrat Beltway conventional wisdom.  He can speak progressive, but he governs on the basis of where he thinks the real power resides.  By bailing out the banks, but acting only belatedly to respond to the plight of the millions of foreclosed and dispossessed, he early on squandered the progressive mandate that swept him onto office in 2008.  His legacy depends on mobilizing our support through courageous executive actions that maintain the integrity of the brand.

This paltry 36 percent midterm turnout is not a mandate; it’s a sign of a broken political system.  The Democrats need to bite the bullet and have the courage of their convictions.  There will be a firestorm no matter what.  Many of the current generation of centrist Democrats will need to be replaced by candidates who come out of the progressive movement network and are not genetically incapable of envisioning life beyond capitalism as we know it.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is where the energy, passion and creative public policy intelligence reside. The Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders social democratic vision of shared prosperity in liveable communities offers a grounded counterpoint to unchecked corporate state capitalism and its vapid and alienated consumer culture.  We need to offer the American people a real economic and cultural alternative that makes sense, elicits our social capacity for cooperation and empathy, seeks to protect and preserve our precious planet, and works for the common good of the 99%.

Last month I attended a three-day conference in San Francisco produced by the Praxis Peace Institute on the ‘Economics of Sustainability.’  I was heartened to see that the progressive movement is developing a deep bench of talented activists, advocates, researchers, educators and visionaries to help lead the next phase of cultural and political evolution.

This is the moment of truth for Obama: will he allow his presidency to be ground into the dirt in this last two years by betraying his base in some kind of misguided ‘bi-partisan’ Grand Bargain on core Democratic social programs and tax policy, thereby sinking his party for a generation or stiffen his spine and dig in for the fight to come?

We all know that if Obama does keep his word on the immigration issue, the Tea Party will rise up in fury to seek to impeach him.  Their game plan is to tie up the Obama administration with a big noisy impeachment melodrama, and present him with a series of poisoned apple choices on the lines of: “Give us the Keystone Excel pipeline or you don’t get a budget passed.”  Sadly, I predict that will be the trajectory of the next two years.

As far as the impeachment tactic, I say, bring it on.  It will get all the really whacky Tea Party bats that came in on the Red State wave flying around the belfry.  That will sober up a lot of folks up who still think that both parties are the same.  Louie Gohmert and Michelle Bachmann are going to have serious competition for top “crazy/dumb” Palin Awards category.  Case in point:  the newly elected Tea Party House character who does exorcisms of the spirit of Obama in the name of Jesus.  God help us.  I want see the whole freak show frothing and baying at the moon at full volume.  It will scare a lot of voters into action in the next cycle.

Now is the time to build up grassroots power through progressive organizations outside the Democratic Party, and activate the Obama coalition to turn out en masse in 2016 to vote for keeping hope alive.  The path to creating a progressive majority coalition over the next two years is for the progressive movement to turn up its game and reframe the dialog within the Democratic Party in our direction. That’s already mostly happened in California. The political class in the top tiers of the party will co-opt whatever they see as the strong horse movement that they can ride to victory.  It’s our job to create that movement.

We don’t need a third party.  It’s easier to carjack a car from a thief than it is to build one from scratch. The conservative movement patiently built power and took over the Republican Party in a generation.  The progressive movement needs to move in and take command of the Democratic Party now that the centrist program has collapsed. That’s the path to victory in 2016 and beyond.