One Party State
What Republicans are doing could never work without a willing accomplice
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I used to believe, back when I was merely a progressive-minded liberal, that there would be something, some inflection point, at which even out of sheer desire for self-preservation, Democrats would have their come-to-Jesus moment and move in ways they needed to move to save democracy and us in the process. I was wrong. If anything disabused me of that notion, it was the reaction to January 6th, 2021. The slow walk on impeachment, not striking while it could’ve actually worked, showed me that if you can’t even move to land a blow at this burgeoning fascist movement when it is (quite literally) threatening to remove your head, you will never act. Since then, all of my predictions about how Democrats would fail to meet the moment have, unfortunately, proven true. Since 2021, the rise of the hard right reactionary wing of the Republican Party, culminating in its re-ascendance to power with Trump at the head, driven by the Democratic Party’s refusal to take the moment seriously and deliver for working people at the expense of the profits of their corporate donors, has been entirely predictable. Much has been written by thinkers on the left about the ways in which reaction rises in times of economic peril, when, in the absence of a strong left-wing economic message that points the finger correctly at the ruling class, the right can take hold by scapegoating minorities as the cause of all their woes. This precisely is what is happening in the United States. While Democrats operate purely on reaction to whatever the right wing is doing, refusing to develop a coherent message or a left-wing economic vision, the Republicans have made mass deportations their cause célèbre. They’ve convinced an alarming number of people that illegal immigration is to blame for every hardship they experience.
The occupation of cities across the country by ICE under the guise of deporting violent criminals - but which is really in practice just a military occupation that is waging war on the American people - has been met by Democrats with barely a whimper. While the ICE budget tripled, ballooning to nearly $40 billion in 2025, congressional Democrats are not even seriously discussing a return to the budget they had only a year ago, let alone the abolition of ICE and DHS. In this time, Democrats have made what can only be described as the most tepid of demands: removing masks (sometimes), bodycams (which are either useless or even harmful), and requiring a judicial warrant (already the law!), in response to the execution by ICE of two American citizens in Minnesota. This, while the general public’s support for full abolition has doubled in popularity in a matter of weeks.
Not only that, but both parties have consistently funded ICE year after year, despite calls from the activist wing to abolish ICE going back at least a decade. While the Republicans are taking actions that strongly imply they’d like to do away with democracy (as flawed, limited, and managed as it is) altogether, Democrats still manage to provide this party with the exact number of votes they need to accomplish their goals time and time again. This is what it’s like to live in a de facto one-party state. No matter what the popular support for an issue is, the will of the voters is never reflected in policy, and no matter which party wins, the Republicans get almost everything they want.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have witnessed firsthand the way the Republicans always seem to escalate, and the Democrats always capitulate. Democrats promise to resist the rising fascism of Republicans but cave when it counts. When they have all the levers of power, there’s guaranteed to be multiple institutional stumbling blocks they cite as to why they really can’t materially get anything done and why nothing fundamental can change. Whether it’s the filibuster, the parliamentarian, or the cast of rotating villains like Manchin or Sinema or MGP or Fetterman, there’s always something preventing Democrats from delivering the goods to working people. Bipartisanship is touted as some lofty ideal that is always used to advance the same bad outcomes of militarism and imperialism, surveillance, and enhancing corporate power. In response, critics of the Democratic Party like to attribute these outcomes to weakness and cowardice - “they just aren’t good at fighting” - but that fighting spirit always seems to magically appear when it’s time to block the left flank from gaining power. Democrats have shown in multiple primaries what it looks like when they want to flex their muscle. Eventually, one comes to the conclusion that it isn’t weakness; it is the system working as designed. It is wrong to say that Democrats are exactly like Republicans because if they were, this gambit wouldn’t work. In fact, it is their differences in presentation that make them better able to function together as the bulwark of capital against the working class. Democrats are the stabilizing wing of capital, always promising to restore and uphold the status quo. While Republicans are the radicalizing force pushing that status quo ever rightward. One can’t work without the other. And as we careen further and further rightward, the Democrats move ever away from the demands of the people they need to elect them. The popular momentum on the ground is now far to the left of the Democratic Party's offerings. This would be a problem if the Democrats were there to represent the people, as they say, but that is not what the party is for. They are there to blunt momentum to their left while doing everything possible to protect the profits of capital. Whatever true objections Democrats may have to what the Republican Party is doing at any given time are purely on the grounds of the destabilization these actions may cause to the capital-owning class. This is why we get the equivalent of thoughts and prayers around ICE executions, instead of meaningful change. Democrats as much as Republicans need these security forces to exist, as they are a tool of class order. The boundaries of acceptable reform are always constrained within social questions, because militarism, the security state, and the question of who owns what - the fundamental question of how society is structured and for whom - is out of bounds. Democrats may promise to put a few regulations in place here and there, but they have no real plan to rein in the billionaires or cut military spending or restructure society to work for the rest of us. This isn’t a matter of fecklessness; it is a matter of ideology. To understand why we even find ourselves here, we need honesty about what the Democratic Party actually believes.
