STRATEGY

918 belated

see big picture

but also related to RW Big picture long term SYSTEMIC strategy, eg gerry?  -> capture of states --> eco-terror, abortion, voter suppress ...[see below ALEC model grabbed by barton wallbuilders

aka defeat  defund the left

aha:  unions are collective action in the workplace/economic world, but class action is collective use of courts (legal vs economic power). both are under attack, defund the left. kochs undermine democ eg voter fraud BS to deprive we the ppl of political power, trifecta game over.

SEE RESIST POST MORT 11 24

RO K AND

After the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee famously commission an internal “growth and opportunity” report to chart a path forward. But even then, the GOP found electoral success only after Trump ignored the report’s recommendations to strengthen the party’s infrastructure and adopt a more welcoming and inclusive message.

After the 2016 election, Democrats also made changes to their party infrastructure and fundraising after a period of introspection as well.

Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir, who led Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, is worried that Democrats won’t do the introspection necessary after this devastating loss.

“A healthy party is challenging itself to do that kind of an autopsy and hear what we did wrong,” he said. “I don’t even know that there is going to be that kind of a process.”

Sanders himself was more blunt in his statement.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” he said. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

Cappelletti reported from Detroit. Associated Press writers Dan Merica, Farnoush Amiri and Stephen Groves in Washington contributed.

ROBT R

AN 12 24

Today we don’t know if the United States government will shut down tomorrow because, first, Elon Musk followed by his co-president Donald Trump, persuaded House Republicans to vote against a compromise bill, and then, last night, Republicans couldn’t summon enough votes for a stripped-down continuing resolution because Trump insisted that it contain a measure lifting the debt ceiling.

This is not governing. Trump and the Republicans are not a governing party.

What’s the back story to all this? It’s the oligarchy that put Trump into the presidency.

A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market.

But as power and wealth have moved to the top, everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek words meaning rule (arche) by the few (oligos). It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society — and therefore have most power over other peoples’ lives.

So far, Trump has picked 13 billionaires for his administration. It’s the wealthiest in history, including the richest person in the world. They and Trump are part of the American oligarchy, even though Trump campaigned on being the “voice” of the working class.

America has experienced oligarchy twice before. Many of the men who founded America were slaveholding white oligarchs. At that time, the new nation did not have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farm hands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the American population was Black, almost all of them enslaved.

A century later a new American oligarchy emerged comprised of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. It was called the Gilded Age.

They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. But they also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”

World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of the robber barons’ wealth, and much of their power was eliminated with the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

America demanded fundamental reforms — a progressive income tax, corporate taxes, estate taxes, limits on the political power of large corporations, antitrust laws, laws enabling workers to form unions and requiring that employers negotiate with them, Social Security, the forty-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, civil rights and voting rights, and Medicare.

For the next half-century, the gains from growth were more widely shared and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans. During these years America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

There was still much to do: wider economic opportunities for Black people, Latinos, and women, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress.

Starting around 1980, a third American oligarchy emerged.

Since then, the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has stagnated. The share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent, according to an analysis by my Berkeley colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, another oligarchy.

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else.

While the Biden administration sought to realign America with its ideals, it did not and could not accomplish nearly enough. Trump’s lies and demagoguery exploited the anger and frustration of much of America — creating the false impression he was a tribune of the working class and an anti-establishment hero — thereby allowing the oligarchy to triumph.

In 2022, Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter and turn it into his own personal political megaphone. Then, in 2024, he spent $277 million to get Trump elected, also using Twitter (now X) to amplify pro-Trump, anti-Harris messages.

These were good investments for Musk. Since Election Day, Musk’s fortune has increased by $170 billion. That’s because investors in Tesla and SpaceX have pushed their value into the stratosphere.

Trump has put Musk (and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy) in charge of gutting government services in the name of “efficiency.” Musk’s investors assume that Musk will eliminate the health, safety, labor, and environmental regulations that have limited the profits of Musk-owned corporations, and that Trump will put more government money into SpaceX and xAI (Musk’s artificial intelligence company).

Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else.

The power shift across America is related to a tsunami of big money into politics. Corporate lobbying has soared. The voices of average people have been drowned out.

The American oligarchy is back, with a vengeance.

Not all wealthy people are culpable, of course. The abuse is occurring at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain power and then utilize that power to accumulate more wealth. Today’s robber barons include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Charles Koch, Jeff Yass, Ken Griffin, and Rupert Murdoch.

This is how oligarchy destroys democracy. As oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates and deploy platoons of lobbyists and public relations flaks, they buy off democracy. Oligarchs know that politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them.

As long as they control the purse strings, there will be no meaningful response to the failure of most people’s paychecks to rise, nor to climate change, nor racism, nor the soaring costs of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, college, and housing, because those are not the main concerns of the oligarchy.

The oligarchs want lower taxes, which is what Trump, Musk, and other oligarchs are planning — an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cut, with an estimated price tag of at least $5 trillion.

They want no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of their giant corporations. Instead, their corporations will grow larger, able to charge consumers even more. Trump is replacing Lina Khan, the trustbusting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, with a Trump crony.

There will be no meaningful constraint on Wall Street’s dangerous gambling addiction. The gambling will only increase.

Wall Street is already celebrating Trump’s victory. The stock market has reached new heights. But the stock market is inconsequential for most people, because the richest 1 percent own over half of all shares of stock owned by Americans while the richest 10 percent own over 90 percent.

There will be no limits to CEO pay. Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will also rake in billions more. Government will dole out even more corporate subsidies, bailouts, and loan guarantees while eliminating protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.

It will become a government for, of, and by the oligarchy.

The biggest divide in America today is not between “right” and “left,” or between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. The old labels — “right” and “left” — prevent most people from noticing they’re being shafted.

The propagandists and demagogues who protect the oligarchy stoke racial and ethnic resentments — describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists.

This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics. It causes Americans to hate each other so we don’t look upward and see where the wealth and power have really gone.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back, as we did in response to the oligarchy that dominated America’s last Gilded Age.

This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans fightingfordemocracy and againstconcentrated power and privilege.

It will require that the Democratic Party, or a new third party, tell the truth to the American people: that the major reason most peoples’ wages have gone nowhere and their jobs are less secure, why most families have to live paycheck to paycheck, why CEO pay has soared to 300 times the pay of the typical worker, and why billionaires are about to run our government, is because the market has been rigged against average working people by the oligarchy.

The agenda ahead is simply stated but it will not be easy to implement: We must get big money out of our politics. End corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Bust up monopolies. Stop voter suppression.

We must strengthen labor unions, give workers a stronger voice in their workplaces, create more employee-owned corporations, encourage worker cooperatives, fund and grow more state and local public banks, and develop other institutions of economic democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

It may seem an odd time in our history to suggest such reforms, but this is the best time. Trump and his oligarchy will inevitably overreach. The lesson from the last Gilded Age is that when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, the majority will rise up and demand real, systemic change.

It’s only a matter of time. A government shutdown that hurts average people, engineered by the richest person in the world, might just hasten it.

NOW READ:**Elon Musk shows Mike Johnson who's boss**

proto-Occupy? [KA also discounts importance of Koch TP?

https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-geniuses

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/evil-genuises-by-kurt-andersen-an-excerpt.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/

laffer w/ hart and later dems cans

...

Although very few people I knew voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the 1980s and ’90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . whatever, as long as it didn’t involve big new social programs that affluent people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of ideological consistency.

When Gary Hart ran a second time for president, in 1988, one of his tax-policy advisers was Arthur Laffer, Reagan’s inventor of supply-side economics. When Jerry Brown ran for the 1992 Democratic nomination, he too sought Laffer’s help, to devise some kind of tax scheme “that was clear and easy to articulate,” and Laffer himself says he voted for Bill Clinton. (He’s now a Trump adviser.) The Democratic Leadership Council, co-founded by Clinton in 1985, became a think-tankish anchor for Democrats who didn’t disagree with Republicans that pretty much the only acceptable new solutions to any social problem were market based.*

For the remainder of the century, no candidate from the Democratic left became a plausible finalist for the nomination. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically centrist party. There was no organized, viable national economic left in the vicinity of serious power. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism at the beginning of the 1990s was very good news, but it had the unfortunate effect of making almost any left critique of America’s new hypercapitalism seem not just quixotic but also kind of corny and quaint.

Not everybody in the 1990s was sanguine about the emerging future, or as oblivious as I still was to the multi-faceted unfairness that had been built into the economy, or as complacent as I was about the millions of Americans losing out in the go-go globalizing digitizing frenzy. Around this time, a middle-aged law-school professor and bankruptcy expert, until recently a registered Republican who’d been affiliated in the late 1970s with the conservatives’ hugely influential new Law and Economics movement, began to see the light. Elizabeth Warren has said that she realized only in the ’90s that “starting in the ’80s, the cops were taken off the beat” in financial services. “I was with the GOP for a while,” she has said, “because I really thought that it was a party that was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets. I feel like the GOP just left that. They moved to a party that said,No, it’s not about a level playing field. And they really stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial institutions are just hammering middle-class American families.”

I’m betting that at the end of 1999, Warren didn’t feel complete solidarity with all the thousands of demonstrators in Seattle outside the biannual World Trade Organization meeting. Their grievances were various—from AFL-CIO folks pissed off about U.S. companies manufacturing more and more things overseas to anarchists smashing store windows and otherwise acting out their hatred for the System. I know I rolled my eyes at the Gen-X kids in Seattle chaining themselves together and getting off on tear gas; at their lack of a feasible agenda or nuance or even coherence; and at the belief of so many of them in a shadowy, multi-tentacled conspiracy of the omnipotent elite to tyrannize the little people and subvert democracy. It took me a few more years to realize that their caricature of the new economic paradigm was closer to right than wrong. What that new paradigm ultimately brought us, of course, is Donald Trump....

The obeisance of the rich right and their consiglieri to Trump for the past four years has exposed more nakedly than ever their compact—everything about money, anything for money—and the events of 2020 pushed that along to an even more hideous crescendo. In early spring, when COVID-19 had killed only dozens of Americans, Stuart Stevens, a strategist for the four previous Republican presidential nominees, wrote that “those of us in the Republican Party built this moment,” because “the failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party … Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect.”

Norm Ornstein: I’ve witnessed the decline of the Republican Party

Entirely apart from this administration’s unique incompetence and Orwellian denial of facts, while its handling of the pandemic may wind up as a political failure for them, every piece of the crises’ exacerbation came directly out of the right’s playbook of the past four decades. Stevens could have also listed Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear, Short-term profits are everything, Inequality’s not so bad, Liberty equals selfishness, and Entitled to our own facts.

proto-arabella?  millionaires ~?

vogel politico says rove dark $ death star is ctr/mirror?

2010 tp wave origin? mirror?! this was ctr to BO win 2008?

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36841_Page3.html *Rove, GOP secretly plot vast network to reclaim power

By: Mike Allen and Kenneth P. Vogel May 6, 2010

The Republican Party’s best-connected political operatives have quietly built a massive fundraising, organizing and advertising machine based on the model assembled by Democrats early in the decade, and with the same ambitious goal — to recapture Congress and the White House. The new groups could give Republicans and their allies a powerful campaign apparatus separate from the Republican National Committee. Karl Rove, political architect of the Bush presidency, and Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman, are the most prominent forces behind what is, in effect, a network of five overlapping groups, three of which were started in the past few months. The operating assumption of Rove, Gillespie and the other organizers is that despite the historical dominance of Republican fundraising and organizing, the GOP has been outmaneuvered by Democrats and their allies in recent years, andit is time to strike back. “Where they have a chess piece on the board, we need a chess piece on the board,” said Gillespie, who is involved in all five groups in roles ranging from chairman to informal adviser. “Where they have a queen, we shouldn’t have three pawns.” The network, which doesn’t have a name,attempts to replicate the Democracy Alliance, an umbrella group — founded in 2005 and funded by George Sorosand other billionaires — and to borrow tactics from liberal groups established to help Democrats regain power after eight years of the Bush administration. Two organizers of the Republican groups even made pilgrimages earlier this year to pick the brain of John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff who, in 2003, founded the Center for American Progress and was a major proponent of Democrats developing the kind of infrastructure pioneered by Republicans. Rove, currently on a book tour, has provided “a laying-on of hands” for the groups — as one organizer put it — by encouraging major Republican donors to support them as part of the GOP’s path to revival. “Karl has always said: People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy,” he said. “Now, he wants to get more serious.”

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While separate, the five entities are so closely related that three share an 11th-floor office near the White House.

The groups are: *American Crossroads * American Crossroads — designed to counter spending by labor and progressive groups, including the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Unit and MoveOn.org — will focus on voter contact with the potential to move into ground game and turnout efforts. Organized under the tax code as a Section 527 organization, meaning it can spend directly on political activity, it’s set an ambitious budget of $52 million and says it’s already received commitments for $30 million of that.Its president and CEO is former top U.S. Chamber of Commerce executive Steven Law; its political director is veteran GOP operative Carl Forti. The chairman is Mike Duncan, former RNC chairman; the treasurer is Jo Ann Davidson, former RNC co-chairwoman; and the secretary is Jim Dyke, former RNC communications director. To try to avoid undercutting RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who has alienated some givers, Duncan tells prospective donors that the party structure is “an important part of winning” and that he is looking for people who “want to go above and beyond.”

*American Action Network * American Action Network, modeled on the Center for American Progress, will conduct polling in key races, and plans to put up TV advertising since it is allowed to engage in explicit political activity as a group organized under Section 501c(4) of the tax code. Former Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota is the CEO; Fred Malek, a longtime top GOP financier, is chairman; andRob Collins, a former top aide to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, is president. Board members include former U.S. Sens. George Allen and Mel Martinez and former House Reps. Tom Reynolds, Jim Nussle and Vin Weber.

*American Action Forum * American Action Forum, a policy institute linked to the American Action Network,also will mirror CAP.Coleman is also chairman of this group, which as a501c(3) organization, is prohibited from directly endorsing or opposing candidates. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director and campaign adviser to Sen. John McCain, is the president. Board members includeformer Govs. Jeb Bush of Florida and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania.

*Resurgent Republic * Resurgent Republic co-founded a year ago by Gillespie and Republican pollster Whit Ayres, says in its official description that it is “modeled on Democracy Corps, which has made important contributions to the public debate from the left and has proven to be a valuable resource for labor unions, environmentalists and liberal congressional leaders.” The group has released a series of polls and offers itself as a message-testing laboratory to help GOP lawmakers develop policies.

