Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Within days —
maybe the very day after I’m writing this, November 30, 2017 — the Republican-controlled
United States Senate is going to strike yet another powerful blow on behalf of
the Right-wing counterrevolution in the U.S. today. They’re going to pass a
highly reactionary, regressive tax bill that will hugely benefit corporations
and super-rich people — not only presently existing super-rich people but their
descendants — and hurt almost every American who isn’t part of the 0.01 percent.
And they’re
going to do it at the end of a mockery of traditional legislative process —
what Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) called “regular order.” They’re going to
pass a bill that makes sweeping changes in virtually every aspect of how
Americans relate to their government with only one committee hearing and at most 20 hours of floor
debate. They’re also going to pass it with zero support from the Democratic
Party. Historically attempts to rewrite the U.S. tax code have been bipartisan,
but not this one: it is a weapon of mass destruction in an ideological war
being waged by a party that has rejected any notion that equality and fairness
are virtues.
The heart of the
Republican tax bill is a reduction of the nominal tax rate on corporations from
35 to 20 percent. I wrote “nominal” above because there are so many deductions
and loopholes in the current tax law that virtually no corporation actually
pays 35 percent of its earnings in taxes. Many, in fact, pay little or nothing.
In addition, by eliminating the standard allowance — the part of your tax
return where you write in the number one for yourself and add one for each of
your “dependents” — and making other adjustments to skew the tax codes in favor
of the rich, the bill is going to raise
taxes for more than 80 million Americans.
What’s more, by
eliminating the estate tax, it will bring the U.S. closer to the sort of
hereditary aristocracy our founders feared creating, in which money will
continue to concentrate, generation after generation, in the families that have
it now. At the same time the bill directly attacks college students and others
pursuing the traditional paths of upward mobility in this country.
It’s also an
assault on the very notion that government should ever tax the rich to benefit the not-so-rich. The Senate
version of the bill totally eliminates the ability of taxpayers who itemize
deductions to take their state and local taxes off their federal tax burden.
The point of this is to penalize states like California, New York, New Jersey
and Massachusetts which have chosen to tax their better-off residents to
benefit their not-so-better-off ones.
Once such
taxpayers can’t take off state and local taxes from their federal returns, it
will become politically impossible for any
state to sustain expensive social programs with their own revenues because even
their most generous-minded residents won’t be able to stand the tax burden. The
idea — and it’s quite explicitly stated by the people pushing this bill — is to
drive every state down to the level of places like Mississippi, where taxes are
low and state government does little or nothing to help its poorer citizens.
With each new
incarnation of the tax bill, it looks even worse. The Senate slipped into its
version of the bill the elimination of the “individual mandate,” the provision
of the Affordable Care Act (so-called “Obamacare”) that requires every American
either to carry health insurance or to pay a penalty to the government.
Nonpartisan
analysts, including the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), have estimated that
up to 13 million Americans could lose access to health coverage if this passes,
either because it will cause chaos in the private insurance market or it will
force insurance companies to raise premiums so high insurance will be
unaffordable. The CBO also estimates that people who would still have insurance
would face an average 10 percent increase in their premiums. This is
essentially a “stealth” provision to accomplish what the Republicans tried and
failed to do with their bills to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act.
Various drafts
of the tax bill — there are many, and according to the Politico Web site (https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/30/mccain-to-vote-for-gop-tax-bill-270511),
the contents of the bill are still in flux — include provisions that single out
such typical Republican targets as graduate students and the tech industry
(which in at least one version didn’t get the generous tax credits for
repatriating profits stored in foreign countries other big corporations got).
And as Carmen
Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, came to New York at the end of
November to tell Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert, the current Senate bill
imposes a punitive 20 percent excise tax on goods made in Puerto Rico and
brought onto the U.S. mainland. That’s proof, in case we still needed any, that
the Republican Party does not think of Puerto Rico as part of the United States
(which it is) but as an alien territory from which we need to be “protected.”
The Republican
tax bill is a perfect expression of the Libertarian ideology that dominates the
Republican Party and to which virtually all
GOP officeholders adhere. I’ve written about Libertarianism a lot in these pages before, but just to recap:
Libertarians believe it is none of the government’s damned business to tax the
most fortunate to help the less fortunate. They fundamentally reject Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, as well as all other
social-welfare programs, because they regard them as “enslaving” the rich to
help the not-so-rich.
