Should Progressives Form Their Own Party?

As Bill Maher so elloquently put it on one of his recent shows:

"Every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there's a political party standing in his way: the Democrats...

We don't have a left and a right party in this country anymore, we have a center-right party and a crazy party. Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture, and the pharmaceutical lobby; that's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-Earthers, and civil war reenactors who mostly commuincate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans. And who actually worry that Obama is a Socialist, Socialst?! he's not even a liberal...

Shouldn't there be one party that unambigiously supports cutting the military budget, a party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marraige, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot, and steep direct taxing of polluters? These aren't radical ideas, a majority of americans are either already for them or would be if they were properly argued and defended. What we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren't being served by the Democrats. Because bottom line: Democrats are the new Republicans."

Watch the entire segment below:

With that in mind, the Financial Times had an interesting article from Yukio Hatoyama, the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan and potentially the next Prime Minister. In it, he details his political philosophy of "fraternity:"

• "Although freedom and equality are important for human beings, if they are followed to fundamentalist extremes, they can both result in immeasurable horrors. Therefore, Coudenhove-Kalergi recognised the necessity of a concept that could achieve a balance and maintain respect for humanity. That is what he sought in the idea of fraternity."
• "Freedom is supposed to be the highest of all values but in the fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism, which can be described as ‘freedom formalised in economic terms’, has resulted in people being treated not as an end but as a means"
• "In our present times, fraternity can be described as a principle that aims to adjust to the excesses of the current globalised brand of capitalism and make adjustments to accommodate the local economic practices that have been fostered through our traditions."
• "I believe it is no exaggeration to say that the global economy has damaged traditional economic activities and market fundamentalism has destroyed local communities."
• "Under the principle of fraternity, we will not implement policies that leave economic activities in areas relating to human lives and safety, such as agriculture, the environment and medicine, at the mercy of the tides of globalism… Our responsibility as politicians is to refocus our attention on those non-economic values that have been thrown aside by the march of globalism."
• "The ties that bring people together have become weaker and the spirit of public service has also dimmed…we aim to build a society of coexistence in which people can rediscover the ties that bring them together, help each other, and find meaning and fulfilment in performing a useful social role.”
• "We reject the Ministry of Finance-led theory of fiscal reconstruction that relies on the imposition of uniform restrictions on, or the abolishment of, social welfare payments and which seeks to take shortcuts by raising consumption tax...(and) the bureaucrat-led system of centralised government and the indiscriminate spending facilitated by that system, from the social safety net collapse and greater inequality of wealth that results from an uncritical faith in globalism and finally, from the public loss of faith in politics following unhealthy collusion between government, civil service and industry."

Knowing that this man may become the leader of the worlds 2nd largest economy, I say Progressives co-opt his platform of Fraternity and form their own political party.

As a side note, Mr Hatoyama had this to say about the US economic system:

“The recent financial crisis has suggested to many people that the era of American unilateralism may come to an end. It has also made people harbour doubts about the permanence of the dollar as the key global currency. I also feel that as a result of the failure of the Iraq war and the financial crisis, the era of the US-led globalism is coming to an end and that we are moving away from a unipolar world led by the US towards an era of multipolarity.”

So Japan openly sees Iraq as a failure and the US as the root cause of the financial disaster. I wonder what the rest of the world thinks...