Loose Ends

  • April 4, 2017
* Just as the toleration of the unrelenting sexist and misogynist attacks on everything about Hillary Clinton in last year’s election tells us something about our society’s attitudes toward women and women’s equality. So too does the absence of a public uproar over Fox’s decision to continue to employ Bill O’Reilly, despite his record of repeated sexual assaults against women at Fox. Long past time for him to take a walk.

* ESPN fumbled the ball on Monday morning; its top story wasn’t coach Dawn Staley and her South Carolina women’s basketball team that won the NCAA championship yesterday against Mississippi State women, the team that upended the seemingly invincible Connecticut women. Staley is the second African American woman to win a championship in women’s college basketball and is now one of the main faces of women’s basketball.

* More than one article recently has remarked on the militarization and escalation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. And much of this is happening without any significant challenge either at the congressional or grassroots level. And to think that some suggested last year that a Trump administration would offer a redirection of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. How to change that is a major challenge for the movers and shakers in the progressive, left, and peace communities. Among other things, the many sided assault by Trump and his gang makes this easier said than done.

* Republicans are talking again about repealing Obamacare, notwithstanding their shellacking only two weeks ago. If they do, they will face the same dilemma:

“I don’t know what has changed,’’ said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “The bill went down because it was too bad for Republican moderates and not bad enough for their conservatives. I don’t know how they reconcile the divides within their own conference, never mind find any Democratic votes.”

And even if Trump and the various factions of the GOP do have some meeting of the minds and come up with a new version of Trump/Ryancare, there is little reason to think their own constituents – not to mention Democratic and independent voters – will like it any better. More likely is that they will use the ballot box to express their anger next year.

The fissures, tensions, and contradictions that rent the GOP have been evident for some time, but they have taken on a new coloration since the Republicans became the governing party. The health care debacle could be but the first of a new level of intra-party fighting. Let’s hope.

* I didn’t expect Trump to say anything about the brutal and unprovoked murder in New York of an older African man; he was too busy attacking Colin Kaepernick for exercising his democratic right to protest racist injustice and murder. But other public figures should have (and maybe some did that I don’t know about.) Racism kills. Always has, but in the atmosphere created by Trump – and the right and alt-right – we can expect more racially motivated hate crimes like this. Seems like each of us has to find ways – small as well as big – to protest these racist crimes as well as challenge the enablers of them in high places – the White House in the first place.

* I got to admit I don’t like or use the term “The Resistance,” to describe the array of organizations and people opposing Trump. I use resist and resisting, but I stay away from The Resistance. It seems, to me anyway, too clubby, too small circle, and too unfamiliar to many people. Not everybody is young. There are other ways, I believe, to characterize the diverse and far flung opposition to Trump’s policies that will more likely strike a chord with the American people. It’s not a big issue, but the more general point is –  language matters in politics. And in choosing one expression over another to capture a political reality, the point of departure isn’t what sounds good to our ears, but what resonates with people far beyond our immediate circles.

*Poets very seldom rule the world, but they often stand witness to misrule. And in doing so, give us inspiration and courage. Yevgeny Yevtushenko stood witness.

Martin Luther King

  • April 4, 2017

Martin Luther King was the outstanding people’s leader of the 20th century. He left us an unparalleled legacy. Nobody combined a liberating and humane vision, strategic insight, and practical know-how as well as he did at the time or since. Below is a brief excerpt from his speech, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break the Silence”  delivered at Riverside Church in New York City (1967). Still resonates. Or should I say it resonates even more?

” … we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice, which produces beggars, needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Back to the bench

  • March 15, 2017

I’ve decided to bench once again the term “center,” as in a political coalition of the center and left. That’s where it had been for years. But in the wake of Trump’s election, I decided to bring it back into action. My hope was that it would give emphasis to the necessity of constructing a coalition that is broad and diverse enough to contest the Trump administration and the Republican controlled Congress.

Or, to put in a little more polemically, I thought it would offer an alternative to the small-ball, ideologically driven, “blow up the Democratic Party” politics that were making the rounds on social media. The latter has a militant tone for sure, but, in dissing people, organizations, and sections of the Democratic Party occupying the middle of the political spectrum, they become a very poor strategic counterweight to resist the concentrated power of the extremist juggernaut entrenched in Washington and a majority of state capitals now.

On their best days, small ball politics can make some ripples, but what they can’t do is set into motion and sustain powerful waves of opposition to effectively oppose Trump. Only a dynamic, broadly constructed – and at times contentious – coalition that includes the center as well as progressives and the left, older establishment organizations as well as new social movements, and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as well as Bernie Sanders has that capacity. And even if assembled, albeit through dint of great effort, compromise, and creativity, the going will still be hellacious in present circumstances.

Moreover, much of center is trending in a progressive direction, realizing that the days of a centrism that turns on the unalloyed blessings of globalization, financialization, and triangulation are over.