Libertarians
also believe in economic inequality. While other people — including some who
call themselves “conservatives” — lament the increasing economic inequality in
the U.S., Libertarians love inequality
because they regard the rich as the “makers” who create economic value and
everyone else as the “takers” who demand wealth and income they do not deserve.
Indeed, Libertarians believe that in a true “free market” economy, wealth is an
indicator of personal capability and social worth: if you’re rich, that proves
that you are better than the
common run of humanity and therefore you deserve more.
Also,
Libertarians are completely opposed to civil rights laws — they believe that
people ought to have the right to discriminate as a part of “economic freedom”
— and they hate environmental protection. Libertarians believe that the spirit
of entrepreneurial capitalism is so strong it can literally set aside the laws of physics (the hero of Ayn
Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which
is to Libertarianism what Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ The
Communist Manifesto and Capital are to socialism, invents a motor that runs on air
and then organizes the disappearance of all the entrepreneurial capitalists in
the world to prove that it can’t run without them), and therefore laws to
protect the environment are just one more encumbrance those pesky “takers” in
government and among the masses try to impose on the superior capitalist
“makers.”
President Trump
didn’t campaign as a Libertarian — he basically posed as a European-style
Right-wing nationalist conservative who promised to spare Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid for “real Americans” (i.e., U.S.-born white men) by
blocking immigration and thereby protecting the jobs of “real Americans.” But,
as I’ve argued in these pages before, he’s certainly governed as a Libertarian. He’s savaged the environment (when
he lists his accomplishments, among the items he always cites are pulling the
U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement and authorizing the Keystone XL and
Dakota Access oil pipelines), blocked pro-consumer regulations, fought
civil-rights protections and been open about his racism.
The Republican
tax bill now before Congress, which Trump probably had little hand in writing
but which he certainly supports wholeheartedly, is a perfect expression of
Libertarian economic and social priorities. It will slash taxes on the rich
while raising them for virtually everybody else. It will be paid for with
gaping cuts of over $1 trillion in funding for Medicaid — the government health
program (Medi-Cal in California) that pays for about one-fourth of all health
care in the U.S., including one-half of all births — and nearly $500 billion in
Medicare.
It will
essentially repudiate the entire history of the United States since the 1880’s,
when corporations and super-rich individuals not only openly bribed politicians
to make laws that would make themselves richer and everyone else poorer, but
sometimes (as with railroad magnate and U.S. Senator from California Leland
Stanford, essentially the Donald Trump of the 19th century) bought
political office for themselves. It’s especially ironic that there are still
political commentators who call Trump a “populist” when his policy proposals,
and especially this tax bill, are
exactly the kind of soak-the-poor, coddle-the-rich policies the original American Populists of the 1890’s were rebelling against.
A Done Deal
Don’t hold out
hope that somehow there will be enough divisions within the Republican Senate
caucus to sink this monster of a tax ripoff. On November 28, when the U.S.
Senate passed its last procedural hurdle before the final vote on this tax bill
— the motion to proceed (i.e., allow it to be voted on), the vote was on strict
party lines, with all 52 Senate Republicans voting yes and all 48 Senate
Democrats voting no. (So much for the idiotic idea promoted by alt-Leftists in
pathetic, impotent “alternative parties” like the U.S. Green Party and Peace
and Freedom that there is “no difference” between the Republicans and the
Democrats.)
Senators Ron
Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), who’d both previously told
reporters they had vague “reservations” about the tax bill, voted for the
motion to proceed. So did all three Republican Senators whose “no” votes sank
the last attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act: Susan Collins (R-Maine),
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and John McCain (R-Arizona) — and McCain and
Murkowski have both publicly pledged to vote for the final bill as well. Ignore
everything you’ve read or heard from the pundit class about “civil war in the
Republican Party.” On this — and in general on their commitment to wipe out all
progressive programs from the 1890’s to today — the Republicans in both houses
of Congress move in lock-step with an absolute, unshakable loyalty to the
Libertarian ideology.
