Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Hillary
Clinton’s July 28 speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia
— her attempt to re-introduce herself to an American electorate that, according
to pollsters, believes she’s competent but also doesn’t trust her — was
dramatically different from the one Donald Trump had given at the Republican
Convention in Cleveland the week before. For one thing, it was considerably
shorter: 56 minutes as opposed to Trump’s 78. It was also much cooler in
emotion and temperament.
The PBS
commentators who ganged up on her after the speech and said it “lacked emotion”
were missing the point. Clinton has never been good at the touchie-feelie side
of politics; during one of the Democratic primary debates she said, “I’m not a
natural politician, like my husband or President Obama.” She’s not the sort of
person who can address a crowd, tell you she “feels your pain,” and get you to
believe it. And she’s aware enough of her own limitations that at the
Convention, charged with making the biggest speech of her life, she didn’t try.
Instead Hillary
Clinton projected an image of sober competence — and quite frankly, if she’s
going to win in November, that’s the biggest selling point she has. Against
Trump, who seems to be so proud of his own ignorance that he quotes “Two
Corinthians” before an audience of evangelical Christians (the correct
reference is “Second Corinthians”) and swears that he’ll uphold the entire
Constitution — not only Articles 1 and 2, which exist, but Article 12, which
doesn’t — she’s obviously selling herself as the candidate of reason and
experience: the adult in the room, not the petulant, spoiled brat we’ve seen
from Trump.
The third, and
perhaps the most important, big difference between Clinton’s speech and Trump’s
is that Clinton’s was not all about her.
She didn’t say “I alone can fix” America’s problems, like he did; she said that
the true spirit of America was to unite and “fix it together.” She quoted the
much-maligned title of her book It Takes a Village — which she got from an old African proverb, “It
takes a village to raise a child” — and used it to say the obvious truth that
it will take all of us to solve
our country’s problems and make things right for all Americans.
Clinton’s tone
was also refreshingly humble. She did not go into the finger-wagging
schoolmarm-ish mode that marred her performance in a lot of the debates against
Bernie Sanders. She played a person who has benefited from her over three
decades’ worth of experience in the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics
(counting Bill Clinton’s years as Arkansas governor as well as his presidency
and her own terms as U.S. Senator and Secretary of State) precisely because
she’s realized how difficult change can be, particularly in a political system
with so many built-in hurdles against reform as ours.
One of Clinton’s
hurdles is that sober competence tends to come across as dull. Even the
Democrats who voted for her in the primaries don’t seem all that excited by
her. She may offer the novelty of being the first woman to win a major-party
nomination for President, but that’s less a triumph than it seems because she’s
just been around so long — a quarter-century on the national scene — she’s
hardly a new or fresh face. And — unlike Donald Trump, who’s been building up
his nationwide image at least as long as Clinton has (since he published his
first book, The Art of the Deal, in 1987)
but hasn’t gone after elective office before — she’s spent most of those 24
years in public service and become an old-hat figure, one we’re too used to
having around to be impressed by her “first female major-party Presidential
nominee” accomplishment.
What’s more, Hillary Clinton has
accumulated a weirdly assorted host of enemies on both Left and Right who
ceaselessly repeat the same scurrilous stories about her. Some of the
anti-Hillary tales have at least some connection with truth; others — like the still-live
reports that Hillary and Bill Clinton’s friend Vincent Foster was murdered on
the Clintons’ orders (every official investigation concluded he committed
suicide) — have about as much credibility as the nonsense Donald Trump peddled
for years about President Obama’s birth certificate.
And now it’s not
just the Right that’s peddling this B.S. about Hillary Clinton. Members of the
Bernie-or-bust crowd, as well as Leftists who long ago gave up on the
Democratic Party and only briefly returned to it to vote for Sanders in the
primaries (and have, in some cases, turned against Sanders himself for his
full-throated endorsement of Hillary at the Democratic convention), are
regurgitating the old lies that the Clintons had a hit list; that the Clinton
Foundation exists only to extort protection money from other countries and
their leaders; and that Hillary’s long-standing ties to Wall Street campaign
donors make her just as bad for the country, and for progressive ideals, as
Trump.
