This Briahna Joy Gray interview of David Sirota discusses the fundamental problem of money in USA politics. Near the beginning, they discuss the likely danger that Harris will lay out positions that are progressive, but eventually abandon them and capitulate to the donor class, as she did on Medicare for All in 2019.
Beginning around 39:23, Sirota summarizes The Lever’s new work on Lewis Powell and the Powell Memo, and how Powell enabled corporations to corrupt the political system. There is some important information that was not publicly known before The Lever staff combed through nearly forgotten archives the past two years, including Powell’s friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the group of secret task forces established by the Chamber of Commerce to implement the Powel Memo.
They discuss what the Democratic Party might do when Trump is no longer on the scene. The Party just can’t be held together if it’s only progressives and big money donors in the Big Tent. Sirota talks about what he saw at the Demcoratic National Convention: the tensions under the surface between clean energy groups and corporate sponsors involved in fossil fuels. “You had anti-billionaire Senator Bernie Sanders… sharing the same stage with Illinois ultra-rich Democratic governor JB Pritzker.”
The last 20 minutes I found very tedious and a bit maddening. Gray asked whether or not Biden was a break from the right-ward drift of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. When Sirota said he thought that was the case, Gray refused to accept the answer and kept pressing for example of how Biden was “better.” Sirota would explain some policy change or program achievement, and Gray would just ignore it.
What a waste of the last 20 minutes! Why can’t Gray and other people on “the left” accept that, as Sirota said, “something changed” that made Biden much better on economics than Clinton and Obama? It would be so much more useful to try to identify what changed, what caused that change, and figure out if that cause and effect can be replicated again to continue driving the Democratic Party toward better economic policies.
And, glaring by its absence, was any discussion of how two of the most progressive member of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman, were defeated in primaries earlier this year. They were buried by an avalanche of money from the Israeli front group, AIPAC. There was no mention of this at all.
Finally, also missing was any discussion of what people can do, either inside or outside the Democratic Party. Gray now believes that the two Sanders presidential campaigns, and the freezing out of AOC, Katie Porter, and The Squad, all show that the Democratic Party is useless as an instrument for achieving progress.
Ok, that’s understandable, but what are the alternatives? Remember, Gray and Sirota have both been “on the inside.” From 1999 to 2001, Sirota worked as press aide and spokesperson for then U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, then served as a speechwriter and senior adviser for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. And Gray was National Press Secretary for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.
I should also note that in 2008, Sirota published The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, giving ample warning of the populist surges we have seen under Sanders and Trump. So, an important topic for discussion should be: Why did reactionaries manage to take control of the (anti)Republican Party, but the progressives fails to take control of the Democratic Party?
GlassHammer
“Why did reactionaries manage to take over the Republican party?”
Answer: Because it was given to the reactionaries on a silver platter. Decades of ideological bombardment from radio, television, print media, and online content got the rank and file to crave an uncompromising form of politics. Additionally the donor class went along with it so long as their assets and investments remained untouched. The missing element (which didn’t stay missing for long) was a series of crisis that discredited the middle ground solutions of the two parties.
The Democrats had 2 of those 3 elements but their donor class hated the uncompromising ideology they had and snuffed it out every time it gained momentum because it would endanger their assets and investments. Also, Biden didn’t do anything radical, his imfrastructure programs were still able to benefit the donors.
david lamy
I have read the Episodes 1,2, and 3 of “The Lever’s Master Plan” plus the supplementary article. I am going to read Episode 4 in a few. I wish the presentation would ditch the corny slapstick.
Where is Biden better? Short answer is Lina M. Khan, the director of the Federal Trade Commission. If Ms. Harris were to pledge to keep Ms Khan in her position I could understand one voting for Ms. Harris as a result. (For me, supporting Israel is too large a hurdle.)
I don’t want to devote the time to watch this discussion between Gray and Sirota, but hopefully Sirota brought up Ms. Khan.
Daniel Lynch
Tony asked “Why did reactionaries manage to take control of the Republican Party, but the progressives fails to take control of the Democratic Party?”
Umm … maybe because the reactionaries were backed by big money? Closed primaries helped, too, IMHO.
Maybe because so-called progressives keep getting hung up on divisive social issues instead of focusing on popular economic issues? And there’s the big money thing — the neolib / MIC Dems are backed by big money.
