So what we need to do is give the Democratic Party a jolt. We may never
convince them that they need to be more aggressive about the big issues
if they want to win over the unaffiliated voters, but we
can convince them
that they can no longer simply count on the support of the progressive
wing of the party, which they have taken for granted since the end of
the New Deal.
The way to do this, quickly and unambiguously, is for progressives,
enmasse, to resign from the party, officially at the voter registrar's
office. If Democratic Party officials see a fall off in Democratic
registrations, they will be thrown into a panic — especially if those
de-registrations are accompanied by comments, as on this
petition, explaining their reasons for resigning.
As I explained earlier, a de-registration campaign will also be
powerful because the ones who will notice it first will be local
Democratic political officials, who usually face very low-turnout
elections and count on using Democratic Party registration information
for their campaign and get-out-the-vote mailings and door-to-door
efforts. If those lists start to shrink they will positively freak out,
and when they learn that it is because progressives are angry, they
will send the word to their congressional delegations that something
has to be done to placate the alienated progressives.
This is the way things ought to operate, but in the top-down Democratic
Party of today, the system has broken down. I was recently at a meeting
of the Bucks County (PA) Democratic Committee, invited by a member to
give a brief talk in support of a resolution calling on Congress to
impeach the president. I asked for a show of hands of who in the room
supported impeachment, and nearly every hand went up, but at the end of
my presentation, when a member proposed such a resolution, the
committee chair refused to consider it, using parliamentary rules to
block it. He went further to argue against the idea, saying "We don't
want to embarrass our Democratic Congressman, Patrick Murphy," who has
said he opposes impeachment.
This is, of course, an ass-backwards notion of how democracy should
work. It's the grass roots of the party that should be telling members
of Congress how to vote, not the grassroots asking their elected
representative what it is okay for them to support.
Progressives have talked for decades about "taking over" control of the
Democratic Party, but this has never happened. The closest we came was
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but even then it was only a partial
success and in the end the leadership sabotaged the party's own
presidential candidate, George McGovern, in 1972. Reforming the party,
even if it could be done, is a major project that will take years of
concerted effort at the grassroots. We don't have time for that now.
With the Bush administration hell-bent on war with Iran, and on gutting
democracy and trashing the constitution in favor of executive rule, we
need something faster.
Nothing would be faster than having hundreds of thousands of
progressive Democratic Party members simply quit the party. In doing
that, they would not, in many if not most states, forego their ability
to vote in primaries. Nor would they be prevented from voting for a
suitable Democratic candidate in November 2008. But they would be
putting a real fear in the hearts of Democratic leaders and elected
officials that they could no longer be
counted on to vote Democratic. And that's the fear we have to engender.
It should be clear by now that until Democratic Party leaders really
have to contemplate losing the progressive vote, they are going to play
to the right, avoid the big issues, and simply ignore progressives,
while undermining their favored candidates.
It's time for action. Quit the Party!
Writings 
Since I posted my call two days ago for registered Democrats to re-register as independent voters (and to 
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