Truth to Power

[A few days since my previous post ...] All that hope for a Democratic Congress? Not gone exactly, but fading. Republicans are stubborn bastards, and it seems for the most part they think they get more votes, and hold more seats, by holding their collective nose and staying with their sexual predator/nominee. What an ugly picture! And all that talk about the GOP breaking apart, the first major-party realignment since ... 1932? 1872? 1854? You choose. But it ain't gonna happen.

True, Trump has exposed the faulty connections between a disadvantaged white working class base of social conservatives and a set of fiscal policies determined by an elite crew of plutocrats. But there is nothing new in this, and absent an intolerable blowhard as candidate, it works! Why? Here's my hypothesis:

That magic 40% who would follow Trump right off the cliff? They'd do it again, and again, and not because they're stupid. No, just misinformed. They have been told so many times by their only news sources--Fox News and squawk radio--that Hillary is a she-devil, Obama a Muslim terrorist, climate change a fraud, Mexicans rapists, etc. etc., that they can't see beyond this parallel universe. It has become their reality, and what the rest of us believe is lies. And as long as our balkanized media maintain this split-screen vision--and that could be forever--these low-information voters will vote for ignorance. And despite their better educations and superior information, their elected officials know it. And love it--it makes them so easy to stampede. Unfortunately Trump headed them off the edge of the flat earth, but they'll be more careful next time.

Which doesn't mean that the Democratic majority I envisioned is unobtainable. It just won't be as easy as Trump handing it to us. It will have to be earned, precinct by precinct, district by district, preferably before the next reapportionment of seats after 2020. Democrats--and more specifically Bernie's Our Revolution--will need to do the digging, just as Republicans did some 10 years ago, and lay the foundation for their base. There's room there to build it.

Is There Hope?

Kafka said: "There is hope, infinite hope in the universe--but not for us."

After Friday's disgraceful revelations, Saturday's upheaval, Sunday's debate, there is hope, more than before, that Donald Trump will sink like a rock in these troubled waters. And as Republican party operatives and officials agonize over what looks like his inevitable defeat, some abandoning Trump, others hoping to hold on to his rabid supporters, there is even some hope, more remote but real, that Hillary Clinton will take office with Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress. Unlikely still, perhaps, but no longer a fantasy. But would even that outcome give us hope?

Would President H. Clinton make use of this historic opening to move the country in a progressive direction? In certain ways, yes: she would be likely to break the deadlock in the Supreme Court with a liberal appointee, perhaps adding others within her term, thus preserving gains in LGBTQ rights, protecting Roe v. Wade, and sustaining efforts to preserve minority voting rights, among other pressing issues before the court. She would no doubt reinforce Obama's limited but important executive orders on energy conversion and climate change--the most urgent policy imperative of our time. These are not small matters for hope.

She might also act on the broader agenda sketched out in the Democratic Party platform--shoehorned in by Sanders supporters in some cases--, an agenda that would be dead on arrival at a Republican-controlled Congress. But even if she had a congressional mandate, would Clinton spend capital to implement a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition, expansive wealth taxes, and other elements of a progressive, anti-inequality fiscal program? It would take constant pressure from more progressive agents inside and outside the political establishment, but these things are not inconceivable.

More broadly, will Trump prove to be the last gasp of intolerant, racist, nativist reaction to the transformations at work in American society for more than a generation? I saw a map, produced by Nate Silver and his colleagues, a speculative electoral map of what a real Clinton landslide might look like. The bands of blue stretch from Maine to Florida (possibly skipping over Georgia and So. Carolina but just barely), from upstate New York to Minnesota and Iowa (missing only Indiana), and from Washington state to Colorado, hooking across from California through Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico: a permanent progressive majority. Delusional? Not really, just very, very hopeful.

And what would that large majority consist of? Two rising elements in our population: the metropolitans--modern urban people who accept the new realities of  the LGBT revolution, of new technologies, of essential transformations in energy systems, social systems, wealth distribution--and cosmopolitans--the rising tide of immigrants, Spanish speakers, global citizens, internauts, people whose horizon extends much further than America's. What this electoral map suggests--if not now, soon--is that the majority of Americans dwell in metropolitan areas, along the coasts and borders, where innovation and heterogeneity are increasingly the rule. The remaining red states are clustered in the middle, in the depleted zones of the lower midwest and old South--a dwindling remnant, dangerous as Trump is dangerous, but no longer able to conjure up a national majority.

Is there hope? Possibly, in the short to middle term, if this visionary electoral map produces a workable Democratic administration. Otherwise we will face more legislative paralysis under a mediocre, conservative Clinton restoration--with more, perhaps worse Trumpery to follow.

Why Jill Stein?