*The Republican State Leadership Committee * The Republican State Leadership Committee, which focuses on down-ballot races for statewide and legislative offices, raised $22 million in the last campaign cycle. Gillespie took over as chairman earlier this year. Its goal is to raise at least $50 million to $70 million to influence congressional elections this fall and to road-test an agenda for a future Republican House and, ultimately, a Republican president. Colemanrecalled in an interview that he admired the left’s financial prowess so much that until recently, he gave potential donors copies of “The Argument,” a book by Matt Bai that chronicles progressives’ rising financial power. “This is what the left does — we need to do it on the right,” Coleman said he told people. Democrats say the new GOP network has the potential to tip Republicans back into the House majority, since the formal party structures will burn through money as they struggle to compete in a record number of House seats. Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said he is worried about the groups as a potential “conduit for a lot of special-interest money to flow into campaigns.” The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened possibilities for groups like American Crossroads, American Action Network and others backed by corporations, unions or huge donors to be more aggressive in supporting or opposing candidates. Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation that would curtail its effects, but right now the decision is emboldening donors - particularly on the right - who had grown reluctant to open their wallets to outside groups, said Charlie Spies, a GOP campaign finance attorney on Resurgent Republic’s legal advisory board. ...

brulle 2021 obstructing:

...Our analysis also supports the finding that funding strategies differ between progressive and

conservative philanthropists.We find a striking stability in funding over the 16-year time

period. The funding strategy of the conservative movement was laid out in the so-called Fat

Memo(Miller 2005), which informed the giving practices of theOlin Foundation, the first

major conservative philanthropy, and subsequent conservative donors. These funding efforts

focus on the development and promulgation of a clear conservative viewpoint. To realize that

effort, conservative philanthropies have funded a range of organizations that act to realize that

goal on a long-term basis. This strategy focused on the creation and maintenance of conservative 

think tanks, development of public intellectuals (“thought leaders”), and promulgation

of a consistent ideological message. Additionally, conservative foundations focus on building

institutional capacity in organizations with strong communications capabilities (Covington

1997; Barley 2010).

This consistent and long-term funding strategy has enabled the development of a cohesive

institutional network of conservative organizations that work collectively to promulgate a

consistent message. This strategy stands in marked contrast to the funding strategy of

progressive foundations, which focus on individual research projects and short-term efforts.

Consequently, the progressive activist organizations and think tanks form a very loose and

disconnected network(Barley 2010, p. 792). This differs significantly from the very tight

network of organizations and think tanks that comprise the conservative movement. The

analysis confirms the long-term stable funding that maintains the CCCM.

This analysis still leaves Senator Whitehouse’s question unanswered. The source of over

three-quarters of the funding of the CCCM cannot be identified.While some of this funding

could come from small donations, the existing IRS disclosure rules do not enable any further

investigation in this area. Further research is needed to develop new means to extend our

understanding of the unidentified funders that created and maintain the CCCM.[refs]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-party-funding/

it's time to defund the GOP, and there's precedent and strategy for the effort.

The need to cut the party's access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker's proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. "Freedom!" they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.

Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experimentsand that public health measures like masks are "un-American," while we're being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.

Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it's a lie.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the first public health care legislation—it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization not just for the Navy but also for civilian sailors. And both he and President George Washington had participated in quarantine events during epidemics in the summers of 1793 and 1798, and both promoted inoculation against smallpox.

From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation's capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1798, that city's board of health, with no objections raised by President John Adams or any member of Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia.

Most signers of the Declaration and Constitution were still alive, and many were in Congress and on the Supreme Court. None opposed the lockdown. Churches not only couldn't meet; a few in the quarantine areas were closed down entirely for much of the year in America's capital city.

From their bans on teaching sex education and evolution in our schools, to denying climate change, to this latest campaign against public health, far-right Republicans' fight against science has damaged America's standing in the world and destroyed the lives of millions.

Thomas Paine, in his time, wrote about "The Age of Reason." Today we have "The Age of Intentional Republican Stupidity." And they don't just embrace it for themselves; they're hell-bent on imposing it on every American, from schoolchildren on up.

They have rigged elections by making it hard to vote, seditiously tried to overturn the 2020 election, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means.

These Republicans are not patriots; they're traitors to reason, science, education, human rights, democracy and now, unbelievably, public health. They're traitors to humanity itself.

The only way to deal with a death-dealing cult is to end it; thus, we must embark on a campaign to defund the Republican Party.

Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party, and actually pulled it off.

While the Republican Party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions. So Ronald Reagan, as part of his "Reagan Revolution," figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America's unions.

His first shot was to destroy PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, and he did it in less than a week in August of 1981. He, along with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court, then embarked on a campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus gutting the Democratic Party's ability to win elections.

It worked, and by 1992, American union membership, and union's ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party turned to giant corporations and billionaires to win that election year.

Reagan's plan not only kneecapped the Democratic Party for the next 40 years but also changed the party at its core, turning it from President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society party into Bill Clinton's corporate-friendly Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrats, now in bed with big banks, insurance companies, etc.

Defunding the Republican Party may even force it to start focusing on the needs of regular people rather than just billionaires and corporations, which only adds to the urgency of the job. There are just a few steps through the process, which include:

• End "Red State Welfare."
• Kentucky gets $2.41 for every dollar they send to Washington, D.C. Most other red states are similarly "taker" states, so let's fight for a law limiting states to no more than, say, $1.50 for every buck they sent to D.C. in tax revenues. Call it welfare reform!
• End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $700 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, and nearly $1 trillion a year we give to Big Pharma, as well as support for insurance companies (like subsidies for the "Medicare Advantage" scam) and "Big Ag."
• End corporate monopolies. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses while rejuvenating local economies. From airlines to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans and use some of that money to fund the GOP.
• Bring back Eisenhower's 91 percent top tax rate, or at least something north of 50 percent. America's strongest economy was during the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, with a top tax rate of 91 percent to 74 percent. Progressive taxation on the super-wealthy was openly supported by Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. With that tax revenue, we built highways, schools and hospitals, and put men on the moon, while the best way CEOs could avoid the tax was to use the money to pay their workers better wages. Reagan cut that top rate to less than 30 percent, and the billionaires it produced now pour money into the GOP to keep it that way.
• Follow Europe's example and impose a wealth tax on great fortunes. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year—the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. Billionaires should pay a similar annual tax on their money bins.
• :{

}:

• End campaign contributions from corporations, end super PACs, and limit billionaires' ability to skew our politics with their money. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one.

These simple "Progressive Contract with America" steps, along with restoring the ability of American workers to unionize, will not only revive the Democratic Party, but also restore America to economic greatness and give us a far more honest political system.

Thom Hartmann is America's number one progressive talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His online writings are compiled at HartmannReport.com. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/tactics-from-the-right-wing-playbook-on-covid-19/

pfaw peter montgomery

uring this extremely challenging time, when the spread of the coronavirus threatens people’s lives and the nation’s well-being, Americans should be able to count on their leaders for honest and accurate information. But Americans who trust right-wing media, political, and religious leaders have too often gotten the opposite.

President Donald Trump himself has been a steady source of dishonesty, disinformation, and wildly mixed signals about the coronavirus outbreak. And his supporters in right-wing media, the religious-right political movement, and Republican Party leadership have employed a range of messaging strategies and tactics designed to mask administration failures, smear its critics, and promote narratives that serve to distract and misinform Americans about the crisis and the public health measures being taken to address it.

Here, briefly, are some of the ways Americans are being ill-served by conservative leaders, activists, and media.

Dismissing and Downplaying the Threat

In the early days of the spread of the virus, Trump and members of his administration downplayed the seriousness of the threat the virus posed to Americans. Trump’s allies and right-wing media have decried what they described as a hoax, hype, and fearmongering designed to harm Trump’s reelection prospects. Even now, as new cases and deaths continue to spike, Trump and his supporters send mixed messages about the threat and the importance of social distancing.

Distracting Americans with Conspiracy Theories and Finger-Pointing

A wide range of conspiracy theories about the virus and its spread have been promoted not only by fringe activists in online spaces but also by members of Congress and religious leaders with large audiences. Many of the conspiracy theories are meant to deflect accountability from U.S. officials’ decision-making by diverting attention and blame elsewhere. COVID-19 has been portrayed as a weapon of war launched by the Chinese or North Korean governments and as a plot by Satan, the Democratic Party,  globalists, big pharma, and other habitual enemies of the right-wing imagination. Others who promote the QAnon conspiracy theory popular in some corners of Trump’s base say the virus and social distancing measures are cover for Trump to make mass arrests of a deep-state pedophile ring. A new wave of hoax conspiracy-mongering is spreading on social media using hashtags like #coronavirustruth and #FilmYourHospital.

Pushing the Team Trump Line, Whatever It Is

The extent to which right-wing activists, leaders, and media have become public relations vehicles of the White House is evident in the ways that they have followed the Trump administration’s own dramatic shifts from dismissing fears of the virus as hype generated by the media to belatedly recognizing the seriousness of the situation and the need for strong public health measures. Trump’s supporters have learned from him not to bother acknowledging or explaining their abrupt shifts in position. One religious-right activist even defended Trump’s misinformation as a strategy for sowing confusion in the “enemy camp.”

Making the Most of It / Shameless Opportunism

Some right-wing leaders are taking advantage of the crisis to push preexisting agendas. Among them: promoting hostility to immigrants and immigration; shutting down accessto abortion; promoting school vouchers; underminingenvironmentalprotections; fomenting nationalism and disparaging international institutions; disparaging federal aid to struggling individuals and promoting libertarian social darwinism; and weakening the separation of church and state. Others have used it to enrich themselves by selling bogus “cures.”

Playing God and Portraying Trump’s Actions as Part of a Divine Plan

Conservative evangelicals are Trump’s most loyal supporters. Many have followed his shifts, urging their followers to adopt the administration’s social distancing guidelines. But some have resisted restrictions on large gatherings, portraying them as attacks on religious liberty and telling supporters that believers have divine protection. Some have portrayed attending church as a test of their faith in God’s power to heal. Some have called the virus a sign of God’s punishment for abortion or homosexuality, and others have said it’s God’s way to focus attention on the church.

Some “prophetic” leaders have declared that God will bring swift and miraculous resolution to the crisis: one asserted that the tide was turning in mid-February; others decreed that the virus would leave Earth on March 23; and others have predicted divine intervention around Passover or Easter, when Trump himself has said he would like to see churches full. Some are depicting current events as evidence that we are living in the End Times and that believers should therefore expect “pestilence” and other events prophesied for the last days.

This post has been updated.

Tags: conspiracy theoriesCoronavirusdisinformationTrump Administration

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/project-blitz-is-producing-model-legislation-for-christian-nationalists

no lnx

Project Blitz is producing model legislation for Christian Nationalists

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly January 24, 2020

You may have heard about legislation passed recently in Tennessee and other states which allows adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples or families with whom they have religious objections. The fact that bills like that are being considered and passed by red states is no coincidence. They are the product of an organized effort being led by Project Blitz.

The first thing to know about Project Blitz is that it was launched in 2015 by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, the National Legal Foundation, and Wallbuilders. The latter is an organization founded by David Barton, the Republican operative and discredited historian who rejects the separation of church and state, claiming that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

This project seems to have maintained a low profile until Fred Clarkson, who has been studying the Christian right for decades, came across their 116-page manual of model legislation in early 2018. As Clarkson explains, Project Blitz is to Christian nationalists what the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was to big business.

Many of the bills on [the Christian right] agenda are making news; some have passed key legislative committees or whole state legislative chambers, and some have already been signed into law. But what reporters, activists, and most legislators don’t realize is that many of these bills draw from an unusual package of 20 model bills included in a report assembled by a coalition of Christian Right groups for an initiative they call “Project Blitz.”

The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content—from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that’s animated a meaningful portion of the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks probusiness state legislators, drafts sample legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-radicalizations-of-the-american-mind-why-liberals-need-to-grapple-with-the-complexity-of-the-new-left/

wa po

The radicalizations of the American mind: Why liberals need to grapple with the complexity of the new left

Avant-garde social movements are jarring among the non-adherent. It’s part of their point—and familiar at the moment. By 2019, a set of radical political theories on the left has spread from college campuses into professional media and mainstream culture, variously emphasizing demands for safe spaces free of posttraumatic triggers, limits on free speech to offset structural privilege, new pronouns to help de-normalize cisgender identity, and other unconventional imperatives. You’ve probably seen scare quotes around “safe spaces,” “structural privilege,” or “cisgender identity” as often as not.

A more familiar but still disruptive politics of anti-capitalism has meanwhile been on the rise across the left under the old banner of socialism, while a politics of white nationalism, resurgent on the right, has echoed the tropes of fascism. All together, these movements haven’t just bewildered the uninitiated majority of the country; they’ve seemed to hasten a steep erosion of consensus around the terms of political debate in America and a metastatic spread of conflict without common ground.

For anyone committed to the foundational mores of liberal democracy, such as toleration, free expression, and due process, the encroachment of illiberal consensus from all sides represents a special problem. Liberal-democratic politics may be compatible with any number of radical ideas over time, but it also depends on the maintenance of a common social repertoire that includes a broad investment in mutual persuasion, a commitment to evidentiary argument, and an openness to creating diverse coalitions for distinct political ends. The more radical politics thrives by working against this social repertoire, rather than with it, the more it stands to threaten liberal-democratic politics as such.

In his new book Panic Attack, Robby Soave takes a comprehensive and critical look at the flourishing ecosystem of American radicalism with this problem in view. That means surveying a lot of ground: the hugely influential worldview informed by intersectional theory, which focuses on the complex interactions among racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression; the related politics of identity, culture, and power behind Black Lives Matter, fourth-wave feminism, and trans activism; the new salience of the Democratic Socialists of America; and the alarming phenomenon of the hateful, cruel, and ironical alt-right.

It also means going to some historical depth. While Soave’s subtitle is Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, he understands that, like so much about this age, the state of its radicalism has vastly more to do with decades of emerging conditions that preceded Donald Trump’s presidency than it does with Trump himself. In a sense, Panic Attack works as an anthology of historical explainers. Perhaps you’re uncertain about the origins and significance of ideas like “cultural appropriation” or “gender dysphoria,” the importance of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, or the influence of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory on undergraduate instruction in the humanities and social sciences? Soave lays these out clearly, without condescension to either his subject matter or the reader.

He integrates them, as well, in an overarching historical narrative. Despite their eclecticism and sporadic mutual enmity, Soave argues, the array of radical movements asserting themselves since Trump’s election share a core set of themes, apart from which we fundamentally can’t understand them. More specifically, they’re driven by a core set of experiences that have unmoored “Zillennials”—a mash-up term of art combining Soave’s own Millennial generation (born 1981–96) with the younger Gen Z (1997–)—from some of the basic assumptions of their forebears.

