The party that can win my vote

I hate the Democratic Party. This plain-spoken assertion will turn off some readers, but we do not live in times that allow for squeamishness. The party went astray by adopting Third Way Liberalism, the political hodgepodge that believes that as long as we say the right things to special-interest groups, we can go on doing whatever corporations tell us to do. And my outrage has grow all the more as in election after election I am told that a must vote for the lousy centrist the Democrats offer because I would not want the other guy to win.

The party behaves like a drug addict who promises again and again that if only we will bail him out this time, he will reform at some point in the future. We could have had Bill Bradley in 2000, Howard Dean — back when he was a progressive — in 2004, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and this year. Instead the party — whether the Democratic National Committee or the voters is irrelevant for this point — chose a Diet Republican and lost. Barack Obama ran as a transformational progressive in 2008 and won, then governed as the sort of politician who would have fitted in well with Eisenhower’s administration, and his re-election was the result of incumbent inertia.

Now that Joe Biden is the default nominee, having won by mostly staying silent and by promising the handwringing centrists that he will not bring too much change, the Democratic…