In my view, Kornetzke’s historical and radical analysis (“radical” in the true sense of the word*) puts him in the same league as Cornel West, Norman Solomon, Marianne Williamson, Henry Giroux, Chris Hedges, Nina Turner, Butch Ware, Ralph Nader, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Following is part of what Kornetzke shared yesterday on his substack.
The trajectory that produced this exact historical moment was not authored by leftists. It was not authored by protest voters. It was not authored by young people who looked at the Democratic Party and felt nothing, or by anyone exhibiting what gets condescendingly diagnosed as political nihilism by people who have been comfortable enough to afford patience while others could not. It was authored by the Democratic Party itself, over decades, through a series of deliberate, documented, explicitly chosen strategic and ideological decisions made by people with real institutional power who had every opportunity to build something different and chose, repeatedly, consciously, and profitably, not to.
And if you want to understand how we got here, and I mean actually understand it rather than just assign blame in a direction that conveniently protects the institutional party from examination, you have to go back further than 2024. You have to go back further than 2016. You have to go back to the structural conditions that made both of those elections possible and understand what produced them.
The American working class did not wake up one morning and spontaneously decide to distrust democratic institutions and embrace authoritarian politics. That distrust was built, systematically, over generations, by a set of material conditions that were themselves the product of specific policy choices made by both parties acting on behalf of the same concentrated class interests.
The deindustrialization of the American economy did not happen by accident. The collapse of organized labor did not happen by accident. The destruction of pension systems, the elimination of defined benefit retirement plans, the explosion of predatory debt as a substitute for wages that never grew, the transformation of healthcare into a for-profit industry that bankrupts families, the collapse of rural economies, the defunding of public education, the construction of a carceral system that consumed entire communities, none of this happened by accident and none of it was imposed solely by Republicans. These were bipartisan achievements of a political system operating on behalf of a specific class of people who were not the ones experiencing the consequences.
The Democratic Party, beginning explicitly and consciously with the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, made a strategic decision that has defined the party ever since. They decided, in writing, in documents that exist and can be read, that the path to electoral success ran through corporate donors and suburban professional class voters rather than through organized labor and the multiracial working class that had been the party’s political and moral foundation for fifty years.
They dressed this up in the language of pragmatism and modernization and electability and Third Way politics and they celebrated it, and their media allies celebrated it, and their think tank infrastructure celebrated it, and for a while in a narrow electoral sense it worked. Bill Clinton won twice. And in the process he signed NAFTA and watched manufacturing communities get hollowed out across the Midwest and the South. He signed the 1994 crime bill and presided over the largest expansion of mass incarceration in American history. He signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act and deregulated the financial industry in ways that set the conditions for the 2008 collapse. He gutted welfare and called it reform. He signed telecommunications deregulation that began the consolidation of media that would eventually produce the information ecosystem that makes democratic politics nearly impossible. And the working class communities that absorbed all of these consequences, that watched their factories close and their unions dissolve and their sons get incarcerated and their daughters get buried in debt, were told by the Democratic Party establishment that they were the beneficiaries of good governance and that any anger they felt was being exploited by demagogues on the right.
Which it was. But it was being exploited by demagogues on the right because the institutional “left” had abandoned the field.
Then the 2008 financial crisis happened and the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history occurred in broad daylight. Banks that had committed documented, systematic fraud were bailed out with public money while millions of ordinary people lost their homes, their savings, and their retirement funds. And Barack Obama, who had run on a platform of hope and change and who had genuine political capital and genuine public support for using it, chose Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and a cabinet full of Goldman Sachs alumni and decided that the priority was stabilizing the financial system rather than holding anyone accountable or providing material relief to the people who had been destroyed by it. Not a single senior financial executive went to prison. The banks were made whole. The American people were not. And the Democratic Party called this responsible governance and told everyone who was angry about it that they were being unrealistic.
Out of that specific, documented, material failure grew two things simultaneously. On the right, the Tea Party and eventually Trumpism, movements that channeled the legitimate economic rage of people who had been abandoned into authoritarian ethnic nationalism because the liberals had provided no alternative vessel for that rage. And on the left, Occupy Wall Street, which was the first mass movement in decades to correctly identify concentrated wealth as the central political problem, and which was subjected to a coordinated federal crackdown involving the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement, and which the Democratic Party establishment did absolutely nothing to defend, and which was then replaced in the national conversation by a series of culture war flashpoints that were significantly more useful to the donor class than a movement explicitly organized around taxing them.
Bernie Sanders ran in 2016 with a genuine, documented, cross-demographic, multiracial working class coalition built around exactly the structural critique that the moment demanded, and the institutional Democratic Party, with full knowledge of what it was doing and why, actively worked to prevent his nomination. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is in the Podesta e-mails. It is in Donna Brazile’s memoir. Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in disgrace over it. It happened. It was deliberate. The party apparatus made a calculation that a candidate who threatened the donor class was more dangerous to their institutional interests than losing to Donald Trump. And the response from the establishment and its media allies was not to hold the party accountable for this calculation. It was to tell everyone who was furious about it to shut up, get in line, and wait for the next election.
Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, a man so transparently, cartoonishly, documentedly unfit for office that his victory should have been impossible, and the Democratic Party spent exactly zero time examining what structural conditions had made it possible and instead spent four years blaming Russia, third party voters, Bernie Bros, and everyone and everything except the thirty year strategic project of abandoning the working class in favor of the corporate donor class that had created the conditions for the loss.
In 2020, when the party had a second consecutive opportunity to nominate someone who might actually address the structural rot, they cleared the field for Biden in a matter of weeks, and the media apparatus that serves the party’s institutional interests amplified that consolidation with remarkable efficiency, and everyone who raised concerns was told to shut up and fall in line because winning was what mattered.
Biden was [. . .] a competent institutional caretaker who governed more progressively than many expected on some issues and who offered absolutely nothing transformative to the people whose lives had been systematically dismantled over the previous three decades, and whose administration’s most significant domestic achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, was a fraction of what had been promised and was celebrated by the establishment as proof that the system worked while the working class continued to fall behind on every material metric that actually governs the quality of a human life.
Democrats then ran Kamala Harris in 2024. She ran a campaign so surgically, deliberately, almost ideologically allergic to economic populism, so committed to reassuring the donor class and the suburban professional voter that nothing too disruptive would happen, so studiously avoidant of any structural critique of the conditions producing working class rage, that it managed to bleed support across nearly every demographic the party needed while the party apparatus watched and dispatched consultants and held fundraisers. And when she lost, the immediate response from the establishment was to look for someone to blame who was not the establishment.
And now here is John Pavlovitz, with his slideshow, fucking pointing blame at leftists. At young people. At protest voters. At the people who looked at this fucking broken system with clear, open, historically-informed eyes and assessed accurately what it had produced for them and their families and their communities and their futures over the entire course of their lives and responded with the entirely rational, evidence-based, morally coherent conclusion that it was not working for them, had never seriously been designed to work for them, and showed no credible institutional signs of intending to change that.
That is not where the culpability lives. That is not where the blame goes. The blame goes to a class of people, a specific, identifiable, named, documented class of people with concentrated wealth and the institutional power that concentrated wealth purchases, who have captured both political parties to varying degrees and used that capture to ensure that the range of acceptable policy outcomes never seriously threatens their interests regardless of which party wins. The blame goes to a Democratic Party that consciously, deliberately, and profitably chose its donors over its constituents for thirty fucking years, suppressed every internal movement that threatened that arrangement, destroyed its own working class coalition through active institutional negligence rather than bad luck or foreign interference, and then had the staggering, almost magnificent audacity to turn to the people it abandoned and tell them that their failure to show up with sufficient enthusiasm was the “real reason” that democracy failed.
No.
The people who created the conditions for democratic failure were the ones who spent thirty years making democratic institutions deliver nothing of material value to the people who needed them most, and then expressed bewilderment when those people stopped believing in democratic institutions.
You cannot starve people of material hope and then be surprised when they stop showing up for the institutions that starved them. You cannot abandon the working class to deindustrialization and debt and precarity and incarceration and tell them it’s their own fault and then be surprised when they vote for the first person who performs rage on their behalf, however cynically and destructively. You cannot rig your own primary against the candidate who might have actually rebuilt the coalition and then blame the people who noticed that you rigged it.
Here is the part that is most important and most deliberately avoided: the intellectual and moral framework that John is deploying here, the framework that says any structural critique of the Democratic Party is dangerous, irresponsible, and functionally equivalent to supporting fascism, is not a framework for defeating fascism. It is a framework for ensuring that the only alternative to fascism is an institutional party permanently insulated from accountability, permanently captured by the same donor class, permanently incapable of offering the working class anything that might actually rebuild the coalition that defeats fascism, because doing so would threaten the people paying for the party. It is, in the most precise and non-hyperbolic sense, a mechanism of control. It keeps the Overton window pinned. It keeps the structural conversation from happening. It keeps the donor class comfortable regardless of which party wins. And it keeps producing the outcome we are currently living through, a slow rightward drift of the entire political spectrum, an increasingly desperate and diminishing Democratic Party that offers less and less to more and more people and then blames those same people for noticing and saying it out loud.
If you want to break the cycle, you have to be willing to look at what is producing it. That means looking at who funds the party. It means looking at what those funders receive in return. It means looking at the thirty year strategic project of abandoning the working class and examining what it produced. It means being willing to say out loud that a political party that shares a significant portion of its donor base with the party it claims to be the only alternative to is not capable of being the structural opposition to the interests those donors represent. It means being willing to have the conversation that John’s entire slideshow is designed to prevent.
