America already has a three party system but still no real choice
The first line of the Zohran for NYC website gives it away:
Zohran Kwame Mamdani is a New York State Assembly member and democratic socialist running for Mayor.
Or berniesanders.com’s first line:
Bernie is counting on all of us to continue fighting for our progressive agenda.
There are three parties — progressives / democratic socialists, Democrats / conservatives, and Republicans / radicals. Progressives must, for now, win a Democratic primary to be included in a general election, but that doesn’t make them less their own party.
In fact both Joe Crowley (beaten by AOC) and Andrew Cuomo (beaten by Mamdani) didn’t even drop out of the race after losing their primary battle.
However progressives are a much larger party than just those more frequently in the headlines. The Congressional Progressive Caucus
is comprised of more than 100 members of Congress standing up for progressive ideals in Washington and throughout the country. Since 1991, the CPC has advocated for progressive policies that prioritize working Americans over corporate interests, fight economic and social inequality, and advance civil liberties. The CPC champions progressive policy solutions like comprehensive immigration reform, good-paying jobs, fair trade, universal health care, debt-free college, climate action, and a just foreign policy. The caucus, which consists of 100 House members and one Senator, has been the leading voice calling for bold and sweeping solutions to the urgent crises facing this nation, including ending America’s broken for-profit health care system, raising the minimum wage, eliminating political corruption, bolstering labor protections for working families, and taking swift action to stop the warming of our planet.
There are three parties but two of those parties no longer have an agenda in which America, in any form we would understand, survives. Greg Casar, new chair of the Progressive Caucus (from Texas!), says this:
If the Democratic Party just tries to act Republican-lite on the issue, then we don’t present any real vision or alternative to the Republican vision. And then the Republicans will drag us further and further to the right, to the point where Democrats are being asked to vote for things that are completely outside of our value set. When you’re completely outside of your value set, people know that you’re being inauthentic, and there’s nothing worse for a political party than to be seen as inauthentic.
Casar is talking about immigration but the same is true of many issues. For instance Casar also says:
Voters don’t function on a spreadsheet, right? You can’t say, “Well, these hundred people are going to lose their jobs, but these thousand people are going to be able to get a cheaper toaster, so we’re going to go up a net 900 votes.”
However real question is where progressives stand on technology.
We know that increasing biomedical research funding works because Ronald Reagan proved it. We also know that merely temporarily reducing health care costs isn’t really progressive, because eventually some politician, like Ronald Reagan, will go after “socialized medicine”.
By 2034, older adults are projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. Progressives have to get out of the business of temporary partial mitigations and return to actually solving things with science.
The United States has three political parties and a reasonable division would be progressives pulling for biomedical research and/or housing built with nanomaterials, conservatives (traditional Democrats) pulling for maybe defense research, and radicals (Republicans) pulling for fringe ideas like colonizing Mars or transhumanism.
Or maybe Republicans use primaries to split their party in two also so that half can be fringe science and half can be theocracy. As it stands there will be no real change, because the only real mechanism for change, science (or lack of it), remains stuck building sand castles with on again off again poorly spent funding.
Going back to the progressive caucus website’s claim of “bold and sweeping solutions to the urgent crises facing this nation, including ending America’s broken for-profit health care system”. What does that even mean?
Even if you are Danish Novo Nordisk is definitely for profit and making a killing. Does it mean taxing such companies? Nationalizing them? Reducing patent time frames? Having government funded R&D take a stake in profits from its research?
America has three parties but each mainly stands in opposition to one of the others. That’s not the same as having a vision for the future and the only vision that anyone can really understand is progress from science.
When Marty McFly arrives in the future world of 2015 they have cars that fly. That’s not a mitigation for traffic — that’s a solution (“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”). If our society can’t solve anything then Republicans eventually win the politics of a zero sum world.
The same is true of the cost of education. We have the technology for a Harvard professor to teach millions of students. We shouldn’t be aiming for “free” college where the government collects taxes to pay exorbitant education rent and most students are locked out of Harvard anyway. We should just be using technology to end the current system altogether.
The same could one day be true of low income housing construction costs.
That’s the kind of proposals progressives can make that the other two parties cannot.