A new party—not a third party, but a real second party representing authentic alternatives, as befits a democracy—is therefore urgently needed. Fortunately, the nucleus of such a party already exists, however captive-like and timid, inside today’s Democratic Party. (The late Senator Paul Wellstone called it “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”) For this nucleus to grow, come to power and lead a new reformation of American capitalism, it must liberate itself by occupying and transforming the Democratic Party, as insurgents have done in other co-opted parties that outlived their historical mission—even if this means bipartisan Democrats leaving to become Republicans or go into the third-party wilderness.
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The political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, its historic achievements consigned to the distant past, is not a recent development. The party’s role in the making of the current crisis speaks for itself. For forty years—that is, under both Republican and Democratic presidents and Congresses—the nation’s wealth has been put into fewer and fewer hands (the richest 1 percent now possess more wealth than the less prosperous 90 percent), while ever more people have been relegated to poverty or rendered unable to maintain their hard-earned place in the middle class.
Hence today’s shameful American realities (and new exceptionalism): rates of family income inequality, child poverty, infant mortality and incarceration that are greater—and opportunities for quality education and upward social mobility that are less—than in almost any other modern democracy. The two defining tenets of the American dream are being lost, if they have not been lost already: that most children have a fair chance of achieving more than their parents did; and that determination and hard work will assure a successful and secure life.
Democratic loyalists blame Republicans for this national tragedy without acknowledging their own party’s responsibility.
MORE: How to Save the Democratic Party | The Nation.