In some despair about the general run of the presidential campaign, I happened to visit the website of Green Party candidate (and old acquaintance) Jill Stein, where I found her platform (here). It was a very different experience from any other in this campaign season so far. Even Bernie Sanders's heartfelt exhortations didn't come close. What I found was (as I wrote on the site) "a rather precise description of the world I would like to live in, and would like my children and their children to inherit." It begins with a whole and comprehensive response to the climate problem and various climate justice solutions, but it doesn't stop there. It considers equity issues in the workplace, and calls for redistribution of wealth and resources at many levels in our society. Though thin on foreign policy, it envisions a major reduction in military expenditures, closures of bases, and a turn to diplomacy in place of warfare. It follows the old injunction to first see the change you want to bring about, and I feel deeply drawn to the vision laid out in this platform document.

Of course this poses a problem. As everyone knows, voting Green will help make Donald Trump our president. As a 2000 Nader voter, I heard this a lot, though I drew several different lessons: first, my Massachusetts electors were instructed to vote for Gore, and did, so my vote added nothing to Bush's (stolen) election. Secondly, the 5% of us in MA who voted Green helped put that party on the ballot, where Stein and others have added considerable wisdom to the public debate in numerous campaigns since then. And third, I was able to feel I had voted for an honorable candidate, rather than that shill Al Gore. Mutatis mutandis, I think these lessons apply pretty directly to the present case.

In particular, as we are still in the public debate stage, I would love to see Stein's platform become part of that discussion. Her ideas are both solid and creative, and deserve a whole lot more attention than they get. (I hope to add a more substantive critique soon.) Speaking of public debate, the Green and Libertarian candidates should all be included in the major televised debates. Why not? They broaden the terms of discussion, represent serious parties and doctrines, and offer real choice in an election where more than half of the voters say they really don't like either of the bigger party candidates. Stein's website contains a petition to include the Greens in the national debates. Go there and sign it. Now.

Of course as we approach November my 2000 experience will cause me to reevaluate. A Florida Nader supporter would have been well advised to make a strategic compromise in the voting booth, and I suppose the same thing could happen in various swing states this year. Then as now, I would have to say, if MA turns out to be a swing state, then there would really be no hope for a Democratic Party victory nationally. But I would take that calculation seriously.

Meanwhile I'm thinking that one of the best ways to expend my progressive political energies between now and November would be to promote Stein and the Greens, to encourage any and all to learn what she stands for, and make clear how far short Clinton's ideas fall. No, Jill probably won't win. Is that all that matters? She is saying what needs to be said, and seeing what so many refuse to see. I would like to hope that her campaign this year, if spread widely enough, will plant the seeds of a real victory--not just a default to some future Clinton--in some later, but (hopefully) not too late election. What other hope is there?

Michel Rocard and the End of Something

Have I got it wrong all these years? Was it always futile to think there was a possible alternative to the global market-based capitalist economy? Did socialism in all its forms die a slow death after 1945, and expire altogether when the Berlin Wall came down?

These thoughts arise with the death over the weekend of Michel Rocard, France's prime minister  from 1988-91, and leader of a third-way current within the Socialist Party. Rocard was by all accounts a profoundly thoughtful, intellectual politician, trained at the highest levels and introduced into France's leadership caste in the 1950s, a protégé of Mendès-France. Never a Communist though initially on the Marxist left wing of the socialist movement, Rocard became convinced in the 1970s that social democracy within the framework of civil society and a market economy was the only viable compromise for achieving the social benefits the socialist movement in its various forms aspired to. Popular, a straight-talking man of great personal integrity, Rocard with his adherents represented  the right wing of the Socialist Party formed under François Mitterand, and he and Mitterand had a famously hostile relationship. Mitterand nonetheless included him in his first cabinet in 1981, and kept him on through the disaster of that first government, where it became clear that Mitterand's classic strategies of nationalization, capital controls, an authentic state socialism, were completely untenable in a globalized economy. Rocard resigned eventually, in protest of Mitterand's dubious maneuver to introduce proportional representation into the Assembly--a move that damaged the conventional right by elevating the National Front (Thanks, Tonton).

After Mitterand won reelection in 1988, he selected the still-popular Rocard to run his government, and Rocard was able to advance a social democratic agenda, including a form of guaranteed minimum income--a modest but significant addition to the social safety net.

With Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder, Rocard can be seen as a late flowering of the socialist movement, or its moment of demise in the triumphalist 'end-of-history' euphoria of the 1990s. Mitterand fired Rocard in 1991 and sabotaged his attempt to run for president in 1995. Rocard remained an elder statesman and inspiration to a younger generation of Socialist Party conservatives, including the current prime minister, Manuel Valls.