I don’t get the obsession with trying to reform the Democratic party. You might as well try to reform the Republican party. The odds of success are exactly the same — zero. Get over it. Move on.
Raad
The answer to your last question is power, in the form of $$$ which has managed to destroy its counter balances in various forms, while also becoming much stronger through consolidation.
The rightward drift will continue until the cleaving of progressives from centrists under the broad church of liberalism happens. After that, who knows? It’s a game of chance from that point on as climate conflagrations become much more common in the form of disasters or downstream effects in geopolitics or global trends in power.
Take care Tony,
Raad
Soredemos
Because it hasn’t gotten better under Biden. Stocks aren’t the economy.
I live out here, in the real world. It’s a goddamn shit show. Look at anyone’s grocery bill and then tell them the economy is better.
GlassHammer
Soredemos,
In terms of sticker shock, the grocery bill has nothing on the cost of back to school supplies this year. And you can’t shop around for cheaper alternatives because most schools lock you into certain brands.
As far as I am concerned the Recession started months ago.
Willy
Why did reactionaries manage to take control of the (anti)Republican Party, but the progressives fails to take control of the Democratic Party?
To paraphrase the Bible, when I was rich, I talked like a rich, I thought like a rich, I reasoned like a rich. When I became poor, I put the ways of richness behind me. And then I had to learn how to enjoy doing every single goddamned thing for myself.
I’ve noticed that in my own family, the rich get a whole lot more attention than the poor do. My rich doctor in-law is really only expert about doctoring, and the selling of local clinics which he did not build to a large corporation for the purpose of retiring very well I suppose. And then his doctoring expertise, anybody can find online since he’s made it public he hates always being asked medical questions and thus provides short answers. While I know more about everything else, he’s the one everybody prefers. That whole “fool and his money” thing too, perhaps. As for discomforting whining, he does a lot more, being a cult reactionary addicted to conservative talk radio.
So for me it isn’t so much a case of why, but how. There are plenty of influencers like Chomsky and Reich and Hartmann… who explain all that.
One interesting theory about Reagan, was that he lost his FDR love in favor of the meme that allowing the middle class too much power was bad. After becoming rich (and thus callous), he forgot about the benefits of a large middle class and his emotions turned towards the disruptions of the ‘60’s. He saw all the teenaged rebellion, racial uppityness, sex drugs rocknroll, as proof that a large middle class was unmanageable and so intentionally sought to shrink it down. The other rich and all the wannabes found that more compelling than the New Deal stuff. Although not so much anymore, after so much damage has been done.
david lamy
In reading the excellent thoughts expressed by commentators other than me I want to say that Lina M Khan needs a different administration to work for. Sadly, there is no better potential administration slated on all 51 presidential election ballots.
Our polity is captured by big money. That money has eviscerated the power of our votes.
I am an old. I listen with some amusement of acquaintances talking of downsizing. My insistence that we all collectively are going to downsize, willing or not, gets met with some derision.
COVID, climate, and capability are our challenges. In every sense of capability we fall short.
bruce wilder
“The Party just can’t be held together if it’s only progressives and big money donors in the Big Tent.”
And, the spooks? What about them?
My problem with the Democratic Party is that dishonesty has become fundamental to its messaging and selection of leaders.
I always understood why the Republicans were so dishonest in their messaging: the Republicans were pushing policies favorable to big business and often at the expense of everyone else. You cannot win majorities any other way than by lying. The Republican Party was so far gone that the elite Republican establishment did not even realize that their electoral base did not want what the elite was offering. Trump exploited that discrepancy, that cognitive dissonance to take over.
At some point, the Democrats transitioned to the same model of politics: lie and manipulate, full stop. Democratic messaging about Trump and the Republicans is full of lies and deceptive half-truths. I have no sympathy for Trump, birther-in-chief, in any of this. Screw Trump. But, it is destroying any possibility of small-d democratic, populist governance, which is what I want. Pretending that Trump is a racist and a traitor and that explains his appeal is not engaging the electorate on issues like immigration or the in Ukraine.
Democrats pretended for four years that Biden was “sharp as a tack” and in charge. They will pretend the same about Kamala Harris. A few of the smarter ones may say the quiet part out loud: that we are being asked to “elect” the apparatus around a President. But, the apparatus is driving straight for WWIII. Are we suppose to ignore that while speculating on the fate of Lina Khan?
