Why the Democratic leadership contest is urgent: It will shape the opposition to Trump
Why the Democratic leadership contest is urgent: It will shape the opposition to Trump
Paul Rosenberg
Salon
That’s why the race for the DNC chairmanship matters. It’s not just a fight over who’s going to lead the opposition party under Trump — although installing Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota would go a long way toward unifying the party. Current Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who seems like a overwhelmingly decent person, would presumably represent more of an accommodation with the capital-friendly Clinton Democrats of the recent past.
But there are questions beyond the choice of Ellison versus Perez: Are the Democrats a neoliberal reform party, whose privatization-prone big-city mayors tolerated the Occupy movement for a few weeks or months before cracking down? Or will they return to the social democratic roots that made them politically dominant for decades, from the eras of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson?
This is not to argue that Ellison and Perez consciously represent opposite sides of a debate on neoliberal ideas. During this leadership contest they are unlikely to mention such issues directly but most certainly lurk in the background.
What the Democratic Party desperately needs is a root-and-branch rejection of the entire neoliberal worldview. It stands against its core constituents at every turn. I’m not arguing that a race for party chair should be interpreted as a contest about all the above themes and ideas. Contesting core ideological questions is not really the party chair’s job.
But the job can and should be about creating space and capacity for the party to reinvent itself, challenging those ideas from the bottom up — which is what Keith Ellison promises to do. If the Democrats can’t do that, then perhaps the party deserves to die, so that something more suited to the urgent needs of the day can take its place, as the Republican Party replaced the Whigs during the national crisis that led up to the Civil War.
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