Progressives Need a Paradigm Shift

What progressives need today more than anything else is a “paradigm shift”. To be sure, we need to reject all the attempts to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, we need to defend the ACA, Planned Parenthood, Voting Rights and the EPA, we need a financial transactions tax and we need to take hundreds of billions from a bloated military budget to fund our communities, to repair and update our infrastructure, to provide public education for our children, etc.

But winning some (or even all) of these battles will NOT change the situation we are in unless we tie them to a revolution in the way Americans think about the role of government in society. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn popularized the concept of “paradigm shift” in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution. He argued that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but is accomplished through revolutions where “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” (Think - Newton, Darwin and Einstein) I would argue that this same model applies to Americans’ ideas about government’s role in society.

The reactionaries (please, let’s stop calling them conservatives, because that’s not what they are) understand this. More than 40 years ago, they set out to produce just such a paradigm shift, to reverse the social and economic thinking of the previous 70 years of history in this country. To undo what the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and The Great Society (and similar movements lead by Socialists and Social Democrats in Europe) had accomplished, they had to vilify government as the source of all problems in society (particularly in the economy) and to promote the ideas of economic individualism and the free market as the solution to these problems.

Their intellectual forefather, Friedrich Hayek, provided the economic and philosophical underpinnings in his book, The Road to Serfdom. In this work, Hayek argues that government intervention in the economy (and collective action more generally) inevitably leads to tyranny and that the only defense of individual liberty is the free market and laissez faire capitalism. These ideas, further developed by the Chicago School of Economics and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, formed the basis for the neoclassical school of thought and the antigovernment politics of the new right in the 1970s.

Enter David Stockman, et al. From the Reagan “revolution” to the Tea Party and Donald Trump, the arguments of reaction have been based on the acceptance of this conceptual framework. If we accept this paradigm (and it is today, and has been for the past 30 years, the dominant framework in economics and politics), the best we can hope for is to fight a rear-guard action to slow the erosion of programs that meet the needs of ordinary Americans. In 2017 that is what we are doing, and it feels very much like a terrible game of Whack-A-Mole.

What we need is to shift the paradigm, to reassert the concepts of collective response to problems and the expansion of the public sector (aka the commons) as the only guarantor of real freedom and social progress. This won’t be easy, but to use a sports analogy, the best defense is a good offense.

To change the debate we must do three things: first, redefine what government spending is and why it is critical to society; second, overcome the argument that the government is already spending too much and as a result going into debt and make clear that government budget deficits are NOT primarily a product of increased spending over the last 40 years (with the exception of spending on the military & war, which has played a significant role), but rather of reduced revenues due to tax cuts for the wealthy and tax avoidance by the corporations; and finally emphasize that the growing economic inequality and the problems it creates are a product of the very changes in government policies which the reactionaries keep shoving down our throats.

Government (more accurately “the state”) is the way in which a society protects and provides benefits for individuals that they can not effectively provide for themselves. It performs that role by taking some of the wealth produced by society (usually through taxes) and investing it to make available these benefits and protections. While individuals may disagree with this or that particular use of society’s resources (and as progressives we do disagree with its use to project American power and dominance abroad), we need to recreate a consensus that overall what governments do is both necessary and beneficial. Here we can use examples to demonstrate how society could not possibly function without these collective activities (police, roads, schools, etc.)

Well duh, everybody knows that, don’t they? No, this is where the reactionaries get support from ordinary Americans, by simply denying this role for government. What progressives must do is repeat this framework whenever we fight for a particular program or policy. We need to point out that the collective actions of government benefit society even when they may not affect a particular individual. Public education benefits everyone in a multitude of ways, even those who don’t have children in the schools!

But government has a second role to play (and one that it has not always carried out). Jared Diamond in his book “Collapse” points out that individuals’ and private corporations’ pursuit of their short-term interests may frequently occur at the expense of other individuals and of the long-term survival of the society. Thus, a critical role of the state is to defend those collective and long-term interests against rapacious forces that threaten individual and/or group survival (read coal and oil industries and global warming).

Conclusion: Society needs government with adequate resources to carry out those functions. The question then becomes, where can those resources come from, not where can we cut, cut, cut.

Our second task should be a lot easier. “Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years.  Legislation enacted since 2001 added about $3.0 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2007, with nearly half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) And that does not even include the much more significant Reagan/Bush tax cuts of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But tax cuts have had another “side effect” recognized as early as the later 1980s. Kevin Phillips (former chief political analyst for Nixon’s 1968 campaign) in his book “The Politics of Rich and Poor” points out that it was a major factor in the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the very wealthy beginning in the 1980s.

Which brings us to the third point we need to hammer home. While many “mainstream” economists and politicians seem oblivious to the fact, the outstanding economic problem of the 21^st century is not growth, but rather income and wealth inequality, that is the distribution of the income society produces.

The third point requires a lot more analysis, but I would highly recommend the book our Wilmington Progressive Book Club is currently reading and discussing, Runaway Inequality by Les Leopold as a good starting point. More on this later.

The Empire Strikes Back

In the wake of the populist explosion of the last 8 year that has swept the US Democratic, UK Labor and other Social Democratic parties from power, we have seen two different responses from the traditional conservative and neo-liberal elites that have dominated Western politics for the last 40 years, particularly since the fall of Communism. This is perhaps most true of the US and Great Britain.

The conservative elites have embraced rightwing populism and are utilizing its energy to continue to roll back the economic, social and political advances that social democracy achieved in the 20^th Century. They have done this by focusing the legitimate anger of ordinary people on immigrants, terrorism, etc., while enriching their friends at the public trough and through privatization of the commons. And they are winning just about everywhere, but particularly in the US.

Not so the neo-liberal elites. They have not only resisted the populist wave, they continue to urge that the way forward is to move to the center, although in this period the “center” keeps shifting to the right. They do this for several reasons: a sincere, if misguided, belief that by moving to the right they will pick up support from middle forces alienated by the extreme right turn of the conservative parties; a desire to maintain support from wealthy patrons in finance (Wall Street) and in the technology sector (Silicon Valley); and a supposition that the left has no other place to go.

One would think that after a series of disastrous defeats (and long-term decline, as is the case for the Democratic Party in the US and many Socialist and Social Democratic Parties in Europe) they might have reason to question this approach. But, NO, instead they keep doubling down.

Two articles in the New York Times illustrate this refusal by the liberal elite to take seriously the populist explosion and the force behind it – the growth of inequality. The first “John Lennon vs Steve Bannon” by Jochen Bittner (Feb 23, 2017) focuses on cultural and political differences as the source of the deepening rift with American and European societies. According to Bittner, the Lennonists have an internationalist, traditional liberal/libertarian, secular world view often based on identity politics while Bannonism arouse as a critique of the Lennonists and takes a nationalist perspective, is more likely to align with Judeo-Christianity, and rejects the idea that various sectors of society (women, minorities, LGBTQ) are still not treated equality with straight, white males. His conclusion – that the two world views must engage in dialogue from the center, a “third way”, if you like.

Tony Blair (yes, he keeps turning up like a bad penny; reminds me of someone else closer to home) is even more direct in his opinion piece “Against Populism, the Center Must Hold” (March 3, 2017). Blair’s dismissal of “leftist populism” as being unable to compete with rightwing populism shows that he is totally out of touch with what has been happening – both in the US (Sanders campaign) and in Southern Europe. His recipe for the “progressives” is to build from the center by caving to the right on issues like immigration and gender identity (he doesn’t mention racism or sexism, but I’m sure he would include these as issues that the progressives obsess about). Then, we can bring together Silicon Valley (did he forget to mention Wall Street?) and those responsible for public policy and all live happily in our Brave New World.

The problem with all this BS is that it ignores the 8000 pound gorilla in the room. “It’s the economy stupid”, to quote James Carville, campaign strategist for the Bill Clinton campaign. Populist movements do not arise out of thin air; they are a response to something that causes widespread pain. Is it a coincidence that we have seen these movements, both of the right and left, in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the lack of a real recovery (forget the great gambling house for the rich, the stock market) for the large majority of the working class in Europe and the US?

Economic inequality has reached an extreme that has not been seen since the Gilded Age and continues to grow. Real economists (like Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz), not those who are point men for big business, have been pointing this out for several years, but the political elites of the Democratic Party and its counterparts in Europe have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the consequences.

Guy Standing, Professor of Economics at the University of London, in his book The Precariat: A Dangerous New Class, has given us some insight into the social and political implications of runaway inequality and they are not pretty. His analysis concludes that members of this new class face a life of insecurity, lacking prospects for long term employment (even m any who are college graduates) and living a precarious life on the edge of poverty and despair. His analysis is that as much as 50% of the population of European countries and the US now belongs to the “precariat”. Its members are susceptible to demagogues, think Trump, unless the progressive left offers clear and palpable alternatives.

The road ahead for progressives in the US must not be to double down on the failed politics of neoliberalism. If we are to resist and overcome the rightwing surge, we must offer something more – a true vision of a society where the government and the economy meet the needs of the many, not the rapacious greed of the few.  

The 2016 Election – Part 5 – What is to be done?

Given the preceding analyses of the election (Parts 1-4), the question we need to answer is where does the progressive movement go from here? Perhaps the easier part is to begin with where we shouldn’t go, since much of the renewed political activism seems to be guided, either explicitly or implicitly, by what I would argue are incorrect or incomplete evaluations of how we got to where we are today.

One position is that we (and here I mean progressive Democratic Party activists) need to double down on what we’ve been doing. Whether it’s work harder (organize more effectively, have more personal contacts, have a 50-state strategy, etc.) or work smarter (utilize the internet, voter identification software, etc.) or raise more money, it is essentially the same prescription we’ve heard for years. The problem here is that this is exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing, and it hasn’t worked. “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is …” (I assume you know the rest of the quote).

Another position, put forth by the Indivisible folks, is to take up the “strategy” of the tea party. I’ve dealt with my critique of that in part 3 on the election, but it deserves further comment since it has come to dominate a great deal of the activist response to the Trump election. At the risk of sounding harsh in response to the genuine sentiments motivating this approach, it leads to knee-jerk reactions to every obscenity coming from the Trump administration. One can almost imagine Trump's advisers urging a particular action by telling him “This will really get a reaction from the liberals. Let’s keep them busy.”

There many problems with this approach. First, it generally reaches only those already part of the “choir”. It does little to change the minds of those who sat out the election or voted for Trump because he was someone who gave the establishment the finger. If anything, it reinforces their view that the opposition does not speak for them.

Second, it will almost always come up short (if the strategy couldn’t block the Betsy DeVos nomination, where do the Indivisible folks think we can win?) which will demoralize many of the newer activists. True, it can help to give Democrats in Congress some backbone, but beyond that, it accomplishes little. And I believe there are better ways to shore up weak-kneed Democratic lawmakers.

Third, it may focus attention on less, rather than more, critical aspects of the assault on ordinary Americans, allowing the Trump administration to push through more damaging measures without significant opposition. Feint one way, run with your reactionary politics in another direction.

But most importantly, it fails to develop a conversation around the assumptions of the existing political establishment (both liberal and conservative). In other words, it fails to offer a real alternative vision to the Republican’s assault on all of us.

So, what do we need to do?

A.    FOCUSED RESISTANCE

I am not saying that resistance isn’t critical. I believe that we need to resist with all our might, but that resistance needs to be focused in three ways; first on the defense of those most vulnerable, second on issues where we can draw clear lessons which can begin the change the conversation and third on issues where we have at least a chance of winning.

A good example is the resistance to the Muslim ban. It focuses on defending a vulnerable minority, it allows us to frame our resistance as supporting a basic tenet of our democracy, and it is complemented by a legal strategy that could produce a win for the resistance.

Likewise, the battle to defeat the nomination of Betsy DeVos. It had an outside chance of winning; it focused on defending poor and minority children, who are those who are most affected by the attempts to dismantle public education; and it gave us the opportunity to rise up in support of maintaining public, rather than privatized, education – a defense of the “commons” against the privatizers.

I would argue that, in the immediate future, our resistance needs to focus on the battle over health care. This should include not only preserving Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA and fully funding Planned Parenthood, but expanding affordable health care to all by creating a single payer health care system. A vigorous defense of the existing programs which provide healthcare insurance for millions of Americans (many of whom may have voted for Trump) combined with a clearly stated plan which would guarantee benefits to all Americans would allow us to begin changing the conversation.

B.     CHANGING THE CONVERSATION by CREATING A VISION

Much of the efforts of progressives have been focused on mobilizing our forces opposition to particular actions or policies of the Trump administration. The problem is that this does not reach those who feel they are disenfranchised or have been scammed by the right-wing alt-facts (aka, lies). After the massive protests on Jan. 21^st, Trump tweeted asking why the protesters didn’t vote. Well, he was wrong, as usual. They did vote and not for him. But how did this action reach out to those who didn’t vote or voted for him?  The answer should be obvious – it did not.

Progressives need to create a vision, a big picture that counters the picture that the right has cultivated for the past forty years. Like any big picture, it requires an overarching theme that ties together the various issues and constituencies that can make up the majority of Americans. I would argue that the theme must be the fight against inequality.

That fight means more than just raising the minimum wage, or taxing the rich or free college tuition at public colleges and universities. It requires rejecting what Les Leopold refers to as the “Better Business Climate model” and the idea that economic competition always leads to a better life. It requires us to accept that the economy should serve the interests of the society rather than the other way around; that cooperation trumps competition in promoting the interests of all. It means rejecting the “Race to the Top” with its winners (and therefore its losers) and adopting the guiding principle of the labor movement that we all advance together ("the union makes us strong").

This is, unfortunately, not the big picture that has been projected by the Democratic Party (and in Europe by the Social Democratic, Labor or other “left” parties). It is, as a number of authors have argued, the central reason for the decline of these parties and the populist explosion since the Great Recession. It is why we must concentrate our efforts on make the Democratic Party a true part of the people.

C.     RESTORING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AS THE “PARTY OF THE PEOPLE”

There is nothing wrong with a big-tent party bringing together various electorates under the guise of identity politics. But a big tent needs a center pole that provides support for the entire structure and a political party needs a central tenet that unifies its constituencies under a single banner. I would argue that a “party of the people” needs to build its program around the fight against inequality and for economic as well as social justice. Despite its progressive platform (largely ignored during the election campaign) the Democrats have not done that for fear of alienating their Wall Street and Silicon Valley supporters.

How can the Democratic Party merge an all-out struggle against inequality and the assumptions that arise from accepting competition as the be all and end all of progress and still maintain its big tent? By tying the struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia to a broad movement against inequality which can unite us all (well, except for the 1%).


We must point out that everyone loses when working people allow politicians to turn us against each other. We need to project an image that is more than a coalition of groups and an inclusive organization that fights for each group’s demands. We need to show explicitly that behind that support for each issue is the overriding issue that unites us all. Then and only then will the Democratic Party be able to reclaim the mantle as “the Party of the People” and capture the populist tide that has swept the country.

Conversation with a Concerned & Aware Friend

This is from a very recent conversation with an old Florida friend, Mike Flanery, an engineer & Quaker activist.

Mike,

You mentioned that there were 7 issues of critical threat to the future - e.g. human cloning.  Could I 

get a complete list & maybe a citation or citations if possible?

D Michael Flanery	11:32 AM (2 hours ago)
to me

My short list, there are probably more:

Critical Issues that concern me that seem unstoppable considering human tribalism and self-interest. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1) Sea Level Rise – General Displacement, starvation.  Climate change in Syria is an example. This will 

occur around the world at the same time, tipping point has already been crossed, CO2 levels in oceans, 

methane in tundra.

2) Wealth Distribution due to Sea Level Rise – .  Wealthy gain short term financial benefits to raise roads, 

barriers built at public / future indebtedness, (Miami, $6B in new construction, denying SLR.  Loss of tax 

revenue due to decrease in land values are one reason Governor won’t discuss climate change “not on 

his watch will land values go down” Then as rise increases and desirable sandy beaches – around the 

world – disappear, the wealthy use taxes on poor (who were living at higher areas) to drive them out 

(displacement).  Ref Great Depression, where taxes went up on the poor, driving them into bankruptcy) 

At that point rich live in most protected areas, middle and lower classes have nothing, and then Oligarchy, 

Feudalism.

3) Genetics & Life Extension– Access to life extension methods and drugs, and major expenses as well, 

limited by those in power and with money to their supporters and relatives.  Include organ transplants, (soon 

to be grown in pigs)

4) Cloning – Already Dolly the Sheep has been successfully cloned, and cones are surviving just fine.  

Dictators will clone themselves, choosing best gene modifications, and perhaps cloning less capable 

workers.  “Time machine +)

5) Control of Personal Information – Those in power will be able to know everything we do.  Computers can 

already translate our voices, read handwriting and text in our Facebook mimes, and match faces.  This is 

coming soon.   With this they will control us.  No apparent way to stop, particularly the efforts of a foreign 

county like Russia who already knows all they need to control Trump.

6) Computer Superiority – Postulated as being the next phase of human evolution.

7) Nuclear “war” with explosive and radioactive agents, particularly in the hands of Sociopaths, 

Narcissists, others for which reconciliation and empathy are valueless.  Proliferation continues – 

N Korea, Pakistan, Israel, etc.  For example, N Korea is developing submarines that can launch 

missiles without being detected.  They are also selling missiles to other countries.  When a 

nuclear explosion goes off in NY or LA, we will have to retaliate, and it’s over.

The 2016 Election – Part 4 - Who Could Have Predicted It?

A lot has been written about who did and who didn’t predict the outcome of the 2016 election, based on polls in the weeks before Nov. 8^th. Yes, a very few were lucky and predicted Trump’s win but the large majority got it wrong. And even those prognosticators who got it right, provided data to support their prediction, but little, if any, analysis of why.

One author got it right well before the two parties had decided on their candidates and without any reference to polling data. Thomas Frank, in his book “Listen Liberal” (published in March of 2016), analyses the decline of the Democratic Party as a party of the people from the 1970s down to through the Obama administration. What he does is put this election in historical context so can we begin to understand, not just this loss, but the overall decline of the Democratic Party to a point where it has less political power than at any time since 1928.

Frank’s thesis is simple – the Democratic Party has gone from the party of the working class (not just the white working class) to the party of the “professional” class or the party of the 10% (as opposed to the Republicans who are the party of the truly wealthy, of the 1%). This class, which the New Democrats see as the agent of change, is composed of highly educated (i.e., smart), innovative and successful individuals. They tend to be socially liberal; they are “hip” and cosmopolitan. They believe that individuals should reap rewards based on merit and that competition will always lead to the best results.

The latter explains why these New Democrats have no real use for unions. It also explains why they support charter schools and NAFTA and TPP. Most importantly, it explains why the Democrats have failed to take up the banner against inequality; why they have made balancing the federal budget a more important goal than full employment; why they have bailed out banks but not home owners who are being foreclosed; and so on.

Frank documents the failure of both the Clinton and Obama presidencies to take on inequality in any meaningful way. In fact, he argues that Clinton’s legacy has made the situation much worse for large sectors of the working class (particularly African Americans) and notes all the missed opportunities for combating inequality in responding to the Great Recession during Obama’s 8 years in office.

The basic logic of focusing on the “professional” class is that they are the rising demographic which supports the social and economic politics of the “big tent” party. And the working class? They will have nowhere else to go and so they will follow their “betters” (my word, not Frank’s) to the polls and vote Democrat. The problem with this is that there are other options – stay at home (which many, many did on Nov. 8^th) or follow the pseudo populist who promises to return their country to them.

As should be obvious, this has nothing to do with Citizens United or the need to raise campaign contributions from the uber-rich. Getting money out of politics won’t affect this basic ideological shift within the party. Only making the struggle against inequality CENTRAL to the Democratic Party’s agenda can we begin to rebuild the “party of the people”.

Conclusion: To quote Gary Younge in The Nation, “The Democratic machine does not need a tune-up—it needs a complete overhaul.”

The 2016 Election – Part 3 - Where do we go from here – NOT!

We shouldn’t be surprised that the elite liberal establishment (we definitely need a good acronym for it – EEL would work if we just shifted the words around) has come out with their analysis of what happened and why. In the last couple of days, I have been made aware of two examples that merit response because they represent a misreading of the historical context of this election and therefore fail to provide guidance to how progressives can move forward.

The first, and most pernicious, is an article by Paul Krugman, Useful Idiots Galore, that appeared in the NYT. Krugman argues that a swing of 1% in the election sent Sec. Clinton down to defeat. That swing, he states was due to “dirty tricks” (my name, not his), namely the actions of Russia and James Comey in the days leading up to Nov. 8^th which produced the shift and threw the election to Trump. And he may well be right, but …

The conclusion implied from this analysis is dead wrong. It proceeds from the failure to locate this election in the historical context of American politics for the last 40 years. The question he doesn’t address is why was this election so close to begin with. And he fails to even mention the fact that this election marks the continuation of a trend that has seen the Democratic Party become a permanent minority party in most parts of the US. Congress is now solidly in the hands of the Republicans. The Senate races in 2 years will be a disaster for Democrats as they must defend a large majority of the seats that will be up for election, and the House – well’ we can forget about that since only about 10% of the seats are even contestable. Most state governments are controlled by Republicans. Fewer and fewer young people are registering as Democrats. And so on.

What has been the anomaly is that, prior to 2016, Democrats have won 5 of the last 6 Presidential elections (counting Gore’s win in 2000). Now, even that critical office has fallen to the most reactionary forces. Arguing that this election was stolen keeps us from analyzing the fundamental problems of the Democratic Party that led to this loss. To quote Thomas Frank, “What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?”

I would posit that Krugman doesn’t know because he is part of the problem. Democrats need to stop moaning about what the Repugs (a wonderful bastardization of their party’s name that my wife has been using for a while) are doing and own up to what they did wrong. We don’t need to double down on what we have always done, nor do we need to “wait” for changing demographics to give us victory. What the Democratic Party needs is something to motivate voters. It needs to become the vehicle for a real political revolution.

In that light, the widely-circulated article “Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Resisting the Trump Agenda” does hit on a couple of important points. The Congressional staffers who drew it up stress the need to organize locally and call for resistance to every part of the Republican’s agenda. They caution against “buying into false promises or accepting partial concessions”.  Yes and Yes! These are critical to any strategy to reverse the losses that Democrats have sustained.

But their prescription to follow the strategy and tactics of the Tea Party are based on both a misunderstanding of the history of that reactionary movement and of the objective conditions we face today.

First, the Tea Party did not arise in an ideological vacuum. Over forty years ago, reactionaries (please don’t call them conservatives, because they are not trying to “conserve” anything) began an ideological assault on the politics of the New Deal, particularly targeting the idea that government should have any role outside of power to protect private property (basically the military and the police). This assault was carried out by a large array of think tanks, media outlets, etc. and by 1980 had successfully altered the political debate so as to lay the groundwork for the extreme reactionaries of the Tea Party (much to the chagrin of many of the old-line Republicans). The rules of the game were stacked in their favor.

No such game-changing ideological work has been done to date for the progressive movement. Despite some beginnings by progressive think tanks and institutions and the popularization of some progressive ideas by mass movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign, the reactionaries still dominate the conversation. Without breaking this strangle hold on framing the questions which we address, the left will not be able to build a mass movement. The beginnings of any political revolution are in ideology, translated into program and put into place by organization. You don’t start with organization.

Second, we need to remember that the goal of the Tea Party was stop government from functioning, thereby proving that government was incapable of solving problems. Success for the party of “no” did not involve mobilizing support for programs designed to meet the needs of ordinary people. Given our historical structure of checks and balances, it is a lot easier to prevent things from happening than to make them happen. Keeping the government from functioning, becoming the new party of “no” cannot be the strategy for Democrats, it simply plays into the hands of the reactionaries. We need a positive, not a negative, blueprint.

Third, the successes of the Tea Party came at a time when the Republicans were the majority party in both the House and Senate. The Tea Party activist tactics revolved around making sure that moderate Republicans (the few that are left) towed their line. Right now Democrats are not in control of either house in Congress and only in a few states do they have much influence in the state legislatures; they are hardly in a position to block reactionary legislation.

Thus, trying to influence (or annoy) Republicans in Congress is a poor strategy.  Neither Trump nor the Congressional Republicans are about to back away from what they see as a chance to implement their reactionary policies on a grand scale. While it may be possible to sway a few moderate Republicans in battleground districts on a few issues (and we must pursue that whenever we can) as a general strategy it will fail. To recapture the hearts and minds, Democrats must become the party of “Yes, We Can”.

Another problem with the proposed strategy (I’m not sure it even qualifies as a strategy) is its piecemeal approach to policy. The Democrats have played “small ball” for much of the last 40 years, trying to build a coalition here and another one there to make limited gains. An excellent example is the Affordable Care Act. What is needed to mobilize Democratic voters, Independents and even some Republicans. is to merge the populist upsurge we are witnessing with the “big-tent” strategy to create a broad “new deal”.  

For the Democratic Party, it’s time to “tell no lies and claim no easy victories”.

Note: Part 4 will deal with the tasks ahead.

The 2016 Election (Part 2) – Why Did It Happen and Why Didn’t We See It Coming?

The election of Donald Trump caught a lot of people by surprise – and I’m certainly one of them. Clinton had every advantage – her approval ratings, although terrible, were better than his; she raised more money; she had the support of almost every major media outlet; she had a ground game and he did not; she had the strong support of the entire Democratic Party political establishment, his support from the Republican Party establishment was tepid at best. I could go on.

Yet, as the night of November 8^th went on, battleground state after battleground state in the Midwest and South fell to Trump in what was an endless cascade of unimaginable defeats. It seemed like a bad dream (read, nightmare) and it still does. How could the polls and the pols have been so wrong?

While there are other factors that need to be considered (see below), one clue to the Democratic defeat can be found, not so much in “how” people voted, as in “who” voted. We know that the turnout in general and among African-Americans and young voters was down. On the other hand, it appears that significant numbers of what has been described as the “missing white vote”, may have tipped the balance in Trump’s favor – particularly in rural areas and small towns. What distinguishes these areas is that they have not benefitted from the policies of the liberal establishment – especially those associated with trade. Little wonder that in those areas, there was no enthusiasm and much distrust for the Democratic Party standard bearer, Sec. Clinton, who was seen as the embodiment of liberal establishment politics.

Further, if we look at which areas of the country gave strong support to the Democratic ticket, we see areas that have not experienced the economic decline to the extent middle America has. Although income inequality is very high in these areas, economic growth has, for the most part, been concentrated there. As a result, there is not the same level of anti-establishment sentiment and less support for a loose cannon, who promises to “overthrow” much of the system.

This may also account for the fact that the liberal establishment (leadership of the Democratic Party and the main stream media) never saw this coming. They have little awareness of, and much distain for, this part of American society. They live, both physically and intellectually, in a different world, and have written these folks off, assuming that the support from women, minorities, the LBGT community and young people, generated by the Democrats’ liberal social policies, would provide them with a new majority. Thus, the same “identity” politics that promised a victory for Sec. Clinton blinded the campaign to the danger from rural America.

The reliance on the Democratic constituencies might have elected Clinton, except that significant sectors of these constituencies are no longer motivated by the “more of the same” approach of the Democratic Party, as they too have failed to benefit from the economic growth over the past 40 years (see American Dream Collapses for Young, StarNews, Wilmington, NC). Fear of what Trump could do if elected, particularly since it seemed that he had no real chance of winning, was not enough for them to get out and vote. Perhaps they would have come out to vote had the Democratic candidate offered an alternative to “politics as usual” (yes, I’m talking about Bernie) but we will never know.

Trump won the enthusiastic support of many whites (and a significant number of Hispanics) by scapegoating the “other”. But scapegoating doesn’t go very far unless people are dissatisfied with what is going on in their lives. It allows someone to look at their problems as caused by terrorists or immigrants or anyone who is different, particularly if they are not given a clear and credible alternative explanation.

To summarize, I would argue that the main factor leading to Trump’s election was the failure of the Democratic Party to offer a hard-hitting and genuine alternative to economic policies of both Democrat and Republican administrations over the last 40 years. These policies have left large part of American society behind and have provided fertile ground for the rise of reaction – first the tea-party and now Trump. This is not an American phenomenon alone; we are seeing it from Brexit to the resurgence of right-wing, nationalist parties in Europe.

These developments seem to share one thing in common; they result from the extreme (and rising) inequality in these countries and the growth of a class, which has been appropriately named the precariat by Guy Standing, of individuals who live on the edge of poverty and who have little or no stability in their lives. Their lack of stability, in contrast to the traditional working class, makes them more susceptible to demagogues like Trump.

Two other factors in Trump's “win” merit attention, because they show how great a danger our democracy faces in the years ahead. The first is the “ignorance factor”. A poll recently released to MSNBC shows that 2 in 5 Trump voters are so misinformed that they believe the stock market actually went down during the 7+ years that Obama was President and 2/3rds think that unemployment went up during the same time. No wonder “fake news” had such a significant effect during the election.

I would argue that the ignorance factor is the result of two interrelated components: first, the transformation of the media and its decline as a source of news and other information and second, the rise of the internet. Today the mainstream media (particularly the broadcast media - who reads newspapers any more?) is focused on entertaining, rather than informing, the public. Trump’s antics were much more entertaining than dealing with the issues in the election, so he “merited” more coverage. For many, their main source of information, besides radio talk shows, was the internet. The problem here is that anyone can post on the internet (even me) without one shred of support, and “fake news” can spread like wildfire.

The second factor is voter suppression. While we don’t know exactly how great an effect the successful acts of voter suppression were in places like Wisconsin, just the widespread information about voter IDs may have kept millions from attempting to vote. A personal note: I spent over 100 hours as a poll greeter (in New Hanover County, NC) and had countless individuals who came to vote ask what kind of ID they needed, even though the voter ID law in North Carolina had been thrown out over 3 months before the election. How many more simply decided not to try to vote because they were unsure if they had the “right” ID? Voter suppression, I would argue, works even if there is no legal barrier but only a perception that one exists.

Why is all this important? Because, unless we understand what happened and why, we will continue down the rabbit hole and the forces of reaction will lead our country in a direction to scary to even contemplate.