Book review -- a political solution?

The Billionaires Have Two Parties:  We Need a Party of Our Own by Les Leopold (2026)

[Yeas, this is a long post, but this is important.]

There is a growing sense among ordinary, not-very-ideological Americans that our politics under the two-party system has reached a dead end.  Both parties are almost equally captured by the power of billionaire donors; both are dominated by a well-heeled class of entrenched professional politicians remote from the real concerns of the people, even if the occasional outsider manages to infiltrate the halls of power here and there.  The growing concentration of obscene mountains of wealth in the hands of a tiny parasitic oligarchy, while wages stagnate and the working masses struggle to get by, has been getting worse and worse for half a century, under governments of both parties.  Two generations of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have saddled us with chronic deficits and a growing national debt, yet the parties offer no solutions but arguments about where to cut spending.  I could go on and on, but we all know.

In Europe, establishment politicians' refusal to listen to and respect the voters' concerns about immigration, Islam, and crime has led to the rise of new nativist parties such as the AfD, the Rassemblement National, and Reform UK, which in some cases have recently been polling higher than the old establishment parties.  But in the US, the system is structured differently, and seems to entrench the two existing dominant parties immovably -- a third party could not succeed here, so says conventional wisdom.

In this book, labor activist Les Leopold sets out to show that a working-class third party, focused exclusively on an economic-populist agenda, could indeed succeed.  He briefly compares our time to the only period in US history where a new third party did emerge and succeed -- the mid-nineteenth century, when the dominance of wealthy pro-slavery interests within both major parties (the Whigs and the Democrats) created an opening for the new anti-slavery Republican party, which ultimately displaced the Whigs.  The dominance of billionaire and corporate interests in both major parties today creates a similar opening.

He goes into some detail about why reforming the Democrats from within into a working-class party isn't possible, and why the Democratic brand has become ballot-box poison in the eyes of so much of the working class.  The latter discussion, I think, is the book's weakest point.  Leopold is on solid ground in explaining how the party itself has abandoned the working class, sometimes quite explicitly so (p xxiii).  But he downplays how the US left has alienated the broad mass of normal Americans with toxic culture-war stances.  He does bring some polling data to show that the working class is more "progressive" on some social issues than many believe, but these data do not address three of the left's most toxic cultural fixations:  identity politics (making everything about race), transgenderism, and especially hostility to guns and gun culture, which essentially locks the Democratic party out of winning elections in vast areas of the country.  These are far more important than Leopold acknowledges.  But the essential point is that the Democratic brand is irredeemably damaged among huge numbers of working-class people, regardless of the reasons.

Leopold provides some specific instances of how the Democrats have changed over time and alienated working-class voters.  For example, FDR's New Deal directly created jobs to help alleviate unemployment.  Today's corporatized, neutered Democratic party would consider this too interventionist; Biden's IRA instead used various incentives and gimmicks to try to get private enterprise to create jobs (p xx).

More than half the US population is working class (there's a brief discussion of the definition of "working class" on pp xxv-xxvi), but fewer than 2% of our elected leaders come from a working-class background (p 108).  Leopold also gives a lot of information on how the parasite class's dominance works and how dire the situation is, much of which was new to me.  For example, I knew almost nothing about corporate stock buybacks, but they are a major driver both of mass layoffs and of the further engorgement of the already wealthy.

Leopold argues that the new party should be modeled on labor unions, not on the existing major parties.  There are several reasons for this.  One is to ensure that the party remains fully under the control of working-class people, avoiding capture by the ecosystem of consultants, professional-class politicians, and social-issue activists who dominate the major parties and who do not, and probably cannot, understand politics primarily in class-war terms (p 91, p 123).  Another is to ensure that the party remains exclusively focused on the economic-populist agenda and stays neutral on other issues, accepting a wide range of views.

The latter point is crucially important.  Most political groups accept only people who agree with a long list of mandatory positions, often called "intersectionalism".  A labor union focuses exclusively on labor issues and represents all of its workers, regardless of their views on other issues.  The new party must behave likewise.  There are many important issues not related to economic populism -- abortion, guns, the environment, gay rights, immigration, race, religion, Israel, etc -- but the new party cannot afford to come down on one side or the other of any of these.  Doing so would alienate substantial potential support, because working-class people hold a wide range of views on them, ranging from "left" to "right".  Individuals are of course free to support their own stances on such issues outside the context of the party, just as individual union members are free to do so outside the context of union activity, but the party itself must focus solely on economic populism.

