This is a lot of words for “Nothing can be done”. You balk at getting a ton of progressives elected, but you advocate getting a bunch of progressives to lead a revolution? You’re kind of hand waving over some huge details there.
It would be easier to get a shitload of progressives elected into positions of power in the US via the democratic party than it would be to lead a successful revolution to overthrow the US government, and I agree with your take on how difficult that would be.
It would be more difficult to build a third party that’s larger than the democratic party than it would be to infiltrate the party with progressives. You said it yourself, the money is center-right. The hard left parties need money, and small doner donations only work if your base is huge, which it isn’t for the hard left.
Historically, running as an independent or unaffiliated has a higher success rate than any other third party, especially at the local level where it matters the most, because those local politicians go on to run for state and federal positions once they build up enough clout.
The real issue is that very few hard-left people have gained the trust and support of the general population. Bernie, AOC and a handful of other progressives have managed to carve out a foothold in the Democratic party, but they’re a handful of people out of hundreds of millions. Where are all the good non-democratic-party leftist leaders? What is the PSL or anyone else doing to build their mind share with the voting public? This kind of “middle mile” groundwork is super important for parties. Having a pipeline of party-affiliated people to run as candidates nationwide is a huge job, and it’s something the Dems and the Republicans have locked down.
A leftist party in the US doesn’t have a base exact because the traditional laborer blocks are uneducated and kept ignorant by the ruling class. They also have very little money. That’s why the Dems go center right for votes. If the left wants to be taken seriously, it MUST participate, at ALL levels. AOC was a joke to the right when she was elected. This past election right-aligned PAC’s spent millions to kick the squad out of government and only succeeded in ousting two of them. IMHO, that’s indicative of a huge shift. Working to change the system works. It’s hard, takes a ton of energy, and a handful of people can’t do it alone.
This kind of opportunistic small-shifts is exactly how the GOP gained all of its power. Every step mattered, from the Karen advocating for banning books in her local elementary school all the way up to state governors passing abortion laws until one of them stuck. The far right has a pathological persistence that no organization on the left has come close to matching, and thats why the fascists are winning. They don’t stop.
Well, that’s what pretty much everyone on the far left is doing, which is going to do absolutely nothing to change anything, and that’s my point. Tear down the Dems and the not-progressive-enoughs all you want, at least they have their asses out there trying to do something instead of literally waiting to die.