I asked about “the spooks” at the top of my comment. Democratic congresspersons with a police, military or intelligence background vastly outnumber the Squad. The Democrats now favor censorship.
Russiagate, initiated by Clinton and Obama in cooperation with the Intelligence Agencies, is still part of Democratic messaging. It was dishonest from the beginning and reckless in its disregard for the blowback on foreign policy.
And, there is no explanation for the Biden “open borders” policy — not even an acknowledgment that that has been the policy. Is Harris going to continue that?
Mark Level
A couple of comments based on my limited knowledge & experience in this area:
1. It is nice to know that they did a detailed dive into how Neoliberal Hegemony & the enshrining of the Market as God Almighty back in the 70s, throttling Keynsianism & the Social Welfare State & enshrining the likes of fascist pro-oligarchy Friedman & Hayek.
2. The point about the Dem party’s utter incoherence is obvious, beyond that it’s stunning. Pritzker & Bernie– well, if Bernie still had a single ideal left it might matter, at this point it’s obvious that he’s only there to sheepdog people into the Dimmie Masters’ tent. He may’ve had some principles once but he’s a miserable sellout & puppet, too bad that heart attack that all the Neera Tanden types were in ecstasy over wasn’t a bit stronger. (To be fair, evidently his wife got caught up in some illegal shenanigans in the last 2 years that allowed him to be blackmailed & become a 100% sellout, instead of only 97.)
3. As to Briahna Joy Grey’s competitiveness & browbeating, this has been well-covered in particular by Russell Dobular of the Due Dissidence podcast, who knows her personally, & defended her both in person & then online at the “Dissident Dialogues” (sic) event some months back with a bunch of GLibertarian thinkers & Zionists, also professional Islamophobes like Richard Dawkins (who no longer fulminates against Christianity, but has called Islam “evil”, bloodthirsty, primitive, etc.)
Dobular had previously called her out for dishing out the same kind of full-court press attacks on Matt Taibbi for not doing the Twitter Files the way she thought was best, focusing more on censorship of the Left by Twitter than the right. She has a point up to a point (perhaps) but as Dobular noted she’s a Harvard-trained attorney and thus (like a certain Trump) focused on “winning” at any costs. In ambushing Taibbi she wasn’t afraid to lie, misrepresent his actions, talk over & hector him. Some people have problems with ambiguity & shades of gray, I used to think they were mainly on the Right, but since the Dems are Center Right and there is NO electoral (& scant other) “Left” allowed in the US anymore, my view is more nuanced now.
4. Yes, I am grateful for Lina Khan. However I have to ask– if the Biden admin. appointed ONE good and not captured official among the top 1,000 functionaries they have, how much of a difference does that make? Little to none, clearly. I’ll second Sorodemos, having one well-placed deck chair (perhaps with inflatable wings for safety) on the Titanic deck does not a rescue plan make.
5. One correction, also thanks to Due Dissidence (& others). David Sirota’s wife remains a Dem party professional functionary, so his “outsider” status is fake. It’s shameful that he even pretends although I respect 90% of his work. When you’re captured, your word is not worth the CO2 emission it’s issued with.
We’re already in WW III under the Biden admin, the main question being whether it ignites in the Mideast or in Ukraine first. The Democrat party will go down in history (if we have a future to write about) as morally equivalent to the Social Dems who helped install the Fuhrer in Weimar Germany. As Dobular (& I) like to say, “Scratch a Liberal and you’ll get a Fascist.” We couldn’t have the goddamn dirty effing hippies anywhere near the ship of state, thus all the folks you point out are banned in the Dimmies. The Clintons perfected the art of Hippie-Bashing over 3 decades ago. They let Trump in the door to power to keep Bernie out (when he still seemed mildly “populist” & relevant) & the US domestically is hurtling over a cliff just as it tries to hurtle the entire (white) “West” into war against the 85% “rest.” Your last post covered the arrests of Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkerson in the UK. Anti-fascists in Germany are being jailed for opposing Zionism. The writing is on the Wall. PK Dick always had a fear of an international “Black Iron Prison” & that is what our Rulers want. What the rest of us want simply doesn’t matter. We all need to LISTEN when Kamala talks. Only They get to control the future, & the debate thereon.