It’s yet another
example of why Vladimir Lenin called “‘Left-Wing’ Communism” an “infantile
disorder.” My Facebook page is currently being cluttered up by grainy videos
purporting to show Hillary’s supporters mysteriously making Sanders’ votes
disappear. I’m reading hysterical (in both senses of the term: insane and
funny) posts to the effect that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are “the same
shade of evil,” and their authors are proudly boasting that they’re planning to
throw their votes away this November — or to vote for an “alternative”
candidate like Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party, which under America’s
winner-take-all election system is the same thing as throwing your vote away.
Democrats
vs. Republicans: The Real Difference
I’m especially
incensed by this because in several previous elections I’ve drunk the “they’re
both evil” Kool-Aid myself and voted accordingly. Not this time. The Republican
Party is in the grip of an economically libertarian and socially authoritarian
ideology that rejects the idea that human beings have any responsibility to
each other or their environment. It rejects the idea that people of color,
women or Queer people are equal to white straight men. It not only rejects
doing anything substantial to reverse, stop or even slow down human-caused climate
change, it ridicules the science that shows humans are causing climate change.
A nation
governed by the current Republican Party would be one in which it would once
again be illegal to have an abortion or have sex with someone of your own sex.
It would be one in which it would be illegal for workers to form unions and
bargain collectively with their employers. It would be one in which there would
be no minimum wage and no enforcement of laws to protect the health and safety
of workers on their jobs. It would be one in which, instead of narrowing, the
gap in pay equity between men and women would increase. It would be one in
which racial discrimination would not only be allowed, but encouraged. It would
be one in which Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would not exist, and
health care would be a luxury available only to those who could pay for it. It
would be one that continued to run itself on fossil fuels and ignored their
impact on the environment.
And it would be
one in which the bloated U.S. military budget would be increased still further,
in which the U.S. would push its weight around the world even more than it does
now, in which any Leftist, progressive or liberal who came to power in any
country in the world would have to worry about being overthrown in a Right-wing
revolution or military coup supported by American power. It would be one in
which once the U.S. government declared someone a “terrorist,” however flimsy
or nonexistent the evidence for that declaration was, they would cease to have any
due-process rights and would routinely be tortured.
That’s the sort
of world your generic cookie-cutter Republican leaders believe in, and that
doesn’t even get into the specific positions and attitudes of their
standard-bearer in this year’s election, Donald Trump. It’s true that on a few
issues Trump has staked out positions at least vaguely more progressive than
the Republican mainstream — like protecting Social Security and Medicare, and
opposing the network of so-called “free trade” agreements that began with the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 and continues with the
currently proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
But it’s also
true that every time Trump stakes out a progressive position, elements of the
Republican coalition are right there to snap him back in line. It happened when
he declared he wouldn’t care which restroom Caitlyn Jenner used if he visited
Trump Tower — and then quickly backtracked when Right-wing “social
conservative” Republicans declared it’s a matter of party policy that states
can make laws keeping Transgender people from using the restrooms of the gender
in which they identify and present themselves. Trump went along and, as is his
wont, pretended that nothing he’d said had changed.
The Republican
Party of today is a Right-wing ideological party, and its current Presidential
nominee is — I’m going to say it — an out-and-out fascist with a visceral
contempt for the whole idea of representative democracy. The comparisons
between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump are almost too obvious: the conscious
construction of a cult of personality (Hitler declared himself the embodiment
of Germany’s “racial will” and Trump said, about America’s crisis, “I alone can
fix it”); the scapegoating of racial and religious minorities and blaming them for their countries’ problems (with Hitler it was
Jews, with Trump Mexicans and Muslims); the pride not only in militarism but
torture and the enthusiastic boasts that if elected, they would commit war
crimes; and the thug-like behavior both Hitler and Trump encouraged their
supporters to direct at protesters at their rallies.
The Hitler-Trump
parallel goes not only to their personal styles — both described their
countries as being in the middle of existential crises they alone could fix —
but in their sources of support. Hitler came to power as a result of Germany’s
defeat in World War I and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles,
particularly the reparations payments that basically sank the German economy.
Trump’s base of support is the white male working class, and his appeal to them
is that he can single-handedly reverse the systematic de-industrialization of
America and bring back all those lost manufacturing jobs to the U.S. (this
while virtually every item of Trump paraphernalia on sale at his rallies and
the Republican convention was made in some other country).
If you still
think there’s no substantial difference between the Republican and Democratic
parties, please go to http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-party-gap-20160729-snap-story.html
and read the news analysis by Los Angeles Times writer David Lauter. “One night this
week, the Democratic convention featured eight Black women whose children
had died in shootings or at the hands of police,” Lauter began his story.
