It’s Time for a Party of the 99%

Editor’s Note: System Change cofounder Richard Smith argues in this essay that the time is ripe to create a new electoral party. Here he introduces a Draft Platform that fleshes out the case for such a party and details majoritarian support for an agenda to the left of what the Democrats have on offer. We invite readers to comment on the proposal using the comment form below the endnotes.

In the wake of the Democratic Party’s historic triple wipeout last November, the Party leadership’s refusal to mount a fightback against Trump’s authoritarian takeover, and its refusal to reject its neoliberal capitalist anti-working class politics that have been driving away working class voters since the 1970s,^[1] the Democratic Party (DP) is now threatened with permanent minority status if not virtual extinction. In February-March 2025, the DP’s public approval rating cratered at 27%, a record low, with 55% disapproving. Worse, even with his multiple assaults on labor — calling with Musk for striking workers to be fired; stacking the NLRB with anti-union officials; packing the courts with anti-labor judges; mass firings of federal employees; crippling cuts to worker health and safety, Medicaid, the social safety net, the EPA, the Veterans Administration; and more — Donald Trump is still polling way ahead of the Democrats with an average approval rating of 47.6% versus 49.3% disapproving, as of June 5th.

So today, the working classes — 90+% of the people of this country — are left with no political party that can even credibly pretend to represent their interests. Across the country Democratic voters are furious, depressed, and crying out not just for a fightback but even more for a new progressive vision and policies to replace the Democrats’ unpopular, failed policies — but there is no party for them to turn to.

Thus, we on the left are presented with a once-in-an-epoch opportunity to seize the moment, to found a social democratic workers’ party. In any other period, attempting to launch a third party to seriously challenge the GOP-DP duopoly would have been a fool’s errand. But today we’re living in an unprecedented moment in history in which the DP has lost all credibility and, for structural reasons explained in our draft Platform, is unlikely to recover. We are well and truly living in another great period of party realignment, creation, and replacement. So, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

What’s more, it’s frighteningly clear that if we on the progressive left do not either fundamentally change the nature of the Democratic Party, or come up with a viable alternative to the DP-GOP duopoly, this could all end very badly. We believe that an explicitly socialist party alternative is still a non-starter in this country at present. But a pro-labor and pro-environmental social democratic party: Yes! Howie Hawkins discusses the issues of third party runs and rank-choice voting in the Platform Point 3.

The assumption that our two-party system is set in stone and thus third parties can never win, is not true. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by 30 anti-slavery activists meeting in a Wisconsin small-town schoolhouse as a “third party”— one of several in those days when parties were frequently splitting, regrouping, arising, and fading away. Its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected in 1860 in a four-way contest. He won a plurality, just 39.7 percent of the national popular vote, but he got more electoral votes than any of the other three parties. That secured his victory.

Today, established old parties are falling left and right again, and new third parties are rising around the world. Look at Germany, where the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (who have dominated German politics since the post-war years) are outnumbered in the German federal parliament by five smaller parties. Look at the UK, where a recent headline read, “After 100 Years Reform [Party] Leads Charge to Smash Britain’s Two-Party System.”

Can Bernie Reform the Democratic Party?

The Bernie Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “anti-oligarchy tour” shows why reforming the DP is impossible in the current context and why we need a workers’ party. Bernie Sanders has done more than any politician since Eugene Debs to legitimate the idea of socialism in the public mind. His impassioned and consistent advocacy for the US working and downtrodden classes stands in glaring contrast to the elite concerns of the DP leadership and most DP politicians. His single-payer Medicare for All proposal is virtually socialized medicine in the US context, which is why it’s so fiercely opposed by both capitalist parties. And unlike the Democrats, who won’t fight the power and instead hide from their voters to avoid embarrassing town halls, Bernie Sanders and AOC have been out touring the country speaking to enthusiastic crowds with a different vision and message:  

In the richest country in the history of the world, 60 percent of our people live paycheck to paycheck, and working-class people, as a result of the stress they experience trying to survive, have a seven years shorter life expectancy than the wealthy. . . . We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth. Over 800,000 Americans are homeless, and 20 million Americans spend half of their incomes or more on housing. . .