As Soave sees it, Zillennials have been raised in a chronically freaked-out “safety culture,” at home and at school, that has left them broadly unprepared for some of modern life’s tougher realities. They have then been loaded with unprecedented student debt and dropped into an extraordinarily rocky economy. With the intensifying influence of social media, and the powerful new modes of social normalization they’ve catalyzed, Zillennials have been primed for immersion into a networked set of radical ideas that have seemed to speak meaningfully to their lives. Coming largely out of the academy, these ideas have emphasized a capacious view of victimhood and an associated need for protection from psychological harm; an antipathy to capitalism; and a hard turn away from the traditionally youth-friendly norms of free expression that characterized the civil rights and antiwar eras.

The result has been a proliferation of new forms of common sense that are contemptuous not only toward liberals’ traditional embrace of markets in the economic realm, but also toward the traditional defenses of free expression, open debate, and due process that liberals have often shared with radicals on the left in the social, political, and legal realms.

Like many concerned about “political correctness,” Soave locates these tendencies first and foremost on college campuses, the sources of some of the more familiar and dramatic illustrations. These include the deliberate disruption and harassment of campus speakers—occasionally quasi-fascists, sometimes mainstream conservatives, but just as often heterodox liberals or even left radicals—on account of the putative harm their ideas do to one or more categories of oppressed people. Other illustrations include the establishment of new campus regulatory powers to enforce radical norms and various successes in reshaping curricula to conform with them. But Soave also sees these new norms beyond academia, in patterns of fierce division, exclusion, and censure that inflect different race-, sex-, and gender-based identity movements across society at large.

Notably, when Soave reports conversations with left-radical protestors, they tend to convey little interest in liberal theories of the case at all. “Free speech is allowing people to express themselves in a way that doesn’t put other people down,” one tells him at an anti-alt-right counterdemonstration last year. “It doesn’t oppress people and damage our society.” Elsewhere, an antifascist activist is incredulous about any need to justify physically attacking a peaceful group of right-wing demonstrators: “They’re fucking Nazis.” Elsewhere still, in arguing to cancel the screening of a pro-gay film about Stonewall that a group of student activists deemed in an open letter “discursively violent” toward members of the trans community, an undergrad student dismisses the idea of showing the film and then debating about it. “Critical discussion,” she says, “is simply a way of engaging in respectability politics.” Overall, the lack of engagement with liberal ideas is at least as striking as the substance of any radical ideas themselves.

The role of this negative space seems key to interpreting the story Soave is telling in Panic Attack. It’s not uncommon in skeptical accounts of “political correctness” to encounter the idea that radical politics goes too far in an illiberal direction. But Soave’s account is different. The physics of contemporary radicalism that he describes isn’t really linear, in the sense that “too far” would imply, so much as circular: as liberal-democratic mores become increasingly meaningless among radicals, they themselves increasingly see only left versus right, socialist versus fascist, radicalism versus radicalism. The only lucid way to respond to the world and win the future is, now, to understand that liberals are objectively allied with your most extreme political enemies; and the more forceful you imagine those enemies to be, the more force you’ll consider necessary and justified to counter them.

This dynamic may account for what some will no doubt consider a glaring disproportionality in Soave’s book: he devotes one chapter, less than twenty-two pages out of 280, to the alt-right. This appears to be because he considers the movement’s reach tightly limited. “The alt-right doesn’t have a comparable base of power,” he writes, in reference to the radical left’s dominance on college campuses, “but its members have played an important role in infesting social media sites and making them miserably toxic places.” The alt-right has been violent, even lethally; it’s everywhere hateful and ugly; but, for Soave, its only true political achievement is to have dressed itself up as something the left would maximally fear and react to, while feeding cues to a nihilistic and insecure president who, of course, reads the world extensively through social media.

The alt-right, Soave believes, has failed to grow for the same reason it’s succeeded at all: despite all the anger and disaffection it can speak to, it has no argument for destroying the legacy of liberal democracy in the United States that’s in any way compelling to most Americans. It just feeds off the twisted psychology governing a very online, disaffected fringe population of white men who consider themselves victims. “Alt-right activists often chant ‘You will not replace us!’ at their marches,” Soave writes. “They are specifically radicalized by the idea that multiculturalism is about erasing white identity.” That is, as timeworn as its KKK-style white-supremacy tropes are, the alt-right makes no sense as a contemporary movement, even to its members themselves, apart from the core narrative that a “politically correct” left is oppressing them. The alt-right is, for Soave, only marginally significant apart from its codependent relationship with the radical left.

This is an account in which cause and effect can play ambiguously. That won’t please everyone. But it does help give Panic Attackan unusually subtle aspect. Soave is interested, above all, in the underlying political psychology of our fragmented moment. Self-identified radicals may inevitably feel stereotyped or altogether misunderstood. They may also feel suspicious, particularly knowing that Soave identifies as a libertarian. But the dominant themes of the book aren’t specifically libertarian; they’re generally liberal-democratic, and Soave gets at them in a remarkably open spirit of liberal-democratic dialogue. There’s an important substance to this style. Critical commentary about threats to free speech and due process can often work itself up about a monstrous formation like “postmodern cultural Marxism” that’s ostensibly beneath everything one could hate about the present-day radical left. It can imagine something like a single rhizome supporting and sustaining all sorts of toxic social tendencies—“politically correct” degradations of plain language, performative anger, and so on—that we might otherwise understand as distinct.

In effect, single-rhizome thinking like this reapplies the fundamental analogy in the concept of radicalism itself, with its etymological origins in the Latin radix, meaning “root.” Radical politics understands itself as going to the roots of society’s problems and addressing them there. Single-rhizome thinking is radical anti-radicalism. It sees no compromise, let alone prospect for transformative mutual understanding, with people immersed in the vocabulary of the radical left; the root has to be dug out and destroyed before it destroys us.

Soave rejects this way of thinking. Which allows him not only to distinguish different theoretical frameworks (for example, “postmodern” theories from Marxism), but also to see value where radically anti-radical analysts might not—as he does in the relentless attention Black Lives Matter has brought to policing and the criminal justice system or in the achievements that trans and queer activists have made in extending the equality and dignity that gay activists won before them. Which in turn allows Soave to be uncommonly specific rather than overly general in his criticisms. It’s a rare virtue. Occasionally, Soave struggles to balance the intricacies this virtue can demand with the scope of the book. At times he just moves too briskly, as, for example, in his summary of G. W. F. Hegel’s significance for modern politics, which he interprets in one paragraph by reference to a single blog post. At others, he invokes idiosyncratically libertarian reasoning about a complicated and contestable issue. This tendency may be most pronounced in a chapter assessing a miscellaneous range of contemporary political movements without consistently establishing their connection to his central argument. For instance, his discussion of post-Parkland youth activism on gun control offers no reason to see it as a form of radicalism, apart from conjectural links to “safety culture.” The effect is one Soave might have preferred to avoid in an argument otherwise characterized by recurring efforts to establish good faith.

Toward the end of the book, Soave shifts from sympathetic critic to frustrated potential ally. In his chapter on the alt-right, for example, he argues that the contemporary left is engaged in a devastating array of strategic and tactical blunders, alienating armies of potential allies and ensuring the impossibility of the sort of coalitional alliances that could effectively counter Trumpian politics. “Political power, at least for now, is firmly in the right’s grasp,” he writes. “And it’s probably more likely to stay that way as long as the right’s foes—the left, but also liberals, centrists, and libertarians—remain hopelessly divided.”

The idea that we could overcome the far right’s political dominance through strategic and tactical compromises among its opponents is, in its way, hopeful. But it may also wish away the problem: Soave’s left radicals aren’t, as they see it—or even as he presents them on the whole—really here to defeat Trump; they’re here to do what they can to ensure that what follows Trump is a radical future. And as Soave notes throughout the book, this is a future liberated quite precisely from the politics of compromise, the “moderation” and the “centrism,” that radicals on the left believe have allowed radicals on the right to gain so much ground in America over the decades—and have enabled systematic forms of oppression for longer still.

In the end, the challenge for coalition building between liberal-democratic stalwarts and left radicals isn’t really strategic or tactical; it’s political. They don’t obviously want the same things, and so they can’t obviously think about coming together to undo Trump or the Republican Party in the same way. Neither should liberals, or anyone else intent on defeating the Trumpian right, accept without argument that a coalition with left radicals makes sense as a strategic priority at all—compared with, say, helping the Democratic Party win at the state level, undo GOP-engineered gerrymandering, or just run better national campaigns. As Soave himself reminds us throughout Panic Attack, the politically disaffected population in America super-outsizes the actually radicalized population. But then, if liberals ever needed a demonstration of how crucial it is for them to see beyond electoral strategy, renew their ability to speak compellingly to a world rife with injustices, and intellectually seed a liberal-democratic future that no one can take for granted, the Age of Trump is it.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/noam-chomsky-democrats-may-have-handed-trump-the-2020-election/

As  Attorney General William Barr releases Robert Mueller’s long-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about what he sees as the political perils of “Russiagate.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you share your analysis of President Trump? You have lived through so many presidents. Explain President Trump to us and assess the massive response to him.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Trump is—you know, I think there are a number of illusions about Trump. If you take a look at the Trump phenomenon, it’s not very surprising. Think back for the last 10 or 15 years over Republican Party primaries, and remember what happened during the primaries. Each primary, when some candidate rose from the base, they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them and succeeded in doing it—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum. Anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment. The change in 2016 is they couldn’t crush him.

But the interesting question is: Why was this happening?Why, in election after election, was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment? And the answer to that is—if you think about that, the answer is not very hard to discover. During the—since the 1970s, during this neoliberal period, both of the political parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats, by the 1970s, had pretty much abandoned the working class. I mean, the last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party legislative proposals was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth, just became voluntary. But the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class.They became pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum. Two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, about five or 10 years ago, described the Republican Party as what they called a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned parliamentary politics.

Well, why did that happen? It happened because the Republicans face a difficult problem. They have a primary constituency, a real constituency: extreme wealth and corporate power. That’s who they have to serve. That’s their constituency. You can’t get votes that way, so you have to do something else to get votes. What do you do to get votes? This was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy: try to pick up racists in the South. The mid-1970s, Paul Weyrich, one of the Republican strategists, hit on a brilliant idea. Northern Catholics voted Democratic, tended to vote Democratic, a lot of them working-class. The Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending—crucially, “pretending”—to be opposed to abortion. By the same pretense, they could pick up the evangelical vote. Those are big votes—evangelicals, northern Catholics. Notice the word “pretense.” It’s crucial. You go back to the 1960s, every leading Republican figure was strongly, what we call now, pro-choice. The Republican Party position was—that’s Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, all the leadership—their position was: Abortion is not the government’s business; it’s private business—government has nothing to say about it. They turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called cultural issues. Same with gun rights. Gun rights become a matter of holy writ because you can pick up part of the population that way. In fact, what they’ve done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically, you know, tolerable to the establishment, but they don’t like it. OK? And they’ve got to hold that, those two constituencies, together. The real constituency of wealth and corporate power, they’re taken care of by the actual legislation.

So, if you look at the legislation under Trump, it’s just lavish gifts to the wealth and the corporate sector—the tax bill, the deregulation, you know, every case in point. That’s kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, those guys. They serve the real constituency.Meanwhile, Trump has to maintain the voting constituency, with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the voting base. And he’s doing it very skillfully. As just as a political manipulation, it’s skillful. Work for the rich and the powerful, shaft everybody else, but get their votes—that’s not an easy trick. And he’s carrying it off.

And, I should say, the Democrats are helping him. They are. Take the focus on Russiagate. What’s that all about? I mean, it was pretty obvious at the beginning that you’re not going to find anything very serious about Russian interference in elections. I mean, for one thing, it’s undetectable. I mean, in the 2016 election, the Senate and the House went the same way as the executive, but nobody claims there was Russian interference there. In fact, you know, Russian interference in the election, if it existed, was very slight, much less, say, than interference by, say, Israel. Israel, the prime minister, Netanyahu, goes to Congress and talks to a joint session of Congress, without even informing the White House, to attack Obama’s policies. I mean, that’s dramatic interference with elections. Whatever the Russians tried, it’s not going to be anything like that. And, in fact, there’s no interference in elections that begins to compare with campaign funding. Remember that campaign funding alone gives you a very high prediction of electoral outcome. It’s, again, Tom Ferguson’s major work which has shown this very persuasively. That’s massive interference in elections. Anything the Russians might have done is going to be, you know, peanuts in comparison. As far as Trump collusion with the Russians, that was never going to amount to anything more than minor corruption, maybe building a Trump hotel in Red Square or something like that, but nothing of any significance.

The Democrats invested everything in this issue. Well, turned out there was nothing much there. They gave Trump a huge gift. In fact, they may have handed him the next election. That’s just a—that’s a matter of being so unwilling to deal with fundamental issues, that they’re looking for something on the side that will somehow give political success. The real issues are different things. They’re things like climate change, like global warming, like the Nuclear Posture Review, deregulation. These are real issues. But the Democrats aren’t going after those. They’re looking for something else—the Democratic establishment. I’m not talking about the young cohort that’s coming in, which is quite different. Just all of that has to be shifted significantly, if there’s going to be a legitimate political opposition to the right-wing drift that’s taking place. And it can happen, can definitely happen, but it’s going to take work.

AMY GOODMAN: The world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky, speaking at the Old South Church in Boston last Thursday night. Go to democracynow.org to see more of the interview and to see his speech. You can go to democracynow.org for our video and audio podcasts, as well as transcripts of all of our shows.

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burgess sp give them an argument

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-june-3-2019/

https://www.c-span.org/video/?460185-1/the-democracy-fix

6/19

The Democracy Fix

Caroline Fredrickson, American Constitution Society president and former special assistant for legislative affairs to President Bill Clinton, offers her thoughts on how the political left can regain power.

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see long game big picture

3/19 that is evil rw vs strategy left legit

defund left, const conv, gerrymander redmap

RU w S

D.D. GUTTENPLAN – In our ongoing attempt to make sense of the US under Donald Trump, we turn today to the author of a new book that promises hope that a concerted group of dedicated Americans can salvage the nation out of the President’s vice-grip. D. D. Guttenplan was the lead reporter during the 2016 election for The Nation magazine and his new book, The Next Republic, chronicles how nine activists have worked to change the course of the US and how their work offers a path for survival.

