Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I have a lot of
respect for MS-NBC news host and former Congressional aide Lawrence O’Donnell,
but he was dead wrong on December 29 when he hosted his show — a year-in-review
episode detailing all the mistakes President Donald Trump had allegedly made
throughout 2017 — and read his list, liberally illustrated with clips from
previous episodes, under a title reading, “Donald Trump’s Bad Year.”
The title
couldn’t have been more wrong. Donald Trump had a great year in 2017. He’s been ridiculed for having said
early on in his Presidency that he was doing more in his first year than anyone
since Franklin D. Roosevelt took office during the depths of the Great
Depression in 1933, but he’s come damned close.
Trump has also
been made fun of because it wasn’t until the end of the year that the
Republican-dominated Congress passed, and he signed into law, a truly major
piece of legislation. But that has hardly ever mattered less. Taking a page
from the book of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, Trump governed from
his first days largely by “executive orders,” simple
this-is-the-way-it’s-going-to-be proclamations that he issued in huge
leather-bound folders and signed with a huge Sharpie pen — as if, I joked at
the time, any lesser writing implement wouldn’t be big enough for his … hands.
Between his
steady flood of executive orders, issued with all the pomp and flourish of a Third
World military officer having staged a coup d’état and ruling by decree, his wholesale deletions of
government regulations, his judicial appointments and the revolutionary
reshaping of American fiscal policy, Trump has achieved his goal of a “transformational”
Presidency, one which will fundamentally change every American’s relations
between him/herself and the U.S. government and ultimately achieve the
Republican Party’s long-term goal of ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid
and every other program that taxes the rich to help the not-so-rich.
Even more than
George W. Bush, who once complained that his critics have “misunderestimated”
him, Donald Trump has been a far more brilliant and savvy manipulator of people
and events than he usually gets credit for being. The alleged “chaos” of his
administration reflects deliberate policy on his part: a long-time management
strategy, which he used as a businessman well before he entered (or even
thought of entering) politics, of deliberately setting his employees against
each other and promoting the ones who win while firing the ones who lose. (It’s
essentially the self-image he projected on his TV show The Apprentice.)
Jonah Goldberg,
a Right-wing opinion columnist who was one of the last from his side of the
political fence to acknowledge and at least grudgingly support Trump, published
a column in the December 26 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-goldberg-column-20171226-story.html)
detailing the achievements of President Trump’s first year in office: “A record
number of judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice, the defeat
of Islamic State, repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate, tax reform and
major rollbacks of various regulations, from arctic drilling to Net
Neutrality.”
One of the
reasons Trump has been so “misunderestimated” has been his low standing in
public opinion polls. Generally his “approval” rating in such polls has hovered
between 32 and 38 percent, lowest for any American President in the history of
scientific polling. But that doesn’t matter as much as a lot of people think it
does. One reason, I suspect, is that Trump has a sort of reverse version of the
“Bradley effect” going for him. The “Bradley effect” was the alleged
unwillingness of Americans to tell survey researchers they weren’t going to
vote for an African-American candidate because they had racist prejudices but
didn’t want to admit those to people polling them.
It was named
after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who in 1982 ran for Governor of California
against Republican George Deukmejian. He was ahead a few points in the last
pre-election polls but lost the election by a few points, and the 5- to
10-point difference between those last-minute polls and the actual results
became known as the “Bradley effect.” President Obama’s election in November
2008 was largely thought to have ended the “Bradley effect,” but in fact his
support dropped off from the last polls to the actual result just as the
“Bradley effect” predicted: he was ahead 10 percentage points in the last polls
and he won by five. So Obama was harmed by the “Bradley effect” just as
previous African-American candidates had been; he was just so far ahead he won
anyway.
I think Donald
Trump has a reverse “Bradley effect” going for him: a 5- to 10-percent margin among Americans who support Trump
precisely because he is so openly racist, sexist and generally bigoted, but are
too ashamed to admit that to pollsters. This was one of the main reasons he won
the election; not realizing that Trump would always score 5 to 10 points higher than his poll numbers
would indicate, Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff and her supporters generally
couldn’t imagine they could possibly lose Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania …
until they did. So those who are hoping Trump’s Presidency would implode
because of his low approval ratings in polls need to look up and face the
facts. Trump actually had a 36 percent approval rating on November 7, 2016 —
and he won the election with 46 percent of the vote. So it’s reasonable to
estimate the hard-core Trump “base” as about 40 percent of the electorate, 10
percent more than his lowest poll ratings.
