Bernie Sanders was never the Democratic nominee.
And the world is a lot poorer for it. Bernie was the only major living American political candidate I ever truly loved. (Ralph Nader is a little too scary smart to be truly lovable.) Bernie’s speech warning about the risks of the Iraq War — like he had a newspaper from 2012 — that speech alone would be worth the price of admission.
AOC is also dynamite: she can ask brutal factual questions with this relentless clarity I just haven't seen in generations in American political discourse. She makes big demands, asks for a lot more than we can get today, which is how you get it tomorrow, and I'll bet she aims for a lot more than she demands today. I have great hopes for her.
(But I cannot see Obama's face today without feeling a congeries of negative emotions. Our last chance, squandered: but they say he will be the first billionaire ex-President.)
Still, moving to the Netherlands!, here I had three socialist parties to choose from in the one election so far where I on a technicality was allowed to vote, and the party I voted for got a plurality, a “win”, because no one party ever wins a majority — that’s rocked my Overton Window (“Did the Window move for you too?”)
Indeed, the reason people say these wild things is to move the Overton Window a little bit back from where it is now, looking out into the madhouse. You shouldn't discourage such enthusiasm.
Remember, eating just one fossil fuel company executive prevents more greenhouse gas emissions than going vegan for the rest of your life.
with precious few exceptions (Joe Manchin comes to mind as one such exception), there are no elected or nominated Democrats who fit the label of “right-wing”.
That’s only true if your definition of “left wing” is “to the right of moderates in the Republican party of 2020”. But for all the rest of the world, and for most of the history of America, this isn’t a correct definition.
Consider this idea — widespread amongst Democrats including Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and Obama: “A for-profit medical system is the only possible arrangement. The problems of US medical can be solved by a regulated free market and tax incentives. Health insurance must continue to be tied to jobs.”
This is an essentially capitalist idea. (It’s also a really stupid idea. Italics cannot convey the depth of my contempt for people who could actually profess such a belief with a straight face, given the profoundly broken nature of the system.)
Here’s the left wing view: “People deserve free health care simply for being alive.”
Another example — having a professional standing army is generally against leftist theory. (There is actual leftist theory, you know, going back well over a century. The word has a meaning!)
In times of war, the people become the army. The people are armed, and train together, and take up arms against the invader.
America’s endless imperialist foreign wars of choice, completely against all leftist theory. And yet both political parties vie as to how much they can raise the budget for the US military, already by far the most powerful military in history!
On this matter, as so many others, there is no light between the platforms of the two parties — both are pro-militarist, pro-imperialist, right-wing parties.
And look at where they differ!
Consider gun control, abortion, gender rights, immigration. None of these are left or right wing issues at all — they are social issues where one side or the other has been adopted by Republicans and Democrats. In other times in America, and in other places, left and right wing parties have had other views.
Marx, very likely the most influential leftist thinker in history, said, “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempts to disarm the people must be stopped, by force if necessary.” (I personally have never lived anywhere with guns, and would be happy never to see a gun again. But had I stayed in the US, I would have felt forced to own a gun.)
Historically, many American leftists were strongly opposed to immigration because they felt it eroded the role of the American worker.
Left isn’t “what a Democrat says”. If “workers control the means of production” is not a desirable goal to you, you aren’t a leftist.
And we have seen Pelosi, Schumer and Clinton give long impassioned odes to capitalism, but none to nationalization and redistribution, or to labor.
If “eat the rich” makes you shudder, rather than understanding that it is a convenient shorthand for, “The 1% have looted the American economy for generations now, leaving the average American in the wreckage of what was once a Great Society. The wealth must be clawed back from this tiny number of sociopaths by any means necessary,” then you aren’t a leftist.
And make no bones about it — the ruination is what you are seeing. Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs, most of them permanently. Trillions have been given to big businesses, who kept it, while small businesses were mostly left to twist in the wind.
