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).