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https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/?s=bregman

RUTGER BREGMAN - Fox News Anchor Tucker Carlson had a now-famous exchange with a prominent European historian named Rutger Bregman, that only became public after a video of the encounter was leaked. Bregman is the author of Utopia for Realists: The Case of a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek. After he addressed wealthy elites in Davos, Carlson invited Bregman for an interview but then lost his temper in an expletive filled rant. A video of the taped recording that never aired has now gone viral. Here is the video of their exchange. Bregman was a guest on our show when his book was published in 2016. Here's our conversation with him. Imagine a life where you didn't need to work more than 15 hours a week to make ends meet. One where you weren't restricted by the place of your birth and the stamp on

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/campaign-end-on-election-day-movements-dont/

hightower

Campaigns end on Election Day. Movements don’t. Voting day is a time stamp for measuring our progress, and when the polls closed last Nov. 6, it was clear that the intensive organizing by grassroots groups throughout 2017-18 had paid off. But let’s not forget that it’s all the days in between elections that matter on Election Day. We’re like the farmers and gardeners who do grub hoe work through the summer for a good harvest in the fall. Let’s look at what we’ve learned.

Most political opinion writers assert that, with 2018 in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to focus our full attention on 2020’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious presidential campaign. Given the exigencies posed by a deranged Trump, that’s an understandable instinct, but it’s wrong — at least for those of us who want to build a durable progressive movement with the public support needed to extend democratic government throughout America. For us, 2019 is the time to focus on … 2019! Already, thousands of races for mayor, county office, school board, legislature and more are gearing up.

Seeing them as inconsequential to big-picture politics, many Establishment beings scoff at these “lesser offices,” which are actually key to movement politics. They:

• hold serious power for directly improving common people’s lives;
• engender campaigns that tend to be more issue- and solution-oriented and less vulnerable to sabotage by right-wing ideologues;
• (often) have broad authority, allowing for bold policy innovations;
• are training grounds for future contenders for higher office;
• are winnable with principled, low-dollar grassroots campaigns.

Indeed, these races are the essence of percolate-up politics: Build the farm team and presidents will follow. Even more important: Genuinely progressive policies will follow.

November tells us which offices we won, but January started the clock on what we actually gained. After all, the movement’s goal is not just to elect good people, but to enact good public policy. From my eight-year experience as Texas agriculture commissioner (elected 1982 and again in 1986), I can attest that the second goal does not necessarily follow the first. One major pledge of my campaign, for example, was to reduce pesticide poisoning of people and the environment and to promote organic production. Upon taking office, though, I was swarmed by chemical lobbyists, the Farm Bureau, powerful state officials, corporate media outlets and other intimidating forces of the agricultural poison complex, demanding that I “move to the middle of the road.” This furious onslaught was daunting, and my political resolve wobbled … until farmworker advocates and environmentalists confronted me. When a West Texas farmer friend scoffed, “Hell, Hightower, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos,” that perked me up. We rallied, pushed ahead, and achieved my campaign promise.

I see three distinct steps for getting good policies from officials who mean well but might back away under pressure. We, the movement, must:

1. Go inside with those we elect, providing aggressive public support, info, staffing and expertise to shore up the progressive agenda — that lobbyists and big donors will pressure our new officials to water down — and to expose the corporate powers trying to corrupt the people’s will.

2. Confrontour electeds when they drift, prodding them privately and publicly to be as bold as their promises.

3. Ride the momentum of our election victories to push — from inside and out — additional proposals for long-term structural changes to democratize America’s economic, social, and political systems.

You know your community and state. You know the people’s issues. You know your group’s talents and ingenuity. And you can see how progressive issues, candidates and movements are advancing! So this is no time to get sucked down into the swamp of Trumpism or surrender to bubbling right-wing fanaticism. Our task is to keep doing what brought us this far: organizing, harmonizing and mobilizing. Let’s keep at ’em!

Lakey How We Win

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-february-11-2019/

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tim snyder yale on tyranny : 20 lessons from c20:

#1 don't obey in advance

#2 defend institution (only source of collective power) eg unions, NGO, the constitution [corp personhood?!]

...

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-17-2018/

2012 corps are not ppl, new ed 2018 fwd bill moyers

https://www.amazon.com/Corporations-Are-Not-People-Rights/dp/1609941055

game over for democ and plane if they win; metaphor used by scotus

ralph: corps are doing comprehensive and long range strategy, want predictable environment, do propagnda of kids looking at screens...

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Here's Why the Republican Party Has Abandoned Reality

It's Trump's GOP now.

By David Akadjian / Daily Kos

David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.

https://akadjian.com/2016/07/how-to-get-to-planet-x-the-change-we-desire/

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https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-republican-party-has-abandoned-reality

no lnx vid

Here's Why the Republican Party Has Abandoned Reality

It's Trump's GOP now.

By David Akadjian / Daily Kos September 16, 2018, 7:58 AM GMT

This year, the Republican candidate for governor in Georgia was decided in a special runoff election between Brian Kemp and Casey Cagle, the top two finishers in the Republican primary. Before the runoff election, Casey Cagle was secretly recorded talking about the craziness of the Georgia Republican primary. He said:

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The problem is in a primary—and you and I are just talking off-the-record frank—they don’t give a shit about those things. Okay. In the general election, they care about it. Okay. But they don’t care about it in a primary. This primary felt like it was who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.

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Kemp quickly pounced on these remarks and used them to win the runoff by 40 points—which, ironically, validated Cagle’s remarks.

Here in Ohio, I saw the same thing in our race for governor. The entire race was about  who was the most conservative. Mary Taylor called Mike DeWine a “liberal” and DeWine said Taylor was a criminal, so “lock her up.”

You’ve probably seen something similar in a race where you live. Conspiracy theorists are falling out of trees in Republican primaries.

So why is this going, on and what can we learn from it?

Politicians are cowards

Almost a year before the 2016 election, Devin Nunes spoke with The New Yorker about then-House Speaker John Boehner’s ouster.

Nunes told the author that one of the biggest changes he’s seen since his arrival in 2002 is the rise of online media outlets and for-profit groups that spread bad or even false information:

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I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation.Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.

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Today, the calls and emails are 90 percent about the bad information and conspiracy theories, and only a small percentage are about things that are actually true.

Of course today, we know Nunes as the point man from the House Intelligence Committee who keeps trying to push the lie that it was Hillary Clinton who actually colluded with Russia. Nunes is also a global warming denier even as Fresno, the largest city in his California district, experienced a record consecutive days with highs that topped 100 degrees.

Nunes is now one of the leaders in disinformation.

Why?

Because Fox News and other right-wing conspiracy media outlets have made him famous. His fame has brought in $7.4 million in campaign donations, the most of any California Republican. This is also three to seven times any previous amount he’s raised.

So … conspiracy away!

In three years Nunes went from Freedom Party critic to one of the lead conspiracy theorists in Congress. Along the way, he threw out every principle he once might have had.

He’s not a leader. He’s a Fox News puppet.

[vid]

Devin Nunes calls his own paper, The Sacramento Bee, ‘fake news’

It’s important to understand that this is not just true for Nunes, but for most politicians

It’s easy for liberals to see this with Devin Nunes because he’s a lying conspiracy theorist Republican.

The mistake we often make, however, is seeing Democratic politicians differently. They’re not conspiracy theorists like Nunes. But they also don’t tend to be leaders like we want them to be. They have to get elected, too. So they will do what it takes to get elected.They will champion causes that are hot-button issues in the media. They will talk about what they think they can talk about in order to win. If an issue is going to hurt them politically, they may avoid it.

The simple model for what they’re doing looks like this:

Social change -> political change -> policy change

Social change is cultural change. It is what is popular in the public mind. Political change is winning elections. And policy change is when politicians write legislation.

Politicians will do what those who get them elected want.

If we look at someone saying this on the Democratic side, it looks like Barack Obama in 2009 talking about health care. Obama took a page out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s playbook. FDR once met with a group of activists who wanted support for new, bold legislation. After listening to their arguments, he then said, “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.”

What he meant by “make me do it” was to accomplish the social change necessary to keep representatives in power long enough to effect the policy change.

If you want something done in our country, you have to have representatives in government to do it. To accomplish this, you have to change social norms.

This process is the same whether you want to get the money out of politics or whether you believe in some big government conspiracy.

Why the Republican Party has abandoned reality

The things corporate special interests want are not popular in America.

They want to

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Pay people less and get them to work more

Eliminate benefits like health care

Keep all the profits for themselves(privatize the profit)

Shift any of the costs and risks onto everyone else (socialize the risks)

They don’t care at all about whether or not people lead decent lives. All that matters are the returns they can deliver in quarterly reports.

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If they have to buy government to do this, so be it.

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If what they want isn’t popular, they’re going to look for ways to get politicians elected without having to talk about these issues. Toward this end, they have purchased media bullhorns and they’ve developed a story about good and evil to tell people.

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We all know this story.

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If you are a conservative, you are a good defender of capitalism. If you are a liberal, you are an evil socialist who is trying to destroy the country.

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Whether or not this is true does not matter to them. What matters is whether they can get politicians elected.

This is why the Republican Party has detached from reality. Corporate special interest legislation is not popular with people, so corporate special interests have to create a different reality: one in which corruption is good (today we call it “business friendly” or “free” markets) and one in which democracy is bad (people should not interfere with corruption).

What this means for your conversations

Many people I know don’t like to hear that politicians are cowards. They want politicians to be activists who are leading the push for change.

I find it comforting to understand politicians because if we understand politicians, we have a better chance of actually creating change.

If we expect politicians to be activists, we will always be disappointed. Why? Because by and large they can’t lead the activist charge. If they do, they get unelected.

Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean we don’t need activists. We absolutely need people creating social change. We need to make it possible for politicians to support something and stay elected.

We need both movements and politicians.

If you do this right, you can even get politicians to support conspiracy theories

That’s a joke. I don’t want them to support conspiracy theories.

The point I’m trying to make is that if people get involved and push and vote, things will change.

It will happen.

What this means practically

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It means that you and I have to do certain things repeatedly.

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When elections aren’t happening, we must:

Work to change our culture

Push for better ideas

Put as much pressure as you can on your elected politicians (no matter what party they’re in)

Get involved with an activist group

Reach out to people, especially people who might be different from you, and find out what interests them

Make as many connections as possible—build your networks

During primaries:

Vote for the most liberal politician who can win (this might not be who makes you feel good)

Support candidates

Contribute to their campaigns

Get involved in party politics

Encourage others to vote and get involved

Do this up and down the ticket

Help people understand how politics works and how change happens

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During general elections

Repeat the same steps as for the primaries

Corporate special interests are going to try to convince you that change isn’t possible. They will try to discourage you. They will spread fear and they will do whatever they can to keep people from voting.

Demographics are changing in favor of the Democratic Party. On issue after issue, the Democratic Party is on the side of the American people.

All we have to do is make enough politicians pay the price for abandoning reality.

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maybe also msging?

https://www.alternet.org/are-politics-incivility-paving-road-american-fascism

henry giroux salon

In the face of a nauseating and poisonous election cycle that ended with Donald Trump’s presidential victory, many commentators are quick to argue that Americans have fallen prey to a culture of incivility. This is the discourse of “bad manners” parading as insight, while working, regardless of intention, to hide the effects of power, politics, racial injustice and other forms of oppression.

The rhetoric of “incivility,” when used as a pejorative ideological label, serves to discredit political rhetoric as ill-tempered, rude and uncivilized. Politics, in this sense, shifts from a focus on substance to style – reworking the notion of critical thinking and action through a rulebook of alleged collegiality – which becomes code for the elevated character and manners of the privileged classes. As John Doris points out in his book "Lack of Character," the “discourse of character often plays against a background of social stratification and elitism.”

In other words, the wealthy, noble and rich are deemed to possess admirable characters and to engage in civil behavior. At the same time, those who are poor, unemployed, homeless or subject to police violence are not seen as the victims of larger political, social and economic forces that bear down upon them; on the contrary, their problems are reduced to the depoliticizing discourse of bad character, defined as an individual pathology, and whatever resistance they present is dismissed as rude, ignorant and uncivil. Ruling elites have used the discourse of incivility to criticize dissent as it has emerged across ideological and racial lines and includes unruly conservative working-class whites as well as left-oriented black youth groups.

Trump has marshaled the assumptions underlying this discourse to support his presidential campaign and political agenda, which warrant far more alarm than suggested by terms such as “ill-mannered.” More than other candidates, Trump not only showcased and appropriated “incivility” in his public appearances as a mark of solidarity with many of his white male followers, he tapped into their resentment and transformed their misery into a racist, bigoted, misogynist and ultra-nationalist appeal to the darkest forces of authoritarianism.Yet millions of Americans decided to live in Trumpland, and as David Remnick observed in the New Yorker immediately upon Trump's election, this represents more than a tragedy in the making:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will ... witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

Clearly, Trump’s embrace of “incivility” was a winning strategy, one that not only signaled the degree to which the politics of extremism has moved from the fringes to the center of American life, but also one that turned politics into a spectacle that feeds the ratings of the mainstream media. The incivility ethos Trump resurrected as a tool of resistance against establishment politicians played a major role in gaining him the presidency. But it would be wrong to subordinate Trump’s politics to his persona, or to categorize either as mere rudeness. Trump has turned politics into what Guy Debord once called a “perpetual motion machine” built on fear, anxiety, the war on terror, and a full-fledged attack on women, the welfare state, and poor minorities.

Tom Engelhardt has persuasively argued that Trump’s election may in time be viewed as a wholesale “regime change,” one that will alter the political and economic trajectory of the country, or what might otherwise be described as a paradigm shift toward an anti-democratic or authoritarian mode of governance. This is a change that points to a democracy spiraling out of control and a prescription for the unfolding of what Hannah Arendt once called the “dark times” associated with totalitarianism. Engelhardt writes:

Donald Trump’s administration, now filling up with racists, Islamophobes, Iranophobes, and assorted fellow billionaires, already has the feel of an increasingly militarized, autocratic government-in-the-making, favoring short-tempered, militaristic white guys who don’t take criticism lightly or react to speed bumps well.  In addition, on January 20th, they will find themselves with immense repressive powers of every sort at their fingertips, powers ranging from torture to surveillance that were institutionalized in remarkable ways in the post-9/11 years with the rise of the national security state as a fourth branch of government, powers which some of them are clearly eager to test out.

What happens to a democracy when justice loses its mooring as a democratic principle, and can no longer be a moral guidepost, let alone a central organizing principle of politics? What happens to rational debate, civic culture and the common good?

