Is it enough to be right?

  • February 15, 2019

Carl Winter, a leader of the Communist Party in much of the 20th century, told me more than once that it isn’t enough to be right. He would then add that you have to be right in a way that resonates with your audience and gives your opponents no easy way to attack you or your ideas or the organization that you represent.

Now I never found myself on a big stage and in the glare of the right wing attack machine so if I failed to follow his sage advice it didn’t cause too many waves. But for anyone who does, who speaks for the Democratic Party and/or the larger coalition opposing Trump and Trumpism, it is advice that should be carefully considered, especially as we draw closer to what arguably is the most important election in the country’s history.

It’s a trap

  • February 14, 2019
It is silly to insist that Democrats, progressive and otherwise, should emphatically reject anti-socialism and anti-communism, as bandied about, for example, in Trump’s State of the Union speech and in his remarks in El Paso this week. And it is even sillier to say that the future of progressive politics turns on it. And yet a few on the left are making this argument.
 
This strikes me as very wrongheaded. Democrats would be wiser to take a different tack and make the case that Trump’s new”socialist/communist” talking points are a transparently dishonest attempt to distract and divert public attention from his calamitous policies and move the conversation to a terrain that Trump believes is ripe for his lies and demagogy. Socialism (or much of it), after all, went belly up three decades ago and its democratic deficit was acute and well known.
 
Democrats, if their smart, won’t fall for Trump’s bait. It’s a trap. Martin Luther King, the greatest radical reformer of the 20th century, went no further than to say that anti-communism is an irrational mode of thinking. He didn’t go to the wall to defend the Soviet Union or the other socialist countries. He picked his fights judiciously and kept his eyes on the prize. We should do the same.
 
The danger to progressive politics isn’t that Democrats will take a pass on frontally challenging the anti-communist and anti-socialist jeremiads from Trump and gang. The danger is that good people on the left think that Democrats, as a matter of principle, should engage Trump on this terrain and any refusal on their part to do so will ineluctably undermine the progressive turn in the county’s politics. They forget that it is sometimes better to deflect an issue and move to other issues that are far more urgent to people.

 

A formula for victory

  • February 13, 2019

Thinking about the last shutdown, what ended it, while handing Trump a defeat, wasn’t the actions of one person or one group. It was the broad unity of the same coalition that has been resisting Trump since his Inauguration. Herein lies the formula for winning in 2020.

The danger of a declaration of emergency

  • February 13, 2019

With a bipartisan committee coming up with a compromise bill that doesn’t include Trump’s demand for a border wall, but keeps the government open, it looks like Trump might declare a national emergency and order the building of a wall. If he does, this authoritarian power grab should be universally condemned. It’s wrong on its face and sets a dangerous precedent at this moment when Trump’s presidency is besieged on all sides

Happy Birthday Abe

  • February 13, 2019

Lincoln didn’t possess the most radical outlook as a candidate or president, but what set him apart and served the country well was his strategic depth, his capacity to change his views in the face of new experience and sober self-reflection, steely determination when things weren’t going well, and nearly unmatched ability to capture in few words the stakes and meaning of the Civil War..