Category: Political

Different Side, Same Coin

by theopendiscourse, posted in Opinion, Political, Sourced/Cited, User-Submitted

Since the outcome of the election, many dyed-in-the-wool Democrats have yet to come to the conclusion that their candidate was flawed and ran a fundamentally incompetent campaign. Perhaps this is the usual cycle of grief for rank-and-file party supporters that have just endured a defeat. Anecdotally, we see this to be true in the electoral victories of President Obama that gave rise to right-wing discontent and movements like the Tea Party. Such seems inevitable, if not encouraged, in American democracy.

 

To be honest, political tantrums are an American pastime that I would personally never wish away precisely because they can be so stupid. That is why I pray Keith Olbermann lives for a thousand years. I hope he is preserved in amber, frozen in a rictus, with a placard below that simply reads ‘The Last Existing Specimen of the Angry Liberal (Iratus liberalis)’. Next to the exhibit will be a television looping Olbermann’s political GQ video series, the current season of which is unimaginatively dubbed ‘The Resistance’, so all can see his self-righteous bloviating roleplay of an Aaron Sorkin character. God bless you, Keith, I’m sure it’s not easy to maintain that volume at every moment of the day.

 

Ridicule aside, Olbermann encapsulates the fruitless ‘How dare you, sir!’ prognostication of liberals that inhabit the Democratic power structure as well as its support base increasingly rooted in the professional class (petty bourgeoisie, anybody?). Their highest virtue is starch collared civility and the source of their power is claiming to represent the victims of society’s injustices. However, they have repeatedly demonstrated that when they are entrusted to a position of power they serially abuse it to maintain corporatist support and push aside the interests of unions, minorities, and so on in the name of ‘pragmatism’. These are the same people that thought it a good idea to give money to reopen the firebombed North Carolina GOP office because of their fetish for pinkies-out civility. They would rather be ‘holier than thou’ than be bothered to feel any urgency to win. Why should anybody trust these people to honestly lead ‘The Resistance’?

 

Furthermore, liberal figures like Olbermann hand-wringing over Russian hacking and flipping electoral college votes echo the impotent rage and paranoia of Republicans in the wake of the Obama victories. As a result of their foundering, they do not address the very real danger of a unified Republican government. Instead, liberals are content to propagate the narrative that Russia is to blame for everything instead of engage in any introspection that could lead to changing or fortifying their ideological position against the coming administration. They are incapable of realizing that Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate being floated by the immense Democratic machine and how much of their traditional support bloc has been alienated.

 

Regarding the Russian issue, most accusations center on Russian hackers somehow forcing the election in the direction of Trump. We must first understand that there is no evidence that Russian operatives altered vote counts directly. The transgression is in the hacking of the DNC, stealing John Podesta’s emails, and operating a digital disinformation campaign. Are these accusations true? Personally, I think it is more than likely that such things were perpetrated to some degree or another. Cyber-espionage of any sort is tricky business to deal with and, if the allegations are proven true, a response is certainly merited.

 

But let us take these accusations to be true; what was uncovered? We saw the open secret of party machinery working for the establishment and unforgivable campaign ineptitude. Is this what we are supposed to be outraged about? Are liberals really so deluded that they think some faceless Russians are more to blame for their loss than Hillary deciding not to step in Wisconsin for the general?

 

This stubborn, counterproductive attitude is quite succinctly illustrated in Garrison Keillor’s opposition to Keith Ellison’s bid to chair the DNC. While Democrats win elections on the backs of minority voters, when their status quo is challenged by this ‘lackluster black Muslim congressman from Minneapolis’ they begin to fret that he won’t be able to ‘connect with disaffected workers in Youngstown and Pittsburgh’. As the face of the party threatens to actually become the face of its claimed base, establishment liberals disregard Ellison’s record as an activist and use his identity against him. Like Republicans, actually giving a shit about the marginalized seems to be anathema to the party orthodoxy.

 

This phenomena of liberal flailing, I claim, is due to a history of the Democratic Party not living up to its expectation of being the de facto party of labor. In addition, its unrelenting technocratic wonkishness that creates impossible to navigate bureaucratized programs (think Obamacare) has further alienated the working class from wanting Democratic policy. A newly energized political movement, as galvanized by Bernie Sanders, has come to understand these realities and is collectively acting to move the party left in accordance with the pedagogy of the most popular politician in America. Liberal pundits, thought-leaders, and politicians alike see the writing on the wall and are scrambling to maintain their tarnished prestige.