There is more at issue in the discourse of “incivility” than ideological obfuscation and a flight from social responsibility on the part of the dominant classes. There is the reality of Trump’s language of violence and hate, which labelling “uncivilized” will only serve to reproduce existing modes of domination and concentrated relations of power. There is also the corollary of minimizing Trump’s behavior as merely “uncivil”: When his opponents engage him using argument, evidence and informed judgment – when they hold power accountable or display a strong response to injustice – their arguments can similarly be dismissed as a species of bad manners, rude behavior or even the effect of self-preening, liberal lifestyle choices associated with middle-class cultural capital. In this discourse, matters of power, class conflict, racism and state-sponsored violence against immigrants, Muslims and minorities of color simply disappear. If Trump’s bitter railing against elites is mere “rudeness,” then on what grounds can legitimate anger against oppression be expressed and expect to be taken seriously?

Removed from the injuries of class, racism and sexism, among other issues, the discourse of incivility reduces politics to the realm of the personal and affective, while canceling out broader political issues such as the underlying conditions that might produce anger, or the dire effects of misguided resentment, or a passion grounded in the capacity to reason. Trump is reduced in this case to a rude clown rather than a dangerous authoritarian who now happens to be in control of the most powerful nation on the planet.

As Benjamin DeMott has similarly pointed out, the discourse of incivility does not raise the crucial question of why American society is tipping over into the dark politics of authoritarianism. On the contrary, the question now asked is “Why has civility declined?” Tied to the privatized orbits of neoliberalism, this is a discourse that trades chiefly in promoting good manners, the virtues of moral uplift and praiseworthy character, all the while refusing to raise private troubles to the level of public issues. The elitist call to civility also risks collapsing the important difference between just anger and malevolent rancor, dismissing both as instances of faulty character and bad manners.

America has become a country motivated less by indignation, which can be used to address the underlying social, political and economic causes of social discontent, than by a galloping culture of individualized resentment, which personalizes problems and tends to seek vengeance on those individuals and groups viewed as a threat to American society. One can argue further that the call to civility and condemnation of incivility in public life no longer register favorably among individuals and groups who are less interested in mimicking the discourse and manners of the ruling elite than in expressing their resentment as the struggle for power, however rude such expressions might appear to the mainstream media and rich and powerful. Rather than an expression of a historic, if not dangerous, politics of unchecked personal resentment (as seen among many Trump supporters), a legitimate politics of outrage and anger is desperately needed.

In this instance, we must not confuse anger that is connected to experienced injustice with resentment emanating from personalized pettiness. We see elements of such crucial anger among the many supporters of Bernie Sanders, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement and the indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Anger can be a disruption that offers the possibility for critical analysis, calling out the social forces of oppression and violence in which so many current injustices are rooted. Meanwhile, resentment operates out of a friend/enemy distinction that produces convenient scapegoats. It is the festering stuff of fear, loathing and deep-seated racism that often erupts into spectacles of spontaneous violence, hate-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, ideas lose their grip on reality and critical thought falls by the wayside. Echoes of such scapegoat-driven animosity can be heard in Trump’s “rhetorical cluster bombs,” in which he states publicly that he would like to punch protesters in the face, punish women who have abortions, bring back state-sanctioned torture and, of course, much more. Genuine civic attachments are now canceled out in the bombast of vileness and shame, which has been made into a national pastime and the central feature of a spectacularized politics.   

Critical reflection no longer challenges a poisonous appeal to “common sense” or casts light on the shadows of racism, hatred and bigotry. Manufactured ignorance opens the door to an unapologetic culture of bullying and violence aimed at Muslims, immigrants, blacks and others who do not fit into Trump’s notion of “America.” This is not about the breakdown of civility in American politics or the bemoaned growth of incivility. Throughout its history, American society has been inundated by a toxic, racist ideology that oppresses and marginalizes black people, indigenous people and immigrants of color, and particularly since 9/11 has singled out Muslims as targets. Joined with a market-driven ideology that has enshrined greed and self-interest, there is now an extreme-right movement waging a sustained attack on public values and the common good fueled by policies favoring a financial elite, much of which was codified by both the Republican and the Democratic political establishment.

Trump did not invent these forces; he simply brought them to the surface and made them the centerpiece of his campaign. As anti-democratic pressures mount, the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics and responsibility. The goal of making the world a better place has been replaced by dystopian narratives about how to survive alone in a world whose destruction is just a matter of time. The lure of a better and more just future has given way under the influence of neoliberalism to questions of mere survival. Entire populations once protected by the social contract are now considered disposable, dispatched to the garbage dump of a society that equates one’s humanity exclusively with one’s ability to consume.

The not-so-subtle signs of the culture of seething resentment and cruelty are everywhere, and not just in the proliferation of extremist commentators, belligerent nihilists and right-wing conspiracy types blathering over the airways, on talk radio and across various registers of screen culture. Young children, especially those whose parents are being targeted by Trump’s rhetoric, report being bullied more. Hate crimes are on the rise. And state-sanctioned violence is accelerating against Native Americans, black youth, and others now deemed unworthy or dangerous in Trump’s America. In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic peddling of lies becomes fodder for higher ratings, informed by a suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to “the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance.” Politics has been reduced to the cult of the spectacle and a performative register of shock, but not merely, as Neil Gabler observes, “in the name of entertainment.” The framing mechanism that drives the mainstream media is a shark-like notion of competition that accentuates and accelerates hostility, insults and the politics of humiliation.  

Charles Derber and Yale Magrass are right in arguing that“Capitalism breeds competition and teaches that losers deserve their fate.” But it also does more. It creates an unbridled individualism that embodies a pathological disdain for community, produces a cruel indifference to the social contract, disdains the larger social good and creates a predatory sink-or-swim culture that replaces compassion, sharing and a concern for the other. As the discourse of the common good and compassion withers, the only vocabulary left is that of the bully – one who takes pride in the civic-enervating binary of winners and losers. What was on full display in the presidential election of 2016 was the merging of the culture of cruelty, the logic of egregious self-interest, a deadly anti-intellectualism, a ravaging display of resentment, a politics of disposability and a toxic fear of others. Jessica Lustig captures this organized culture of violence, grudges and bitterness in the following comments:

Grievance is the animating theme of this election and the natural state of at least one of the candidates; Trump is a public figure whose ideology, such as it is, essentially amounts to a politics of the personal grudge. It has drawn to him throngs of disaffected citizens all too glad to reclaim the epithet “deplorable.” But beyond these aggrieved hordes, it can seem at times as if nearly everyone in the country is nursing wounds, cringing over slights and embarrassments, inveighing against enemies and wishing for retribution. Everyone has someone, or something, to resent.

It gets worse. In the age of a bullying Internet culture, the trolling community has now elected one of its own as president of the United States.As the apostle of publicity for publicity’s sake, Trump has adopted the practices of reality TV, building his reputation on insults, humiliation and a discourse of provocation and hate. According to the New York Times, even before the 2016 election Trump had used Twitter to insult at least 282 people, places and things. Not only has he honed the technique of trolling, he has also made it a crucial resource in upping the ratings for the mainstream media which, it seems, are insatiable when it comes to covering Trump’s insults.

Criticizing the pernicious trolling produced by political extremists should not suggest a generalized indictment of the internet and social media since they have also been key tools in pushing back against Trump’s egregiousness. Yet no one has done more than Trump to bring a vicious online harassment culture into the mainstream. In doing so, he has legitimated the worst dimensions of politics and brought out of the shadows white supremacists, ultra-nationalists, racist militia types, social media trolls, overt misogynists and a variety of reactionaries who have turned their hate-filled discourse into a weaponized element of political culture.

This impact was made all the more obvious when Trump hired Steve Bannon to run his campaign. The former executive chairman of Breitbart News is well known for his extremist views and for his unwavering support of the political “alt-right.” One of his more controversial headlines on Breitbart read, “Would you rather have feminism or cancer?” He is also considered one of the more prominent advocates of the right-wing trolling mill that is fiercely loyal to Trump. Jared Keller captures perfectly the essence of Trump’s politics of trolling. He writes:

From the start, the Trump campaign has offered a tsunami of trolling, waves of provocative tweets and soundbites – from “build the wall” to “lock her up” – designed to provoke maximum outrage, followed, when the resulting heat felt a bit too hot, by the classic schoolyard bully’s excuse: that it was merely “sarcasm” or a “joke.” In a way, it is. It’s just a joke with victims and consequences.... Trump’s behavior has normalized trolling as an accepted staple of daily political discourse. [Quoting Whitney Philips:] “When you have the presidential candidate boasting about committing sexual assault and then saying, ‘Oh, it’s just locker room banter’ ... it sets such an insidious, sexually violent tone for the election, and the result of that is fearfulness. ... People are being made to feel like shit.”

Another example of this brand of vitriol was noted in Andrew Marantz’s profile of Mike Cernovich, a prominent online troll. He writes:

His political analysis was nearly as crass as his dating advice ("Misogyny Gets You Laid"). In March, he tweeted, “Hillary’s face looks like a melting candle wax. Imagine what her brain looks like.” Next he tweeted a picture of Clinton winking, which he interpreted as “a mild stroke.” By August, he was declaring that she had both a seizure disorder and Parkinson’s disease.

In the age of trolls and the heartless regime of neoliberalism, politics has dissolved into a pit of performative narcissism, testifying to the distinctive influence of a corporate-driven culture of consumerism and celebrity marketing in the United States that is reconfiguring not just political discourse but the nature of power itself.

In spite of the 2008 Wall Street collapse and the ensuing political corruption, in spite of the resulting large-scale protests against economic injustice that ranged from Madison to Occupy Wall Street and numerous teacher strikes across the United States, millions of Americans have turned to the politics of resentment. And the consolidation of wealth and power continues apace. Reinforced by the strange intersection of celebrity culture, manufactured ignorance and a cult of unbridled emotion, the outcome is one that borrows from totalitarian logic but inhabits a new register of resentment that, as Mark Danner points out, takes “the shape of reality television politics.”

Within such an environment, a personalized notion of resentment drives politics, while misdirecting this private form of rage towards issues that reinforce the totalitarian logic of good friend versus evil enemy, atomizing the polity and lobotomizing any collective sense of justice. Under such circumstances, the longstanding forces of nativism and demagoguery emerge in full force to drive American politics, and the truth of events is no longer open to public discussion or informed judgment. All that is left is the empty but dangerous performance of misguided fury wrapped up in the fog of ignorance, the haze of political and moral indifference, and the looming specter of violence. All the more reason to examine the politics of incivility against those historical memories that offer a broader landscape by which to engage the pre-fascist scripts that now hide behind the discourse of performance, character and incivility.

The Trump guide to cultivating neo-fascism in America

Donald Trump’s election has sparked a heated debate about the past, particularly over whether the Trump administration should be judged on a continuum with totalitarian regimes whose “protean origins” reach back to the beginnings of the modern nation-state, but which a number of contemporary thinkers believe are “still with us.” This is a compelling argument, one that combines the resources of historical memory with analyses of the distinctive temper of the current historical moment in the United States. For instance, an increasing number of critics across the ideological spectrum have identified Trump as a fascist or neo-fascist whose administration echoes some of the key messages of an earlier period of fascist politics. On the left/liberal side of politics, this includes writers such as Chris Hedges, Robert Reich, Cornel West, Drucilla Cornel, Peter Dreier and John Bellamy Foster. Similar arguments have been made on the conservative side by writers such as Robert Kagan, Jeet Heer, Meg Whitman and Charles Sykes.

Historians of fascism such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton have argued that Trump is not comparable to Hitler, but that there are sufficient similarities between them to warrant some concerns about surviving elements of a totalitarian past crystalizing into new forms in the United States. Paxton, in particular, argues that the Trump regime is closer to a plutocracy than to fascism. I think Paxton’s analysis overplays the differences between fascism and Trump’s style of authoritarianism, and in particular under-emphasizes Trump’s militarism and his embrace of the neoliberal state, which goes much further than endorsing only the rule of free-market capitalism toward an extreme version of the corporate state. If Trump has his way, traditional state power will be replaced by the rule of major corporations and the financial elite. We have already seen that the social cleansing and state violence inherent in totalitarianism has been amplified under Trump.

Both Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, the great historians of totalitarianism, argued that the dangerous conditions that produce totalitarianism are still with us. Wolin, in particular, insisted (in his book "Democracy Incorporated") that the United States was evolving into an authoritarian society. In contrast, other historians and pundits have downplayed or simply denied the association of totalitarianism with the United States. With respect to Trump, they argue he is either a sham, a right-wing populist or simply a reactionary Republican. Three notable examples of the latter position include cultural critic Neal Gabler, who argues that Trump is mostly a self-promoting con artist and pretender president whose greatest crime is to elevate pretentiousness, self-promotion and appearance over substance, all of which proves that he lacks the capacity and will to govern.  Salon's Andrew O’Hehir claims we have to choose between whether Trump is just a clown or a fascist dictator, and in the end seems to pivot more towards the clown argument, though he admits Trump is a dangerous clown.

A more sophisticated version of this argument can be found in the work of historian Victoria de Grazia, who has argued that Trump bears little direct resemblance to either Hitler or Mussolini and is just a reactionary conservative. Certainly Trump is not Hitler, and the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic. But it would be irresponsible to consider him a clown or aberration given his hold on power and the ideologues who support him.

What appears indisputable is that Trump’s election is part of a sustained effort over the last 40 years on the part of the financial elite to undermine the democratic ethos and hijack the institutions that support it. Consequently, in the midst of the rising tyranny of totalitarian politics, democracy is on life support and its fate appears more uncertain than ever. Such an acknowledgment should make clear that the curse of totalitarianism is not a historical relic and that it is crucial that we learn something about the current political moment by examining how the spreading darkness of authoritarianism has become the crisis of our times, albeit in a form suited to the American context.

History, once again, offers us a context in which a global constellation of forces are coming together in ways that speak to tensions and contradictions animating everyday lives, now transcending national boundaries and for which there is not yet a coherent and critical language. What these tensions and contributions do is create fear, angst, paranoia and incendiary passion. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, it would be wise to resurrect one of the key questions that emerges from her work on totalitarianism, which is whether the events of our time are leading to totalitarian rule.

Whether or not Trump is a fascist in the manner of earlier totalitarian leaders somewhat misses the point, because this would then suggest that fascism is a historically fixed doctrine rather than an ideology that mutates and expresses itself in different forms around a number of commonalities. There is no exact blueprint for fascism, though the ghosts of past fascist regimes haunt contemporary politics. As Adam Gopnik observes:

To call [Trump] a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form –an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

The undeniable truth is that Trump is the product of an authoritarian movement and ideology with fascist overtones. In responding to the question of whether or not he believes Trump is a fascist, historian Timothy Snyder told Salon's Chauncey DeVega that the real issue is not whether Trump is a literal model of other fascist leaders but whether his approach to governing and the new political order he is producing are fascistic.

