I understand that much can happen between now and next November, especially with Trump in the White House. But I think there is good reason to be confident about the elections next year. And yet I come across a lot of pessimism, which I don’t believe is well grounded. I often hear as an argument that we didn’t think Trump would win in 2016. That’s true, but much has changed in a few years and his victory back then was underwhelming to say the least and contingent on some factors that aren’t easily repeatable.
I welcome the author’s insistence that the left become a full participant in the larger effort to defeat Trump, even in the event that Bernie loses the presidential primary. That wasn’t the case in 2016. And there is much else to welcome in the analysis. But for now, I want to mention a few things that bother me.
Its tone, to begin with, is self righteousness and not worthy of a mature left. Some modesty and generosity of spirit would be appropriate.
It also includes some questionable claims, such as: “While some are stumping for Warren – the only other candidate in the race who regularly articulates a conflict with the ultra-rich – most of the left appears to be fighting for Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic primary.” This claim, I would argue, turns on a very narrow definition of the left. I don’t have any data at hand to back this up, but, I suspect, that once the left is defined more broadly, a different picture would emerge with a large swath, maybe a majority, of the left supporting Warren.
The author in his analysis introduces an interesting category into political discourse: nausea. It is what the “left, ” he writes, will feel if someone other than Bernie, and perhaps Elizabeth Warren, win the nomination. I would hope this isn’t the case, that the left has more political depth and maturity than this because nausea is seldom a good motivator for people either in politics or any field of endeavor.
There are sweeping and gratuitous characterizations in the article as well, such as “(Hillary) Clinton was a neoliberal hack.” While such a characterization may titillate some on the left and remind some readers of the author’s revolutionary credentials in case they doubted them, it serves absolutely no purpose if the intent is to speak to a broader audience. And should’t that be what the left attempts to do?
Then there is this jewel: “And it goes without saying … that presidential elections are far from our only tool to fight against fascism and for a democratic economy and society. Movements, direct action, and strikes are in many ways the root of our power.” Even abstractly I don’t like this piece of political wisdom; it’s the Howard Zinn “bottom up” framing of the process of social change that squeezes out complexity, novelty, irony, and impurity from the historical and political process. But more to the point, and even though the writer makes up for it elsewhere, it misses an opportunity to make the case again that the upcoming presidential elections is the singular tool that millions — not just the left — must unhesitatingly grasp and energetically utilize to defeat Trump and his right wing cohort in Congress and elsewhere at the ballot box. No other form of struggle at this moment comes close to giving tens of millions the political leverage to upend Trump and right wing, white supremacist authoritarian rule as do the elections next year.
One more thing: it is notable that the author is silent on the left’s role as a unifying force in the broad democratic, anti-Trump coalition or the Democratic Party. I suspect that isn’t an oversight, but is likely reflective of the author’s (and some others on left as well) truncated politics.
1. I generally agree with Elizabeth Warren and like the idea of her being the nominee, but I don’t agree with her claim that the biggest problem in Washington is corruption. It’s a problem for sure, but the biggest of our problems at this moment is Trump, Trump, and more Trump. We can’t get to the former if we don’t defeat the latter.
2. Medicare for All and to a lesser degree a Green New Deal were front and center in the Democratic Party presidential debate. But I couldn’t help but think that I’m glad the election is more than a year out. Why? Because there’s still much “splaining” to do before the general public embraces either demand at a gut level or the candidates who espouse them. Clever slogans and the enthusiasm aren’t enough in the present political circumstances, to make them a reality or to win next year, especially when Trump and his acolytes in Congress and the media have turned lying and demagogy into an art form and congenital habit.
3. It is easy to feel despair and anger at the daily torrent of racism coming from Trump. But despair and anger, while understandable, have to be turned into active resistance. And one thing each of us — and especially those of us who are white —- can do is engage other white people, strangers as well as friends, in conversation over Trump’s racism.
4. The conflation of Medicare for All with socialism is problematic. A socialist society would surely provide such heath care, but it isn’t peculiar to socialism. Such care, each with its own particular wrinkles, is provided in several major capitalist countries now. I have some tactical worries about Medicare for All in this election cycle, but I don’t agree with some of its critics who in a maneuver to shut down discussion of it (and other progressive measures for that matter) paint them as socialist and thus preemptively beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. I can only think that in their minds a robust public sector and the universal provision of public goods, which, ipso facto, entails some restrictions on capitalist profit making, constitutes socialism and they don’t like it. Again a socialist society, which turns on substantive democracy and fulsome equality, would enact in short order such measures, but such measures aren’t necessarily peculiar to socialism.
5. I’m reading a history of the U.S. spanning from the War of 1812 to the end of war with Mexico in 1848. The author, Daniel Howe, quotes another historian, John Murrin, who writes that white yeoman farmers who acquired land by dispossession and force during this time were the “beneficiaries of catastrophe.” That this social process and social class were considered the backbone of Jeffersonian democracy tells us much about the limitations, contradictions and racialized nature of that vision and practice. Murrin’s observation also reminds me that Marx’s “primitive accumulation of capital” was much more than a moment at the dawn of capitalism’s pre-history. Instead, it stretched out over decades, even centuries, and was in its many iterations catastrophic for Native and enslaved peoples. Some writers, David Harvey for one, in fact, see it as a contemporaneous process, especially in the Global South.
6. I wonder if historical memory has drained the abolitionist movement (or should I say movements) of their strategic depth and tactical flexibility. I sometimes get the impression that the movement in memory is nothing more than the practice of moral suasion and electoral abstentionism. But that is hardly the case. The movement had many tendencies and wings, many of which embraced strategic and tactical understandings that were far more complex and nuanced, including the necessity of electoral participation and broadly constructed alliances. Many Black abolitionists were in this camp. I mention this not only to complicate a little bit the abolitionist movement(s), but also because it has some contemporary relevance.
1. I’ve seen a lot of ugly moments in our country’s politics in my lifetime, but what Trump did last night in demonizing and endangering Congresswoman IIhan Omar at a rally in North Caroline, ranks up their with the worst. What makes it more frightening is the thousands of white people at the rally, seething with resentment, reveling in the moment, and chanting “Send her back.”
2. When Trump’s vile racist rhetoric mixes with the perception of many white people that their white skin privileges and social order are under a fierce and inexorable assault from a rising multi-racial, multi-cultural movement insisting on equality, justice, and popular democracy, it can make for an exceedingly toxic and dangerous brew as we saw last week at Trump’s rally in North Carolina.
What adds to the toxicity is that Trump’s supporters believe that whatever advantages they enjoy, they earned them through their hard work and intellectual acuity. Conversely, the inferior and unequal conditions in which people of color are assigned, through the force of law, politics, institutional design, the “normal” workings of the economy, and, not infrequently, violence are the result of their own doing, inferiority and indolence. In this rendering, white people get their just due as do people of color. And any attempt to reorder these relations, that is, to create a multi-racial society resting on full equality and robust democracy, is considered unjust in their eyes and should be fiercely resisted.
In Trump, this substantial grouping of white people can count on a white nationalist authoritarian leader who will give voice to their (and his) resentments and rage and in the Republican Party, they have a reliable political vehicle that, with Trump, will prosecute their case.
By the same token, Trump can count on a broad swath of white supporters that will unflaggingly defend him as well rally around his authoritarian and plutocratic policies, enforce discipline in the Republican Party, and eagerly vote for him and other Republicans next year. In short, the connection of one to the other is symbiotic and co-dependent.
3. It’s almost absurd to hear media commentators discussing whether Trump is a racist or not? It should be a settled question by now. Trump by his words and actions over a lifetime has already given us an affirmative answer to that question. No further discussion in warranted.
4. Trump’s racist rhetoric and attacks are hateful, divisive, demeaning, demonizing, and, let’s not forget, endangering to people of color. Anybody who isn’t worried about the physical safety of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan is ignoring history, very recent as well as past.
5. Check out Dan Le Batard on ESPN. He mentions former African American sport’s host Jemelle Hill, who got sacked for her refusal to “stick to sports.” And her firing sent a signal across ESPN’s many platforms to stay clear of politics and controversy. To his great credit, Le Batard refuses. He’s good and gutsy here.
6. I watched the redoubtable Karen Bass (CA37) on MSNBC defending the “Squad” and it reminded me of the many women of color who play a prominent and leading role in the House Democratic Party caucus. Even though they aren’t in the cross hairs of Trump’s vile racist attacks right now, they aren’t that far removed and deserve our solidarity.
7. Trump’s rallies, it is commonly said, are designed to energize and incite his base. And they obviously do that. But they have other purposes as well, which often go unmentioned — to demoralize the far flung movement opposing him, while giving his reelection next year, notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary, a sense of inevitability.
8. In googling more information on the ill advised and groundless attack last week on Sharice Davids, one of only two Native Americans in Congress, at the twitter hands of AOC’s chief of staff, I couldn’t help but notice that every right and alt right media site were all over this story. No doubt nothing triggers their animal spirits and provides them with juicy copy quite like real, invented, or exaggerated tensions and disunity within the Democratic Party. In their calculus (and Trump’s as well), the stoking of such differences is the only ticket they possess to return their guy to the White House for four more years.
9. Last week I came across a comment on facebook, claiming that centrists in the Democratic Party consistently align themselves with the far right on a range of issues. But this is sheer invention even if it is dressed up in the language of radicalism. Where is the evidence? How have the centrists allied themselves with Trump and against Pelosi? What is more, this assertion ignores the fact that right wing authoritarian rule hanging over Washington and the country would be worse, far worse were it not for the Democratic Party majority in the House, centrists and progressives alike, who are resisting Trump and Trumpism.
If this weren’t bad enough, it got worse when the writer doubled down on his claim by bringing Lenin into the argument. He argued that today’s centrists in the Democratic Party are much like the “bourgeois democrats” of early 20th century Russia, who, according to Lenin, were “untrustworthy, backstabbing, vacillating, unreliable allies.”
In painting with such a broad brush, without so much as a single word of qualification or any mention of the context, dynamics and challenges of this political moment, the writer’s analysis is not only mistaken, but also un-Lenin like, that is, it was ungrounded, uncomplicated, one sided, and abstract. Luckily, most Democrats and activists aren’t of this mind. Whatever the differences are over policy and approach (and there are some substantive differences) within the Democratic Party and the broader coalition opposing Trump, they are being discussed and debated in a spirit free of accusation and vitriol in most instances. And that is how it should be.
10. A strategic approach to next’s year’s election has to consider the requirements of retaining control of House seats in purple/swing districts as well as regaining Senate seats in states that aren’t necessarily progressive friendly. And then there is the challenge of winning the electoral college as well as the popular vote in order to oust Trump. This is what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi grapples with every day, understanding that simply tacking to the left in these circumstances, as some think she should, is neither smart nor strategic politics.
11. I will be curious to see to what extent the testimony of Robert Mueller moves public opinion on impeachment. Right now only a minority support it, and if recent polling is accurate, a shrinking minority. I don’t consider the impeachment of Trump a moral and political imperative. For me, it a tactical question that is subordinate to the overarching imperative of defeating Trump and the GOP at the ballot box next year. In other words, will an impeachment fight assist in achieving that objective or is it a diversion?
1. Biggest winners in last week’s debate: Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris; biggest loser: Joe Biden. And polls this week confirm this fact. To enlarge the frame, the other winner was the American people who were able to listen to a lively, contested, and substantive debate.
2. Unite the left and defeat the right — a slogan that I see now and then — should be no more than a subset of the left’s strategic approach to the elections. The main strategic task — and it cannot be said enough — is to extend as well as unite the existing, diverse, and multi-class coalition whose overarching task is to elect a Democratic Party president and Congress in next year’s election.
3. Identity politics is Trump’s bread and butter; he employs it daily, hourly, almost minute by minute. Why wouldn’t he? It’s the glue that binds together the white, cross class, mainly male, Christian-Evangelical coalition that elected him and, he hopes, will reelect him next year. Contesting it, as we are learning, isn’t easy. Indeed, it seems resistant to morality, political appeals, and reality. And to no small degree it is.
Not only does this form of politics deny uncomfortable and obvious truths, It also constructs its own “reality” and “truths” out of a long list of invented grievances, resentments, and nostalgia for a world in which white and male privilege, heterosexual identity, a Christian and White Nation, and U.S. global supremacy were considered natural and the bedrock of the country’s greatness.
It is this worldview embraced by millions that gives Trump such a stable following. His demagogic skills are impressive at times, but then again he speaks to a friendly audience that never tires of hearing their beloved leader in the White House affirming and stoking their sense of grievance, resentment, and loss — in short, their worldview.
Tomorrow’s spectacle and vanity project on the National Mall may rub most of Americans the wrong way, but it will titillate many — not all, I suspect — of Trump’s die hard supporters.
4. When Putin says western style liberalism is “obsolete,” beware. If his track record as Russia’s imperial and imperious president gives us any clue as to what he means, and usually deeds do speak louder than words, he surely considers “obsolete” an independent press and judiciary, regular and fair elections, representative and constitutional government, restraints on presidential-executive power, and a robust civil society and citizenry. That Trump wouldn’t offer, even a mild criticism of his best bud’s comment when asked in Japan last week, comes as no surprise. He and Putin are one of a kind.
5. And to think that what is happening to babies, children, and their parents is a deliberate and calculated policy and done in our name.
6. To suggest, as Tim Ryan and Bill DeBlasio did in the Democratic Party presidential debate, that workers gravitated to Trump because they were abandoned by the Democratic Party and “coastal elites” is one sided and therefore misleading. First, it wasn’t the working class as a whole that bailed. It was, more precisely, a section of white workers, and not all of them at that.