When the Iron Lady proclaimed “There is No Alternative” she should’ve added “no freedom”, “no future” (which at least Malcolm McLaren picked up on and put in the Sex Pistols’ mouths.) The Brave New World of 24/7 Fascism and Zionism as the ruling philosophy alongside NeoConservatism (endless wars, let the refugees work delivering meals for GrubHub) & NeoLiberalism (all for the 0.1%) is here. The Elites agree it is a beautiful Utopia, which History tautologically demanded & created.
responseTwo
The democrat party is useless to the American working class. Started two wars to try to bring back the good old days, never did “roll back the Trump tax cuts” like Biden said he would, and constantly raised the military budget every year. Democrat party is beholden to billionaires. This county is so over, with its Citizens United, dark money in elections, bailing out bankers when they crash the economy. Clinton rolled back the glass stiegel act and gave the news to the highest bidder with his telecommunications act. Having faith in the democrat party is like whizzing into the wind.
bruce wilder
Near the end of the Obama Administration, the Obama Labour Department promulgated a rule change, which would greatly expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay. It was timed such that it was highly unlikely to go into effect in the event that the Republican (Trump) was elected in November 2016. I interpreted it politically as a gift to the Clinton campaign insofar as it was a prime example of concrete material benefits available to Democratic voters in the working classes. I do not have the figures at hand for how many people would see their wage income increase, but it would be in the tens of millions and in a demographic, which, when it votes, leans Democratic.
Obama had eight years to deliver and made this particular, huge benefit to the working classes contingent on four more years. Clinton, insofar as I know, made no attempt to take political advantage in her campaign rhetoric or messaging or, critically GOTV, nor did professional Democrats like Sirota.
Obama over the course of 8 years in power promised an increase in the minimum wage more than once without making any serious effort to see it enacted. So, I think it fair to say he lacked personal commitment on such issues. But, absolute master politician he was and is, Obama knew how to put options on the agenda for political advantage in electoral politics.
Pro-labor policy is embedded into the deep memory of those who identify with the Democratic Party. But, the instincts for actually doing the kind of political campaigning that delivers — those instincts are broken. They’ve been broken by operatives like Sirota who decry the tribalism of “the most important election in my lifetime” and “the most important thing is to stop Trump” and then go right ahead and echo it and enact it. They’ve been broken by nominating candidates like Clinton and Biden who have clear records of corruption and then prattling on about “getting money out of politics”. How do those words mean anything to a Hillary Clinton voter? Seriously. 😒
Willy
Pretending that Trump is a racist and a traitor and that explains his appeal is not engaging the electorate on issues like immigration or the in Ukraine.
Bruce, Trump is a racist and a traitor and that does explain much of his appeal.
If he wasn’t so old and demented, he could expand his base by explaining stuff like what a drag undocumenteds are on the system, how they take the fallback jobs which natives who’ve fallen down from corpora-topia could do while they catch their footing, or how Dems stymie border things because they’re on the take from corpora-topia.
Instead, Trump always talks about how murderous, criminal, and insane they all are.
And Ukraine is as old news for most voters as the last winter Olympics. It’s rarely ever an MSM topic anymore. Trump has traitorous freudian slips all the time. Think of all the stuff he’s said about jailing his opposition, the media, constitutionalists, federal law enforcement and the military. Since he’s so incapable of controlling his mouth, it’d be stupid for establishment Dems to not try and take advantage.
For the progressive Bernie haters, had the Bernie-Biden connection not been a thing, then realities like “corporate greedflation” would still be conspiracy fringe completely ignored by the MSM. It instead does occasionally get alluded to and is quite frequently discussed by nontraditional media. Since attacking the left from the left is a left thing, it’d be stupid for establishment R’s to not try and take advantage.
I think progressives failed to take control of the Democratic Party because they’re generally not the kind to “try and take advantage”.
Soredemos
Also speaking of money related matters, Joe Biden still owns me 600 bucks. He owes every US citizen 600 bucks. Comparatively minor matter, but don’t think I’ve forgotten. I’m sure that money would prove extremely useful to many people these days.
