"I would suggest that this insurgency has broader significance going forward than just Trump winning and crushing the Republican establishment in five states last night," professor and political commentator Dr. Tony Monteiro told Loud & Clear’s Brian Becker, referring to the billionaire candidate’s wins in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Maryland.
Much of Trump’s support can be attributed to the frustrations voters experienced under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
"[Trump’s] bombastic and racist, very base approach to the population, along with enormous amounts of media coverage…has really attracted people who are extremely frustrated, fed up, and who are easily prone to the ideas that workers like themselves, Mexicans, people of a different religion…are the enemy…" Gloria La Riva, presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, says.
"This is why it’s absolutely necessary for progressives to fight those ideas and to bring about the reality of who is the cause of the economic crisis…"
The Democratic Party is experiencing its own shakeup in the form of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
"I think we are at a turning point. We have two great insurgency movements. Whether Bernie gets the nomination or not is not the central question. The question for all of us is whether or not these insurgency movements will continue after the November elections, after the conventions, and so on," Monteiro says.
For progressives, the turning point relies on the left’s ability to organize.
"Within the labor movement, there’s some hope of real resistance beginning to grow," La Riva says. "The fact that several major unions started out right away in the election campaign saying that they would support Bernie Sanders and have continued to do so…shows that there could be some hope in the labor movement after the elections for a fightback.
"That’s what’s going to be necessary, is an organized, militant, leftist fightback and not succumbing to the Democratic Party."
While the Democrats appear to be on track to elect Clinton, a neoliberal politician, this does not signal the end of the true progressive movement.
"We are on the cusp of something very new in the history of mass movement and mass militancy in this country," Monteiro says. "The people are in the street. I don’t think they’re going to go back in their houses anytime soon."
"[The Left] must bring the message of solidarity, of the power of the people, [that] the people make history, but that only the people united can change the situation."