I don’t want to dodge your question about whether Trump is a fascist or not. As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism. Whether he realizes it or not is a different question, but that’s what fascists did. They said, "Don’t worry about the facts, don’t worry about logic, think instead in terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader and the people." That’s fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we forget, that is fascism. Another thing that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s. And Mr. Bannon’s preoccupation with the 1930s and his kind of wishful reclamation of Italian and other fascists speaks for itself.

To date, Trump’s ascendancy has been compared to the discrete emergence of deeply reactionary nationalisms in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere. I would like to broaden the lens with which we view the events happening in the United States in a way that allows for a deeper historical understanding of the international scope and interplay of critical forces that characterize 21st-century globalization.

We are seeing both coherent and incoherent responses, of which ultra-nationalism is one, to the shifts and contradictions arising from the global domination of neoliberal capitalism, which is now the single greatest factor affecting a world increasingly brought to the brink of catastrophe by technological disruption,massive inequities in wealth and power, ecological disaster, mass migrations, relentless permanent warfare and the threat of a nuclear crisis. In the United States, shades of a growing authoritarianism buttressed by neoliberal values are present in Trump’s eroding of civil liberties, the undermining of the separation of church and state, health care policies that reveal an egregious indifference to life and death, and his attempts to shape the political realm through a process of fear, if not, as Snyder insists, tyranny itself.

https://www.alternet.org/are-trump-supporters-evil-or-just-wrong

Are Donald Trump's supporters driven by immoral hatred, or simply shaped by moral codes that most liberals or leftists don't understand? 

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That question, phrased in more sophisticated and technical terms, has sharply divided political scientists ever since Trump's emergence on the scene -- and in fact long before that.

More than a year after the violence in Charlottesville, just as midterm campaign rhetoric starts to heat up for, it's a useful moment to examine what's  wrong with even the most intellectually serious attempts at the mode of political analysis known as both-sides-ism. What does a more realistic assessment might reveal about ideological motivations?

About a month after Donald Trump’s election, long before we had heard the phrase "very fine people on both sides, I wrote a story here questioning the "good people on both sides" logic of Jonathan Haidt's "moral foundations theory,” or MFT, based on a paper by Jeffrey Sinn and Matthew Hayes, “Replacing the Moral Foundations: An Evolutionary-Coalitional Theory of Liberal-Conservative Differences.” It wasn’t the first time I’ve criticized MFT based on specific researchers' work (see here and here), but it was the most promising in terms of suggesting a compelling alternative approach. Now a new paper by Sinn goes a long way towards fleshing out that alternative and revealing its superior explanatory power.

In a nutshell, MFT claims that liberals think of morality in narrower, more individualistic terms (focused on such dichotomies as harm vs. care and fairness vs. reciprocity) than conservatives do. Conservatives are "good people" too, Haidt claims, but are concerned with a cluster of three "binding morality" issues, which he defines as "authority/respect," "in-group/loyalty" and "purity/sanctity."

It’s a tantalizing just-so story, satisfying to both conservatives, who feel liberals have disrespected them intellectually, and liberals, who want to be inclusive and fair-minded.

But Haidt’s key claim that “liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral mechanisms (or foundations)” is contradicted by evidence that “moral judgment involves a common template grounded in perceived harm,” as detailed in “The Unifying Moral Dyad,” by Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray. Haidt also leaves a great deal unexplained, not least the question of where such values originally came from in our evolutionary past — as well as why and how they can veer into darkness, as they have clearly done with some of the support for Trump, and have done before in human history with distressing frequency and dreadful results.

In contrast, Sinn and Hayes explain conservative values in more realistic evolutionary terms, reflecting the navigation of different sorts of threatened harm. Haidt's “binding morality" idea "underspecifies conservatism," in a crucial sense, Sinn told me. As he sees it, that morality "arose because it steeled coalitions against adversarial out-groups,” which also “blends in practice with a darker orientation specifically motivated to dominate and exploit vulnerable out-groups." (Sinn and Hayes' theory carries the somewhat unwieldy label of "evolutionary-coalitional theory," or ECT.)  [// xeni kennedy kpfa early , 9/3 that racism supported all kinds of group/power relation eg econ, social, religious etc etc]

This analysis draws on two well-studied ideological attitudes that overwhelm all other factors when it comes to explaining bias or bigotry. The former, “binding morality,” reflects the influence of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), while the darker motivations Haidt overlooks reflect "social dominance orientation" (SDO). In other words, according to this analysis xenophobia and out-group demonization are a feature of "conservative values," not a bug.

Haidt also "underspecifies liberalism," Sinn said, by giving it a limited, individualistic focus. But that’s only part of the picture, he noted. “Instead, ECT contends that liberalism reflects concern with a wider world, one that includes all people and extends morality to include the natural world.”

There’s been no response to that critique so far, Sinn told me. Which is disturbing, given the way that Donald Trump’s gross immorality, reflected in far too many of his followers, poses obvious problems for MFT. As Sinn explained, via email, MFT is now perceived as "established science," which makes it "tough to challenge." Why has that happened?

I think in part because it seems a more “progressive” or “enlightened” position to want to broaden the moral domain to recognize conservative morality as a real thing. Also, [MFT] tells a very easy to grasp, intuitive story about political differences (that seems non-judgmental) so it’s sort of hard to unseat. Ironically, I think liberals like it because it appeals to their universalism and tendency to want to respect diversity (in this case, ideological diversity).

But Sinn’s perspective doesn't require us to reject all conservative politics as immoral. Rather, it could guide us toward a more rational, equitable way of balancing competing ideological perspectives. Liberal values of universalism and respect for diversity can still be honored, but not in a framework built simplistically on a just-so story.

As Sinn and Hayes have argued in another recent paper, the values now identified as right-wing authoritarianism and social-dominance orientation may have provided evolutionary advantages in our past. But the  dark side of those values, which we still carry with us as a species, is something we need to struggle with, overcome, and repurpose. We will need the insights and guidance provided by liberals' more universalistic view to guide us in that process.

In Sinn’s new paper, he builds a more comprehensive account of ideological motivations in two ways. First, he’s strengthened his criticism of MFT by drawing on a larger framework for mapping ideology known as the Schwartz Value Theory Circumplex. This was originally based on data from 20 countries, and first reported in 1992 by Shalom Schwartz. In a review article 20 years later, now drawing on data from 82 countries, Schwartz explained:

The theory identifies ten basic personal values that are recognized across cultures and explains where they come from. At the heart of the theory is the idea that values form a circular structure that reflects the motivations each value expresses. This circular structure, that captures the conflicts and compatibility among the ten values is apparently culturally universal.

Sinn proposes situating the ideologies he’s previously discussed — along with libertarianism — within the SVT circumplex framework like this:

Second, Sinn draws on a larger repertory of evolutionary processes — based on life history theory, signaling theory, parent-offspring conflict and more — to account for greater refinement of ideological differences, and strengthen the perspective of seeing ideologies change over time. In doing so, he lays out significant foundations for a much more robust analytical response to the experience of Trumpism.

Trump’s emergence doesn’t just challenge MFT’s presumptions about conservative morality. As described by a paper just presented at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting (“The Problem of Donald Trump and the Static Spectrum Fallacy”), Trump’s

reconfiguration of conservatism (not historically unique, by any means) exposes an even more fundamental problem: how to account for ideological coherence and differences in the face of repeated, sometimes sudden and drastic, issue-level change.

Sinn’s new paper doesn’t directly address this, but his discussion of the multiple ways ideological attitudes can evolve over time represents a more promising perspective for making sense of what’s otherwise a deeply confusing political moment. In addition, Sinn drew my attention to another paper by the aforementioned Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray, which  points toward a more general evolutionary dynamic that can plausibly operate on a variety of time-scales, sometimes with great rapidity.

To help clarify some of the most basic insights in his latest work, Salon interviewed Jeffrey Sinn by email. Our exchange has been edited for length clarity.

Your new paper is titled, "Mapping Ideology: Combining the Schwartz Value Circumplex With Evolutionary Theory to Explain Ideological Differences." OK, so what is the "Schwartz Value Circumplex," and why is it a promising framework for making sense of ideological differences?

The Schwartz complex offers a very useful framework for understanding value differences.  Its circular composition captures both alignments and tradeoffs that show up among different value positions. Adjacent values are complementary and correlate positively (e.g., power and wealth), values positioned across from one another are in conflict and correlate negatively.  I find it promising for explaining ideological differences in that it captures both these convergences and conflicts.

Ideological differences seem to tap into profoundly different assumptions about the way the world should work, and most ideological positions can be located within the logic of one of these 10 values and the differences among them.  For example, conservatives tend to be more deferential to authority and power, and there’s an inherent tension there with the value of universalism (i.e., egalitarianism).

By contrast, MFT doesn’t tell you how its two principal factors (i.e., binding and individualizing morality) relate to one other. With Schwartz, there’s a visual explication of the underlying logical tension between wanting to recognize some people as superior and wanting to treat everyone as equal.  MFT, in contrast, suggests you can be high (or low) [in every category], and so doesn’t capture these tradeoffs.

You write that "Considering a possible libertarian orientation helps reveal SVT’s strength as a nomological network." What do you mean by that?

Because SVT can capture some of the psychological profile of libertarians that the rhetoric of libertarians misses. Libertarians emphasize self-direction and self-determination. So at face value, you might think that they would then want to liberate others (like liberals want to do). But libertarians aren’t typically very concerned about benevolence. They also tend to be folks who don’t back traditional values or conformity and tend toward being less empathetic and more selfish. It’s exactly the sort of profile that the Schwartz profile would suggest for them.

However, you can’t come out and say, “I’m just not really that empathetic or concerned about others and I’m sort of a hedonist.” It sounds better, it’s more morally defensible, to present yourself as very concerned about liberty and not being constrained by authority. In short, I think SVT reveals characteristics or a flavor of libertarianism that cuts away the veneer and gets at something closer to the actual set of values motivating libertarianism.

In the next section, "SVT and Morality," you write that "researchers might also consider whether SVT’s broader scope could actually absorb MFT’s constructs." You argue that MFT mistakes "moralized values for moral foundations." What's the distinction between those things, and why does it matter?

MFT implies that its constructs are “foundational” – that they have causal efficacy. It’s slippery, in that it doesn’t often make that claim explicitly, but you can see it clearly in the title of the 2009 flagship piece: “Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations.” Their data are correlation and don’t support this claim. A less speculative claim would be that liberals and conservatives moralize different sets of issues.

In other words, I would argue that "right-wing authoritarian" conservatives moralize deference to authority because it’s part of a broader strategy of maintaining cohesive, kin-based coalitions. It’s not as if they have a different internal moral sensor more finally attuned to authority issues. They make deference to authority a moral value because it feels right given the bigger overall strategy. You can see this in that they don’t moralize deference to scientific or professional authority as much as they do traditional sources of kin-based authority (e.g., ethnic, family or religious authorities).  

What's the larger significance of this argument?

Claiming that moralized values are instead “moral foundations” makes them part of the internal, authentic orientation of the individual in a way that suggests we need to respect those values, just as we respect immutable, inherent features like race or sexual orientation. It’s a rhetorical move unjustified by the data. You can see echoes of this in the rhetoric of the Christian right in talking about “religious freedom” – that is, the argument that I have to discriminate against Group X to authentically practice my religion.

In the section of your paper on right-wing authoritarianism and social-dominance orientation, you write that "RWA and SDO may reflect, respectively, slow and fast life-history strategies," and that the "slow-fast distinction may reveal another circumplex axis."  Explain what you mean by this.

In brief, the "slow-life" orientation invests for the future and doesn’t build bridges, the "fast-life" orientation is opportunistic and short-sighted. The data (from another study by me and Hayes) suggest that right-wing authoritarians don’t see themselves as mean or prejudiced. They see themselves as reliable coalition partners, as altruists. Social-dominance folk, in contrast, aren’t really conservative in the social sense of the word (e.g., a Jesus-like concern for the poor, pious, altruistic, sexually restrained). They are interested in power.  I have other data showing that SDO correlates with sadism and a preference for sadistic leaders. They overlap with right-wing authoritarians in sharing security and power values, but they also endorse hedonism (and self-interest) in a way RWA does not.

The Schwartz values likely break along "fast" vs. "slow" in orientation – i.e., half of the circle tends toward slow and half tends toward fast. That is, the fast-slow distinction may help explain why we see differences in the values people endorse.

In the section "Parent-Offspring Conflict and Ethnic Nepotism," you write that "the conflict between tradition/conformity and self-direction (or, more broadly, between social conservatives and liberals) may reflect, in part, parent-offspring conflict." What's the reasoning here?

The short story is that social conservatives are very concerned about restraining sexuality, and Schwartz doesn’t really get at this. That is, the labels of "tradition" and "conformity" don’t suggest anything about sex per se. The basic strategy is to build a cohesive community that makes the kids help each other and sacrifice for the larger family in a way that favors the genetic interests of the older generations (e.g., marrying someone in the tribe who will strengthen the tribe, vs. someone who will take your daughter or son away).

The self-direction more typical of liberalism is less interested in family and maintaining cohesive family structures, and more interested in controlling one's own sexuality to maximize one's own genetic fitness by marrying the individual with the best genetic material.

So a classic issue is whether an adult child can marry outside the tribe. If family is less central or has fewer resources (e.g., not nearby because of labor mobility, or less a source of prestige in the modern financialized world), then the offspring maximize their genetic fitness by mating with the best genetic fitness they can find -- the smartest or the healthiest -- regardless of that person's social background, religion, race, etc. Romeo and Juliet, in short, were liberals.

This paper is a theoretical overview that draws on a wide range of empirical studies to argue how they should be seen as fitting together.  What's the most significant empirical test your theory could face?

It should be able to make finer distinctions than other theories. For example, and this isn’t in the paper, we should be able to distinguish the political issue positions of different types of liberals – those more driven by benevolence and universalism and those more driven by self-direction and stimulation. I think those scoring higher on the former should be more concerned with issues like child welfare and environmentalism, whereas the latter should be more concerned with things like access to family planning and legalization of drug use. Little ideology work has gone into explaining liberalism – it’s typically taken as a kind of default.