And automation. Automation is so much more important now in the days of the virus! But this will kill the worker forever. And who can afford to automate? A small business, or Amazon? Amazon has stores where you go in and it automatically deducts the cost for things you put in your bag. You think Mike’s Grocery Store can do that?
Why is the stock market going up while trillions in value are objectively being destroyed? Answer: investors know that when the dust settles, the stock market will own everything.
For generations, the American people have desperately needed a great champion in their corner — but instead they have weak-ass, center-right, bought-and-sold career warhorses like Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Clinton, Clinton and Obama, cheap ringers who come in flexing their muscles, go a couple of rounds jumping around and yelling without ever laying a glove on their opponents, and then take an obvious dive in the third, leaving an increasingly jaded audience despairing of ever getting a fair fight.
“What could they have done?”, do I hear you ask? The inaction is so strong that “Anything,” would be a perfectly good answer. But I think that’s a cop-out.
So let’s take a really solid problem — COVID. When do you think it was totally apparent that it was a real thing? And then that Trump was not going to do anything about it? March?
At this point, the Democrats should have set up a shadow government. They should have gotten top doctors and epidemiologists together, famously Republican doctors who weren’t fucking crazy, famous people who had played doctors on TV, and set up a task force to issue recommendations for what to do.
The actors would not actually get to write the recommendations, but would deliver them at the end.
If Trump refused to act, they could get personal. Go to the White House with pictures of people’s lungs! Dead children! Learn FIVE people’s names who “didn’t deserve to die of the disease” and chant them over and over. Make specific demands — “PPE for nurses now!” and get arrested over and over again.
Have a short, fast, highly-edited broadcast every two weeks of the facts. Have a central COVID board. Take control of the story. Force Trump to compete with you. Confront him with famous, well-spoken doctors. Analyze his statements and explain why he’s wrong.
Insist the networks carry it. Pull strings. Allow advertising!
At the same time get the top PR agencies and start flooding Facebook with “unrelated” advertising like this:
“This young boy was perfectly healthy. [Smiling boy.] Two weeks later, he was dead. [Funeral.] Make his memory count.”
Click through to a site that’s called “Memorials of COVID” which is nothing to do with Democrats, one that’s all sweetness and light, but has pictures of healthy young-looking old people, who are dead, and healthy looking young people, “Mike had diabetes — like 34 million Americans. He was took care of himself and was healthy. Then came COVID.”
A section “Survivors of COVID” would show young people in wheelchairs.
Strongest part is there is one section “in red” marked — “The Medicine of COVID — adult only.” You force them to fill in their date of birth to click through, and you have a content warning, and then they have to click to reveal the more graphic parts on each page.
Finally, you get case studies of, for example, cute Italian girls, and then you see them really sick, and then dead, and then their lungs or other graphic details.
The worst Trump supporters enjoy the pain of others. They won’t be able to resist clicking through all of these, particularly if it’s made a little hard for them. Even they will be a bit, “Hmm,” after seeing these grim pix.
You get these pictures by going to doctors in Italy and Spain and the rest of the world and saying, “Americans are killing themselves through but if we can change their minds, we can save hundreds of thousands of them, and someone’s daughter’s death will mean something. Find this for us please and get a release from some kind family.”
Slogans and ads: “Stop! You’re killing us!” “How many more Americans must die for Trump’s mistake?” A bomb… tick tick tick tick tick tick — then a hand with a glove stops it and the camera pans — it’s a doctor or a nurse. “Stop the clock on COVID-19 — wear a mask, for our doctors and nurses!” “Today is Frank Gabrin day.”
You get the point — go all out. Go all out!
This should have happened in March!
Instead America gets what? Milquetoast shilly-shallying around in kente while society collapses. And Democrats are so used to never getting anything that they don’t even see anything wrong with their leaderships’ near-complete inaction, in this, the hour of their greatest peril.
It’s learned helplessness. Democrats should be asking so, so, so much more from their so-called leaders. Maybe one day they’d get it.
