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The Pre-Posthumous Recordings of The Artist

I’ll be the millionth writer to note that 2016 has been absolute murder on legendary musicians so far. And now Prince is gone.

I don’t have a full obit, a critical reappraisal or anything terribly profound to add; just a few musings on record shopping that are too long for a Facebook status update.

Many artists of Prince’s stature and longevity usually leave behind a trove of posthumous recordings, so that they remain platinum-selling artists years after their death. And, of course, now their holograms can go on tour in support of those new records (the future is a strange place). But Prince was a legendarily prodigious recording artist. It’s not an unusual year that sees Prince out out two or three new records! (or, rather, saw; the past tense doesn’t feel right yet). And, so, Prince is the rare artist who has dozens of pre-posthumous recordings ready for purchase. So, before you bemoan the fact that you will never hear a new Prince song ever again, there are hundreds – perhaps thousands – of hours of Prince music that is new to you, waiting to be picked up and taken for a spin.

When I got married, I heard my record collection through new ear’s: my wife’s. Kate sort of played DJ with my records when we first moved in together, and put in heavy rotation some discs that I might have only spun once every other year previously. Prince was one of those. Embarrassingly, I only had The Very Best of Prince, when everyone knows that greatest hits are for housewives and little girls. So, out of a renewed appreciation, and a desire for a little more variety, I started picking up more Prince CD’s every time I visited a used record store.

3121

I never really bought new Prince records. His stuff was much more of a used record store hunt for me. And there’s a ton of them in every used record store. Music going digital caused a lot of fans to tell their copies of Purple Rain and 1999 (of which there are millions!) to make some room and a buck. But I was also able to score the one-and-done discards of fans who actually bought the new records to sort through whether it was a good one, a great one or a mediocre one. Emancipation, Musicology, 3121 – that whole blur of records that he put out after regaining his name and artistic freedom just in time to watch the music industry basically collapse.

And so, the only profundity that I will leave you with is this: go out and buy 3121. It’s the best recent Prince record that I’ve heard and you probably have not. It feels classic and new and like listening to an old friend all at once. Plus, he interrupts one slow jam with a falsetto command to “Turn off your cellphone,” which, if nothing else, would make a great ringtone.

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Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Our First Socialist Mayor: Remembering Milwaukee’s Socialist Party History

As the country’s politics take a right turn, an unlikely progressive wins office as mayor of a major U.S. city. In an era marked by conformity and the primacy of business interests over the common good, he has the temerity to call himself a socialist. Both locally and nationally, his example serves as a beacon of hope for the waning left and a lightening rod of criticism for the resurgent right. His fundamental decency and fealty to the democratic process and the public good see him continually reelected, with most voters regarding him on a first-name basis. He goes on to run a quixotic campaign for President.

If this sounds familiar to fans of Bernie Sanders’ career, it should. But I am describing Frank Zeidler, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee who served three terms from 1948-1960. When the producers of the television series Happy Days wanted to cast a nostalgic look back on the supposedly placid 1950s, they chose to base their sitcom in Milwaukee. Of course, no mention is made that not only is the mayor a socialist, but the state’s junior Senator is the demagogic anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy.

This is a history that’s been hiding in plain sight, given focus by a new book from the University of Illinois Press’ Working Class in American History series. Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee, by Tula A. Connell, explores the record of a socialist administration in an era that is popularly thought to be when Americans definitively turned against socialism and abandoned urbanism.

But there was, nevertheless, a right turn in the 1950s, and Connell’s book is a vital study of the roots of modern American conservatism. The election of Scott Walker and the battles over his anti-union attacks and the subsequent recall effort revealed to many outsiders the extreme polarization that have marked Wisconsin politics since before Zeidler and McCarthy shared the stage (A polarization that can be seen in Tuesday’s primary results, where Wisconsin Democrats went strongly for socialist Bernie Sanders and Republicans chose Ted Cruz because he is more reliably conservative than Donald Trump).

Connell’s history documents how Milwaukee business and suburban interests inveighed against the expanded role of government in as an attack on “American free enterprise” and used racial demagoguery to peel off voters from the New Deal coalition. This local right-wing pushback became part of a national network that gave rise to Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan. If Wisconsin DNA is so central to modern conservatism, then today’s polarization of national political discourse was seemingly inevitable.

