Truest statement of the week II

The “Russiagate” hysteria is only the latest reason to conclude that the Democratic Party is the greatest institutional impediment to creation of mass “resistance” to onrushing war and never-ending austerity under late-stage capitalism. Last week’s vote on the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019 showed, by the numbers, that any legislative “resistance” depends, not on Democratic victory in November of this year, or in 2020, or the cycle after that, but on the formation of an entirely new party. Only 59 Democrats  voted against the $717 billion Pentagon spending bill, whose passage guarantees, not only more war, but new waves of privatization and a painful spiral of doom for what’s left of the social safety net in the United States—an ultimate outcome that is fully understood by the perpetrators on both sides of the corporate duopoly.
The lopsided vote reveals that there really is no “left wing” of the Democratic Party, just a tiny, ill-defined faction that can be brushed aside even on “bright line” issues of war and peace, guns or butter, and social justice versus police repression. Since it is the Democratic half of the duopoly that claims the allegiance of the vast demographic consisting of virtually all the components of a “progressive” social base in the U.S. -- components representing large majorities of the American people and the near-totality of the Black population -- it is the Democrats that are to blame for the strangulation of the majority’s aspirations for a more just, equal, and peaceful society. Republican gerrymandering of legislative districts concentrates Democrat-leaning voters, but it is the Democratic Party that turns these voters’ progressive notions into mush and dust. Donald Trump didn’t make the Democrats betray the solid progressive majority of their constituents; Nancy Pelosi did, on behalf of the party’s masters on Wall Street. No rescue of “the people” is conceivable under budgets burdened with such military outlays, yet there is only token “resistance” to military spending from the Democrats, and even those that voted against the authorization still scream for war against the Russians, daily.

--  Glen Ford, "How the “Progressives” in the Black Caucus Have Shrunk to Almost Nothing" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).