The DNC’s Successful Strategy of Failure

[Photo Credit: Charles Dharapak / AP]

By Petra Glenn

In the last few decades, on multiple occasions, Democrats have secured unified control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. Each time, they failed to deliver on their promises. Abortion rights are an infamous example.

The Biden and Obama administrations had years to codify reproductive freedom. In 2007, before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, President Obama told abortion rights activists that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act [FOCA],” which would have established abortion as a fundamental right nationwide. Yet, even with 257 seats in the House, the largest number of Democratic seats since 1994, and a supermajority in the Senate, Obama did not attempt to pass the FOCA.

Biden secured the House and Senate with narrow majorities, but despite his campaign claims that if made President “Roe would be the law of the land,” no action was taken to secure abortion rights. This allowed Donald Trump’s decidedly anti-choice bench to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Democratic inertia has terminated much of the goodwill the party once had on the abortion issue. Yet, in the leadup to the 2024 election, Democrats are claiming that your donations and votes will lead to the reproductive protections the party has promised for decades. Ignoring their misconduct, Democrats point the finger squarely at Republicans for widespread abortion bans that endanger millions across America.

The Republican Party indeed deserves much blame. Though Republicans once viewed abortion as a personal right, efforts to court evangelicals made them increasingly anti-choice. And they embrace this new identity, with Republican senators like Lindsey Graham calling for a national abortion ban. Oppressing women fits logically with the rest of their platform, which includes exploiting the environment and working class to line the pockets of corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Democrats, meanwhile, are a party of contradictions. They too continually bend to the ultra-wealthy but cloak it in the rhetoric of minority empowerment and progression. Abortion isn’t the only right Democrats dangle above the heads of their voting base. The Democrats have continually built their party off the supposed interests of Black communities, immigrants, workers, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. This alignment is typically purely symbolic, as both Biden and Obama increased police funding, sped up the process of deportation, blocked asylum seekers, and expanded imperialist foreign policies. Democrats have continually doubled down on oppressive systems while boasting of their diversity, equality, and inclusion.

It’s no wonder to those with intersectional class consciousness that the election of Vice President Kamala Harris, former “top cop” of California, didn’t smash the patriarchy. While standing for the same corporate interests, the two parties act like bitter enemies fighting to save the country from the other. Petty disputes take center stage while both vote for tax cuts, police expansion, more military spending, and genocide.

This hasn’t always been the case. In the 75th Congress from 1937-1938, Democrats secured 77% of the Senate seats and 75% of the House. With this majority, that hasn’t been achieved since, the Democrats heavily subsidized education and social services by raising the top marginal income tax to 75%. Fast forward to the 1990s and Democrats had a chance to achieve similar successes. Under Bill Clinton, they won unified federal government control after decades of Republican dominance. Clinton ran as a change agent, rekindling the optimism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election 60 years prior. 

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Despite campaigning as a progressive, Clinton governed as a corporate neoliberal. This shattered the electorate's hopes and set the tone for the Democratic Party as a whole. Taking office amid a recession, Clinton made economic growth his primary policy goal, not equality. This posture and the desire to create a “new economy” led to the embrace of free trade policy, which assumed that globalization would catapult the country into the 21st century. It was a crushing lie. As was the Clinton administration’s financial deregulation, which planted the seeds of the 2008 economic crash. But these choices made sense. Servility to the capitalist class meant more corporate money flowing into Democratic coffers—Clinton’s broken promises made for a more viable — but increasingly useless — party.  

In 2020, Joe Biden adopted the Clinton playbook. His campaign framed the notoriously conservative Washington insider as a staunch progressive. Behind closed doors, “Uncle Joe” promised maintenance of the status quo for his mega-donors. In public, Biden was a climate savior, reproductive champion, and working-class hero, bringing morals back to the Oval Office. Yet he was fully capable of turning on a dime. The same weekend Biden vowed to tackle poverty, he also promised a wealthy audience at the Ritz-Carlton that “nothing would fundamentally change.” He would not “demonize” the rich through higher taxation.