The public good or the virtue of selfishness?
Milwaukee was an early stronghold of the Socialist Party, furnishing the party with wins for mayor, council, state legislature and even a seat in Congress. In city government, they emphasized honest government and effective public services. Critics on the party’s left derided them as “sewer socialists.” The Milwaukee Socialists wore the term as a badge of honor.

Although, to this day, the Socialist candidate can draw upwards of 20% in first round balloting in Milwaukee’s non-partisan mayoral elections, Zeidler’s election was something of a last hurrah for the party. He ran as part of a liberal coalition and benefited as much from name recognition (his older brother’s tenure as mayor was cut short by his WWII casualty) as it did lingering voter loyalty to socialism.

But his record in office nevertheless contributed significantly to the city’s socialist legacy. Milwaukee’s stock of public housing was expanded dramatically; a lucrative new channel of newfangled television broadcasting was reserved for public education programming; and the city’s tax base was preserved through an aggressive campaign of suburban annexation.

Zeidler’s annexation agenda was particularly crucial for Milwaukee, and represents a road not taken for too many other post-war cities. The combination of white flight, highway construction, suburban development and tax breaks for mortgage interest is a uniquely American tragedy that left great cities blighted and broken down. Zeidler refused to accept that suburbanites could just cut themselves off from responsibility from the wider society. His office organized over 300 annexation votes that incrementally expanded the city by more than 35 square miles. Zeidler’s preferred method to win these votes was through education campaigns about the benefits of pooling resources and the efficiency of Milwaukee government, but he was also not shy about engaging in water wars. Suburbs that insisted upon independence were denied Milwaukee city water and sewer services, among other benefits.

Of course there was a backlash. The suburbs sued, right-wing elements pushed state legislation to make annexation more difficult while some townships merged to form “cities” of their own to forestall annexation by Milwaukee. An “iron ring” of rich suburbs encircled Milwaukee, ultimately producing the same racial tensions and defunding of public services that plagued other American cities.

In fact, much of Zeidler’s agenda was vociferously opposed by a rising right-wing movement. This subject is the heart of Conservative Counterrevolution. Author Tula Connell calls the post-war consensus around full employment and living standards that rose with productivity “a mirage” and documents how modern conservatism “was not newly generated in the 1950s or 1960s but rather represented a resurgence of a deep current in America’s history.”

It is perhaps not surmising that it was small and mid-sized businessmen who first chafed at the New Deal, and were in the vanguard of right-wing opposition. Conservative Counterrevolution’s bête noir is William Grede, who operated a Milwaukee area steel foundry that he (of course!) inherited from his dad. Grede was a viciously anti-union boss, who took the then uncommon step of hiring permanent replacement scabs when his employees went on strike in 1946.

Grede served a term as the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and, according to Connell, “had a fundraising finger in nearly every organization that challenged perceived encroachments on free enterprise,” including Americans for Constitutional Action, the National Association of Businessmen and the John Birch Society. His philosophy – which can be efficiently summed up by the title of the book he never finished writing, The Virtue of Selfishness – remained far outside the mainstream of Republican policymaking during his lifetime. Today, his brand of selfishness has utterly captured the GOP, thanks in part to the deep pockets of odious men like the sons of Grede’s Birch Society co-founder, Fred Koch.

Although Grede’s and others’ opposition to Zeidler’s public housing program was rooted in a fear of “creeping socialism” and a desire for private profit, his opponents resorted to the most base racism in order to win voters over. His opponent in his third and final election, Milton McGuire, waged a demagogic campaign that focused on the rising number of African-Americans moving to the city. McGuire accused Zeidler of placing billboards throughout the south, to attract new black residents with promises of low cost public housing. Zeidler won re-election handily, but had decided that his third term would be his last.

“The greatest living American”
Zeidler was succeeded by Henry Maier, a conservative Democrat who won office by race-baiting his opponents. His administration abandoned public housing construction, slow-walked civil rights, responded to 1967 riots with a law and order agenda and consolidated power. He remained in office for an unprecedented seven terms. By 2002, research showed that Milwaukee’s racial disparities were the worst in the nation.

