Time for a workers’ party
Earlier this year, Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain said, “I am more worried about this country than I’ve been in my entire lifetime.” I can’t help but agree. Our political differences have reached a stage of impasse that offers no resolution. There is no compromise. There is only winning and losing. Everything else is incidental.
As a liberal, I’ve tried hard to talk to conservatives about what’s going on in our country today. Of course, nothing ever comes of it. As I see it, conservatives tend to believe whatever they want to believe, facts be damned.
I believe that the GOP holds sway over the working class because Republicans pander to bigotry and exploit ignorance. It’s an observation worth repeating, because there is no other way to explain how the anti-worker, pro-corporate GOP could win blue-collar support.
Although the Democratic party is more worker-friendly than the GOP, the party remains a far cry from perfect, and the institution will not change of its own accord. The working class will have to drag the Democratic National Committee kicking and screaming into a brighter future.
And that leads us to the heart of the matter, which is how we on the left must redefine ourselves in political terms. The GOP can be whatever it wants to be. The DNC must be, from this point forward, the worker’s party.
This doesn’t mean the left has to abandon all else. We still will fight the good fight against racism, homophobia, polluters, climate change deniers, misogyny and all manner of avarice, unfairness and corruption. But the American left, by way of the DNC, must explicitly make the prosperity of the workers our primary concern. Workers and Democrats — the two must be synonymous.
In America, we live in a peculiar system where the people who do the actual work to create the actual wealth are allotted the least of it. At the same time, the rich (who have never been richer) want more tax breaks while corporations (which are posting record profits) want deregulation.
I implore every working-class Republican to make a list of what the GOP has done for workers over the course of the past 40 years. I assure you it will be a very, very short list.
Speaking to fellow progressives — to all of us who work every day — I encourage you to join me and re-evaluate our goals and methods as Democrats. We’re workers first, from now on. If we put workers first, all else will follow.
Craig Abalos lives in Roswell and is a poet, author and activist.