Second, its strategy is not a new one. It is the latest of a series of vehicles, including Tom Hayden’s Campaign for Democracy in California in the 1980s, or Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, to attempt an “inside/outside” strategy to shift the Democrats in a more liberal direction. The “inside” aspect of its strategy isn’t a secret. PDA’s Web site proclaims its goals as:

We are specifically committed to the realization of new models for achieving local, national, and global security that redirect the current wasteful and obscene levels of military spending toward the uncompromising and effective funding of: health and education programs; an end to discrimination; the provision of full and meaningful employment; and an end to poverty for all people. To achieve these goals, we dedicate ourselves to work within the general framework of the Democratic Party and with sister organizations to create a new, democratic, grassroots-based, nationally federated organization.

The “outside” aspect comes in two parts: first, a willingness to combine traditional lobbying with more public forms of pressure like press conferences, rallies, and teach-ins; second, and more importantly, a desire to bring into its “big tent” members of the Green Party and other projects aimed at (at least in the past) building an alternative on the left to the Democrats. That’s why Global Exchange leader and Green Party member Medea Benjamin, Nader’s 2000 Vice-Presidential running-mate, Winona LaDuke, and David Cobb, the Green Party’s 2004 candidate for president, have been prominently featured at PDA events.

Throwing a lifeline to the Democrats

PDA claims dozens of chapters in thirty-six states and thousands of members. Since its founding a year ago, it has taken up one campaign after another. In the immediate period between its founding conference and the November 2004 election, the PDA network worked to get out the vote for Kerry and other Democratic candidates. A crucial part of this effort was aimed at the left-most reaches of the Democratic electorate, trying to assure that it wouldn’t stray into the independent camp of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo. In the immediate aftermath of the election, PDA worked with Jesse Jackson and David Cobb to protest election irregularities in Ohio. The November election and the Ohio battle formed the backdrop of PDA’s second national meeting, held on inauguration weekend in January.

Since January, it has shifted its attention to activities related to the war in Iraq. PDA, in partnership with the liberal antiwar coalition United for Peace and Justice, has been the chief promoters in Congress of the Woolsey amendment, the legislation sponsored by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) that calls for the gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and their replacement with a United Nations-led force. After the London Times exposed the Downing Street Memo, PDA and one of its main congressional supporters, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) launched a new campaign and Web site (www.afterdowningstreet.org) to pressure Congress for hearings into Bush’s pre-Iraq War lies. PDA claimed credit for the June 16 press conference, held in the basement of one of the congressional office buildings, which called attention to the Downing Street Memo while most of the mainstream press was ignoring it. PDA hailed the reconstitution of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a grouping of fifty-nine liberal members of Congress. And, most recently, it organized the July 23 events that called for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and raised calls for Bush’s impeachment.

Exactly how successful any of these campaigns have been is open to interpretation. The fallout over the Ohio election produced a brief challenge in the U.S. House’s pro-forma vote to certify the election of Bush/Cheney. The Democratic Party’s opposition to waging a serious challenge to the vote in Ohio assured that the protests would be brushed aside. The various antiwar initiatives have seemed to gain more headway. But this certainly has more to do with the disaster in Iraq, the effectiveness of the Iraqi resistance in sabotaging U.S. plans, and the enormous shift in public opinion against the war. When conservative Republican Rep. Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones (R-N.C.) feels compelled to support a resolution calling Bush to “set a timetable for withdrawal” from Iraq, it’s unlikely that he’s feeling any heat from the likes of the PDA. On the contrary, the unfolding disaster in Iraq will see more rats like Jones jump off Bush’s sinking ship.

But whether the PDA can genuinely claim credit for these events (and anyone who has visited its Web site will know that it isn’t shy about doing so) is beside the point. The most important role that PDA plays lies elsewhere. That is in its creation of a political space so that activists who might otherwise be building a left-wing political alternative to the Democratic Party can be pulled back into the Democratic “big tent.” What’s more, the existence of PDA (and other organizations that share its politics like the Independent Progressive Politics Network) helps to give shape to the idea that activists can win their issues like national health care or an end to the war in Iraq by working within the Democratic Party. Admittedly, it does this in a more activist-friendly way than organizations like Democratic Socialists of America or the Campaign for America’s Future, whose starting point is a rejection of activity outside the Democratic Party. PDA leaders say the organization would, in certain circumstances, support Greens, socialists, or other third party candidates. But this is window-dressing at best.⁴

One of the political analyses underpinning PDA is the assessment that the vote of almost three million people for Ralph Nader in 2000, rather than representing a positive declaration of independence from the two corporate parties, represented a disastrous split among progressives that allowed Bush to steal the White House. The official press release announcing PDA’s founding included this quote from Lu Bauer, a Maine Democratic Party leader:

