Robert Reich Calls For a What? A "New Democratic Party" Whatever That Is.

During the campaign, Robert Reich urged American progressives to hold their noses and vote for Hillary. He also said that, the day after the election, they should mobilize, perhaps around Bernie Sanders, to create a new progressive movement, one that could challenge both the Republicans and the Democrats in 2020. Well that day has arrived, albeit not with the anticipated outcome, and Robert Reich is still calling for a new progressive movement, something called a "New Democratic Party."


The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people’s party — a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which is about to take over all three branches of the US government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.

Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.

The Democratic Party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper-middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.

...They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class — failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify — with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination — more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration — has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.

...The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.

There are valuable lessons in Reich's warnings for our own sitting government. The Liberals have followed in the footsteps of the Democrats. Do you think Trudeau more progressive than Obama? I don't. With just one year under his belt and three more in which to change course, Trudeau has been given an invaluable lesson in what could await him in 2019.