Second, it wasn’t only economic grievance, as both Ryan and DeBlasio imply, that accounts for their decision to jump ship and embrace Trump, first as candidate and now as president. Misogyny, xenophobia, and racism and white skin privilege have to figure large in any explanation for their behavior, but neither Ryan or DeBlasio make any mention of this.
Finally, their invocation of “coastal elites” to explain the rightward shift of white workers conceals more than it reveals. Are there no elites between the coasts? I believe Walmart is headquartered in Arkansas and GM in Detroit to name only two examples of elite power located in the heartland. But more germane, the immediate danger that working people face in the Midwest and other regions of the country isn’t any kind of elite power, but elite power in its right wing extremist form.
It is this fraction of elite power, controlling as it does the White House, the Senate, much of the administrative machinery of the federal government, and a majority of state governments, that has to be squarely confronted and defeated in next year’s election. In a moment of peril, we should expect clarity, not ambiguity, not cheap bids for popularity from Democrats seeking the party’s presidential nomination.
An addendum: The term “coastal elites” or even “elites” is not only fuzzy, imprecise, and misleading, but it also can easily become freighted with anti-semitism and racism in the minds of many people. The term should be retired.
7. On Morning Joe, the hosts and guests were puzzled by the complicity of Christian Evangelicals in their support of Trump’s misogynist behavior. At quick glance, the support of Evangelicals for Trump’s amoral and misogynist behavior may seem perplexing. But on deeper look, this religious current, whose rise coincides with the rise of right wing extremism forty years ago, was never on the side of democracy and freedom in general nor women’s equality in particular.
Indeed, patriarchy, and a very traditional and backward version of it at that, was always a cornerstone belief of Evangelicals, finding justification in their reading of Scripture. Thus their support for Trump isn’t a case of turning a blind eye to Trump’s brutish and violent behavior. Nor is it even a case of compromising their faith. In their view, Trump might be a bad boy at times, but in the larger scheme of things, he is their prodigal son and faithful minister in a secular world that is at war with their religious (and political) worldview and values. And if he puts women in “their place” from time to time, even physical violates and assaults them, well, maybe “these women,” deserve it.
8. When I was chair of the Communist Party, I used the term “labor led people movement” to capture what I thought was one of the main political dynamics of that time. But reflecting on it later, I came to the conclusion that the term was aspirational at best and misleading and unnecessarily exclusive at worst. For the fact of the matter was that labor wasn’t the leader of the broader democratic movement either then or over the previous half century. The dynamics of struggle are and were far more complicated than my rendering at that time. And that will likely be the case in the future. All of which nudged me to acknowledge that abstract class theory and wishful thinking are never a good substitute for a concrete analysis of real on-the-ground political processes.
9. Any prescriptive advice for the upcoming elections has to take into account the multiplicity of terrains — state to state. urban, suburban, and rural, congressional district to congressional district, etc. — on which the struggle to defeat Trump and his Republican congressional acolytes will be fought out. One size won’t fit all. More to the point, the variation in political, organizational, and social mapping from place to place has to be fully taken into account in the elaboration of any election plans.
10. When I hear someone say that a livable, egalitarian, and sustainable future for humanity will take more than just mobilizing for the 2020 elections, I cringe. While the statement is true, it misses this crucial point. Defeating Trump and his right wing acolytes in Congress next year is the key, strategic task — the key link — in moving the whole chain of struggle forward at this moment.
Thus everything that we do, I would argue, should be framed within that strategic understanding. That doesn’t mean that everything else should grind to a halt until November of 2020. But it does mean that every democratic movement and struggle should mesh with campaign to defeat Trump and all at the ballot box next year.
11. For some time I have felt, and even more so today, that it is imperative to complicate the concepts of class, class struggle, and class approach. And my reasoning for doing so comes not from some Marxist text — although it can be found there along with deterministic and rigid interpretations of the aforementioned — but from my reading of the process of social change over the past century and more.
12. My blood boils when I hear someone with progressive or left politics roll out a “plague on both houses” explanation for our present and past difficulties as a country. After all, that trope has had no analytical or political value other than to strategically and tactically confuse and mislead for, at least, the past half century. Nixon’s southern strategy, Reagan’s ascendancy to the presidency, Gingrich’s Contract with (on) America, and many other markers of an ascendant right during this time should have triggered a critical rethink in the progressive and left community of this fraudulent concept. But old tropes die hard, especially when they become a showpiece of one’s radical political identity.
