Bad things happen when workers lack political representation.

A major reason why the US welfare state is so meager, its union movement so frail, and its working class so divided is that the United States is the only advanced capitalist democracy where parties of big business have always monopolized the political arena. The morbid symptoms of this impasse are everywhere today, from the rise of Trumpism, to the Democratic establishment’s stubborn opposition to Medicare for All in the midst of a pandemic, to the deepening polarization of national politics along partisan lines free from any focus on redistributing wealth and power.

Identifying this problem, unfortunately, has proven to be much easier than effectively overcoming it. Radicals have tried and failed over the past hundred years to make a clean break from the Democrats and Republicans by founding third parties. Yet realignment efforts to transform the Dems into a social-democratic formation have not been any more successful. In response to these setbacks, some socialists have recently questioned the goal of building a workers’ party with its own ballot line.