The Republican
tax bill is a done deal. Let me repeat that: the Republican tax bill is a
done deal. There will be no dramatic
last-minute Senate votes by so-called “mavericks” to sink this. This tax bill
is too pure an expression of Republican ideology for the party to allow any
waverers to sink it. It is also too important a priority to the mega-donors the
GOP relies on to finance its campaigns — the Mercers, the Kochs, the DeVoses,
the Adelsons, the Popes and others — for the Republicans to allow it not to pass.
Republican
Congressmembers have been surprisingly honest about that. A number of them have
given on-the-record interviews — and others have leaked it off the record —
that the big donors to the Republican Party have made it clear that if they do
not get this huge tax cut for themselves and their companies (and their heirs),
GOP Congressional candidates needn’t bother asking them for money in 2018. As
Betsy DeVos, sister of Blackwater founder and missionary Erik Prince and
Trump’s Secretary of Education, bluntly — and publicly — said, she and the
GOP’s other “big donors” demand “a return on their investment” in the
Republican Party — and this tax bill is that “return.”
That’s why the
Senate Republicans are pushing through a bill that, according to polls, is
opposed by about half the country — the percentages have ranged from 49 to 52
percent opposed, 25 to 28 percent in favor, 20 to 25 percent undecided, but all
the polls agree that by nearly 2 to 1 Americans who have come to an opinion about this bill are against it.
That’s also why the attempts of people with disabilities to stage the kinds of
direct action they did so powerfully to block the attempts to repeal the
Affordable Care Act — including sit-ins in Congressional offices and a stark,
dramatic disruption of the Senate Finance Committee hearing at whch the bill
was reported to the floor — haven’t had the same effect this time.
Once the tax
bill passes and President Trump signs it into law, not only will he finally
have a legislative accomplishment to show for his first year in office —
something his critics have been ragging on him about — it will be a doozy. It
will be the most important victory for the radical Right, the oddball coalition
of economic Libertarians and social conservatives who don’t trust the
government to regulate the economy but want it to micromanage people’s sex
lives, since Trump’s election on November 8, 2016. It will be a huge step
forward in the Republicans’ determination to wipe out every vestige of the
Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.
It is a clear
answer to the oft-asked question from the 2016 campaign, “When does Donald
Trump think America was ‘great,’ and to which he thinks we need to return to
‘make America great again’?” The answer is the 1880’s, when it was totally
legal for wealthy individuals and corporations to bribe politicians and openly
buy elective office, either for themselves or their loyal servants in the political
class. It was a time when labor unions were illegal and segregation and
discrimination against people of color was legal. It was a time when cities
took civic pride in how black their air was with coal-fueled industrial
production and environmental protection wasn’t even a concept in politics.
The Republican
tax bill is a concerted attempt by the Republican Party, its politicians and
its campaign funders to return America to a state without Social Security,
Medicare, unemployment compensation, a minimum wage or any other encumbrances
on the absolute power of wealthy individuals and corporations. It is virtually
certain to pass; and, once passed, it is likely to be successful. It will be a
game-changer in future political organizing on both sides of America’s ideological divide, with the
Right ascendant and the Left essentially restricted to damage control. Just 3 ½
weeks after voters in Virginia, New Jersey and other U.S. states that were
having elections in November 2017 decisively and overwhelmingly rejected the
Republican Party and its policies, this tax bill will enshrine them into law
and fundamentally remake America in the swaggering, bullying wealth-über-alles spirit of Donald Trump and his fellow
0.01-percenters.
I must say that
I made a rare mistake after November 7, 2016: I let myself get optimistic about
the political future of this country. I started a commentary on the Democrats’
election victories that was supposed to be a vision of hope as well as a
warning that, now that they had won races across the country essentially by
promising not to be Donald Trump, they needed to be serious about governing and
in particular about delivering on their promise of a society that works for all people. But events move so fast in Trump’s America —
they “swirl,” as one literary critic wrote about Shakespeare’s plays in general
and Macbeth in particular — that
election already seems like ancient history, like a mere blip in the Right’s
road to absolute triumph.
Here’s What I Wrote on
November 8, 2017
I began writing
this article on November 8, 2017, the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s
surprise election as President of the United States. Ironically enough, the
anniversary was greeted by the first good political news the Democratic Party
has had in nearly a decade. Until November 7, 2017 the 2010’s had been one
unrelieved disaster for the Democrats — and for the progressive coalition a lot
of former Presdent Barack Obama’s supporters believed his 2008 election would
usher in — after another. The Democrats lost the House of Representatives in
2010 — and, arguably more important, they got killed in elections for governors
and state legislatures that year, so Republicans could and did stack electoral
districts against them in the once-a-decade process of redistricting.
