Harvard Professor of Government Theda Skocpol has a new essay in Vox on why rebuilding the Democratic Party -- starting with fierce opposition to Trump and the GOP Congress -- should be priority number one for progressives. Only a strong Democratic party, she argues, can do the job of stopping the spread of Trump's creeping authoritarianism and far-right policy agenda.
For the past several years, Skocpol has researched how the Koch brothers and their network have spent money and built a political infrastructure on the far right. With her research team, Skocpol has looked at how the Koch strategy has succeeded in moving the whole GOP right. The Koch’s flagship grassroots organization, Americans for Prosperity has pushed issues and mobilized voters. They have helped the GOP clean Democrats' clocks in the states and in Congress. They’ve weakened unions, Democrats’ traditional allies, and fought the expansion of Medicaid. And they helped deliver critical states for Trump in November.
She's compared that to the way progressive donor groups invest their money, scattering funds across dozens of organizations with no overarching strategy to win power.
Based on her research, Skocpol has argues that it would take too long to build a sufficiently large organization outside the Democratic Party. So for the center and the left, fixing and revitalizing the party of FDR is the only game in town.
The whole thing is worth a read.
Disclosure: I work with Skocpol at the Scholars Strategy Network.
To read more, check out: Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, "The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism," Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 3 (2016): 681-699.
Jason Sclar, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol, and Vanessa Williamson, "Donor Consortia on the Left and Right — Comparing the Membership, Activities, and Impact of the Democracy Alliance and the Koch Seminars," prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.