One of the reasons Frank cited for not running for re-election in 1960 was his frail health. He was always in poor health, and yet he somehow lived to the ripe old age of 93. He even ran for President as the standard-bearer of the reconstituted Socialist Party in 1976! It was in his capacity as the party’s chairman emeritus that I had the pleasure of getting to know Frank. I always found it fascinating to visit Milwaukee while Frank was still alive; it was a bizarro world where the Socialist Party’s leader was revered as a statesman and warmly greeted as a neighbor. To whit: when I was doing press for the party’s 100th anniversary conference in 2001, a reporter for the Journal-Sentinel asked me what socialists in other parts of the country thought of Frank. I answered that most of us think he’s a really great man. The reporter naturally heard that as “the greatest living American” and put it in the story, embarrassing Frank slightly.

With the racial strife and economic decline of the city that came later, it’s not hard to see how Milwaukee residents look back on the Zeidler years as, indeed, happy days.

[This post first appeared at In These Times.]

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It’s Time for the Labor Movement To Pursue a New Judicial Activist Agenda

Unions that were bracing for a major defeat in Friedrichs v. CTA breathed a sigh of relief following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He was expected to be the decisive fifth vote against the California Teachers, and the outcome likely would have severely weakened American public sector unions. But Friedrichs likely died with Scalia.

More than a respite between anti-union attacks, this moment is an opportunity for a new judicial activism by the labor movement to win new rights and benefits and to match the planning and aggressiveness of the right-wing plot to kill unions.

Moshe Marvit detailed in these pages how Friedrichs was part of a grander scheme of right-wing litigation aimed at destroying unions. Well-heeled union-busters strategically lodge lawsuits to line up Supreme Court appeals that build on precedents like Harris v. Quinn and the now never-to-be Friedrichs, confident of a 5-4 vote in their favor.

Heretofore, unions have mostly limited their own judicial advocacy to stopping these attacks. With the Supreme Court now poised to tilt to a liberal majority that will last a generation, it is time for labor to develop its own judicial activist agenda. Ironically, a decision for the bosses in Friedrichs could have had the confounding effect of granting unions new 1st Amendment rights we have long been denied. Now, we have the opportunity to advance our own agenda to make union activity constitutionally protected free speech.

“The judge can drop dead in his black robes.”

The sad legal fact that corporations are “people” with free speech rights is well known, but you may be surprised to learn that unions enjoy no such rights. In order to get past the last most conservative Supreme Court, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was constitutionally rooted in the Commerce Clause—not the Bill of Rights. Long before that, judges were hostile to the country’s first union efforts, treating strikes and boycotts as unlawful restraints of trade. The judiciary spent the 19th century building up a body of case law that regulated labor as a commodity and prioritized contracts, property rights and the smooth flow of commerce over the free speech and free assembly of working people.

Law professor William Forbath wrote a book on the topic that is essential reading for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of why American unions behave the way they do. Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement details not just the bad body of case law that metastasized in the Gilded Age, but also the development of the voluntarist instinct that still runs deep in the veins of our movement.

Prior to the NLRA, both conservative and radical unions wanted to get government and the courts to butt out of labor relations. To this day, most unions shy away from pursuing rights and benefits that cannot be won at the bargaining table.

In one of the sharpest analyses of labor’s prospects following Scalia’s death, Joe Burns reminds us of how labor leaders once railed against “judge-made law” and warns, “As long as labor allows nine establishment figures to dictate policy, we will never revive ourselves as a movement.” Most judges are too far removed from the lives of the working class to be reliable advocates for unions. And, as professor James B. Atleson argues in his book Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law, the primacy of business interests is a pervasive ideological influence on labor case law.

Take the original sin of judicial gutting of the NLRA, 1938’s NLRB v. Mackay Radio, which gave employers the “right” to permanently replace strikers despite the Act’s explicit protection of strike activity and literal ban on termination of union activists. That decision was based not on previously existing case law, or any attempt to divine legislative intent—just the justices’ tossed off assumption that “of course” employers should be free to hire new permanent employees in order to ensure their right to continue to run their business during a strike.

Labor law is currently so far removed from the First Amendment that the Court has ruled that workers can be legally fired under the Act for making “disloyal” statements about the employer’s product in the course of a union campaign. (Any organizer who’s run a corporate campaign has lost precious days of her life arguing with union lawyers about whether a lit piece runs afoul of the NLRB v. Electrical Workers Local 1229 (Jefferson Standard) decision (which was, for the record, written by a Harry Truman appointee).