Obama squeaked
to re-election in 2012 but the Democrats suffered further losses in elections
for state houses and Congress. Indeed, so good were the Republicans at
gerrymandering following the 2010 census and their virtual sweep of state
governments that even though more Americans voted for Democrats than
Republicans to serve in the House of Representatives, the GOP kept their House
majority anyway. In 2014 the Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate,
and in 2016 the Democrats got slaughtered nationwide. The Republicans not only
with the Presidency, they held onto the Senate (despite math that favored the
Democrats) and they got the largest House majority they’d had since 1928, just
before the Great Depression that spawned the New Deal Coalition and 36 years of
Democratic dominance from 1932 to 1968.
The results of
the off-off-year elections on November 7 were a different story. Democrat Ralph
Northam not only won the governorship of Virginia against Ed Gillespie — who’d
begun his campaign as a moderate Republican but by the end of it was fully
embracing the Trump agenda, bashing immigrants, “sanctuary cities” (of which
there are none in Virginia) and protesting football players, and embracing gun
rights and Confederate war memorials — he did so by nine percentage points,
four points better than the final
pre-election polls had indicated. What’s more, he took his entire ticket into
office with him, including Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor candidate
who is the first African-American elected to statewide office in Virginia since
governor L. Douglas Wilder in 1989 — and came within one vote of a majority in
the House of Delegates, the lower chamber of Virginia’s legislature.
Democrats also
got good news in New Jersey, where Phil Murphy was elected governor over
Republican Kim Guadagno, who’d served as lieutenant governor to the
spectacularly unpopular Chris Christie. Murphy won by a 13-point margin. Voters
in Maine, which Trump carried in 2016 and whose governor, Paul LePage, said
last summer he deliberately plants false “news” stories about himself and the
country would be better off without newspapers, passed an initiative to expand
Medicaid health-care coverage by nearly 20 points — though LePage is doing his
level best to block it (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/8/1713945/-Maine-s-Referendum-on-Medicaid-Still-Faces-Uphill-Battle)
and the Trump administration, in its ongoing jihad against the Affordable Care Act (so-called
“Obamacare”), has monkey-wrenched any state seeking the federal waivers needed to expand Medicaid.
Democrats also
picked up three state legislative seats in Georgia. They won mayoral races in
Charlotte and Fayetteville, North Carolina. They defeated the incumbent mayor
of Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city. Democrats held on to the mayoralty
of St. Petersburg, Florida. In Washington state, the Democrats won a special
election to secure a majority in the upper house of the stage legislature and
elected open Lesbian Jenny Durkan Mayor of Seattle, the city’s first female
mayor since the 1920’s. St. Paul, Minnesota elected its first Black mayor,
Melvin Carter.
Progressive
lawyer Larry Krasner won his bid to be district attorney of Philadelphia in a
race of which the Philadelphia Inquirer
said, “[T]he 56-year-old was assailed from the start
of his campaign by critics as unsuitable for the job — as an attorney best
known for taking on civil rights cases and suing the Philadelphia Police
Department. It was for some of the same reasons that he drew support from
activists demanding criminal justice reform from an office they deemed
unfair[.]” Mayors in New York City and Boston were overwhelmingly re-elected
(though the Boston mayor, a Democrat with a past as a labor leader, defeated an
even more progressive Black candidate). About the only good news for
Republicans were a few victories in special Congressional elections, notably
Provo, Utah Mayor Jack Curtis, who was elected to replace the retiring
Congressmember Jason Chaffetz.
Perhaps the best news for America’s Queer community was the
victory of open Transgender activist and journalist Danica Roem for District 13
of the Virginia House of Delegates. In a case of karmic justice if there ever
was one, she unseated two-decade incumbent Bob Marshall, who had proudly
boasted of being “homophobe-in-chief” in Virginia and had pushed through the
state’s controversial bill to ban Trans people from using the restroom
corresponding to their gender identity. Not that Roem made that her signature
issue: her campaign signs said, “Fix Route 28 Now!” — referring to a terribly
congested roadway a lot of people in her district depend on to get to and from
work. In her victory speech, Roem cited her victory not only as a defense of
equal rights for Trans people but a defense of journalists against the
ceaseless attacks by President Trump and his supporters on the media as “fake
news.”
