Francisco Panizza writes about how Trump's theatrical refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election fits into his right-populist politics, Trump: Once a populist always a populistLSE Blog 11/13/2020). His comments address the "cultural cleavage" expression about (supposedly) not being heard that I mentioned in my last post
When it became clear that Trump had lost the election the commentariat thought that he should behave as a good old liberal democrat and concede. Once again, they are being left disappointed. Why should he? By claiming electoral fraud and refusing to concede, he is fuelling [sic] the long-held grievances of his base. In 2016, Trump told his supporters that their voices were not being heard, now he is telling them that their votes are not being counted. In both cases his supporters believe that they have been denied their claim to incarnate the true American people and the exercise of their sovereign rights.
By alleging mass fraud that would require the complicity of Democratic Party voters, the party’s machine and Democratic-leaning electoral authorities, Trump is creating an antagonism that is both wider and deeper than the one he set up against Hillary Clinton in 2016. In fact, one of the weaknesses of Trump’s 2020 electoral campaign was that it was difficult for him to demonise Biden, as he did with Clinton. Now, he is denying legitimacy to his government and othering his voters as cheaters. By further polarising American politics, Trump is also strengthening his grip on the Republican party, as seen by the lack of any substantial challenges to his allegations of fraud from the Republican establishment. Today, Trump owns the votes, owns the narrative and owns the party. [my emphasis]
Conservative Democrats, of course, couldn't wait until Trump actually concedes - well, to be fair, he's not likely to ever personally concede - to start fighting the Real Enemy. Which in their view, means progressive Democrats. So, the intra-party fight is on (again). Hopefully, this will go on for the next four years. Because the conservative Dems won't stop it during that time. So the progressives can't, either. Politics is about conflict, after all. See Mr. Madison's Federalist #10. In which he observes, that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property."
ConservaDem Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin falls back on the we-aren't-being-heard theme in explaining why Democrats should be, uh, more like Donald Trump. The guy who just lost the Presidential election by more than five million votes. (Mayank Aggarwal, Biden’s lead in popular vote now more than 5 millionIndependent 11/11/2020)
“You know, the one thing I will say about Donald Trump,” Slotkin began. “He doesn’t talk down to anybody. He is who he is, but he doesn’t talk down to anyone. And I think that there is a certain voter out there because of that who identifies with him and appreciates him.” (This “certain voter,” she noted, is the MAGA enthusiast who appreciates that Trump does not condescend to them while ignoring how he belittles and demeans others.) [emphasis in original]
Which is why I don't find trying not to look down on the voters is particularly deep strategic insight. Isn't this something that pretty much every candidate in any democracy knows they sure try to avoid doing?
In addition:
“It’s not just that he eats cheeseburgers at a big celebratory dinner. It’s not just that he does things that the common man can kind of appreciate. And it’s not even because he uses kind of simplistic language—he doesn’t use complicated, wonky language, the way a lot of Democrats do,” Slotkin said. “We sometimes make people feel like they aren’t conscientious enough. They aren’t thoughtful enough. They aren’t ‘woke’ enough. They aren’t smart enough or educated enough to just understand what’s good for them. … It’s talking down to people. It’s alienating them. And there’s just certain voters who feel so distant from the political process—it’s not their life, it’s not their world. They hate it. They don’t like all that politics stuff. Trump speaks to them, because he includes them.” [my emphasis]
Uh, isn't bitching about voters who just "don’t like all that politics stuff" a way of saying you "look down" on them. Should Democrats show they are listening to them by saying "politics is awful, I hate it and you should to"? Hard to see how that makes sense for a candidate actually running a political campaign in an election. But ConservaDems insights are sometimes difficult to decipher. Even if they avoid that thar "complicated, wonky language"!
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this kind of talk means the Democrats should look to stage Sister Souljah moments to show white voter that minorities bug them, too. It's the principle of The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the LeftFrumForum 08/10/2010)
Alberta's article gives another long explication of the ConservaDems attacks on progressives. Don't look for any discussion of the popularity of, say Medicare For All. Or any explanation of how Democrats can get Republicans to stop calling them names in election campaigns. Since conservatives have been attacking their opponents as "socialists" since, oh, 1865 or so. (See: Heather Cox Richardson, Marx is Not Around the CornerMoyers on Democracy 10/28/2020.)
The Ilhan Omar flap was a self-induced fumble on the part of the establishment Democrats that illustrated some unpleasant facets of the current Democratic Party. Such as, their unwillingness to challenge the rightwing Netanyahu government in Israel even when it works against the self-defined interests of the United States, and even less so leverage American civilian and military aid to demand changes in the settlement policies, for instance, that the US rightly recognizes as in violation of international law.
It also revealed the Democrats' unwillingness to challenge Islamophobia, and even a willingness to play on it. Ilhan Omar is a black Congresswoman who is Muslim, relatively young (37), progressive on most issues, and an immigrant from Somalia. By bashing her, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer could give a nod to conservative white voters who would never vote for a Democrat in 1000 years that Democrats, too, can be anti-Mulsim, anti-black, anti-immigrant, and against uppity young women - all in one package!
Is that a stretch? I don't think so. There are various kinds of people promoting anti-Semitism. White Christian Congressman Gym Jordan, for instance. (Zack Ford, Ilhan Omar’s critics have little to say about Jim Jordan’s anti-Semitic tweetThink Progress 03/04/2019) But the biggest group by far is made up of fundamentalist Christians. And this isn't a recent recognition. Michael Lind did a great review essay 24 years ago on Pat Robertson's book The New World Order (1991) that details how Robertson presents an anti-Semitic vision of history, Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy TheoryNew York Review of Books 02/02/1995. Robertson did a follow-up book along the same lines, The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense (1993). Lind noted in 1995 that Robertson "is the founder and leader of the most powerful grass-roots movement in American politics today", meaning the Christian Coalition, then the most prominent Christian Right group.
Robertson is still around, though his personal influence is not so dominant among the Christian Right as it was in 1995. But anti-Semitic theology is just as present if not more so today as it was 24 years ago. Much of it centers around "End Times" theology, the most prominent versions of which look forward with happy anticipation to the day that all the Jews in the world will be "gathered" into Greater Israel where most of them will be slaughtered in a huge war. The remaining few Jews will then convert to Christianity and the Second Coming of Christ can occur. There are variations on the details. One of the fundamentalists in the following video has the unslaughtered Jewish remnant converting when Jesus returns to Earth. Why Evangelical Christians Love IsraelVice News 05/15/2018 (published on YouTube):
The establishment Democrats are willing to challenge Christian fundamentalist political positions. But they are not willing to directly challenge this kind of incredibly influential anti-Semitism directly. Because Democrats have been tiptoing around Christian fundamentalists since 1978. So when we see things like the Trump-Pence Administration flaunting with their friendship with John Hagee, leader of the group Christians United For Israel (CUFI), a large and prominent fundamentalist group that promotes an anti-Semitic End Times ideology (Kelsey Bradshaw, S.A. pastor John Hagee meets with President Trump to discuss international affairsSan Antonio Express 04/05/2017), the Democrats don't rush to denounce them in public, much less try to pass censure resolutions against them.
But a black, immigrant Muslim Congresswoman criticizing the influence of the Israel lobby in promoting US support for the rightwing Netanyahu government, that's something Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer were willing to jump on right away, fecklessly dancing to the Republicans' tune, as they so often do.
Part of what establishment Democrats have done to appear at least critical-minded toward Republican and far-right Islamophobia is to urge that the national, state, and local governments work with members of the American Muslim community to combat extremism. One of the biggest American and European criticisms of Muslim extremism and even Islam generally is their hostility to women's rights. Far-right parties in Europe who are conservative or even hostile toward protecting women's rights, like the far-right Austrian FPÖ and their partners in the "turquoise" faction of the Austrian Christian Democratic (ÖVP) party, use women's rights as one of the main slogans for their Islamophobia and general hostility to Muslims. And as a cover for their own anti-women's-rights stances.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (DFL-MN), along with over thirty members of the House Democratic Caucus, introduced the Federal Worker Childcare Protection Act of 2019 today—which ensures that federal employees affected by the shutdown are eligible for reimbursement of their childcare expenses. ... There are about 100 childcare facilities in federal buildings across the country providing care to 7,500 children a day, two thirds of whom are children of federal employees. As long as those daycares are closed, many parents are paying double – fees to their interim provider, on top of fees to the closed daycare to maintain their child’s place once the government reopens.
“What this bill does is simple: it makes sure that the people who are suffering because of the President’s manufactured crisis are at the very least able to cover their childcare expenses,” Rep. Omar said. “This bill is personal for me. I am a working parent with three beautiful children and I know firsthand the costs associated with child care.”
But the Democratic establishment isn't interested in Omar as a model of a small-d democratic and successful Muslim woman. (Much less a large-d Democratic one!) They are more interested in discrediting her as a progressive and a black Muslim immigrant woman. Even at the cost of stepping on the publicity for their own HR1 bill to secure elections and fight corruption. All while tip-toing around Republican white supremacy and anti-Semitism.
The most recent attacks on Representative Omar are based on her answer to a broad question about anti-Semitism during a recent town hall meeting at Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC. I was there, sitting just a few feet from Omar, asking a question during the Q&A. She never said that Jews have dual loyalty. She never expressed “prejudicial attitudes” or supported “discriminatory acts” against Jews or anyone else. And yet that is the language being proposed for a Democratic Party–sponsored resolution aimed at undermining Omar’s credibility, and likely that of Rashida Tlaib, the other Muslim woman just elected to Congress. Like Omar, Tlaib, who is Palestinian, stands forthrightly in support of Palestinian rights, against the power of the pro-Israel lobby and other lobbies that use money to influence Congress to support guns, environmental destruction, and Israeli violations of human rights—and she stands against racism and anti-Semitism.
These members of Congress understand that real anti-Semitism in the United States has been rooted in white supremacy since the Ku Klux Klan reemerged in 1915 and added Jews to the African Americans who had long been their primary target. That’s the real anti-Semitism we’re seeing — the violence of the Charlottesville march by Nazis and the Klan, the Pittsburgh synagogue murders, all of it rooted in white supremacy. Criticism of Israel, and of its human-rights and international-law violations and its lobbies, is simply not anti-Semitism. [my emphasis]
The white Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites are also among the whites most likely to support intense white supremacist ideas and practices. And Donald Trump. The prominent "Ex-Eveangelical" writer Chris Stroop (also a scholar of Russia) writes about the centrality of the Christian Right to the radicalization of the Republican Party and to Trump's grassroots supprt (#ChristianAltFacts, or, how the Christian Right Broke America 02/24/2017)
Fundamentalists–including the vast majority of white Evangelicals in the US–are inherently authoritarian. Authoritarianism, for its part, is a form of abuse on a social scale that depends on gaslighting, hence post-truth politics and “alternative facts.” And ... it is the Christian Right’s #AltFacts, post-truth ethos that has radicalized and overtaken the Republican Party. Having broken one of our two major parties, the Christian Right broke America. It’s been a long time coming, but here we are–and since those of ex-Evangelicals who grew up indoctrinated and mobilized to fight the culture wars have been well aware of the plan, many of us are particularly angered and even retraumatized by the white Evangelical backlash that, with 81% of the white Evangelical vote, has brought us the disastrous Trump presidency. [my emphasis]
The controversies around Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar are instructive. As numerous writers, a number of them themselves Jewish, have explained at length, there was nothing antisemitic or even particularly controversial about what Omar has said about the pro-Israel lobby in DC, which, contrary to what some pundits might tell you, is not synonymous with the Jewish community. Nonetheless, she received a torrent of attacks, much of it from the pro-Israel Right, casting her comments as antisemitic.
Given the prevailing rhetoric over the last few years, one would have expected the Democratic party and its boosters to close ranks around Omar. After all, they’ve spent the Trump administration celebrating women’s defiant voices in politics, urging others to listen and believe women, and making the defense of immigrants a key plank of the party, while valorizing black women and their pivotal electoral role. And here they were faced with a barrage of dishonest attacks on not just an outspoken woman, but an outspoken black, Muslim, refugee woman, whose voice her political opponents were trying to silence at the same time as they lobbed racist attacks at her and she faced death threats.
Instead of adhering to their self-declared principles, the party and its prominent loyalists instead quickly joined the right-wing pile-on against Omar, to the point of putting offensive, racist words in her mouth that she never actually said. In some cases, the same people who jumped to criticize her and silence her voice had previously expressed platitudes about women and girls persevering against adversity, and black women being the party’s backbone. [my emphasis in bold; internal links omitted]
And, of course, it remains the case that Israelis themselves seem to be far more willing to criticize Israel's most questionable policies than even Democratic Members of Congress in the US:
“When the hell will someone in this government let the Israeli public know that this is a country for all its citizens and that every person is born equal. And also, that the Arabs are human beings,” @GalGadot https://t.co/gt5Cc0dK4v
This magnum opus from @ryangrim (which I contributed a bit to) makes the point that an explosion of progressive, grassroots political organizing, largely led by women and in support of women, is the legacy of the Trump presidency. https://t.co/gg5kYI49Bx
He provides a detailed report here about the upsurge in activism in the Democratic Party. And it's left activism.
It's sobering to see it reported just how systematically the Democratic Party establishment tried to discourage grassroots activism and continue their losing, consultant-centric approach:
With a strategy in hand — recruit centrist candidates with an ability to raise money from big donors — national party leaders ignored or rejected advice from anyone whose approach to combating Trump involved embracing a strong progressive alternative, whether it came from Indivisible chapters, Lancaster Stands Up, the local Democratic Party, Swing Left, or DSA [Democratic Socialists of America].
Having to battle the official Democratic Party was disorienting, but the Indivisible Guide [for Democratic activists] had prepared millions, and the 50,000 (and growing) card-carrying members of DSA were ready from the jump. Through brute force, they broke through in primaries across the country, winning some outright and pulling candidates their way in others.
And the Dem establishment is still trying to frame the current upsurge as somehow due to corporate Democratic wonderfulness:
If you listen to the gaggle of campaign operatives, media planners, strategists, and policy mandarins that holds down the centrist wing of the party, they’ll explain how they dominated the 2018 cycle, channeling anti-Trump energy into moderate, business-friendly candidates who will return Washington to a bipartisan equilibrium. In September, Third Way, the most vocal defender of the political center, released a primary score card, showing that candidates backed by the DCCC and the NewDemPAC, the political arm of the House centrist New Democrat Coalition, won an extraordinary number of races, while left-wing groups like Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution had a much lower win rate. Jim Kessler, Third Way’s co-founder, has brandished these numbers like a weapon. He boasted “20 million Democrats can’t be wrong,” in a recent email sent to Democratic insiders and forwarded to The Intercept.
But delving into the numbers, as the Progressive Change Institute has done, shows that those successes are largely exaggerated. For example, Third Way statistics claim that 32 of the 37 NewDemPAC candidates put on the organization’s watch lists before the primaries won their races. But in eight of those races (AZ-09, KS-02, MN-02, NY-22, PA-06, UT-04, WA-05, and WI-06), the NewDem endorsee had no opponent in the primary. In another 17, the disparity in fundraising between the NewDem candidate and the alternative was so stark — $2.4 million to zero in one case — that they can be said to have been virtually uncontested. So in over three-quarters of the wins, the NewDem candidate had no real competition.
He goes on to explore that propaganda claim in more detail.
I wouldn't want to minimize the role of corruption (de jure and de facto) and old-fashioned greed in this phenomenon. But there is also pressure in all organizations toward institutional conservatism. That's not a bad thing in itself. If things are working well and your organization is successful and/or growing, that's strong incentive to keep doing what you've been doing.
It's a familiar phenomenon in business. If your product or delivery method is successful and making money, it's an obvious approach to keep doing more of what has worked: tweek and update the product, extend the successful delivery method, etc. And it works, until it doesn't. It's a continuing concern for successful companies to balance the need for innovation with caution about cannibalizing the company's exissting products and services.
Back in 1998, when America Online (AOL) was stil one of the hottest tech companies out there, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in a romantic comedy film called You've Got Mail. It was in part about the emerging practice of online dating. But the plot also involved the fact that Meg Ryan's character worked for an indepenedent bookstore that had to close because of decining business. The Tom Hanks character ran a big-box bookstore on the model of Barnes & Noble and Borders (remember that company?). Ryan's character eventually gets more comfortable with the big-box model, seeing that it can provide important services that the typical independent stores couldn't.
Ironically in retrospect, even though the film dealt with online dating, it didn't give any hint of the vulnerability of the big box model to online book sales. On the other hand, there are still independent books stores in the US. Two particular favorites of mine are the legendary City Light Books in San Francisco and Lumuria in Jackson, MS. Yes, Jackson. It's one of the best bookstores you'll ever see. Stores that deal in used books can get a big margin from that trade. They can also do special events targeted to their local markets, and they often provide a more useful and enjoyable kind of personal service.
Political parties have to adapt, too. In the last quarter century, the Republican Party has converted itself from a conservative party with generally really bad ideas, a party that included some more-or-less moderate figures, to the disciplined authoritarian theocratic rightwing party that is today in full support of Trump's fascist moment. The Democrats are still acting like they are a party with a heavy contingent of Southern conservatives that had to win some Southern states to be able to take the Presidency, a condition that hasn't been the case since 1988.
The popular American philosopher Eric Hoffer famously made the cynical observation, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” (From The Temper of Our Time) It's an overgeneralization that seems to encourage an apolitical attitude. But it does refer to an organizational reality. Political movements need to construct a variety of institutions, including political parties. Not everyone who becomes part of those institutions is necessarily deeply ideologically commitment to the cause. And people do change over time. People making careers in parties and party institutions also develop a personal career interest in going along with the party. Even the most virtuous organization needs to renew itself over time. And, obviously, not all changes or renewals are good and effectie ones.
But starting on Wednesday of this week, there will be a running two-year political battle between the progressive and the corporate wings of the Democratic Party, no matter whether the Democrats take control of the House or not.
In my latest, I argue that the Democratic Party has ignored political opportunities in Mississippi -- the blackest state in the union-- where not one, but two Senate races are currently taking place. #ElectionDayhttps://t.co/TTkDjvoDBr