So Joe Burns is right. In pursuing a new judicial activist labor agenda, we should not view judges as our saviors—or even as our allies. The best analogy I would make for a judicial activist labor agenda would be the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. During that movement, an army of civil rights attorneys found the right plaintiffs and facts and guided cases like Brown vs. Board of Ed through the courts. But it was sit-ins, boycotts and marches that changed the political context in which the cases were decided. A judicial activist agenda for labor will not be successful without a substantial increase in worker protest activity.

In pursuit of free speech, choice and solidarity

A good example of what currently passes for judicial activism in labor is a recent petition filed by 106 leading scholars at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), seeking reinstatement of an equal time rule for mandatory on-the-clock anti-union presentations.

The idea itself is brilliant. Co-petitioners Charles Morris and Paul Secunda noticed that the NLRB has been on the record for the last half century as soliciting union advocates to make a case that when a boss requires employees to attend an anti-union lecture in the run-up to a union election, and denies union organizers access to the workplace, it is at least grounds for overturning an election result, if not an outright unfair labor practice.

As outsider advocates, Morris, Secunda, et.al. could only file an advisory petition, which the NLRB is free to ignore for, well, forever. Actual judicial activism requires a union challenging the results of a lost certification election in which an employer used mandatory captive audience meetings while physically restraining union organizers from access to the workers and the workplace. Nearly every union has seen such meetings used against them in organizing drives; one of them should seek to overturn a union election’s result and cite Morris and Secunda’s brief in their appeal. The Board must rule on the request.

To keep up the pressure, many unions should do the same. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of election losses to appeal. Once the first employer refuses to comply with an equal time rule, we’ll be off to the races with a free speech labor law case.

The NLRB is currently ignoring another petition filed by Charles Morris, seeking confirmation of the brilliant thesis he laid out in his 2005 book, The Blue Eagle At Work: The labor act was not written with the intention that the only way a union could be certified was by winning a winner-take-all election to represent all workers in a bargaining unit. In the early history of the NLRB, unions filed card check petitions to represent their members only. If unions were able to file such petitions for only part of the workforce in a given workplace today, millions of workers who want a union would gain rights on the job right now, and unions would win footholds in thousands of new workplaces.

But instead of demanding such representation as a right, unions are waiting for permission from the courts. Someone has to press the case.

I have an idea that will make my former colleagues at the AFT’s heads explode. There are currently half a dozen unions competing to represent adjunct faculty. It is common for the same workers to belong to different unions at multiple institutions of higher education. It is also common for them to want to organize their additional non-unionized schools, and to have a strong preference, based upon experience and membership, for which union it should be. Therefore, it would be reasonable for one union that gets wind that another is organizing a targeted school to rush a members-only petition to the NLRB.

This would be a helpful set of facts for re-establishing a Blue Eagle precedent. Since unions win most adjunct faculty elections, this won’t look like a shortcut to otherwise-impossible majority status (like a failed effort by the Steelworkers at a Dick’s Sporting Goods during the Bush administration). And whether the NLRB refuses to issue a members-only certification, or an employer refuses to comply with one, it gets into federal court pretty quickly. Now, I’m no lawyer (I just argue with a lot of them), but it seems to me that the legal case is that an arm of the government is interfering with the First Amendment rights of workers by restricting legal recognition of their union to only the form and choice it dictates.

To be clear, a win in a case like this could radically transform unions. Members-only certifications could undermine the principle of exclusive representation and, with it, the agency fees that unions collect from all represented workers to compensate for the expenses of having to represent everyone in a workplace. As I have written, there is both promise and peril in that trade-off.

The ultimate goal of a judicial activist agenda must be restoring solidarity rights. In a complex economy made up of suppliers, subsidiaries and franchises, unions are banned from extending a dispute with their employers to the so-called “secondary” employers who profit from and help make profitable an unfair business.

What is the difference between a cable company blacking out a sports channel to demand more money, a liberal boycott of NBC and its advertisers demanding that the racist reality television personality Donald Trump be fired and a campaign for people to stop eating at restaurants that profit from the exploitation of workers in the food supply chain? The only difference is that if the latter is conducted by a union, they could be sued for triple the economic damages of the boycott.