 

All of this understood, how far separated are the Democratic and Republican parties? Both coddle corporate interests whether they be tech monoliths in Silicon Valley or coal barons in Appalachia. One wants to put boots on the ground in the Middle East, while the other is content to explode Yemeni funerals from afar. Republicans actively antagonize unions, while Democrats offer only token resistance. Neither party is on the side of the common American if it doesn’t help shore up their base of power.

 

We are at an impasse in American political history. In the face of reactionaries taking power, the Left has an opportunity to capitalize on populist aggravation and create a sustainable movement to improve the material well being of all working Americans. While there are important questions as to whether the Left should occupy the Democratic apparat or create its own party, the takeaway is that the neoliberal experiment has been rebuffed by the people that it exploits. How leftists organize and how liberals reform themselves in the the near future will determine the success of anti-reactionary politics for many years to come.

 

  • Andrew

 

 

We Shouldn’t Have Been Surprised

by theopendiscourse, posted in Opinion, Political, Sourced/Cited, User-Submitted

“It’s fucking done, it’s over” are usually words reserved for nasty breakups. In a sense, it was. A friend who had recently become a naturalized citizen said this as he and I frantically chain-smoked, realizing Michigan would go to Trump. We were both dismayed, but he was betrayed. How could the liberal democracy he believed in deliver the nation into the hands of a man that openly antagonizes minorities and a Republican party sewn up into the rhetoric of white nationalism?  How could he now feel welcome in this country?

Watching Michigan fade to red, we each emptied a bottle of wine. Fascism had come to power in America and ‘Make Donald Drumpf Again’ hats surprisingly did nothing to stop it.

The F-Word

Many will undoubtedly wring their hands (Don’t be so glib! Give him a chance! Well, he’s not literally killing people yet!) at the assertion that the executive is about to be controlled by fascists. However, when a campaign wins in large part by pushing a narrative of community decline to appeal to a populist nativism that antagonizes minorities in pursuit of a promise for national rebirth, it hits all of the checkboxes. The Trump campaign spent a year and a half crafting the face of its date rape Volksgemeinschaft, while liberals were too busy playing Weekend at Bernie’s with a Democratic campaign void of competence or charisma, and Trump won out.

More telling is the inner circle of the president-elect: Steve Bannon (anti-semitic ethnonationalist and propagandist), Mike Pence (a man who is fine with abusive ‘conversion therapies’ that push queer people to either conform or be removed from society) and Peter Thiel (who “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible”). This is only to name a few.

Even if Donald himself turns out to be nothing more than a limp dick blowhard who isn’t serious about being the president, these are the characters that will be working through and around him to push their anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-labor agenda. Pair this with three potential Justice appointments as well as a Republican controlled Legislature and you can see how easy it could be for them to accomplish.

If we as a people want to claim that we are committed to equality and justice, then the consequences of this incoming government must and can only be stopped by a robust and material resistance, not simply through inconsequential rhetorical sparring. If you are not satisfied, then protest in the streets, mobilize yourself with others to volunteer in your community, and put your money where your mouth is. Continuous mass action is a requirement to preserve what progress has been made. No unity is owed to a president-elect that means to treat much of the nation as second-class.

Hubris

How exactly, though, did victory get handed to Trump? It does not take an over-involved post election autopsy to understand that Democrats lost on the votes of the white working class as the direct result of a wildly overconfident and out of touch campaign.

The arrogance the Clinton camp and their assumption that ‘The Blue Wall’ would hold even after losing Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan to a working class oriented populist in the primary led to a negligence of the states in the general. The natural result was always going to be that Hillary would get beaten in these states by the other populist unless the traditional Democratic voting base there was mobilized.

Instead of doing the obvious work required to win, the Clinton campaign’s treatment of the MN-WI-MI region smacks political arrogance: Hillary didn’t even step foot in Wisconsin to campaign in the general and her campaign offices in Wisconsin and Michigan apparently scrambled at the last minute on GOTV operations after restraining themselves to play a pointless ‘psychological game’ (read: neglected trying to actually get votes) with Trump.

It’s clear that they weren’t worried about winning because they lazily believed that the Obama coalition would hold without giving it a reason to, that a Clinton victory was a divine imperative. If they weren’t worried about winning, then they weren’t really worried about serving the working and middle class.

Past and Future

The reasons for Clinton’s defeat, however, go deeper than the campaign and the candidate herself. The Democratic Party, once a mode for organized labor to make its voice heard, has for too long taken for granted the support of unions. Democrat endorsed neoliberal policy has long shredded the working class; whether it be by sending jobs to other countries via trade deals like NAFTA or neutering the welfare depended upon by families whose household incomes have stagnated. At the same time, Democratic leadership whistles on about how they stand for the marginalized while actively tossing them aside. It was only a matter of time until their base abandoned them.