While there are some efforts to win those voters back, they have not emerged from within the anti-war, progressive camp. This time around, it will take former Nader voters to win over real progressives and help defeat Bush. Kerry can’t do it, because his position on the war remains out of sync with most progressive voters, let alone with early and strong opponents of the invasion of Iraq.⁵

Many of us in the Green Party made a tremendous compromise by campaigning in swing states for such a miserable standard-bearer for the progressive movement as John Kerry. Well, I’ve had it. As George Bush says, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”

For those of you willing to keep wading in the muddy waters of the Democratic Party, all power to you. I plan to work with the Greens to get more Green candidates elected to local office.⁶

In the fund appeal for the PDA she says the PDA is not the Democratic Party. It is like saying the Panama Canal is not Panama. I’d have to say it’s still in Panama. The Progressive DEMOCRATS of America are not the Democratic Party but they’re in the Democratic Party. In fact they are the front line fighting to prevent an independent force from developing against the two parties and clearly in competition with the Green Party. Part of their goal is to co-opt the Green Party back into the Democratic Party.⁷

The most important thing we do is that inside-outside strategy: Pulling together members of the Green Party, the Independent Progressive Politics Network, the hip hop community, the civil rights community, our allies in congress, the anti-war community. We are bringing together all the social movements within the Democratic Party under one effective tent, and we will do it better if people can contribute to our cause.⁸

Getting lost under the “big tent”

The PDA’s “big tent” perspective sounds like a more “realistic” and achievable objective for the Left than building a party completely independent of the big business Democrats. But one only has to look at the experience of the 2004 election, when virtually the entire Left crowded under the Democrats’ tent, to see how wrong this is. Was George Bush and his conservative agenda destined to win the 2004 election in the face of an unpopular war, unprecedented job losses, and pessimism about the direction of the country? To many progressives, the answer was “yes,” because they believe that the U.S. is an irredeemably conservative country. But did the 2004 elections give working people the opportunity to vote against the occupation of Iraq, for national health care, or against attacks on civil rights? The pro-war, pro-business, anti-civil liberties Kerry/Edwards ticket didn’t.

The Nader/Camejo independent presidential campaign did offer left-wing alternatives on all of the key issues. But it was marginalized from the outset by an ABB drumbeat consciously promoted by many leading progressive intellectuals and activists, including many of the current leaders and allies of PDA. The result of these political choices in 2004 was a disaster: the complete marginalization of any progressive ideas, the suspension of antiwar organizing for the better part of a year, and a possibly fatal blow to the Green Party as an independent force—all in the service of a strategy that failed on its own terms (i.e., of electing Kerry).

When elections roll around, Democratic politicians operate on the assumption that the Left “has nowhere else to go.” So they spend much of their time courting the “center,” i.e., moving to the right. As long as the Left doesn’t build an alternative, the Democrats will continue to take it for granted, just as it takes the Democratic “base” (women, Blacks, labor, and so on) for granted. As long as their threat of leaving the Democratic Party is empty, progressives will always be forced to back “lesser evil” Democratic candidates. One has to look no further back in history than to last year, to the failed presidential campaign of Dennis Kucinich, to see how this process works.

Kucinich remained in the race long after Kerry had locked up the nomination. He said he was going to bring his delegates to the Democratic convention to fight for progressive issues like ending the war in Iraq and for single-payer health care. Instead, the Kerry-controlled Democratic platform and convention committees compelled the Kucinich forces to recant their positions. The Kerry forces could have simply outvoted the Kucinich forces. Instead, they demanded unconditional surrender, and Kucinich gave it to them. “Unless we have a firm and unshakeable resolve for John Kerry, we will have no opportunity to take America in a new direction,” Kucinich said in urging his supporters to back Kerry.⁹

Yet Kucinich made it quite clear that he had no intention of leaving the Democratic Party over any of the positions for which he stood in his campaign. At one point during the campaign, he said, “The Democratic Party created third parties by running to the middle. What I’m trying to do is to go back to the big tent so that everyone who felt alienated could come back through my candidacy.”¹⁰ And so Kucinich endorsed and campaigned for—and urged his supporters to support and campaign for—Kerry, a candidate who ran “to the middle.” Kucinich campaigned against the USA PATRIOT Act, yet he urged his supporters to work to elect a man who voted for it. Likewise with a host of other issues, from the No Child Left Behind Act to the war in Iraq. Kucinich told his supporters that the only responsible thing they could do in November 2004 was to elect a man who stood closer to Bush on these issues than he does to them. That’s the ultimate tragedy of reducing elections to anybody but Bush or a choice of the lesser evil.