And Roem wasn’t the only openly Trans person to win a U.S.
election on November 7. African-American Andrea Jenkins won a seat on the
Minneapolis City Council. Tyler Titus was elected to the school board in Erie,
Pennsylvania. And Lisa Middleton became the first Trans person elected to a
non-judicial office in California when she won a seat on the Palm Springs City
Council — which after this year’s election will consist exclusively of “out”
Queer people.
And
Here’s What Things Look Like Now
As I noted
before that historical digression, events move so fast in Trump’s America the
above seems like not only old news, but ancient history. Since then we’ve had
not only the zip-through of the Republicans’ horrible tax bill, which as of
this writing stands on the verge of near-certain passage in the U.S. Senate
(and, likely, quick enactment into law because instead of following the usual
practice of appointing a “conference committee” of both House and Senate
members to resolve difference in the bills, I suspect House Speaker Paul Ryan
will simply bring the Senate version to a vote in the House and get it to
Trump’s desk that much sooner), but the rising scandal over sexual harassment
in workplaces in general and politics, entertainment and the media in
particular.
Contrary to
popular belief, the sexual harassment scandals that have quickly brought down
such formerly powerful and prominent people as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey,
Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Al Franken and John Conyers is a net benefit for the Republicans, not the Democrats, in today’s twisted partisan
landscape. The reason is that people who are considered likely to vote
Democratic care about it far more than people who are likely to vote
Republican. In fact, I would argue that the sexual harassment scandals are as
great an existential threat to the Democratic Party as failure to pass the
current tax bill would be to the Republicans.
That’s because
the Democratic Party long ago lost the votes of white men. The last Democratic
Presidential candidate to win a majority of white male voters was Lyndon
Johnson … in 1964. Democrats win elections these days only when they can mobilize enough women and people of
color to vote for them to neutralize their disadvantage among white men. Barack
Obama won the Presidency in 2008 and 2012 because as a person of color himself,
he was uniquely able to mobilize voters of color, especially African-Americans,
to vote for him in record numbers.
Hillary Clinton
lost in 2016 because as a white woman she didn’t have the appeal to voters of
color Obama did, and she didn’t get a comparable boost among female voters
because, unlike people of color, women aren’t an economically and socially oppressed minority group with a class
interest in common. Donald Trump not only mobilized white male voters to turn
out for him in much greater numbers than they had for John McCain in 2008 and
Mitt Romney in 2012, he won a majority of white women as well.
Women range all
over the political map in terms of socioeconomic status, education levels,
religious commitment and belief (since the radical religious Right emerged as a
political force in the 1980 election one of the key predictors of whether
people vote Republican or Democratic has been how often they go to church), and
views even on such so-called “women’s issues” as reproductive choice and equal
pay for jobs of comparable worth.
Though the
so-called “gender gap” isn’t as broadly decisive in elections as many Democrats
believe (or want to believe), it nonetheless does exist. Women are on the whole
more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans, and out of all
demographic groups of women the one that most overwhelmingly prefers the Democratic to the Republican party is
college-educated women in white-collar professional jobs. These are exactly the sorts of women most vulnerable to the kinds of
sexual harassment and exploitation that have been reported from Harvey
Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose et al.
Because the
Republican voter base is overwhelmingly male, Republicans running for office
can afford to make light of sexual harassment, or even commit it themselves.
Clarence Thomas, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump (the sequence is purely
chronological) all won high office after being credibly accused of harassing
and even assaulting women. Indeed, Trump was seen and heard on nationwide TV in
the infamous Access Hollywood tape not
only making highly sexualized, demeaning remarks about women but saying that
because he was a “star,” he could get away with groping them.
