Back on May 20th, a bill passed to increase funding for the Capitol police. The idea is that the events of January 6th mean they need more funding. They’re already VERY well-funded, and the failure was not due to lack of funding, but lack of preparation for a forseeable event (as it was announced and organized on social media), and failure to call in help. The capitol will become even more locked down, and access of ordinary citizens to it and to their representatives and senators will be more restricted.
This bill passed by ONE vote.
Whenever you see this, you should suspect absolute and complete bullshit.
The progressive defectors have all called to “defund” the police in the past: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) voted present, while Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) voted against the bill, which includes funds for the Capitol Police.
This is an arranged vote. House members who need to be seen to oppose the bill were given “walks.” Because they needed the Squad to note vote against it, three didn’t, and the three who wanted/needed to keep their cred were allowed to vote against.
I am thinking back, and I can’t remember a time that the Squad, when they had the margin of victory, has ever cast the deciding vote against a bill that Democratic House leadership wanted passed. It may be that they have, and that I missed it; I don’t follow legislative matters super-closely.
But this vote was Kabuki, and unfortunately (I really did want to believe) I’m coming around to the view that the Squad is now basically onside. At a guess, I’d say a combination of co-option and punishment/threats have made clear to them their position, as when AOC didn’t get the committee assignment she wanted.
This is a genuinely difficult problem. People who go to Congress and want to play spoiler — to actually use their power when they have a veto, have to be willing to withstand both gestures of kindness and real punishment, along with the genuine hatred of their colleagues. If you’re not a “team player,” if you don’t do what leadership wants, there are prices to be paid.
It appears that those prices are too high for the Squad. Again, I may be wrong, but this isn’t a conclusion I come to anything but reluctantly. Nor, of course, does it not mean they aren’t “better” in some ways than other members. But there appears to be a fundamental dishonesty here that is disturbing, and a lack of willingness to use power when they have it.
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Z
I had thought highly of them too, particularly AOC, who I honestly wouldn’t be surprised is a Deep State asset at this point.
I also seem to remember AOC damaging Bernie’s campaign by being insistent about some flavor of open borders and even rallying for it when she campaigned for him, pushing him into supporting it. In 2016 he was pretty consistently in favor of severely limiting immigration in order to build the power of labor, a much more populous platform.
Z
bruce wilder
The ideal politician of my imagination would admit powerlessness and tell the truth about the reality of that.
anon
I started giving up on Bernie and the Squad after Super Tuesday and seeing that they were not willing to fight and embarrass the Democratic establishment to get the nomination. Bernie always talked about his “good friend” Joe. It made me sick after hearing him say that a dozen or more times. I’ve been proven correct about our so-called progressive Democratic politicians since Biden’s inauguration. They disappoint every single time.
Wealth and power are very difficult to give up once you have a taste of it. It’s easy to critique power as an outsider. AOC talked a lot about having courage to do the right thing even if it meant being a one-term representative. I doubt she believes that today. The Squad got theirs and they have shown that they aren’t willing to put on the line their six figure salary, health benefits, and other privileges to do what they were initially voted in to do by their progressive supporters. More progressives need to face the facts that they’ve been had by the Squad who now gives cover to the Democratic establishment. They are all such a disappointment.
bruce wilder
To a large extent “the Squad” has been a deliberate creation of corporate media to distract attention from the right-ward shift of the House Dem caucus and the larger number of new, young Dem Representatives from a police/intelligence/military background and the creeping potential for fascism they carry with them. Of they voted for more Capitol police!
I do not think Ayanna Pressley qualifies as “left” at all, by the way.
Mallam
The fact that you can write this column in earnest is more of a larger symptom of why the left fails: an addiction to perpetual losedome, seeking out traitors, wanting to purge for fear of being unclean.
The great thing is that the larger left seems to be ignoring these impulses and making actual changes in peoples beliefs (persuasion) and attracting more votes to their cause on things that matter (lol at “Capitol police funding”, jfc).
Eric Anderson
It’s basically a big Ivy League frat where the hazing doesn’t stop until the pledges conform.
Ian Welsh
Rather a lot of things I’ve pushed for years have become mainstream. Things I was talking about long before the “larger left.”
