'This Fight Within the Democratic Party Is About Which Future We Get'

[sop]

"The Democratic Party is trying to get born again."

"For forty years it didn’t want to be. Since Reagan, the Democrats stopped fighting the world he built and started managing it. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and sent the factories south. He signed the crime bill Joe Biden wrote and helped fill the prisons. He ended welfare and called it reform. He tore down the wall between the banks and your money, and a few years later the banks lost your money and got bailed out for it. Obama bailed them out, let the houses go, deported people by the millions, and kept the drone war and the surveillance state running without missing a step. On the things that decide who holds power, money and war and the police and the spying, our party and theirs were one party. That was never where they fought."

"What they fought over was the rest of it, and even there they did the least they could get away with, because anything real would have cost their donors. They told us things were getting better and better. They told us they were on our side. They put out a statement for women and Black people and immigrants and Latinos every time one was due, and then they went back to managing the decline. And every couple of years they came back and told us this was the most important election of our lifetimes, so hold your nose and vote, and we did, and the rent went up anyway."

"The left is connecting now because it tells the same truth and points it the right way. America is falling apart, and it didn’t fall by accident, and the people who broke it are not the busboy or the kid at the border.
Then Trump stood up and said the whole thing was a fraud and the country was a wreck. Media talking heads were appalled. They laughed at him. But he connected, because it rang true. We’d been told for thirty years that we’d never had it so good while the ground gave out under us, and here was a man saying out loud that it was a lie. The trouble was where he pointed. Trump took the truth of our condition and aimed it straight down, at the immigrant and the poor and the weak and the despised, the people with the least power in the whole arrangement. He found the real anger and fed it to the worst part of us."

Continued at link:

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/mamdani-future-of-democratic-party