And from the
latest polls in the special election to fill Alabama’s U.S. Senate seat
December 12, it looks like Roy Moore is about to join that list. What Moore has
been accused of by multiple women is disgusting, and some of it is illegal (or
would have been if it had been reported within the statute of limitations), but
President Trump and the Alabama Republican Party have come down hard on Moore’s
behalf and said point-blank that all
Democrats are so terrible that no matter what Moore may or may not have done,
he needs to be elected to keep the Alabama Senate seat in Republican hands and
make sure the GOP’s already narrow 52-48 Senate majority doesn’t become even
more precarious.
In order to
preserve their share of the women’s vote and their branding as the “party of
women,” Democrats have to move hard against any of their officials who are accused of sexual misconduct.
That’s why San Diego Democrats came down so hard on newly elected Mayor Bob
Filner in 2013. Filner was a local progressive icon whose voting record on
women’s issues was everything the National Organization for Women (NOW),
National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and other major national
feminist organizations could have wanted. He was also a bizarre sexual harasser
who remarked to the veteran professional women on his staff that he’d like them
to come to work without wearing panties, and made so many other demeaning
comments about them that liberal Democratic activists came together in June 2013 to force him
out of office.
The troika who went after Filner — former City Councilmember
Donna Frye, public interest attorney Cory Briggs and Marco Gonzalez, lawyer and
brother of Lorena Gonzalez (then head of San Diego’s labor movement and now a
state assemblymember) — couldn’t have cared less that Filner had been the first
Democrat elected as Mayor of San Diego in 20 years. They also couldn’t have
cared less that in all likelihood, if he were forced out as Mayor, a Republican
would succeed him — which indeed happened. Their public statements were that
his treatment of women was so intolerable he needed to go, Realpolitik considerations be damned. Their real interest was in protecting the Democratic “brand”
against an elected official whose private behavior towards women threatened to
brand the entire Democratic Party as hypocrites, paying lip service to women’s
rights in public while treating them like shit in private.
All those wonderful Democratic electoral victories I
wrote so joyously about on November 8 came about because their campaigns were
especially successful at mobilizing women to vote. Indeed, many of the
grass-roots candidates who took on established Republican politicians and beat
them were women. But women will
only turn out en masse for
Democrats when they feel the Democrats are on their side, not only politically
but personally.
Hillary Clinton
didn’t make that case in 2016, partly because of her personal baggage on the
issue. When Bill Clinton was impeached and nearly removed from office in 1999,
the social consensus was that Hillary, the cheated-on spouse, was a victim, and
a lot of people who opposed the impeachment did so because they felt that if
Hillary were willing to forgive him, they should be too. A decade and a half
later, the spouses of sexually abusive men are judged considerably more
harshly, routinely referred to as “enablers” and almost equally at fault when
their men misbehave. That’s why New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand, who sits
in Hillary Clinton’s old Senate seat and represents the same constituency she
did, recently said that Bill Clinton should have resigned over the sexual scandals
instead of fighting and eventually winning acquittal in the Senate.
As Amy Davidson
Sorkin wrote in the November 27, 2017 New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/liberals-and-sexual-harassment?mbid=nl_Weekly%20112017&CNDID=48795007&spMailingID=12403837&spUserID=MTgxNTc4MjMxMTQ5S0&spJobID=1281914575&spReportId=MTI4MTkxNDU3NQS2),
“When Hillary [Clinton] ran for President in 2016, she may not have gauged how
profoundly Bill Clinton’s record with women would hurt her. Just a month
before the election, after the Access Hollywood” video emerged, in which Trump
bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, he brought [Juanita] Broaddrick and
[Paula] Jones to a Presidential debate.” (Paula Jones was the woman whose
sexual harassment suit against Clinton had led to special counsel Kenneth
Starr’s investigation of him, the exposure of his affair with Monica Lewinsky,
and his impeachment. Juanita Broaddrick had gone even farther and accused
Clinton of outright rape.)
“Clinton
dismissed this as a stunt, meant to throw her off her game,” Davidson Sorkin
wrote. “But the key audience for it was purple-state women, particularly
middle-aged or older working-class women, who might identify with Broaddrick,
or be receptive, based on their own experience, to the contention that, as
Trump put it, Hillary was Bill’s ‘enabler.’ (Polls after the election showed
that Clinton performed less well with those voters than her campaign had
hoped.) For others, Clinton’s decision to make her husband an active part
of her campaign—and the potential First Spouse—constrained it.” And no doubt
Hillary’s tight connection with another
wife of a sexually errant Democratic officeholder — close political advisor
Huma Abedin, then-wife of disgraced (and now imprisoned) former New York Congressmember
Anthony Weiner — didn’t help her either.