Your previous paper argued against MFT, in part by questioning how "moral" some "foundations" really are. This new paper seems to go even further than MFT. The SVT circumplex gives us more seemingly equivalent values. So which way are we headed: Do we regard all these values as equivalent or not? As you have previously argued, right-wing authoritarianism, combining in-group altruism and strong leadership, could provide an evolutionary advantage for hunter-gatherer tribes. But combined with social-dominance orientation, it threatens to drive us into a trajectory of mass extinctions, culminating in our own. Arguably, we can only avoid such a fate by shifting our balance toward more universalist values, which now have superior survival value.

So, putting my personal cards on the table, we need universalism or we’re doomed.  At the moment, I’m inclined to accept arguments by moral dyad theory, which suggests there’s a specific mechanism that recognizes an agent causing harm and that this conceptual dyad is at the heart of perceiving an issue as moral in nature. This mechanism can get extended to other domains (by argument or experience) but this is core.  In this sense, it’s just descriptive.

Now, ethically and philosophically speaking, “moral” seems to have a far wider reach, where people argue about what is moral and what is not, and advance claims they think are “true.” Not being a moral relativist, I do this, and I would be willing to argue in general for “universalism” at its core being more “moral” than some other orientations.

So neither Schwartz nor I are saying that Schwartz’s 10 values are definitely “good” or moral. I would argue that keeping immigrant children in cages is immoral.  One issue I have with MFT is that it claims to be purely descriptive but often slides into demanding a recognition of conservative morality as "moral" in the normative sense. I think it’s wrong there.

On this issue and others, psychology bumps up against deeper metaphysical or ontological issues and sometimes has far more confidence than it should in its empirical methods.  It has to inform those things, but it can’t offer a sufficient answer on its own.

Why the GOP surrendered to hate and bigotry

What Democrats Still Don’t Understand About Winning Back the White Working Class

The debate over moderate versus progressive policies is irrelevant unless Democratic candidates can first establish a basic level of trust with these voters.

By Andrew Levison / The Washington Monthly August 31, 2018,

Among Democrats who remain committed to regaining support from white working-class and small-town, red-state voters, there are two main competing strategies—the same ones that have been continually debated for the last five decades without any resolution.

While the centrist, “New Democrat” approach of the 1990’s and early 2000’s is clearly in retreat, a significant group in the Democratic leadership and party apparatus continues to believe that, in general, Democratic candidates should offer carefully moderated platforms and programs. Progressives respond to this cautious view with the argument that timid, “Republican-lite” platforms offer little that can actually appeal to ordinary Americans while a robust progressive platform can provide an authentic and compelling Democratic alternative.

The very powerful continuing influence of this debate is vividly evident this year in the discussion—both in the media and within the Democratic coalition—about the primary and special election results that have occurred since the 2016 election. Despite the fact that these elections have occurred across profoundly different districts, each result has been immediately categorized as a victory for either the progressive or moderate side of the debate.

But there is a compelling argument that both the progressive and moderate-centrist views are based on an inadequate conception of how voters in many districts across the country are actually making their political choices today. In many white working-class and red-state districts, Democratic policies and proposals, regardless of whether they are “progressive” or “moderate,” never get seriously debated or even considered. In these districts, neither strategy can be relied on to elect Democrats.

In relatively urban or diverse districts with a substantial number or a majority of Democratic and independent voters, issues and platforms do indeed play an important role in a contest between a Democrat and a Republican. In these places, there’s a compelling case for progressive arguments that arouse the enthusiasm of “base” Democratic voters.

But in the vast number of Republican, red state districts, many of them in small towns and the urban fringe of large cities where many voters have less than a college education, there is reason to believe that a profound political change has occurred—one that has rendered debates over issues and programs largely irrelevant unless Democratic candidates can first establish a basic level of trust with these voters.

How White Working Class Voters Make Political Choices

The basic problem is that both progressives and the Democratic establishment are using the same conventional model of “political choice” that is presented in civics textbooks and academic political science—that voters basically make up their minds by comparing the platforms of different candidates and choosing the one with which they most closely agree. Of course, anyone who follows politics knows that’s not the whole story; poor and working-class Republican voters in particular routinely support candidates whose policies are not in their actual economic self-interest. Commentators often try to square this circle by pointing to the importance of candidate quality. In this view, candidates who voters say “understand their problems,” “share their values,” or “is on their side” are basically making subjective judgments of the candidate’s personal style and presentation – in effect, his or her performance as an actor in debates and TV commercials.

But when it comes to today’s Republican base, the focus on style misses something much more important. Donald Trump, vile and dishonest as he may be, very successfully tapped into a deep mental and emotional perspective in white working-class life—a distinct kind of modern class consciousness, class resentment, and class antagonism that is almost entirely unacknowledged in current discussions regarding how to reach these voters, but which plays a critical role in their political thinking.

White Workers’ Perception of Social Class

There is, of course, tremendous resistance among social scientists and historians to the idea that American workers can be said to have anything like a “class consciousness” at all. While it is considered acceptable to use the term to describe, for example, the attitudes of British working-class voters and their support for the Labor Party after World War II, or British coal miners during the Thatcher era, it is almost never used in discussions of American workers. In most social commentators’ minds, the term “class consciousness” can only refer to a radical mode of thought that sees society in Marxist terms as sharply and fundamentally divided between labor and capital.

But from the point of view of white working-class Americans themselves, there is a quite different sense in which class is deeply meaningful. From their perspective, society is indeed sharply divided between, on the one hand, “people like them,” and on the other hand three distinct and separate elites who in different ways are screwing them over.

This is a different form of class consciousness than the traditional, radical conception, but it meets the key characteristic of the term: a perception of society as sharply divided between ordinary people and elites and a sense of resentment those below feel at the treatment they receive from those above.

A key difference between this modern white working-class conception and the traditional radical view is that white working people do not visualize a single dominant “ruling class” or “power elite” above them. Rather, they see three different and distinct groups, none of which totally dominates society but each of which in one way or another mistreats them and holds them in contempt.

The first group is the political classand, as anyone who has ever listened to focus groups or has actually spent time with white working-class Americans can attest, many working people do indeed see politicians as a completely distinct, utterly corrupt, and entirely parasitic class that lives in total isolation from ordinary people in a rarified environment of fancy ballrooms and expensive restaurants, big money contributions and backroom deals that invariably end up screwing ordinary Americans.

The second group is the Wall Street financial elite that makes decisions in faraway office towers that destroy local community jobs and mom-and-pop businesses. They reside in fancy gated communities and send their children to private schools with country club entrance procedures that would never allow the children of ordinary workers admission even if those workers could afford the steep tuitions.

The third group is the “liberal” elite—the heterogeneous group of college professors and students, Hollywood actors and producers, music and fashion producers, and TV, newspaper, and magazine columnists and commentators. They are not seen as a financial ruling class but rather a social group that dominates and controls the culture—what one sees on TV and in the movies, what is taught in colleges and universities, and what is written in editorial page commentaries. They are perceived as affluent urban dwellers who live in expensive, gentrified urban communities or charming college towns and who exercise substantial political power, using the Democratic Party as their vehicle. This power to impose their “liberal” agenda on ordinary Americans is obtained through a cynical alliance with minorities who are bribed to vote for Democrats by various kinds of “handouts,” special government programs, or preferential treatment.

Working people have quite distinct feelings about these three different groups but see the members of all three as living in worlds that are economically and sociologically high “above” them and who resemble each other in their indifference to the needs of ordinary people and their contempt for them as human beings. All three groups are emphatically perceived as “them” and not “us”

This “class consciousness” and “class resentment” is a complex perspective that cannot be easily tracked by standard opinion polls. For this reason, it is often overlooked in the discussion of Democratic political strategy. But it is vividly evident in focus groups with white working-class Americans, in the discussions that occur during progressive campaigns of door to door canvassing in white working-class neighborhoods, and in the interviews conducted during ethnographic field studies. Its centrality is revealed in the very titles of the major sociological studies of white working-class Americans that have appeared in the last several years: Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment, Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, and Justin Gest’s The New Minority.

Essentially, a decades-long campaign by conservatives has succeeded in creating among the broad majority of white working class and small town/red state Americans a deeply embedded view of Democrats as the party of the educated urban elite who impose their liberal agenda through a cynical alliance with minorities.

Democrats are aware of this perception, of course, and routinely complain about the conservative “information bubble” that is created by Fox News and other media. But many continue to base their campaigns on the hope that if they can only somehow figure out how to craft exactly the right package of proposals and programs—either progressive or moderate—they will somehow break through and convince these voters to support Democrats once again.

But it is now necessary to seriously consider the opposite possibility: that class resentment is so powerful and deeply entrenched that Democratic plans and proposals never get seriously considered by white working-class and small-town/red-state voters in the first place. They are, instead, dismissed at the outset because they come from a party that is perceived to represent groups and interests that are deeply alien and antagonistic. The Affordable Care Act, for example, was never seriously examined by white working-class Republican voters. Its provisions were wildly caricatured (“Death Panels”) and the measure described as quite literally a sinister socialist conspiracy simply because Obama and the Democrats had proposed it.

It is, therefore, now necessary to accept that Democrats have to develop a completely different mental model of how these voters actually do make their political choices—a model that will suggest alternate strategies for how Democrats can break through the wall that now separates them from many white working-class and small-town/red-state Americans.

The Three-Level Conservative Ideological Cocoon

The first step is to recognize that the metaphor of a Fox News created “information bubble” is an inadequate way to visualize the problem. It suggests that the “bubble” is essentially created by the national mass media and that a candidate with sufficient funds to run massive advertising or otherwise gain voters’ attention should therefore be able to penetrate it. (This was one of several major errors of Hillary Clinton’s campaign—an almost complete reliance on major TV ads and voter micro-targeting in white working-class districts.)

In reality, however, in white working-class communities and red state small towns there are actually three concentric levels of ideological insulation isolating these voters from Democratic messages.

The first level is indeed the increasingly extremist messaging of the conservative national media and the official GOP communications apparatus.The creation of Fox News and conservative talk radio in the 1990’s produced a major amplification of the extremist demonization of Democrats, as did Karl Rove’s authorization of outright dishonesty in the 2004 elections (“If the Democrats win they will take away your bibles,” “Homosexual teachers will molest your kids”). The election of Barack Obama ramped up this conservative “big-lie” strategy against all Democrats to previously unimaginable heights with the clinically paranoid ramblings of Glenn Beck, Breitbart News, and other right-wing outlets funded by conservative donors and given wide national distribution.

This national effort to totally discredit the Democratic Party was reinforced by more local sources of information: Sinclair TV stations, regional talk radio, and local hometown editorial pages projected an equally biased image of Democrats as alien outsiders rather than part of the community. Themore local character of these information sources made their accusations seem more authenticand believable than purely national messages. As Democrats were repeatedly defeated in elections in white working-class/red-state areas in recent years, their growing absence only validated reinforced the charges against them.

Finally, and most importantly, it is the network of personal relationships between neighbors and friends that works to validate and confirm the broader messages. Casual conversations with friends, Facebook messages and e-mails from relatives, and jokes passed among co-workers all reinforce the sense that Democrats are the “other” and lead people who once supported Democrats to mute their views, creating what sociologists call a “spiral of silence.”  The result makes support for the Republican Party seem not just dominant but unanimous.

This last, most intimate level of influence is the most important because it validates and provides the “proof” that what the conservative national and local media are saying is actually right. In this environment, political life ceases to be a debate or dialog between candidates or parties. Instead people come to accept that you would have to be completely out of your mind to ever vote for a Democrat.

It is this process that underlies the existence of today’s intense “negative partisanship,” the fierce and categorical rejection of the Democratic Party as a whole that is now the most striking result that emerges from current opinion polls and the reason for the defeat of even very conservative Democrats in red-state areas.

Ideological Diversity within the Cocoon

But what is critical to recognize is that inside this three-tiered “bubble” there is actually a wide and nuanced range of social opinions and perspectives. Among devout Christians, for example, there is a deep divide between two interpretations of the message of Jesus Christ. The first is intolerant and absolutist and leads to the belief that Christians should impose their beliefs on society as a whole. The second is rooted in the compassionate elements in Christian teachings and faith and, as a result, is more tolerant and accepting of diversity.  Equally, racial attitudes among white working people span a wide range, from overt racist bigotry to a more relaxed “live-and-let-live” acceptance, the difference based more on individual psychology and personality characteristics than commitments to any specific social or political doctrine.

These divisions are clearly visible in daily white working-class life. Popular country music now includes a number of artists who express acceptance of gay men and women and condemn misogyny in a way that is dramatically different from two or three decades ago. In evangelical churches, even before the recent wave of family separations, there was an ongoing debate about what a true Christian’s response to immigrants ought to be. During the Obama years, many evangelical churches were making active efforts to invite African-Americans to their services until the 2016 election poisoned the atmosphere. More generally, transcripts of focus groups and ethnographic interviews repeatedly reveal the degree to which the realities of modern life have changed former patterns and attitudes.  Many white working Americans now have some non-white or interracial couples living in their neighborhood and personally know gay men and women. The attitudes of a significant number are consequently more open-minded than they were years ago. But these debates and divisions are largely invisible to many urban and educated Democrats because they occur inside the three-level ideological cocoon.

It is vital to recognize that these divisions exist because they are the key to developing more successful Democratic strategies. Many Democrats have recoiled against all Trump voters because the bitter racism and crypto-fascism that is on display at Trump’s rallies seem like clear proof that anyone who supported Trump in 2016 must be equally racist and anti-democratic. The reaction is understandable but based more on emotion than analysis. After all, about one in ten African-Americans and about one in four Latinos voted for Trump in 2016, and unless one is prepared to seriously argue that they are also genuine racists, it is necessary to recognize that a range of other factors—from low information to class resentment to an inchoate desire to “shake things up”—also played a role in his election. The reality is that Trump’s white working-class supporters are divided between a deeply racist, intolerant sector that is beyond any realistic hope of persuasion and a distinctly more tolerant sector that is potentially open to Democratic appeals and can be reached with messages that are specifically crafted to appeal to their very distinct social outlook and political views.

What Democrats in White Working-Class Districts Must Do

Given the reality that simply proposing programs and policies that are objectively in white workers’ interests is insufficient to win their support, Democratic candidates must instead visualize the method of appealing to these voters as a two-stage process.

First, they must develop a specific communication and persuasion strategy designed to break through the conservative “bubble” and become accepted as a legitimate part of the political discussion that goes on between the different sectors of the white working-class community. Second, once this is accomplished, they can begin to debate and challenge their Republican opponents regarding specific social and economic policies and programs.

