Politics World May 19, 2018May 21, 2018

The US Left Brace Up in a Big Way for Mid-Term Elections in November

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The mid-term elections in the United States of America, scheduled for November this year, have assumed crucial importance as the Left wing of the Democratic Party led by Bernie Sanders, has launched a massive campaign in a planned manner to get the candidates with faith in people’s agenda elected in the Democratic Party ticket to transform the character of the US Congress. These biennial elections are being held just two years after the November 2016 presidential elections which led to the victory of the Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Since then in the last eighteen months, Bernie Sanders through his movement Our Revolution, has been campaigning in every part of America appealing to the underprivileged and the younger people to take active interest in the politics of the country and to work for selecting persons to the governing positions from the grassroots level so that the administration is changed in favour of the common people as against the one percent wealthy. His group is approaching the November elections with big confidence since in the recent by-elections in different regions of the USA, the candidates of the progressive groups have been able to get elected in a number of constituencies.

The midterm elections will take place in the middle of the President Trump’s term. All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the US Senate will be contested. Interestingly, over 80 Indian Americans are planning to run for the mid-term elections and the majority of them will be contesting in the tickets of the Democratic Party. Over 220 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are running for various offices in more than 30 states. Further, 12 Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) political organisations for the first time announced the launching of an online clearinghouse for its political and election activity. The clearinghouse will provide a place online for candidates and voters to learn about opportunities to get involved in campaign activities and to find ways to support one another.

Bernie Sanders has a good equation with the American immigrants and he has been consistently fighting for their rights. In a recent interview, he has said his group has been putting a lot of emphasis on the views of the candidates. According to him, it is not just electing candidates to be a senator or to the House of Representatives. It is electing candidates to the school board, to the city council, to state legislature. So he makes it paramount in his programme that the left candidates have to bid for every position of power to facilitate the process of changing the way decisions are made in favour of the haves till now. As Sanders sees it, his movement is taking on the entire establishment. They are taking on moneyed interests, Wall Street as also Democratic establishment. That is why he says that the only way the change can be brought about is by developing strong grassroots movement and for that, the millions of the concerned people have to be organised.

The intensity of the movement against the Trump administration has reached such a level that the Democratic Party, initially at a loss on its strategy, finally came round to electing leadership with Thomas Perez, a Hispanic as chairman and Eric Ellison, a Muslim of African American origin as deputy chairman. Bernie Sanders is the Chairman, Outreach, of the Democratic Party. This trio with the firm commitment to the causes favourable to the underprivileged and 99 percent of the Americans, is expected to collaborate with the nonparty mass movement to impart a new dimension to the anti-Trump mobilization. Everybody is talking of socialism and thanks to Bernie Sanders, after a long time, the younger sections in the US are engaged in an intense debate on how to go about in replacing the Trump government with a real progressive agenda. The US Communist Party which strongly supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party contest against Hillary Clinton is playing the crucial role of unifier of the anti-Trump forces and the whole objective of the US communists is now to ensure that the far left groups do not jeopardize the all-out unity by taking sectarian positions.

Left-wingers in the US say that though this is a bad time for the world and the USA as a result of Trump presidency, but the opportunities for the American left are immense as the neo liberal sections of the Democratic Party have discredited themselves and they are getting isolated from the current anti-Trump mass movement. The American movement has now the potential to build Democratic Victory during 2020 Presidential elections and that has to be left oriented. There is a mass discontent but not just with Trump, it is with the political class in general and this has led to a broad, populist anti establishment mood. Trump was able to lap that at a superficial level but since his real colour is coming out, it will be easier for the Left to capitalize on this anti-establishment mood and install a government that will be pro-people. The mood in the country is such at the moment that Republicans may lose heavily in November elections.

Presently, the Left has an opening of the sort that it has not had in memory. The political leadership of the Democratic Party may not want to depend on mass action from below to oppose Trump but they have been put in a terrible situation and the ground reality may lead the new Democratic Leadership to be a part of the widespread anti-Trump movement that is also against the domination of Wall Street to which many big shots of Democratic Party are connected. Sanders supporters believe that the new leadership of the Democratic Party will be out of bounds of Wall Street and the Perez-Ellison team along with Sanders will actively collaborate with the current people’s movement to impart it a positive direction based on a progressive programme which Sanders has been advocating for long.

The Communist Party of USA is the biggest defender of the broad-based unity including the new leadership of the Democratic Party. The party says that the present situation is opportune but the unity of the masses in action, has to be maintained at all costs. What is required is the broadest unity in the defence of democratic norms, institutions and rights. The American people have to keep fighting for that cherished vision of the inclusive, just and peaceful America and the world. The long battle for restoring the real American values and imparting it further progressive direction has started and American Left led by Sanders and the US Communist Party expect dividends after mid-term elections.