Ahead of the 2024 election, there is much discussion of Democratic failure to achieve any of the goals they set in 2020. A lack of climate urgency, the fall of Roe, not forgiving student loans, inflation, and funding a genocide are particular ways the DNC has failed Americans and millions abroad. Abortion, and other rights, have been used as leverage over Democratic voters. When the right continues to be at risk, at-risk populations have continual reason to vote for the party that claims to fight for such rights. The threat of the Republicans and Donald Trump, in particular, are utilized to explain policy failures and to create cop-outs when failure occurs.

Failure and purposely losing is therefore the strategy of the DNC. The more Democrats lose and fail to provide the rights they allegedly support, the further reasons to vote for them occur. Both parties have no issue voting bipartisanly to cut taxes for the ultra-rich or to fund genocides abroad, yet rely on their construed ‘differences’ to secure votes from their constituents. Republicans’ platform better aligns with their corporate interests, making it easier for them to follow through with their campaign promises.

Democrats, however, contradict their campaign with their funding, making their promised policies of rights, universal healthcare and education, and climate policy impossible. Therefore, the more the Democrats lose, the more they can campaign for further funding from voters and corporations, to hopefully ‘defeat’ the Republicans in the future.

Supporters can argue that Republicans, gridlock, and budgeting have been obstacles to the success of the Democrats, yet these same hindrances appear to be no issue when foreign governments need billions of dollars to commit a genocide that the American public does not support. Our foreign policy simply cannot be majorly adjusted, as “stability” abroad is vital to the security of the American people more than relieving student debt, prioritizing healthcare and education, and addressing poverty. So despite the skyrocketing prices, taxes used to bomb children, and attacks on women, BIPOC, and queer Americans, the very same Democrats who are the ones dropping the bombs remain the saviors.

Dissent against this losing strategy has been met with greater force than any Republican threat has. Forcing Bernie Sanders out of the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary elections was a key strategy of the DNC to avoid being held responsible for their promises and losing corporate interests. The DNC would have rather lost with Clinton than won with Sanders so they can continually look like the victims of the fascist haters of the Right. When Republicans vocally support a genocidal ethnostate, they are racist monsters that need to be voted out of the government so that the moral Democrats can quietly fund the atrocity instead.

Anything to the left of ethnic cleansing and continual tax cuts for the 1% is censored and any representatives who oppose such policies eventually succumb to the establishment to survive. The contradictions of this political game have led to representatives trading their political identities for social status. When progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala — which requires upwards of $50,000 for a ticket — in a gown displaying the message “tax the rich,” it became clear that progressive rhetoric is best used for social clout.

The spiel that continual funding and voter mobilization for the DNC will be the savior for the American people has continually failed to create meaningful change. Biden’s presidency has proved that identity politics can only take our country so far. Our political parties are working how they were designed to: for and by the rich. One party is simply more honest about it.

Petra Glenn is an activist and aspiring political scientist. She is pursuing her PhD and aims to aid in bridging the gap between academic theory and practice.

Pavlovian Socialism: How Metrics of Empire Can Ruin the Left

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

It has been roughly a year since Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to replace Stephen Breyer and become the 116th Justice of the US Supreme Court. The appointment has been hailed by liberal figureheads far and wide since then. President Joe Biden called the nomination an act of “[preserving] freedom and liberty here in the United States of America.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the appointment as a “greater moment for America as we rise to a more perfect union.” In reality, the affair speaks to a vital yet often ignored aspect of sociopolitical oppression in the United States: metrics of empire. 

In the United States, like in any imperialist force, the powers-that-be employ many different tactics to preserve their rule. These tactics include Pentagon involvement in Hollywood filmmaking, the deliberate whitewashing of grade-school education, and the skewing of news coverage to manufacture consent for pro-elite policies. Metrics of empire fall under this same category, as they refer to a carefully curated incentive structure by which accomplishments and developments in American society are measured and rewarded. 

