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On 3/7/20 5:26 AM, Nick Fredman wrote:
The Democratic Party compared to "labor social democratic parties" is under more direct bourgeois control, in funding and leading personnel, while having a similar working class and urban middle class voter base and substantively similar in formally somewhat different ties to union and other "social movement" bureacracies. While it's then even less likely to house any sort of class struggle social democratic-type current than the ALP, but this isn't impossible in very specific circumstances. Maybe only twice ever — Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign in the 30s and the Sanders since 2015, more debatably to some extent in the Jackson movement.
Why stop at Sinclair's campaign? Why not the New Deal and FDR? As a Sandernista sympathizer, you should know describes his candidacy as nothing more than an attempt to carry out a new New Deal.
By the criterion you put forward, Trotsky's critique of the Popular Front goes out the window. It also sidesteps the Comintern's careful distinction between a worker's and farmer's government that would consist of Communists and Socialists in power and, on the other hand, a government made up of those parties and bourgeois parties. Some of these bourgeois parties made the Sandernistas look reactionary by comparison. Like the Radical-Socialist and Radical Republican Party in France, better known as the Radical Party, that was in a coalition government with the CP and the SP. Like Sanders, its leader Eduard Daladier was great at making fire-breathing speeches. He took a populist line against the banking oligarchy in France that was a threat to democracy. He called it the Two Hundred Families.
But who cares what Trotsky wrote? Your friends in the DSA like Isaac Silver understand that all that uncompromising revolutionary stuff is what you'd expect from boomers who got their heads filled with nonsense from Howard Zinn and other 1960s revolutionaries who insisted on drawing clear class lines. Everybody knows that Michael Harrington and Bernie Sanders were far more in touch with the needs of the working-class than dreamers of the absolute.
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