So in order to
protect their political “brand” and attract the overwhelming turnouts among
women (especially white women) they need to overcome the Republicans’ advantage
among men (especially white men), Democras have to cut loose immediately any Democratic officeholder credibly accused of
sexual misconducts. Republicans, with a voting base containing a far larger
percentage of men, don’t have to be nearly as harsh. Also, despite Republicans’
claim to be the party of “family values,” Republicans have proven themselves less likely than Democrats to base their votes on a
candidate’s personal conduct.
Republicans keep
their eyes on the ideological prize,
voting not on who the candidate is but what he (or she) says s/he will do. Candidate Donald Trump promised Right-wing
(anti-choice, anti-Queer, pro-business) judicial appointments, expanding
fossil-fuel production over environmentalist objections, repealing the
Affordable Care Act and building a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border. He’s
delivered on the first two, and he can legitimately claim that the others are
being blocked by obstructionists in the Congressional establishments of both
major parties.
Those Democrats
and Leftists who think the Trump Presidency is doomed because his public
approval ratings in polls have hovered between 30 and 38 percent need to be
reminded that on the day before he won the election, his approval rating was at
36 percent. He got 46 percent of the vote, clearly because that additional 10
percent may not have “approved” of him as a person, but they decided he would
be better on the issues they cared about than the hated Hillary, a figure so
demonized by the American Right that subscription solicitations for the American
Spectator magazine contained a cartoon literally depicting her as a witch.
Likewise, Roy
Moore is going to win the Alabama Senate
race, partly because a lot of voters will believe him when he says the attacks
against him were made up by “Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders and
Socialists” (as a Gay Socialist I feel inordinately proud to be so high up on
Roy Moore’s enemies list!; partly because a lot of Alabamans, particularly from
evangelical religious backgrounds, don’t think what Moore is accused of is so
bad (for a fascinating commentary on why, see Kathryn Brighthill’s fascinating
commentary in the November 12 Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-brightbill-roy-moore-evangelical-culture-20171110-story.html);
but mostly because Alabama Republicans (and Republicans in general) don’t care
how good (or bad) a man he is as long as he can be counted on to vote the way they want him to.
The extent to
which the sexual harassment scandals pose an existential threat to the Democratic Party (and not to the Republicans) was brought home this week. On Monday, November
27, Nancy Pelosi, former House Speaker and current leader of the Democrats in
the House, gave an interview on the NBC-TV show Meet the Press in which she called John Conyers an “icon” and said
she would insist on due process in the House ethics investigation of his
conduct with women on his staff before taking a position on whether he should
remain in office.
That was the
“wrong” answer politically, and it met with almost immediate big-time blowback
from Republicans and Democrats alike. It sent a signal to women voters that
neither Republicans nor Democrats can be counted on to protect you: both parties will circle the wagons to protect their own
who are accused of sexual harassment, while blasting away at people from the
other big party facing similar charges.
Three days
later, Pelosi got the message and, as CNN reported (http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/30/politics/nancy-pelosi-john-conyers-resign/),
called on Conyers to resign and said on November 30 what she should have said
November 27: ““It’s very sad and the brave women who came forward are owed
justice. I will pray for Congressman Conyers and his family, and wish them
well. However Congressman Conyers should resign. … No matter how great a
legacy, there’s no license to harass or discriminate. In fact it makes it even
more disappointing.”
In short,
precisely because they are so dependent
on mobilizing and motivating women voters to overcome their major disadvantage
among men, Democrats have to have a “zero tolerance” policy towards sexual
harassers in their ranks. Republicans don’t. That’s why John Conyers and
Minnesota Senator Al Franken will be forced out of office in disgrace, as
Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and Bob Filner were, while Donald Trump and Roy
Moore will serve in office and be treated with full honors and deference by
their Republican colleagues.
