American leftists are stuck in a conundrum. On the one hand, our two major parties are dominated by corporate interests — including the Democrats, who are currently tasked with (and failing to) meet the challenge of opposing the openly reactionary and wealth-worshipping Republicans.

On the other, our country’s laws governing third parties are the most restrictive of any established democracy, making ballot-line challenges to the two major, corporate-dominated parties arduous, if not impossible. We seem doomed to either quixotic, ineffectual third-party challenges, or getting sucked into the conservatizing force field of the Democratic Party.

In a 2016 article, Jacobin executive editor Seth Ackerman proposed another way. He argued for creating an independent organization that functions in key ways like parties in other countries around the world, with an official membership, a binding platform, and clear mechanisms to ensure fealty to that platform from candidates and officeholders running under the organization’s banner — all things the Democratic Party currently lacks.