What's the opinion of pushing for Social Democrats for President as a tactic for growing class consciousness?

Indeed. The Democratic Party is home to the political representatives of opportunism and neocolonialism in their various forms: the rotten and corrupt business union leadership, the liberal "identitarian" political formations (ie the Human Rights Campaign, etc), and so on. The Green Party is no better, as, in spite of their rhetoric, they remain an openly counter-revolutionary party, they have never engaged in revolutionary struggle, their biggest victory is reforming Germany's energy infrastructure to include lots of renewables. In the USA it's even worse since they have more or less no presence in movements except to try to recruit people, although they have little to no organizational presence anywhere. In an earlier life I was hired to do campaign work for a Green candidate. Their state-level organization had no platform ie they wanted power but they didn't know what they wanted to do with it. They literally hoped that their abstract values minus any practical program would carry them to political power. I tried to suggest to the state steering committee that they come up with a specific program of action. They found the idea exciting and invigorating but they did nothing with it and to this day they have no actual program, other than an endorsement of the Party's values.

Perhaps the worst thing about the US Green Party is that people who are finally ready to break from the Democrats can easily be misdirected into supporting the Greens, and even if the Greens had any decent politics, they'd still be an organizational failure on every level.

The Democratic Party is the private property of the bourgeois factions that control it from top to bottom and I don't see why anyone would try to deny this after the Sanders campaign, not like we needed the Sanders campaign to tell us this.

The reason why liquidationism/entryism (don't organize independently as socialists but instead work within other organizations with different politics) doesn't work is that it is actually extremely difficult to just take over another party organization (entryism), and of course if you just don't even try to organize as socialists and tail behind liberals, you'll just be serving liberals' agenda.

SA has a long and "proud" history of entryism, liquidationism, and failing to actually build up independent socialist organizational/political capacity.

/r/communism Thread