Breaking the Impasse

Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States

Kim Moody

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642597264
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In his latest book, veteran socialist writer Kim Moody masterfully analyzes the political impasse which has shaped the rise of a new socialist movement in the United States: recurring economic and political crises, sharp inequality, state violence, and climate catastrophe proceed apace as the right ascends across the world. Moody situates the historic electoral campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other self-described "democratic socialists" and the growth of organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America in this context, and incisively assesses the revived movement's focus on electoral strategies. Offering an important account of left attempts to intervene in the American two-party electoral system, Moody provides both a corrective and an alternative orientation, arguing that the socialist movement should turn its attention toward a politics of mass action, anti-racism, and independent, working-class activity.

CHAPTER1

The Impasse

The multiplication of parties, which arises as a result of other factors, is facilitated by one type of electoral system and hindered by another. Ballot procedure, however, has no driving power. The most decisive influences in this respect are the aspects of the life of the nation such as ideologies and particularly the socio-economic structure.¹

—Maurice Duverger, Political Parties

For the past three decades, since the end of the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s when politics shifted dramatically to the right, electoral politics in the US have been at an impasse. By “impasse” I mean a political situation defined in part by legislative gridlock between the country’s two major parties, and in part by the economic limitations and class dependencies perceived by the leaders and actors in both parties, in which no major reforms have been possible. Drawing on Brookings Institution analyst William Galston, Mike Davis has perceptively described this impasse as political “trench warfare” with its stalemate and “immobile line of battle.”²

This impasse, however, is not only a matter of legislative gridlock, as persistent as that is, but of a partisan and ideological polarization that was not typical of twentieth-century US politics. This polarization and impasse is rooted in deep divisions within the capitalist class as it faces its own crises, on the one hand, and underlying class and racial dimensions that are more familiar but also more intertwined, on the other. It has been characterized by what political scientists call an “asymmetrical polarization,” in that it has been stuck in a context that cannot go beyond right versus center.³

This impasse is not unique to the US. It is found around the world where the traditional parties of the left have moved toward the center, while new forces on the right push politics toward more irrational, often authoritarian, frequently racist, but always deeply pro-capitalist policies and trends. This acceptance of the system by both sides is not only intellectual, but above all in the US based in the presence of capital and its contesting factions within each party funding the entire political process—party organizations, all but a handful of candidates and office holders, and the legions of expensive specialists and consultants that typically run political campaigns these days. Thus, the impasse is internal to both major parties. For the Democrats, however, the internal impasse is enforced by the increased role of super-wealthy individual donors, on the one hand, and a strategic orientation to wealthy and more prosperous voters, on the other.

This political framework is itself embedded in and limited by capitalism’s recurring crises spurred by the ups and downs and secular tendency of falling profit rates. Marxist economist Michael Roberts has called this the “long depression.”⁴ This has meant that the capitalist class is itself engaged in an internal struggle over such economic surplus as this crippled system provides. The impasse itself is thus primarily the result of the conflict of capitalist elites caught in what Dylan Riley characterizes as a “a zero-sum redistributive conflict” at the top and bottom of society.⁵ It is a clash between organized sections of finance and production, new industries and old, corporate giants and upstart privateers, and the largely disorganized mass of the population and electorate that finds itself more and more removed from any influence over the political process.

The crises facing capitalism today, however, go beyond even this limiting economic context. There is the now unavoidable climate crisis that is the result of capitalism’s relentless exploitation of Earth’s resources and reliance on fuels and materials that further damage the environment. On top of this has come a series of epidemics, the latest of which has proved deadly on a massive scale and difficult to confine. The COVID-19 virus spread rapidly across the corridors of travel and trade that capitalism has refined and accelerated in the last few decades far faster than the 1918 influenza pandemic. It was the first “just in time” plague clashing with neoliberalism’s costly, understaffed, wholly or partly privatized health systems. These triple crises have, in turn, deepened the ongoing crisis of social reproduction experienced in various ways by the world’s growing and still largely impoverished working class.