So, you might be thinking, why bench the term? What’s the problem? The term, I found, in its brief run over the past few months, confused more than clarified. Rather than being understood as a broad and fluid political current that evolves and is an absolutely necessary part of the far flung opposition to Trump, it is, for some people, nothing more than a term of derision, signifying an attempt to recycle the corporate driven policies and ideology of the Clinton presidency. For others, less ideologically inclined and new to politics, it is too vague a term to shed much light on what kind of alliances and coalition relations are necessary, if we have any chance of turning back the anti-democratic and authoritarian impulses and polices of Trump and gang.

Now I realize that no terminology is going to magically put everybody on the same page. Nor will any term resolve longstanding political differences of the varied groupings that make up the resistance to the Trump administration. We’re still going to lock horns, for example, over the Democratic Party – its nature and reform (and radical) possibilities. No doubt differences will crop as well over the role of the labor movement and other traditional social organizations aligned to the Democratic Party. Nor will everybody be on the same page as far as how to engage the Trump administration. Finally, the discussions will continue on the merits (or weaknesses) of an economic-working-class populism that subordinates (and sometimes is deaf to) issues of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

None of this, however, changes my decision to bench “center.” I haven’t quite figured out what I will put in its place. But I do know this: what I won’t bench is is my conviction that broad and flexible strategic and tactical concepts of struggle that unify people and organizations, politically and socially varied in outlook and composition, is imperative at this moment.

If Trump goes?

  • March 9, 2017

A comment of mine to someone else’s post. I hope you get the gist.

I hope you are right, that Trump’s days are numbered. I go back and forth as to Trump’s longevity in office. If he goes, its effects across the political landscape, would go beyond, in my view, an exchange of one bad cop for another and the triggering of an angry backlash from Trump’s base.

First, Pence is a nasty right winger to be sure. But his political pedigree isn’t identical with Trump’s. Pence’s traces back to the rise of Reagan and Reaganism, while Trump’s better fits the new kids on the bloc – the alt right. This latter association makes Trump uniquely dangerous, but what cranks up the danger meter to a much higher reading is his psychological makeup – his unpredictability, instability, and narcissism.

This toxic mix of extremist politics and a pronounced personality disorder makes Trump at once completely contemptuous of democratic governance and ready to take highly risky actions without serious consideration of their consequences to the country and world. It doesn’t take a flight of imagination to hear Trump repeating the words of the absolutist ruler of France Louis 14th, if he were familiar with them, who, so the story goes, exclaimed, “L’Etat c’est Moi,” (I am the State). Thus, a Trumpless White House would allow me anyway to breathe a little easier, while fully understanding all the while that we would still face major challenges and dangers from a Pence administration.

As for Trump’s core supporters, it is fair to think that many will become enraged by the sacking of their Boss, but it’s also not out of the question that some – maybe no more than a silver – will become demobilized, too much duplicity and stress for them. Much would depend on what Trump would do in reaction to his unceremonious dimissal. Meanwhile, new and significant rifts, almost inevitably, would open up in the GOP political coalition, as the alt right goes to war with the traditional right. And on our side of the ledger, it is reasonable to expect that the broader democratic coalition and the Democratic Party will gain momentum, energy, and confidence due to Trump’s ouster. Finally, I can’t help but think that all this and more would improve, among other things, our election prospects next year.

International Women’s Day

  • March 8, 2017

A couple of thoughts that International Women’s Day brings to mind. One very brief, the other a bit longer:

* To say that women hold up half the sky (and just about everything else) is a gross understatement. I learned that as a young child, and have come to more deeply appreciate it as a (much) older man.

* The notion that waged work on a “production” site and in the formal sectors of the economy set the parameters for who’s in, who’s out, and who’s on the bubble of the working class – not to mention who has a hand in the production of the economic surplus from which profits and a fresh round of capital investment are derived – is a gendered as well as a racialized and generally exclusionary concept. In earlier centuries, it left large numbers of women as well as slaves of African ancestry, indigenous peoples, and new immigrants outside the category of working class, even though their labor was commonplace, abundant, and essential to capitalism’s accumulation, industrialization, and commodification process.

Today, global capitalism continues to rely on such labor, albeit on a much broader scale and in new as well as old forms, to sustain and expand its accumulation process, But in doing so, it makes this truncated and limited notion of class no more serviceable now than it was in previous centuries. This is especially so in the Global South.

Only a wide angled framing and understanding of who constitutes the working class, along with the specific class trajectories, histories, needs, and, not least, capacities, of each constituent group, and especially the historically invisible, uncounted, and subordinate, will provide us with a sturdy basis for unity and thus the grounds for victory against the nasty coalition of the right and alt right that is threatening democracy and everything that is decent and good in our country. In the elections, an exclusivist, racialized, gendered, and nativist concept of class captured the thinking of many white workers, and thus contributed significantly to the election of Trump – a candidate who was proudly, outspokenly, and uniquely misogynist, racist, and xenophobic. This, needless to say, presents the broad democratic movement and the Democratic Party a major challenge, if they hope to congeal a united people’s movement and transform a dire situation into a new step down Freedom Road.