Faiz Shakir
Let’s start with this: if you’re a member of the Democratic Party, you are on the email list of the Democratic National Committee. What is membership? Right now, all it means is you’re an online contributor. You send us a check every now and again, and that’s it. There’s nothing asked of you. Being a member of the Democratic Party needs to mean something very different in an oligarchic age in which the powerful ruling elite run this country.
What is our power? Our power has to be people. We have to be a people’s party. If you want to remake the brand to engage working-class people who feel like the party doesn’t stick its necks out for them, then we have to change the way we operate.
When the Teamsters go on strike against Amazon, we are going to send information out to our universe. We’re going to recruit people to stand in solidarity with them. When there are communities across the United States trying to cancel medical debt in this country, do we recognize it? Do we say anything? Do we support them? Yes, we should. If you’re fighting unjust utility rate hikes from greedy utility monopolies, we could organize members to go to the town council meeting, the next open commission hearing that they’ve got, and raise our voices.
Being a member of the Democratic Party needs to mean something very different in an oligarchic age in which the powerful ruling elite run this country.
We’ve gotten so anemic in our willingness to use the bully pulpits we have. The Bernie campaigns were trying to change the consciousness of America — particularly in a broken media environment in which, if Amazon workers are trying to build a union at a warehouse in, say, North Carolina, how much attention are they going to get right now? Because of the way our media is constructed, there is no incentive for a lot of the major outlets to give…
Auteur: Faiz Shakir