Electing
Democrats the Only Way to Stop Trump
The Democratic
Party is certainly not perfect. I think Senator Bernie Sanders got it right
when he said in his campaign that the Republican Party was “controlled” by Wall
Street and the Democrats were “influenced” by it. The war between conservative
Democrats who think the way to push their party forward is to move to the
“center” and accept a good part of the agenda of the business community in
return for their campaign donations, and progressives who want to challenge
Wall Street (as Sanders did) instead of sucking up to it (as Hillary Clinton)
did has been going on at least since 1896, when William Jennings Bryan
successfully challenged incumbent President Grover Cleveland for the
nomination, won but then lost the election to Republican William McKinley.
One can
certainly assemble a long laundry list of all the faults of the Democrats, all
their failures — either due to incompetence or to “centrist” willfulness — to
push forward a progressive agenda. Nonetheless, as the events of the Trump
administration are proving, when it comes to a rational choice between
America’s two big political parties, the Democrats are far, far preferable to the Republicans. They may not be as
aggressive in protecting workers, consumers or the environment as we would want
them to be, but at least they aren’t actively opposed to them the way the Republicans are.
As I said at the
beginning of this article, the starkness of the party-line vote with which the
motion to proceed on the Republican tax bill passed the Senate — all 52
Republicans voted for it, all 48 Democrats voted against — itself proves that,
contrary to the idiotic mewlings of several generations of “alt-Leftists,”
there are profound differences between
the two major parties on the issues progressives and Leftists care about. And
what’s more, thanks to the structure of American politics — particularly that
we elect our legislatures in single-member districts on a winner-take-all basis
— for progressives and Leftists the Democratic Party is the only
electoral game in town.
It wasn’t always
thus. In the 1890’s and even up to the 1930’s, there was a sufficient base of
progressives and even radicals in the Republican party that Leftists could play the two big parties off against each
other to see who could give us the better deal. The reformation of the
Republican Party as a consistently ideological far-Right party began in 1912 —
when former President Theodore Roosevelt sought to win back the Presidency
against his more conservative successor, William Howard Taft, was unable to
wrest the GOP nomination away from Taft (largely due to internal
process-rigging much like what Bernie Sanders endured from the Democratic
National Committee in 2016) and formed his own party — and it was basically
completed with the nomination and election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Therefore, once
again, when it comes to participation in electoral politics, for American
progressives and Leftists the Democratic Party is the only game in town. Noam
Chomsky realized this when, much to the disappointment of many of his anarchist
admirers, he endorsed Democrat John Kerry over Republican George W. Bush in
2004 and gave, as his reason, that it was essential for the short-term interest
of the American Left that “the reality-based wing of the ruling class be in
power.” That’s even more of a consideration given that Trump has reached
heights of irrationality Bush could only have dreamed of — especially his
schoolboy taunts against North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which threaten to
start a nuclear war, and his outright demonization not just of “radical Islam”
but Islam itself as our enemy in the “war on terror.”
The continuation
of the Trump administration and the Republican regime in Congress must end for
America to have a future that doesn’t
look like The Hunger Games. And
under the rules of American politics, the only way to get rid of
Trump and the Republicans is to elect Democrats. Electing Democrats is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve the social change we
desire. It will also be necessary to continue street actions to demand that the Democrats keep their promises to the
progressive and Left communities that help elect them, and to organize contests
within the Democratic Party (as
Bernie Sanders and others from his movement have already done) to target
pro-corporate Democrats for primary challenges and replace them with
progressive Democrats.
As I’ve written
in these pages before, in past periods of progressive ferment in American
history — the 1890’s, the 1930’s, the 1960’s — the American Left understood
that you cannot achieve social change just
through electoral politics, and you cannot achieve it just through direct action. It takes both. Our only road out of the political, economic,
environmental and moral sinkhole the United States of America is becoming under
Trump and the Republican Congress is to stay committed both to electing Democrats and using direct action to
pressure them to fulfill the progressive agenda.
The Right-wing
“Tea Party” of the early 2010’s successfully pursued this dual strategy on the
other side, using both direct action and primary challenges to drive the
Republican Party farther Right while remaining in the GOP instead of pursuing
the will-o’-the-wisp of an alternative party. We on the Left need to do the
same if we want America — the America we grew up in and believed could be made
even better, the America that protects and takes care of all its citizens
instead of pitting them against each other in dog-eat-dog competition — to
survive Donald Trump and the Republican ideological onslaught of which he is
the leader and the public face.