A Decades-Long Campaign
In his article,
Jonah Goldberg attributes Trump’s successes to the way he’s let the established
institutions of the Republican Party largely take over the government, despite
his protestations that they are part of the mysterious, shadowy “Establishment”
aimed at sabotaging him. “Trump’s success (such as it is) is less attributable
to sudden mastery of the issues than staying out of the way of rank-and-file
Republican policymakers, activists and bureaucrats,” Goldberg said.
The truth is
actually broader than that. Ever since the late 1930’s, there has been a
Right-wing movement within the Republican Party that coalesced in the first
place around opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s and the Democrats’ “New Deal” —
and, later, their foreign policy. For a quarter-century this tendency battled
with the more moderate, centrist “business Republicanism” of the party’s East
Coast-based establishment.
Business
Republicans wanted to put brakes on the New Deal and the Democrats’ penchant
for using the power of the U.S. to determine events throughout the world, but
they basically accepted those doctrines. They were willing to sustain at least
some investment in social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare
because for people who grew up in the 1930’s the alternative seemed to be
economic chaos. They were also willing to tolerate organized labor and to reach
out to communities of color, especially since the Democrats, with their base in
the “Solid South,” had historically been the party of slavery, segregation, the
Ku Klux Klan and organized racism in general.
Business
Republicans continued to dominate the party until the mid-1960’s, when a series
of events put the hard Right in control first of the Republican Party and,
eventually, the entire country. First, a coalition of liberal Northern
Democrats and business Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, thereby flipping the two parties’ historic positions
on civil rights for people of color. The Democrats established themselves as
the party opposed to racism, while the Republicans moved to capture
disillusioned Southern Democrats and
working-class Northerners put off by the Democrats’ increasing identification
with the African-American cause and also by the counter-cultural movements
among young people in the 1960’s.
The Republicans
first sought to take advantage of this so-called “white backlash” when they
nominated their first hard-Right Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, in
1964. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act and thereby gave himself
and the Republican Party “cred” among racist and culturally conservative voters
disgusted by the Democrats’ alignment with young people and people of color.
Though Goldwater lost, he carried five Southern states, spelling the end of the
“solid South” for the Democrats and permanently changing the balance of power
in American politics from the Democrats to the Republicans.
The next step
forward for the hard-Right in the Republican Party was Richard Nixon’s open
embrace of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) in his 1968 Presidential
campaign. Anxious to blunt the threat that racist Alabama Governor George
Wallace’s independent Presidential campaign would split the Right-wing vote and
allow Democrat Hubert Humphrey to win, Nixon and Thurmond concocted the
“Southern strategy” by which the Republicans would take over from the Democrats
as the party of cultural conservatism and racism. Between them, Nixon and
Wallace won 57 percent of the Presidential vote in 1968 to Humphrey’s 43
percent, indicating that the days of the “New Deal coalition” was over and
there was now a permanent Right-wing majority in Presidential politics that
would last until the 1990’s.
Nixon won in
1968 and scored a landslide re-election victory with 61 percent of the vote in
1972, and though he ultimately fell from grace after the various stratagems and
“dirty tricks” he had pulled to win that sweeping victory, collectively known
as “Watergate,” were revealed, the Right-wing majority in American Presidential
politics survived him. Democrat Jimmy Carter won in 1976, partly a reaction to
Watergate and the disgrace it had heaped on the Republicans, and partly due to
his status as the first major-party Presidential candidate who was also an
evangelical Christian. Evangelicals who had previously stayed away from
politics joined in the Carter campaign and believed he would govern according
to their culturally conservative values.
He did not, and
the reaction of the evangelical community to what they considered Carter’s
“betrayal” helped shape the next step forward for the radical Right in their
ultimate takeover of American politics: the successful campaign of Ronald
Reagan, the first hard-Right nominee for President actually to win, in 1980. Unlike Carter, whose administration’s
pro-choice position on abortion and tentative overtures to Queers (including
issuing an executive order banning discrimination against Queers in
non-military federal employment that remains in effect) had alienated his
fellow evangelicals, Reagan delivered for the so-called “Christian Right” up to
a point. In particular, he imposed the infamous “gag rule” barring U.S.-funded
non-governmental organizations working abroad from even mentioning abortion as an alternative for pregnant women.
