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In Defense of Partisanship: Part One, All Politics is Political

2009-03-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

Americans love to hate political parties. From the founding of the Republic, parties have been seen as dangerous barriers standing between people and their government. Parties are left completely out of the design of the state as constructed by the Constitution, and early American writing on politics treated their inevitable formation as an almost pathological social problem. As we all know, President Obama plays this stream of public opinion masterfully, even if his “post-partisanship” looks a little strange in the face of Republican discipline in Congress.
Personally, I’m a big fan of parties, mostly because I’m a big fan of organizing as a tool for generally less powerful people to tip the scales in their favor. I certainly understand the allure of politics without parties. Watching cable TV news makes even hardened politicos like me wish for a world with less polarization and conflict. But this longing is a mistake.
At the core of the anti-party argument is a quintessentially American evasion of the political. From the Founding Fathers through to the remarkably successful turn-of-century Progressive movement, we have labored under the utopian notion that there exists a discoverable, apolitical “common good” that is obscured and threatened by corruption, partisanship and self-interest. This thread of American political thought is reflected in contemporary appeals for politicians to “put aside their differences” and just “do what’s right” or “fix all the problems”. A more sinister version of this same desire to rise above politics can be seen in totalitarianisms of both the Right and the Left: if you hand the state over to the right “Folk” or class, politics will simply disappear.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a single “common good”. We don’t all agree on what the best solution is for a problem, or even what the problems are. That’s not a bad thing. What one person sees as the good society would be a dystopia for another. The world that John McCain wants to live in is substantively different than the world that Howard Dean wants to live in. They may agree on sugar imports, but such questions don’t necessarily define their politics. This is true even at the most local level, long a site of the most extreme illusions of non-partisanship. A libertarian small business owner, a hippie and a construction worker may all agree that potholes should be filled. However, despite the old adage, there are, in fact liberal and conservative ways of filling those potholes. Income tax? Parcel tax? Privatized road maintenance? These are all options that imply ideological preference and have huge social and economic repercussions.
Thus, all politics is political. In a democratic society, the way we go about making these decisions is by allowing citizens to choose between policies, even if this is done through representatives. In the United States, however, too often we don’t actually choose between policies or even ideas- we choose strictly between people. “Vote the man (sic), not the party” is so widely held a notion that it sounds almost un-American to disagree.
But voting for individuals doesn’t eliminate those difficult political decisions, it just takes it out of the hands of the voter. Instead of voting based on policy preferences, or even small but effective clues as to policy preferences like party identification, legally nonpartisan elections or “post-partisan” political culture encourages votes based on any number of pieces of information: name recognition (which can be bought), charisma, cultural affinity, gender biases or ethnicity.
Before I get accused of blatant idealism, let me also say that of course, there are also fundamentally competing interests in society. The point here, as well, is that the balance of those interests is achieved through politics. Nowadays, every politician everywhere hopes to score points with the electorate by denouncing “special interests”. What is almost hilariously obvious, however, is that the only common definition of “special interest” appears to be interests which the given politician opposes. Just as “pork” is any sum of money not spent in your own district, any group that you don’t like becomes a “special interest”. Here’s the thing: labor and business are competing interests, as are environmentalists and agribusiness. To the extent that government has a role in mediating those competing interests, we shouldn’t seek to depoliticize the process.
The idea of a disinterested, neutral set of elected officials serving as judges deciding which of these interests will prevail is as fundamentally undemocratic as it is unlikely. If the role of elected officials is to reflect the will of the people, elected officials should be voted in or out based on their views of how these interests should be balanced. Parties play a role in this process, as well, giving voters a clear sense of which collection of interests a politician is aligned with.
In the next section of this essay, I will look at the consequences of the restraints we’ve put on party activity. Of particular interest is the rise of nonpartisan voting systems at the local level, which has lowered voter turnout and advantaged candidates with strong social and financial capital. California’s Progressive experiment with effectively eliminating partisanship at the State Legislative level, thus handing governance over to industry lobbyists is another important case.

The "S" Word and it's strange American Career

2009-03-29T19:56:00.001-07:00

“Christ, do I hate socialism and socialists. Scum like Daraka - esp. his spiritual brethren running the Legislature - are why I left CA in the first place.”
- Joseph Turner, comment on Flashreport.com

Socialism. Is there a more dreaded word in American politics? Judging from the talking points of Republicans and their cheerleaders, there just couldn’t be. Granted, the histrionics over at Fox News does remind one of a hundred Chicken Littles with a hundred little doomsday messages. When everything is a sign of the sky falling, it’s hard to be taken too seriously. Nonetheless, the argument that the Obama Administration is leading the country on a long march to socialism is pretty unavoidable nowadays.
As is generally the case in the facile world of American political discourse, one can find a lot of irony in conservatives’ over-use of the “socialism” charge. Last Fall, it was easy to hear Sarah Palin boast that in her bucolic State, natural resources are owned by the “people of Alaska”, and so it’s only natural that every Citizen receives an annual check paid from oil receipts. She would then go on to snidely readbait the bejeezus out of Obama’s health care, taxation and public investment plans. I couldn’t help but think about what would happen if some crazy Democrat ran for Governor of California calling for the people to take ownership over our considerable natural resources. I think it’s a safe bet that someone, probably someone who voted for Sarah Palin, would call that crazy Democrat a socialist.
In the minds of most Americans, “socialism” is at worst a synonym for totalitarian Communism, and at best some dangerously European government-run threat to cherished freedoms. Such a perception exists hand in hand with majority support for national health insurance, well-funded public education and a public hand in guiding financial markets- a fact that today’s Republican Party leaders are painfully aware of. It’s that visceral reaction to the word itself that has made it the go-to talking point for tearing down even modestly progressive policies over the past century. When you can’t beat it on its face, just call it names.
And so, conservatives use the word to tar almost any policy they don’t like- whether or not it has anything to do with anything any real-life socialist would advocate. Lately, the gigantic bailout packages being pushed by the Obama Administration are the main targets. Nevermind that spending a lot of money isn’t in itself socialist policy: if it were, Ronald Reagan would be the movement’s poster boy. To the extent that there is any consensus about what socialism actually is, it boils down to democratic control of the economic power-levers. Dumping a gazillion dollars into private firms with scant oversight (let alone public control) may be smart or stupid, but it sure as hell isn’t socialism.
Conservative ire is a little closer to the mark when it comes to Obama’s proposed budget. Thankfully, the Administration’s spending priorities are certainly more social than those of the Bush/Hastert era. Still, spending more money on education, infrastructure and social programs doesn’t make a body socialist. Calling it so reveals a lot about just how far to the right the Republican Party actually is.
In response to these old canards, the Obama administration has stuck to its own proven formula of painting the opposition as hopelessly ideological and their own policy priorities as eminently pragmatic. However, in more progressive precincts, it’s not uncommon to hear almost private mumblings of “if only…” To this point, Robert Scheer has written a wonderful piece about the missed opportunities of the Administration’s expensive but not expansive recovery agenda (be sure to read the comments). The Nation recently featured a surprisingly disappointing “debate” between progressives over the relevance of socialism in today’s political reality.
Perhaps the most illuminating debate, however, is the one brewing between the Obama Administration and European leaders- in which Obama’s calls for massive, internationally-coordinated stimulus spending is meeting a cold reaction from Continental governments, most of them led by parties of the Right and Center Right. While some American conservatives point and say “aha!, the President is even more socialist than those froo-froo eurosocialists”, the facts point to something significantly different at the root of the disagreement. According to many European leaders, the strong social safety nets and regulatory regimes prevalent in Europe make gigantic spending packages less urgent. In most industrialized countries, spikes in unemployment aren’t the catastrophes they are in the United States, where private health care, chaotic housing markets and a dogged refusal to consistently support domestic industry conspire to create the cycle of misery the Obama Administration is working hard to stave off. To oversimplify: they don’t need emergency “socialism” in Europe because they already have something closer to the real thing. I don’t remember my 8th grade English lessons well enough to say that that is an “irony”, but there is definitely something poetic going on.
These differences get at the real tragedy behind our current political predicament. If it weren’t so easy to derail progressive policy by painting it red, we might have more institutions that would make the present crisis easier to manage. Why do they have these mechanisms in other countries? Not because Europeans are any smarter, more sophisticated or just plain cooler than Americans- it’s because political parties and social movements influenced by socialism have been a powerful part of the democratic order everywhere but here. I don’t know that the “s” word will ever be a normalized part of the political debate in the United States, or that it is worth expending much energy on rehabilitating it, but I do know that we are poorer because of its vilification.
Truth be told, there actually are socialists in the United States, and some of them are Democrats or support Democratic candidates. Among progressive intellectuals, there isn’t the same reflexive fear of the vocabulary of socialism as there is in the realm of electoral politics, which is a mixed blessing. More generally, there are scores of constituencies (and at least one whole State) which have chosen to elect representatives who either embrace or are nonplussed about the socialist label. Republicans worked hard to redbait Ron Dellums, but Berkeley and Oakland sent him back to Washington year after year.
Here’s the dirty secret, conservatives: it’s true that the left of the Democratic Party would be right at home in mainstream parties labeled “Socialist” or “Labor” in other countries. So what? These aren’t wacky fringe parties: they win elections and achieve important victories for environmental, social and economic sanity. They include such subversive enemies of freedom as Nelson Mandela and Tony Blair. Incidentally, any honest mapping the politics of the Republican right, which includes open calls for religious-based government, justifications for torture, appeals to racism, and a crude Social Darwinism onto politics abroad would produce interesting results as well. Take a conservative Republican and throw them into Italian politics, and it would be hard to avoid the F word. No, not that one.
The gut-punch impact of the socialist label provides delicious possibilities for sound-bite politics on the right. Any connections between “admitted” socialists and Democratic politicians are put to wide use. If you can dig deep enough and find a purported socialist supporting a Democrat, that’s proof positive that they are socialists, too. Thus, the fact that Barbara Ehrenreich supported Obama, however critically, means that Obama is, well, you get the point. On a tiny scale, I’ve seen this dynamic first hand (again, don’t miss the comments).
Like full-blown McCarthyism, the chilling effect of this tactic is part of a deliberate strategy to marginalize any policy positions that don’t conform to the anti-government orthodoxy of modern conservatism. Unfortunately, it means that for survival’s sake, there is an understandable tendency for Democrats to give the stiff arm to the left. What’s most perverting about this system is that as a matter of course, the same thing doesn’t happen to elements of the Republican Party which embrace views are no less radical. The end result is a massive skewing of political discourse to the right, even though on individual policies, there is deep support for many of the left’s ideas.
The chill runs deep. In fact, as I write this little essay on my little blog, I’m painfully aware of the fact that everything I say can and will be used against me in a context not of my choosing. So, why write it? Because I agree with Robert Scheer- it’s just stupid to ignore the good things that socialist movements have achieved throughout the world because Newt Gingrich or John Fleishman will call people names.
This would all be strictly late night beer or coffee sort of discussion if it weren’t for a coming political battle that will put this dynamic front and center: health care. Achieving the humiliatingly overdue goal of universal health care will test the mettle of the Obama administration. We are likely to produce a more expensive, less efficient, less universal system in part because our side will be afraid of the inevitable name-calling.
Michael Moore’s Sicko (which I liked a lot) did a reasonable job of dramatizing the mobilization of anti-socialist rhetoric in the scuttling of several waves of health care reform efforts. The footage of Ronald Reagan’s first foray into politics as a shill for the insurance lobby should be required viewing. Moore’s film raised the important points that passing national health care doesn’t lead a country to socialism, and, once established, national health systems or national insurance systems become quite popular and durable- kinda like Social Security, which was also denounced as a red Trojan Horse in it’s day. But Sicko held back on marking an equally important fact- in almost every case, national health care systems were adopted because of governance by (or pressure from) movements that were not afraid of the “s” word.
In other words, you don’t have to be a socialist to think that health care for all is a worthy social goal. But in the coming months, you might wish that someone would stand up and say “so what?” when good policy is called bad because it carries a whiff of socialism.

Mandate. Mandate. Mandate.

2008-11-21T13:12:00.000-08:00

It’s still all sinking in. Three States in the old Confederacy in the Democratic column for a black President. Striking distance from cloture in the Senate. A Republican Party stuck in clichéd states like “disarray” and “the Wilderness”. Huge voter turnout. And then there’s that single electoral vote in Nebraska. Absolutely fabulous. Am I happy? Yes, the grumpy, skeptical old man here is actually happy. And I’m not alone.

It’s a bit creepy, but nonetheless understandable that people are posting webcam footage of themselves crying with joy and elation. Jon Stewart was only half kidding- people do seem genuinely happier post-election, at least in the half of the country that wasn’t ever on board with the Bush-Rove experiment. There is dancing, literally and figuratively, in the streets.

But not so fast, blue America. Here come the killjoys. Beginning on election night, the punditocracy took to the airwaves to declare that, historic as it was, November 4^th should not be seen as a mandate for “liberal” ideology, or even for Democrats as a Party. The country, their argument goes, did not shift to the left. Just like the “market”, another useful fiction, the “electorate” simply corrected itself, making up for an unwholesome shift to the right led by overzealous ideologues in the Republican Party. After all, voters passed homophobic ballot measures alongside Obama, and the Democrats only picked up a “few” seats in Congress. President-elect Obama is a pragmatist, not a progressive (as if these two things are mutually exclusive), and look- he’s appointing insiders and moderates to key positions.

This argument would hold some water if John McCain and Sarah Palin had run a different campaign. But they didn’t. Aside from their desperate ad hominem attacks in the final weeks, the Republican standard bearers made this election a referendum on Reaganomics. They did precisely what I had hoped our side would do, what Obama has always seemed unwilling to do himself. By responding to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression with a strict diet of anti-government platitudes (somewhat muddled at times, to be sure), McCain and especially Palin gave Obama a tremendous opportunity to put a basic and clear choice to the American people. To his credit, Obama did a masterful job of underlining that choice, of articulating a decisive break with the tired approaches of the past. Significantly, he criticized the blind worship of the “free market” on display in both parties. Then those same people gave him as strong and clear an answer one could hope for. Sorry folks, they gave him a mandate.

You can’t label your opponent’s proposals as radical, redistributionist, even “socialist” on Monday, and then when he wins on Tuesday say that people really didn’t vote for a real shift in economic policy. The exit polls are clear- people are ready to finally bury Milton Freedman. The only question is whether Obama will really get out the shovel.

Given, no mandate is a blank check. The expanded Democratic base is more socially conservative, more working class and even blacker and browner than it would have been with a smaller victory. That raises challenges for those of us who are as committed to social equality as we are to economic justice. But to argue that because we lost on gay rights in three states means that Obama should be cautious on health care, financial regulation or job creation is just plain duplicitous. Any majority to be built in a nation as large and diverse as the United States will be riddled with contradictions. I’m happy to have to deal with those contradictions if it means cutting into the Republican coalition.

The big question now, however, is whether January 21st Obama will be as bold as November 4^th Obama was in seizing the opportunities given him by an economic crisis and the collapse of support for conservative policy frameworks. The last Democratic President had a similar, if less dramatic set of opportunities. It was the economy and health care in 1992 as well. Let’s hope it’s November 4^th Obama and not the stack of Clintonistas piling up around him that will take the reins in January.

Heh Heh

2008-03-19T15:10:00.001-07:00

your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams

2008-03-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

“Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

- Barack Obama

Yesterday, Barack Obama gave one of the most important speeches in recent American political history. In a different climate, with a different media and surrounded by a different presidential race, Obama’s speech would be seen as what it was: a paradigm-shifting argument about the nature of America, her many ills and their possible solutions. Instead, like a Beatles song used to sell sneakers, his words have been analyzed, cut and repackaged as nothing more than a response to an immediate threat to his position in the electoral horse-race. It was, after all, a response to yet another in a series of campaign-associate-says-something-stupid “scandals”.

Of course, there was a lot of beauty, art and thoughtfulness in yesterday’s watershed speech. His personal reflections and honesty about his family were incredibly touching. Even though few can directly relate to being a person of color who has to grapple with racist comments from their white family members (such a joy), Obama’s characteristic rhetorical genius was to tell such stories in such a way that it felt universal. His willingness to be nuanced and brazenly intellectual was amazing. His analysis of racial discourse, taking the media to task for their dumbing down of all talk of racism in America was masterful. I was especially energized to hear him call out conservative iterators’ cynical entries into the conversation. That was all great. But the big news is that Obama finally made an argument about what his movement really is.

As I’ve said before, the Reverend Wright-inspired attacks on Obama will continue to plague him should he win the Democratic nomination. White America has discovered, almost at once, that Obama is, indeed, a black person, and like most black folks, has been in rooms full of other black people who will articulate an embittered account of racial injustice in America. For many, many white voters, that’s scary and off-putting. White people, we all know, tend to be somewhat touchy on the subject, which is why the national memory has cleansed even hard-fought struggles like the Civil Rights movement of anything remotely threatening.

And so, as a response, Obama could have taken the easy way out. Say what you will about the mean-spirited will behind Geraldine Ferraro’s comments, but she’s not wrong that loads of white folks were willing (and some excited) to vote for Obama because he seemed to absolve them of having to face the reality of black anger. Obama could have tried to sprint back into that cozy space, thrown his Pastor under the bus and moved on. He could have tried to stiff-arm a part of his constituency in that patently Democratic way that Party leaders have done to labor, African Americans and others for decades. He could have taken a cue from Colin Powell. He could have continued to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. as if King were a religious Bill Cosby. His speech could have called upon America to simply “transcend” race, as many of the headlines today misreport.

Instead, Barack Obama did something remarkable. He explained black anger. Then he did something even more remarkable. He explained white anger. And then he did something I haven’t heard him do in a long time. Instead of simply stating that anger is bad and unity is good, he explained why such anger, while understandable, is a mistake. He did that by talking about class.

Why shouldn’t black people pull away from the political process and be cynical about working together with whites? Because to do so is both pessimistic and unrealistic. Progress comes from coalition-building and struggle. Why shouldn’t white working-class people believe the racist scapegoating of the Right? Because it isn’t poor communities of color who deny their health care, destroy their schools and ship their jobs away. In a way, with this speech, Barack Obama wholly adopted the John Edwards narrative, and then radically improved on it. Finally, he named an enemy, however carefully: a “corporate culture” of greed and inequality, backed by a political opposition that deliberately sows disunity in order to protect that culture. He named this enemy, however, in the context of directly addressing the salient and tangible realities of race. It was a class appeal, albeit a very American one. And that’s a good thing. Nothing else would make any sense

This is a shift in Obama’s narrative. He has always called for, and certainly embodied a notion of reconciliation along racial lines, and, at his most distressing, he has spoken much about coming together across party lines to “deal” with challenges and problems facing the nation. That has always disturbed me, as I find such attempts to depoliticize politics to be dangerous and demobilizing. I must confess that while many of my friends swooned over his entreaties to “come together” and “move beyond the divisions of the past”, it has sounded to me like a song about triangulation sung to the tune of kumbaya. He’s always said that we are our “sister’s keeper”, but now he’s translated that familiar Christian notion into a political argument. We should come together because there are opponents whose pursuit of their own narrow interests poses a real and common threat. That’s an important caveat to the call for unity. In religious terms, it’s the difference between the Opus Dei and Liberation Theology, between throwing charity at people and throwing the money changers out of the temple.

This shift may not be enough to push through to beating John McCain. However, it was more than enough to make me very glad indeed that I voted for Barack Obama. I pray that Senator Clinton will be smart enough not to take any of this as bait.

Notes on the Primary Process

2008-03-14T12:53:00.000-07:00

Very quickly, I'd like to answer questions I've gotten about my opinion of the Primary process in the context of the likely scenario of a contested Democratic Convention.

As all my regular readers know, I am not a huge fan of primary elections in general, especially with the added antidemocratic practice of opening them to non-Democrats. The primary election process, promoted by liberal and reformist Democrats as a way of destroying the cartels and machines of old-school Democratic politics has, as these things tend to do, completely backfired. Instead of tightly controlled regional and urban machines, the power in the Democratic Party, as in all of American politics, flows in the form of campaign dollars. Our primary elections have degenerated along with the rest of our political process into battles based on spending power and charisma.

All of that being said, the Party has led millions of voters to believe that the primary elections and caucuses are meaningful. That's why they've turned out in droves, doubling, tripling even raising by an order of magnitude voter turnout in States across the country. We are going to need that energy in the coming general election, no matter who our Nominee is.

The worst possible thing that our party could do would be to allow Superdelegates to flip the outcome of the nomination process away from the results of the state-level caucuses and primaries. It may be legal, it may be exactly why Superdelegates were created, but it would be a horrible mistake.

And let me be clear: I think this is true no matter who comes into the convention with more delegates. There will be no way to untangle or disprove large scale feelings of sexist or racist power-brokering if party officials are seen to be responsible for blocking the first black or first female President from advancing. Let's not do that.

Likewise, I completely support efforts to find an equitable way of including delegates from Florida and Michigan, but only with some method that allows voters or caucus-goers in those states to chose from among all the candidates still contesting the election. The Clinton campaign's cynical claim that the delegations should be seated as-is is honestly laughable. However, she and others in the party are completely right that going into the general election having burned two state's worth of Democrats (one of them ever-crucial Florida) would be foolish.

Jeremiah and Geraldine

2008-03-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama is a black man. Hillary Clinton is a white woman. I'm sorry to break this news, but it's true. Ask them.
In recent weeks, two figures affiliated with the rivals have engendered passionate denunciations for essentially stating the above uncontested truths. True, some of what has come out of Geraldine Ferraro's mouth has been appallingly insensitive to the realities of racism in the United States, and Pastor Jeremiah Wright's now infamous sermon about Obama and Clinton made it seem as if gender simply didn't exist. However, the controversial kernels of both of their controversial statements are unimpeachable.

First, let's take Ferraro's bitter complaints on behalf of Senator Clinton. There is a truckload of sexism at the core of the current election season, and no serious proponent of Obama's campaign could or should deny that his racial identity is crucial to his appeal, his experience, his soul and, yes, his success. I mean, come on. Duh. What's galling and blinkered about Ferraro's statements is that she implies that this is a bad thing, and that, somehow, Clinton's race and gender aren't also shaping her life in important ways. Clinton, in Ferraro's assessment, is primarily a victim of sexism, and isn't also a beneficiary of racial privilege. One strikingly honest thing that Ferraro did say, about herself and about Clinton, is that their gender played a huge role in their advancement to the top (or possible top) of the Democratic ticket. Clumsily, and with a blindness toward race that is sadly typical, Ferraro has said what a lot of people won't say. Hillary Clinton is a woman, and that accounts both for a measure of her success, but also for the particular and vicious attacks on her personal worth and character that have plagued her since she entered the race.

In many respects, Pastor Wright has done the same thing. Speaking in the language of black Christianity, Wright has worked to remind black congregants, and black voters in general of the simple truth that Barack Obama is also black, and that he has shared many of the experiences of other black people in America. The fact that this simple reminder has shocked and awed so many white pundits (and, anecdotally, potential voters) is distressing but predictable. Just as Clinton has had to be very careful in walking a line between being "too" or "insufficiently" feminine, Obama's got the same problem with his blackness. Wright's comments are a reminder that just because there is a mainstream black candidate for president does not mean that black people have forgotten about the realities of racism in the United States.

Of course, a lot of what Wright has said in his sermons sounds extreme to many Americans. "God Damn America" is not something I'd want ringing around my campaign. No doubt, it's a PR problem for Obama, and is part and parcel of the fact that as a liberal politician in Chicago, he's rubbed shoulders with parts of the left that have been effectively shuttered out of the mainstream. We can all look forward to more of such attacks based on Obama's "associations", something that Clinton doesn't have to worry about because she didn't have to move up from the grassroots of big city politics. Incidentally, there's nothing about Wright's sermons that is any more "radical" than what comes out of the Evangelical movement churches that Republican candidates frequent, but Obama's not going to be able to fix the ideological and discursive double standard in national American politics in the course of one campaign.

I don't envy either Obama or Clinton for having to walk these treacherous lines. At the same time, I'm pretty fed up with watching both of their campaigns pounce whenever there appears to be the potential of point-scoring.

We live today in the shadow of the reductive and destructive “debate” over “political correctness” that emerged in the 1990’s. That framework helped to reduce the realities of racialized and gendered inequalities to sparring over word choices and speech. The problem of racism, sexism or homophobia became one of hurtful, offensive statements, as the popular imagination merged concepts of bigotry and plain old rudeness together into a useless mishmash. In the end, simply mentioning the existence of race or gender, or class or sexuality as real factors in the real world experience of real people becomes a lightning rod. We can't talk about any of it in a serious way because the only way that people know how to talk about oppression is by denouncing someone's speech.

This is not to say that discourse isn’t important, or that words do not have power. However, actions by both the right and left during the “culture wars” over political correctness helped create an environment in which the stupid rantings of a comedian on stage was nearly as big a story as the horrific crimes of New Orleans.

Perhaps it is utopian folly to wish that mainstream public discourse around race, gender and class would be anything other than superficial in the United States. But in this election season, faced as we are with the most sociologically complicated set of choices imaginable, the superficiality of our discussion is as stark as it is dangerous. The campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing themselves, their party and their natural constituencies no favors by choosing to score points amid the maelstrom instead of concentrating on issue differences and together denouncing racism and sexism.

The Republicans are taking notes.

a letter (or, how I almost learned to stop worrying and love obama)

2008-02-04T21:05:00.000-08:00

In lieu of a nice analytical essay, below is an email I sen to a somewhat random list of people who were having the Obama vs. Clinton debate:

Hey everyone,

This has certainly been an interesting conversation to eavesdrop on, and an interesting campaign season overall.

I just wanted to say that I really, really hope that everyone on this list who is excited about the prospect of an Obama nomination is ready and willing to put in the work that it will take to elect him president. This is no less true of Clinton supporters, of course, but, my experience is that Obama supporters seem to underestimate the amount of work it’s going to take to beat John McCain in November. History is full of candidates who excited generally demobilized parts of the Democratic base (especially young people) who rode a wave of excitement to the nomination but were defeated in the general election. So, Micah and Erik I hope to see your names first on the list for trips to Nevada or Colorado or wherever the polls say is the front line.

I was a strong supporter of John Edwards, both because he is the first serious Democratic candidate in my lifetime to articulate the need for a different kind of economy and because I think he was the strongest candidate for the general election. This is for reasons both good (a populist appeal to Reagan Democrats) and bad (racism, sexism). A central demographic challenge for creating and maintaining a Democratic (and progressive) majority in the United States is winning back white working class men (this is what’s “wrong with Kansas”). We’re not going to do that this year, and so I expect that our majority (Insha'Allah that we have one) will be slim.

With Edwards gone, and after a whole lot of hand-wringing, I’ve decided to vote for Obama. It has been a hard decision. We know that a Clinton presidency will be filled with unnecessary concessions and triangulation. However, I find Obama’s anti-partisan rhetoric extremely dangerous even if it is effective in the short run. Also, I agree with others who have pointed out that policy-wise, Obama is not clearly more progressive than Clinton, and on health care is actually worse. There’s also nuclear power and social security, two issues on which Obama has said strangely conservative things. I also think that there is no small bit of sexism in the fact that so much of this race has been about “likability” and charisma, two aspects that socio-semiotically favor male candidates. It’s hard to imagine a female candidate inspiring the kind of savior-worship that surrounds Obama. A lot of the Hillary-bashing I hear makes my stomach turn, even though her policies and those of her coterie are well worth withering critique.

But make no mistake: it will be hard to win in November. We haven’t seen Obama’s negatives. We all know what the Republicans will do to Clinton. But the same is coming for Obama, and all of the post-partisan rhetoric in the world is not going to inoculate voters against the onslaught. This will be especially true versus McCain, who also rides on a wave of maverick non-partisanship. There is a reason that many voters in New Hampshire were torn between McCain and Obama: they are running very similar campaigns. Don’t get me wrong, I like Obama a lot. I met him as a College student and walked precincts for him when I lived in his State Senate district. He is an impeccably moral and serious person, perhaps the most intelligent individual to seek the office, and would make an amazing president. I just don’t think that he is the messiah. Remember that the brother, talented as he is, has never really run for office against a Republican.

I’ve decided to vote for Obama for one reason- all you folks who seem excited and energized by his campaign. I hope that he wins the nomination so that you and everyone like you across the country will hit the streets and the phonebanks this year and turn people out to beat the Republican. I also hope that those of us who do this all the time will be able to convince a few of you to stick around after November and continue in the struggle for a more just and sustainable future. It’s not going to be over in November. Obama is right- yes, we can. But we have to do it.

The stupidest day

2008-01-10T13:58:00.000-08:00

I’m inclined to believe that New Hampshire was at least somewhat about race. It’s true that white people simply do lie to pollsters. We know for sure that it was in large part about gender. Watching the boys gang up on Clinton in the debate, watching John Edwards play the masculinity card, watching Obama play the arrogance card and, finally, seeing Clinton pilloried by the chatterboxes for doing what the same pundits said she was incapable of: women were clearly moved by all of this. I was as well. The result is that the horserace between Obama and Clinton continues. I have no predictions as to how it will shake out in the end.

I’ve not experienced a stupider 48 hours in American politics than the one that preceded the New Hampshire primary. Let’s review:

A pack of Ron Paul supporters chased Sean Hannity through a parking lot.

We had a national discussion about Hillary Clinton almost crying.

John Edwards entered this discussion by attacking her for it.

The Edwards blogger who once endangered his race by saying ridiculous things about Catholics stormed off to the Obama camp.

Barack Obama compared himself to MLK and JFK.

Hillary Clinton compared herself to LBJ.

John McCain won the New Hampshire Republican primary again.

I feel you, Hillary. I’m pretty fucking choked up myself.

the people have spoken (goddamn them)

2008-01-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

Well, I'll save you the spin-doctoring or the sour grapes. Barack Obama won a decisive victory last night, aided in large part by record turn-out and a strong showing among independents and young, first-time caucus goers. These were the constituencies that were supposed to help Howard Dean in 2004. It seems that Team Obama got it right this time. Good for them.

This historic win by an African American candidate in an almost completely white state is reason to celebrate, even though I am not looking forward to the struggle of explaining to my students that Obama's rise does not signify the end of racism in America. Nonetheless, the Iowa Caucus victory should eliminate all of the grumbling about Obama not being a "serious" or "viable" candidate. He could win. The Presidency.

While all hope is not lost for John Edwards (union-heavy Nevada is just weeks away), things are exceedingly grim for his campaign. The media, as predicted, have almost completely written him off. A win in Iowa, the focus of his strategy for more than a calendar year, was seen as a make-or-break for his Presidential aspirations. As the only major candidate accepting public financing for his campaign, he's limited to spending less than 50 million dollars throughout the Primary campaign. Obama and Clinton have each raised more than 100 million. New Hampshire will be a Clinton-Obama slugfest, and after that the pundits and media will officially declare Edwards over and done with.

While my friends in the Obama camp, good progressives all, savor this big win, I'd advise them to think soberly about what an Edwards exit will mean. Barack Obama is charting a new "third way": this time not just between conservatism and American social liberalism, but between conservatism and the old 1990's Clinton/Blair third way. He's shrewd and creative enough to use that narrow space in important and beneficial ways, but at the end of the day that's a dangerous geography. The major talking points by mainstream pundits is that Obama did well by bucking the party line, being independent of "traditional" Democratic constituencies (particularly labor) and attracting independent minded young voters who fetishize the "new". He'll have to deliver on that promise, and I predict it will come in ways that anyone interested in the redistribution of political and economic power will find incredibly painful. You'll miss Edwards sooner rather than later.