At the same time, the Democratic propensity to focus on identity politics that largely treats the symptoms of an unjust system has created a disunified and unfocused liberal coalition. A Democratic Party in shambles as it looks for its soul will not be well equipped to pursue an agenda that benefits all Americans, let alone resist right-wing skullduggery for the next handful of years. Broader class-oriented politics that attack the machinations of inequality at their root are now required to unify these factions as well as the working class at large. It will be the job of a labor commanded Left, not limousine liberal leadership, that carries the progressive baton.  

  • Andrew

The Irritation Game

by theopendiscourse, posted in Opinion, Political
So before I start (or before you start reading) I want to make something clear. This post is an opinion, and is not cited nearly as well as I would like. This is also, in my opinion, not a very well constructed post in general. This was written some time ago and in posts going forward I will have detailed citations to back up my arguments.

 

The way we, as a society and as individuals, consume and disperse information needs to fundamentally change. If we look at the state of modern discourse (as highlighted ever so well by the conversations happening around the 2016 US election), we see a culture of outrage and vitriol, and large groups of angry people yelling and pointing at other large groups of angry people. In addition, no one group of angry people yelling has a full set of information and is only operating on partial sets of information that increasingly does not overlap or cover the whole picture. Simply put, this is unsustainable. The question is, how did we get here and how do we begin to bridge the widening political gap?

Now, the nature of US news had never been strictly held to any significant standards of party neutrality as there were many partisan newspapers. However, when broadcast news rolled around onto the radio, there was first regulation that forbid editorializing, which was later replaced by the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine allowed editorializing, but stipulated that an opposing viewpoint be represented in those situations. There was no stipulation on giving the opposing view equal time, but operated that simply exposing listeners (and later viewers, once television came about) to opposing views was beneficial. This doctrine was overturned in 1986 under the administration of Ronal Reagan, under the logic that the government making and enforcing this sort of rule was infringing on free expression (and without getting too deep into the details, I partially agree with that logic). After the legislation was overturned, nothing was put in place to replace it and the world moved on.

What the legislators at the time could not have foreseen where 2 very significant things. The first was the creation of Fox News on cable in 1996 (bear with me here, I know it looks like I’m going to throw conservatives under the bus, but I’m not). The second was the rise of the internet in the mid to late 90’s. Fox News, then went on to prove something every businessperson worth their money knows: if you give consumers what they want, your business will profit and grow. As such, other news stations began to imitate this behavior, MSNBC being a notable cable news competitor (and it was actually founded a few months before Fox), took on this strategy in a less successful attempt to replicate the success of Fox. I realize that these are cable news outlets and not subject to broadcast regulation, but please bear with me a bit longer. Now as this trend was making itself apparent, internet usage became more common in individual households, and internet news was beginning to grow. While it wouldn’t grow to threaten traditional newspapers, radio, and television news yet it was becoming a noteworthy occurrence in the news media market. Eventually, television, radio, and internet news came together and news outlets generally had to have all three in order to be competitive. Now, because they were not subject to any regulations, news entities could televise, broadcast, and post whatever they wanted with whatever political spin they wanted. This trend not only allowed news media to tell people what they wanted to hear, it allowed them to begin putting them in politically exclusive bubbles, to get people agitated and angry over what “the other” group was saying or doing, and to claim that they and they alone were the only source of truly objective reporting.

Now that brings us today, where a lot of much younger online only news sites have sprung up, passing opinion blogging as journalism (yes I see the irony in saying that, though I would not consider myself a journalist), serving to further polarize readers. They do this by feeding on the addictive feeling of righteous outrage. At this point, I highly recommend you watch this video and/or read this article/blog post as they put the action-reaction nature and psychology of this much better than I could. The short version being: anger is addictive, and we begin to build totemic strawmen of opposition amongst groups who agree with us to further feed our anger addiction. This is an issue because anger bypasses rational thought, which each and every person is capable of when calm. So how do we move away from the addiction to outrage, and the ritualistic hatred of opposition from within our own bubbles? We venture out of our comfort zone, we listen to and engage with opinions we disagree with in good faith and with an open mind, and we become self-aware enough to recognize our anger begins to bypass our capacity for rational thought and discussion. That was the purpose this site was established for, and after being disappointed in the dialogue in the media and among my peers, that is my cause going forward. Feel free to comment, give feedback, criticism, or counterarguments, I welcome all of it.

 

  • David