Reagan was more
concerned with delivering on the economic agenda of the hard Right than the
evangelical social agenda. He put through two huge tax cuts in his first two
years in office that, contrary to the optimistic predictions of so-called
“supply-side economists” that they would actually increase government revenue
by stimulating economic activity, in fact tanked the economy and led to a
recession in 1982. He also followed a policy Adolf Hitler called Gleischhaltung — one of those indigestible compound words Germans
love to create that doesn’t have a good English equivalent, though I’ve seen it
rendered as “rectification” — which means blunting the effect of government
agencies charged to do something you don’t like by appointing people to run those
agencies who fundamentally disbelieve in their missions.
Reagan’s most
flagrant and notorious example of Gleischhaltung was appointing a woman named Anne M. Gorsuch to run the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) despite — or, rather, because of — her opposition to governmental attempts to
protect the environment. The way the American radical Right is tight-knit not
only ideologically but personally
through generations is illustrated by the fact that one of Donald Trump’s most
spectacular first-year triumphs was to get Gorsuch’s son Neil onto the U.S.
Supreme Court for life.
Trump, of
course, has used Gleischhaltung even
more systematically than Reagan. As his EPA head he appointed Scott Pruitt, who in his previous life as
attorney general of Oklahoma repeatedly sued to have the EPA declared
unconstitutional and whose attitude towards the environment makes Anne Gorsuch
look like a charter member of the Sierra Club by comparison. To run the
Interior Department he picked Ryan Zinke, who’s apparently never looked at a
wilderness area he hasn’t wanted to see drilled or mined. To run the Consumer
Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) Trump chose Mick Mulvaney, a former Republican
Congressmember on record as saying the CFPB should be abolished.
With
appointments like that, Trump doesn’t need
to get the Republican Congress to pass legislation. All he has to do is put
hard-Right people in charge of various agencies and tell them to dismantle as
many regulations as possible so he and other 0.01-percenters can have a free hand
to manipulate government in order to make themselves even richer. He also has
had an advantage in that in 1994 the Republican Party finally broke the 42-year
Democratic monopoly on control of the House of Representatives, and the House
has been Republican for all but four years ever since.
The Hard-Right’s Master
Plan
The American
hard-Right has spent the last several decades pursuing a meticulous and
carefully strategized master plan that has relied on the huge financial
resources of a handful of mega-rich donors and the construction of an
alternative set of media that keep voters in line by pumping out hard-Right
propaganda masquerading as “objective” news. President Reagan took the first
step in creating the American hard-Right’s media arm when in 1987 he and his Gleischhaltung appointees at the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which had required broadcasters to
represent multiple political points of view in their programming.
Without the
Fairness Doctrine in the way, owners of radio stations were able to program
hard-Right propaganda from talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly,
Mark Levin and Roger Hedgecock 24/7. Within a few years virtually the entire AM
radio band was dominated by hard-Right talk-show hosts, spewing out a daily
propaganda line meticulously set out for them by weekly meetings organized by
hard-Right activist Grover Norquist. In 1996, nine years after the repeal of
the Fairness Doctrine, multinational media owner Rupert Murdoch and long-time
Republican campaign operative Roger Ailes brought the talk-radio sensibility to
cable TV by launching Fox News. With their constant demonzation of the “liberal
media,” talk radio and Fox News prepped their audiences to believe anything they heard from them and discount any news or
information from sources that weren’t part of the hard-Right network.
The first step
in the hard Right’s takeover of the U.S. media was Reagan’s abolition of the
Fairness Doctrine in 1987. The second step was the establishment of Fox News in
1996. The third and fourth steps are taking place right now. Earlier this year,
Ajit Pai, Trump’s appointee to head the FCC, pushed through a rule change to
abolish so-called “Net Neutrality,” the legal obligation of Internet service providers
(ISP’s) to treat all data equally and not arbitrarily censor some Web sites or
slow them down to discourage people from using them.
Most of the
coverage of the end of “Net Neutrality” has been centered around the ability it
will give major ISP’s like AT&T, Comcast and Spectrum to make money by
pushing consumers to content Web sites they own or control, by making sure those sites get transmitted rapidly and without glitches
while sites they don’t own are slower and glitchy. But there’s a more insidious
danger to the end of “Net Neutrality”: the degree to which it allows ISP’s the
ability to censor the Internet by barring their customers from accessing Web
sites whose political content they don’t agree with.
Already AT&T
has been caught restricting its users’ access to Planned Parenthood and other
pro-choice sites, and the CEO of Comcast once called his users’ Internet
connections “my pipes” and said he didn’t see why he should have to allow
political content he disagree with to be transmitted over “my pipes.” Without
Net Neutrality, ISP’s have essentially attained the legal status of
“publishers” under the First Amendment, with the full legal right to decide
what political points of view their customers can access and which they can’t.
