It is all on the tin. The GOP is what they say they are.
This nation is doomed, partly because liberals and progressives like me sit and say nothing when the GOP explicitly tells us what it wants to do: abolish queer people, strip rights from women, inflict more suffering on the poor, drain the public wealth (like cutting public school budgets and diverting local tax revenue to charter schools), and use outrage and violence to win votes.
And there are the abhorrent policies. Just last week, over 20 South Carolina legislators co-signed a bill to put women to death if they terminate their pregnancies. That’s one-sixth of their state legislature, putting forward something that the Taliban or Saudi Arabia would enforce. And I’m just supposed to fucking sit there silently, and listen to Michelle Obama’s new podcast? In 2016 and 2020, she told us to “go high,” but what she really meant is avoid confrontation. She might as well have told us to just sit there and take fascism and oppression from the red states.
This is part two of a quick two-part post. It’s about the short term political future of the US in the turbulent, depressing 2020s.
I’m going to keep this brief, as books have been written about how the left should fight back against states pulling right. The solution is to go left. Pull back left. Do not ever surrender.
Okay, but how? While never easy, the strategy is to cut off Democrats that are furthest to the right. If progressives had their way. Democrats like Richie Torres, Henry Cuellar, Adriano Espaillat and Ed Case would be upset by progressives. The needle for the Democratic caucus would edge left, in-step with the culture. The Democratic policymakers who don’t care about women’s rights, or the environmental catastrophe or freedom-destroying red states would be purged from the party.
Locally, progressives need to pull left. Codify abortion rights. Get those marijuana decriminalization laws passed. Raise the state minimum wage. Tax the rich a little more. Make your good state better.
Run for office. Policies will not write themselves. We need progressives to win seats, no matter how minor. Get that school board chair. Get on the city council. Oust that cranky old mayor. Quit your job and run for office. You job sucks anyway and you can probably go back to the private workforce if you have a decent political career.
Policies will beat back the Right. Pointing out their hypocrisy does not work. Shaming them does not work. They don’t give a shit about your feelings, your opinions or your tweets. Get into office and get to work on policy.
Outsmart them. And out-policy them in the halls of government.
They are the minority party. We are the majority party. Let’s act like it.
What did we affluent, college educated liberals do to deserve a crushing autocracy? We went to a gay wedding a few times? We voted for Obama? We said repeatedly that minorities should be treated with respect? Holy shit we're being given the death sentence, here. What was the infraction? If the infraction can't be explained, then the GOP is more evil and destructive than even I ever imagined.
The GOP has long been the party of the rich. Their mission is still to make the rich richer. But now it is intertwined with winning votes over a fierce and angry backlash to a changing culture. No political party in any democracy can change culture. Human culture is always changing. As Professor Sut Jhally frequently lectures, “culture is always up for grabs.” Once something becomes commonplace in culture, it cannot be forcibly removed from a society.
There is one extreme way to suppress culture, however, and that is to suppress the society. A nation can transform from a democracy to an authoritarian state. An autocracy closes itself off from the rest of the world, while forcing propaganda and ideology onto the people in an effort to tame them and reduce dissent. We see it in North Korea, Belarus, Russia, China and Burma.
Now transforming the US into an autocracy would be a steep hill to climb. The GOP would have difficulty selling authoritarianism at the national level. Some people in this country are intelligent, and would not stand for it. But thanks to the multi-layered setup of our republic, the GOP is having much success taking away freedoms at the local level. States are pushing the boundaries of the 14th Amendment, to see how far they can restrict personal liberties in the name of “protecting children.” Leading a backlash against cultural change is also a tactic to motivate Republicans to vote. And they sure are furious, vocal and motivated.
The US has been in a measurable state of decline since 1973. The empire is in decline. The prestige of the US is ruined. But most important is what’s happening at the granular, individual level. Liberty and freedom are now under attack by the minority political party. The GOP has decided that it would rather burn down what’s left of the republic than share it with everyone equally in a society that is based on freedom and respect.
The 14th Amendment is under attack. That means that authoritarianism is coming. How will you live with it in the coming decades? Will you fight back? Will you go underground? What is the plan?
Congratulations, Frederick Douglass! How's he doing, by the way? I heard Trump say a few years ago that he’s “done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more,” but I haven't heard much about him lately. It's great to see his recent accomplishments are now being recognized in the U.K.
Of course, at 201 years of age, he's probably slowing down a bit.
This is not a popular question, but I feel the need to ask it out loud. 30 years ago, when Act Up taught me how crucial it was for homosexuals to get the same civil rights I enjoy, in the face of a deadly pandemic, did they envision a future in which gays would become the new conservatives? The capitalists. The owners. The bankers and politicians. The same boys club that keeps women from getting birth control? The same club that doesn't blink when unarmed black teenagers are gunned down by police? What I'm asking is, do we all want to be this affluent New York couple? To be wealthy conservatives? Or am I reading too much in a Tiffany ad?
Every civil rights movement in the USA has begun from an edgy place. Secretive women's afternoon meetings. The pews of black baptist churches. Or a loud protest outside a gay bar in New York. The goal of every civil rights movement is to obtain equal rights for all, so anyone can be anything they want to be. But when I see capitalists embrace a group that was only recently kept out of the mainstream, I have to wonder, is that what we were fighting for? Did corporations embrace gays only when they realized how much disposable income they have?
And gay friends, do I even have a right to bring this up? Is this topic off-limits for straights?
In 1971, the group broke into a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, while the nation was followng the Ali-Frasier fight (the 15 round "Fight of the Century," in which Frazier knocked out Ali). They stole thousands of documents. Nearly half of the documents detailed a domestic spying program which had begun under FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, who had a year more to live, and was going to serve as bureau director until the day he died, in May 1972.
