One more time?

For those whose entire political focus is on defeating Trump: The Berners claim that the best way to defeat Trump is to get “progressive” (meaning liberal) candidates. Such candidates will get a new layer of voters, mainly young, to turn out to vote. The conservatives (AKA “moderates”) claim that what’s needed is to triangulate. In other words, to appeal to the middle class suburban voters, leaving Trump with only the minority of hard right voters.

Who’s right? The following is not an argument for supporting either wing of the Democratic Party. In fact, the conclusion is just the opposite. But an analysis in Vox of last year’s mid term elections sheds some light on the above argument. Among other things, Vox analyzed the results in two Republican-held states – Georgia and Texas. They concluded, “the flipped districts they (the Democrats) took were in the suburbs.” In other words, it was the “moderate” voters who flipped from Republican to Democrat.

When you think about it beneath the surface, the conclusion is somewhat surprising: The argument that Sanders or Warren has the best chance of defeating Trump does not seem to be supported by last year’s election results. So, if socialists put all their energy into campaigning for them, they are likely to come up empty at the end of the day. Based on the results as analyzed by Vox, socialists are likely to end up with a losing candidate, either in the primaries or in the general election.

And what will we have to show for it? Once again, we’ll have invested all our energy into building the liberal wing of the Democrats, only to have failed once again.

Instead, we should be putting our energy into building the movement in the streets – the forerunner to a mass working class party and the only force that can really start to resist Corporate America and its drive to destroy the planet.

One more time?