And since virtually all ISP’s are owned and run by people with hard-Right
politics, it doesn’t take two guesses to figure out how they intend to use that power.
Hard-Right
multibillionaires are also increasing their investments in so-called “legacy
media.” A group bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, multibillionaire brothers
whose family made their money in fossil fuels and who have used a good chunk of
their fortune to advance the political fortunes of the hard Right, has just
concluded a deal to buy Time magazine
from the Time Warner conglomerate. Another group of hard-Rightists associated
with the management of the hard-Right Libertarian Orange County
Register recently bought the alternative
newspaper L.A. Weekly and
promptly fired the entire editorial staff, obviously intending to replace the
progressives who used to work there with people who can be trusted to toe the
hard-Right media line.
The hard Right’s
long-term plan is to make sure they monopolize the U.S. media so no political or social points of view opposed to or
critical of theirs get expressed
in mainstream communications channels. The hope is that Americans will
automatically adopt hard-Right politics since their media will no longer allow
them to be aware that other points of view exist. The hard Right can leave the
First Amendment guarantee of “freedom of the press” technically in place
because they will have achieved censorship, not by government action, but by
private economic power. As the late A. J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press
belongs to those who own one” — and the hard Right is using its money and its
clout to make sure no other Americans get to own one.
The hard Right’s
master plan extended to far more than using the media to win total support of a
hard core of about 40 percent of the population (which they have achieved).
Their multibillionaire backers also funded a wide array of think tanks like the
Hoover Foundation, the American Heritage Institute and Americans for Prosperity
to determine just what policies government should enact to fulfill their goal
of making the rich richer, making everyone else poorer and abolishing all
programs aimed at taxing the rich to help the not-so-rich. One of the key
organizations in this network is the American Legislative Exchange Council
(ALEC), in which hard-Right organizers and corporate funders sit together and
actually write the laws which will fulfill their policy goals, then hand them
over to sympathetic legislators at both the federal and state level to get
passed into law.
Another key
organization is the Federalist Society, which identifies up-and-coming
hard-Right law students and gives them a leg up in their careers. The ultimate
goal of the Federalist Society is to get their protégés appointed to be judges
in both federal and state courts, so that any attempts to stop hard-Right
legislation or policies in the courts will fail because the judges will be
committed members of the hard Right and will rule on these cases on ideological
grounds. Jonah Goldberg noted that Trump had essentially “outsourced” his
judicial appointments to the Federalist Society — as did the last previous
Republican President, George W. Bush — and the importance of the Federalist
Society’s success at “working the ref” and making sure supposedly “objective”
judges are actually hard-Right activists who rule ideologically cannot be
overestimated.
That’s one
reason why Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) made it one of
his major priorities, once the Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate
in 2014, to hold up not only President Obama’s last attempt at a U.S. Supreme
Court appointment but virtually all his
appointments of federal judges. McConnell deliberately set out to make sure
that if a Republican replaced Obama he would have at least 100 vacancies on the
federal courts to fill with lifetime appointments — and Trump has followed
suit. While Trump has been notoriously slow in appointing officials to the rest
of government, he’s speeded through the judicial process, getting 90 new judges
on the bench in his first year — three times as many as Bill Clinton, George W.
Bush and Barack Obama got through in their first years. The goal is that even
if the Republicans lose control of the executive and legislative branches,
they’ll have “packed” the judiciary so well that anything the Democrats try to
do in the political branches will be thrown out as unconstitutional.
Taxation as Class War
The most recent
success of the hard-Right’s long-term ideological project to achieve permanent
control of American politics and skew public policy in their direction is, of
course, the tax bill recently passed by the U.S. Congress on strict party-line
votes and signed into law by President Trump. The tax law increases the U.S.
budget deficit by up to $1.5 trillion in order to give huge tax cuts to
corporations and wealthy individuals and their families. It sabotages the
Affordable Care Act (ACA), so-called “Obamacare,” by repealing the “individual
mandate” that everyone in the U.S. had to have health insurance or pay a
penalty tax, which will likely mean a drastic increase in the cost of health
insurance for every American who has it,
whether they got it from their employers, through an ACA “exchange” or some
other way.