Green New Deal, for example. Apartheid Israel. I wrote about the coming plague 15/16 years ago. I analyzed how broken housing and CDOs were, M4A, etc, etc. All of this stuff I was writing about when AOC was still a child.
It always starts with people on the margins, and anyone who doesn’t understand that really doesn’t understand how public persuasion works. (This is also true from the right and the ideas that took power in 1980 were considered crackpot in the early 50s and early 60s.)
As for this in particular, it’s precisely the “pushing from the left” that people say they want to see, but get uncomfortable with when it actually happens, because they are secretly authority worshipers.
Because you only see the tip of the spear, you don’t see what it takes to actually lunge with it.
bruce wilder
The topic Ian takes up in the OP is fundamental to the degenerate nature of American politics. The neoliberal revolution went for the foundations of democratic politics and succeeded. Electoral politics on the national level is impervious to the will or interests of 80-90% of people. Government is nowhere a source of countervailing power to oppose, regulate or restrain the greed and corruption of predatory finance and business and the distribution of income and risk is perverse and extreme.
AOC was a lonely voice acknowledging the reality of this absurd and horrifying state of affairs. Just drawing clear-eyed attention to the objective reality of a predatory politics — “every billionaire is a policy failure” — has revolutionary potential at this point. It gets a reaction from the dispossessed, disaffected, nearly unconscious majority. This voice had to be quieted, subverted for neoliberalism to continue its reign and it has been, subverted into playing a game where democracy losing is the point.
Mallam’s absurd conceit that “the larger left” is changing consciousness is a fever dream set off by an increasingly authoritarian tendency among the complacent parasites of the liberal-left. They are not doing anything now but hastening the transition of the nation-state from passive and unconscious to corpse. Policing language and propagating self-refuting slogans (“defund the police”).
Chicago Clubs
lol at AOC being a “lonely voice.” She’s a Pelosi-in-waiting. A real lonely voice would be someone you barely hear about. Check out Matt Taibbi’s very recent interview with and review of the new book of Dennis Kucinich.
bruce wilder
“A real lonely voice would be someone you barely hear about.”
I think the TPTB like to monitor the state of things, take the temperature frequently, so you are allowed to hear possibly resonant voices. Not necessarily real. The once and future lonely? The ones who discover quickly they have “good friends” and career opportunities.
Ché Pasa
Yep, politics really makes a lot of people lose their minds. It’s ugly, it’s a nasty business, and betrayal is guaranteed sooner or later. There are never any guarantees that you will get what you want, but it’s guaranteed that when you do get what you want it is never enough.
What’s the alternative? Dictatorial rule by a God-Emperor? That sure seems like what a lot of people want on all sides of the aisle. Politics as it’s being played in Congress and practically every other level of government is too grotesque, too decadent, too unsatisfactory to abide much longer if at all. The dysfunction of Congress is legendary.
The unfortunate reality is that even with a God-Emperor ruling, the political games continue, only perhaps fiercer and bloodier than the inefficient, ineffective politics we’re subject to now.
The Squad, obviously, is not in a leadership position or role; not yet, and maybe never. They don’t vote to thwart Party objectives and may never do so, even when Party objectives conflict with their personal / political goals. Same thing on the other side; Rs and their hot shots follow the same or almost the same rules.
What should they do?
Thing is, you can’t get rid of politics. It’s human nature. Politics at any level will fail to satisfy everyone all or even part of the time. Politicians held up as heroes will fail. Guaranteed.
Do you want to change it? To what? And how?
edwin
It is easy to say what the squad should morally do. I think that Ché has nailed it though. His last question can be answered in part.
To what? Perhaps some form of proportional representation in some form of Parliamentary system. The Democratic Party is not a party (nor democratic). It is a coalition that is thrown together at the point of a gun.
I’m afraid that the how is after everything else is tried and fails and they sink to absolute rock bottom and only then will something sensible be tried. This seems to be the American way.
Feral Finster
If the establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at deciding which dissenters to co-opt, which to buy off, which to ignore, which to neutralize.
Witness how all kinds of genuinely radical movements were eventually neutered and made harmless advocates of “working for change within the system.”
