The pundits are all abuzz about whether or not Bernie Sanders has a "path to victory" in the Democratic primaries. Handicapping the horse race in all its minutiae from "the true math" to speculation over superdelegates and the size of campaign war chests fills the airwaves and plugs the tubes of the internets.

They are talking, largely, about a victory within the arcane electoral rules set up by the parties, but they are generally studiously ignoring the elephant in the room - the struggle of the 99% to achieve political and economic power.

Underneath all of the bloviating and rhetoric, power is what the so-called insurgent candidacies are really about.

Insurgent candidates threaten 1%-dominated party structures

The success of insurgent candidates is making for some interesting discussions about the future of the the two American corporate parties. The parties hold a virtual monopoly on national elective office and the people seem to have caught on that America is an oligarchy where, in the words of a noted academic study of political influence by Gilens and Page:

“In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”

How did the people catch on? Well, despite the media and politicians talking up an economy that doesn't appear to include them, the fortunes of average Americans are in decline and there is anger in the land:

Over the past 35 years the working class has been devalued, the result of an economic version of the Hunger Games. It has pitted everyone against each other, regardless of where they started. Some contestants, such as business owners, were equipped with the fanciest weapons. The working class only had their hands. They lost and have been left to deal on their own. ...

Over the past 35 years, except for the very wealthy, incomes have stagnated, with more people looking for fewer jobs. Jobs for those who work with their hands, manufacturing employment, has been the hardest hit, falling from 18m in the late 1980s to 12m now.

The economic devaluation has been made more painful by the fraying of the social safety net, and more visceral by the vast increase at the top. It is one thing to be spinning your wheels stuck in the mud, but it is even more demeaning to watch as others zoom by on well-paved roads, none offering help.

What's more, average Americans, despite a bunch of snotty economists telling them that they don't understand free trade and that they are better off because of it, are experiencing righteous rage against the technocrats and expressing it at the polls:

Were the experts wrong about the benefits of trade for the American economy? ...

What seems most striking is that the angry working class — dismissed so often as myopic, unable to understand the economic trade-offs presented by trade — appears to have understood what the experts are only belatedly finding to be true: The benefits from trade to the American economy may not always justify its costs.

In a recent study, three economists — David Autor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Dorn at the University of Zurich and Gordon Hanson at the University of California, San Diego — raised a profound challenge to all of us brought up to believe that economies quickly recover from trade shocks. In theory, a developed industrial country like the United States adjusts to import competition by moving workers into more advanced industries that can successfully compete in global markets.

They examined the experience of American workers after China erupted onto world markets some two decades ago. The presumed adjustment, they concluded, never happened. Or at least hasn’t happened yet. Wages remain low and unemployment high in the most affected local job markets. Nationally, there is no sign of offsetting job gains elsewhere in the economy. ... In another study they wrote with Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price from M.I.T., they estimated that rising Chinese imports from 1999 to 2011 cost up to 2.4 million American jobs.

These trends are being dealt with by the insurgents in two different ways. Bernie Sanders is organizing what he calls a political revolution. A mobilized public will force popular changes on the government. He is taking no money from the usual 1% sources and is funding his campaign through small-donor money. This provides a sense that his priorities lie with the 99% that mobilize behind his issues and fund his campaign.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is already rich, he has funded other people's campaigns in the past and is now going out on his own. He claims that he's "unbought" and makes the seeming rift with the Republican establishment a theatrical production of epic proportions. Fortunately for him, much of his support base has not figured out that he is a candidate of the 1% for his party. The clue is in all of the free media coverage he gets from the 1%-owned media. When the 1% media wants to freeze out a candidate, they cut them off from coverage or trivialize their campaign as they have done to Bernie Sanders.

While Trump has his establishment enemies, and they are nervous, Donald Trump at this point in the election cycle looks like he has a better than fair shot at becoming the Republican nominee, thus the chances of a Republican party split are diminished. The Democrats are quite another story.