The tax bill
also encourages state and local government to slash their social budgets. By drastically scaling back the
ability of middle-class people to reduce their federal tax liabilities by
deducting the taxes they pay to state and local governments, the bill will make
it politically tougher for even the most liberal “blue” states like California,
New York and Massachusetts to maintain their states’ current levels of social
services. They’ll be able to do that only by raising their own taxes to economically and politically unsustainable levels. The goal — and
some Republican Congressmembers were quite honest about this — is to end the
so-called “subsidy” of more generous states by less generous ones and to force
down the level of social insurance in places like California to the level of
places like Mississippi.
The tight
discipline and unity with which the Republicans in both houses pushed through
the tax bill shows just how wrong the pundits who keep talking about a “civil
war in the Republican Party” are. Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa
Murkowski (R-Alaska), who had received nationwide plaudits from progressives,
liberals and moderates for their votes against the bill to eviscerate the
Affordable Care Act, voted for the tax bill. (Murkowski’s vote was essentially
“purchased” by slipping in a provision allowing oil drilling in the Alaska
National Wildlife Refuge — thereby putting another piece of bad public policy in the bill.)
Senator Bob
Corker (R-Tennessee), who’d been hailed by the liberal punditocracy for some
vague remarks about how President Trump had not yet shown the maturity and
judgment to be an effective leader, voted against the tax bill on its first
go-round in the Senate — he said he didn’t want to be a party to any increases
in the budget deficit. But he voted for it on final passage after language was
inserted directly benefiting major investors in real estate like Senator Corker
and President Trump. Senator Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), who’d been praised for
writing a book called Conscience of a Conservative that attacked Trump, voted for the bill. So did his
Arizona colleague, John McCain, who missed the final vote because his terminal
brain cancer had flared up, but voted for it on the first go-round despite the
fact that the process used to put together the bill made a mockery of McCain’s
call for the Senate to resume “regular order.”
The tax bill
passed with a vote of 51 to 48 in the U.S. Senate. All the votes for it were
from Republicans; all those against it were from Democrats. My friends in the “alt-Left,” the increasingly
out-of-touch moralists or just plain crazies who still insist there is “no
difference” between the two major parties, please take note. As I pointed out
in my last commentary, the tax bill is a Right-wing revolutionary act whose
intent is not merely to give huge tax breaks to the rich at the expense of
everybody else and the country’s
long-term economic health — though it is certainly that. It’s also a weapon in
the current Republican Party’s drive to impose a hard-Right Libertarian
ideology on the U.S. and wipe out all government programs that help people who aren’t part of the 1 percent.
As House Speaker
Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) — a thoroughgoing Libertarian who reportedly gives
copies of Ayn Rand’s Libertarian manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, to his new staff hires to tell them what he wants
from them — said almost as soon as the tax bill was passed, the next step was
going to be “entitlement reform.” That’s Republican-speak for deep cuts in
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The Republicans in Congress intend to
pay for the $1.5 trillion their tax cut for the rich will cost by gutting these
vital social insurance programs, in line with their Libertarian ideology that
says the government has no business ensuring that people will have a retirement
income or access to health care.
It’s true that
President Trump promised during his campaign that he wouldn’t cut Social Security and Medicare, but this is Donald
Trump we’re talking about, a man who
regards words as weapons to achieve what he wants and simply doesn’t care about
whether what comes out of his mouth is true or not, as long as it advances his
agenda. If you believed Trump would protect Social Security and Medicare
against the people in his party who want to destroy them, you probably also
believed you could become a multimillionare real-estate tycoon just by
attending Trump University.
One MS-NBC promo
spot features one of their anchors asking just what the Republican Party’s plan
for America is. It’s to return the U.S. to what it was in the 1880’s — the
decade Ayn Rand named as the one in which she thought America was truly “great” — in which corporations and their
owners openly bought political influence (and in some cases, most notoriously
California Senator Leland Stanford, the Donald Trump of the 19th
century, directly bought political office) and used it to make their already huge fortunes even bigger.
In the 1880’s
labor unions were illegal, white Americans reneged on the promise of racial
equality that had been made during Reconstruction and imposed segregation on African-Americans,
women were essentially the property of their families until they got married
and their husbands afterwards, cities actually pointed with pride as to how
polluted their air was, and the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S.
became more unequal than ever before or since in our history … until now. That is the decade when Trump and the Republicans believe
America was “great,” and to which they want to return to “make America great
again.”
Only One Way to Stop It:
Vote for Democrats!
