EDITORIAL
"Democracy":
A Two-Party Dictatorship

Nov 16, 2025

Democrats won the two big governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey. The Democratic governor of California won a big referendum vote, by almost a 2-to-1 margin. Democrats, attaching a “socialist” to their name, won mayors’ races in New York City and Seattle. And Democrats won down-ballot positions in small cities and towns.

CNN was ecstatic. FOX News tried to explain it away.

But it wasn’t a surprise. When people get fed up with the party in power, some of them vote for the other party, some sit out the next election. The same dance has been going on for a lot of years—since 1860, to be exact, 165 years.

For all those 165 years, the same two parties have taken turns running the government. A few Democrats have called themselves “socialists,” some Republicans said they belonged to the “Tea Party.” But the same two parties that dominated in 1860 still dominate today.

The two parties alternated to craft laws which serve the interest of the ruling capitalist class, whoever made it up—merchant-traders, slave-owners, industrialists and/or their bankers.

Democracy, it wasn’t—no matter how many times we voted.

During all the wars carried out by this country, the population has never once decided whether or not to go to war. Yes, we’ve voted, but ordinary people didn’t decide on a policy for war. Some of our class died in the wars, but we were not the ones who decided that millions of people should die, and whole towns and cities laid waste.

Governments ran up big deficits to throw money at the capitalist class. Ordinary people paid the taxes, yes, voted, yes, but we weren’t the ones who decided to give our tax money away.

Big corporations, in the pursuit of more profit, made decisions that created severe unemployment, recessions, and depressions. Workers ground out the production society needed, but we never decided how the economy should run.

Yes, we could vote out the party in power—only to get back the other one, its spitting image. Democracy? That’s a fancy word for a dictatorship presided over by the two parties and owned by the capitalist class.

The only time we ever had any say in these matters is when we voted with our feet, when we organized strikes, pushing them to extend from one city to the next, one state to the next; when we organized protests; when we took over the streets.

Republicans just pushed through Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which cut taxes so disproportionately that 10% of the population got 80% of the benefits. When that happened, were you at the table that decided what was in it?

The Democrats pushed through laws under Obama, then Biden, that gave a little bit of medical coverage to the poorest workers while improving profits of the insurance industry a lot. And when that happened, were you at the table?

To believe that an election gives us a seat at the decision-makers’ table is a pipedream. To believe that someone else will do it for us, is to be deluded by smoke and mirrors.

We fought for the vote, only to discover that the system is still monopolized by two parties that represent the ruling class. And we aren’t part of that class.

The working class will sit at the table, when it creates a different kind of system, one in which working people will make the decisions, choose their own representatives based on their workplaces and neighborhoods. Such a system will not be set up by the ballot box. It can come out of the working people’s own struggles.

Even now today, working people can head in this direction—IF we break free of the illusion that voting for one of these two parties will solve our problems. It won’t.

We can do that by building our own organizations. Why not start with a party, to make the voice of our class be heard.