Plague Species
Did you see those tattoos? How does that comport with the dress code? He seems like one of them but in uniform. A switch hitter.
bruce wilder
No, you cannot get rid of politics. Man is a political animal, said Aristotle. Loyalty, betrayal, maneuver, strategy — these are stock-in-trade.
But, politics can work better for the health and well-being of the society, the body politic as it were, governing the political economy and so on.
We are asked in these days to judge whether the political system is broken or not. If it is judged that the system is not broken — and we ought to allow in our judgement that a system need not be ideally efficient to be working adequately — then going along to get along makes moral sense. Good machinery may require much apparently greasy, filthy lubricant to lumber into motion and to do work. We must make generous allowance for practical utility in political arrangements — does any one of sense doubt it?
I think the system is broken in the very real sense of being unresponsive to the popular will and manifest national interest. ymmv, of course. The neoliberal consensus in favor of perpetual war, though, seems brain-dead to me to give one example and yet . . .
Even a responsive politics can throw up foolish policy. Vain conquest or austerity can be popular. And, nothing can be accomplished except by persuasion that appeals on various dimensions; politics is who gets what when.
different clue
The tragedy of ” these things take time” is that there may be less time left than the ” time which these things take.”
That said, how might a Congressional Representative express a willingness to be hated in order to make a kamikaze raid which might change the direction of something? Somewhere I heard or read that if a Representative can serve 5 consecutive terms, then he/she is guaranteed getting a Congressional Pension upon reaching the age of retirement. 5 terms. That’s all it takes, if I heard or remember right.
So a change-maker wannabe could get elected for a term, get re-elected for four more terms by going along to get along, and then if he/she could get re-re-elected for term number Six; then he/she could spend that term on kamikaze raids, crucial one-vote victory margins, being as hateful and hated as necessary to kick some shit over sideways and stomp on it, and etc. And if he/she is then defeated for term number Seven, he/she comes away with a guaranteed subsistence income upon retirement age anyway. And if he/she could get re-re-elected for term number Seven, based on his/her constituents loving him/her based on how much the Congress hates him/her, then he/she would be in a stronger position to launch more kamikaze raids, recruit new ten-years-and-then-start-raiding mentees, etc.
Gingrich didn’t mind being hated. And he got things done.
nihil obstet
I’m disappointed, but still watching the Squad. You have to be playing the game to score. That’s why I still like Bernie. He’s done a lot I don’t like, but over his Congressional career he’s brought about policies that increased general welfare. Have the members of the Squad had the opportunity to bring in good policies? What happens on the issues where they didn’t confront to my satisfaction? I recognize that I sound a lot like the “centrist” Democrats keeping their powder dry for forty years. And I admit that it doesn’t look good.
Ian Welsh
An important thing here, which seems to have been missed by most commenters is not whether or not they should or shouldn’t have voted for this but that it was a show put on for rubes. What is important to understand is the vote was arranged to let certain people abstain or vote against BUT not stop the bill and none of the people involved admit it.
This is what you need to know. You can agree or disagree with the Squad, Pelosi or whoever. The issue is simply an accurate understanding of what went down and that it is a pattern. The Squad appears to have never voted against Pelosi/leadership if they could actually stop a bill. Maybe that will change, but the pattern is VERY strong.
Take whatever lessons you want, but understand the pattern and they have lied to you be omission by not saying what is going on.
different clue
Is this yet another case of what Glen Greenwald has called ” rotating villains syndrome”?
(He might better have called it ” rotating villains strategy”, but still, did he finger the problem?)
someofparts
Democrats handle voters the way staff at care facilities handle dementia patients. When the patients ask to leave their requests are not refused directly. This would upset them, which would make them hard to handle. Instead, they are humored, and then they are distracted and their attention is directed elsewhere.
Ché Pasa
They constantly show you what’s going on (at least what they can and want you to see — “Kabuki”, right ?) and it’s been going on since dirt was new. It’s disheartening to realize that after all these years (what, 200 and some odd for the US under the Constitution) so many people still don’t get it, and they continue to say, “Oh that so-and-so lied to me or betrayed me or made me look like a fool.” Yes, yes they did. That’s how the game is played.