And as I’ve
pointed out in these pages before, there’s only one way to stop the Republican
agenda of economic Libertarianism and social conservatism — the party’s
peculiar but nonetheless enduring consensus that the true role of government
isn’t protecting people against corporate greed or ensuring that people have a
right to survive, but micromanaging their sex lives — and that is to vote for
every Democrat on every ballot in every election in 2018, 2020 and in between.
Despite its many failings and shortcomings, the fact is the Democratic Party is
the only force in the U.S. standing in
the way of the complete conquest of the American political and economic system
by the Republicans in their Right-wing revolution.
Goodness knows,
the Democratic Party has its flaws. While the Republican Party has become an
ideologically consistent machine, the Democrats are still trying to be a
“broad-tent” party encompassing everyone from conservative Senators like Joe
Manchin (D-West Virginia) to progressive Senators like Elizabeth Warren
(D-Massachusetts). At least since the 1896 Presidential campaign, when William
Jennings Bryan successfully challenged incumbent President Grover Cleveland for
the nomination on a platform combining economic progressivism and social conservatism
— a combination virtually unimaginable today — the Democratic Party has
historically been split between moderates who want to suck up to Wall Street
and the financial interests, and progressives who want to run the economy in
the interests of the 99 percent.
The split within
the Democratic Party seems to recur every time the party is out of power —
between Cleveland and Bryan in 1896, between William Gibbs McAdoo and Al Smith
in 1924 (that was the year the Democratic convention deadlocked after 103 ballots
and ended up nominating John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer whose last public
act was arguing for racial segregation
at the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown
v. Board of Education), between
Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in 1968, between Michael Dukakis and Jesse
Jackson in 1984, between John Kerry and Howard Dean in 2004, and between
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. I harp on this because a lot of
commentators seized on the Clinton-Sanders race as if the conflicts between the
two — and the corrupt role of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in
rigging the race for the nomination for Clinton and against Sanders — were
something new. They weren’t.
I don’t go as
far as Los Angeles Times op-ed
contributor Conor Friedensdorf, who on December 27 published a column (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-friedersdorf-vote-better-20171227-story.html)
saying that in 2018 progressives should stop mounting street protests and
demonstration against the Trump/GOP agenda and concentrate on electing
Democrats in 2018. It seems to be a peculiar delusion of the American Left
these days that the choice between electoral activism and direct action in the
streets is either-or. In fact, it’s impossible to achieve social change just through elections and it’s impossible to achieve it just through street protests. It takes both, and I want to see people continue to demonstrate
against Trump and the Republicans, not only because it builds public awareness
of the depths of depravity to which the Republicans have sunk but because once
we do elect Democrats, we will
have to continue to demonstrate to keep them honest and make sure they serve
the people instead of Wall Street and the corporate “interests.”
But Friedensdorf
is right when he says, “Beyond the greater oversight and accountability that
divided government brings, a decisive defeat of the GOP is the only tool voters
have to repudiate Trump, in particular his tendency to stoke animus against
minority groups to gain power.” As long as Trump or another Republican is
President, and the Republicans control both houses of Congress, they will
continue to be able to eviscerate all economic, social and regulatory
protections against unsafe workplaces, financial scams, environmental
destruction and racial and gender discrimination. They will continue on their
current course of jamming through major legislation without any public hearings
or input from the people who have to live with its consequences.
It would be nice
if the U.S. had a parliamentary system with proportional representation, like
Germany’s, where it made sense to organize the Green Party because once it got
more than 5 percent of the national vote, it got a share of seats in the
national legislature and a shot at real power and influence. But we don’t. We
have an electoral system based on single-member legislative districts and
winner-take-all elections, and that makes organizing alternative parties futile,
counterproductive and a waste of time, energy and money. While the battle for
social and economic justice in the U.S. will require both electoral activism
within the system and street protests and demonstrations outside it, to the
extent that the struggle has an electoral component it will have to be waged
within the Democratic Party.
Electing
Democrats won’t be a panacea. Anyone who’s lived through the successive
disappointments of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
knows that well. But the Republican Party has become so ideologically
consistent and so implacably dedicated to a far-Right Libertarian vision of
America’s future, that it has to be stopped — and the only force within the
political system that can stop it, like it or not, is the Democratic Party.
People who dismiss the Democrats as the “lesser of two evils” need to see that
sometimes the greater evil is so evil that you have to do anything within your power
to stop it. That was the case in Germany in 1932 — when the pointless conflicts
between the Social Democrats and the Communists split the Left and helped the
greater evil, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, take power — and it’s also the case
in the United States in 2018.
