Some thoughts on the elections, labor, and the left

  • April 6, 2018

I don’t understand the reasoning behind the reply of Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., to a question about Trump’s visit to Ohio where he talked about an infrastructure bill.

“He and Congress didn’t blink whenever they shelled out a trillion and a half dollars in tax giveaways for the rich,” Trumka said, “but we haven’t seen a nickel yet for infrastructure. He can talk about it forever, but he’s got to do something.”

First of all, it wasn’t Congress that “shelled out a trillion and a half dollars in tax giveaways for the rich.” It was Trump and his Republican enablers. The Democrats opposed the handout to the corporate class and wealthy, but they don’t control (for now anyway) either chamber of Congress. But that went unmentioned by Trumka.

Second, Trump’s infrastructure plan is, to use Paul Krugman’s word, a scam. Meanwhile the Democrats have offered a far more comprehensive plan much like President Obama did. This too should have been said by labor’s top leader.

This isn’t the first time that Trumka has given the GOP what is essentially a free pass, while at the same time either casting Democrats in an unfavorable light or damning them with faint praise.

Democrats have anything but a perfect report card, but their grades are far better than their counterparts on the other side of the aisle. Moreover, their participation in the diverse coalition combating Trump and Trumpism is essential if we hope to turn the country in a different direction, beginning this fall when voters go to the polls.

All of which means that working people — and their allies — will be better served if Trumka focuses on present challenges rather than the Democratic Party’s past sins.

To be fair, that is what labor did in the recent election in W.PA. where Democratic candidate Conor Lamb won a seat in Congress in a special election. A similar effort, but on a much larger scale, is necessary this fall when voters across the country have the opportunity to take the Congress out of Republican hands.

Before that happens though, we can expect a torrent of Trump’s toxic mix of economic nationalism, racism, misogyny, nativism, and phony patriotism. This hateful rhetoric, while providing red meat for his base nationally, has at the same time another geographically narrwower (strategic) target, namely white (and mainly male) workers in the Midwest. Trump and his team understand that if they can convince a significant section of these workers to migrate (as some did in 2016) to their side the GOP will have a good chance of preserving control of the Congress in November as well as position Trump to win reelection in 2020. What is more, a migration of this kind would sound the death knell on any hope of a progressive majority, while fundamentally realigning politics and power in the direction of authoritarian rule.

Each of us who stand for democracy, equality, and a livable future for people and the planet have skin in this game. But no one is better situated to contest this retrograde political strategy than the labor movement. Provided, of course, that the voices of labor make crystal clear what the differences between the two parties are, offer an alternative to Trump’s dangerous brand of economic nationalism, and, not least, vigorously and persuasively challenge Trump’s politics of hate, division, and inequality. Demands for economic justice, notwithstanding their urgency, can’t crowd out other equally urgent demands for justice in its other forms. In fact, the realization of the former is contingent on the achievement of the latter.

Of course, Democratic candidates will make all this much easier if they embrace the moment and aggressively speak to the pressing needs of the people in their districts, while challenging Trump and GOP policies.

That said, or should I say done, talk of a wave election favoring Democrats is in the cards. Trump’s unpopularity persists. The “enthusiasm” factor is on the Democratic side. The special elections over the past year are early signs of a building wave. The decision of a record number of Congressional Republicans to retire suggests that the political environment this fall isn’t Republican-friendly.

The rise of massive social movements ready to engage in the electoral process and elect Democrats also gives good reason to think control of Congress is likely to change. Finally, the activism of women in general and suburban women in particular this fall can easily become the GOP’s worst nightmare.

One final, and not entirely, unrelated thought: 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 whose legacy we celebrated earlier this week? 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.

MLK

  • April 4, 2018

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.

Spectacular, massive, and novel

  • March 28, 2018
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.

 

A dangerous turn, the mass media, and famine

  • March 23, 2018

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine-anne-applebaum-review#img-2

W.PA. election, Bernie, and unity

  • March 17, 2018

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!