The statute of limitations ran out on the bugulary in March, 1976, but members of the group decided that now was a perfect time to reveal themselves, less than a year after Edward Snowden's daring theft of Pentagon and NSA materials, and just in time to helop promote a new book on the break-in.
Hoover was a relentless bureaucrat, who cowed presidents and the Congress for decades, because, it was feared, he had dirt on EVERYBODY. No one wanted to hold him to account. And so it took eight private citizens, breaking the law, to reveal the far worse law breaking of the FBI. Does this sound familiar? Edward Snowden come to mind?
When members of Citizens' Commission stepped forward, NBC featured two of them, the married Raines couple, on the Today show. As the mainstream media usually does, they brought out a figure to provide some sort of counterpoint. They found retired agent Patrick Kelly, who charaterized the Raines' as "rationalizing a criminal act." I would argue that their act is very easy to explain: it was a rational crime. It had to be done. The unconstituinal actions of the FBI had to be revealed by a comparitively tiny crime. It was, frankly, a precursor to electronic acts of thivery, such as those by Anonymous and Wikileaks.
Needless to say, the responses from the right wing to this news story were both predictable and sad.
Herman Cain opened himself up to uncomfortable, personal questions when he went on a tour to promote his new book, which promotes his run for president. In the book, he explains in detail why he chose not to get involved in the 1960s civil rights movement, depite being a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta between 1963-1967.
I want to make it very clear that it involvement in the civil rights movement should never be a litmus test for office, much in the same way military service in Vietnam used to be a litmus test for national, male politicians. No black man or woman who was an adult between 1955 and 1970 should be required to reveal their involvement in the civil rights movement, nor should it be expected or assumed that they were involved simply on the basis of their skin color. Everyone had reasons for speaking out or remaining silent, and a lot of it had to do with geographic location and income.
No one should have to be interrogated about what they did in the 1960s. That is, unless they are running for president and bring it up themselves.
Lawrence O'Donnell went straight for the jugluar in his interview with Herman Cain last week. Mr. Cain, in his book, tells the story that while he was in high school, his father advised him not to get involved in civil rights rallies, marches, petitions, or other public events. For everyone who lived through that era in the south, getting involved was assuming at least some risk, be it legal, professional, or in some case, physical. I would agree that a black teenager being arrested in 1962 or 1963 Atlanta would not have been easy to shake off. I don't judge Herman Cain's reasons for not getting involved.
But I do think it is appropriate to ask Mr. Cain about 1963 if he himself brings it up. In his book, Mr. Cain writes:
On a day-to-day basis, because the civil rights movement was a few years in front of me, I was too young to participate when they first started the Freedom Rides, and the sit-ins. So on a day-to-day basis, it didn't have an impact. I just kept going to school, doing what I was supposed to do, and stayed out of trouble--I didn't go downtown and try to participate in sit-ins. But I well remember, as a young teenager, seeing signs printed in large black letters at the fronts of buses: "White seat from front, colored seat from rear." One day when I was thirteen, my friends and I were riding home from school in a half-empty bus--this was at the time when the civil rights movement was just getting off the ground and some police officers were just looking for a reason to shoot a black person who "got out of line." So, counter to our real feelings, we decided to avoid trouble by moving to the back of the bus when the driver told us to. By that time, the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides had kind of broken the ice, even though things hadn't fully changed. So we saw it every day on TV and read about it in the news. Dad always said, "Stay out of trouble," and we did.
That passage almost makes it seem as if Mr. Cain would have gotten involved in sit ins and protests if he wasn't so young at the time. However, Mr. Cain was 19 years old and in college during Freedom Summer. He must have been surrounded by fellow students who were involved. So if he agreed with ending segregation and discrimination, why didn't he step forward just a little when history came knocking on his door in Atlanta in the mid 1960s? He wasn't in a northern city. He wasn't overseas. He was living near the epicenter of a movement that changed this country and opened the door for him to run for national office.
Now if I were interviewing Herman Cain here, I might start the line of questioning with something gentle like, "Did you ever consider participating in a civil rights event while at Morehouse?" Or I might ask if he had friends who did. Or I might ask if he ever regreetted not getting involved, especually after the Freedom Summer of 1964, which was a media breakthrough for the movement. But that's why I am not an aggressive journalist. That's why I don't have Lawrence O'Donnell's job. Civil rights era questions at 07:20:
And if you thought O'Donnell was blunt and to the point, check out Martin Bashir laying a massive smackdown on CNN International (H/T We Are Respectable Negroes).
And on Friday October 7, a day after his heated interview with Cain, Lawrence O'Donnell got some constructive feedback from Al Sharpton, Professor Mellissa Harris-Perry, and Goldie Taylor.
For all the shit Democrats have had to go through after volunteering their service and putting their asses on the line (both Al Gore and John Kerry volunteered for Vietnam and skipped the draft lottery process), should the news media be giving a pass to candidates who almost boast about sitting out opportunities to put themselves on the line?
It is obvious that the book passage (which seems very random, sandwiched betweeen other little stories from Cain's teenage years) was meant to reassure the GOP and potential voters that he is not a rebellous black man. He's no community organizer. He never flirted with liberation theology or black power. He's a corporate manager. And he is runnign to protect corporate interests. The GOP need not fear the color of his skin. They'll just have to put up with his volunteer peanut gallery (which can be heard in the O'Donnell interview videos).
The battle to nullify Proposition 8 just got cranked-up a notch. The group that sponsored Proposition 8 (called 'Yes on Proposition 8') has asked the California Supreme Court to nullify all gay marriages already in California's records.