Soredemos
@Willy
Treason, like spending four years attempting a media and spy driven slow-motion coup conspiracy against a duly elected president?
bruce wilder
@Willy
I have no interest in advising Trump on his messaging.
I have observed that the Democrats feature certain stock tales in drawing their caricature of Trump — “inject bleach,” “fine people” in Charlottesville, and so on. Biden featured a few, most not at all factually accurate, in that debate where he labeled Trump a liar — if Democrats have to lie to “prove” their slander, what does that say about Democrats?
What about Democrats endorsing censorship? What about Democrat lawfare against Trump? What about Russiagate? What about the War in Ukraine?
Having the memory of a goldfish shouldn’t be the foundation of a political ideology or Party.
KT Chong
Actually, Trump’s misogyny and sexism is even more of an appeal than him being a racist and a traitor. It explains why a lot of Black, Latinos and even Asians – specifically men – are switching over to Trump and just the Republican party in general.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP7V-r4A1rU
Chris Smith
“but what are the alternatives?”
Bluntly, there are no current easy alternatives. Either we build a new party (difficult and generational) or we take over the Republican party. Trump showed that the latter is doable, as he succeeded in taking over the Republicans, while the people in charge of the Democrats pulled out all the stops to end Sanders.
Also bluntly, the Democrats are unreformable. Either the leadership will co-opt you (see AOC) or eliminate you (see Cori Bush). The regular members of the party have become increasing cultish over the last decade. Best to admit this fact and move on to a workable project, because time and resources are better spent building that alternative to the Democratic party than trying to reform it.
Soredemos
@KT Chong
Anything, but anything, to avoid talking about jobs and class. Liberalism is genuinely incapable, on a deep level, of diagnosing problems (usually problems of its own creation).
The most stark example of this is the compilations of Trump saying ‘China’. Endless clips of him saying it in a goofy way. But WHY are there so many clips of him saying the word? What’s the context? Oh, invariably it’s him talking about job outsourcing and competition. Liberals can’t even begin to engage with that aspect. Better to just call him stupid and racist, and anyone voting for him stupid and racist. That’s the only explanation Liberals can muster.
Trump will fix nothing in the economy, to be clear. He’s a fraud. But he’s at least a clever fraud who has identified issues to focus and attack on. Meanwhile Democrats are again using the ‘the economy is fine; America is Already Great’ playbook they lost with four years ago.
bruce wilder
Just a side-note on Lina Khan and the politics of antitrust:
If you have been reading/skimming the invaluable Matt Stoller, as I have for a while, it ought to be clear (but maybe it is not), that the Republican Party’s and Trump’s core electoral constituency of some-college aspiring entrepreneurs are also a class of people with direct experience of predatory monopoly. In Stoller’s telling of detailed stories, these are the people who, as franchisees and small business owners in monopoly-dominated product/service networks, who are being harvested. This is why, imho, J.D. Vance became the V-P candidate and, predictably, has commented favorably on Khan.
I am not saying Trump, who is clearly a con-man and predator himself, is a trustworthy leader or is likely to take up antitrust as a cause. His first administration did empower a very smart guy as Special Trade Representative, who then engineered a major shift in trade policy, and such random developments are possible albeit generally unlikely in another mostly incoherent Trump administration, because Trump is . . . well, Trump.
Nor am I saying that that Trump constituency is not, itself, predatory, because in some ways it is. These are the people most unsympathetic to increasing the minimum wage, for example, because they see a zero-sum game vis a vis their ungrateful employees and Trump’s political rhetoric tends to focus on their resentments against sometimes bogus “bad guys”.
But, I am saying that the politics of antitrust, generally, is complex. There are a lot of business interests scattered across the U.S. that are hard-pressed by monopoly and would welcome efforts to take down some of the “big boys” of tech and finance. At the moment, the Democrats are managing their policy in part as a fund-raising opportunity among their “big boys of tech and entertainment” — a dangerous game since the “big boys” don’t want to see themselves as anyone’s captives.
Willy
Treason, like spending four years attempting a media and spy driven slow-motion coup conspiracy against a duly elected president?
So the progressives failed to take control of the Democratic Party because they’re ethicals trying to go up against the treasonous?
Having the memory of a goldfish shouldn’t be the foundation of a political ideology or Party.
It’s the foundation of the art of the possible, thanks to the mental state of the mob. I think there are multiple reasons why progressives fail to take control of the Democratic party.
