Running yet another corporate Democrat would play straight into the hands of the right.
By Eric Blanc
The Guardian (6/11/19)
Many Americans agree on the urgent need to defeat Trump in 2020. But what kind of candidate can do it?
Media pundits and Democratic Party insiders would have us believe that the path to the White House passes through the political center. While dismissing challenges from the party’s left wing, Democratic elites are also writing off large swathes of the country as irredeemable Republican bastions. Despite the ultimately disastrous results of this approach in 2016, Joe Biden’s currently high polling numbers imply that a number of voters buy into this logic.
The real winning strategy in the race for president won’t be a centrist one – it will be a bold anti-corporate campaign oriented around working people’s most pressing needs.
But the recent surge of teachers’ strikes across the United States, from Los Angeles to Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, powerfully demonstrates what recent research has found: that a progressive, bipartisan working-class majority already exists in the US. Mobilizing that majority requires that Democrats present a viable alternative to a discredited status quo. The real winning strategy in the race for president won’t be a centrist one – it will be a bold anti-corporate campaign oriented around working people’s most pressing needs.
In 2018 and again in 2019, millions of teachers, parents, and students in conservative states, including massive numbers of Republicans and independents, participated in walkouts to demand major pay raises, increased funding for schools, and an end to billionaire-funded privatization schemes. Many of the strikers belonged to the “white working class” that liberal elites wrongly blamed for Trump’s election.
Massive support for change
When given the opportunity to fight for an issue that directly affected them or their children, educators and parents — white, Latino, and African American alike — put partisan labels aside and supported illegal strikes to protest Republican legislators and the corporations that benefited from their anti-tax, anti-education policies. Due in large part to massive public support, the strikes won victory after victory.
Significantly, this upsurge began in West Virginia, a state that Trump swept in 2016. …
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