A clip went viral recently of Twitch streamer Hasan Piker being asked a hypothetical question: if in 2028 the election were between Gavin Newsom and JD Vance, who would he vote for? His response was that he would vote third party. This was met with outrage from many Democratic Party mouthpieces across social media. The same playbook that has been run over and over when the people demand something of their elected officials was run again: “You just don’t care about marginalized people! You’re so privileged! This is harm reduction!” This line was familiar to me because it was the argument that convinced me to vote for Hillary and then Biden after that, despite my distaste for both, but it no longer has a hold because I now realize that the current iteration of Trump would never have been possible without every single president before him refusing to make changes to the material conditions of the working class. I remember voting for Biden to do something to address COVID, but instead he told us the pandemic was over and to get back to work. I remember his refusal to go after Trump for waging an insurrection. I remember him sitting on the Epstein files. I remember the thousand excuses we got as to why the Democrats couldn’t raise the minimum wage, or pass the PRO act, or deliver on the BBB. I remember watching Democrats attack me and my comrades for daring to criticize their genocide. I remember the gaslighting about the state of the economy and grocery prices, while people around me struggled to make ends meet. And I know that all of these things, taken together, gave us an even worse Republican Party in 2024. The notion that we can just keep electing the type of people who allow our lives to erode and that that will somehow defeat fascism (if they just never lose another election again) and furthermore, that those who are suffering right now and who have suffered immensely under Democrats too, can merely wait forever for things to get better while choosing people who won’t address their needs, is a deep misunderstanding of this moment. The real privilege is in the insistence that we can just keep rolling along under these worsening conditions and never expect better.
When critics say Democrats are weak, they do not understand the core problem with the Democratic Party. It is not weakness; it is a deep ideological commitment. This is a party that fundamentally believes in capitalism. They believe in the efficiency of markets, private property, existing political institutions, and U.S. global military primacy as a force for good. They view rising fascism as a deviation from a good system rather than a predictable outcome of it. The things that are required to transform society: radical redistribution of wealth, the dismantling of the military industrial complex, and challenging ownership structures, are things that cut directly against the fundamental tenets of the party. Preservation of the capitalist organization of the economy takes priority and constrains any possible response to the crises we face. Democrats see themselves as the stabilizing force of capitalism and continuity, and this sets the outer boundary of what they consider an acceptable reaction. The corruption inherent in the party is harmonious with their core beliefs. Their ideological commitment to capitalism is reinforced by donor networks and revolving doors, rather than guided by it.
Because the Democrats are captured by the ideology that brought us here, the solutions necessarily cannot come from them. They must come from the bottom up, not the top down: from the people who live inside of the pain of these decades of capitalism and neoliberal austerity that made this outcome inevitable. I contend that no Democratic president can save us, reform can’t save us. The expectation that it will is like expecting a zebra to change its stripes. You are asking for a party of capital to be a party of workers. A thing that is diametrically opposed to its aims. As the last vestiges of whatever we call a democracy slip away over the next few years, it will become more evident that what is needed is a united coalition of the working class, not someone from on high. Not a few slick-talking saviors and an election in 3 years, but a direct confrontation with capital and its backers. Bickering about who might be president in November 2028 may serve as an emotional release, but it is not only kicking the can down the road; it is living in a sort of delusion in which we have a democratic process to rely on and people who have the will and the means to save us. We must return again and again to the difficult truth that it is only we who can do this. We are all we got.
I read/heard somewhere that the job of Democrats is to keep the oven warm for the next Republican administration and it's kind of perfect.
To paraphrase Freire, the elite are incapable of liberating themselves let alone the people.