Putting so much faith in politicians to do your bidding or at least act like it on the Big Things is the fool’s game because they’re not going to — unless you’re rich and well connected and understand the game and the rules by which it is played. Rules that generally fuck over the Little Guy.
It’s disheartening too to realize that politicians — people in power generally — cannot be relied on.
Dems in Congress are masters and mistresses of staged votes, but so are Rs. It happens at the state and local level, too. It often has to do with staying in office more than one term. The system is set up for incumbents, not for newbies.
Why don’t Dems use the real power they have to thwart passage of this or that law? Well, they do, don’t they? Isn’t that how Sinsema and Manchin are behaving in the Senate? They’re going against… something… I’m not sure it’s the Party… to thwart Dem passage of voting rights and other bills, effectively siding with Rs. This is Kabuki too, but it’s Kabuki that’s been going on for many years and now is rotten with age. In other words, no matter what, Dems always seem to have enough members in the House or Senate who will side with the Rs to thwart socially beneficial legislation. Always. On the other hand, when Rs want to do something harmful to society, there are usually enough Dems on board to ensure passage.
Given the gerrymandering and voter suppression under way, this situation won’t get better.
The question is what to do about it outside (and inside) the halls of power.
bruce wilder
Historically, mass movements had effects. And, the careful distribution of power among opposed interests: Big Labor as well as Big Business. The financial sector was once fractured among not just a great many business entities but among a great many types of financial entities, with interests opposed to one another: banks and brokers, savings and loans and mutual insurance, investment banks and credit unions. Media, too, was once fractured: television stations, movie studios, sports teams, local newspapers, book publishers, television networks, magazine publishers — yes, Virginia one financialized corporations did not own all of these and single-handedly reach 97% of eyeballs on 371 of 500 channels.
The politicians you see on television have no degrees of freedom, no objective power. A politician has power when she can play opposed interests off against each other. That does not happen much today. It could happen. Jeff Bezos has a lot of enemies, potentially — a million reasons to own the Washington Post, which was once owned by a merely rich family.
The production of Kabuki theatre is entertainment for the rubes and it gives the politicians something to do, other than exercise power or govern.
Stop sitting in the audience. Stop being entertained. And, wait for an opportunity. One might never come, but one might come and you won’t recognize it if you are still wringing your hands over the “threat of fascism” or the threat of the Russkies stealing the election from whatshername.
Plague Species
One thing is clear, to me at least, and I’ve been saying it forever. Politics is not a solution, it’s a large part of the problem. It’s a demonic sport at this point all things considered. Discussing political machinations is akin to sports analysis except the consequences of politics is existential and its ultimate terminus is our annihilation via degradation.
One of the absolute worst things that could have happened, happened. The Neoliberals embraced anti-Russianism as a political strategy and by doing so have muddled the threat Russia poses. The hackers who have set up shop in Russia are the future. They are the oligarchs of tomorrow. The current oligarchy is playing with fire by engendering it and enabling it. As the power and expertise of the hackers grows, the current crop of oligarchs are scrambling their PR teams to create a perception they have a handle on it and they can control it. They don’t have a handle on it and they can’t control it. These hackers will be the next feudal overlords and they will ultimately depose the current oligarchy. Their reign will be brutal to the very end.
Trinity
The main problem is believing that politics are necessary (even “required”), and that problems can therefore only be solved … with politics. How convenient.
“Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no spoon… ”.
Politics are an illusion to structure the world in a way that maintains power in the few. It requires a bureaucracy to maintain layers of separation between institutions and individuals which helps to maintain that power. They’ve found two thousand year old equivalents of “modern filing cabinets” in China. The Chinese have apparently kept excellent records, and it’s not a coincidence that China also generated multiple alternative ideas, philosophies, religions over the centuries. These alternatives were written down, in many cases are still relevant, and still freely available. They continue their experimenting even today. Their ideas also align with some of what has survived from indigenous cultures, with notable differences (population control is one).
In other word, there are alternatives, always have been. It’s a mistake to quote a Western philosopher to support the idea that politics are necessary. That’s just using a lie to support the lie.
