Searching for a New Politics: The New Politics Movement and the Struggle to Democratize the Democratic Party, 1968–1978 (original) (raw)
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Organized for Democracy? Left Challenges Inside the Democratic Party
Socialist Register
This essay examines the relationship between the left and the Democrats by undertaking a strategic assessment of the challenges facing left political power in the Democratic Party that draws on the mixed results of various challenges the left has presented inside the party historically. That strategic assessment must be based, I argue, on an institutional understanding of the Democratic Party as an organization, requiring the development of more sophisticated analytical tools than those typically employed by scholars on the left. The fundamental point to be drawn from this analysis is that while a robust, well-organized left can conceivably exercise power inside the Democratic Party, that power is unlikely to serve socialist ends of building the collective power of the working class due to the way the party is organized. Past efforts to transform the party organization into a party of different type, culminating in the New Politics movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrate the difficultly of overcoming this problem. Coupled with the unlikelihood of producing the labour-based third party that has eluded the American left for well over a century, the analysis presented here suggests that the American left must rethink which kinds of goals can be accomplished in the realm of party politics and which cannot.
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The Reemergence of the Left in Contemporary Mainstream American Politics: The Case Study of Bernie Sanders’ Electoral Movement, 2020
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