What The Hell America!

Neal Meyer

Of course — “if you give us money.”

I am heartened by what we see with Bernie and AOC’s rallies. They’re very inspiring to a certain extent. But we have to figure out what to do with that energy. And there, I think, we have to change tack a little bit.

In 2021, in my opinion, what happened was the Sanders wing essentially joined the Biden presidency as sort of the junior partners to Biden and became his PR agents, to a degree, with left-wing and working-class voters. They were saying, “This guy really is on our side. They really are going to do it this time.”

In fact, we saw that this corporate filter we’ve been talking about was still in place. Most importantly, in 2009 and 2010, Obama mostly had to deal with business; in 2021 and 2022, Biden had to deal with the right wing of his own party. And he was completely unwilling to challenge them, completely unwilling to fight them in any serious way. That’s not coincidental. The right wing of the Democratic Party was actually doing the party a service, by blocking more redistributive programs that would upset capital.

We have to be realistic about what this party is about under the current leadership. You either have to figure out a way to replace the leadership of the party, or you have to find a way to get distance from it.

For people who think they can replace the leadership . . . there’s a lot of excitement right now around AOC potentially being a presidential candidate in 2028, and of course I would vote for her, a lot of us would. But the problem here is that even if she were able to win the nomination — which is no guarantee, especially in a party that is more middle class than it was in 2016 and 2020 — she would have an entire party below her — basically everyone in Congress, all the governors, would be against the kind of redistributive program she would want to pursue.