As someone said, this is all a failure to imagine an alternative, despite the widespread availability of so many alternatives. I think this “failure” (in reality, “non-starter”) stems from the idea that alternative social structures means also giving up all the shiny baubles and conveniences for a life of colorless drudgery. Well, I happen to think that right now is pure drudgery, a life with little meaning or purpose except to follow the endlessly changing and labyrinthine rules and instructions of “the elites”.
Life today is non-stop worry, and an endless fight to keep their fingers out of my pocketbook, their surveillance out of my life, and their illusions out of my head. And their promise is that this situation will continue until my death and beyond. This is not living, it’s a long, very slow death by a thousand cuts. And all these shiny baubles and conveniences are nothing less than a thousand cuts to the earth, to the Nature that keeps us alive in the first place.
Ché Pasa
It’s interesting to me that this Kabuki of Show Votes goes on in parliamentary systems — like Britain, Canada, Australia, etc. — too and is not unique to the anachronistic US system of government.
And of course it’s a characteristic of non-democratic systems that have performative votes by representatives in annual congress assembled.
Real rule goes on behind the scenes, yes? We don’t necessarily know how decisions are reached or what sort of pressures and trade offs are applied to secure votes. Our government is often considered to be run behind the scenes like organized crime, and it’s not necessarily wrong.
We’re expected to have faith in the process and in the integrity of those we put in office. And we know that faith has been broken. Time and again. Our representatives lack integrity.
The process is faulty, corrupt and deeply dismissive of the interests of the majority. Those in office are supposed to be on our side but frequently turn out to be corrupt showboaters, often deeply evil.
And we have almost no means of correcting the situation even at the margins.
There’s an idea that if we knew this is going on, somehow we could fix it. It’s our ignorance that prevents us from doing so.
But I’d suggest that’s not true. Knowledge is not power in this case. Those who “know” have no means of addressing the situation. They can only watch in horror as it gets worse and comment about the ridiculousness of it all.
Which might, over a long period of time, goose things slightly in what we think of as the right direction. Or not.
I sometimes use the example of the mainstream media — which, like the processes of government, has been an Ur-topic of internet criticism. People long ago woke up to the awfulness and evility of mainstream media and leveled the fiercest internet criticisms of it starting decades ago continuing to today. Guess what? It doesn’t get better. It gets demonstrably worse.
Our critiques, while necessary, don’t really move the needle in the right direction. Just the opposite in too many cases.
Mass movements can make changes including revolutionary ones. But the revolutionary energy in this country and much of the world is on the right, backing a neo-fascist future. We get closer every day. And it has been that way for decades.
So what do we do?
Jeff in Texas
What’s telling about all this is that the game being played by Democrats right now– oh gosh what are we gonna do about Manchin and Sinema, oh look the Squad stood up for defunding Capitol police but the votes just weren’t there– is the same damn game they played in 2008-10 when they had even larger majorities in the House and Senate. Remember the online left mantra of “more and better Democrats”?? How did that work out? They’re always just a vote or two short of 50, or 60, or 2/3, or 3/4, or whatever arbitrary threshold there is for whatever it is they claim they want to do but cannot.
Sinema and Manchin are clowns, but they are not doing what they do because they love the filibuster. Like, are we supposed to believe Sinema ran for Senate to save the fucking filibuster??? They are doing what they do because the Democrats LOVE claiming that their hands are tied. That’s all it is.