Working-class Americans are not voting Republican because they support tax breaks for billionaires or want to decimate Medicaid, Social Security, or the Veterans Administration. . . [but] because they perceive, correctly, that most Democrats are not prepared to forcefully address the economic crises that they face. Democrats are widely perceived as the party of the status quo — a status quo which has been a disaster for most Americans. That has got to change.

We need a clear economic program that takes on the oligarchs and the greed of corporate America. An agenda that raises wages and supports unions, ends poverty for seniors, children and the disabled, makes housing affordable, guarantees health care and education for all ,and creates millions of good paying jobs by combating the existential threat of climate change. . . . After 10 years of simply criticizing Trump, we have to give Americans something to vote FOR. 

It is no secret to anyone that the current Democratic Party is a top-down institution . . . largely funded by . . . the “donor class,” run by well-paid (and out of touch) consultants, and elects most, not all, candidates through massive amounts of advertising. That is the political approach of the Democratic Establishment. It is an approach which will not only continue to lose elections but will never bring about the profound changes this country needs.

They gave inspiring speeches like this to huge rallies, including 36,000 in Los Angeles on April 12. They even fill arenas in deep in Trump territory like Utah, Montana, and Idaho where they’re going after voters with a message they’ve never heard from the DP.

Sanders is winning the hearts and minds of voters, but the problem is that he has no viable strategy to win his “revolution.” Bernie has always been a loner, which is strange for an avowed socialist. Instead of organizing with other socialists to found a social democratic party or joining the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — which, after all, freely provided thousands of enthusiastic canvassers across the country for his 2016 presidential campaign — his strategy has always been to reform the Democratic Party. Ever since he first won national office as an Independent Socialist 35 years ago in 1990, Sanders has been struggling to push the DP to the left, to win his “revolution,” his legislative agenda crowned by Medicare for All.

And what’s he got from the DP in return? They kick sand in his face. They bait him as a communist. They sabotage him. They’ve crushed him time and again. Even as he has voted with the congressional Democrats for decades and endorsed and campaigned (uncritically) for Biden and Harris, the leadership and mainstream Democratic pols hate his guts and never miss an opportunity to wreck his progressive legislative efforts and sabotage his runs for the presidency.

In 2016 the only candidate that could have beaten Donald Trump was Bernie Sanders. Early in the 2016 primary race, Bernie surged ahead of Clinton in February, and he outperformed Clinton in a hypothetical matchup against Trump, leading Trump by 15 points (53-38 percent) versus Clinton’s 5 points (47-42 percent). Not only was he polling way ahead of Clinton, but Newsweek reported polls showing “Sanders is the most popular U.S. politician, ever,” with an 80% approval rating.”

Yet instead of winning with Bernie the Democratic National Committee leaders pulled out all the stops to sabotage Sanders and nominate the loathed and widely predicted loser Hillary Rodham Clinton. The DNC preferred risking a very tight race against a wannabe Mussolini than support independent socialist Bernie Sanders. As Clinton went down to defeat, Sanders’ popularity only grew. So the DNC crushed him again. When Sanders got into the 2020 race, he was, again, the most popular politician in the country, polling way ahead of Joe Biden. But again, rather than back the most popular politician in the country, the DNC mobilized to derail Bernie and secure the nomination for Biden. Biden won, barely, but his policies as president set the stage for the DP’s debacle of 2024. Then, as Biden faded into senility, the DNC abruptly anointed Harris as candidate rather than risk a primary or an open convention fight that might nominate Sanders because as usual polls were showing Sanders still had the highest favorability rating of all the 2024 contenders. To no one’s surprise but Harebrained Harris, the Democrats suffered another humiliating defeat.