Conditions Favorable for a Democratic Party Split

The contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is tightening. For the Democratic establishment, there is considerable fear generated by polling showing that large numbers of Sanders supporters will not support Clinton under any circumstances.

Many people are wondering if the Democratic party can hold together as the schism grows between the Democratic establishment, which has cashed in its credibility as a party of the people and become the other party of the 1%, and the left/liberal/progressive base.

In the late 1980s, the DLC Democrats (and now the Third Way/Clinton Democrats) embraced the professional class and embraced complex solutions to our nation’s problems. They consciously moved away from labor/working class and towards an elitist embrace of banksters, the emerging “geniuses” of Silicon Valley, and the college-educated at all levels.

They even went so far as to suggest it was a good thing that much of America’s blue-collar working-class high-school-diploma jobs go to China and Mexico, as we here in America needed to move to the “new economy” jobs of technology, medicine, and finance, requiring a college education.

This ideological change in the Party led to the Clinton-era 1990s policies that gutted our industrial base, ripped apart the social safety net (ending “the era of big government”), and financialized our economy. ...

The policies that came out of this new Democratic Party ideology (largely taken from the 1950s Republicans) have resulted in a boon for the professional class, but almost totally left behind the bottom 90%.

Within the Democratic base, people are angry, disgusted with the establishment and ready for a change.

The Sanders campaign was right on time in responding to this trend. Many pundits are now saying that win or lose, Sanders has irretrievably affected the election. In fact, by showing the base that something better is possible, Sanders has opened the space for a much larger change than just the results of one election.

The party is now in the position of having to sell itself to a major portion of its base again, it can choose to change or it can run the party institution into the ground with the likelihood of competition arising.

This is an Opportunity for a Negotiated Surrender by the Establishment

While the pundits are bloviating about whether Bernie Sanders has a path to victory, there is a larger victory available for the movement that has coalesced behind Sanders.

What is happening here is a struggle for power.

There is a path to victory for the 99% whether Bernie Sanders wins or loses.

Sander's movement should take a cue from Bernie himself. Sanders' choice to run as a Democrat had little to do with his love of the Democratic party. It was a pragmatic choice to leverage the resources of the party against the malefactors of great wealth represented by the Democratic Party:

Asked by an Ohio voter why he chose to run as a Democrat, despite having served for years as an independent, Sanders explained his thinking. "We did have to make that decision: Do you run as an independent? Do you run within the Democratic Party?," he said. "We concluded -- and I think it was absolutely the right decision -- that A) in terms of media coverage, you had to run within the Democratic Party." (B, if you're curious, was that you needed to be "a billionaire" to run as an independent.)

There is no good reason for the movement to have any sentimental attachment to today's Democratic Party which has done all that it can to destroy the insurgency growing inside its ranks and gathering outside its gates.

If Sanders wins the primary, he and his movement could begin the arduous process of rebuilding the Democratic party from within. It might be worth it, but the 1%ers and their liveried lackeys inside the party are not going to give it up easily. Over the long haul Sanders' people could swell the ranks of the party and begin to take it over from the grassroots up. But there will be considerable internecine fighting with the vast numbers of third-way, neoliberal morons like Chuck Schumer who occupy elective office and will not just desert their ambitions because Bernie won an election.

Sanders, if elected, will have proven beyond doubt that the money and connections of the DLC corporate faction are not needed and that will encourage decent people to run for office again against powerful party trolls.

It's important that this battle is also carried on from outside the party to keep party gatekeepers with their manipulations that favor incumbents and foundation funders from sabotaging reform efforts and limiting their scope and scale.

Win or lose, the movement that Sanders has encouraged to mobilize will have to organize itself for independent action.

This asymmetric struggle between the party establishment and the left/liberal/progressive base will require us to construct independent channels for communication and promotion before and after the election is over.

After the primaries if Sanders does not win, the struggle is one where the weaker power's eager cooperation and energy is desperately needed by the stronger power for it to succeed.