That's why I don't take huge pleasure in the third place finish by Clinton. She's not going anywhere, and anything but a win by Edwards meant a winnowing down to Clinton and Obama, who has been as likely to attack her from the right as from the left. "Anti-establishment" is not enough to excite me.

But, as Howard Dean put it, it's on to New Hampshire, and Nevada, and South Carolina, and California and Kentucky and New York and Texas, and Alabama and Michigan (oh, wait, not Michigan). Come what may, I look forward to bringing the fight to the other team.

John Edwards for President

2008-01-03T15:03:00.000-08:00

What’s At Stake

Democrats have three distinct opportunities to make history this year. Unfortunately, we have to choose between them. We could make history by electing the first woman President. We could elect the first black President. Or, we win the election by securing a mandate for truly progressive politics. Any of these would be phenomenal achievements, and they are each worth every ounce of sweat we can muster. It’s the third one, though, that is the most necessary and the most urgent. For this reason, my hopes and prayers are for John Edwards to win the Iowa caucuses tonight and continue his campaign for the nomination.

Breaking the white male monopoly on the world’s most powerful political position is not superficial. The social-psychological impact of redefining the Presidency to be more expansive and inclusive would have a measurable if not immediate effect on real access to real power by real people. This is on top of the material gains of beating any of the Republican hopefuls. A victory by either Clinton or (especially) Obama would help slow the backward march that threatens the very survival of this country. Either new Administration would usher in crucial policy improvements that would be benefit millions of people worldwide.

But neither of the front-running candidates is seeking a mandate for a progressive vision of what the United States has become in the post-Reagan era, or what it could become if there were a decisive shift in power and privilege. That’s not a subjective critique on my part. Clinton is quite clear that her strength is in cutting deals, in “getting things done” through compromise and strategic calculation. She is the hard-nosed pragmatist, unshackled by ideology. Similarly, Obama’s call is to “transcend” the divisive politics of Washington, to put the simplistic conflicts of both the 1960’s and the 1990’s behind us, and to end unruly partisanship, “re-uniting” a falsely divided country. Both of these are compelling narratives which resonate with many people. However, they aren’t progressive, at least not in the same way that the Republicans’ narrative is conservative.

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he championed a movement conservative story of national moral decline, government intrusiveness and Communist encirclement. That narrative shaped his policies as well as the national agenda. The Reagan revolution was an assertion about the way the world works, a coherent explanation of the reasons for a damaged economy, a global political stalemate and cultural shifts which left many feeling threatened and uncomfortable. Thus, even though his initial victory was only moderate, the resulting era was seen as a broad mandate for his overarching narrative. It was so effective that the majority of Democratic leaders, the Clintonistas chief among them, accepted most of it’s basic assertions.

We need a counter-narrative, one that fundamentally explains the world and the situation in this country in a clear and understandable way. From the 1930’s to the 1970’s, the era of greatest strength for American liberalism, Northern Democrats and Western populists actively broadcast just such an explanation, and their policies and priorities reinforced it at all levels. The concentration of economic power in the hands of a few must be actively and aggressively challenged, from below and from above. Every citizen has the right to a share of the wealth their work produces. The tools to achieve this vision are social movement mobilization, public investment, social provision, macroeconomic policy and democratic participation.

The Reagan era was a direct assault on this basic foundational creed. It replaced it with cultural nationalism and atomized individualism. Of the mainstream candidates for the Democratic nomination, only John Edwards is framing his campaign as a direct and straight-forward counter-attack. Not everyone who supports Edwards does so because they agree with him, just as Reagan benefited from Carter-era foreign policy disasters and an uncanny personal charisma. In the end, however, because Reagan was clear and honest about what he was about, he was able to claim a mandate for his worldview.

Contesting The Terrain

John Edwards is the anti-Ronald Reagan.

And that, more than anything else, is what this country needs right now. We don’t need a truce. We don’t need to reach across the aisle to find what we have in common. The Reagan revolution built a coalition that re-entrenched corporate power by convincing people that it was in their own interests. Edwards is out to convince people that it is in their interests to confront, and, at least partially dismantle it. By running on that narrative, he sets himself up to actually accomplish this difficult task. Like Reagan (or Roosevelt) this mandate will shift the terrain for years to come. That’s huge. It’s worth supporting.

Does this mean that, on some larger theoretical level, I believe that class trumps race or gender? Not on your life. Politically, however, I believe strongly that it is on questions of how our economy should be structured that we have lost the most ground over the past generation. It is in the field of economic power that world-wide the Left has sacrificed most fundamentally. I don’t think I need to remind any reader of how these sacrifices have impacted the prospects of freedom for women and people of color. It was not under the rhetorical mantle of white supremacy that the people of New Orleans were sacrificed. It was on the altar of small government.

It is on this point that the Edwards campaign is so amazingly exciting. There are those, particularly in the traditional bastions of the labor movement, who believe that progressive politics is a zero-sum game. They lament the increased commitment by the Democratic Party to protect a woman’s right to chose, or to defend Affirmative Action or advance LGBT rights as the necessary corollary to the party’s retreat on economic justice. Edwards is as staunchly pro-choice, more vocally anti-racist and at least as strong on gay rights as his major opponents. We do not need to sacrifice one part of the coalition to bolster another. Indeed, our destinies are intertwined. Obama has gorgeous things to say about these connections, but Edwards’ campaign crystallizes it into a political program. Program matters, which is why Jesse Jackson (an Obama endorser) infamously stated that Edwards was the only candidate who isn’t ignoring the plight of black America.

Why Not Obama?

I would challenge anyone to find a person in the United States with more of a personal stake in Barack Obama’s political success than I have. Growing up, despite pop culture propaganda to the contrary, I never believed that anyone like me could run for and win the Presidency. And yet, here’s another bi-racial, well-educated guy with a white Midwestern mother and a black immigrant father, born after the baby boom, who is out there doing it for real. I don’t mean to flatter myself with the comparison: from the moment I first met Obama, in college, I have been in awe of his character, demeanor and skill. He is on a short list of my heroes. My point is simply that I would never have imagined that anyone I could actually relate to on a personal level would be in the running for President. People like us just don’t make it that far. So, it’s gut-wrenchingly uncomfortable to find myself supporting someone else. It’s just not in my nature to vote for the man. I vote for the campaign.

Obama is running to win the Presidency by appealing to a deeply held belief that there are “better angels” in all of us, and that the right kind of leadership can unlock them. If Edwards is the anti-Reagan, Obama is the black Kennedy. Don’t believe anyone who argues that Obama is in any way naïve in his approach. He knows exactly what he is doing.

In an interesting and thoughtful piece for the American Prospect, Mark Schmitt made the most compelling case for Obama’s transcendental politics I have read to date. He concedes that Edwards is right that politics is an adversarial art, but asserts that

“…perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.”

All of that is profoundly true. The Obama feint is an artful dodge that takes the moral high ground and is winning the hearts and minds of millions across the country, even without the Oprah bonus. Others, of course, are worried that Obama is another Bill Clinton, using a “pox on both houses” argument about the hard Right and the “hard” Left to steer a path that wins some battles but forfeits the war. Markos Moulitsas has had nary a kind word to say about “Obama (who) has made a cottage industry out of attacking the dirty fucking hippies on the left, from labor unions, to Paul Krugman, to Gore and Kerry, to social security, and so on.”

There is reason for such a worry. Obama’s recent attack on Edwards for enjoying the support of “special interests” because of an SEIU-led independent campaign focusing on health care was patently disgusting. He has made privatization noises regarding social security and other public benefits, and has cast some bad votes in favor of corporate interests (but Edwards isn’t perfect here, either). Most problematic, however, is Obama’s arguments that the Left goes “too far” on a range of issues, and that the fights of the 1960’s and their re-emergence in the 1990’s are stale or outdated. That plays well with middle class voters and people too young to remember politics before Ronald Reagan, but it’s hardly transformational.

The most important thing for me, therefore, is that Obama’s master narrative is just weak and uncompelling in comparison with Edwards’. Kennedy’s new frontier was exciting because it existed in the context of a muscular New Dealism. Public provision, union rights and an interventionist macro economic policy were givens. They aren’t anymore. Before we can talk about going to the moon or uniting around common purpose or moving beyond partisan gridlock, we need to move the debate away from the anti-government, market-dominated war of all against all that currently holds sway. Obama may want that in his heart of hearts, but Edwards is running on it.

What sort of mandate will President Obama have? It will be one that emphasizes innovation even where the old answers are the right ones. It will be one that assuages but does not challenge. It will be one that closes books instead of rewriting scripts. It will not be one that corrects the right-wing triumph of the post-New Deal era. It will not be held as an ideological shift in our favor. And that’s what we need. A groundswell. A paradigm shift. A mandate. We need John Edwards.

i need a word for that sharp pain i have in my back...

2007-12-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

In case you've been living underneath a large pile of dirt for the past few months, you know that screen and television writers are on strike throughout the United States. Pickets and demonstrations have been ongoing in New York and Los Angeles, with solidarity rallies held around the world. At stake is more than a decent contract with good wages and benefits: this strike is over whether writers will be paid at all for the use of their work on the internet, an issue that everyone who makes a living through the creation of art should take very seriously.
Amazingly, the U.S. media has been largely sympathetic toward the writers, in part because their demands are so freakin' reasonable but also because the union (Writers Guild of America) has been quite adept at explaining their case in public. It helps that some of the most talented communicators in the world are in the union's rank and file. Celebrities have flocked to the picket-lines to show support, adding a sexiness to the strike that surrounds few other industrial actions.
A recent attempt to return to the bargaining table failed, as management (the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) walked away, refusing to make concessions on core issues. Meanwhile, the AMPTP has hired Clinton-linked consultants to help them in their defense of core American values like profiting off of other people's work without paying them.
But now the writers have a new challenge: anti-strike mobilization by other entertainment workers. Yesterday, hundreds of "below the line" television workers (stage hands, line producers) and vendors took to the streets to demand that the two sides "strike a deal". The message was that their shows have been shut down by the strike and they want the two sides to come to an agreement.
Underneath the rhetoric of "not taking sides", however, was a clear attack on the WGA, with chants and picket signs intimating that the writers, whose upper-level salaries are quite a bit higher than many "below the line" employees, are simply spoiled and should go back to work. The president of the stage hands union was even quoted in the always-happy-to-bash-the-labor-movement Los Angeles Times attacking the writers for not wanting to "bargain in good faith", which is a violation of labor law. Ouch. So much for solidarity.
Personally, I can't imagine what it would feel like to be on strike and have co-workers take to the streets to demand that I fold, particularly in a situation like this one where the basic structure of the industry is at stake. It is quite understandable for people to feel resentful when a higher-paid group of workers strikes and it puts them out of work, a situation made more complex by the fact that the the WGA has been less-than-pristine in it's support of other unions' strikes in the past.
Nonetheless, it's a stupid, stupid move that plays right into the hands of the AMPTP. There is nothing more potent in turning public opinion against a strike than to paint strikers as "spoiled", "overpaid", or willing to sacrifice other workers for their own benefit. The timing of it takes the pressure off of management, the folks who are responsible for the breakdown in talks, and reframes a very straight forward conflict into a moral wash. It's not. The AMPTP is wrong. Just like they are wrong when they go after benefits for stage hands. Duh.
The same talking points were used against UAW workers in the agricultural implement industry in the 1980's. They were often the highest paid workers in their communities, and when they struck, their bosses successfully played the "spoiled" card to turn their neighbors against them. They lost those strikes, and wages in the region have never recovered. It's a basic lesson of the labor movement: what they can do to the highest paid or best organized, they can, and will, do to everyone else. As an aside, that's also why it was so jaw-droppingly ridiculous to read quotes in the papers from student activists who took part in the uprising in France against proposed youth labor market "reforms" attacking the recent transit strikes. Some of those same young activists who enjoyed labor union support in their confrontation with the previous Gaullist administration hit the Paris streets to demand that workers cave in to the current one.
Incidentally, when striking writers asked if they could participate in the "strike a deal!" rally, they were told that they weren't welcome. Read the comments.

