I think the Democratic Party should tack left instead of right.

[dreamnightwind]

22. That would be great, though there's one other way I can see

which won't be popular here, but here it is.

First, I'll start by saying that moving the party to the left is the preferable path.

However, the party has erected huge institutional barriers to protect itself from leftist/populist influence, including and by no means limited to using superdelegates in the primary.

There are currently FAR more U.S. citizens who belong to neither corporate party, and have withdrawn from party politics, out of disgust for both parties. They self-identify as independents.

If we can't get the Democrats to move left and represent the people rather than the corporate interests, there's another way, which is to realign on a corporate/populist axis rather than on a left/right axis. By doing so, there would be a huge base instantly attuned to the new populist alignment.

The independents themselves are all over the left/right spectrum, and mostly agree that corporations have too much power in our lives and in our government, and that both major parties represent corporate interests more than they represent citizen interests.

There is a surprisingly large ideological intersection that such a realignment could draw from. I suspect that the independents would mostly agree on issues of getting corporate money out of our political system, rejecting fossil fuels and embarking on a massive conversion to save our planet, creating clean energy jobs in the process, reigning in Wall St., spending less taxpayer money on the most expensive military the world has ever seen which is mainly supporting resource extraction and exploitable labor pools, ending this nation's incarceration binge, ending the drug war, ending the push for globalization of business and labor, taking care of our citizen's survival needs (healthcare, living wages, possibly a guaranteed minimum income to offset the coming automation layoffs, secure retirement), and other things I'm not thinking of at the moment.

It requires getting cats to lie down with dogs, we have all been programmed to fight along the left/right battleground for a long time, but today, in my opinion, the more important battles are being fought along corporate/populist lines. Sadly, today's Democratic Party establishment is clearly on the wrong side of these lines.

We can move further left and try to take on the powers that be ourselves, starting with our own party, as you suggest. Then we'll need to win power over the oligarchs. I don't think we're that strong, frankly, I just don't see the left pulling that off by ourselves. Alternatively, we can realign and agree to disagree on certain left/right divisions while having each other's backs in a newly aligned populist movement.

It's certainly what the corporations fear most, and is why so many divisive issues get all of the airplay, while the larger issues we face are not even discussed in the corporate media.