Tag Archives: primaries

Political Rants

Berned.

It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up.

Building a future, not just a campaign.

As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the presidency someone who has never taken part in the Nixon/Reagan conservative framing that has dominated our politics for decades. That is unprecedented in the modern era. It’s a heavy lift, and we should have no illusions about that. But as Bernie himself pointed out on Wednesday, his campaign represents majority positions within the Democratic party. It also reflects the priorities of a large majority of our young people – and by “young”, I mean 45 and younger. There is no question that that is where the party is going, not to some chewy center represented by people like Biden.

The fatal question for us as a society, though, is can we afford to wait another decade or more to see this new progressive majority emerge? I would say that the climate crisis has already answered that question. But I want to emphasize that the most important component of our response is in the organizing and the mobilization. Yes, Bernie Sanders is the only remaining candidate who, if elected president, would need little or no convincing to take on the enormous task of turning this fossil-fuel driven society around. But if we don’t achieve that maximal objective (and we should most definitely try to do so), we will still need the organizational institutions to push policy forward on whomever ends up in power next January. Short of Bernie, it would be better to have Biden than Trump; but either way we have to have mobilization. The Sanders campaign is like a progress indicator on the movement – the degree to which it succeeds is some rough indication of how well we’re doing on the ground. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past few years, but we have a long, long way to go.

My recommendation is simply this: don’t lose heart. We can still win this nomination. But even if we don’t, the effort is not wasted so long as we build on the foundation of this campaign.

luv u,

jp

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

Voices not heard.

The New York primary is history, and I am not alone, I’m sure, in feeling somewhat disappointed, if not surprised. Sure, we all knew that the Empire State would be an uphill battle for Bernie Sanders, but when you get all these texts and phone calls from volunteers, and you are visited at home not once but TWICE by canvassers, one group of whom told me (accurately) where my polling place was, you start to imagine a better outcome. Those kids did pretty good upstate, actually – Sanders won my home county along with almost every other county north of Westchester. I hope they draw some encouragement from that.

Prpblematic in New York, too.What is kind of discouraging, however, is the mess that New York State elections often turn out to be. We actually have fairly restrictive voter laws. No early voting, no same day registration, excuse-only absentee balloting, and a lot of weird business, like all of those voters shut out in Brooklyn this time around. I’m not claiming any conspiracy. It’s just a kind of studied incompetence that I see in my own district. (For instance, my first presidential election as a voter was 1980 – I was away from home, at SUNY New Paltz, had applied for an absentee ballot, and they sent it to my parents’ house up in the Utica area. Stuff like that.)

Another issue is independent voters. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that any taxpayer supported election should be open to whoever wants to participate. Even if you want to maintain some party integrity (i.e. not letting Republicans decide who the Democratic candidate will be), you can still let independents vote – just let them choose which ballot they want. And the requirement that you register with a party by sometime in October for a primary the following April is plainly absurd. New York’s system just seems like it’s the product of an ossified political culture full of time-serving hacks who seek only to protect their patch and who are careful not to smash the other guy’s rice bowl, as Alan Chartock used to say. (Perhaps he still does!)

So, we move on. Bernie Sanders still has some work to do, plainly. He may never be president, but he’s a great organizer, and we need that skill to push forward an agenda for change that even the Clintons can’t ignore.

luv u,

jp