An entire institution is rarely justified by simply setting up an illusion for the average person to fall for. The US duopoly is a good example for this.
There is a very material incentive for the bourgeoisie to have precisely two parties alternating, that is, the importance of donors.
If the blue team were to lose only a small amount of donors, they would inevitably lose to the red team, and vice versa. If there were more major parties, losing donors could be a calculated decision to not alienate a part of the electorate, because the donations would go to one of the major parties. But in a duopoly situation, the donor’s money go straight to the other party, doubling the relative loss. On the contrary, a monopoly situation is not ideal because the importance of donors is diminished since the campaign is less important therefore money matters less.
This system therefore ensures maximum control over political parties by the bourgeoisie, because it optimises the bargain that donors have over party politicies
Fair point. The “lower” level (not a fan of the term) of the Dems have a lot of potential revolutionary people in their ranks. Consider how many people were swayed into radical and socialist politics by the Bernie movement of 2016.
And yet Bernie himself ended up being revealed as an imperialist stooge along with the rest of the “Squad”. And it is fairly clear that most of their supporters ended up going along with them. Those who ended up breaking rank with these “democratic socialists”, becoming communists instead and principled anti-imperialists are only a very small minority.
So the question is did they even do any net good or did they just end up building the left flank of imperialism under a “progressive” social democratic cover?
Are these so-called “progressives” not just pied pipers, or if you will excuse the mixing of metaphors, sheepdogs whose task was to herd the section of the masses with the most revolutionary potential away from truly radical politics of a kind that would pose a real danger to the bourgeois establishment, and into a managed, controlled and system-safe socdem box?
These same people today help legitimize the empire’s lies about Russia and China “from the left”. Their role is to be the leftmost end of “acceptable” politics, they are treated as being the furthest left you can be while still being “reasonable” and not “a violent extremist” or “an apologist for dictatorial regimes”.
It is disturbing to encounter more awareness of the lies of the neoliberal imperialists and more understanding for the rational position of the likes of Assad, Putin and even Xi from certain sections of the right in the US. I see this as a fundamental failure of the US left which has allowed itself to be co-opted into the liberal establishment starting around 2008 and really accelerating in 2016.