Originally published in The Star-Ledger, 11.30.19
Last week, New Jersey activist Carlos Rojas of Movimiento Cosecha confronted Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at a town hall meeting in South Carolina over the record-setting deportation rate of the Obama administration. I was shocked when Biden brushed him off with a curt “You should vote for Trump.” It was a hollow, dismissive response.
But was it that different from what our own New Jersey Democrats tell us? They claim to resist President Donald Trump, but they contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to facilitate its work of needlessly caging immigrants. They obstruct their own driver’s license bill for our unauthorized neighbors. Democrats even presided over the crass, aggressive expulsion of activist Sue Altman from a public hearing last week, a shameful travesty on par with Trumpian thuggishness. In short, they don’t need to say outloud what Biden so gracelessly said; they embody it in their actions by holding progressives captive to the Democratic Party and its machines, knowing we won’t vote Republican.
We don’t need better individual Democrats; we need to destroy their corrupt machines root and branch.
Whit Strub, Co-Chair — North New Jersey Democratic Socialists of America