Willy
As no economist I know little of Stoller. From Wikipedia:
Politico described his “dogmatic” belief that the goal of breaking up monopolies is “so central and so urgent that nearly any other cause or political relationship should be sacrificed in service of it”
Makes sense. Breaking up monopolies that is. A maintained capitalism would deconcentrate power away from power-addled pathologicals who believe themselves so incapable of error they’re worthy of monarchy. And all the other related progressive benefits.
But wouldn’t that be like trying to keep an alky away from their grog? They’ll fight back using whatever means is available to them. Does Stoller have answers for that? Can Stoller advise progressives about gaining power, without being ruined by power?
Willy
Chris Hedges has mentioned how vindictive some establishment Dems were. But when I tried finding his own personal specific examples I failed (maybe they’re out there and I just need to be walked over there?) And so that blanket opinion went into the same mental round file as “Biden is deeply corrupt!” and “niggers are dumb!”.
I’ve known plenty of diplomatic, soft spoken ‘old shoes’ (paraphrasing Dale Carnegie) who when challenged or crossed, became so surprisingly vindictive that they were possibly revealing their true, power-crazed asshole, selves. But without concrete examples, I’d think progressives can hardly get to the stage where they come up with ideas for defense against such, and then attack.
KT Chong
@Soredemos
No one can fix America at this point. It’s long past the-point-of-no-return.
Soredemos
@Willy
No, my point is I don’t want to hear about how Trump is supposedly treasonous from other people who are themselves traitors.
Progressives can’t win because the Party establishment and aligned media (which is the bulk of the media) has the number one priority of denying them even an iota of power. If you actually look at the issue by issue polling, ‘radical’ progressive policies poll overwhelmingly positively. But it doesn’t matter when the Party can gaslight, deflect, and deceive.
In addition, like a battered wife, people who claim progressive principles keep siding with the Dems even when they reliably stab the progressives in the back. The latest is the people who want drastic healthcare reform yet are still endorsing Harris even though she’s openly delcalred Medocare for All is of the table. Democrats realized decades ago they don’t have to concede anything, because many people will always come crawling back to them if they just scream loudly enough about how the other side is Satan and ‘this is the most important election of our lifetimes; you can push left after we have power, honest’.
Swamp Yankee
For those advising an attempt to take over the Republican Party. I think candidly that that is even less likely than taking over the Democratic Party.
I live in, and am involved in local politics and environmental activism in, a region that, despite being in a very Blue State, is quite conservative, with some of the towns around here reliably voting for GOP candidates — in Massachusetts — at rates above 60 and 70% (other towns are more reliably Democratic, these differences are fascinating at a sociological level, and quite complicated).
I am in coalition with these conservatives on a critical important local issue where 90 percent of the populace agrees that a corporation is lawless and must be stopped. I grew up with some of them, and know them well, we are of the same small communities (this is also true of the liberals, the left, the non-engaged, the right-wing and left-wing online street fighters, many more — these are smaller towns for Massachusetts, with one exception).
Despite this coalition, or rather because of it, and dealing with them, I think it’s unlikely they are going to be a good candidate for entryism. For one thing, they are viscerally and often just off the wall in their hardcore anti-Communism and 1950s-era redbaiting.
The other thing is that they have as kind of their Ur-Principle the idea that Private Property Is Sacred (this is, as Ur-Principles so often are, is frequently and seemingly without dissonance contradicted by them in the actual practice of their lives). They do not distinguish between the person owning a small cottage and Elon Musk; for them, private property is private property.
A third factor is that fifty years of talk radio, cable news, and now Facebook and other social media have marinated them in a culture of querulous suspicion and anti-reason; they fall for just lunatic conspiracy stuff, and while some of them are just naturally intelligent enough that they fight through this and make real contributions to our local governments, it’s still their native idiom, if that makes sense (like, believing basically every election is stolen; despite the minimizing of certain interlocutors of Trump’s misdeeds, this is a real one, this baseless accusation of fraudulent or stolen elections — this is a corrosive rhetorical move, and one that makes the actual practical life of our bodies politic in the real world more difficult.
