Tag Archives: Bernie Sanders

Political Rants

Proof of concept.

I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed by the “Super Tuesday” results. All night, the thing that kept ringing in my ears was the memory of Tom Brokaw back in 1984 saying, “Looks like another good night for Walter Mondale,” and just how nauseating that moment felt. Tuesday was a similarly nauseating experience, except that, if anything, I have less confidence in Biden as a candidate than I did in Mondale. I should say here that I am no stranger to political disappointment; very, very rarely does my first choice candidate rise to the top. That’s partly a function of my being to the left of the Democratic party, but it’s also due to the fact that I do not have a deep connection to the party as an institution.

Like most institutions, the Democratic party favors some people over others for leadership positions within the party. That dynamic pushes forward senior, well-connected, establishment politicians – people like Biden, Hillary Clinton, Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, etc. – regardless of their relative talents, ability to connect with voters, etc. With regard to the presidential race, more often than not, they prevail, and when they prevail, more often than not, they lose in the general. Obama was an insurgent who became the establishment – he didn’t start at the top. Hillary was favored to win in 2016 because it was her turn; she lost on her own merits, or lack of same. Biden is being advance for the same reason – it’s his turn. It’s far from obvious that he’s the strongest candidate to go up against Trump, but that, it seems, is an afterthought for party leaders.

Sure looks like a lot of people.

All that said, Bernie should have performed better Tuesday night. Which proves the obvious: grassroots organizing is hard, tremendously hard. No one even pretends that Biden has a grassroots activist organization – nothing of the sort. Bernie does, but they missed the mark on Tuesday, for the most part. A candidate like Bernie can only prevail if he has a mass movement behind him. What he’s proposing from a policy standpoint is reliant on the existence of such a movement. Bernie is quite frank about that. Without the movement, there’s no Sanders presidency and no Sanders agenda. So these primaries amount to proof of concept at some level. If he can’t build the support now, it wouldn’t be there for him later. His agenda cannot succeed on the basis of a narrow win against Trump. We need a progressive wave, and thus far, it hasn’t materialized.

My hope is that the movement does rise in time to put Bernie over the top. But if it doesn’t, make no mistake – we will still need the movement for what’s ahead of us. Our survival as a species depends on it.

luv u,

jp

New podcast drops

I’ve launched a new political commentary podcast called Strange Sound. It’s free, it’s brief, and it’s available now at anchor.fm/strangesound.

Political Rants

The last war.

On various occasions over the past week or two I’ve felt like I was tele-transported back into the mid-twentieth century. It started with MSNBC host Chris Mathews during a broadcast in New Hampshire spouting some crazy-ass rant about revolutionaries from Castro’s Cuba executing him in Central Park as American leftists – including Bernie Sanders – looked on approvingly. He later went full retrograde pundit, comparing Sanders’ victory in Nevada to the Nazis overrunning French defenses at the start of World War II. Then, this past week, Bernie Sanders’s comments about literacy programs in Cuba somehow became a central issue in the Democratic primary campaign, hoisted high by the “liberal” cable outlet MSNBC as evidence of Bernie’s unelectability and nefarious socialistic tendencies. The crew on Morning Joe jokingly addressed one another as “comrade”, jumping up and down on Sanders for being a Castro apologists, then – practically in the same breath – remembered the late dictator Hosni Mubarak as a source of stability in a troubled region. Can’t. make. it. up.

Sees commies everywhere. Still.

Now mind you, it isn’t like the MSNBC crew (and others) needed to resort to fighting the last war to properly bash Bernie. Their hair was on fire in the wake of Nevada particularly, and they are using what influence they have to trip him up in South Carolina, where their peculiar favorite Biden is favored to win. But resort they did, and in so doing, they (with some notable exceptions) revealed just how steeped in right-wing historical narratives their correspondents remain. I expect nothing better from Scarborough, a former right-wing congressman from Florida, but frankly one would hope that more than a handful of these journalists might acknowledge the neo-colonial relationship we’ve had with Caribbean and Central American nations over the past Century.

Comparing Cuba with the United States is a meaningless exercise. The former is a small, poor, underdeveloped country; the latter, a global superpower and the richest nation on Earth. A more apt comparison would be between Cuba and Guatemala or El Salvador, as these examples are also poor and underdeveloped, but remained in the U.S. sphere of influence, unlike Cuba post 1959. Compare literacy rates, the availability of health care, and other social goods, and trust me, Cuba is head and shoulders above the other two for the vast majority of their respective populations, despite Cuba having endured a crushing U.S. embargo (in addition to all-out terror) since its revolution sixty years ago. It’s also worth remembering that Cuba stood firmly on the side of Angola and the ANC throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when we were actively supporting apartheid South Africa. That’s why Raul Castro was honored so lavishly at Nelson Mandela’s funeral – they, more than any other nation, brought about the end of apartheid, and it cost them dearly.

I think Majority Report’s Michael Brooks had it right on Wednesday when he said that, given Cuba’s status as a cash-starved country under sustained attack for six decades, we could be excused for not obsessing over its authoritarian tendencies when we’re perpetually giving a nearly free pass to powerful, massively abusive authoritarian countries like China (as Bloomberg and CBS debate moderators did this past Tuesday).

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Winning and losing.

I’ll start this post with some overly simplistic observations about human nature – here goes. My first thought is that, in general, modern-day Americans are encouraged to think that the sky’s the limit, but that that sky is about three inches over their heads. It’s a freakish hybrid of the power of positive thinking and terminal pessimism. This comes to mind as I consider what we as Americans are capable of vs. what we’re likely to even try to accomplish over the next few years. We have done enormous things before, no question. While the problems facing us are of an almost unprecedented scale, they are ultimately solvable if we have the political will to act. And yet, because we have been admonished for decades to “think small” when it comes to what we can ask of our government, it feels like we’re frozen in place, like a deer in the headlights. That, it seems to me, is problem number one.

Bernie and the also-rans.

My second observation is about Democrats – more specifically, people inclined to vote for Democrats. They (or I should say, we) are shell-shocked and obsessed with the project finding a presidential candidate that can win against Trump. We listen to talking heads and prognosticators who tell us the relative merits and risks associated with this candidate, that candidate, etc. But the risk of any Democratic presidential candidate, it seems clear, is that Democratic voters won’t show up for them in November. So this ends up being a kind of Dorothy/ruby slipper problem. We waste all of this time and effort on scarecrows, tin men, and cowardly lions, bowing to bogus wizards in hope of salvation when in fact we have had the power to save ourselves from the very beginning. Just pick the goddamn candidate you agree with, then whoever gets the nomination, fucking vote for that person in the general. If we all do that, we will prevail.

With the Nevada caucuses now underway, we need to focus on policy, not competitive politics. Let’s not obsess over which Democrat the never-Trumpers prefer as our nominee. And even more importantly, let’s not be swayed by the notion that we can’t get hard things done. We are faced with a series of hard problems – not in the sense that the solutions are obscure or unknowable, but rather that they require a heavy political lift that we as a nation are wholly unused to. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it. We lifted ourselves out of the Great Depression. We created Social Security and kept it running, despite the many attacks, for all these years. We achieved formal political rights for black people, women, even if those efforts remain works in progress. In short, we need a real sense of possibility if we’re going to accomplish any of these vital task before us.

I think Reverend William Barber said it best when he observed that Martin King wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if, say, at Selma he just said, “Oh, well …. we can’t win.” We can win, if we are willing to work toward it. In fact, that’s the only way.

luv u,

jp