A Note On Keith Ellison

A 235-230 vote that went to a second round tells me that there is a real struggle within the Democratic Party and that we have a stake in how that fight goes whether we're Dems or not. And it tells me that there is real reason for optimism because there are close votes which force compromises and give people needed political experence and present opportunities to build left-wing credibility. We can't win at the top what we can't win at the base, and a defect in our movement is that we don't organize enough or in the right ways, in ways which move working-class people, people of color, women and youth into everyday activism and united fronts. We knew early on that Ellison did not have needed union support, but we didn't activate the working-class base to change that. We can do better. We don't need an either/or approach which takes the left out of the Democratic Party; we need an action-oriented inside/outside strategy and tactics which constantly pushes people in the Democratic Party to raise their level of organizing and struggle.

"Before this gets turned into another thing where the establishment Democrats posture as the reasonable adults victimized by the assaults of those left-wing baddies, let’s just be very clear about what happened here. It was the establishment wing that decided to recruit and then stand up a candidate in order to fight an internal battle against the left faction of the party. It was the establishment wing that then dumped massive piles of opposition research on one of their own party members. And it was the establishment wing that did all of this in the shadow of Trump, sowing disunity in order to contest a position whose leadership they insist does not really matter...The establishment wing has made it very clear that they will do anything and everything to hold down the left faction, even as they rather hilariously ask the left faction to look above their differences and unify in these trying times. They do not have any intent of ceding anything — even small things they claim are mostly irrelevant — to the left wing."--Matt Bruenig