How the Democratic Party Creates Conservatism

M.Junaid Alam explains how How the Democratic Party Creates Conservatism by not being duplicates of the Republicans, but

If Democrats simply paralleled Republicans, they would be politically redundant. But the Democrats are not duplicative - they are duplicitous. Peddling slightly less reactionary programs and packaging them in more appealing rhetoric, they soften up, placate and paralyze possible popular opposition to right-wing attacks. This creates the groundwork for future assaults by the Right. The Republican agenda, ugly, brutal, and brazen as it is, could not possibly pierce the public on its own - but the sordid record of Democratic appeasement has locked, loaded, and enabled right-wing advances.

Emphasis Mine

In Australia, the ALP performs the same role as the Democratic Party does in the USA. However, the ALP is the more right wing party of the two in Australia as it was the Hawke and Keating governments that deregulated the banks, emasculated the unions through the Accord and IR thuggery, attacks on Social Security and refugees. John Howard is actually rolling back some of the ALP policies especially in the area of refugee rigthts.

What makes this process so poisonous is a unique combination of American pragmatism and American political structure. American pragmatism, or the popular public understanding of politics, dictates that at the end of the day there must be an end to bickering and some sort of bipartisan compromise - a ‘fair middle between extremes,’ like the philosophy behind Aristotle’s Golden Mean. American political structure, or the structure of two dominant parties, fosters the assumption that each party exists in opposition to one another, creating a kind of symmetrical polarization. Pragmatism and politics, then, should neatly overlap: the political center should lie between the two parties.

This charade is further expanded into the blogosphere where the left-wing and right-wing bloggers carrying on this phony war. Anyone outside of this permissible range of opinion is portrayed as dangerously mad.

... It is possible here only to point to two potential factors driving Democratic acquiescence: the absence of socialist pressure due to the collapse of the Soviet experiment, and the presence of capitalist pressure brought upon by the relative decline of the US economy compared to China and the European Union. This pincer movement of ideological triumphalism and economic straitjacketing may be severely limiting the basis for even modest genuine Democratic progressivism.

Here I disagree with the author: the "so-called left-wing parties" have always existed in the Capitalist system to maintain the illusion that we live in a democracy in which we have two (2) distinct choices. Any other choices are quickly destroyed or absorbed as Ms Pauline Hanson found out.

The road to justice, on the other hand, must be created by the people themselves, because it is their own collective future that is at stake. It is precisely the task of our times to work side by side with those millions of Americans victimized by modern capitalism - workers, women, veterans, people of color, and immigrants – and join them in carving out the path that will lead all of us toward a more secure and humane future.

This is an anarchist illusion that the people will arise of their own accord. Small sporadic uprisings like Redfern, Palm Island, Lakemba, and Macquarie Fields will continue to occur. The police for all their failings are quite adept at containing these outbursts.

The Leninist perspective (to which I subscribe) is that a party is needed to gather together revolutionaries to educate and train ourselves in the tasks necessary to overthrow the Capitalist system while remaining part of the Proletariat. The party is the not the elite - it consists of the most aware (in Marxist terms, the advanced workers - those understand better what is going on and are prepared to do something about it.)