“A week earlier, Republicans repeatedly paid tribute to law enforcement. In
Philadelphia, the billionaire global warming activist Tom
Steyer was ubiquitous. In Cleveland, Republicans put a spotlight
on the plight of out-of-work miners and pledged to increase use of coal. A
speaker needing applause at a Democratic convention can always praise teachers.
Republicans can reliably criticize public employee unions.”
The “infantile”
(Lenin’s term, not mine) Leftists who still cling to the notion that there’s
“no difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties usually respond
to arguments like that with plaints about how the Democrats aren’t really that
progressive. They’re sometimes right, but that’s beside the point. It’s true
that Democrats haven’t been as aggressive on combating climate change as they
should be — but at least they acknowledge it as a problem, which the
Republicans don’t. It’s true that Democrats have supported imperialist wars in
the Third World — but other Democrats have led the electoral opposition to
them. It’s true that Democrats take money from the 1 percent in general and
Wall Street in particular — but other Democrats have led the opposition to Wall
Street’s desires while Republicans have meekly lined up with them. I think
Bernie Sanders got it right when he said the Democrats were “influenced” by
Wall Street money but Republicans were “controlled” by it.
Yes, both the
Democrats and the Republicans are capitalist political parties. They’re both
committed to maintaining a system of private enterprise that inevitably
produces major disparities in wealth and income. But they are committed to that
in profoundly different ways, and therefore it matters which one we vote for
even though we shouldn’t believe that desirable social change will come only from electing Democrats. The Republicans have taken
an increasingly hard line that “the Market” should determine the allocation of
wealth and resources, and any government interference with “the Market” is not
only bad public policy but immoral because it takes money from the “deserving”
rich and gives it to “undeserving” working-class and lower-income people. This
is what 2012 Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney meant when he said
that the Democrats would always get votes from the 47 percent of people who
“want government to give them stuff.”
Democrats
haven’t always been as faithful or strenuous champions of workers’ rights as
they could or should have been, but if you’re serious about challenging the
inequality of wealth and income in the U.S., they remain the only game in town.
As I’ve noted in these pages before, during the primary campaign Hillary
Clinton and Bernie Sanders had long and extensive arguments in their debates
over whether the federal minimum wage should be raised to $12 or $15 per hour.
Meanwhile, some of the Republican candidates were calling for abolition of the
minimum wage altogether, and their eventual nominee, Trump, said U.S. workers
were overpaid and needed to scale down their wages so the U.S. could compete
with foreign countries in a global economy. (So much for Trump as the protector
of the American working class against globalization, a fantasy that has driven
a lot of American workers to vote for him.)
Building
On — or Squandering — the Sanders Legacy
What’s more,
thanks largely to the Bernie Sanders campaign and particularly the incredible
outpouring of young people’s support for him and the dedication and commitment
with which they fought against the odds, the Democratic Party is considerably
more progressive than it would have been without them to push it to the Left.
This year’s Democratic platform includes a $15 per hour minimum wage (and
Hillary Clinton helped broker a compromise with the Right-wing Democratic New
York Governor Andrew Cuomo for a $15/hour minimum in New York City and $12/hour
upstate) and important proposals to free both current and future college
students from the crushing lifelong burden of student-loan debt. It also
commits the party to abolish the death penalty, reform the criminal justice
system and guarantee a woman’s right to reproductive choice (while this year
the Republicans adopted the most anti-choice
platform in American political history).
Not that the
platform is all it could have been. It’s fascinating that Hillary Clinton’s
people on the platform committee gave in on the $15 per hour minimum wage and
abolishing the death penalty but dug their heels in on the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP). What’s more, there were reports that delegates to the Democratic
convention who held up anti-TPP signs on the first two days were threatened
with expulsion if they continued — and whether those were true, you didn’t see
any anti-TPP signs the last two days. It reinforced my suspicion that Hillary
Clinton, who was Secretary of State when the TPP was being negotiated, once
called it a “gold standard” for trade agreements and opposed it in the middle
of her primary battle with Sanders, will, if she’s elected President, make some
cosmetic changes to the agreement, announce that her qualms have been satisfied
and be for it again.