Because if we keep shutting that conversation down every single time an election approaches, and there is always an election approaching, and we keep demanding that everyone silence their structural analysis and their historical memory and their material interests and their entirely legitimate anger at the people who created these conditions in order to support the controlled opposition that those conditions produced, then we will keep getting this. We will keep getting a Democratic Party that moves right to chase donors and the fascism that fills the vacuum on the left. We will keep getting Trumps. We will keep getting this conversation, every three days, forever, with John pointing at leftists and young people and protest voters while the donor class counts its money and funds both sides.
That is the cycle. That is what it looks like from the inside. That is what keeping the structural critique silent produces. Not safety or stability or a functioning democracy. Just a slower, more managed, more politely narrated version of the same collapse into fascism.
And I am fucking done being told to shut up about it because the midterms are coming.
The midterms are always fucking coming. That is the whole mechanism. That is the trap. And recognizing the trap is not nihilism. It is the prerequisite for getting out of it.
Until the Democratic Party can give us a genuinely compelling reason to vote for them beyond “at least we aren’t the fascists,” a bar so fucking low it is buried in the ground, they are going to keep having this problem.
Not because leftists are nihilists or because young people are naive or because protest voters are irresponsible. But because “we are marginally less catastrophic than the alternative” is not a compelling political vision. It is not a coalition, nor is it a movement. It is a hostage negotiation in which the hostage is democracy itself and the party holding it expects gratitude for not pulling the trigger quite as fast as the other guy.
Give the American people something to fucking vote for. Not just something to vote against. That is not a radical demand. That is the bare minimum threshold of a functioning political party in a functioning democracy, and the fact that meeting it is apparently beyond the institutional capacity of the Democratic Party in 2024 or 2026 is not the left’s fault. It is the thirty year bill coming due. Pay it or keep fucking losing. Those are the only options left on the table.
– Oliver Kornetzke
Excerpted from “You Know What? Fuck You, John”
May 23, 2026
Excerpted from “You Know What? Fuck You, John”
May 23, 2026
* All too often the word “radical” is erroneously equated with extremism of one kind or another. Yet that’s not what “radical” means. It means to go to the root, to recognize and address the underlying essence of a given reality, along with the deep-seated issues, questions, and/or problems associated with it. To be radical is to not get mired on the level of symptom, to not confuse symptoms with the problem that’s causing them. To be radical is to be clear and focused in recognizing and addressing the actual problem, the underlying root cause or causes of a given situation, issue or conflict.
Related Off-site Links:
The Democratic Party: Architects of Cowardice, Accomplices to Fascism – Henry A. Giroux (CounterPunch, September 8, 2025).
Liberals Can’t Confront Authoritarianism – Cyrus Gazdar (The Medium, November 17, 2025).
Why the Democratic Party Can’t Save Us From Trump’s Authoritarianism – Henry A. Giroux (Truthout, August 21, 2017).
Trump’s Greatest Ally is The Democratic Party – Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report, November 3, 2025).
Kamala Harris: Still Blaming Everyone Else – Tim Black (Tim Black TV, October 6. 2025).
The Corporate Democrats Delivered Donald Trump – Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, October 21, 2025).
Kamala Harris’s Memoir Shows Exactly Why Her Campaign Flopped – Yasmin Nair (Current Affairs, November 12, 2025).
Kamala Harris Admits Biden Administration Failed Gaza – Novara Media (November 13, 2025).
Report: Kamala Harris Lost 2024 Elections Over Gaza – Middle East Eye, March 12, 2026).
Kamala’s Silence on Israel’s Genocide Helped Hand Power to Trump – Joe Glenton (Canary, February 24, 2026).
It’s the Genocide, Stupid – Michael Arria (Mondoweiss, May 22, 2026).
Wrong Voters, Wrong Message: Progressives’ Autopsy Lays Bare Kamala Harris Failures – David Smith (The Guardian, December 10, 2025).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Authoritarianism With a Blue Sticker
• The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party
• David Norton: “The Democratic Party Serves Capital, Not You”
• Mike Figueredo: “Elected Democrats Have No Real Interest in Doing What the Base Wants”
• Tony Pentimalli on the Fallacy of the “Safe Political Center”
• Genny Harrison on Brian Tyler Cohen’s Interview with Obama
• Progressives and Obama
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
• The Lamentable Legacy of the Biden/Harris Administration
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in 2024
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• Adam Bates on the Team Blue / Kamala “I Told Ya So” Smugness Tour
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’s Book, 107 Days
• Touré F. Reed: “Kamala Harris Didn’t Lose Because of Racism”
• David Sirota: Quote of the Day – January 26, 2021
• Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
• Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win”
• Nick Cruse: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is the Privileged Position”
• Centrist/Corporatist Democrats Have Just Launched “Left Punching” Season
• Yes, Just Imagine
• Politics 101
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