Portside

Polling shows Americans are ready to support independent populists running on economic platforms. But what they don’t want is anything associated with the Democratic Party’s brand.

Friday Portside posted An Open Letter to the Green Party About 2020 Election Strategy, by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert.

There has been a growing movement of grassroots state power building independent political organizations (IPOs). Drawing lessons directly from this experience, the authors share three specific state-based strategies for organizers and activists.

The Working Families Party has achieved its goal of flipping the New York State Senate — but now faces a threat to its very existence.

Two Progressive Alliance leaders–city councilors Jovanka Beckles and Gayle McLaughlin–are preparing to run as “corporate free” candidates for higher office.

Ultimately, a new left politics in the United States will have to involve recapturing the energy of some of those pre-New Deal labor, agrarian, and socialist radicals who held on to the promise of a party of their own.

"He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," Della Volpe said of the senator from Vermont. "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation - the largest generation in the history of America - thinks about politics."

In the current cycle are two related but distinct problems. First, progressives have no national electoral strategy to speak of. Second, elections cannot be viewed simply or even mainly within the context of the pros and cons of specific candidates. Progressives are very divided about the relative importance of electoral politics, and our near exclusive focus on the candidates, that there is no coherent national progressive electoral strategy.