I'm for Obama, but only because Ron Paul can't win

2007-11-26T17:10:00.001-08:00

End the war, bring the troops home, and stop the imperial meddling in other nations' business. That's a wonderfully encouraging platform to see from a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. The fact that it is coming from a Republican who shares the field for his party's nomination with proud apologists for torture is even more remarkable. For this reason, Texas Congressman Ron Paul has been drumming up money and interest on the internet, and has even begun to register in national and state polls.
Predictably, a small number of those who would generally consider themselves on the left have also contracted Paul fever. My partner Nina and I have overheard several people say that they are "really for Ron Paul, but will settle for Obama" since Paul doesn't have a chance. I've seen chalk, spraypaint, stapleguns and wheatpaste, the full arsenal of the activist cadre mobilized to spread his message. Some are traditional libertarians, but others are campus lefty types. Though Paul is unlikely to make much of a dent when it comes to actual voting, it's all a pretty depressing reminder of just how silly folks on the left can be. This is the problem with not having a real progressive narrative, and the fact that our progressive leaders (like, um, Obama) won't actually spell one out in a way that really makes sense. Paul is for "change". Obama is for "change". People want "change". Ergo, Obama, Paul and "the people" all want the same thing. They don't, of course, but it is possible to make that mistake considering Obama's refrain about putting all that boring old "left vs right" stuff behind us.

Let's review, though, just for fun, all the ways in which Ron Paul is a serious nutjob, albeit an affable one: Paul is firmly anti-choice. He wants to abolish the federal income tax, along with most of the functions of the Federal government. Department of Education? Gone. EPA? Gone. IRS? Gone. NEA? Gone. What's left? Police to lock you up for performing and abortion.
Yes, he wants to pull us out of Iraq and NAFTA, but also the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. He has stopped calling for the immediate abolition of social security, but wants to phase it out. He identifies Federal regulation as the greatest threat to the environment (I didn't make that up). Amazingly, though undocumented workers pay millions of dollars into social security they will never see, his priority is to make sure that social security is for "Americans only." And that's just a small sample.
Many right wingers oppose foriegn wars. There has always been an isolationist tradition on the American right. Confusing it with progressivism is a very bad mistake.
Personally, I agree with John Edwards, Barack Obama and Dennis Kucinic, the three actual progressives running for president this year. They are all calling, in different ways, for a revitalization of our public sector. They've pointed out that we've seen the effects of the anti-government vision Ron Paul broadcasts at work: in the effective loss of New Orleans, in the foreclosure crisis, in our national health care disaster and in the privatization of our military. It's not "change." It's a deepening of the mistakes we've been making as a nation for thirty years. It's time to turn the page indeed.

PS: Just for fun, here's Ron Paul solving the problem of racism in our society through...limited government!

"A nation that once prided itself on a sense of rugged individualism has become uncomfortably obsessed with racial group identities. The collectivist mindset is at the heart of racism.
Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry. Bigotry at its essence is a problem of the heart, and we cannot change people's hearts by passing more laws and regulations. It is the federal government that most divides us by race, class, religion, and gender. Through its taxes, restrictive regulations, corporate subsidies, racial set-asides, and welfare programs, government plays far too large a role in determining who succeeds and who fails. Government "benevolence" crowds out genuine goodwill by institutionalizing group thinking, thus making each group suspicious that others are receiving more of the government loot. This leads to resentment and hostility among us."

Prioritize

2007-11-20T15:40:00.000-08:00

At this weekend’s California Democratic Party Executive Board meeting, leaders in the Progressive Caucus, supported by outside organizations like the Courage Campaign, headed an effort to pass a resolution censuring Senator Dianne Feinstein for a number of her votes, including the push to confirm a pro-torture Attorney General. The resolution, submitted late, was killed in the Resolutions Committee: a supporter of the resolution was pushed by one Party staff member, and another staffer made inexcusably disparaging comments in the media about grassroots Party activists. It was all very unfortunate.

Equally unfortunate, however, was the fact that the Progressive Caucus of the party, of which I am proud to be a member, spent the greater part of it’s meeting time talking about the Feinstein resolution, even though only a handful of members voted against endorsing it (full disclosure: I was one of them). As a result, the Caucus had only passing discussion of the rest of the business of the Executive Board, and did not take a position on anything except the doomed, symbolic resolution of Censure. At stake: the Party’s positions on a multi billion dollar Indian gaming expansion contested by the Hotel and Restaurant Workers, a highly contentious education funding initiative and a plan to overhaul term limits. No official positions were taken on these issues by the Progressive Caucus.

Hardly anyone in the state cares or knows about resolutions passed by the California Democratic Party. Sure, a resolution of censure would make some headlines, but it was also a non-starter in a Presidential election year. The most that would come out of it would be a series of press stories about unruly Democrats. Meanwhile, the Eboard meeting was flooded with union folks, Native American tribes, political operatives and education advocates debating where the Party should be on the issues which will actually appear on the next ballot. Those folks know where the party does have power, and were there to attempt to wield it. It’s on those issues where a progressive strategy, where input from the left of the party would be meaningful. But we were busy on the Feinstein resolution, along with much of the “netroots” activist community. I respect and admire many of the progressive leaders in the Party, and am always straightforward and constructive when I disagree with them. This was one of those moments.

I want to move toward setting the agenda as much as anyone. It’s not enough for us to react to things which are brought to us. But a big part of moving an agenda is moving one which is focused on issues which effect people’s lives directly, and not getting swept up almost exclusively in issues which are sexy or which animate communities we are the most comfortable with. I think that there were good people on both sides of the debate over the resolution, and disagree with the idea that the important fault line in the party is between those who support such actions and those who oppose them. All the time and energy that was spent on the resolution, I believe, would have been better spent educating delegates and the public about the initiatives we just took positions on, furthering progress in developing the party’s infrastructure, and building our clubs, central committees and leadership. I know that it’s possible to multitask, but it’s also crucial to prioritize.

blue primary blues

2007-11-19T16:28:00.001-08:00

The American Presidential season is generally source of soul-destroying agony for progressives. Between the sliminess of the mainstream media, the hegemony of corporate money and cynicism of the professional political class, there is rarely much to find inspiring. Usually, I find myself keeping Max Weber’s famous dictum about the strong slow boring of hard boards nearby in order to keep from throwing myself from a window.

At first, this election cycle seemed to give us reason to be cautiously excited. If someone had told me two years ago that the Democratic Presidential field would be dominated by a young and brilliant black man, a skillful and talented woman and a Southern white man who is running on what amounts to a social democratic platform, I would have assumed they were stoned. For the first time in my life, there is almost no outcome of the Democratic Primary that wouldn’t lead to a politically meaningful campaign as opposed to our usual rearguard action.

As we approach the first set of votes, however, the soul crushing has commenced. Let us take it as a given that Senator Clinton is working within the DLC framework: a carefully honed appeal to skittish middle class voters, a reminder to everyone else that the Republicans are worth beating and an invincible fundraising and networking operation. The smart money is on her winning the nomination fairly handily. Campaigning for the first woman president, especially against a political party that will appeal to misogynistic fears of cultural upheaval will bring a high level of excitement to the race, at least for me. Nonetheless, it is depressing that after six or more years of building, of concerted efforts to reassert some kind of proud and vibrant liberal message, of watching the Republicans come so close to completely dismantling the legacies of social movements and rational public policy at every level, that the best that we could come up with is another centrist Clinton. Clearly, we have a lot more work to do.

Watching Edwards’ social justice message ridiculed because of his wealth, attractiveness and haircut is a stark reminder of the bizarre reality of America’s lack of a rational class discourse. Somewhere, a smart grad student is launching a dissertation in trying to unpack the irony and convoluted ideology that both feminizes and class-baits a candidate who is finally talking about rolling back the Reagan revolution in way that is meaningful to working-class voters. And I’ve heard these talking points from Democrats, even self-identified progressives: Edwards isn’t serious about reform because he’s rich.

The diminishing prospects for John Edwards should worry everyone. There is no hope of building a lasting progressive majority in America without winning back Joe and Jane six-pack. They won’t be won back permanently until Democrats are meaningfully leading on reorienting the economy in their interests. Edwards’ campaign is the most serious attempt at such a project that I have seen in my lifetime. It's a new realignment strategy, or what historians might call re-re-alignment.

Barack Obama is chasing realigment as well, but more semiotically than politically. I have watched Obama’s political career almost from the beginning, volunteering on his first successful run for office, and watching as he negotiated the deadly terrain of Chicago politics. He can talk to disaffected white working class voters, (including my family in central Illinois), inspires young and liberal voters across racial lines in an unprecedented way and, more than any other candidate in this race, exudes the optimism and infectious energy of the Kennedy era.

It may be possible to charismatically and symbolically forge a winning coalition. His is the most “fired up” organization, recruiting thousands of enthusiasts into politics for the first time, which is always a good thing. Obama is running on the mystique of the “new”, a trope which can be a powerful mobilizer but which often frustrates as a substitute for substance. In some speeches, Obama speaks of moving beyond the conflicts of the 1960’s, in others the 1990’s, rhetoric which casts Senator Clinton as stale, appeals to generations X and Y, and reassures white voters that he’s not going to burn the mansion down. It also pitches him as running against Washington, a posture that never seems to get old (and cuts both ways ideologically). Its smart politics, even if it’s a bit creepy, and I believe that he wants to win because he wants to do good things.