The structure itself can be further broken down into three subcategories: Government, Private and Public. The Government subcategory consists of exactly what its name suggests: governmental forms of legitimation and recognition. American society has been made to believe that prominent government positions carry an inherent degree of legitimacy and sophistication, such that they should be admired and revered simply for existing, rather than routinely interrogated as hotbeds of imperialist empowerment and corruption. Such positions — due to their aforementioned societal rank — thus become rewards in and of themselves, serving as markers of achievement that deserve public reverence and praise regardless of their occupants’ work or character. Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination exemplifies this perfectly.

As a black woman working within the American legal system, Jackson experienced no shortage of hardships and systemic obstacles in her professional journey. Considering demographic data alone, it is clear that Jackson was in largely uncharted territory, as just under 5% of first-year law students are black women while they make up just over 3% of associates and less than 1% of partners. In the end, however, what was her reward for surpassing these systemic hurdles and beating overwhelming odds? A seat on the Supreme Court, a grossly antiquated, inherently undemocratic, and historically oppressive institution that most often operates at the behest of capital and bends to the will of America’s most reactionary impulses.

The Private category consists of entities such as private universities and privately owned publications:

1.  Universities (ex: The University of Chicago): The school is considered one of the 10 best in the country and has historically boasted competitive rankings across a broad range of subject areas and specializations. Yet, it was the so-called “Chicago Boys” — a group of economics graduates — who cultivated and ultimately spearheaded the implementation of neoliberal economic policy abroad, namely in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. This cohort of Chicago alumni collaborated with the United States government to advance business interests by using Augusto Pinochet’s Chile as a testing ground for the economic models and policies they hoped to pursue domestically. 

2.  Publications (ex: The New York Times): Despite being heralded as the gold standard for journalism nationwide, the investor-owned New York Times routinely employs biased coverage and partisan language when discussing matters relevant to American foreign policy -- including Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Iraq War — whitewashing such atrocities to manufacture consent for the imperial project.  

The Public category consists of entities such as nonprofit organizations and public-facing awards:

1.  Nonprofits (ex: Doctors Without Borders): Though it is ranked 26th among America’s Top 100 Charities according to Forbes magazine, this organization is a hotbed of white saviorism and intraorganizational racism that perpetuates US hegemony abroad through the lens of healthcare and medical treatment. 

2.  Awards (ex: The Nobel Prize): The prize is widely considered to be the most prestigious recognition of achievement in the world. Yet, the awardees of the Peace Prize have included the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. 

This state of affairs spells a particularly grim prognosis for the socialist movement across the United States. Metrics of empire have the very real potential to serve as direct inhibitors to tangible progress in the fundamentally socialist areas of social justice, economic transformation, and material improvement. As such, a sort of Pavlovian socialism can develop, one in which it is only through the awarding of such imperial accolades and symbols of legitimation that our work is perceived as successful, casting out all other achievements in the process.

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At best, this dynamic can create a qualitative hierarchy in which the work recognized by metrics of empire is considered superior. At worst, the dynamic can become a hegemonic enclosure fundamentally opposed to the radical dimensions of socialist praxis, eventually creating a scenario in which the metrics themselves become the sought-after achievements rather than the empirical progress made by the work that warranted the metrics’ awarding in the first place. 

We’ve seen this play out already with organizations across the country, one such organization being the Sunrise Movement. While its founding principles contained more radical conceptions of action and changemaking — including sit-ins at government offices, Wide Awake demonstrations, and recognition by prominent leftist figures such as Noam Chomsky — Sunrise’s more recent activism has left much to be desired. Since the beginning of this decade, it has largely shifted away from direct action-based initiatives to focus on electoral endorsements and armchair advocacy. Most notably, these shifts have resulted in a severe lack of climate victories on the legislative front as well as serious organizational neglect of representation and empowerment of marginalized voices in the movement, particularly those of color.