But then the
whole network of so-called “trade” agreements that began with NAFTA and is
climaxing with the TPP and the analogous Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP) the U.S. is negotiating with the European Union is too
important an issue for the worldwide — not just the American — ruling class for
them to allow the mere workings of representative democracy to derail it. Of
particular importance to them is the concept of Investor-to-State Dispute
Settlement (ISDS), a mechanism in all such “trade” treaties that allows
corporations to sue nations and force them to set aside laws protecting their
workers or their environment. The secret tribunals, packed with corporate
lawyers, that hear ISDS cases can’t literally force a country to get rid of its
labor or environmental laws — but they can threaten to impose crippling fines
and/or lock them out of the world economy if they don’t go along.
So Hillary
Clinton is probably hedging her bets on TPP and waiting until she can seize a
pretext to support it again. But I suspect Donald Trump is, too. Watch how fast
Trump’s supposedly diehard opposition to TPP and other “trade” deals will
evaporate once he actually becomes President (God forbid!) and he has to deal
with his fellow U.S. and worldwide 1-percenters who expect him to deliver for
them. The regime of “trade” agreements and the neo-feudal world they are
designed to produce — in which corporations essentially rule and nation-states
merely do their bidding — is one that will have to be stopped by a worldwide
campaign, most of which will inevitably consist of activism outside the electoral system.
But then that’s
true of virtually every issue I’ve discussed in this article. The reality is,
as I’ve written again and again, is that working within the political system
and electing people to public office is not enough to bring about radical
social change. Neither is street activism — demonstrations, rallies, civil
disobedience. It takes both. The gains
the U.S. Left made in the 1890’s, the 1910’s, the 1930’s and the 1960’s came
from the combination of electoral
activism and street action. It also helped that, at least in the 1890’s and the
1910’s, there were progressive candidates and caucuses within both the Democratic and Republican parties, and therefore
Leftists could play the major parties against each other and weren’t faced with
the damnable “Democrats or nothing” bind they’ve been in ever since.
Bernie Sanders’
campaign has left the American Left a powerful legacy it can either build upon
or squander. It will build upon it if it realizes that electoral politics don’t
begin and end with the Presidency. A political movement aimed at building a
truly mass Left in this country will have to run candidates for public office
at all levels, from water districts and
school boards to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. And, except for
local elections which are legally “non-partisan,” it will have to do so using
the ballot access mechanism of the Democratic Party because under America’s
winner-take-all political system, people who aren’t Democrats or Republicans
simply don’t get elected to office (with a few insignificant and quirky
exceptions).
The American
Left will have to pay particular attention to who runs state governments —
governors, other statewide officials and state legislatures. And it will have
to mount an especially intense offensive to contest these elections in 2020.
The reason for that is, according to America’s quirky voting laws, elections in
years ending in zero are especially important because those choose the
representatives who will draw the district lines for the next 10 years. The
Republican sweep in the 2010 elections gave Republican state legislators the
ability to draw lines that protected not only their state legislative
majorities but their U.S. House majority as well — so in 2012 Republicans kept
control of the House even though more Americans voted for Democrats than
Republicans to represent them.
The other thing
the U.S. Left must do to build on the Sanders campaign is coordinate between its electoral and non-electoral activists.
As late as the 1960’s we knew how to do this. Since then, however, it’s become
a lost art on the Left. All too many Leftists engaged in direct action outside
the electoral system believe it’s morally demeaning and wrong to participate in
the electoral process. Likewise, all too many progressives who are involved in electoral politics are frightened by
direct-action activists and worry they’ll jeopardize their “contacts” in high
office.
In cleaning our
clocks over the last three and one-half decades (ever since the election of
Ronald Reagan), the Right has shown — or reminded — us of how social change can be achieved. First, the electoral and non-electoral
activists of the radical Right remain in close contact and work together.
Second, they categorically reject the siren song of building their own
political party and thereby shutting themselves out of real political power.
The people who started the Tea Party told their supporters again and again and again not to bother with forming their own party, but
instead to run their candidates through the Republican party and ultimately
take it over.
The legacy of
the Bernie Sanders campaign will be squandered if the Left runs back into its
little holes and maintains its stance of ideological “purity.” It will be
squandered if the young people who were the bulwark of Sanders’ campaign decide
after one setback that working through electoral politics is hopeless and
therefore they’re not going to bother even to vote. It will be squandered if
Sanders supporters continue to clog social media by harping on the deficiencies
of Hillary Clinton, which are real but insignificant compared to those of
Donald Trump. And, above all, the Sanders legacy will be trashed if Trump wins
and answers the demands of impoverished and oppressed Americans with his foul
brew of racial, religious and gender stereotyping and discrimination.