Mark Level
As someone who follows this crap (politricks) the kabuki doesn’t surprise me in the least, it is par for the course. The pols service those who pay them– the Neoliberal elites in the FIRE sector, (esp. Finance), Big Pharma, the Military-Industrial and Prison-Industrial complexes who make up the failing and flailing US Empire. As Bruce Wilder correctly noted, “The politicians you see on TV have no degrees of freedom, no objective power,” and they know that very well. People like AOC and “the Squad” may not have known that when they ran for office and may have had genuine insurgent instincts, but it does not matter, the Federal ruling class elites have their own narrow narrative, and nothing outside it is really allowed, beyond performative “I hear you” pretense. They now know the truth, and play their little part in distracting the public. American “representative democracy” (haha, what a self-contradictory crock of sh1t, I haven’t voted “for” anyone who would meaningfully represent me in years, when I vote it is only against the greater evil, not with any illusions the lesser evil will ever be on “my” side) is a joke. The Ruling Class fully accepts Maggie Thatcher’s TINA, and will reward failure by the elites with future office, and millions of $$$. How many people who hitched their wagon to the genocidal Iraq invasion, based entirely on lies have been punished professionally? (Arguably, Judith Miller who lost her cushy post at the NYT; and the Lincoln Project sleazebag who recently got caught in predatory recruitment & paying decades-younger men for sex, punished for the sex, not the Iraq deaths.) How many prospered and remain in the ruling class? All the rest. Change WILL come. The current leadership is so sclerotic and so out of touch with reality and the physical (“meat space”, virus space) world that a collapse is coming, which even the stupid, fat and indifferent Americans will at some point have to acknowledge . . . It could be in 3 years or 15 or . . . who’s to say? But as Malcolm X long ago observed, chickens do come home to roost. There are others thinking along Ian’s lines– I ran across this very long article today in the Jacobin (hardly revolutionary as a source, but sometimes clear-eyed on specific issues)– https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/take-me-to-your-leader-the-rot-of-the-american-ruling-class For those with energy to read to the end, the closing line however is rebutted by the discussion here. “Making revolution against the ruling class, however, is a hell of a lot harder than making revolution within it.” There will be no revolution “within” the American ruling class, TPTB– only collapse will force some reckoning, one would hope by people from outside it, though that remains to be seen when it occurs.
Stirling Newberry
F Lee Bailey has died:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/metro/f-lee-bailey-brilliant-brash-lawyer-high-profile-trials-dies/
someofparts
Speaking of chickens coming home to roost, this was posted at NC today. In the comments section, people from around the country describe the observable economic conditions in their localities. The costs for buying a house or renting an apartment seem to be skyrocketing out of control everywhere. It sounds like regular people in every part of the country are experiencing the rich as an invading force that arrives and pays gruesomely inflated prices for any scrap of real estate. They are making survival even harder for regular people everywhere. The thinking in the comments thread is that sky-high rental costs, combined with equally astronomical costs for used cars may explain the problems employers are having finding enough staff. The people they need to hire can’t afford to live close enough to commercial districts to take those jobs.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/06/how-is-your-economy.html
Also, reading Matt Taibbi today, he suggests that for Americans, politics is experienced only as a sporting event. The idea that picking a politician will have any impact on actual policy is something that people stopped even imagining long ago. Now, the only value of political campaigns is the fleeting thrill of seeing your home team win.
bruce wilder
I find myself both frustrated and disturbed by the shallowness of “ever thus” and “hard to think of an alternative” arguments.
Political theatre is not novel, not is it per se something to be upset about.
The problem is that American national politics is broken — it has been converted into a tool exclusively of the predatory rich and giant business corporations. And absolutely no one volunteering as a champion of the neglected interests of the People and elected to office is willing or able to tell the truth about that, let alone take action to fundamentally reform the system.
Ché Pasa
“Broken?” Nah. National politics is operating pretty much as designed, even with a freak of nature like Trump in the Big Chair.
As for electeds telling the truth about it, lots of them from all sides of the aisle do that. Problem is, they either can’t do anything about it or choose not to — whether under compulsion or not.
Talk is cheap. Throwing a spanner in the works is something else again.
Mr Jones
And absolutely no one volunteering as a champion of the neglected interests of the People and elected to office is willing or able to tell the truth about that
AOC’s entire raison d’etre as a candidate was to tell the truth about that. Others as well.
let alone take action to fundamentally reform the system.
This is the issue.
Soredemos
@Trinity
Politics is what society does. A ‘society’ without politics would be a single person living in a cave somewhere. Except probably not even then, as the individual would inevitably manage to be indecisive and weigh different options and effectively have a kind of internal politics.
It’s pretty common for fiction writers to posit various kinds of hiveminds, but even these would have politics. Actual honey bees have elements of democracy, and even some sort of gestalt mass intelligence, with no true individuals, would develop factions, as it’s always possible to arrive at different conclusions based on the same set of evidence and logic.