I am inclined to view Rocard as the man who led an honorable retreat from the barricades--unlike Blair and Clinton, who crossed lines and fraternized happily with the financiers. Perhaps the very French identity of intellectual--a man of books and learning as neither Clinton nor Blair was, for all their education and intelligence--was lure enough for Rocard to remain honorably in his tradition. But his moment passed, and now he has too. What is left of the French and European socialist movement he lived in and inflected is a sorry spectacle at this moment--shrill, defeatist, rudderless. Rocard may represent the end of that tradition--certainly for the present. I would have placed myself in opposition to his moderating, social democratic ways, but maybe that's because his sense of history was more acute than mine.

After Orlando: Will We Endure?

One knew an event such as the Orlando massacre would happen. That foreknowledge doesn't make it any less sad for the victims, their loved ones, and indeed, all the rest of us who have to suffer the threat of sudden, senseless violence. We all live in a diminished world after Sunday's bloody horror.

We also know that these sorts of attacks will happen again--here, in Europe, in Africa and the mideast, wherever. It is instructive to think that the Orlando massacre was the work of a disaffected Muslim, who felt some sting of prejudice and some pull of jihadism, but also (apparently) a deranged and contorted homosexual, who hated his own attraction to the LGBT culture he attacked.

From this I draw two conclusions: first, there are many complex patterns of causality behind this, and probably every other mass terrorist attack, and we go wrong when we try to assimilate them into a simplistic, linear narrative. And secondly, in such a maelstrom of psychotic crosscurrents, the deranged party will find the means of violent destruction if he chooses: a military-grade automatic weapon if he is American, a homemade bomb if he has internet, a knife if he is Palestinian and thus deprived of every other weapon. These discouraging conclusions are by way of preparation for those recurrences which are now an ineluctable fact of our contemporary, mediated, globalized, highly-powered civilization.

These sober realities do not make it inevitable that our nominally democratic political systems will collapse into fascism--but they give a strong push in that direction. That is a shocking remark--I am shocked to see it on my screen--so let me try to justify it with some very recent particular facts.

• Lies and falsifications are remarkably easy to let loose in our mass media. Thus Donald Trump calls the Orlando shooter an "Afghan" when he is really an American. Restrictions on Muslim immigration would have prevented this tragedy, Trump tells us, but the perpetrator was not an immigrant. "Hundreds of thousands" of such immigrants are admitted "without screening" he tells us, but no, intensive screening can take up to two years. And so on. 
• Such amplified Big Lies threaten to delegitimize our civil order. Trump himself has delegitimized the Obama administration for years by denying Obama's claim to citizenship. Tens of millions of Americans have been persuaded--on the basis of no evidence whatsoever--that he is right. Their visceral hatred of the President, their absolute refusal to acknowledge his presidency, has made the country ungovernable in some key respects.
• And now, for me the most shocking instance of the delegitimizing Big Lie: Trump, speaking as nominal head of the Republican Party, accuses Obama, through a screen of veiled but perfectly legible innuendo, of colluding with global terrorists to bring about attacks such as the Orlando massacre. 

This despicable gutter rhetoric would make the author of Mein Kampf proud. It will only get worse. We are after all still early in Trump's 'campaign'--really less an electoral campaign than a media-platformed March on Rome. Can this juggernaut of poisonous rhetoric, fueled by the hate-filled nightmares of psychotic terrorists world-wide, be averted? Is there room for 'good speech' to overwhelm and neutralize this tainted sort? That will be the challenge of the Clinton campaign, the respectable news media, and all of us as we try to survive this bitter electoral season in a world coarsened by unspeakable violence.

Bern It Forward

That's it. With yesterday's results in California and elsewhere, the Democratic nomination phase of Bernie Sanders's campaign--whatever he and his diehard supporters may say--is over. I voted for him, I like him a lot, but I have to say it: after the primary voters have decisively chosen Clinton, there is no justification for claiming 'foul,' for demanding that unelected super-delegates should switch their support to Sanders, or for bringing any of this adversarial rhetoric to the convention. That part is over.

But the Sanders campaign itself isn't over and musn't end. The issues he has brought to the surface--and some others he hasn't--will not be fully addressed by candidate or president Clinton, and the energy and enthusiasm Sanders has generated needs to move forward in pursuit of those issues. The best way to do this is NOT to argue about procedures in Philadelphia, smear Clinton, and undermine her general election campaign.