However, there are two major reasons I haven’t jumped on an Obama bandwagon: First, I don’t have a very clear sense of what Obama would be like as President. Is he a New Frontier liberal or a Third Way centrist? He sounds alternately like both. It’s hard to sift through with only a couple of years of a voting record at the Federal level, and a policy team that is all over the map. My friends who support him tend to point to his choice of metaphors and his biography to emphasize his transformative agenda, but I’m still smarting from the Bill Clinton burn. I’m not one to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, (hell, I supported Dean), and so policy squishiness isn’t the bottom line for me, it’s the campaign.

Obama’s campaign, like his appeal, is centered around Obama: not a larger organizational project the way that Howard Dean’s was, not rooted in social movements the way Jesse Jackson’s was. An independent organization based in San Francisco called Vote Hope is trying to utilize Obama’s appeal to simultaneously contribute to his victory and to recruit, train and mobilize activists for the long-run. That’s a great project, and I care about it’s outcome. However, it’s the exception in a larger reality. The new Obama activists I have encountered don’t seem particularly interested in sticking around, moving the party, building organization or learning how to be leaders. I don’t have data on this assertion, but I’ve talked to other Party activists who have noted the same thing. They still need to be outreached to and engaged, but in most parts of the country, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, Obamamania seems more about fandom than movement.

It is a commonly held faith in most progressive circles that the left has fallen behind in its ability to present effective narratives and “big picture” vision. In part, the growing attraction to Obama in certain neighborhoods of the progressive base is that he seems capable of breaking that destructive pattern. More than any candidate in recent memory, both biographically and rhetorically, Obama offers a remarkably compelling story of what America is and could be. At moments, that narrative is just what we need: radical and pragmatic, honest and compassionate. Other times, however, it seems virtually contentless. “Different and new” for sure, but what that means is largely unclear. Politics won’t be realigned in this country without a set of broad, accessible messages from the left. However, those messages must be deeper than platitudes and hipness.

Let me also say that I don’t buy any of the campaigns’ rhetoric around “electability”. All three of the “top-tier” candidates, plus Richardson (and perhaps even Dodd and Biden) could win in November ’08. Edwards is not too pretty, Obama is not too black and Clinton is not too female to win the Presidency.

And that’s exactly why I’ve got the blue primary blues. This is a year in which the wind is at our backs. People really are hungry for change, and the other team is off their game. We’re gonna win. The stakes are higher than just correcting the dazzling incompetence and mean-spiritedness of the Bush Administration. Republican rule since 1981, including the Clinton interlude, has primarily been an era of destruction for social equity and solidarity, both institutionally and culturally. We have a real shot at pushing that back, not just restoring the New Deal and the Great Society, but moving beyond them, updating American liberalism for a more dynamic, globalized economy and finally allowing the best of it’s benefits to touch the lives of oppressed and marginalized communities. Great things are possible.

But not likely.

Next: The Second Clinton Presidency

erik and hillary did it so, whatever

2007-07-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

Apparently I look more like patrick swayze than charles barkeley, so I'm OK.

on, ahem, hiatus

2007-05-10T13:46:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, hoverbike is on hiatus while I finish up my thesis. Look for a relaunch, with some possible major changes in the Summer.

-daraka

This is why I haven't finished a real post on the presidential primary

2007-03-16T00:28:00.000-07:00

I can't get my head around the really important questions.

Who is cuter?

FOXNews.com - Redirect: Senator Obama Says John Edwards Is 'Kind of Cute' - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum: "Redirect: Senator Obama Says John Edwards Is 'Kind of Cute'"

The Democratic Party | Help the Democratic Majority Pass the Employee Free Choice Act

2007-02-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

The Democratic Party | Help the Democratic Majority Pass the Employee Free Choice Act

And, it's on. Write in now to show your support for a democratic workplace!

...F a MAC

2007-02-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

Apple boss slams US teachers' unions - Education - Macworld UK: "Associated Press reports that Jobs was sharing the stage with Dell CEO Michael Dell. Both men were discussing their vision of how digital technologies can boost educational achievement."

This just in from my esteemed colleague Erik Love over at The Most Important Blog...Ever. I hate to sound like a broken record, constantly harping on the anti-union attitudes of the tech class and their intellectual heroes. However, it's just so bad up there in Silicon Valley and Seattle that I just can't help it.

Here we have Steve Jobs being his usual heroic, giant-slaying self, taking a break from fighting for market share against Microsoft by attacking the greedy and shiftless teachers unions. They impede technological development and protect "bad teachers", according to educational and industrial relations expert Jobs. Michael Dell demurred, saying that the only reason there are unions is because of bad employers. These two statements encapsulate the thinking about unions and the labor movement dominant in the technoclass: at worse they are anachronistic and get in the way of progress, at best they are an understandable but unfortunate reaction to bad employer behavior. Of course, in the utopian world of the new economy, employers are nice and generous. They even let you wear sneakers to work.

There is a lot of interesting work being done around organizing high-tech and freelance labor, a move that will require some creativity and flexiblity on the part of existing unions. Barbara Ehrenreich has been an outspoken advocate of opening the labor movement up to skilled, contingent and high tech workers even when traditional collective bargaining agreements are not on the short term agenda. The Freelancer's Union, the UAW's National Writers Union, and even the AFL-CIO's Working America are all related to this effort. The Communication Workers have been organizing computer programmers around health care and job security. Unions are necessary wherever there are employees. Period. This is especially true in the insecure and volatile world of the old "new economy".

However, the assumption that employers and employees in the tech industry have some kind of special relationship that differs from the traditional manufacturing or service sector is dangerous and wide-spread. I'm skeptical of this notion: the tech sector is undergirded by brutal working conditions and environmental insanity in the "hardware" industry, the cult of flexibility has burned up thousands of worker's benefits, capital speculation caused a crash that took the whole economy with it, and programmers are increasingly "proletarianized" through outsourcing and insane work speedups. Bosses in jeans are bosses. They may be nicer in some ways than the Wal-Mart CEO, but they operate in the same market under the same logic.

The Center for American Progress recently underwrote a study by consultants Celinda Lake and Jim Grossfeld on attitudes toward work and unions among high tech workers. They found that the insecurity of the industry has created a wide opening for labor organizing, but that Silcon Valley employees want unions which, among other tings, are geared toward cooperation with management. An article based on their findings appeared online at TAP. It's quite interesting. There is an old debate within both academia and the labor movement about "white collar" workers and their attitudes toward and "identification" with management. Many have argued there are huge differences between such workers and agricultural, service or industrial employees. This may or may not be empericaly true, and it's an open question as to whether this is a convenient mythology or describes some actual difference of conditions.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that the engineers at Boeing don't see themselves as having a special relationship with the company that tried to gut their health care and wages a few years back. At one point in time, Henry Ford was seen as the scion of a new, generous paternalistic capitalism that didn't need unions. Thank god that his employees had the bravery to strongly disagree. We all benefited from the prosperity they helped wrest from the coffers of American business. Even Steve Jobs.

ucsb represents....

2007-02-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

Student activists pulled off a major victory here at UCSB, mobilizing 1000+ students to skip class and march against the Iraq war. Erik Love has a rundown over on the Most Important Blog...Ever. Included in his report are pictures of the "counter demonstration" semi-organized by the College Republicans. Their statement? Drinking beer and eating hamburgers, as well as hoisting three flags in "opposition" to the march: The United States. The POW-MIA flag. A Bud Light flag.

I am always amazed when people play right into our lazy stereotypes. The CR's paid for the beer and hamburgers. That was their political act: an affirmation of both political and cultural nationalism. Support the war. Eat meat. Drink Bud Light.

Collegate conservatism is, at it's core, a cultural movement- an explicit rejection of all things "radical" or "countercultural". While there is an organized campus right that is at least as ideologically sophisticated as the campus left (for better or worse), what dominates is a high-school style reaction by the "jocks" against the "freaks". I am reminded of scenes in the Strawberry Statement, a flawed but well-written account of the Columbia University uprising in the late 1960's. While radical students occupied buildings, jocks and frat boys surrounded them in phalanxes, and attacked those trying to ferry food and water to the protesters. These guys with their patriotic bar-b-q are replaying those roles, just as yesterday's protesters perpetuated 60's cultural trappings, slogans and tactics.

The campus right is xenophobic, homophobic, mysoginistic, classist and racist. It is also, however, somewhat populist, playing into a generalized alienation by average students from outlandish, cliquish, "activist" culture. That's the point behind a counter demonstration that features beer and a grill. It says: "Regular people like America, beer and beef. Those freaks out there are just being freaky for its own sake."

It's not surprising that such a tactic doesn't fly so well here at UCSB, where hyper patriotism is generally uncool. However, in general, it has been an effective strategy by the right in exoticizing and marginalizing the left on campus and off.

I don't want to overplay the cultural to the exclusion of the political. College Republicans and their audience have dangerous politics, and are being trained to bring those politics into the corporate institutions they aspire to join. However, the trick for the campus left is always to insure that it doesn't also fixate on cultural differences on campus. What was great about these scenes from yesterday's marches are how goddamned normal so many of the protesters look. I'm all for free expression, but the left doesn't get anywhere if it simply plays into its own marginalization. So, by all means, let your freak flag fly, but create a safe space for the 'normals' as well. You shouldn't have to make a lifestyle choice in order to be on the right side. Successfully doing that is what makes the frat boy right, at school and in the broader political culture, look so stupid.

EFCA Introduced

2007-02-16T14:08:00.000-08:00

Well,

This week the Employee Free Choice Act was passed through committee and on to the full House for deliberation and hearings. Here's a fairly comprehensive article about it.

Opposition from business groups and their buddies in Congress will be fierce, no doubt. Already last year the Center for Union Facts began a "grassroots" campaign against the reform, including taking out full page ads in major newspapers comparing union leaders to Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin. Nice.