The shift can be largely understood as a pragmatic change resulting from an outstanding reliance on big-money donations as well as ties to government officials and politicians. Through accepting and actively engaging with metrics of empire in this context, namely of the governmental and private varieties, the Sunrise Movement and organizations like it have provided a glimpse of what such a dynamic could mean for the socialist movement when applied to actual revolutionary praxis in the future.

This is not to suggest that socialist praxis should be entirely devoid of notable awards or recognitions. After all, acknowledgements of outstanding achievement can be an incredibly valuable way of qualifying motivated, focused, and effective work. These “metrics of the proletariat,” however, must have a carefully curated relationship to the doers of the work and to the empirical effects of it. The metrics themselves must never come to occupy the place of the work’s initial objective: substantive and revolutionary change. 

As such, “metrics of the proletariat” are a thing of the socialist future, an element of our aspirational imaginary that can come to occupy the dynamics of our work down the line, but not that of the present day. So long as systemic injustices and widespread oppression reign supreme — further emboldened by the unrelenting fervor of imperial capitalism — these metrics will inevitably reward advantaged and privileged socialists and, more pressingly, will run the risk of becoming metrics of empire in and of themselves.  

Thus, as the socialist movement carries on with its vital work of national and global changemaking, it cannot neglect the very real hurdle that metrics of empire can come to represent. Only by preemptively abolishing the air of legitimacy these metrics now hold — and looking toward a future in which new metrics of success and achievement that honor socialist ideals and avoid imperial capitalist corruption will be established — can the movement avoid existing structures of incentive and recognition that seek to counteract its aims at every turn.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Petro/Márquez and the Question of Democratic Socialism in Latin America

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

On September 11th, 1973, a US-backed military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile led by Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende. Given his own success, Allende believed that electoral means could bring about socialist ends. Despite this optimism, the coup took his life after he responded to the attack by staying inside the presidential palace to defend it at all costs. Following the tragedy, Cuban revolutionary and then-Prime Minister Fidel Castro said the following:

“The Chilean example teaches us the lesson that it is impossible to make the revolution with the people alone. Arms are also necessary! And that arms alone aren’t enough to make a revolution. People are also necessary!”

“Chilean revolutionaries know that now there’s no alternative other than revolutionary armed struggle. They tried the electoral way — the peaceful way — and the imperialists and reactionaries changed the rules of the game. The reactionaries trampled the Constitution, the laws, the Parliament — everything.”

Twenty-five years after Castro uttered these words, Latin America experienced a phenomenon now known as the “Pink Tide.” This refers to a wave of elections that saw many socialist executives take power democratically across the region. It began with the 1998 landslide victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Chávez was followed by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina. Many of the region’s more robust electorates soon rejected this trend, however — namely those of Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Argentina -- electing conservative leaders soon after. It wasn’t until the late 2010s that a second Pink Tide took hold — this time, featuring the likes of Andres Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, Pedro Castillo in Peru, Gabriel Boric in Chile, and, most recently, Gustavo Petro in Colombia. Petro’s election last year rocked the status quo, as decades of pendular motion between liberals and conservatives had cast aside the prospects for socialist leadership.

Petro is a product of the leftist guerrilla movements that emerged in Colombia during the mid-1960s, a development in political militancy largely born out of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. From 1974 to 1987, he was a member of the 19th of April Movement — colloquially referred to as M-19 — an urban guerrilla effort with the goal of expanding electoral democracy in the country via armed struggle. The future premier would go on to pursue a prolific political career, serving in the Colombia House of Representatives from 1991 to 2006, the Senate from 2006 to 2012, and as mayor of the capital Bogotá from 2012 to 2015.