In the Friedrichs oral arguments, Chief Justice Roberts said, “It’s all money,” when it comes to unions’ free speech—tempting grounds for challenging the ban on secondary boycotts as the case law on solidarity activism has always emphasized money without even considering speech. Finding a test case is tricky. Triple damages could utterly bankrupt a union, so understandably no union is eager to risk that.

For this reason, the food supply chain boycott work I described earlier is currently run not by unions, but by workers centers like Brandworkers and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (who are not exactly sitting on millions of dollars). If sued, perhaps they could mount a fight on constitutional grounds?

Worth renewed consideration is a 2004 proposal from the American Federation of Teachers for labor to sponsor new “start-up unions” that “might enjoy greater strategic and tactical flexibility and would have substantially less to lose.” That was proposed during the debate on union form and structure that preceded the Change to Win split in the labor movement, and, sadly, promptly forgotten. But it is more relevant than ever. Providing seed money to “start-up unions” that can challenge, break and resist unjust labor laws could be very wise investment of the “Scalia dividend,” the revenue unions were expecting to lose post-Friedrichs that now represents “found” money for new organizing.

The whole damn system is out of order!

To be at all successful, a judicial activist agenda must be joined by many more labor lawyers, scholars and organizers calling out unjust areas of labor law and proposing plans to defy them—even if it ruffles some feathers. We also need more people writing about how unfair the system is; it does help inexorably shift public opinion about the need for change.

It’s worth noting that this agenda will require suing—or being sued by—the NLRB, which has quietly become a functional agency for workers rights of late. Just as Obama’s Justice Department declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act while a party to court challenges against it, perhaps the NLRB could signal that the interesting constitutional questions raised by unions are worthy of judicial consideration?

Labor law, and the rules of the system, are rigged against workers. This call for a judicial activist agenda for labor is explicitly a call to question, challenge and break the law where it works against us. In so doing, we will be breaking up what remains of labor peace and helping foment more of the only thing that will save us: chaos, strife and unrest.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

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Our Political System Is in the Midst of a Massive Realignment. Here’s How the Left Should Respond.

America needs a New Democratic Party.

No, I don’t mean a Democratic Party made new by a restored commitment to liberal idealism (although that would be useful, too). I mean an American version of Canada’s NDP: an explicitly socialist party that can win on a regional basis, credibly compete on a national basis and actually win on issues that matter.

The leftist debate on electoral activism is depressingly reductive. It’s either be the “left-wing of the possible” within the Democratic party or immediately form a third party, as if we are not capable of sorting out complicated solutions for complicated times. We have a historic opportunity. Whether one realizes it or not, we are in the midst of a profound political realignment that could make a third party conceivable.

The right-wing realignment and its pull on the Democrats

A political realignment happens when the two main parties significantly alter their ideology and campaign appeal and in so doing shift their regional bases of support. They are rare. One happened when Roosevelt’s New Deal effectively wooed urban progressives away from the GOP, while preserving the Democrats’ traditional base of southern support (largely by avoiding black civil rights demands). For the next 36 years, the Democrats won seven out of nine presidential elections, and controlled the House and Senate for much of the period.

Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” tapped into reaction against the civil rights, women’s rights and anti-war movements and produced a new realignment. With the former Confederate states now solidly in the GOP column, and white working-class voters increasingly willing to cast reactionary votes for the party in the north, Republicans won seven out of 10 of the next presidential elections and have, since the mid-1990s, tended to control the House.

The Republicans’ crisis, and our opportunity, is that the party has been so captured by its base that it is circling the drain of national viability. The hateful, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and just plain reality-denying rhetoric that the current crop of their presidential aspirants must use to pander to their troglodytic base makes them simply unelectable in a national contest.

Look at the demographics, as the Pew Research Center did earlier this year. The GOP alienates the majority of women voters, the vast majority of black and Latino voters and has all but lost the so-called millennial generation—voter groups that are an increasing proportion of the electorate.

More importantly, look at the so-called “big sort,” the geopolitical trend of people moving into or out of communities in order to be surrounded by more like-minded neighbors. Researchers James A. Thompson and Jesse Sussell found that the “big sort” is significantly contributing to the political polarization of Congress. Republican voters have created for themselves an echo chamber that goes beyond Fox News to include their like-minded neighbors. This contributes to the GOP reinforcing and doubling down on its extremism. It’s hard to imagine how the GOP can break this cycle any time soon.

