A Third Party? — NY PAN and their quest for change
The New York Progressive Action Network, or NY PAN for short, is a grassroots organisation founded in the wake of the 2016 elections that saw Donald Trump come to power. Originally, it was made up purely of groups or ‘chapters’ founded to support Bernie Sanders’ New York campaign during that election cycle and it is now made up of over 30 chapters across New York State. Their stated goal is clear — mobilize and advocate for positive change. The way they aim to do that is less so.
I met their assistant secretary, Ting Barrow, on a sunny weekday morning in Upper Manhattan. As he walked in, he was impossible to miss, proudly sporting his Bernie cap and full of energy despite being in his mid-70s he was eager to tell his story and that of the organisation that he had been a part of since its inception.
Whilst devouring an almond croissant he spoke of the problems with the political system not just here in New York but also across the country and how they were mirrored in or differed from those in his home state.
But he was frustrated. He had been fighting these particular battles in this particular organisation for six years and was tired of getting close to the finish line, only to be denied at the last hurdle. He’d seen it in healthcare, he’d seen it over environmental policy, and more than anything he had seen it time and time again over issues of racial and social injustice. Every time they seemed to get so close only for someone somewhere with more money and more power from the established elite to bat them down. Now he had a new plan…
As far as Ting sees it, a strategy change is what is needed in grassroots politics. Every election cycle, he says, “young people come out in their thousands”. “I love their energy, I feed off it, it gives me hope, but it’s not sustained and that means that the movements themselves become unsustainable”. Now, he wants to focus on small, achievable goals one at a time, and keep larger, big picture ideas as ideal solutions that in reality probably aren’t worth bothering with.
For NYPAN right now, that issue is housing. “It’s the small issues that galvanise people”, he tells me, “big issues are a luxury in many ways, most people don’t have the time for them”. And this approach has worked — progress on Medicare and elsewhere proves that there is hope going forward.
In the long-term though, there is only one solution as far as he is concerned: a third party and widespread election reform. “After 2016 we got close with Bernie, but it was just too much to ask of people. The powers that be want us to be slaves to their two-party political system, it suits them. A third party is possible and eventually, we have to wake up, smell the coffee, and realise that it’s the only solution”. This is something that comes up time and time again in US politics and is batted away as impossible and unrealistic, indeed it almost certainly is under the current electoral system. He even points to the UK as an example of how that is beneficial — maybe that shows just how bad the situation in America is.
The next member from NYPAN I meet is a much younger Canadian activist who wishes to remain anonymous, radical even for the organisation she is a member of, her views are altogether more muddled and confused. Interestingly though, she has also concluded that the founding of a third party is the only possible solution.
Whatever question I ask, she comes back to the same thing — ‘the forces of corruption’. She calls them “immense, growing, and a threat to democracy”. Passion was certainly not something she lacked and she was beyond insistent that protecting against these ‘forces’ would “safeguard against crises” but however much I pushed her she was unable to actually define the forces, their origin, or the concrete crisis they provoke. She was maybe the perfect example of what Ting spoke of in our earlier interview: both the brilliance of youth and grassroots political movements but also their problems. There was no pragmatic attempt to focus on single issues here. Instead, the lofty ideals and the foundation of a third party or “a new political force”, as she called it, were the only points worth focussing on.
The reality is of course that structural problems within the US political system make the success of a third party almost impossible. The amount of money needed to run any kind of political campaign state-side combined with the mammoth task of polling 15% support to even get on the stage for a national debate means that these groups are probably condemned to seeing success as merely sparking a national conversation. For groups like NYPAN though, that might just be enough. As much as a third party itself might be unrealistic, there is a chance that democratic candidates pick up their policies at the local level and that might just create a path to substantive change. If not, you can guarantee that Ting and his organisation will keep on fighting all across New York State and that organisations like theirs across America are leading similar charges.