(For some reason Leopold makes an exception for one such issue, illegal immigration, but there's no reason why the proposed new party should do so.)

What should that economic-populist agenda be?  Leopold's group, the Labor Institute, surveyed three thousand voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  The ideas that emerged as most popular included some surprisingly radical ones, such as "enact a federal program guaranteeing all Americans an option of a stable job at a decent wage -- if the private sector can't provide one, the government shall" and "prohibit corporations that receive taxpayer support from conducting compulsory layoffs -- all layoffs would be voluntary, based on buyout packages".  The mere mention of such proposals would set any establishment Democratic or Republican politico harrumphing about how they're impossible, unrealistic, socialist, etc -- which is why we need a new party.

When baldly presented with the idea of a new party embracing a radical economic-populist agenda, 57% of the surveyed voters said they would support it (p 36).  Even 40% of those who voted for Trump said they would (p 37).

Within today's union movement there is a split between the leadership, which largely remains wedded to the Democratic party, and the rank-and-file membership which has turned more Republican or independent but fundamentally wants something genuinely new.  The leadership of the new party would need to be drawn from and represent that rank-and-file, bypassing the old union bosses.

The insistence on neutrality on non-economic-populist issues would lead the activists who emphasize those issues to spurn the new party, but this is a positive, not a negative.  If anything, such people need to be specifically excluded.  The ideological activist fringe brings mountains of culture-war baggage which would ruin the whole project.  To be blunt, we simply cannot afford to have a bunch of these identity-and-pronoun weirdos who say things like "Latinx" and "undocumented" be in there "correcting" everybody's ideas and language and trying to impose a laundry list of side issues like DEI and gun control.  They would end up turning the new party into a mere reincarnation of the Democrats with a new label, thus killing it.  It needs to be a clean break from the Democrats just as much as from the Republicans, or it will fail -- and would be pointless anyway.

Leopold discusses several attempts to create a working-class party or political movement at various times in US history, and why they didn't succeed.  One, the Labor party of the 1990s, almost fragmented over the issue of abortion right from the start (pp 46-47).

Leopold does not shy away from addressing the elephant in the room -- the argument that in our system any third party can only be a spoiler, taking votes from the major party closest to itself and thus helping the other party win.  To prevent this, the new party should, at least at first, run candidates only in solidly-red states and districts -- places where a Democrat would have no chance anyway, so there is nothing to spoil.  If the new party's candidates can win in such areas -- defeating Republicans where a Democrat could not -- everyone will have to take the new party seriously, and it can expand to purple and blue districts and states.  In the meantime, in the latter areas, it can run candidates in Democratic (or maybe even Republican) primaries in hopes of advancing its agenda under their label.  I think the major parties would likely try to prevent this, though.  In fact, they'd both fight tooth and nail against the rise of a genuine new economic-populist party.  In the long run one or both of them will need to be crushed.

To Leopold, the man who already embodies this red-areas-first strategy is one on whom I place some of my own hopes -- Dan Osborn, who is now running for the Senate as an independent in Nebraska.  Osborn's platform is economic-populist, if less radical than Leopold's, and it de-emphasizes social and cultural issues while even including popular conservative positions on some issues, such as border security.  Osborn previously ran for Senate in 2024 and lost by only six points against Republican Deb Fischer, while Kamala Harris lost the state by twenty points.  Clearly the independent-vs-Democrat branding and the economic-populist platform matter.

I ended up getting this book from Amazon, a company I normally don't do business with on principle -- everywhere else I tried, it was out of stock.  I don't know if this means that the powers that be are trying to suppress it, or that it's so popular that it's selling out faster than everyone can re-order it.  I hope it's the latter.

It's well worth reading if you are interested in politics, especially if you're frustrated with our current situation.  The book is quite short, under two hundred pages.  It's the first time I've seen a detailed, plausible plan for breaking out of the dead end of two-party polarization and billionaire dominance, and achieving real reform.

[Image at top:  Les Leopold]