"No" is Enough for the Democratic Party

Tory doyen Theresa May has been pronounced dead. Jeremy Corbyn's rejuvenated Labour Party will likely lead the United Kingdom in the not too distant future. Whether a real social democrat can turn the battleship around, at least when it comes to its militaristic foreign policy, is subject to debate.

At least the UK has arrived at a point where the neoliberals have been routed from a mainstream stronghold, the Labour Party. That's not the case in the United States. The neoliberals remain deeply entrenched and in control of the Democratic Party.

Yesterday prominently featured throughout the day in NYT's online edition was Kenneth Vogel's story, "The ‘Resistance,’ Raising Big Money, Upends Liberal Politics." Vogel describes less a sea change and more an exercise in hedging by wealthy Democratic donors as they distribute money to big post-Trumpocalypse groups like Indivisible:

Perhaps no group epitomizes the differences between the legacy left and the grass-roots resistance like Indivisible. Started as a Google document detailing techniques for opposing the Republican agenda under Mr. Trump, the group now has a mostly Washington-based staff of about 40 people, with more than 6,000 volunteer chapters across the country. The national Indivisible hub, which consists of a pair of nonprofit groups, has raised nearly $6 million since its start, primarily through small-dollar donations made through its website.

Yet Indivisible has also received funding from the tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, as well as foundations or coalitions tied to Democracy Alliance donors, including the San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler, the New York real estate heiress Patricia Bauman and the oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix.

And an advocacy group funded by the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros, a founding member of the Democracy Alliance and one of the most influential donors on the left, is considering a donation in the low six figures to Indivisible. Mr. Soros has already donated to a host of nonprofit groups playing key roles in the anti-Trump movement, including the Center for Community Change, Color of Change and Local Progress.

Indivisible would “gladly” accept a check from Mr. Soros or his foundation, said an official with the group, Sarah Dohl. But, she added, the group is committed to ensuring that money from major donors does not become a majority of the group’s revenue “because we want to maintain our independence both from the funders and from the party.”

I'm sure Soros et al. want to fund Indivisible to get at its list of activists. There was a political awakening after the Trumpocalypse that didn't always reach establishment groups like the Clintonista Center for American Progress (CAP). Also, it is not clear how committed to "No Is Not Enough" that Indivisible is. At the end of the day -- the end of Tuesday, November 3, 2020 -- "No Trump" might be enough.

At the moment it is this calculation -- that a neoliberal Democratic establishment can harness enough of the disenchantment with Trump without having to yield to social democratic demands (Medicare for all, free college tuition) to win in 2020 -- which is preventing the kind of overhaul of the party which Corbyn and Momentum have achieved in the UK.