Under the leadership of the politically bankrupt and incorrigibly corrupt Democratic old guard the Party keeps losing elections even though registered Democrats have outnumbered Republicans from the 1930s up until 2022. Every one of those races was the Democrats’ to lose —and they lost them by running candidates who had nothing to offer the working class, the 99% of U.S. Americans.

The DP began turning away from the working class from the 1970s and then explicitly abandoned them under “New Democrat” Bill Clinton. Clinton exported millions of jobs to Mexico and China in the 1990s and 2000s with his NAFTA and China Shock policies and rebased the DP on the college-educated professional-managerial class (PMC), tech industrialists, and Wall Street. During the 2016 election campaign Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer reaffirmed that shift in his party’s base and confidently predicted that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” How did that work out?

In 100 years the Democrats have never won a presidential election without majority working class support (with the exception of 2020, when Biden squeaked by because of Trump’s chaotic mismanagement of everything, especially the Covid epidemic). In the 1976 election Jimmy Carter won 52% of the white working-class vote. This dropped to 50% for Clinton in 1996, 40% for Obama in 2012, 36% for Biden in 2020, and 34% for Harris in 2024.^[2] There is no reason to expect that this trend will be reversed so long as the Party remains based on the upper classes and dependent on the capitalist “donor class” to fund its pay-to-play elections (Platform Point 1).

Yet, after all these electoral defeats and after his own decades of failing to change the DP, today, on his current speaking tour, Bernie still steers disaffected voters back into the party. He tells his huge audiences to “Vote for Democrats who stand and fight for the working class” and “We need a Democratic Party that fights for us.” What else can he say, since he has no alternative party to recruit them to — which he should have built decades ago. 

After Harris’s loss Sanders said, “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. They’re right.”

Yet Sanders and AOC themselves defended the status quo when they uncritically campaigned for Harris. Supporting her campaign, they had no choice but to cover and lie for her. When AOC announced her support for Harris at the August 2024 DNC convention, she excoriated Trump as “a two-bit union buster who would sell his country for a dollar if he could line his own pockets and grease the palms of his Wall Street friends.” Conversely, she rhapsodized over Harris’s “tireless efforts to take on corporate greed”^[3] but conveniently failed to mention that Harris herself had more Wall Street friends than Trump — a lot more. Harris had 83 billionaire CEOs and owners of major companies backing her, versus Trump’s scant 52.^[4] In his 2016 presidential campaign Sanders righteously campaigned for Medicare for All. But when Harris took in $47 million last year from the medical industrial complex to keep her mouth shut about Medicare for All, Bernie shut up too. When she dropped Medicare for All from her program, stopped talking about hiking the minimum wage, and dropped any mention of climate change, Sanders averred that she was “pragmatic” but still a “progressive.” So long as Bernie and AOC work within the billionaire-capitalist “donor class”-controlled DP instead of building an independent alternative workers’ party, they have no choice but to sell out their own principles — and in the process deepen the electorate’s cynicism about democracy and politics in general.

Working-class Americans need their own party with a broad vision of what kind of country and world we want, a vision that authentically represents the expressed wishes of working people on the full range of economic, social, political, foreign policy, and environmental issues. Without such a party of our own to inspire and attract demoralized Democratic worker-voters and recruit disaffected Trump worker-voters, We the 99% will never displace the capitalist duopoly and never forge a real democracy.

New Party Talk Is in the Air

The Democratic Party debacle has got many on the left talking about the need for a new working-class party — the most serious of which are in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). There are at least three caucuses in the DSA putting forward resolutions on turning the DSA into a real political party in preparation for the biennial DSA convention this summer. There’s even talk about running a socialist presidential candidate in 2028. But the DSA is a big-tent organization with multiple political tendencies (anarchists, Marxists, social democrats, libertarians, etc.) and multiple rival caucuses organized around political platforms. It’s perennially split over centralization vs. decentralization, and after four-and-a-half decades the “organization” has yet to agree if it wants to be a real political party, and if so what kind of party. Some caucuses want to turn the DSA into a “workers’ party” or a “revolutionary socialist party.” But since its inception in the 1980s the DSA has served as an adjunct to the Democratic Party, and still seems too imbricated with the DP to break with it. So I don’t expect to see the DSA morph into a real workers’ party anytime soon.

