@Funkygal Selfa's analysis was and is good -- for 2008, and for some time thereafter, too.

Next year we should see the same political formation we saw in 2017: a Republican trifecta. Only this time we will see Trump try to deal with the results of historically-bad Biden foreign policy. If I recall correctly, the so-called "Left" in the US in the Zeros did not really have a lot to say about foreign policy except to caution that sending troops into Iraq to fight and die for the greater glory of BlackRock was a bad idea. But major protests in 2003 did nothing to change the trajectory of US troop movements.

Nor did anyone on the Left give too much of a damn about what Hillary Clinton did as Secretary of State during Obama's first term. Everyone was paying attention to Obamacare. Here one thinks of Libya, Syria, and Honduras, small countries which Clinton screwed up. Obama did care, however, and replaced Clinton with John Kerry for his second term as President because he wanted to cut the deal with Iran that Clinton would not do.

Today, however, the so-called "Left" in the US will have to pay attention to US foreign policy, because Team Biden has screwed it up so badly that it won't be fixed in any sense without -- you guessed it -- a new political party entering American politics. But yeah, the new party should be a labor party. It would be fun to hang out with Kshama Sawant as she tries to form a labor party -- yeah, second week of April, when Seattle weather can be expected to improve.

In the video below Mark Sleboda elaborates on why the Republicans cannot be expected to improve upon Biden's folly in Ukraine. Sleboda reminds me of a high school nerd, and of the happy life I briefly led in the late Seventies as one such high school nerd. I didn't watch the part with Scott Ritter. Ritter, like Douglas Macgregor, I don't know, kind of obnoxious.

And slowly recovered following escalation in Afghanistan, Obamneycare, piss-poor stimulus(which are good example of what Riley & Brenner mentioned). Reading Lance Selfa's "Democrats: a critical history" gave me clarity.

I think Riley & Brenner built/expanded on the following (excerpt from the review of Selfa's book by Paul Street which IMHO is a good summarye):

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hope-killers-by-paul-street/

None of this means that the Democratic and Republican parties are identical. To be sure, the differences that separate them are "minor," Selfa notes, "in comparison to the fundamental commitments that unite them" (p. 13). Still, he reminds us, corporate America would have no reason to embrace a two-party system if there were no differences at all between the two competing "subdivisions" of what Ferdinand Lundberg once called "The Property Party." The U.S. ruling class profits from a narrow-spectrum system wherein one business party is always waiting in the wings to capture and control popular anger and energy when the other business party falls out of favor.

The parties are not simply interchangeable, however. It is the Democrats’ job to police and define the leftmost parameters of acceptable political debate. For the last century it has been the Democrats’ special assignment to play "the role of shock absorber, trying to head off and co-opt restive [and potentially Left, P.S.] segments of the electorate" by posing as "the party of the people." The Democrats performed this critical system-preserving, change-maintaining function in relation to the agrarian populist insurgency of the 1890s, the working-class rebellion of the 1930s and 1940s, and the antiwar, civil rights, anti-poverty, ecology, and feminist movements during and since the 1960s and early 1970s (including the gay rights movement today).

Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways: (i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power; (ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;" (iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders; (iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly.