A Lesson from the Grassroots: What the Democrat Party Needs to Learn

I have been involved in politics now for well over two decades - actually, closer to three - and one of the aggravating factors I have witnessed in both major parties is the tendency of the leadership in both parties engaging in pissing contests and losing site of the larger picture and what motivates the grassroots effort where elections are often won or lost.  That is not to say that all decisions should be left to the grassroots.  A prime example is the GOP which invited the Christofascists and white supremacists (they are often one and the same) into the party with horrific results as embodied by the current occupant of the White House.  Nonetheless, Democrats need to look to the grassroots now for a lesson on how to win elections.  Virginia provides one such lesson despite the wrongheaded efforts of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to interfere in the Democrat primary last June - something I will forever hold against them.  A column in the Washington Post outlines the lessons that need to be learned by Democrats in Washington, D.C.  Here are highlights:

Sometimes, the Democratic Party amazes me. And not in a good way. Here is a party fresh off a series of big election triumphs all over the country. The nation faces an unprecedented challenge brought on by President Trump’s breathtaking irresponsibility. Republicans are pushing through the most reactionary tax bill since the 1920s.

And what do leading Washington Democrats want to do? They would have us engage in the “move left” vs. “move to the center” squabbles that have obsessed the party for at least three decades. 

[N]ew research is finding that this bickering does not match the mood of local anti-Trump activists.

Ever since Trump’s surprise victory, the distinguished Harvard University scholar Theda Skocpol has been spending a lot of time in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Ohio with her colleagues Mary Waters and Kathy Swartz. They are talking to leaders and rank-and-file citizens in two counties in each state to track changes in our politics wrought by the 2016 outcome.

All the counties they are studying voted for Trump, yet in every one of them, new anti-Trump organizations have risen up. The researchers have found 10 such groups so far. (By the way, all these groups are led or co-led by women, many of whom are also deeply involved in their local churches.)

What’s struck Skocpol is how irrelevant the Democrats’ tired quarrels are to these freshly engaged citizens. “At the grass roots, people are dealing with the crisis Trump’s presidency presents to America, and they’re not refighting the election of 2016,” she said in an interview. “They’re not talking about whether the Democratic Party should be more progressive or more centrist.”

In fact, she finds that “both Bernie [Sanders] and Hillary [Clinton] supporters are involved,” which shows how “you can have energetic citizen action that doesn’t have to sort out national labels.”

This activism, as Skocpol sees it, is motivated by a simple but powerful civic sense that Trump is violating basic norms and principles of American life. The troops on the ground don’t need programs or litmus tests imposed from on high, she adds. They need practical support and the freedom to act as they see fit in their own areas.

This was also the lesson of this month’s elections, which saw victories by Democrats across the party’s spectrum of opinion. In Virginia, Gov.-elect Ralph Northam ran a moderate statewide campaign, while down-ticket winners in legislative races included a member of the Democratic Socialists of America as well as the first openly transgender person elected to a statehouse. Voters in Virginia (and New Jersey and elsewhere) said to Washington Democrats: Stop it with your stupid fights. We have work to do.

 

[Y]es, the party is more progressive on certain questions than it used to be. It is rightly more committed, for example, to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights — but so is the country as a whole. There has been a strong response from Democrats of all races to police shootings of young, unarmed black men. But this is less a move to the “left” than an expression of simple decency. A lot of this left/center business is about abstractions imposed on reality rather than a reflection of it.

The combatants in the intraparty arguments might usefully start by acknowledging the merits of some of the insights their opponents offer. Jared Leopold, the communications director of the Democratic Governors Association, said that Northam’s approach resonated with Virginia voters who “were looking for a calm and strong leader in the midst of chaos in Washington.” Moderates have a point when they say that voters nationally are similarly seeking steady and reliable leadership.

For now, the imperative is to check Trump’s abuses and to stop the truly radical agenda that Republicans are advancing, including their continuing efforts to wreck Obamacare and to pass an unpopular, budget-busting corporate tax cut that redistributes large sums of money to society’s wealthiest.

The grass-roots activists know how important these battles are. The ideological infighters should learn from them.

Should Democrats Worry About Their Own Possible Civil War?

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With the Republican Party in what amounts to an officially declared civil war and its would be standard bearers being more or less all crazy, it would be easier for Democrats to gloat.  However, the reality is that the Democrat Party has its own divisions and truly serious issue of voter apathy, indifference and, in my view out right laziness.  Elections truly matter, yet too many in the Democrat base literally sit on their asses and fail to vote unless a particularly charismatic candidate manages to motivate the.  Worse yet, the party establishment is out of touch with the base in many ways albeit not as horrifically so as in the case of the GOP. In addition, the Democrat establishment has not pandered to hate-filled extremists and Neanderthals as has been the case with the GOP for over 35 years or more.  A piece in Salon looks at the very real issues that the Democrat establishment needs to address (Are you listening Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary?).  Here are excerpts:

Yeah, I know, let’s back up for a minute. I said “post-Bernie landscape.” Deal with it. I’m not going all “I told you so,” even though I did. There really was an opening after New Hampshire, a moment when we all sensed a potential tipping point that could have happened but didn’t quite. That window slammed shut in Nevada and South Carolina and across the South, and I’m not buying the higher-math hypotheses about how Sanders might make inroads with African-American voters in other regions in a way he spectacularly failed to do in the South, and then might win Michigan or Ohio or Florida and push on toward a big victory in New York that flips the race upside down again. I could certainly be wrong, because wrongness is the order of the day in 2016. But I think the next few weeks are about Bernie’s supporters moving through the stages of the Kübler-Ross model and coming to grips with reality, helped along ever so much by uneasy Clintonite gloating.

But here’s the real point: None of that is actually the point. What happens next is far more important. If the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 had a purpose, and still has one, it goes far beyond Bernie Sanders. If the question was whether a septuagenarian senator from Vermont who calls himself a socialist could win the Democratic nomination or the presidential election, the answer was always exceedingly likely to be no. We were all startled to discover how possible and even plausible “yes” looked, for a moment there, and in that possibility we caught a glimpse of a possible future. Bernie Sanders was at best a highly imperfect messenger for such possibilities of political revolution and democratic redemption. If you were designing a candidate to be unelectable on a national scale, you could hardly do better than a crotchety old Jewish guy from Brooklyn whose political ideology has not budged since 1963 and who represents the smallest and most liberal state in the nation. (OK, I exaggerate: Wyoming actually has fewer people than Vermont, not to mention a lot fewer NPR listeners.) 

Indeed, the most striking aspect of the Sanders phenomenon is that he came as close as he did, given how poorly suited he was for the role. Let me say it again: Bernie Sanders was never the solution, and Hillary Clinton, much as she has done to earn the ire and mistrust of critics on the left, was never the problem. They are both symptoms or symbols, and in the short run the outcome of their symbolic collision was not in doubt. But the long run, and the collision between the forces behind Clinton and Sanders — that’s an entirely different matter.

As Sanders’ most ‘roid-raged and testosterone-fueled supporters will ultimately admit, Hillary Clinton is vastly preferable as president to any possible Republican, semi-lovable Rust Belt New Ager John Kasich included. If Clinton runs against Trump or Cruz or Rubio, each of whom is a dangerous opponent in a different register, the distinctions are stark and undeniable. She represents what I recently heard Jeb Bush describe as “regular-order democracy,” and look where that got him. Those guys represent pitchforks and screaming and strange things on fire and the most gruesome scenes from “Game of Thrones.” You won’t catch me hauling out the “Coke vs. Pepsi” line from the Ralph Nader era in this particular election. The 2016 choice is more like last week’s Nestea from the back of the fridge versus a foul-smelling mystery beverage that might be diesel fuel or lawn chemicals or sorority-house vomit, but that someone in a Halloween mask has promised will get you really wasted. 

For Hillary Clinton and the political faction she embodies or represents, America is pretty much OK, both in itself and in its relationship to the world, and American politics are mostly OK too. Yeah, the Republicans have gotten really weird and increasingly crazy and some significant tweaks are needed to correct for that: We need to consolidate gains in LGBT rights and push back on women’s reproductive freedom and confront the lingering legacy of racism. We can make guns a little tougher to buy, make college a little more affordable and make sure that working people have slightly more resources and better healthcare. Those are not bad things! Moreover, it’s understandable that to many Democratic voters those sound like realistic and potentially achievable goals, whereas the Sanders agenda of “political revolution” and free stuff for everyone sounds unhinged and impossible.

The problem with all that is not the agenda itself but the reassuring frame of “regular-order democracy” around it, in which such things might actually happen. No such democracy exists, which was and is the fundamental point of the Sanders campaign. You won’t hear Hillary Clinton use the term “oligarchy” to describe the way the United States is governed, as Sanders does in every stump speech. Why should she? She’s one of the oligarchs, or more properly one of their trusted employees. You won’t hear her say that free-market capitalism has utterly failed to improve the lives of ordinary people, or that the neoliberal economic regime of low taxes and government austerity is a disastrous scam that has robbed from the poor and given to the rich. Or that much of this resulted from the deregulation of financial markets carried out by her husband’s administration and a Democratic Congress, as directed by their oligarch overlords.

Hillary Clinton genuinely believes, I suspect, that things are not nearly as bad as hothead Bernie makes them sound, that most of the problems are things a competent and compassionate administrator can fix, and that the Democratic Party hasn’t made any fundamental mistakes. Change a couple of the proper nouns and that is exactly, word for word, what Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney believed too. A similar comeuppance may be on the way. The Democratic establishment is desperately trying to ignore the moment of popular awakening embodied by the Sanders campaign, or to explain it away. Hence we are told that only young white people want single-payer healthcare, tuition-free public universities or a $15 minimum wage. 

 

We’ve heard the arguments from advocates of the Democratic Long March for many years: On some uncertain day that lies just beyond the visible horizon, we will have our permanent demographic majority and we can start nudging the party away from being the Slightly Gayer Republicans and back toward genuine progressive priorities and policies. 

What those people generally don’t explain is who’s going to make that happen in a political party that has deliberately stripped itself of any core ideology or fundamental set of principles (I’m sorry, but “niceness” and “tolerance” do not count), a party that lacks any coherent socioeconomic base and whose voters no longer even pretend to care unless there’s a charismatic presidential candidate at the top of the ticket.  We already know that the devastating GOP sweep of the 2014 midterms, which produced the largest Republican congressional majority since Herbert Hoover was president, resulted from record low turnout and widespread voter apathy.

Party insiders and “activists,” if any can still be found in that demoralized institution, can’t and won’t make any of that possible. It will take a rebel incursion, an invading force of newcomers from outside the Democratic Party and outside politics, to inject the necessary vitality. It will take a new generation who don’t carry the scars of the Cold War and the Reagan era, who are uncontaminated by the party’s ideological decay and free of its defensive assumptions about the nature of political reality.

Hillary Clinton will almost certainly be the 2016 Democratic nominee, and of course our attention will now shift to the historic nature of her candidacy. But the strange curse that has followed Clinton’s entire career refuses to release its grip, and in the year of the Sanders revolution and the Trump garbage fire she feels a little bit like yesterday’s papers. I think that’s a big reason why Clinton supporters seem so angst-ridden; even in victory she’s had the rug pulled out from beneath her once again.

It was the campaign of Bernie Sanders — quixotic, doomed and fighting uphill against enormous odds — that struck genuine terror into the hearts of the political establishment.

Even in apparent defeat, it introduced us to a newly politicized generation and a whole range of unimagined possibilities, and made clear that the Democratic Party fortress is not as well defended as everyone thought. As we have seen so vividly at the other end of the spectrum, a political party that has drifted off its moorings and alienated its base can become a zone of invasion and conquest and heated internal conflict. Such a conflict has been brewing on the left for decades, and now it’s here. As we have also seen, it could get ugly.

Nothing shows the rot within the Democrat establishment more than Debbie Wasserman Schultz supporting pay day lenders who are the equivalent of loan sharks.   In my view, she needs to go as DNC chair.  That said, notwithstanding her flaws, we must make sure Hillary wins the White House in order to save the nation form more GOP insanity.

Why I am Not Feeling the Bern

As noted last night in a post, I like some of the issues that Bernie Sanders is talking about, but I continue to have doubts on his ability to win in the general election and, even if he were to win, whether any of his proposals could ever be implemented.  On some issues, he's like Donald Trump: sound bites and slogans, but short on any substantive or detailed plans.  Yes, America's healthcare system remains badly broken and Americans continue to pay far more than in any other country in the world for one of the least effective systems.  Yes, big money in politics is a serious problem, but does Sanders offer any viable solution?  Yes, the system is rigged and the middle class have been sold down the river, often by appeals to racism and religious extremism.  But can Sanders really work a change.  Then there's foreign policy.  What does Sanders propose in detail?  A piece in Huffington Post summarizes many of my misgivings.  Here are excerpts:

I began this campaign as a Hillary fan who respected Bernie Sanders and what he had to say about the economy and U.S. politics. I'm not surprised that this message has appealed to so many people, both those I know, and those I don't, in part because it's something which has gotten less attention than it has deserved, even if there are problems with elements of it.

In my calmer moments, I think that the Sanders campaign might represent a positive shift for the discussion of certain topics within the Democratic Party and the broader populace. Listening to him over the past year, however, I began to increasingly believe that for all the positive things his campaign represents, it also represents something deeply problematic: a fetishization of not knowing.

For me, this probably began with the discussion over foreign policy. . . . .  I think there is space for multiple proposals about what we do now, and though I'm sympathetic to much of what Obama is doing and Hillary is suggesting continuing, I would have thought a liberal candidate for the presidency would have been talking about the need for increased foreign aid, or greater openness to refugees, or, well, something.

Instead, his primary comment on international affairs seems to be to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate that he had voted against the Iraq War in 2002. When forced to discuss other matters, he quickly bobbles. In the most recent debate, he seemed unsure about whether North Korea has a single or multiple dictators, and then managed to take both positions in a matter of minutes about whether the U.S. should negotiate without preconditions with other countries.

Now, Bernie Sanders is not the first candidate to not be an expert on even something as significant as foreign affairs. But what's deeply troublesome here is how he seems to have no respect for knowledge on it. It's visible in the almost-disdain he expresses for Hillary Clinton's experience on the matter. She had been Secretary of State for four years, but he has been in Congress for more than two decades. Exactly when does he think he'll have sufficient experience to speak fluently on foreign policy?

Even more disconcerting has been his apparent unwillingness to find advisers to help bridge the gap. It was only 15 years ago that Democrats mocked George Bush Jr.'s disinterest in foreign policy; he at least had the courtesy to be embarrassed by what he didn't know, and hired a staff, including professors of international relations and former Secretaries of Defense, to help. They proved to provide much terrible advice, but there was at least an effort to appear informed. Sanders hasn't done so.

But foreign policy isn't a crucial part of the Sanders campaign. Health care, though, is. Five years ago, Sanders proposed a universal health care bill that failed to get any co-sponsors. When he was reticent to provide information about what plan he was proposing now, the Clinton campaign started to criticize that bill. In response, Sanders withdrew his support of that bill, meaning it now had zero support. Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders proposed a new plan, which was written by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at U-Mass Amherst, whose research focused on the history of the labor union movement in France and the U.S. The plan would cost in the area of $14 trillion over 10 years . . . . 

When the Sanders campaign was presented with this disparity, as well as others, they quickly attacked Thorpe, and then changed their numbers to acknowledge $444 billion per year of increased costs, but also, instantaneously, magically, found the same number of savings elsewhere. This is not how somebody tries to suggest a serious effort to improve the deeply problematic health care plan in the U.S.

For efforts to promote human rights, these are the people one would expect to have the most understanding of how to do so. One of the fascinating things about this campaign has been seeing how so many of those who should know Bernie Sanders the best, and have worked the hardest on what would appear to be his issues, have been so eager to oppose him. He spent more than a decade in the House; of the 188 Democrats there now, two endorsed him, and 157 endorsed Hillary.

Sanders serves in the U.S. Senate with 45 Democratic-voting colleagues; not only have none endorsed him, but 39 have endorsed Hillary. Sanders has been a significant figure in Vermont politics for four decades. Patrick Leahy, his fellow Senator from Vermont, endorsed Hillary. The incumbent governor of Vermont, and two former Democratic governors of Vermont, endorsed Hillary.

Sanders has focused on issues relating to the labor movement; virtually every single major labor union has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Again and again, when the Sanders campaign learns of these moves, the emphasis is on their being parts of the establishment. And they are parts of an establishment. But if this establishment is the enemy, then on whose side is he?

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