Martin Luther King also belongs to the ages. If the left wants to move from the margins to the mainstream of political life, is there anybody that we can learn more from than Martin Luther King? I said more than once when I was a leader of the Communist Party that we have as much to learn from King (and Salvatore Allende of Chile) as we do from Lenin.
Here are a few thoughts on the social movements that have sprung to the surface on the heels of Trump’s election and retrograde policies. First is their large spontaneous character. Overnight these movements have erupted in spectacular, massive, and novel ways. Another interesting feature is their organizational orbits are outside of the traditional organizational forms of the center, progressive, and left. Also standing out is the extraordinary role of new social protagonists that compose these movements at the leadership and mass level. High school students, suburban women, and women generally have jumped on the social-political stage as leaders and activists in these eruptions of social action.
What is striking as well is their tactical sophistication when it come to electoral politics. They don’t, neither automatically nor viscerally, turn up their noses at the notion of participating in two party politics and electing Democrats, including moderate ones, this fall. In fact, they see electoral politics as essential to their particular struggle and the general struggle against Trump and Trumpism. Nor are they trapped strategically or tactically in the language of neoliberalisim — a language that glosses over the real differences between Democrats and Republicans, especially at this moment when the danger of authoritarian rule is palpable.
Finally, each of these movements approach politics in a way that interconnects what is roiling them with what is roiling others. The walls of separation that kept one movement or struggle apart from other movements and struggles are less visible today in the thinking and actions of these activists, and actually activists generally.
1. The danger of the trio of Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton is threefold. First, they have the main levers of power — including nuclear — in their hands. Second, they believe that there are no limits to U.S power in the global theater. Third, they have few hesitations about projecting that power — especially military — to effect regime change. Reckless unilateralism is in their bloodstream.
While people understandably worry about the danger of war with North Korea, it is safe to expect sabre rattling against Iran to ramp up in the coming days and weeks. No one in this rogue’s gallery likes — actually they loathe — the nuclear agreement with Iran and its government.
2. In my view most of the major media constitute an essential — and in some ways irreplaceable — part of the opposition to Trump’s authoritarian war on democratic institutions, norms, and rights.
They do sometimes dwell on the trivial and traffic in sensationalized gossip. But there is much else in their coverage and analysis as well. I know that because I regularly read major newspapers and watch news/cable TV.
They don’t present a radical perspective, but why would anyone — except Fox — think they would. What they do, however, is challenge many of the anti-democratic words and actions of the Trump administration, not to mention the enabling role of the GOP. And their investigative role, including into Trump collusion with the Putin government in the last election, because of their resources and vast network of contacts is indispensable.
And, I’m sure they will find ways to be on the right side in the coming elections, which are the main instrument that millions have to strike a body blow against Trump and the Republican controlled Congress.
Not everyone is of this mind for sure, but as I see it, we have to avoid a narrow framing of the struggle against authoritarian rule — a struggle that the events of this week make much more perilous.
We should always bear in mind that only an expansive, multi-class, heterogeneous democratic coalition has the capacity to defeat Trump and Trumpism.
3. Just completed Anne Applebausm’s “Red Famine.” The book makes a compelling argument that the famine that killed roughly 4 million people, mainly peasants, was the intentional handiwork of Stalin. Here’s a review by a Soviet scholar Sheila Fitzpatrick that I found insightful.
1. Seems to me what we saw in the W.PA. election was broad people’s unity and action, stretching from dissatisfied Republicans to former Trump supporters to labor to anti-Trump activists and organizations to women, and to some, if not all, of the left. In such a politically sprawling coalition not everyone, it is fair to say, was on the same political page. But whatever the differences were, they obviously didn’t rise to the point where they eclipsed the urgency of electing Conor Lamb and repudiating Trump.
Isn’t a similar, that is, expansive and flexible, approach in order this fall, if Democrats are to become the majority party in Washington and in state governments across the country? I would think so.
Bear in mind two things. First, the outcome of the elections won’t be decided in cities like Berkeley or Cambridge or San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York, were liberal-progressive politics are ascendant and Democratic seats are secure. But elsewhere in suburban and small town-rural districts from one end of the country to the other where the politics tend to be more moderate, but fluid and trending in a Democratic, anti-Trump direction. I live in one of those districts. The biggest city is just over 20,000, includes smaller towns and rural communities, and is currently represented by a very beatable Republican.