Concessions will be offered, soothing platform platitudes will be spoken. The party machinery is already preparing the paperwork:

If Sanders arrives at the Convention with a sufficient number of primary victories and between a third and half of the delegates, he will also be able to influence the Party’s platform. ... “He will come out of this with a prominent voice, with a committed e-mail list of people united around his issues,” Anita Dunn, who worked for Bill Bradley’s unsuccessful campaign against Al Gore, in 2000, and was one of Obama’s top strategists during the 2008 race and later in the White House, said. “That is the beginning of a potential movement, if he chooses to build on it. It’s not as though these issues are going to go away. Fundamental inequality and the inequities in the political process are not suddenly going to be fixed by anyone.”

Sanders' supporters should not accept this far less than half-a-loaf, no matter what platform concessions or promises (carefully-worded for later parsing or denial) are on offer from the party establishment.

Surely after years of experience no left-leaning group should play Charlie Brown to the establishment's Lucy holding the football. Everybody knows that the establishment candidates will say or promise anything to get elected.

From the article above, in the words of Sanders himself:

When I spoke to Sanders last week, he refused to speculate about any Convention scenarios that didn’t include him as the nominee. “I look forward to her dropping out and giving me her strong support,” he said. He was adamant that Clinton could not deliver the kind of change that voters are demanding, no matter what policy positions she adopted. “The issue is creating an economy and a political system that works for all Americans and not the one per cent,” he said. “That does not happen through a speech. That happens by reaching out and mobilizing millions and millions of people. There is no indication that Hillary Clinton has ever done that, or ever wants to do that. You don’t go and give speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street and be the same person that is going to rally the American people. That just does not exist.” ...

“What matters is whether or not, if she is elected President—and we’re in this to win—if she’s going to stand up and fight. And I think there are many people who will tell you, look, that will not be the case. Look, anybody can give any speech they want tomorrow—somebody writes you a great speech—but the day after you’re elected you say, ‘Well, you know, I talked to my Republican colleagues and they think this is not acceptable.’ ”

“The question is not what she says. The question is what her record has been and what she will do if she is elected President.”

The good news is this, in this situation, all that is necessary for the weaker power to win is to walk away from the table and stay away until the stronger power concedes.

There will likely be a furious war of words. There is likely to be a progression.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

-- Mahatma Gandhi

We have already been ignored. The needs of the 99% base have been cast aside in order to serve the 1%.

We've been through the laughing stage. Hillary is inevitable. We have the true math. If you leave Hillary, where are you little people going to go, to that madman Trump?

We are now in the fighting stage, and Clinton is bringing the sleaze. The good thing is that Clinton's negative campaigning is making it easier for people to stay away from the table.

In a microcosm of the larger conflict, the web community that calls itself the largest Democratic progressive community blog in the United States, recently declared its support for Hillary Clinton and issued an ultimatum to its community base that criticism of Clinton must be reined in.

Significant numbers of very active members of the community, well more than a thousand, voted with their feet in response to the forceful exertions of the party site in support of the establishment and its candidate.

The party establishment is being a bit more careful than the occasionally excitable owner of the largest progressive community website; they are being careful with their rhetoric. They will try to take in as many Sanders supporters as they can with lies, intimidation and appeals to fear about the rising tide of Trump's fascists.

The movement will have to keep its priorities in order during the tidal wave of election rhetoric.

The Prize is Power

There are two ways to win. If the establishment concedes and the insurgent movement seizes the party, that's one way of winning. If the party establishment refuses to relinquish power and essentially commits suicide, that's another way to win. It happened to the Whigs and it can happen to the Democrats.

Without the support of average Americans, the party cannot be used as a tool by the 1% to promote austerity, rigged trade agreements, imperialism, wars of choice, militarization of police, domestic spying and rules that rig elections.

Left-leaning people can take back the political space that the Democratic Party occupies to block meaningful progressive change if they choose, the opportunity awaits them.