This is a setback in itself because the Democrats feel no pressure to support any progressive policies. But it becomes even worse when the Left performs somersaults to justify its subservience to the Democrats. For instance, when Kerry last year said he would have supported the Iraq War even if he had known that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, he outraged millions of people who opposed the war. And if there was ever a better argument for the necessity of a party independent of the twin parties of capitalism and war, Kerry’s statement was it. But PDA board member Joe Libertelli, acknowledging that Kerry’s “curious” statement had “infuriate[d]” progressives and opponents of the war, nevertheless called for progressives to stick with Kerry:

But the truth is, merely demanding that John Kerry change his position will get us almost nowhere. Progressives have been making similar demands for years. And threatening to support Ralph Nader or the Greens will only alienate those who, at our founding conference, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) called “future progressives.” That’s worse than going nowhere, that’s going backward—at least if we harbor any hope of ever reaching a truly progressive voting majority in this country.¹¹

So the question remains: Can progressives “take over” the Democratic Party? To answer that, one has to consider what the Democratic Party really is—one of the two parties of big business rule in the United States. Despite its name, it is not a democratic organization whose members control it. So any activist or trade union or popular attempt to take it over always faces a counter-attack by the people who really control it—the big business interests, who will use every underhanded trick in the book to maintain their hold over it. They may tolerate the party’s left tail, but only insofar as it helps sweep in more voters.

Consider how the DLC-dominated Democratic establishment torpedoed the candidacy of Howard Dean, who was hardly the progressive that the media made him out to be. When it appeared on the eve of the 2004 Iowa caucus that the “insurgent” Dean was running away with the Democratic race, DLC-connected financiers organized by the sleazy ex-Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ), mounted a vicious ad campaign against him. Among other things, the ads—taking a page out of the Bush playbook—used an image of Osama bin Laden to argue that Dean didn’t have the experience to take on terrorists.¹² These ads played a major role in Dean’s collapse in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If a few hundred thousand dollars could end an internal party challenge from someone who wasn’t even a progressive, what would big business do if it faced a challenge from a popular movement supporting genuine reforms? In 1934, the radical novelist Upton Sinclair actually won the Democratic primary for the governorship in California on a progressive platform. Did the Democratic establishment, including President Franklin Roosevelt, show loyalty to the Democrats’ democratically elected candidate? No. Democratic big business money shifted to the Republican candidate and financed a red-baiting scare campaign that defeated Sinclair. And this was at the height of the social upheaval that included the 1934 San Francisco general strike.

These cases of Dean and Sinclair are crude examples of Democratic strong-arm tactics. Most often, left-liberal challenges to the Democratic status quo are headed off with a combination of political attacks and co-optation.

Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaigns in 1984 and 1988 excited millions of voters who were looking for some way to express opposition to Reaganism. But Jackson never made any threat to break with the Democrats. So after a few symbolic concessions from the party establishment (for example, a phrase in the 1988 platform condemning apartheid South Africa as a “terrorist state”), Jackson announced his support for the hapless losers Mondale and Dukakis. Jackson has since become a member of the Democratic establishment whose main role appears to be to try to convince activists to “keep hope alive” in the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the Democratic Leadership Council—set up to counter Jackson’s supporters—continues to set the course for the party.

A similar transformation is well underway with Dean. When Dean vanquished six other contenders to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee in January 2005, former Rainbow (now PDA) adviser Steve Cobble wrote, “In no small measure this victory is the result of PDA’s initiative and support of the Dean candidacy, along with the support and initiative of others in the grassroots progressive community. At times it looks like a movement.”¹³ Yet hardly six months after his ascension, Dean is echoing mainstream Democratic talking points in support of the occupation of Iraq and a balanced budget and is urging Democrats “to welcome pro-life Democrats into this party.” While no doubt many PDA leaders will agree that Dean’s progressive credentials were pretty thin to begin with, Dean’s move from “Mr. Outside” to “Mr. Inside” should give pause to anyone who thinks that it’s possible to take over and transform the Democratic Party.

Mark Kamleiter, former co-chair of the Florida Green Party and supporter of building an independent Green challenge to the Democrats, asked:

What if the “fundis” [i.e., those who advocate a Green party independent of the Democrats] are actually very politically savvy? What if they have great clarity about the American bipolar corporate political system? What if they already have years of futile experience trying to work with and accommodate liberal Democrats? What if they are not “fundis,” in the pejorative sense, but are, in fact, intelligent, rationale, political individuals, who make political decisions based upon experience, maturity, and a clear sense of what must happen to effectively change American politics? What if they are absolutely and logically convinced that the Democratic Party, and its perpetually recycling liberal/progressive wing, must be challenged by a steadfast, firmly independent, value-based third party?

What if the “realos” [those who advocate the PDA strategy inside the Green Party] are in reality not so politically clever? What if in the depths of their beings, they simply do not really believe that the Green Party can actually break open the bipolar corporate party system? What if they are, therefore, very content to ride on the present popular progressive movement, without fundamentally challenging the existing political power structures? What if they are so eager to be next to the “power” that they will compromise Green Party independence and the dream of Greens across the country?¹⁴

Where real change comes from