Republicans can win—and win big—on a regional basis and implement awful policies. And to be sure, the Left should be concerned with keeping the Republicans out of national office. But the Republicans are going to do a good job of that themselves.

Meanwhile, the “big sort” leaves viable progressive majorities in our large urban centers and even entire states like California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey for the most part trapped in a Democratic party that will also continue to move to the right unless we do something about it. This realignment is pushing moderate and even conservative voters into the Democratic camp. There are, after all, plenty of stockbrokers and corporate executives who support gay marriage and immigration. The GOP is no longer a comfortable home for them—the Democrats are.

These progressive enclaves are increasingly a one-party political system, with the GOP’s carcass lying around as an empty vessel for whatever rich white guy wants to run a vampiric vanity campaign. And, sure, Republicans like Bruce Rauner and Chris Christie can win fluke elections when voters are so disgusted by the laziness and corruption of monopolistic Democratic machines that they stay home – or vote for nebulous “change”—in protest. But for the most part, there is a huge vacuum on the left in these progressive enclaves that should trump any tired liberal objections about “electability” and “lesser evils.”

An inside/outside strategy

What the Left needs is an inside/outside electoral strategy vis-à-vis the Democrats.

Inside the Democratic Party, engaged in primary campaigns to push progressive candidates and causes, because current election laws as well as fear of playing the spoiler mean that this is where we must focus out electoral energy for the time being if we are hold together the broadest possible coalition.

But outside in terms of being clearly delineated as something more specific: more critical of capitalism, more independent of corporations and more accountable to its base of supporters than being just another Democrat. And outside in terms of having a real plan to break with the Democrats and become a fully independent third party when the opportunity comes.

Inside/outside electoral strategies have long been incubated in New York state, where the law allows—and political realities demand—that candidates run on multiple ballot lines. Since 1998, the Working Families Party has been the preeminent inside/outside experiment on the Left. The WFP has an impressive track record of endorsing insurgent progressives early and backing them in the Democratic primary, as well as occasionally running a candidate in the general election against the Democratic nominee—a strategy that has put scores of new progressives in office across the state, culminating in the election of NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

The Working Families Party has expanded to five more states plus the District of Columbia, although the inability to run a candidate on more than one ballot line makes the party’s efforts in those places somewhat less visible. In Illinois, unions like SEIU and the Chicago Teachers Union have formed an independent political organization called United Working Families, which supported Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s insurgent challenge to Rahm Emanuel in Chicago’s technically non-partisan mayoral election. In Vermont, Bernie Sanders’ long run of successful independent runs for office has led to the creation of the Progressive Party, which represents over a dozen local, state and federal offices—a viable third party if ever there was one.

Add to that the various progressive caucuses in legislatures and councils—progressive Democrats and independents who work together to press their agenda within the larger Democratic caucus—and you have, essentially, an undeclared, disunited party within the party.

It is time to unite and declare it so.

What’s in a name?

What you stand for matters, but having a label and an identity of standing for the right causes matters perhaps more. Thanks to the realignment that is expanding the Democratic Party and turning it much more conservative, a “Democrat” can be anybody from Rahm Emanuel and Andrew Cuomo to Elizabeth Warren and Keith Ellison.

What the hell is a “Democrat” and what do they stand for? Without a clear distinction, a vote for a Democrat might as well be a vote for war, for police brutality and mass incarceration, for demonizing teachers and slashing pensions, for shipping jobs overseas and keeping the minimum wage low. An untapped constituency remains alienated from a progressive movement that suffers from guilt by association with the corporate Dems.

Further, a progressive Democrat—even one who runs with a Working Families-type endorsement—is susceptible to all of the pressure from party leadership for the corporate agenda that any other Democrat faces, with little accountability to a base of supporters that comes from public identification with a movement. Most people reading this can think of some maddening state legislator or alderman who’s only progressive when it doesn’t count.

Bernie Sanders jokes about how often he hears from supporters and constituents, “We always know how you vote, Bernie.” Because Sanders, famously, insisted on being registered in Congress as an “Independent,” even while he caucused with the Democrats, C-SPAN had to create a third “Independent” category for vote tallies, and so, yes, we all know how Bernie votes on an issue. As a result, Sanders’ voting record has been the most second guessed and debated by the left for a quarter century (even though there have been members of the House who were arguably to Bernie’s left).