Historically, Democratic candidates who succeeded in white working-class, small-town districts have followed this kind of approach and always tended to display two major characteristics:

First, they firmly asserted and embraced many key traditional values and what sociologists call “cultural markers” of the white working class even as they staked out relatively moderate or liberal stances on these subjects. They would endorse common-sense gun regulations, for example, but also consider gun ownership legitimate and categorically support the rights of citizens to own guns. They would reject the notion that America should impose Christianity on all Americans, but they would assert equally firmly that Christian faith is a positive force in many Americans’ family life, including their own. They would support a variety of populist economic measures but at the same time endorse the virtues of small business and individual initiative that are an inherent part of working-class culture. (In this regard one need only think of the vast number of worker-contractors in construction who are both construction workers and small businessmen).

Second, they frequently embodied white working-class values in their own personal life and history. Many attended church on Sunday; others had served honorably in the military or had a background in a working-class occupation or as the owner of a small business. Many went hunting on fall weekends, listened to country music in their car, and were able to talk with firsthand knowledge and personal experience about the day-to-day problems of the white working-class people in the neighborhoods and communities they represented. In their personal lives they refuted the accusation that they were educated elitists with no connection to or understanding of ordinary peoples’ lives.

One well known Democratic politician who embodies these characteristics is Senator Jon Tester of Montana. As an article in the Washington Post noted:

Tester may be tricky to brand, as he has already established one here. He still works on his family farm, sports a flat-top haircut and isn’t bashful about telling the story of how he lost three fingers in a meat grinder as a child. … “Our guy can take out a transmission on a John Deere tractor, okay?” said Tester supporter Geoff Gallus, 51, as he sat at the bar at the Silver Dollar Saloon here in Butte. “That’s meaningful.”

Other politicians who have been successful in conservative or rural areas do not necessarily embody all of Tester’s personal characteristics, but manage to reflect enough of a similar cultural affinity with their voters to win their trust and support. An example is Montana Governor Steve Bullock, an attorney with a modest, middle-class background.

In a New York Times commentary, he suggested the nature of his strategy:

Above all, spend time in places where people disagree with you. Reach out. Show up and make your argument. People will appreciate it, even if they are not inclined to vote for you. As a Democrat in a red state, I often spend days among crowds where there are almost no Democratic voters in sight. I listen to them, work with them and try to persuade them.

In an analysis of Bullock and the Montana Democratic coalition, sociologist Justin Gest noted that:

What makes Governor Bullock such an interesting case study for the Democratic Party is that he isn’t exactly a unicorn—that rare, transcendent candidate whose personality crosses social divides. He simply combines a reassuring cultural style with a practical progressive message on issues that people care about.

Many of the new Democratic candidates this year are already following the basic two-phase strategy described above, seeking to establish their identity as authentic members of their districts before beginning to battle Republican opponents over ideas. Some have begun their campaigns with vivid biographical ads that cite their military service as the inspiration for their campaigns; others point to their modest, working-class backgrounds and occupations. Examples range from military veterans with hardscrabble backgrounds like Randy Bryce in Wisconsin and Richard Ojeda in West Virginia to other veterans with more middle-class backgrounds like Conor Lamb in Ohio and F-18 combat fighter pilot Amy McGrath in Kentucky.

One common trait that unites these new candidates is a striking idealism.Republican candidates in recent years have generally been of two kinds: (1) professional politicians who see their role as supporting the general GOP platform while cynically devoting their primary efforts to servicing the needs of their major financial donors; or (2) Tea Party ideologues who entered politics with the goal of imposing a Rush Limbaugh-Ayn Rand conservative ideology on the nation. Neither perceive holding political office as an act of public service that one undertakes out of altruism and, as a result, the contrast with the new generation of Democratic candidates who vividly embody this approach is striking.

Beyond Centrism and Progressivism

When the new Democratic candidates in white working-class/rural/red-state areas turn to the debate over issues with the GOP, the most significant fact is that they are following neither a traditional progressive nor traditional centrist political strategy.

Since the 1930s, the primary progressive strategy that Democrats have followed in appealing to the white working class has essentially been along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Until the 1980s, it was assumed that many white workers still fondly remembered Roosevelt’s dramatic wave of bills and initiatives—a wave that included the creation of Social Security, the establishment of legal status for unions and collective bargaining, the organization of major public works and conservation programs, and the funding of major construction projects and rural electrification.

Until the 1980s, this was the model progressives consistently hoped to invoke in their political campaigns–promising broad, visionary programs that would be enacted in a dramatic flurry of legislation. It was thought that this approach ought to inspire and motivate white working-class voters to support Democrats once again.

The problem was that distrust of “big government” and liberal social programs in particular had been steadily growing since the late 1960s, and by Ronald Reagan’s second term had become a dominant view among white workers. Reagan’s slogan that “government is not the solution, it’s the problem” became a national cliché.

It was at this point that centrism emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At first, it was a strategy designed to regain the lost support of the white working class by having Democratic candidates moderate their positions on various “social issues.” During the latter part of the 1990s, however, the strategy changed dramatically, becoming aimed instead at winning the support of affluent “soccer moms” and “office park dads” with economic policies that were only mildly more liberal than the proposals of the GOP. On one level, these policies were very consciously designed to appeal to the wealthy contributors who had become an essential part of modern political campaigns, but they were also rationalized as being “moderate” or “middle of the road” in both economic and social terms and therefore potentially attractive to white Americans who were thought to be generally content with their economic situation.

In reality, this approach completely ignored the profound economic discontent that was actually widespread in white working-class America—a discontent whose deepest source was relentless de-industrialization and the decline of unions and laws that protected workers’ standard of living. In 2000, 2002, and 2004, the centrist “Republican-lite” approach proved completely unable to regain lost white working-class support, and in those communities the Democratic vote continued a steady decline.

A rising progressive reaction to the Republican-lite strategy grew during the Bush years and fed into the extensive grass-roots activism and support for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Once elected, however, Obama’s approach combined elements of both progressive and centrist strategies with his mixture of genuinely significant progressive initiatives, like Obamacare and financial reform, alongside repeated, major concessions to the GOP on the budget deficit and economic recovery. The latter aspect of his approach undercut his ability to present himself as a genuine defender and champion of the economic interests of white working Americans and is partly why the support he received from them fell by 4 to 5 percent between 2008 and 2012.

How the New Candidates are Handling Issues

While the press has given substantial coverage to progressive challengers who have defeated or come close to defeating establishment Democrats in blue or mixed districts, with campaigns explicitly committed to Bernie Sanders’ agenda and platform, most of the candidates in heavily white working-class, rural, and red-state areas are actually following a distinct, more eclectic strategy that features several major components that are neither classically progressive nor centrist.

First, they root their campaigns in their constituents’ actual needs rather than adherence to any formal philosophy or agenda. As a result, they reject being defined as loyal followers of either Bernie Sanders or Nancy Pelosi. They insist instead that their ideas and views must be evaluated on their own terms. Relatedly, they generally argue that their goal is to try to overcome today’s bitter divisions rather than win an ideological war. Consequentially, they firmly avoid defining their campaigns as primarily focused on opposition to Donald Trump.

Second, they almost all avoid asserting a modern New Deal agenda that would require a range of major new federal programs and invoke the specter of “big government.” While some will advocate major progressive reforms like free college or universal health care, they generally express their support for these reforms as a matter of general principle and not an endorsement of any specific plan.

Third, they focus their economic proposals on defending existing programs like Medicare and Social Security and seeking solutions to “kitchen-table” issues like the high cost of health care and the need for better jobs and wages. The underlying idea is that this kind of focus on people’s immediate needs is more important and meaningful to working people than vague campaign promises of major new programs and initiatives.

Fourth, they generally understand the reasons for Trump’s appeal and recognize how to fight it. They recognize that attacks on Trump must be carefully focused and calibrated to avoid appearing to be elitist criticisms of white working people and anyone who champions them. Instead, they tend to focus on the degree to which Trump is quite systematically betraying the people who supported him. It is now becoming clear to many ordinary Americans that the GOP tax reform bill offers virtually no real benefits for average voters and that Trump’s proposals regarding investment in infrastructure were actually a pork-barrel plan to benefit investors rather than the public. Before too long, it will also become increasingly difficult for him to conceal that he is tacitly supporting and enabling Paul Ryan’s stealth attacks on Social Security and Medicare.

Fifth, they treat the need for political reform and reducing the role of money in politics as absolutely central issues. They tend to be funded by small contributions rather than deep-pocketed PAC’s and corporations, and point to those sources of campaign funds for Republican candidates as a fundamental source of political corruption. There is no question that this is a pivotal issue for many working Americans. Stan Greenberg’s polling organization Democracy Corps has conducted extensive polling and focus groups for over a decade on this issue and has overwhelming data to support the conclusion that no significant Democratic initiative can win white working-class support until this obstacle is overcome. As Greenberg concluded, “Championing reform of government and the political process is the ‘price of admission’ with these voters.”

Sixth, they take a variety of different positions on the major social and cultural issues in a generally progressive direction but in general do not treat these issues as core elements of a rigid platform or agenda. Some will unequivocally support Black Lives Matter or LGBT Rights, for example, but do not place them at the center of their campaigns.

There has generally been positive reaction to this eclectic approach from both progressives and more establishment Democrats. Although progressives are forcefully pressing their agenda within the Democratic Party, most of the reactions to Lamb focused on his basically progressive economic platform rather than his “moderate” persona or stances on some “hot-button” conservative issues. There appears to be, in general, a progressive acceptance of the fact that candidates in white working-class and rural areas cannot be held to the same standards as candidates in more Democratic areas.

From Campaign Issues to Developing New Policies

Looking beyond political strategy for the current campaigns, however, there is a deeper challenge that new Democratic candidates will have to confront: developing significant new policy ideas. In the current issue of the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris poses the issue clearly. On the one hand he notes that:

…As the two parties have sorted themselves into more ideologically distinct camps, voters have largely chosen sides. Political scientists find little evidence that the average voter responds to or even understands specific policy messages. Most voters, rather, cast ballots based on identity—they vote for the party they feel represents “people like us,” and, equally important, they vote against the party that doesn’t.

At the same time, however, this does not mean that developing new policy ideas is unimportant:

….The point of championing new policy ideas is not so much to persuade voters of any particular policy, but, rather, to remake the Democratic Party into one that is more in the interests of average Americans, that does truly put more power in voters’ hands. …Policy ideas are important not because most voters will learn the details and think through the implications, but because they can give a candidate and a party an identity that voters can, well, identify with.

“The first step,” he goes on, “is to tell a clear and accurate story of what has gone wrong in the country economically, something [the Democrats] utterly failed to do in 2016.” Across a whole series of issues, from wage stagnation to rising health care costs to waste and fraud in government, Glastris presents the case that the concentration of corporate power is the underlying source of the economic problems that beset working-class America.

To develop a narrative and set of policies that will resonate with white working-class voters and people in small towns and rural areas, this broad argument must be carefully focused and targeted on the specific problems that these voters have directly and intensely experienced and endured.

For working-class people in the formerly industrial areas of the Rust Belt, the most profound social catastrophe that occurred was the massive wave of factory closings that began in the early 1980’s and has continued since that time. Trump placed virtually all the blame on trade agreements like NAFTA, which could be conveniently blamed on Democrats, but the reality is more complex. As professor Judith Stein argued in her book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, there was, beginning in the 1970s, an integrated strategy put in place by corporate America to weaken the power of labor by exporting industrial jobs to less developed countries, aggressively busting unions, and changing American labor law in corporations’ favor. Major trade agreements like NAFTA came later, but were of a piece with this coherent corporate-designed strategy. While in other countries, trade policies were deliberately designed to protect important domestic jobs and industries; in the U.S., trade policy had absolutely no such objective.

In the case of small towns and rural areas, there was a similar willingness within the business community to allow corporate agriculture to undermine local economies based on small and midsized farms. Countries like France and Japan had active policies designed to preserve small towns and rural economies, but in the U.S., nothing similar was ever contemplated by the Republican congressmen who nonetheless declared themselves champions of “the real America.”

Glastris argues that if Democrats can regain a majority in the House of Representatives this November, it will provide them with the opportunity to show white working-class Americans the real sources of their economic problems and who is their genuine advocate. As he says:

Armed with subpoena power, committees will be able to unearth hidden industry and government documents and data about these problems, commission studies into them, and hold public hearings in which victims are invited and bad actors compelled to tell what they know. Fresh information and captivating witness testimony will draw the attention of the press, and if that attention is sustained, the public will slowly begin to connect the dots.

Revealing the hidden history of deindustrialization and the impoverishment of large sectors of small town and rural America can indeed contribute significantly to showing these voters that Democrats are actually “on their side” and “understand their problems”

Conclusion

It is critical to recognize that the new approach many Democratic candidates are taking cuts across the conventional centrist-progressive divide that now so obsesses the media and dominates the elite debate within the Democratic coalition. Some successful Democratic candidates will frame their policies in relatively moderate (though still clearly Democratic) terms, as Conor Lamb did in Pennsylvania, while others will campaign on more robust progressive terms. But the success of all the new Democratic candidates will ultimately depend on whether they can win recognition and acceptance as sincere and authentic representatives of their predominantly working-class districts, rather than on any differences in the exact details of their platforms and policies.

This is not to deny that there are indeed important issues that divide the Democratic left from the Democratic establishment—issues that cannot be avoided. The role of money in politics and the proper design of social and economic policies are significant areas of disagreement that the two sides can and must debate. But at the same time, it must be recognized that the differences that exist regarding these issues will not be the critical factors that decide the 2018 elections.

This will be a disappointment to those progressives and moderates who would like to see the elections validate their particular political perspective and strengthen their relative position within the Democratic Party. Yet both progressives and moderates must recognize that Democrats and the nation as a whole today are in a situation of unprecedented peril. In early 2008, if any American political scientist had been shown a list of the policies and pronouncements that Trump and the Republican Party have issued since 2016, they would have confidently asserted that they were not reading a description of the United States of America, but rather of the programs and views of the neo-fascist French National Front under the leadership of first Jean-Marie and then Marine Le Pen. They would then have sanctimoniously added that, of course, nothing like this could ever possibly occur in the U.S., because the Republican Party would never allow such a thing to happen.

But the impossible has happened, and Democrats must try to reverse the trend. The way that it must be done is to accept that the traditional progressive-versus-centrist debate over platforms and programs will not be the decisive factor that will decide victory or defeat. Rather, in Trump-friendly districts, the central challenge Democrats face is to penetrate the conservative ideological cocoon and convincingly demonstrate to voters that Democrats can once again be their most effective and genuine advocates and representatives.