Nor is Russiagate apposite here; Russiagate was nonsense, but Hillary Clinton, of whom I am not a fan, did show up to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration; she did acknowledge the vote totals were correct, and that she legitimately lost in the electoral college; this is _categorically_ different than Trump’s conduct in 2020-21).
A fourth factor: they genuinely dislike Difference and a pluralistic and open society; many of them are openly bigoted towards LGBTQ people. We had a Klan presence here in southeastern Massachusetts into the 1950s, and that impulse didn’t just go away. Indeed, my own Town’s High School, from which I graduated 20+ years ago, had a significant problem with what can only be described as anti-Semitic and Nazi-sympathizing public behavior by the football team. We have the local evangelical holy rollers running for School Committee (in Plymouth, Mass.) talking about banning books, in just total disregard for the U.S. and Mass. Constitutions.
They are also obsessed with culture war nonsense. Just, like, obsessed.
The thing I should emphasize: the conservatives are often extremely intelligent, and will see any kind of entryist from a mile away. I should also note I actually quite like many of them at a personal level; I don’t think they are bad people (some are, but not most), just misguided and wrong on many issues (sometimes, they are right, and I take coalition with them where it presents itself; this is natural in the parliamentary environment of Town Meeting societies).
Finally, Republicans have their own Machine which is even worse than the Democratic Machine, which at least has to pretend to some notion of human wellbeing. The GOP Machine in my experience down here are connected to local business elites and are also canny, and just like, wildly amoral, and won’t give up the party without a fight.
So, taken together, and played out across the country, I think it will be extremely difficult to engage in any kind of Left entryist strategy in the Republican Party.
My own strategy is premised on local politics — I live in a directly democratic Town Meeting form of government, and if I want to write a statute for the Town, I can get myself and nine other inhabitants of the Town together and put it before the Annual Town Meeting. That’s a lot of power, so I exercise what power I am able to in order to advance the goals of the Commonwealth thought that guided the authors of the Massachusetts Constitution, and, at a larger level, the American Revolution.
Ian Welsh
Commenters are on a roll with good comments. Swamp Yankee, OK if a elevate that comment?
Swamp Yankee
Hi Ian — sure, thanks — I’d be honored.
I agree that the commenters are on a roll, and I think the original posts are as well. Thanks to all.
Purple Library Guy
One thing about the Democratic party is that, like any large organization, it’s made up of a lot of little bits.
I think if I were going to design a strategy for the US left, it would have two prongs.
First prong is, start a political party which does not contest in national elections. Its goal would be to win initially in local elections, then state contests where it had established a strong base in cities. It would also be involved in union politics and working both to increase the power of unions and move them to the left. Any move to national politics would be way down the road if it had gained power in a bunch of states and increased union power a great deal.
Second prong is, figure out how the Democratic party is put together and tackle it bit by bit. If you have a sudden wave of activists electing a few progressive political candidates in the Democrat slot, that is obviously not going to take over the party. Heck, even if you elected ALL the actual politicians running for the Democrats, it wouldn’t take over the party. The Democratic party has this whole apparatus of bureaucrats and bagmen and lobbyists and PR people, organizational structures and backchannel influence conduits. And, a lot of the people in those spots are already used to doing turf wars, so they will resist takeover attempts. Even if you have figured out where the pressure points are instead of just naively going to conventions and voting, taking over would be tough.
But, their turf wars are mostly kind of . . . personal, or at least small scale. If you had a large, committed organization of left-Democrats who knew what bits they needed to grab in order to get leverage over other bits, potentially they could start getting control over pieces of the Democratic party . . . state organizations, policy-planning pipelines, key fundraising thingies, whatever.
The blue sky goal would be to take over the whole shebang and merge it with, or at local levels collapse it in favour of, your progressive political party. The proximate goal would just be to tip the scales a bit so the Democrats did something useful just often enough to stem some of the rot in the US, while you built up the real left wing party.
Of all the comments I’ve seen here, I do like SwampYankee’s because it clearly comes from a place of personal experience that lets him hand out some solid information. But in terms of summarizing the “Why did reactionaries manage to take over the Republicans, while leftists never took over the Democrats?” I think the very first comment by GlassHammer nailed some important stuff pretty well.