The hearings should be exciting, and a great opportunity to highlight the authoritarian nature of the modern American workplace.

news briefs

2007-02-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

Gavin Newsom, Playboy

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is in trouble. He has admitted that, while in the middle of a divorce, he had an affair with a staffer. As if that wasn't enough of a jerk move, the staffer in question was the wife of his campaign manager. All of this is hot on the heels of a mini scandal last fall in which Newsom was dating a 20-year-old Paris Hilton look alike who he probably bought alcohol for. Now, in what seems like a new tradition for celebrities caught with the cookies, Newsom is claiming to have a drinking problem. Apparently, alcoholism causes everything from infidelity to homosexuality to making racist comments. Who knew.
Personally, I don't care that much that Newsom is clearly a jerk who can't keep his dick in his pants. Just as I didn't care that Bill Clinton was playing around with Monica, I worry that we've gone too far as a society in scruitinizing the private lives of public figures. I don't vote for people to be moral symbols.
However, I think it is a lot easier for me to shrug off these sorts of things as a man. I would think twice about voting for someone who made racist or sexist comments off the cuff, as Governor Schwarzenegger has on numerous occasions. Such things are, in a way, a window into their view of the world. Why should I be any less bothered by Newsom's behavior? It seems possible that Newsom's view of women is something less than solidaristic. I'm not implying that infidelity is an exclusively male or sexist event, it's just that in Newsom's case there seems to be a pattern of viewing women as conquests and arm candy.
What is clear, however, is that Newsom should have known better. There were (are) a lot of hopes riding on him. Personally, I've been impressed with his creativity when it comes to social policy, as well as his loyalty to the party at the state level. While legislative leaders lined up to stab Phil Angelides in the back, Newsom held the line. This might have been a function of his own palace strategies vis a vis rival (and admitted adulterer) Antonio Villaraigosa, but that's to be expected. The point is that he has been a good mayor and was a rising star in the California Democratic Party. To the extent that this weakens him as a leader, it was wildly irresponsible.
You don't see female leaders doing such stupid things, and that's the point here. When women get to positions of power, it is generally through a hell of a lot of hard work, and they seem to take seriously how much is riding on them in terms of resources and hopes. Men seem to take power for granted, willing to squander it on stupid things like laying their camaign manager's wife. Women can be just as stupid, blinkered and self centered as men, but they do seem less likely to be quite so arrogant.

Health Care Blindspot

John Edwards released his health care reform plan today. It claims to be a universal plan, and, like the Governor's will require health insurance just as most states require car insurance. What's screwy about both Edwards' and Arnolds' schemes, however, is that they are built around a complex system of subsidies to insurance companies, outlays from citizens and employer mandates. It remains a gigantic mystery to me that we keep debating these arcane and piecemeal proposals in an age in which the US auto industry is paying more for health care than steel, in which a majority of the population favors universal coverage, and in which everyone seems to be begging for a "bold" policy iniative on the part of the Democrats. All of this, but real universal health care is still off the table.

The only mainstream voice I hear speaking the sensible truth about health care is Al Gore. At press time, however, Gore isn't running for office.

Speaking of Arnold's plan, I found it amusing that so much was made of the Governor's Austrian background as a reason for his commitment to universal health care. "I guess it's a cultural thing", the Governor said. He was just "used" to having health care coverage in Austria.

This is hilarious coming from the guy who said that leaving gray, "socialistic" Austria to come to the freedom of Richard Nixon's America was inspiring.

It's not a cultural thing, Arnold. Your friends in the Republican Party have been fighting universal health care since the 1930's. Like you, they've attacked it and everything they don't like as anti-freedom and pro-socialist.

It's all just so Alanis Morissett-style "ironic".

...more on the "libertarian democrat"

2007-02-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

So, here's "Kos" in an essay on the CATO institute website bolstering his "case for the libertarian democrat". He makes four major points:

1. That he is personally motivated by a belief in individual liberty.
2. That unregulated corporations are threats to individual liberty.
3. That people who consider themselves libertarians can be won over to the argument that government is necessary to patrol and underpin a free market.
4. That silicon valley is his utopia because it combines a truly free market with government provided education and infrustructure.

I'll leave aside the bizarre notion that the high tech economy is a utopia (his description of silicon valley is hilariously naive), and focus on the first three assertions.

There used to be a name for the politics built on the notion that freedom and opportunity are inherently linked, and that government must play a role in insuring fair play and a level playing field for entry into the market. It was called liberalism. In tension with this assertion was a politics that argued that there are fundamental imbalances of power within capitalism that the state must either mitigate or abolish. This was called, among other things, democratic socialism. On the opposing side were various stripes of anti-government conservatives.

In today's politics, as we know, any kind of socialism is well off the table. But more importantly, the case for liberalism itself has been vilified. These are bad, bad times. Moulitsas makes a strong case for reviving liberalism, and for why the goal of human freedom is not served by corporate deregulation. What he argues for under the banner of "libertarian Democrat" politics is just liberalism. Nothing more, nothing less.

However, when Moulitsas implies that what he is promoting is new, that it is somehow more "libertarian" than traditional liberalism, he is handing the right a key victory. This rhetorical move reinforces the idea that traditional liberalism was about something other than individual freedom: in essense, conceeding the argument of libertarians and conservatives. Kos, along with many other bloggers, hold themselves up as something different from all those "old fashioned" liberals who somehow were out to destroy the free market or support a big government that is a threat to personal freedom. That's not true. We should say so.

In short, Kos is right that the market needs government. He is right that Silicon Valley is a "success" because of government intervention. The fact is, however, that the only people who disagree with this are libertarians. I can understand that we need to hone our arguments against them, making the case to voters that freedom doesn't come from deregulating the oil industry. What I don't understand is why we would seek to bring these folks into our party. The central problem in American politics today, from any social justice oriented perspective, is how constrained we are in our abilities to use the government as a tool. This needs to be pushed back against, not reinforced.

Joining the chorus for liberarian-friendliness is Campus Progress, the student activist project launched by the centrist Center For American Progress. In a think piece on their website, Julian Sanchez argues for campus coalition work with libertarian students. Included in his piece are the observations that the typical motly campus left culture is alienating to most students (true) and that a majority of young people are vaguely libertarian in mindset (also true). He then says that libertarians might piss leftists off, but we should remember that they are all decent, good people who are not bigoted even if their policies are.

Not so fast. Sanchez misses the point that campus libertarianism is, in fact, rife with both subtle and unsubtle racism and classism, and that on most issues of real import, progressives and libertarians are going to be opposed to one another. So we agree about wiretapping and marijuana. If there's a campaign to mount on those issues, we should be in the same room. But the day to day work of progressives on campus and off should be to push back against the libertarian mindset. All students today grew up after the Reagan revolution, which has had a profound affect on their world view. We need to work hard at undoing that damage, not give in to it.

Basing our arguments in a defense of freedom is important, especially in the United States. As I often femind my friends and colleagues in Europe, all politics in the United States is liberal politics, even social democratic politics. By all means, let's out freedom the libertarians. Let's not let them act as if they have a monopoly on freedom as a value, just as we work on taking religion back from the bigots and the flag back from the militarist right. However, we don't need to become bigots, militarists or libertarians to do that.

why kos creeps me out

2007-01-31T14:25:00.000-08:00

Kos has a quick and interesting post up today about the role of Libertarian Party "spoilers" in the Midterm elections. He points out that Libertarians garnered enough votes to equal the margin of victory for Democrats in both the Missouri and Montana Senate elections. That's significant given the 51-49 split in the Senate.

It's all well and good until he gets to his analysis:

"The theocon and neocon takeover of the Republican Party has left many of its more Libertarian members adrift with few alternatives. I clearly hope the Democratic Party becomes more Libertarian friendly over the coming years, but that's a long-term project. In the meantime, the Libertarian ballot line (when available) can be an apt protest vote."

Woah. The Democratic Party should not become more "Libertarian friendly". If there is a long term project for the Party, it is to move it back to it's roots as a defender of both economic and social security. In many senses, making the party more "Libertarian" is the DLC's agenda: an anti-welfare, free trade, anti-regulation, party that uses anti-statist rhetoric to defend free speech and abortion rights. That's what made us a minority party.

If anyone needs a reminder of where Libertarians are at, check out "Republican and Democrat Lovefest over Socialized Healthcare", a post on their official Party blog.

Moulitsas has raised this bizarre assertion many times. His most detailed discussions of the issue usually revolve around issues like gun control. Here he's generally right: the Democratic Party should be reaching out to the folks who get worked up about their guns. However, the ones who are now abandoning the Republican Party to the -right- shouldn't be the target. What it will take to appeal to them will mean an abandonment, both in electoral and moral terms, of the rest of the Democratic base. That's not the way to get to a strong majority.

The way to reach out to them while keeping the other crucial parts of our base together is to offer an alternative to the corporate-dominated trade policies and public sector destruction that has been dominant in Washington for the past twenty years. The lives of rural and small town America have been damaged, far more than the urban bloggerati recognize, by libertarianism in practice. A strong message on the economy is what's needed.

Let's remember who the Libertarians are. In terms of their activist base, there is a reason that the Libertarian party is attractive, almost exclusively, to middle class white guys and some college students. Their worldview rejects the experiences of the poor, people of color and women. It rejects a recognition of systems of inequality and power. A Democratic Party which is more interesting to them cannot simultaneously be more engaged with those struggles against inequality. Perhaps Moulitsas feels some kindship with this view of the world. I sure as hell don't.

...and more outrageous reading...

2007-01-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

...over at Gawker.

Advertisers Find Hot New Revenue Source - Gawker: "Let it never be said that Madison Avenue isn't creative. From the looks of it, ad agencies are doing their best to maintain any sort of revenue stream:"

The double standard

2007-01-28T14:21:00.000-08:00

So, Dick Cheney, champion of gay rights, has expressed cold indignation at a CNN reporter for asking him a question any Democrat would have been skewered with.

Cheney's daughter is expecting a child with her (female) partner. CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Cheney for a response to a statement by the reactionary group Focus on the Family:

"Just because its possible to concieve a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn't mean it's best for the child."

"That question is out of line" responded Cheney. Indeed, it is. What is amazing, however, is Cheney owes his position as Vice President in large part to the mobilization of such bigotry. Now he's in a huff because the same twisted rhetoric is being aimed at his family.

I suppose I should be used to this kind of hypocracy, and perhaps we should be happy that attitudes may be changing one family at a time. However, I'll not hold my breath waiting for Dick and Lynne Cheney to come to the defense of Democrats hit with these kinds of attacks.

Here's an article from the Fox News website about the exchange:

FOXNews.com - Cheney Calls Reporter's Question About Gay Daughter's Pregnancy 'Out of Line' - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum: "Mary Cheney and Heather Poe, her partner of 15 years, are expecting a baby in late spring."

David Ervine

2007-01-17T16:54:00.000-08:00

I seem to be writing a lot of obits lately here at hoverbike. It seems to be the time of year for significant passings: James Brown, Saddam Hussein and President Gerald Ford all over the holiday break. Earlier in the year we saw the deaths of Augusto Pinochet, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Milton Friedman, a trio which will certainly share a corner of hell just as they collectively helped to create hell on earth for so many.

