In response to Bernie Sanders and AOC's "Fight Oligarchy" tour, the same chorus of voices rings out: “Don’t be fooled by these so-called progressives! They’re just sheepdogging for the Democrats!” They say it's just another trap designed to herd our revolutionary energies into the clutches of corporate centrism.
But the people who spend all their time railing against “sheepdogs” are often the ones herding the left into a far more dangerous place: permanent political irrelevance.
This is not to say that their criticisms are always wrong. The Democratic Party has a long history of co-opting progressive energy, absorbing it into its structure, and neutralizing its most radical edges. But what is the alternative? If we abandon every figure who enters the halls of power, if we reject every imperfect ally, if we insist that only total ideological purity is acceptable (including never engaging with the two-party structure), we don’t get a more radical movement—we get no movement at all.
They call every strategic engagement with power a sellout, every bid to take over the Democratic Party a capitulation, and in doing so, they abandon the terrain of struggle entirely, leaving the machinery of the state uncontested in the hands of corporate interests and reactionaries. They demand that we only engage in ways that are structurally rigged to fail (the Hail Mary path taken by Jill Stein, Cornel West and others)—and when those failures inevitably come, they wear them as badges of honor.
This isn’t strategy. It’s a self-imposed exile.
Real change has never come from people standing on the sidelines, scolding those who enter the fray. Movements succeed because they engage with power while also building pressure outside of it. The labor movement of the 1930s didn’t succeed by abstaining from politics; it succeeded by forcing politicians to respond to it. The Civil Rights Movement didn’t say, “Let’s not work with LBJ because he’s an establishment politician.” They understood that strategic pressure and political engagement must go hand in hand.
But today, we have voices on the left whose primary role seems to be attacking their own side for engaging with imperfect tools. Rather than building independent power that can push elected allies further, they spend their energy on takedowns and purity tests, ensuring that no one is ever “good enough” to support.
When progressives run as Democrats, they’re “sheepdogs.” When they run under a third party banner and lose, they’re “proof” that electoral politics is useless. When they build movements outside the system, they’re ignored—until they work with power in any way, at which point they become enemies.
This kind of thinking isn’t radical. It’s nihilistic.
The irony is that the people most obsessed with “sheepdogging” have a clear agenda of their own: to keep the left permanently disengaged from power. Whether by accident or design, their arguments lead to the same outcome every time—powerlessness.
They claim that engaging with electoral politics is a trap, but where does that leave us? If we abandon the few allies we have in government, the only people left making laws are the same corporate-backed politicians who have been selling out the public for decades.
Refusing to engage doesn’t create a better alternative. It just leaves the battlefield open for our opponents to win unopposed.
If the left is ever going to build real power, we have to reject this all-or-nothing approach. We have to be willing to work with imperfect allies while building independent movements strong enough to hold them accountable. We have to recognize that power is a tool, and if we refuse to wield it, someone else will.
Because the real sheepdogs aren’t the ones trying to give the left a seat at the table. They’re the ones keeping us locked outside, barking at the door, forever irrelevant, forever ignored.
Activism
Politics