The thing is, that seems like a symmetrical question, but it isn’t. Republicans have always fed reactionaries because reactionaries to them are useful tools. And what we don’t tend to get is, even if they turn full fascist, to corporate elites they’re STILL to a fair degree useful tools. WE think of fascists as radical because they, you know, kill lots of people and terrorize lots of people and establish police state shit. But to really rich folks, the ones getting killed and terrorized are OTHER people, not them. And in the mean time the fascists are doing useful stuff like outlawing unions and eliminating anything in the rule of law that might protect normal people from companies. Lots of them don’t think their pet reactionaries turning full-on fascist is a huge deal. To put it a different way, fascists aren’t ACTUALLY radical, in the sense that they make no change to the way the economy works or who’s in charge of it. So right wing parties like the Republicans have no structural reason to worry about reactionaries taking over the party.
Obviously, the relationship between Democrats and leftists is very different. Real leftists getting power in the Democratic party would seriously cramp the style of the elites that control the Democrats, and might pursue policies that would reduce inequality (making the elites less rich) or reduce elite power, like by campaign finance reform or whatever. And that’s not even with radical leftists.
The difference between Republicans and Democrats is, Republicans kind of have to INVENT stuff for their base to want, but they’re fine with GIVING it to them because the made-up shit isn’t important to the bosses. Whereas Democrats rather gingerly make use of REAL objectives their base is inherently going to have with or without them, but much of their organizational purpose is precisely to block their base from actually ACHIEVING those objectives, because that real shit IS important, and dangerous, to the bosses.
The tension in the Republican party is between people who want to go for maximalist versions of the fake objectives, often because they were brought up on their own propaganda, and people who think that will stop them from getting elected. The tension in the Democratic party is between people who actually want the objectives the Democrats vaguely claim to favour, and people who stand to lose a lot of money and power if that were to actually happen. It’s not the same conflict.
Willy
I don’t want to hear about how Trump is supposedly treasonous from other people who are themselves traitors.
bruce claims that commons are continuously being sheepdogged into opposing tribal camps to spout irrelevancies at each other, for the purpose of keeping big money in power. So why not focus on the money, instead of “my team are worse liars than your team”?
like a battered wife
I’d been hearing is how feckless the Dems are in the face of abusers. Never heard the Dems described as abusers before. More accurate seems the old bit with daddy party and mommy party. Would you children prefer to be outright beaten by daddy, or told to behave by mommy lest daddy beat you when he comes home?
Dan Kelly
There is anything BUT a firm divide between ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ and the spooks, like sayanim, are everywhere – working all sides.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Don’t worry! The permacultist’s Oprah-approved pit latrines can be safely dug next to Warren Buffet’s oil pipelines (not the one they got you to protest, you dummy!) They’re expected to be fully operational once the next train explodes. Obama and Bruce Springsteen will be on hand for the silly shovel ceremony.
Of course, Trump is owned and occupied by Israel even moreso, which seems impossible but is absolutely true, It was Trump who armed Ukraine to the teeth, and it was Trump who allowed the covid event to metastasize.
https://invidious.jing.rocks/watch?v=8C1tMsEAUmA
So why not focus on the money, instead of “my team are worse liars than your team”?
Apparently, most ‘big’ money (whatever that means) votes democrat these days. 80-20 is the approximate split, though I don’t know how these things are ultimately measured or how ‘accurate’ they are. But as Soredemos noted, just look at a f’in grocery bill for chrissake.
Dan Kelly
There is anything BUT a firm divide between ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ and the spooks, like sayanim, are everywhere – working all sides.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Don’t worry! The permacultist’s Oprah-approved pit latrines can be safely dug next to Warren Buffet’s oil pipelines (not the one they got you to protest, you dummy!) They’re expected to be fully operational once the next train explodes. Obama and Bruce Springsteen will be on hand for the silly shovel ceremony.
Of course, Trump is owned and occupied by Israel even moreso, which seems impossible but is absolutely true. It was Trump who armed Ukraine to the teeth, and it was Trump who allowed the covid event to metastasize.
https://invidious.jing.rocks/watch?v=8C1tMsEAUmA
So why not focus on the money, instead of “my team are worse liars than your team”?
Apparently, most ‘big’ money (whatever that means) votes democrat these days. 80-20 is the approximate split, though I don’t know how these things are ultimately measured or how ‘accurate’ they are. But as Soredemos noted, just look at a f’in grocery bill for chrissake.