What about the Working Families Party? It’s likewise difficult to see how the WFP could morph into a workers’ party because, like the DSA, from its inception it has functioned as a leftish adjunct of the DP so can’t shed the DP’s political liabilities. For example, the WFP endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, but when he was denied those candidacies the Party endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, then Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024 — in effect “defending the status quo the American people are angry about and want to change.”

Since the Democrats show no inclination to reinvent themselves as a workers’ party, and since there are no other real proposals from the left to found a workers’ electoral party, I figured that instead of just protesting and complaining about the headlines every morning I would try to do something positive by having a go at drafting a plausible platform for a workers’ party which I’ve dubbed the Party of the 99% (attached). I was inspired by Les Leopold (Wall Street’s War on Workers), who has long called for founding a workers’ party, as again in Common Dreams in February, and by former Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins, whose recent article in New Politics points out that, paradoxically, the majority of the electorate is progressive-leaning — well left of the Democrats on all the major issues of the day — despite having just elected a far-right president.

So a small group of us got together and discussed how we might motivate the idea of founding a new labor-environment party either under the name I suggested or something else. The Platform is a work in progress. Comrades have already edited parts of the text and added points. A major strength of this draft platform is that unlike the DP platform, which contains numerous points that most voters disagree with, every point in this Party of the 99% Platform enjoys majority to overwhelming majority public support, as attested by polls cited under each point.

One might object that it’s premature to propose a fairly fleshed out platform. Perhaps. But historically, political parties are typically founded by small numbers of like-minded individuals who organize themselves around a manifesto or platform that defines what their new party stands for. As they grow, members hammer their platform points in committees and in conventions, then the membership votes them up or down. The platforms in turn attract the mass membership, and members revise their platforms as times change and new issues arise. The 2024 Democratic Party Platform runs to 92 dense pages. The British Labor Party Manifesto 2024 fills 136 pages. This provisional draft platform for a Party of the 99% is just 30 pages (so far). No doubt there are other points new members would want to include. It certainly needs a point on DEI and ICE, among others. If there’s interest in this project, then others can write those, and if necessary revise or delete some of what we’ve already written. That’s how a democratic internal process should work. Of course, whether this party platform actually reflects the interests and wishes of working-class voters will be up to the voters to decide.

So if you’re interested and would like to contribute to building a mass-based nonsectarian workers party that can bid to replace the Democratic Party, we invite you to join the Party of the 99% and help lift this off the ground. Recruit your friends, coworkers, and like-minded people. Help us develop and revise the platform, construct our website, write educational material for the Party, and find working people to run for office. Get in touch with us at partyofthe99percent@gmail.com.

In solidarity,
Richard Smith

Richard Smith holds a PhD from the History Department at the University of California Los Angeles, where his thesis examined the contradictions of market socialism in China, and held post-docs at the East–West Center, Honolulu, and Rutgers University. He is a cofounder of System Change Not Climate Change and serves on its coordinating committee and editing team. His writings can be found at richardanthonysmith.org.

Endnotes

1. The DP lost 9 of 14 presidential elections from 1968 to 2024, whereas it won 7 of 9 from 1932 to 1964, when it supported the working class with a raft of policies, programs, and institutions. ↑
2. Les Leopold, Wall Street’s War on Workers (London, Chelsea Green publishing, 2024), 19. ↑
3. AOC, “We have to help her win: AOC gives Harris backing at DNC,” BBC, August 20, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cj4xegj1jq2o. ↑
4. Derek Saul, “Kamala Harris has more billionaires prominently backing her than Trump – Bezos and Griffen weigh in” (updated), Forbes, October 30, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/30/kamala-harris-has-more-billionaires-prominently-backing-her-than-trump-bezos-and-griffin-weigh-in-updated/. ↑