What then? On June 17th, 10 days from now, a People's Summit will convene for three days at the McCormick Center in Chicago. (I wish I could be there but I can't.) The goal? To bring together all the activist groups on the Left, including Sanders campaigners, to organize an integrated campaign going forward. There are so many fronts in this campaign: the $15 minimum wage, the incarceration epidemic and brutal law enforcement, the need for free college, health, and secure retirement, immigrant rights, women's pay equity, financial regulation and taxes on speculative profits. And overarching them all, the need to build a new, sustainable, job-rich green economy--fast! All these movements are actively in the field, but separately. The Sanders campaign has brought many of their adherents together around a visible, immediate goal. Now they have to stay together to lobby candidate Clinton, and then put pressure on President Clinton. This fight is just beginning. Integration of these many issues around a singular, holistic vision for a new society is key.

[Parenthetically, one can see that vision, more articulately expressed, in the campaign of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. I only wish it would make tactical sense to vote for her, as she is by far the most articulate and impassioned candidate in the field. Perhaps it will.]

Last night in California Bernie Sanders was not the most gracious loser--but who would be at that moment, after all he's done? I give him maximum credit for his combative determination--but I also hope that after a short respite he will see the futility of pursuing the nomination fight. But what I really hope is that he will lend his enormous charisma and prestige, not just to Clinton's general election campaign, but more especially to the ongoing work of the People's Summit, and the many interlocking struggles to which he has given voice this past year.

The battle is over, Bernie & comrades. The war continues without a pause. If you can make it to Chicago, be there!

Some Missing Scenes from "Hamilton: the Musical"

Scene 1: It's 1782. Hamilton, after recovering at home from his madcap bayonet charge at Yorktown, has left his family in Albany and joined the confederation congress, the new nation's governing body, in New York. Big problems: the confederation owes a lot of money to a lot of people, but can only raise it by begging from the states, which have their own debts to worry about. Member of congress Robert Morris has two problems of his own: first, as committee chair the national debts are his responsibility. Second, most of the war debt is owed to him personally. After reading up on Hume and others on the public finance question, quick-study Hamilton attaches himself to Morris, and they make a plan.

The continental army is encamped up the river at Newburgh, 10,000 men and 500 officers. The war is over but they don't want to go home without being paid. A certified military hero, Hamilton contacts some former comrades and suggests that a threat of mutiny--and a march on the congress--might focus congress's attention. Hamilton through intermediaries suggests to General Gates--who always thought he himself should have been commander in chief in place of Washington--that he might want to direct the mutiny. He then writes to his old friend General Washington, warning him of the army's restiveness. Washington gets it--he hastens to Newburgh, unhorses Gates, and lets the congress know how urgently things stand. Morris then proposes a generous settlement: the officers can be decommissioned with large, fully funded federal notes, along with the national creditors (like himself)--all included in the same blue-ribbon tranche. The private soldiers will be given much smaller sums of non-negotiable paper, which they sell off at large discounts before going home, broke and dispirited, after winning independence ... so that men like Morris and Hamilton can move forward with their plutocracy. Crisis averted, debt refinanced and consolidated to guarantee stronger taxing powers when the new constitution is written.

"We won the war. What was it all for?"

Scene 2: 1794. Hamilton, still secretary of the treasury, has coaxed his program through Congress: federal assumption of national debt, creation of a national bank, and--most delicate--imposition of a domestic tax, the first such, on whiskey distillers. With his passion for detail Hamilton has studied the distilling industry, domestic and foreign, and realizes that consolidation of small independent producers into large industrial ones is in the air. He carefully structures his tax to benefit these large producers, and thus imperil the only cash commodity produced by many western farmers, who lack the means to sell their grain to the eastern market in any form except whiskey.  These westerners, already dubious about the strengths of the new national government, refuse to pay the new tax, organize militias to repel the federal agents, and threaten secession. Hamilton persuades Washington, in his second term as president, to mount up and lead a large army--10,000 strong--over the Alleghenies to put down the rebellion. Hamilton becomes field commander as Washington returns to his executive duties, and leads a brutal campaign, arresting and detaining hundreds of the resistors without any legal or constitutional authority. Many are marched back to Philadelphia, where the courts release them. The battle has been won though: federal authority over local democratic bodies, industrial production over small decentralized homesteads, big finance over the land banks and easy credit that historian William Hogeland calls populist or egalitarian economics.

"Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?"

Taken together, these scenes represent two of Alexander Hamilton's greatest triumphs, moments when his vision of the new nation was built into the foundations of the national economy. Are the repercussions of these scenes with us today? You bet, from the self-dealing legislators and bond-holders to the misguided and ineffectual but fundamentally democratic resistance, both left and right, to our governing system of finance. Just listen to the current presidential campaigns. Hamilton is with us, not the awkward but well-intentioned young striver of the musical, but the steely man on a white horse, the friend of big capital and enemy of popular sovereignty. It's a different drama, and one worth staging.