Essential observations every "progressive" shitlib, or faux leftist culture warrior should think long and hard about, while asking themselves why they believe the Circle D Corporation isn't exactly who they show themselves to be, every single day of the year.

There's a difference between optimism and insanity. I think the pragmatism shitlibs hide behind is their firewall between the two.

The Green Party has been problematic for leftists, and there are all kinds of reasons why third parties may be doomed within the US electoral system anyway. But as a general principle, a third party that is not willing to, does not understand it must, make Democrats lose elections is a third party that will never go anywhere. It's just a pressure group on the Democratic Party.

This goes to the central point of how one understands the relationship between the left and the Democratic Party. We have this bizarre notion in the United States that there's some intrinsic relation between the left and the Democratic Party, that leftists are naturally closer to the Democrats. It goes back to the aura surrounding FDR, but has been repeated among cohorts that gravitated to the Democrats because of Nixon and Watergate or Bush and Iraq (forgetting things like the party of the Klan, and LBJ and Vietnam).

Most leftists today consciously understand that in the post-Clinton Democratic party, the progressive social or peaceful international party they may have been seeking is gone, baby, gone, and never coming back. Still, there lingers in many an unconscious, implicit belief that there's something in the Democratic Party as an institution or in its nominee personally—some essential quality, no matter how well hidden—that is or wants to be a force for significant progressive change, and that the Republican Party is the primary obstacle to any such change. Therefore, in a political contest between the Democrats and Republicans, the left must always ultimately support the Democrats as the only politically possible check against the essentially more reactionary Republicans.

This is the notion that leftists are Default Democrats.

This is a pernicious, paralyzing assumption that we must extirpate from our minds. Being a leftist has nothing to do with being a Democrat. The political left and right, in my understanding of it, do not correlate with Democrat and Republican. They correlate with class positions.

As some of us have known for a long time, and is now clear to most leftists, the Democratic Party is not a party of, or for, the working class. If it ever was, it has now, as Chuck Schumer has stated, explicitly renounced any such role. It now strains—and only intermittently—to attract working-class support, precisely because its programs and politicians do not advance working-class interests against those of corporate and finance capital in some way that is crucially different from the Republican Party.

Despite any conjuring of the ghost of FDR past, the Democratic Party is, as increasing numbers of Americans recognize, an enemy of the working class. Despite any prior demonizing of Bush, the Democratic Party fully internalizes his war-mongering, imperialist spirit, and is an enemy of world peace.

It is therefore not a party of the left. And the idea that there's any natural connection between being a leftist and supporting Democrats, that leftists are Default Democrats, is ridiculous, and a manacle in our minds. We absolutely must do away with that. Extirpating that persistent and pernicious assumption from people’s minds is, in fact, one of the most important missions of any independent left third-party movement. The intrinsic relation between the Democratic Party and the left is that they are enemies. The Democrats know this, and leftists should.

The Democratic party is not an essentially more progressive institution than the Republican. Its job is to be, and it is, as Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report said, the most effective obstacle to any serious progressive reform. It does that by co-opting the movements for such reform and killing them, as it did with Medicare for All, the prime example.

Talking specifically about Biden or Trump: Neither candidate has any claim, by any leftist metric, to be substantially better than the other. Joe Biden is a proudly reactionary politician, who, over his fifty-year political career, has done more damage to the American people, to the multiracial working class—particularly to Black Americans—and to millions of people around the world, than Donald Trump has done or is likely to do. I repeat, by any leftist metric, by far.

l dare anyone to argue otherwise.

There’s a fundamental difference between the left that understands itself as Default Democrats and the left that’s indifferent to the pretension that Democrats are less of an enemy than Republicans. It was nicely demonstrated when Kyle Kulinski said to Briahna Joy Gray: “Let's just say it's election night, 2024. It is all of our worst nightmare: Biden versus Trump...It's going to be Biden or Trump winning. Are you sitting there like, yeah, of course, I would prefer Biden win over Trump,” and she said, “Honestly, I don't care.”