The Democrats Don’t Need More Scolding—They Need a Break. If They Lose in November, We Should Build a Progressive Party

By Yiannis Damellos

May 24, 2026

I’m not the only one to be exhausted by a familiar ritual on the liberal circuit: a dependable round of “stop blaming Democrats,” delivered with the certainty of a doctor insisting the bleeding is happening somewhere else. Whenever progressives argue that the Democratic Party’s policy trajectory—over decades—has not merely failed to protect working people, but has actively redirected power toward corporate donors, critics get told the same thing: don’t confuse structural critique with “both-sides” equivalence. Don’t imply the Democrats are “like the GOP.” Don’t demand accountability. Don’t make trouble. But this scolding misunderstands both the diagnosis and the goal.

Yes, the parties differ. Nobody seriously disputes that. And no, this argument is not a claim that Democrats and Republicans are interchangeable. Structural critique is something else entirely: it is the refusal to pretend that a party can be “better” while still systematically delivering material harm to the very people whose votes it relies on. It insists that the moral and political question is not whether Democrats are Republicans, but whether Democrats are structurally capable of offering a governing project that matches the scale of people’s lived suffering.

Because the truth—harder to market, harder to soften, and harder to ignore—is that the conditions that produced today’s crisis were authored by the Democratic Party itself, repeatedly, deliberately, and with a long institutional memory of what works electorally for those in power. Those choices built the outcome we now face.

So if Democrats fail to win in November, the response should not be another season of liberal discipline: another demand that progressives wait, behave, and dutifully keep the coalition of “marginally less catastrophic” in place until the next election arrives—because the last several elections have already proved that “wait” is not a strategy. It’s a trap.

The solution is to build something the Democrats have not: a Progressive Party with a coherent governing agenda, an independent funding base, and a refusal to accept permanent captivity to donor interests.

Why “Stop criticizing the Democrats” isn’t a plan—it’s a system of control

The argument that progressives should stop making comparisons is a way to keep a crucial conversation off the table. It reframes accountability as extremism and history as mood lighting.

But consider what structural critique is actually saying.

The collapse of working-class institutions did not occur by accident. Deindustrialization, the weakening of labor power, the dismantling of retirement security, the conversion of healthcare into a profit engine that bankrupts families—these were not inevitable forces of nature. They were policy outcomes pursued through bipartisan consensus, often carried out with Democratic leadership and Democratic branding.

Even when Democrats claimed to be modernizing the country, they repeatedly chose the corporate and suburban professional class over the multiracial working class that had been the party’s foundation for decades. That strategic pivot—formalized long ago—was sold as pragmatism, electability, and modernization. For a time, it paid off. But it hollowed out the party’s relationship to the people it was supposed to represent.

Then came the financial crisis—when ordinary Americans lost homes and retirement savings while concentrated wealth was stabilized by public rescue. The lesson offered to voters was clear: the system would protect finance first, and everyone else would be expected to call that responsible governance.

What grew from that wasn’t only right-wing demagoguery. It was also a refusal to accept that no alternative existed. Left-wing movements that named concentrated wealth as the central political problem were met not with serious defense, but with suppression, distraction, and replacement by easier culture-war narratives—narratives that served donor interests better than class-based reform.

And when a genuinely coalition-building candidate emerged—someone who threatened the donor-class equilibrium—the institutional party didn’t merely lose interest. It acted to prevent the outcome. That is not a conspiracy theory; it is documented political behavior by party officials and insiders.

So when liberals say “don’t say Democrats are like Republicans,” what they often mean is: don’t ask who funds the party, don’t ask what funders receive, don’t ask why internal movements are tolerated only when they don’t threaten donor alignment.

That’s not a request for civility. It’s a demand for obedience.

The only argument that matters now: elections are not fixing the underlying problem

Here is the bleak arithmetic progressives understand and establishment liberals often try to avoid: voting against fascism is not the same thing as building the conditions for fascism to lose. If Democrats win by reaffirming the same donor-driven project while promising incremental improvements inside a system that keeps producing the same material failures, then the political spectrum doesn’t stay still. It drifts right—not slowly enough to satisfy anxious insiders, not quickly enough to shock them into change.

Meanwhile, authoritarian politics thrives in the vacuum left by institutional parties that treat structural reform as unrealistic. People do not abandon democratic institutions because they are irrational. They abandon them because democratic institutions have stopped delivering. Then a different performer comes along—one who offers rage with a power plan, not hope with a consultant slide deck.

That is the mechanism.

And if Democrats lose in November, the mechanism won’t suddenly disappear. It will only intensify.

If Democrats lose in November, we should create a Progressive Party

That brings us to the proposal that will make some liberals furious: if Democrats fail to win, progressives should form a new Progressive Party—an independent political vehicle designed to end the cycle of hostage governance.

This is not a vanity project. It is not a protest brand. It is a structural necessity.

A Progressive Party should be built around three commitments:

Independent power, not donor captivity.

If the funding ecosystem remains the same, the range of acceptable policy outcomes will remain the same. The party must build a funding base that treats working people—rather than corporate access—as the center of political gravity.

A governing platform that addresses material conditions, not just symbolism.

The coalition needs more than “we are better than the other side.” It needs a program: labor rights, affordable healthcare, retirement security, real industrial policy, and an end to the era where debt and precarity are treated as normal weather.

A structural critique that becomes an electoral strategy.

Structural critique cannot be a sermon. It must become a mechanism: candidates, messaging, and platform negotiations that are designed to win power, not merely to express disappointment.

The Progressive Party should also avoid the trap of treating the Democrats as a perpetual “majority waiting room.” When an institution has repeatedly chosen donor alignment over working-class coalition-building, waiting becomes a method of guaranteeing more of the same.

What this is—and what it isn’t

This is not a declaration that Democrats are identical to Republicans. It is a declaration that “not as bad as” is not the same as “capable of building a future.” When a party repeatedly refuses to deliver transformative change, the moral argument becomes tactical: the electorate deserves an alternative that can actually mobilize power for structural reform.

And the alternative cannot be only rhetoric. It has to be an institution.

Ultimately

If Democrats lose in November, progressives should not interpret that outcome as a demand for more liberal restraint. They should interpret it as proof that the current political arrangement cannot meet the moment with the scale of reform required.

A New Progressive Party is how you break the cycle: by building an independent coalition, demanding accountability from a political class that has protected itself too long, and offering voters a vision that is more than an emergency exit sign labeled “at least we aren’t the fascists.”

Democracy cannot be held together by hostage negotiations forever. If the Democratic Party can’t earn a durable coalition through transformative policy, then the time to build a new one has arrived.