One year ago, at a conference held in Chicago on Independent Left Politics, the International Socialist Organization’s Lance Selfa observed that the United States’ corporate and imperial Democratic Party had recurrently demonstrated a remarkable capacity to seemingly “reinvent itself” by coopting once-insurgent social forces and identities. Selfa cited the party’s development of Black Democratic political machines across urban America in the wake of the Black Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. That development provided critical background for the dedicated imperialist and “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” (Adolph Reed, Jr. 1996) Barack Obama’s ascendency to the White House – something that helped boost the Democrats’ branding as the party of the nation’s racial minorities.
Selfa could also have noted the party’s success in cultivating female, feminist, gay, and Latino/a constituencies, organization, and networks. He might also have reflected on how Democrats sucked up the rhetoric of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street rebellion by branding themselves as “the party of the 99%” during the 2012 presidential election pitting Obama against “Mitt 1% Romney” (Never mind that Obama had dutifully served and protected the nation’s unelected dictatorship of finance capital throughout his first term or that his Department of Homeland Security worked with Democratic city halls across the country to dismantle Occupy with police state repression). For the full article click here
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