Because the most active elements in this near zero-sum conflict are sections of capital and their immediate social and political allies, the result is a politically limited polarization among frustrated sections of the population, from the petty bourgeoisie longing for the old white United States to sections of the working class for whom the old palliatives of the New Deal and Great Society are beyond reach. For the vast majority of people in the US, the current political choices are limited to the increasing irrationality of the right embodied in the Republican Party or the cautious centrism of the remnants of American liberalism represented by the Democratic Party. This is the political form of the impasse.

It is, however, not a regime of stability. On the contrary, as the deepening of the multiple crises upends the lives of millions, a president claims the 2020 election was rigged with no evidence, the far right emerges from the shadows in full violent “extra-parliamentary” form, the police flout any level of civilian regulation, the financial markets become more irrational, and slumps become more frequent, the impasse itself becomes a cause of instability, anger, and frustration through the inability of the nation’s political leaders to deal with the symptoms, much less their causes.

At the same time, a new socialist movement is on the rise in the United States. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, the election of publicly declared socialists to a variety of offices, the spectacular growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to ninety thousand members as 2021 opened, and even a number of polls all point to an embrace of this political idea not seen for generations. The new socialist movement has arisen in the context of an era of multiple systemic crises since 2008, repeated mass demonstrations, an upheaval in women’s actions in the Women’s March and #MeToo movements, the teachers’ upsurge, an uptick of general worker self-activity, new forms of rebellion in the context of the pandemic, and the explosion of the second phase of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, the first widely visible public debut of this new socialist sentiment, as a version of socialism per se, has been an electoral one primarily through Bernie Sanders’s two runs for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party that inspired many activists to see electoral action as a viable road to relevance and even socialism.

Given the persistent impasse of American politics, the anticlimactic nature of the Sanders 2020 campaign and its absorption into the Democratic Party’s centrist presidential campaign at almost indecent speed and the relative silence of most Democratic “progressives” in the face of an avalanche of Obama and Clinton administration veterans and other centrist administration appointments, however, one might question socialists’ continued emphasis on electoral politics altogether. Surely, as much as we were glad to see the back of Trump at least as president, in the face of this electoral move to the middle of the road by what passes as the political alternative, the more palpable resistance in the streets and workplaces demands the active intervention and energy of the United States’ new socialist movement. It is mass action that will be the most effective way to push the political agenda away from the center and toward the needs of those at the sharp end of today’s multiple crises. This will be a major theme in this book.

Nevertheless, as many socialists are being drawn into mainstream politics whether reluctantly or enthusiastically, a growing number of DSA members have had local and state election victories as well as defeats on the Democratic ballot line, and some opportunities for independent political action are emerging. It remains necessary to debate the very nature of socialist electoral activity for the foreseeable future. Whatever place we give it in relation to the mass movements of the day, electoral action by socialists is now part of the political landscape. The debate as to whether socialist electoral activity should be conducted within the Democratic Party, and if so how, or on an independent class basis is an old one. But like many “old” debates in the socialist movement, in a new context it takes on a new relevance, sometimes with a new twist. And the post-2008 context is, indeed, new.

Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella (A&G) have presented one of the most sophisticated arguments for why socialists should pursue electoral work along the Democratic Party ballot line.⁶ Rejecting a third-party approach as unrealistic under the US “winner-take-all” electoral system, they propose a “a medium-term road to building a party-surrogate and a mass working-class constituency for democratic-socialist politics.” This is the new twist on the old argument. At the same time, the authors reject the old social democratic idea of “realigning” or reforming the Democratic Party advocated by Michael Harrington, Bayard Rustin, and others to no effect years ago.

In addition to arguing against a third party, A&G also reject “movementist” (non-electoral) approaches, as well as the “organize first, build political (i.e., electoral) power later” approaches. They even spurn any effort to break with the Democrats. Instead they propose building “a powerful mass organization— what we call a party-surrogate—that is independent of the two major parties and can shield candidates from their outsize influence.” I will return to the nature of this surrogate and its claims to shield socialists from the influence of the major parties later, but first we must rehearse yet again the arguments for why we are supposedly compelled by the American two-party system to operate within the framework of the Democratic Party ballot line.

