Current Events > Is This the Future Left Wants?- required reading for U.S. progressives

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/future-liberals-want-matt-karp-populism-class-voting-democrats

If you plan to vote in the Democratic Party primary, are deciding between Warren and Sanders, and want to see real improvements in the material conditions of the mass of people, you should read this popular recent piece by Matt Karp if you havent already.

Its not short. But it does an awesome job of explaining the historical and present contexts that frame the current juncture facing the Democratic Party, and why the choice between Sanders and Warren is in fact a stark one.

Yes, Jacobin is an openly left-wing publication. There is no need to point this out.

I plucked a couple excerpts for anyone wanting a small jist of the article first:

The question here is not simply whether a Democratic candidate nominally supports unions, but where labor stands as a priority within the party. Memorably, Barack Obama supported the union-backed Employee Free Choice Act on the campaign trail, but after his election, he let the proposal die in Congress with barely a sound.

We may choose to regard this as a shameful presidential betrayal, but like many Obama-era failures, it revealed far less about Obamas personal views than about an institutional Democratic Party dominated not by labor advocates but by professional-class politicians highly attentive to their professional-class constituents. (The rise of the broader Patagonia left, as a study of fifteen European countries has found, tends to produce a less pro-worker welfare state.) As an individual Democrat, Warren may be to the left of Obama, but there is little reason to believe that she has the capacity to change this larger state of affairs.

...

Even in the best-case scenario, politics under a President Warren would almost surely resemble politics under Obama: careful negotiations between progressive professionals and stakeholders in Washington, in which the president seeks the least-worst outcome in a world of narrow and fixed constraints. An infinite variety of Yglesiases and Krugmans will luxuriate in the nuance, integrity, and ferocity of Warrens bold progressive agenda, even as fundamental economic structures remain unchanged. And then they will be shocked, just shocked, when the next Donald Trump swaggers into the White House and blows it all to bits.

I thought it largely obvious that the Democrats have 100% succumbed to the progressive technocrats and left the workers behind, which is exactly why we got Donald Trump.
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konokonohamaru posted...

I thought it largely obvious that the Democrats have 100% succumbed to the progressive technocrats and left the workers behind, which is exactly why we got Donald Trump.

Yes, and Bernie Sanders represents the only chance (in terms of presidential candidates) to counter and reverse that. So he should be vigorously supported.