Petro’s chosen vice president, Francia Márquez, is an equally momentous figure. A native of Yolombó — a small mountain town located in the Cauca region — she began working as an environmental activist at 13, participating in the Ovejas River defense from 1994 to 1997, an effort to prevent the development of dams in an important water source for her community. In 2014, Márquez led a direct action of 80 Afro-Colombian women. The demonstrators marched from the Cauca to Bogotá, demanding an end to illegal mining in the region.

Their efforts were successful. By the end of 2016, the Colombian government had disassembled and removed all illegal mining machinery. This victory earned Márquez the 2018 Goldman Prize for excellence in environmental protection. She is also the first Afro-Colombiana vice president in the nation’s history.

During their presidential run, Petro and Márquez outlined a platform of five reform agendas:

1. Labor: shorten the workday, increase access to overtime pay, and regulate short-term contract work.

2. Pensions: provide a guaranteed 223,000 Colombian pesos per month — roughly $155 adjusted for purchasing power — to the 75% of Colombians whose incomes currently do not qualify for a pension.

3. Taxation: raise $5.6 billion in revenue by raising wealth taxes, eliminating corporate exemptions, and raising export tariffs on oil and gas.

4. Political System: prohibit private funding of political campaigns and lower the age requirement for congresspeople.

5. Healthcare: transfer the responsibility of selecting private health providers from individuals to municipal and provincial governments.

Since the inauguration of Petro and Márquez in August of last year, only tax reform has found legislative success, having passed in November of 2022 with a revised fundraising goal of $4.2 billion. The labor and pension reforms remain in congressional limbo while the political reform has already died, having been canceled by Petro in March of this year after legislative changes severely transformed the proposal from its initial iteration. As for healthcare, the reform has prompted notable scrutiny and opposition by all parties, including President of Congress and Petro ally Roy Barreras. This backlash caused Education Minister Alejandro Gaviria to resign. Revised language has since softened the proposed healthcare reform considerably.

Beyond the minutiae of legalese, however, the ambitious aims of the administration’s reform agenda have placed a legitimate target on the backs of Petro and Márquez. At best, they’ve become the subjects of inflammatory rhetoric and baseless criticism. At worst, they’ve become victims of attempted acts of violence.

While campaigning, Petro had to cancel a visit to the nation’s coffee-growing region after learning of a credible death threat against him. The threat came from La Cordillera, a paramilitary organization with ties to the drug trade, law enforcement, the Colombian military, and far-right politicians. Márquez has faced similar challenges.

She narrowly survived two assassination attempts this year alone. The first happened in January when seven kilograms of explosives were found near her home in the Cauca. The second took place in March, when explosives were found near an airport Márquez was passing through in the Choco region.

Since then, right-wing demonstrations against Petro and Márquez have become commonplace. The most notable of which took place on May 5th. The event was held at Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, and featured thousands of retired military personnel as well as law enforcement officials. The occupational character of the crowd triggers bitter déjà vu for anyone familiar with democratic socialist history in Latin America at large. After all, the successor to Allende in post-coup Chile was none other than Augusto Pinochet, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army during Allende’s short-lived presidency.

Luckily, this correlation has not gone unnoticed, as Petro himself took active steps to counteract the trend’s more worrying manifestations late last month. On April 26th, he announced the resignation of seven ministers in his cabinet in hopes of removing the internal dissonance and gridlock the cohort had been struggling with, particularly with regard to his proposed health reforms. In early May, Petro also tweeted out, saying, “Why are they conspiring for a coup? Because they are terrified that we will end impunity. The truth intimidates them so much that they despair.”

Cautionary measures and public denouncements notwithstanding, Petro and Márquez should brace for what is to come. They must embrace the optimism of Allende alongside the cynicism of Castro. For the belief in electorally derived socialism cannot mean the dismissal of its most glaring shortcomings. Only by taking heed — pushing their agenda onward while remaining wary of undemocratic attacks — will this administration entrench a legacy of democratic socialism in Colombia and serve as a success story for prospective socialist nations across the region.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.