Left-Populists—Unshackle Your Imaginations!

It’s time to challenge the Democrats’ “business model.”

By Richard Eskow, The Nation

This year’s election left Democrats in a quandary. They clearly needed new, ambitious proposals to help working Americans, but that would undermine a de facto “business model” that has guided their party for decades. Once again, it seemed that nothing would change.

As always, the left had no shortage of good advice for Democrats. Some commentators joined Senator Bernie Sanders in admonishing the party to remember its working-class issues. In one interesting take, Pete Davis proposed overhauling the party’s “civic structure” with tools like maps, membership cards, and mutual aid.

“By pairing local participation with centralized coordination,” Davis wrote, “the national leadership and the local membership could communicate ideas, concerns, mandates, and marching orders back and forth.”

The problem isn’t the advice; it’s the intended audience. It’s dispiriting for activists to spend their lives supplicating to an institution that has strong incentives not to listen. It’s time to stop talking about what Democrats need to do and start talking about what the left should do.

For years, the idea that the Democrats had any plan would have seemed absurd. But the chaos ended in the 1990s, when so-called “New Democrats” reorganized the party using a corporate-style blueprint. They don’t call it a “business model,” of course, but it exists. It helps explain some of the party’s more baffling decisions—and its distaste for the left.

The model’s “product” is corporate-friendly public policy. Revenue from corporations and wealthy individuals (“customers”) finances the party’s mega-million-dollar—now billion-dollar—campaigns, along with a vast superstructure of think tanks, consulting firms, and vendors. They employ thousands of people who, in turn, help shape the party’s direction.