Excerpts from a political report by the League National Council, Part 1
Basic outlines of transformation in the existing two-party system are beginning to appear. The Democratic Party contains a powerful and growing anti-fascist, pro-working-class current – but that current is in direct conflict with the corporate wing that still controls the party apparatus. The Republican Party leadership has been fully captured by the billionaire fascist offensive. Neither party, as currently constituted, can deliver what the working-class needs. But polarizations and emerging splits within them offer important opportunities to move toward a third party and ultimately the working-class party necessary for social transformation.
The majority of people in the Democratic Party are clearly anti-fascist, as the No Kings demonstrations amply illustrate. Democrats who describe themselves as liberals have increased from 28 percent of the total in the year 2000 to 59 percent today, with millions calling themselves democratic socialists. The pro-working-class movement within the Democrats continues to steadily broaden and deepen. Some 30 House Democrats are being primaried in 2026. Candidates like Graham Platner, James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed are surging in the Senate races. Large cities have elected pro-working-class leaders to local office like Zohran Mamdani, Katie Wilson and Brandon Johnson.
Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna have introduced national legislation to impose an annual 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires, creating a litmus test for measuring Democratic candidates, including ones for president in 2028. The tax would raise $4.4 trillion to reverse Trump Medicaid cuts, expand Medicare and provide $3,000 per person cash payments to all American families earning under $150,000 a year.
COLLISION COURSE
But at the same time, the pro-corporate Democrats who dominate the Democratic National Committee are doubling down on resistance to working-class demands. The explosion of artificial intelligence (A.I.) – and the potential for billions in A.I. profits – now adds new urgency to their scramble to preserve corporate power.
Democratic leaders are rallying around a new messaging strategy called the “abundance agenda.” The concept was popularized in the book Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein in 2025. It has crystallized into an abundance movement that has raised funds, organized conferences, written articles and books and spawned numerous lobby groups. Abundance advocates argue that Democrats should organize around creating more wealth by streamlining government regulations, rather than fighting over how the fabulous wealth that already exists should be distributed.
This is essentially a reinvention of the trickle-down economics popularized by Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan, dressed up in modern “techno-optimist” language. The problem, of course, is that increasing abundance within a private property system only creates more billionaires at the top and more poverty, homelessness, disease and destitution for the masses at the bottom.
The marriage of abundance ideology to the A.I. industry sets the stage for absolute capitulation to fascism. According to researcher Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, the “abundance gang has a big A.I. problem.” It turns out it is funded largely by A.I.-related tech corporations, foundations, think tanks and trade associations. Abundance-advocated policies are not just about housing, energy and transportation, but also for breaking down resistance to building data centers and ICE prisons.
Kings Day march / Photo – betto rodrigues
While pro-corporate Democrats pay lip service to democracy and may even loudly denounce Trump, they are nevertheless inseparably tied to the A.I. industrial complex being unleashed by Trump and the Republican Party. The catastrophic impacts of A.I. make it fundamentally incompatible with democracy. The working-class base of the Democratic Party is on a collision course toward a split with its billionaire leadership. The only question is when it will happen.
REPUBLICAN PARTY
The Republican Party is generally aligned with the pro-corporate fascist agenda, but deeply divided over the tactics of how to implement it, while still retaining some semblance of a working-class base. There is a pro-Nazi wing, led by Stephen Miller, that is aggressively driving the Project 2025 program. At the same time, there is a pragmatist wing led by people who pay lip service to disapproving of Nazism, while supporting a kinder, gentler fascism that can suppress democracy with less of the violence that has aroused so much opposition.
Fascism is not just the project of a group of racist ideologues and corrupt profiteers, however. The fact is that the A.I. revolution is already reducing millions in both parties to destitution. The economy is beginning to tear the MAGA base apart. Artificial intelligence cannot proceed within a private property system without a fascist corporate dictatorship. Corporate dictatorship is impossible without eliminating or severely restricting the right to vote. And voter suppression is impossible without racial and other political campaigns against literally every population subgroup, real or imaginary, that can be separated out and attacked.
The problem for Republicans is that they need real “blood and soil” Nazis to drive the fascist agenda and cannot get there without them. It may seem counter-intuitive for such pro-Israel Republicans to be allied with out-and-out Nazis, but in fact there is a long relationship between right-wing Zionists and Nazis dating back to the 1930s. But the toxic unpopularity of Nazism forces Trump and the MAGA leaders into repeated verbal flip-flopping and ambiguity that weakens their leadership and erodes their unity.
The dictatorship cannot be consolidated without the SAVE Act and the abolition of birthright citizenship. Their real targets are not just undocumented people, as they claim, but rather the rights of ever-increasing categories of people who the dictatorship is forced to marginalize in order to preserve its power. The growing popular revulsion to the dictatorship’s tactics is an existential threat to the entire fascist project.
WAR ON IRAN
All these divisions within the two major parties have been dramatically intensified by the U.S. war on Iran. There has never been as much opposition by the American people to a U.S. war at its outset as there is now. In addition to once again threatening the planet with nuclear warfare, the war massively damages the environment and endangers millions of Iranian civilians as well as U.S. troops. It costs billions of dollars and dramatically raises gas and food prices, not only overseas but in the United States for both Republican and Democratic voters.
The war intensifies the polarization in both major political parties. On April 15, the largest number of Senators ever voted against sending weapons to Israel (36) – including over three-quarters of Democratic Senators. On the other hand, the pro-corporate Democratic National Committee refused to break with the billionaire pro-Israel AIPAC lobby.
Anti-war sentiment has broken out even inside the Republican Party. Major MAGA influencers have spoken out boldly, not because they have changed their fascistic views, but because the impact of the war is traumatizing the working-class sections of the MAGA base.
The convergence of all these factors creates a significant opportunity – unprecedented since the Vietnam War – to unite a broad movement against the militarism of the ruling class. Strengthening the peace movement will be one more step toward independence from the two-party system and creation of an anti-corporate, left-wing third party where workers can fight more effectively for political power against the billionaire class. It is one more opportunity for revolutionaries to address the economic distress and moral outrage of the workers and deepen their social and class consciousness.
The fight against fascism demands that we build working class unity, step by step, across every occupation, region, demographic and ideology. The epic Minnesota uprising points the way. Unity begins with the most impacted and will work its way outward into the broader sectors of society. War, inflation and basic needs budget cuts are driving more and more people into the resistance.
Published on May 18, 2026.
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