By standing out as an “I,” Bernie was held much more accountable to the Left on a national level than any other Democrat. Working Families public officials need to stand out and caucus and have their votes recorded as “W,” not “D.”

Whether we settle on the name “Working Families,” call it the “Progressive Party” or borrow “New Democrats” from our friends to the north, we do need one name that stretches from candidacy to office-holding to everyday activism. And we need one party, coast to coast, that people join and pay dues, that has a national committee and that gets people in a room together in meetings, teach-ins, conventions and trainings.

What holds us back?

There is a regrettable deficit of trust when it comes to any sort of left unity effort. Movements unify when they are on the ascendency, which is not a position that the Left is used to being in. Plus, there is a long history on the Left of dissension, discord and split. Going bigger and broader brings the potential for the project to get out of control. And these efforts—United Working Families, the Progressive Party, the WFP—seem to be self-consciously designed to be small and manageable.

United Working Families is a good case in point. The organizers toyed with forming a chapter of the WFP, but ultimately decided to organize independently with complementary—yet distinct—branding. The WFP has since welcomed the UWF as an affiliate with seats on the national board. (What choice did they have? There’s no space for both organizations to operate in Chicago).

A united party would have to have a federated structure, with autonomous state parties and local clubs. But the resistance to the shared branding goes deeper than a structural concern. It can be read as a desire to not be tarnished by someone else’s mistake.

United Working Families was formed while the Working Families Party was grappling whether or not to endorse Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s re-election bid. The New Yorkers could have really used some tough love and advice from Chicago on the feasibility of cutting a deal with Cuomo. Regrettably, the Chicago organizers chose parochialism and keeping their distance over solidarity.

Another thing that holds us back is fear of playing the spoiler. Again, the value of an inside/outside strategy is holding together the widest possible coalition while we are inside the Democratic Party. To be clear, the risk of letting the now-far-right Republicans eke out a win if the center and Left were to split the vote in a general election is substantial. The Supreme Court, the right to choose, union rights and questions of war and peace are not to be dismissed lightly.

But a split must one day come. If the Republicans cease to be a major party in the northeast, on the west coast and in the major urban centers of the mid-west, and lose the next three or four presidential elections, then anyone who is still harping on about lesser evils or unity at any cost is probably simply not comfortable with a turn towards explicitly anti-capitalist politics.

I write of presidential election cycles because they are important epochal markers, not because we should fritter away our time debating when to make a break and run a Nader-style third party campaign. Look, I get it. Presidential elections are years when more working people actually pay attention to mainstream politics and vote, so what we do and whom we’re supporting is big and symbolic. But big changes in social outlook and political policy are ratified in presidential elections. The changes are made more gradually and much more locally. Our challenge for the next decade and a half is to run Working Families campaigns for legislature, council and Congress and win; to build up a base that makes for “safe” Working Families districts; and to build Working Families legislative caucuses that put real pressure on the corporate Dems.

Some of this can be accomplished, as the Progressive Party seems to have done in Vermont, through a degree of brokering. The Progressives build up enough of a base in a district that they hold the plurality, and the Democrats decide not to run a strong candidate against them. I presume that the Progressives agree in exchange to not make a hard run at a district where the Democrats hold the edge. In this way, a center-left split doesn’t have to be a 100% spoiler effort.

The ultimate split may, indeed, be signaled by an independent presidential campaign. I’m getting many years ahead of myself here, but let me suggest that the timing would only be right if our new party posed a credible threat of actually winning some electoral votes. Could we pose enough of a threat of throwing the election into chaos to extract meaningful election reforms—like abolishing the electoral college and instituting instant runoff voting—to make “spoilers” a thing of the past?

Our big challenge right now, though, is whether we are bold enough to actually get in a room and hammer out a program, a structure and a common name.

The Sanders presidential campaign is a very timely opportunity. Whether Bernie wins the Democratic nomination (still a distinct possibility) or takes his delegates and forces a convention fight over the Democratic Party’s platform, that platform will be the highest profile list of “Left” demands in generations. It will arouse the interest and support of many thousands times more working people than currently number in our tiny movement. What those freshly inspired potential activists will need is to see a party that they can join that will work past the election on winning those demands.

We have a historic opportunity in 2016. Shame on all of us if we don’t recognize the opportunity and capitalize on it.

[Originally appeared at In These Times.]