Tag Archives: Democratic Party

Political Rants

Take over the Democratic Party right effing Now

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I’ve probably told this story before, but let me repeat it for some of the young people out there. I have never been a sustained political activist, but I’ve been activist-adjacent all of my adult life. During that time, I have attended political meetings (mostly around foreign policy issues), participated in protests, and interacted with more committed activists at various levels. I bloviate – that’s most of what I’ve done. I’ve also worked phone banks for specific candidates a handful of times from 2006 on.

Since the mid to late 1990s, I have also taken part in online organizing at a very low level. At the beginning, this involved subscribing to listservs, message boards, that sort of thing. As I mentioned above, I started working on Democratic party campaigns about sixteen years ago, but I never contributed money to a campaign until relatively recently. Nevertheless, around the time of the 2004 election, I started getting fundraising emails from the Democratic party. One of my colleagues on one of the listservs probably shared list data with the party at some point. (I suspect I know who this might have been, but it hardly matters.)

The money machine

I’m providing this background to illustrate one of the central problems with the Democratic party today. In this instance, they treated a group of activists, some very committed to social change, as a market for fundraising. The groups I was involved in fell away after that period, partly as a function of the rise of social media. So now, instead of receiving messages from activists and participating in conversations, I get an inbox full of fundraising messages every day, and I’m bombarded by similar pleas every time I go on FB or Instagram.

There are complex reasons for this, and I won’t delve into all that right now, but suffice to say that this isn’t how change happens. Yes, Democratic party candidates need money to compete. But a party cannot just be about extracting money from its base in $5 or $10 increments. ($22 seems to be the favorite this season.) A party needs to be connected to political and social movements. It needs to be present in people’s lives and making a tangible difference in their communities. Right now, the only time people hear from the Democratic party is when they need money or votes. That’s why we need to take its sorry ass over.

Where it’s working

There are some good efforts underway to accomplish this. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are a good example. Yes, they endorse candidates and support fundraising efforts, but principally they work within local communities to build change from the ground up. The New York City chapter is doing some great work, combining actual organizing and activism with an electoral strategy. It’s encouraging that they recognize the centrality of community-based efforts while putting some energy into electoral politics.

Let’s face it – you can do great things in your community, build strong, radical institutions, foster positive change from the ground up …. only to have it all taken apart by some right wing legislature, governor, Congress, president, or supreme court. The recent supreme court decisions illustrate how important it is for the left to keep its hand in elections. And since we are now working against time with respect to the climate crisis, the only way to facilitate radical change is by commandeering the ossified Democratic party, filling its ranks with activists, and replacing its leadership with people willing to do what needs doing.

No time to lose

There’s a lot going on in this country at the community level, particularly on the labor front. Policies largely associated with the left are popular, but the leadership of the Democratic party has had its head up its ass since the 1990s. The only way we can move crucial issues forward is by combining committed activism with a national electoral strategy, built on the bones of the Democratic party.

Not easy, but it’s easier than starting from scratch. And we just wasted a day.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Meeting the enemy (and it is still us).

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President Biden headed off to Europe this week to meet with the leaders of rich, white-dominated countries on that side of the pond. His meeting with Putin is drawing as much interest as you might expect. Some of the recent hacking attacks and ransomware incidents have been blamed on operatives connected at least tangentially with Russia. And, of course, a goodly number of people within the broader Democratic coalition see Russia as responsible for having delivered Trump into the White House in 2016. They see all this, and more, as pieces of the same puzzle, and they want Biden to read Putin the riot act.

To the extent that the ransomware stuff can be attributed to the Kremlin, it can be seen as part of the same effort that drives their illicit involvement in our political campaigns. They want to sow confusion and internal conflict in the world’s sole remaining superpower as a means of keeping us from confronting them – that only makes sense from their point of view.

But the idea that they are having an out-sized effect on our politics is vastly overblown. We Americans are fond of conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve nefarious foreign actors. Yes, we have serious problems, but they are self-inflicted, not imposed from without.

Clinton v. Clinton

I’ve said it on this blog many times before, and I’ll say it again – I never liked Putin, even back in the early 2000s when that was kind of a minority view. But the impact of their agitation in support of the Trump campaign in 2016 was marginal at best. The biggest reason for the failure of the Clinton campaign was – wait for it! – Hillary Clinton. The biggest non-Hillary factor in her loss was the FBI probe and James Comey, but even that issue was rooted in her own flat-footedness.

Let’s face it – she was a terrible candidate from the beginning, and in spite of that, was almost elected. Regarding Trump’s win, she has no one to blame but herself.

Putin’s Favorite POTUS

Did Putin want Trump to be president? Probably, as likely any Russian leader would. It was obvious that Trump was going to make a mess out of everything from the very beginning. That comports with Russia’s long-term strategic goals viz the U.S. And yes, Trump was nice to Putin as part of his constant self-dealing (he wanted that Trump Tower Moscow), but U.S. policy towards Russia was basically the same as in recent administrations.

As Americans, we have no idea of what it’s like to be a nation in the world that has to deal with the United States. The U.S. is the most powerful military, economic, and political player on Earth, and we don’t exactly walk around on tiptoe. Basically every other nation is dwarfed by our power and influence, so they reach for whatever they can to throw us off.

In the case of Russia, the most cost-effective methods of doing that include exacerbating existing divisions between political factions and, perhaps, making commodity prices – gas and beef – go up. That’s espionage 101. We do similar things in other countries, only from a position of power.

What will Biden say to Putin? God only knows. It would be nice if he did some serious work toward de-escalation of differences, maybe reinstating the IMF treaty, etc., but only time will tell. When you have most of the power, you are inevitably tempted to wield it in increasingly arbitrary ways. That would be hard for Biden to overcome, and he shows no sign of doing so.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The loudest voice.

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I haven’t been watching the Democratic National Convention in its entirety, just pieces here and there. It’s no surprise that this thing is unlike any political convention we’ve ever seen before. What’s kind of astonishing is the degree to which it looks like a long political ad, with some variations in production values. A lot of it is just a crap show, putting a spotlight on some never-Trump Republicans and various center-right figures. I keep expecting some kind of technicolor tribute to Ronald Reagan, or a cameo by George W. Bush. Stuff like that makes it a bit more like drinking urine than it should be, but then I am a leftist, which means I’m just supposed to suck it up and offer my unqualified support. Still, being asked to sit through Colin Powell is a bit beyond ridiculous, in my humble opinion.

I have talked about this on my podcast, Strange Sound, so I won’t go into great detail, but my decision to vote for the Democratic presidential ticket is rooted in the notion of harm reduction, some of the contours of which have been highlighted throughout the virtual DNC. The fate of undocumented immigrants, the so-called “dreamers”, as well as refugees from both state sponsored or tolerated violence and economic hardship, hangs in the balance – a second Trump term would spell disaster for them, and very likely for so-called legal immigrants as well. It would not surprise me to see a second-term Trump move to strip legal residents of their rights, then perhaps naturalized citizens, particularly if they are members of the communities he most despises. (I can picture an Ilhan Omar-focused executive action revoking citizenship from those who escaped Trump-dubbed “shit hole” countries.)

Then there are those who depend on their health insurance … like just about everybody at some point in their lives. A second Trump term would mean a death sentence for many of those people. Hell, the first Trump term was enough to dispatch more than 170,000 unnecessarily. Single-payer advocate Ady Barkan made this case quite eloquently at the DNC in one of the better speeches. For as little effort as is involved in casting a ballot, it seems to me that we should listen to the voices of people on the edge of disaster, for whom four more years of this might amount to a death sentence. As I said on Strange Sound, we don’t need to invest in the new administration – quite the opposite. We need to be ready to push them from day one. And they will need to be pushed. The lobbyists always have the loudest voice, but we have the numbers. We can flip the tables of the moneylenders if we all do it together, but we need to have an administration that will respond to pressure. Trump won’t. Biden will.

That’s my two cents. What’s yours? Leave a comment or a question. Excoriate me. Shake your cyber fist! Always glad to hear from you.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Vox populi.

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I’m going to open with a line from the late Trinidadian author and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (no leftist, btw): a million mutinies now! The primary election this past Tuesday in Georgia was an utter disaster, thanks to a republican-dominated political class dedicated to denying the vote to people of color and anyone else inclined to vote against the GOP. Once again, we’re seeing endless lines in predominately black districts, people waiting for three or more hours, standing in the rain, coping with dysfunctional machines and poorly trained poll workers. It’s a system designed to fail, and it did not disappoint. The combination of this chicanery and striking half a million people from the voter rolls was enough in 2018 to ensure Kemp’s election as governor, and it appears they have the pieces in place to game the November races as well.

The proximate reason for this meltdown was a precipitous replacement of all of the voting machines with new, touch-screen devices designed by a small company connected to the Governor’s campaign manager. Of course, they didn’t work properly. Poll workers were not properly trained on the devices, as they had only just been installed. Access keys were not working, so poll workers and voters were locked out of the machines. In many locations, provisional ballots were in short supply, so it’s likely that many thousands of people were disenfranchised, despite the court orders to keep the polls open beyond the designated closing time. In addition (or I should say, in subtraction), many polling locations had been eliminated prior to the vote, a decision that was not subject to prior review thanks to the Supreme Court’s striking down of the pre-clearance provision in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Shelby County v. Holder).

I’ve said this numerous times on this blog: when the Republicans win office, the first thing they do is try to lock the door behind them. With the presidency, the senate, many state legislatures and more than half of the nation’s governorships in their hands, they have been able to rewrite the rules, gerrymander the living shit out of districts, appoint hundreds and hundreds of reactionary judges, and basically stack the deck against progressive or even watery centrist challengers. On top of that, the President has been setting the predicate for crying fraud in the event he loses his re-elect this fall. That means the Democratic ticket, Biden presumably, needs to win big in order to overcome the shit-storm of challenges and heated rhetoric from the Trump camp. Because of the power dynamic between the two major parties (Republicans fanatically aggressive, Democrats a bit on the limp side), the GOP can afford to win narrow victories, like 2016. Democrats can’t. They need a blowout this November.

Can that happen? We shall see. Biden’s a bit fragile looking for a landslide, but hell … anything can happen. We know that, right? Til then, a million mutinies now!

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Joe. mentum.

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Bernie’s out. I guess it’s no surprise. There really wasn’t a reasonable electoral path forward to the Democratic nomination after the crushing defeats on Super Tuesday and in subsequent contests in Michigan, etc. While there are still many voters yet to be heard from, the mainstream Democratic party has coalesced around their preferred standard-bearer, the somewhat limp-minded former vice president, whose halting commentaries from a foot or two in front of an IKEA backdrop are barely making a ripple, even in MSNBC land. 

I almost never hear from Biden until his watery opinions are being criticized by left commentators. What the hell kind of communication shop are they running there? Is this a presidential campaign or a race for dog catcher? Just this past Tuesday, as Wisconsin voters were queuing up to vote in the midst of a pandemic, thanks to their state Republican party, the most Biden could manage to say about this disaster was that the science should decide whether or not it went forward. Really? Best you can do, Joe? What the fuck. Are you sure you want to be president?

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

It just never ceases to amaze me how dedicated the Democratic party can be to its own self-immolation. We had more than twenty people to choose from on that debate stage, and we went with the guy whose turn it was … the guy who the party felt was due a spot on the top of the ticket, just as Hillary was in 2016, regardless of his skills as a candidate, his mental acuity, his political baggage, etc. This outcome sets us up for a serious fight in November, and it’s not clear to me how we can possibly prevail, given the degree to which Trump and the Republicans are dedicated to gaming this election nine ways from Tuesday. Trump is already setting the predicate for claims of voter fraud, spouting BS about voting by mail. This, combined with the COVID-19 scare, will make it all the easier for the GOP to claim either victory or fraud, and who knows what consequences will proceed from that.

In any case, I want to acknowledge Bernie Sanders’ remarkable contribution to American politics over the past ten years in particular. Since he made that long speech on the Senate floor in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Bernie has brought progressive politics to the fore in a way that simply has no parallel in the modern history of this country. Across a broad range of issues he has staked out a distinctly leftist position in such a way as to pull the Democratic party in our direction and away from the neoliberal consensus that has ruled it for several decades. For that we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Regardless of who the Democratic presidential nominee is likely to be, Bernie has done a lot of the hard work of structural change since 2011. It is up to us to finish what he started.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Proof of concept.

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I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed by the “Super Tuesday” results. All night, the thing that kept ringing in my ears was the memory of Tom Brokaw back in 1984 saying, “Looks like another good night for Walter Mondale,” and just how nauseating that moment felt. Tuesday was a similarly nauseating experience, except that, if anything, I have less confidence in Biden as a candidate than I did in Mondale. I should say here that I am no stranger to political disappointment; very, very rarely does my first choice candidate rise to the top. That’s partly a function of my being to the left of the Democratic party, but it’s also due to the fact that I do not have a deep connection to the party as an institution.

Like most institutions, the Democratic party favors some people over others for leadership positions within the party. That dynamic pushes forward senior, well-connected, establishment politicians – people like Biden, Hillary Clinton, Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, etc. – regardless of their relative talents, ability to connect with voters, etc. With regard to the presidential race, more often than not, they prevail, and when they prevail, more often than not, they lose in the general. Obama was an insurgent who became the establishment – he didn’t start at the top. Hillary was favored to win in 2016 because it was her turn; she lost on her own merits, or lack of same. Biden is being advance for the same reason – it’s his turn. It’s far from obvious that he’s the strongest candidate to go up against Trump, but that, it seems, is an afterthought for party leaders.

Sure looks like a lot of people.

All that said, Bernie should have performed better Tuesday night. Which proves the obvious: grassroots organizing is hard, tremendously hard. No one even pretends that Biden has a grassroots activist organization – nothing of the sort. Bernie does, but they missed the mark on Tuesday, for the most part. A candidate like Bernie can only prevail if he has a mass movement behind him. What he’s proposing from a policy standpoint is reliant on the existence of such a movement. Bernie is quite frank about that. Without the movement, there’s no Sanders presidency and no Sanders agenda. So these primaries amount to proof of concept at some level. If he can’t build the support now, it wouldn’t be there for him later. His agenda cannot succeed on the basis of a narrow win against Trump. We need a progressive wave, and thus far, it hasn’t materialized.

My hope is that the movement does rise in time to put Bernie over the top. But if it doesn’t, make no mistake – we will still need the movement for what’s ahead of us. Our survival as a species depends on it.

luv u,

jp

New podcast drops

I’ve launched a new political commentary podcast called Strange Sound. It’s free, it’s brief, and it’s available now at anchor.fm/strangesound.

Political Rants

Unfit.

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In the main, there are two things that the ongoing impeachment trial of Donald John Trump bring to my mind. One is that this man is perhaps the least suited individual in America for the high office he now holds. The second is that the office of the presidency is far too powerful for a single person to hold, and that if we do not act to constrain that power, we will be in the same situation again before we know it. So in a certain respect, you can say that the Trump administration was an accident waiting to happen, made inevitable by the weak constraints on executive power, particularly in the era of U.S. global dominance following World War II (i.e. the era we remain in now).

Brother Matt took a whack at the hyper paternalistic imperial presidency back in 1991 with his song, “World War II”, the refrain to which went like this:

Daddy likes things done in a big way
Daddy's back with bargains from D-Day
Daddy chose a game for the lads to play
Daddy showed his hand with Enola Gay

We have had mad men at the helm before, to be sure. I’m thinking Nixon towards the end of his Watergate troubles, certainly, but even before, during the terror bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The crazy, drunk Nixon whose Defense Secretary told fellow staffers to ignore the president’s orders – that Nixon was what people typically term crazy. The mad bomber president, not so much. It is emblematic of the imperial presidency that while Nixon could get away with dropping massive ordinance on defenseless populations, his administration was ultimately brought down by his attempts to spy on his political opponents. The power dynamic is obvious.

The inevitable impeachment ensues.

Why is Trump different? Well, if nothing else, he demonstrates the degree to which even the weak constraints we thought we had had on the presidency were only voluntarily complied with – that these were traditions and norms, not laws. Every president in my lifetime had some substantive exposure to constitutional law and therefore felt compelled in a minor way to observe some limits to their power. Not this president. He knows nothing about constitutional law (inasmuch as he knows nothing, period), and so he acts outside of the usual bounds, and there appears to be no remedy or even accountability for that. I think I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I had tacitly assumed that the weak controls on the presidency were statutory in some respect, but apparently not so. This needs to change.

If a Democrat wins this year, I’m sure there will be plenty of cooperation across the political spectrum for constraining the presidency (in ways that can easily be reversed by Republicans). But the only truly reliable constraint is an energized, organized citizenry. Unless we put down our electronic devices and start working together on these weighty issues, we can’t expect any better from any future president.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Heavy lift.

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I want to open this week with a message to my fellow leftists. I know, some of you right now are probably saying, “Okay, boomer … “, but hear me out. For the more deeply committed among you, the upcoming presidential race is probably not the most important item on the agenda, but for those who plan on participating in the Democratic party primaries and caucuses, I have one modest caution: Don’t rip a new asshole into every candidate other than Bernie (whom I personally support). Many of us who are participating in electoral politics want Bernie to win, but that goal is in the hands of the voters. If we out-organize and out-vote all of the other candidates, we can win … but losing is a possibility, and given that eventuality we would still need to beat Trump in November … regardless of who wins the Democratic party nomination for president.

It's going to take all of us

The fact is, achieving top policy priorities like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal will be tremendously difficult no matter who the next Democratic president turns out to be. Obviously, Bernie Sanders is the best choice, in that we can be confident that we won’t have to convince the president to push for them. This is true of Warren to a lesser extent. But even with a reliable progressive / socialist like Bernie in the White House, M4A and the GND will demand massive organizing and activism outside of government, as well as more progressives in both the Senate and the House. All of that amounts to a heavy lift, and the difference a progressive president would make would be significant but not sufficient in and of itself.

In other words, there is no universe in which we can elect Bernie on a Tuesday in November and have him deliver M4A, for instance, sometime over the following year, all by himself. We need to build momentum for this and other progressive policies now and throughout next year, and when we defeat Trump with whatever candidate gets the most primary votes, we will need to push even harder and keep our eye on the ball. The presidential component of this project, while important, is relatively minor; no Democratic president can pass such sweeping legislation without a movement behind him or her. We will be opposed in all progressive proposals by the richest, most powerful institutions in the world, so it’s going to be a fight no matter who wins.

If we work extremely hard, we will get the nominee – Sanders – that we want and need. And then the real work begins.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Bad alliance.

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We started this week with some news flash about North Korea expanding its uranium enrichment capability. NBC talking heads were all on the job, rolling out the standard script on how the North Korean commies can’t be trusted, how they’ve done this with successive U.S. administrations from Clinton forward, and how they’ve rolled a feckless president Trump by flattering him, gaining a massive concession – essentially, the prestige of a summit with the U.S. president – in exchange for nothing. There’s broad agreement on this point on MSNBC, for example, meaning that everyone on the network who detests Trump, from National Review editors to Democratic party strategists, are saying roughly the same thing.

With friends like these ...What emerges is the same bipartisan consensus that has driven bad foreign policy decisions through administrations of both parties for as long as I’ve been alive (and, in truth, longer). It feels to me very much like the assholes vs. the fuckers, and while I certainly don’t want the fuckers running everything, it’s hard to support the assholes and maintain my self-respect. Now, before someone accuses me of Jimmy Dore-like animus toward strategic voting (note: I always vote strategically, specifically to avert the avoidable and wholly predictable disaster that’s unfolding right now), I do have a slight preference for the assholes. But what we need is a radically new approach to national security and international relations – one that would make all of those pundits shake their heads.

This means more than simply not getting ourselves into “stupid” wars. This involves a deeper realization that we do not have the right to launch wars of choice under any circumstances. Radical change means a foreign policy that focuses on what’s good for people both inside and outside of our national borders, not just what’s good for U.S. based corporations and the rich people who own them. It means saying goodbye to the notion of an American empire and winding down the military machine, diverting resources to domestic economic security and international disaster relief efforts. It means owning the darker chapters of our history and being accountable for them as a nation.

Whatever we do in the short term to stanch the bleeding of this increasingly autocratic administration, we must keep a sharp vision in mind of where this country should go and seek to articulate that vision to our friends, our families, our co-workers, our neighbors, and strangers we meet.  If we overcome our short-term problems in part by making common cause with people we disagree with, it’s essential that we keep our eye on a better future … one that they may not want at all.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Making it count.

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My reaction to Tuesday’s off-year political races is the same I always have with regard to elections: you can’t win by staying home. A lot of people on the left get frustrated with the Democratic Party (I certainly do), but in our current political system, only two parties have a reasonable chance to win elections, particularly on a national scale. We have to work within the Democratic Party even as we organize outside of it; and we have to vote Dem (when such a vote is available) even if the candidate is not our preferred choice.

Threatening the neighborsThe alternative (i.e. sitting on your hands) results in what we have today: a national government run entirely by the most reactionary Republican Party in history – a political cabal that is doing enormous damage by undermining the work of vital agencies, appointing right wing judges, and more. This destructive work is moving at such an alarming pace that it is doubtful as to whether we can regain sufficient political power to stem the tide, let alone reverse it, before some of our most vital public institutions are blown to hell. That’s why I am no fan of quixotic third-party detours. The downside risk is far too high, as we are now discovering.

I generally agree with Norman Solomon and his Democratic Party Autopsy report. And I think he might agree that the Democratic Party – like all national parties – is a broad coalition of factions that don’t always (or even often) agree with one another on key issues. It was that way back in the 1960s. It was certainly that way in the age of the Democratic Leadership Conference. The only difference now is that there is a strong left faction that nearly won the presidential nomination process last year. THAT is new, and frankly, exciting. I think that should be a cause for optimism – the inside strategy is mostly a matter of persistence and focus. We have to populate the party with people who think like us, recognizing that we will need a broad coalition to start winning again on a national level. So this can’t be a question of my way or the highway, on the left or the center. The corporate media likes to focus on factionalism. I think this is just the messy process of moving forward.

The left is the future of the Democratic party. It has nowhere else to go. We have to claim that future and continue to use the party as a means of advancing positions important to the well-being of the majority of Americans. Big project, but a necessary one … and we’d best get started.

luv u,

jp