Districts as Destiny: Duverger’s Law

The notion that the United States’ two-party system is anchored in the “winner-take-all” or “first-past-the-post” single-member district system of representation is a staple of American mainstream political science found in virtually every textbook on US politics.⁷ Ironically, this foundational American notion that “first-past-the-post” single-member districts (henceforth FPTP-SMD) impose a two-party electoral system was most thoroughly researched and formulated by a French Communist academic at the height of the Cold War. In the 1950s Maurice Duverger, an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union, where there were no contested elections to speak of, studied different systems of representation across multiple nations. He discovered a high correlation between systems of representation based on the FPTP-SMD method in which the candidate with the largest vote or plurality was the victor, on the one hand, and two-party systems which discouraged third-party success, on the other. This became “Duverger’s Law.” Indeed, A&G cite Duverger’s classic work.⁸

Under these circumstances third-party candidates create a “spoiler” effect that causes the “greater evil” to win. Since third-party candidates have no chance of winning, in this view, votes for such candidates are “wasted.” I’m sure most readers are familiar with this reasoning even if they didn’t know about its Communist sponsor. Other academics questioned the inevitability of this “Law” given that it is based only on a statistical correlation and that countries that use this system such as the UK and Canada, unlike the US, have multiparty systems with class–based membership parties, some of which claim to be socialist. Few, however, questioned the influence of this system in discouraging successful third parties.⁹

How then, do we explain the fact that the UK and Canada have long-standing multiparty systems despite using the FPTP-SMD plurality method? Some have argued that this is explained by geographic and or ethnic concentrations, such as the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the UK. Class, too, however, plays a role in this. Not only do some of these nations unlike the US have labor-based parties created under FPTP-SMD conditions, but some also have long-standing class–based third parties: the labor-backed New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada, which currently holds office in British Columbia, and the middle-class Liberal Democrats in the UK, for example.

A replacement of a first- or second-rank party by an initially third-ranked party in a specific district, therefore, is possible if the organized forces of nationalism, regionalism, socialism, or class consciousness or some combination thereof are strong enough, as they were in the UK in 1906 with the founding of the Labour Party, or more recently in Scotland, where the SNP completely displaced Labour as the dominant party in the last several years. After all, Duverger himself had compared the different ballot systems to “that of a brake or an accelerator.” And while the FPTP-SMD plurality system acts as a brake, he wrote:

The multiplication of parties, which arises as a result of other factors, is facilitated by one type of electoral system and hindered by another. Ballot procedure, however, has no driving power. The most decisive influences in this respect are the aspects of the life of the nation such as ideologies and particularly the socio-economic structure.¹⁰

I take Duverger’s reference to “socio-economic structures” as Aesopian academic language for class structure. Thus, the impact of the FPTP-SMD plurality system is not absolute in its power to prevent third-party formations in countries that employ that system of representation. Both “ideologies” and “socio-economic structure” are sufficient to explain the multiparty systems of Canada and the UK. As Duverger notes, while the FPTP-SMD system “tends to the creation of a two-party system inside the individual constituency; the parties opposed may be different in different parts of the country.”¹¹ Is there then something besides the lack of a mass base built into the US electoral system that has prevented a multiparty choice?

What allegedly clinches the two-party district-as-destiny argument in the US is its presidential system. As A&G argue, the presidential system tends to create parties with broad appeals based on coalitions of voters rather than clear ideological appeals in order to win a national majority. Furthermore, since presidential, congressional, state, and even local elections are often held simultaneously every four years, they argue, down-ballot candidates tend to latch on to the presidential candidate’s “coattails” during presidential elections.

As traditionally measured by the number of gains in congressional seats by the victor’s party in presidential election years, however, the “coattail” effect has declined over the decades. By this measure JFK, Clinton, both Bushes, Trump, and Biden all had negative “coattails” in their initial election. That is, their party actually lost congressional seats in the year they were first elected—the opp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Impasse
• Chapter Two “Upward” and Rightward
• Chapter Three The History and Future of the 2020 Elections
• Chapter Four The New Social Democratic Nostalgia: Class, Race, and “Coalition Politic.”
• Chapter Five The Politics of Winning: How Mass Action Brought Victory
• Chapter Six Reversing the “Model”: How Will the Millions Get Organized?
• Chapter Seven A Season of Inflammable Materials, Economic Dislocation, and Political Instability
• Appendix The Roots of Racial Policing in the US
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover