The significance of progressive narratives and organization in US politics

Joe Biden has been President for just over a month now. And for the most part, even those impatient for constructive changes are relieved at the "normalcy" of having a President who actually respects the basic institutions of the government and knows that the federal government does have responsibilities to its citizens, e.g., in responding to a deadly pandemic.

Progressives are very aware that we have to press Biden to actually enact even the program he put forward in his primary candidacy, and even more so to enact the unity program agreed on with the Sanders campaign.

Naomi Klein has been pointing out that a significant difference between 2021 and 2009 is that the progressive left has a more clear organized presence in politics, in contrast to the relative weakness of the left at the beginning of the Obama-Biden Administration. In a recent editorial (Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal New York Times 02/21/2021), she analyzes the bizarre position the Republicans and their media networks have taken on the disastrous failure of radical free-market energy policies in Texas right now, that the Green New Deal that hasn't even been enacted yet is responsible for the disaster!

She goes back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to illustrate her point:

When Hurricane Katrina broke through New Orleans’s long-neglected levees in 2005, there was, briefly, some hope that the catastrophe might serve as a kind of wake-up call. Witnessing the abandonment of thousands of residents on their rooftops and in the Superdome, small-government fetishists suddenly lost their religion. “When a city is sinking into the sea and rioting runs rampant, government probably should saddle-up,” Jonah Goldberg, a prominent right-wing commentator, wrote at the time. In environmental circles, there was also discussion that the disaster could spur climate action. Some dared to predict that the collapsed levees would be for the small-government, free-market legacy of Reaganism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Soviet Communism.

None of it happened. Instead, New Orleans became a laboratory for the shock doctrine. Public schools were shut down en masse, replaced by charter schools. Public housing was demolished, and costly townhouses sprang up, preventing thousands of the city’s poorest residents, the majority of them Black, from ever returning. The reconstruction of the city became a feeding ground for private contractors. Republicans used the cover of crisis to call for expanded oil and gas exploration and new refinery capacity, much as Mr. Perry is doing right now in Texas with his calls for doubling down on gas. [my emphasis]

There were efforts to block that approach and implement more constructive responses.

But there were no readily available, alternate ideas lying around for how New Orleans could be rebuilt to make it both greener and fairer for all of its residents.

Even if there had been, there was no political muscle to turn such ideas into reality. Though the environmental justice movement has deep roots in Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” the climate justice movement was only just emerging at the time Katrina struck. There was no Sunrise Movement, the youth-led organization that occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office after the 2018 midterms to demand “good jobs, and a livable planet.” There was no “squad,” the ad hoc alliance of congressional progressives whose most visible member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sent shock waves through Washington by joining the Sunrisers in their occupation. There had not yet been two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns to show Americans how popular these ideas really are. And there was certainly no national movement for a Green New Deal.

The difference between then and now goes a very long way toward explaining why Mr. Abbott is railing against a policy plan that, as of now, exists primarily on paper. In a crisis, ideas matter — he knows this. He also knows that the Green New Deal, which promises to create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit and affordable housing, is extremely appealing. This is especially true now, as so many Texans suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services and extreme weather. [my emphasis]

She appeared on Sam Seder's Majority Report Monday to discuss her perspective, beginning just after 17:30 in the video, Why Texas GOP Fears the Green New Deal w/ Naomi Klein 02/22/21:

But the President is career centrist Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders. The best scenario for the next four years is that he will bicker and complain about progressives pushing him and progressives will complain about how much he falls short, and in January 2025, the left will praise him for being surprisingly more progressive than anyone really expected.

Looking at it from the perspective of the start of the second month of the Biden-Harris Presidency, two factors are likely to weigh very heavily in the public reception of this government. If the vaccination and other public health are successfully rolled out and we see a resumption of more normal economic activity in the fall, that in itself will be perceived as a huge relief. The Democrats are surprisingly inept at messaging their own successes, of course. But even with klutzy messaging, results do matter.

As Paul Krugman has been actively pointing out, the lifting of most lockdown restriction in itself will produce a notable surge in economic activity, which he compares to the "morning in America" effect from which benefitted the first Reagan-Bush Administration so much. (He doesn't suggest that Reagan's voodooo economics was the magic it was claimed to be.) If Biden actually does enact his own proposed version of the "New Green Deal," as he prefers to call it, that will also provide a much-needed economic stimulus. (Krugman explains the distinction he makes between economic relief and economic stimulus, which has relevance for the wonkier discussions among economists about economic policy, in Cooling it on overheating Substack 02/21/2021.)

I don't think the filibuster issue is going away. Things that actually need legislation will be blocked by the Republicans in the Senate using the filibuster if they are anything actually significant and important that could befit Democrats at the polls in 2022 or 2024. Comprehensive immigration reform is one. Anything like the $15 minimum wage that isn't included in a bill that can be passed with a Senate majority through the "reconciliation" procedure will also be shot down with the filibuster.

Biden is an experienced legislator and an institutionalist, so he of course knows all this as well as anybody. If the Democrats offer up something like comprehensive immigration reform in a bill that can be filibuster, they will doing so fully knowing it will be defeated. There's no need for anyone to kid themselves about that. It's not a bad thing to fight for something like loses, depending on how important it is and the kind of message the fight itself sends about what Democrats stand for.

But a bill that wins a majority in the Senate but is defeated because the Democrats would not set aside the filibuster, it's safe to assume that it's a bill that the Biden-Harris Administration wasn't serious about getting passed.

The American Prospect is a good source to keep track of Biden's progress, or lack thereof, in his Presidency, particularly on domestic affairs. This piece by executive editor David Dayen, for example: First 100: The Biden Vaccine Rollout Is Working 02/22/2021. The "first 100" refers to the decades-old convention of putting special emphasis on a Presidential administration's accomplishments during its first 100 days in office.

Russia, the Green New Deal, and the 2020 Presidential election

Juan Cole writes about why Vladimir Putin views a Green New Deal - more broadly a meaningful, practical strategy to move away from fossil fuels - as a serious threat to Russian economic and political power in Why the Russian Petro-state is actually terrified of a Bernie Sanders Presidency: The Green New Deal Informed Comment 02/23/2020:

Noting that Putin mocks warnings about the danger of global climate change with comments like, “the way technology is today, without raw hydrocarbons, without nuclear power, without hydroelectric power, mankind can simply not survive, cannot preserve its civilisation”.

Putin isn’t actually afraid of people becoming cave men. He is afraid of his economy radically shrinking if people get off oil and gas. Petroleum and natural gas comprised 65 percent of Russian exports in 2018, and account for 40 percent of its gross domestic product. Although its Soviet past and its military-industrial complex make Russia a significant global player, it is actually just a petro-state like Saudi Arabia. It is only 11th among world economies, and lies amid South Korea, Spain, Canada and Brazil. Not, in other words, in the same league as the US, China and Japan.

The rise of green energy and electric vehicles has the potential to make Russia plummet on down to a level of GDP below that of Mexico and more like the Netherlands, which only has a tenth of its population. I.e., if you took away the 40 percent of GDP that is oil and natural gas, Russia’s gross domestic product would fall to less than $1 trillion annually.

The US GDP is $21.4 trillion annually. One of the reasons Russia is so nervous about its world standing and is willing to spend enormous sums to be in countries like Syria is that economically it has fallen from being a peer superpower with the United States to having a smaller economy than Canada or Brazil, and is in danger of becoming Holland. (Holland is rich per capita because its GDP is only divided by 17 million people, not Russia’s 144.5 million. [my emphasis]

With that in mind, it's easier to contextualize a report like this on from one of the top reporters on Russia in America, Julia Ioffe, Why Exactly Does Putin Love Bernie? GQ 02/23/2020. The title is misleading, because what her article explains is that what Russia is most likely trying to do with election meddling is to promote divisions. Or, as one of her sources calls it, "chaos".

One of her sources is Marc Polymeropoulos, who she identifies as "a recently retired CIA agent who, after the 2016 election, was tasked with pushing back on Russian covert operations around the world." Gleb Pavlovsky is another, "a political scientist who used to advise Putin." Also included is Igor Yurgens, "president of the Institute of Contemporary Development, and a former advisor to erstwhile Russian president Dmitry Medvedev." And Andranik Migranyan, "who used to run a Russian government-funded think tank attached to the Russian mission to the U.N."

Reading an article like this is a bit like watching a cop show. Are these sources telling the truth as they understand it? Or are they promoting some particular story line they would like the reporter to spread? Or do they assume that Ioffe will assume they are trying to deceive her and giving her a more-or-less accurate story so she or her readers would find it dubious? Or maybe they don't entirely know what they are talking about? Or some other convoluted variation of deception and manipulation?

This is where Cole's reminder about Russia's actual situation is important: a regional power who is jockeying for a better power position in a situation where China is becoming the world's leading power and the US, Europe, and everybody else is trying to decide what kind of international arrangements will maximize their possibilities.

Pavlovsky says that Putin's government likes Sanders because they see him as “a soft pro-Putinist.” Yurgens thinks the Russian government wants Trump to win and thinks Sanders will be a particularly weak opponent. Migranyan, though, says, "“I don’t think anyone really respects or values Sanders here [Russia].” And he gives this headscratcher of an elaboration:

“It’s like a knife in the throat,” he went on. “The things Sanders says even Russian communists would be too scared to say. He is a real communist. I always said to Americans, ‘Your brilliant future is our horrible past.’ We collapsed into nothing because of Communism, and now this is the dream that Sanders is offering - and a big part of your country is following him into the abyss.”

Polymeropoulos stresses the desire to sow "chaos". And Ioffe quotes a Russian political scientist, Ekaterina Schulmann, saying, "I suspect that, for our people [at the top], Sanders looks like the mad professor from ‘Back to the Future'. “Which is why he’s very convenient for starting a pan-American brawl. Let them all fight each other while we lay another gas pipeline somewhere!”

I don't think there is any reason to assume that Putin's oligarchic authoritarian Russia is any more adapt at influencing American internal politics than the old Soviet Union was. You don't have to look at many of the regime-change operations the US has undertaken to wonder how adapt Putin's government would be as anything so complicated as such an operation in the US. The US government has the duty to enforce American laws against foreign interference in our elections. But whether the Russians are effective in what they are attempting is a different matter.

From what I've seen of the documentation that has come out on the 2016 Russian interference, I assume that causing confusion was the most likely Russian goal. From the analyses I've seen, I would guess that the Russians assumed that Clinton would win and they hoped to weaken her politically by trying to make the vote in 2016 as close as they could. And maybe I'm overestimating the competence of the Russian spooks. But would Putin and his intelligence officials really have wanted to select such a bizarre "loose cannon" character as Donald Trump as his American counterpart?

Leaving aside how effective the Russian interference attempts actually were - something very difficult to measure accurately - it's clear that Russia would see a power advantage for itself by weakening the NATO alliance and the EU. So isolationist policies in the US and nationalist, anti-EU policies by governments in Europe would increase Russia's relative power in Europe.

The strangest of the responses Ioffe elicited was that from Pavlovsky, who said that Sanders "is a real communist." Good Lord, not even the pundits on FOX News actually believe that! (Chris Matthews could be that far gone, though.)

But, as Paul Waldman writes in Why Putin Wants Trump to Win American Prospect 02/24/2020:

After 2016, Russia knows that they can meddle in American politics without any real consequence, and for a relatively modest investment. And just think of what Vladimir Putin will get from four more years of a Trump presidency. The institutions of American democracy will be degraded and discredited, as Trump systematically dismantles everything that makes our system an example to people wishing their own countries could be less corrupt and more committed to the rule of law. Putin - along with dictators everywhere - will be only too happy to watch it crumble.

Which brings us back to Russia and green measures to address the climate change crisis. Bernie Sanders is serious about a Green New Deal. Donald Trump opposes even long-standing and effective anti-pollution measures. So Pavlovsky's dumb characterization of Sanders is more likely to reflect the real hostility of Putin to Sanders' policies.

As always with US policy toward Russia, I consider it extremely important that both countries realize their common as well as their diverging interests, the most urgent of which is nuclear arms control, including nonproliferation. Despite Putin's backward-looking position on climate change, the fossil fuel era is ending and its very much in Russia's interest to make that transition a successful one. Obviously, espionage and information operations by both countries will always have an antagonistic element. We see now in the Middle East instances of Russian and American interests converging and diverging. Both countries stand to benefit greatly from having a government in Washington that (1) takes foreign policy seriously; (2) has a constructive and coherent approach to the Middle East; and, (3) isn't infected with hacks, idiots, and criminals.