Second, a Democratic Party victory would be a body blow against a threat that is historically unprecedented and politically palpable — the authoritarian mindset and practices of the Trump White House and its Republican enablers.
In these circumstances, can the accent be on any thing other than unity across the democratic movement and within the Democratic Party this fall? You know what I think. Struggle over differences doesn’t disappear, but in present conditions, it shouldn’t be the maim thing.
2. In an oped in the Guardian, Bernie Sanders writes that the mass media has been reluctant to address the exploding inequality and the rising oligarchic capitalist class that increasingly structures day to day life and closes off opportunities for hundreds of millions across the globe.
No quarrel here. But when he adds in his critique of the mass media this observation, we part company,
“Instead, day after day, 24/7, we’re inundated (from the mass media) with the relentless dramas of the Trump White House, Stormy Daniels, and the latest piece of political gossip.”
That Bernie would reduce what the media is doing to shed light on the authoritarian, undemocratic, and indecent nature of the Trump administration to “relentless dramas” — and I have to guess in his mind of little import to the American people — astounds me. What’s the purpose of this framing? Why, in effect, counterpose one to the other? After all, as I read it anyway, the authoritarian threat to our country’s democracy is growing at this moment, not receding, deserving more coverage, not less. Witness Trump’s tweets over the weekend against Andrew McCabe and Robert Mueller.
And yet as astounding to me as Bernie’s take is, it doesn’t really surprise me. I have thought for some time that in Bernie’s world, class and class struggle, albeit, and unfortunately, narrowly constructed, back bench, sometimes take out of the field of vision entirely, the struggle for democratic and constitutional norms, rights, and boundaries.
And that is the case here.
3. I don’t know about you, but my March Madness bracket is in anemic health at this point. Maddening!
1. Dan Rodrick, Harvard professor, has been studying the global economy and its unfairness for some time. Most of his academic life, in fact. In this analysis he comments on Trump’s protectionist measures, announced last week. He doesn’t suggest that the sky is going to fall in as these measures wend their way through the global economy, but he does argue that they are no way to address the undeniable inequities in the current global trade regime. If anything, they will, he avers, make that urgent task more, not less, difficult.
At about the same time, I read an interview of Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steel Workers Union. What bothered me wasn’t Gerard’s defense of Trump’s tariffs. I expected that. What I found bothersome is that he had nothing — not a word — to say about the potential negative impacts on other sections of the working class here and elsewhere, resulting from Trump’s actions.
Nor did he offer a comment on the peculiar situation of the union’s alignment with a president that is authoritarian and backward in every way. We should expect more from a leader of the labor movement in these difficult times.
2. What we saw last week is the usurpation of power and decision making by a lone individual in the White House. Worse still, this individual is narcissistic and impulsive to the extreme, authoritarian to the core, and singularly bereft of any humanity. Meanwhile, the Republican majority in Congress act as enablers of this rogue president. This danger, unprecedented in my experience, is the ground floor of authoritarian rule. This would be discouraging to any sane person if it were not for a whole array of state institutions, social constituencies, and the media that are resisting Trump’s power grab. Still, it’s fair to ask: are we doing enough?
3. Trump’s said a lot of ugly things in his speech at a rally in W.PA. over the weekend, but the ugliest, but not necessarily the one receiving the most coverage, was his dismissal of Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, as a “low-I.Q. individual.” Bear in mind that this was delivered in a predominantly white region, where such racist rhetorical volleys resonate among a considerable section of white voters. No one should think that Trump’s base is strictly animated by its economic discontent. Trump, obviously, doesn’t believe so. And yet, the notion persists that it is enough for Democrats to present an economic alternative that addresses wage and income inequality to turn the tables in November.
4. Any analysis that occludes the rise of right wing extremism in the mid-1970s and its persistence into this century doesn’t help us understand either the past or the present, including the Trump phenomenon. Moreover, it leaves its proponents (and those they influence) flatfooted strategically and tactically. And yet, this blind spot continues to inform the thinking of some progressives and radicals.
5. I hope Mueller does his job – and it appears that he is — and the rest of us do ours in the voting booth in November. Both are necessary to escape this extraordinarily poisonous, perilous, and unprecedented situation in which we — and the world’s people — find ourselves in. If we had any doubts about this, Trump’s behavior and the newest revelations over the past two weeks should have dissipated them.
6. I just finished watching, “7 Seconds,” on Netflix. What a compelling story and performance! The production and its actors deserve an award of some kind.
