The Cavalry Is Not Coming

If we want to save ourselves we have to do something different

Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash

This week has been utterly catastrophic in US Politics. Among the slew of Executive Orders Donald Trump has issued was a federal funding freeze that cut off payments to all recipients of grant programs in the US, throwing the entire government into chaos, and making the Medicaid portals in all 50 states inaccessible. Surely this was an opportunity for the Democratic Party to dominate the airwaves with a full court press talking about how Republicans stole your kid’s school lunch and cut off your grandma’s healthcare. Ha! Just kidding. This is the Dems we’re talking about. The “urgency” was palpable when House Leader Hakeem Jeffries scheduled an emergency meeting…for 1pm the next day — a full 20 hours after the ban would take effect and 19 hours after a judge temporarily blocked the order. Schumer’s response was just as bad. He encouraged Dems to not react strongly but instead cast a protest vote against one of Trump’s nominees instead. That’ll show ‘em!

When Schumer did talk to the press the message was “Republicans have defunded the police”. Not “Republicans took your healthcare, are going to force your kid to drop out of college, are stealing your granddaughter’s lunch money”, no, the message was “We love the police so much more than the other guys”. For all the Dems who told us before the election to “google Project 2025”, it seems they should’ve taken their own advice! The party was caught completely unaware and unprepared for what the Heritage Foundation explicitly told us they were going to do. This is not a party that is a capable of meeting the moment. This is not a party that is capable of doing anything but fundraising and protecting the jobs of some of the worst people alive. There will be no mea culpas, no glimmers of reflection, no resignations. The Dems ran such an incompetent campaign in 2024 that they managed to lose every single swing state and even the popular vote for the first time in 20 years and yet not a single person in leadership was forced out. The same consultants, the same party heads, the same “thought leaders”, that delivered us to this horrific point in time, have all maintained their positions within the party. There is no accountability, no reckoning at all. There are no new ideas. There is no new approach.

The cavalry is quite simply not coming.

Even some of the most ardent Dem partisans are losing faith in the party and their ability to manage this crisis. People are finally noticing - much too late - that Democrats are as useless as they are venal. That the party will not save us. If ever there were an opening to do something else, to create a structure that could mount a real resistance to Trumpian neofascism, this is it. The trouble is, we on the left have our own lack of imagination to contend with. The momentous Bernie campaigns and the election of AOC and the rest of the squad, gave the left in the United States a sense of renewal after decades of McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union utterly hollowed us out. Suddenly it seemed that the left had a direction. We would primary all the scumbags, we would get a majority in Congress, we would change the party from the inside. Unfortunately, this strategy did not bear fruit. Since the election of Joe Biden in 2020, we have witnessed the complete capitulation of the members of Congress we elected to be brawlers. From the unwillingness of Bernie to call out his “good friend” Joe Biden’s terrible domestic and foreign policy, to AOC’s depraved claim that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” at the Democratic National Convention, to the votes for Hakeem Jeffries for speaker, those on the inside who we elected specifically to challenge the party have fallen in line time and time again.

AOC at the Democratic National Convention telling us that Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire”

While the Bernie campaigns minted tens of thousands of new people who called themselves “socialist”, the inability to adapt to new information has revealed a lack of understanding of history, theory, and material analysis among them. Despite the fact that “the squad” has not only failed to grow its numbers, but has in fact lost members, the idea that the party itself can be taken over and reformed persists. Never mind that even if you somehow managed to replace 200 representatives, you would still have to contend with the Senate, the administrative hurdles, the courts, the institutions themselves which are sclerotic and broken, the big money from AIPAC and DMFI that make idea of primarying our way to liberation a pipe dream. What the U.S. left suffers from most is the inability to adapt to a changing landscape, the inability to be agile and come up with a new approach. The majority of left-leaning pundits exemplify this. Despite the repeated failures of even the most left-wing members of Congress to meet the moment, our best pundits insist that this is still the path forward. They still look at AOC as someone to be emulated, seemingly ignorant of the fact that the runway is incredibly short and the party, while incapable of mounting opposition to the right, is a well-oiled machine when it comes to crushing left insurgents.

"The working class must not be led astray by the illusion that it can achieve its liberation through alliances with bourgeois parties. The struggle for socialism must be independent and uncompromising." - Rosa Luxemburg

While the administrative state gets dismantled before our eyes, the left media space, and even the prominent socialist orgs are out of ideas. The orthodoxy of lesser-evilism that brought us to this juncture is still the predominant mode of thought. The idea of creating a new party, creating a working class movement, creating support for a revolution, is treated like territory for the dumb-dumbs. It feels that so many are still chasing the dragon; the hopeful feeling they had when it felt like Bernie could win, when AOC got elected, when Justice Dems was on the rise. Instead of pivoting and accurately assessing our failures, we are damned determined to fit that peg into that hole. How do we escape making sunk-cost fallacy the operating principle of our strategy? How do those of us who understand that revolution is the only way, via a broad movement of the working class, break through the noise? How do we challenge the orthodoxy of the left influencer / pundit space? I regret that there is not an easy answer to this question.

"The duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. One cannot make the revolution by collaborating with the oppressors." - Che Guevara

It can feel as if many want to “one weird trick” our way out of a total quagmire. The truth is that the left is still weak, still relatively powerless, and certainly not popular enough to take on this mess just yet. We are frankly in the worst possible position we could find ourselves in given the crises we face. The solution is, however, not to keep doubling down on the stuff that doesn’t work just because we wish it did. We must throw ourselves fully into the hard work of raising the consciousness of the working class — city by city, town by town. Not wedded to a party that the majority of Americans dislikes, but independently and authentically. We must create new centers of power, not try to share them with forces that stand for everything we are fighting against.

A more honest version of a popular meme

When the right wing of the left smugly chastises you for not wanting to “build power” the correct rebuttal should be “power for who?”. Were AOC’s sacrifices of integrity worth the extremely nominal influence she has gained in return inside a corrupt, capitalist party whose relevance is waning? What has the inside strategy delivered, materially, for the working class in the last decade? If the problem is that AOC et. al. “doesn’t have the numbers”, do you see a way to grow those ranks against the darkest forces of capital in human history? Do you truly believe that a functional democratic party could be realistically achieved in the next two decades? Will anything be left to save by then? I think that the failure to give an honest appraisal of these answers will be our undoing.

"The proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side. But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is a blatant act of stupidity or simply cheating the workers." - Lenin, State and Revolution

We only need look to our heroes to see how to mount a true movement against fascism and for the working class: Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Huey Newton and Fred Hampton, Malcolm X. It has never been achieved through becoming a junior partner with our rulers, instead it was accomplished through a militant worker’s movement that sought to crush not just the parties by the system itself that kept reproducing those outcomes. As Audre Lorde said, “For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” If we really want a systemic change we have to be willing to confront the failure of our strategies and tell the truth about what is required of us to get to where we want to go. Even though that road is hard, is uphill, can feel insurmountable. Even though the chips are stacked against us. We have to be willing to change our minds. We have to be unafraid to change course towards a true path for liberation. After all, we are facing oblivion if we fail. We cannot afford to keep treading the comfortable road we have been traveling down just because the other way, the real way, feels impossible. History is full of people that have done more with less. It’s not too late to change our approach, but it’s later than you think.

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." - Marx, Engels, The Communist Manifesto