Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.
“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”
His was a complaint I heard often as I traveled across the midwest to cover a host of contested Democratic primaries. So I called him up.
Leeland’s list of frustrations is long: grifters, liars, the two-party system, money influencing elections, the US’s standing in the world, the growing national debt and a fixation on cultural issues, not just the larger problems that plague the country.
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Not everyone, that’s why establishment Democrats are fighting progressives in their own party harder than they are fighting Republicans. We need to vote in the progressives to actually represent us.
We need to stop even labeling them “progressive” or leftists, as is that is some kind of aberration from the norm. It needs to be the default. The establishment and the fascists are the weirdos who perpetuate evil in the name of money and private property.
“Leftists” just sane, moral folks who want their elected officials to serve the people, for capital to be subordinated to the will of the workers. For the workers to be the ruling class.