The week before last marked the passing of a strange hero of mine, someone with whom I perhaps shared little ideologically, but nonetheless was deeply affected by and, I must say, admired a great deal. David Ervine, former Protestant terrorist and leader of Northern Ireland's smallest loyalist grouping, the Progressive Unionist Party died two Saturdays ago of heart failure.

Ervine cut his teeth in the brutal world of Protestant paramilitary organizations, an experience about which he was often shockingly frank. The PUP that he led was linked to one of the most vicious protestant terrorist factions, a group that clashed with both Republican forces and the British. It was, he explained, those battles with the supposed protectors of his community, which helped to lead him to the conclusion that the best interests of the Protestant community lay in forging a political solution within Northern Ireland itself. They couldn't rely on self-interested London authorities for protection. His overriding political goal became an end to the bloodshed.

Ervine was never forgiven his crimes by many in the Republican movement. Others, however, saw in Ervine (and the PUP) a Protestant voice which was, at last, political. Unlike the opportunists of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists, Ervine embraced the peace process whole-heartedly. He was a firm defender of British dominion, but he articulated a sort of acknowledgement of the nationalist position that was based on a loyalty to Northern Ireland as such as well as a subtle but clear class analysis.

I actually met David Ervine once. It was a strange opportunity arranged for me and my partner by a friend in the Irish Labour movement. A few phone calls were made while we were on vacation in Ireland. Our meeting lasted about an hour. For no good reason, Ervine hosted us in his office at Belfast City Hall, and spent over an hour answering our questions and giving us his perspective on the elusive goal of peace in Northern Ireland. At the time, self rule was suspended, and there was anxiety about whether the political process would hold. Ervine’s wit and honesty were remarkable. It was one of the most profoundly influential moments of my life, both in terms of political thought and moral outlook.

Here I was, and African-American left winger, who spent his adolescence romanticizing the Irish Republican cause with all the attendant naiveté that comes with distance and strong belief. My partner is an Irish American former punk (now scientist) who has always harbored similar nationalistic sympathies. We was sitting in an office sharing tea with a man who had been convicted of acts of violence against both Irish catholic civilians and the United Kingdom itself; a man who was the leader of a party that, while always distinctly working class, included some pretty creepily far-right characters..

And he won us over.

Not to unionism, mind you. I think both of us, for all the say we have in the matter, believe that a united Ireland is a political and moral good. However, what won us over was the sincerity and sophistication of his position. He represented a group of people with legitimate fears and aspirations, including a palpable sense of threat to their survival. They may have had the support of a waning (though still brutal) empire. They still spilled blood in the fight. They may have been relatively economically privileged. They still are largely working-class, and struggle with the same effects of the global economy and shrinking welfare states. Their communities are crime-ridden. The years of civil war have left many of their core institutions corrupt. They were honestly tired of the fighting.

His solution was to reach out, in a careful and complex way, to his counterparts on the Republican side: people who wanted to politicize the struggle, and begin to repair the damage within their communities. Ervine was critical of the Irish American politicians who snubbed Gerry Adams that Saint Patrick’s Day because of IRA intransigence on disarmament. You don’t make progress, he argued, by antagonizing the very people you are trying to bring to the table. Nobody gets to grandstand about terrorism in a situation in which everyone was engaged in terror.

Ervine argued that the hatred and mistrust between the two communities was so ingrained that only when there is a general, society-wide acknowledgement that everyone was to blame, can progress be made. “People always ask me how you can get someone to bomb or kill civilians,” he said. “It’s really easy. All you have to do is go to people and say ‘look what they did. They’ve got to pay for that.’ It’s that easy.”

And so, if you say that a small group of “terrorists” is to blame, you won’t deal with the underlying problems. You also leave a generation of men raised in violence dangerously alienated from society. They have to be part of the solution.

This is something that we saw, first hand, as he arranged a tour for us of Protestant neighborhoods led by a pardoned Unionist terrorist. Organizations representing released prisoners on both sides give such tours regularly, with veterans of the armed conflict giving tours of respective sectarian neighborhoods, and "handing" the tour group off at one of the most infamous checkpoints. In fact, there is a growing commercial trade in tours infamous Belfast conflict zones, decked as they are in colorful and militant murals. Some are more authoritative than others. The economics of tourism Again, however, much to our astonishment, we were given these tours alone, for free, as a personal favor to Ervine.

Our guide on the Unionist side was Noel, who spent several years in prison and was a gunman for the Ulster Volunteer Force. Noel was unsparingly candid, open and genuinely moving in his explanations of the outbreak of violence known as the “troubles”, his own motivations for involvement as well as the tragic outcome for his community. The paramilitary groups, while explained, were never justified or apologized for. There were simultaneous expressions of regret, contrition, pride and hope in his narrative. It may sound ridiculous, but for the first time, I began to see that these people were people, and that they could be represented with a voice that was neither vengeful nor reactionary.

Noel is part of a network of former UVF and IRA militants who now work to diffuse conflict on the ground. They regularly patrol areas surrounding both sides of the “security wall” that separate Unionist from Nationalist neighborhoods. If kids on one side start throwing rocks, a cell phone call puts a stop to it before it escalates. They do the work of the United Nations.

On the Nationalist side, we were handed off to a Sinn Fein activist who worked for a Republican veteran’s organization. I hate to be overly sentimental, but the entire tone of the experience shifted at this point. It may have been that the veterans themselves, who normally give the tours, would have struck a similarly nuanced tone as Noel had. However, our tour was struck in a much more linearly Republican timbre. We were reminded that David Ervine was a murderer. We were given the Sinn Fein perspective on the peace process, which cast doubt on the sincerity of the Catholic and Protestant “moderates” who helped broker the peace agreement. This was interesting in itself, of course, and I understand that Sinn Fein is also engaged in a political strategy. The point, however, was that the contrast seemed to reinforce the special character of a figure like Ervine, and the folks like Noel who followed his lead.

Sinn Fein, for obvious reasons, is still playing the politics of posture, not admitting to any wrongdoing, defending the armed struggle as a necessary response to British and Loyalist oppression. Ian Paisley and other Protestant reactionaries are doing the same thing. Probably, no solution will be workable until the two “extremes” come to some sort of settlement. Thank god, however, that there are people like David Ervine who are willing to call them all out, but also to argue forcefully that all voices must be heard.

Our trip to Belfast was a strange experience all around. We spent the evenings going to bars and clubs where hip young things partied and posed in a world that seemed like it was a planet away from the entrenched, ruitinized conflicts simmering (literally) down the street. It’s a twenty minute walk from the trendy indie-rock clubs full of students to neighborhoods plastered with political murals, where a shopkeeper told us he was stocking up on Union-Jacks for marching season. Because of this contradiction, exacerbated by the tour buses driving past announcing the location of this or that massacre, I sometimes felt like I was in the EPCOT version of Northern Ireland. But, no, it was the real thing. Perhaps the new Belfast will simply swallow up the old one. No doubt economic development and access to education are a good thing. However, we all know that prosperity does not share itself. If old Belfast is to be something new, it will have to grow from old Belfast.

That struggle lost a partisan in David Ervine. R.I.P.

the state of political journalism...

2007-01-17T16:04:00.000-08:00

Criticizing the political analysis over at the San Francisco Chronicle is like sucker punching a toddler, but I can't resist. Today's top story, about the possible horse race between Senators Clinton and Obama is completely laughable. It posits that the two will compete for the support of the party's left, repeating the ultra-conservative claptrap that Clinton is somehow a radical, or even a liberal.

The question here is whether this is intentional spin or just extremely shoddy journalism. Nobody who is a serious observer of the dynamics of the Democratic Party could argue that Clinton has positioned herself as a defender of the "traditional" or "liberal" base of the Party. That's like arguing that Tony Blair is the voice of British Labour socialism.

Read the whole bizarre thing here.

katha pollitt's new year

2007-01-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

Katha has a fantastic column in this week's Nation, a highly concise and thoughtful list of "resolutions for liberals". It's available online here.

Some choice bits:

"4. Don't think your lifestyle can save the world. I love slow food! I cook slow food! I shop at farmers' markets, I pay extra for organic, I am always buying cloth bags and forgetting to bring them to the supermarket. But the world will never be saved by highly educated, privileged people making different upscale consumer choices. If you have enough money to buy grass-fed beef or tofu prepared by Tibetan virgins, you have enough money to give more of it away to people who really need it and groups that can make real social change."

"5. Avoid weasel words. Like "spirituality." It's "religion." And "faith"--that's "religion" too. And while you're at it, define your terms. What is a "working family"? What is "the middle class"? Do these phrases mean anything more than "virtuous people entitled to make a moral claim on society"--as opposed to those criminals, drug addicts and welfare moms liberals used to care about? And speaking of liberals, whatever happened to them? And to leftists? How come we're all "progressives" now?"

As you can tell, I especially liked that last part... whatever happened to them indeed...

the "L" word. (no, the other one)

2007-01-13T15:35:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows that the moment in which George H.W. Bush made the word “liberal” a political epithet was an important one. It was the crowning moment of the political project laid out by Bush’s former rival Ronald Reagan. The broad left, even in the guise of mild-mannered and intelligent Michael Dukakis, was effectively marginalized. Being a liberal meant being out of touch with the cultural habits of the average American, and, moreover, it meant being weak, if not subversive, in regards to national security.
Ever since, on the national level, running as a “liberal” is a non-starter. Out on main street, hardly anybody calls themselves “liberal” anymore, even when they agree with liberal policy proposals and share many attitudes with those who wear the “L” proudly. This has allowed the right to scuttle important public policy initiatives with the use of a single word. The “liberal bias” in the news media, popular culture and higher education are regular whipping posts for the right-wing opinion makers, and is used to justify the real attacks on journalistic, artistic and academic freedoms coming from the Bush Administration. Even here in California, intimations that someone is “too liberal” are hugely damaging. It’s as if we have two wings in American politics now: conservative and mushy.
In response, the center left has made two rhetorical moves. The first, which you will see on the pages of magazines like The American Prospect and Harper’s or among more academic circles, is to return to using the L-word unabashedly. “Liberal and proud” has become a bit of a slogan of late- which is a good thing. America has a nasty and parochial habit of drawing red lines around political ideologies which are portrayed as insufficiently “American” or “patriotic”. Elites and the right did an effective job of so proscribing ideologies of the left, an effort made all the easier by some political forces who seemed happy to contribute to their own revolutionary marginalization.
However, the other approach is to leave the word “liberal” on the side of the road. Folks have taken to use the word “progressive”, a term so empty of content that everyone from John Podesta to Howard Zinn use the word to describe themselves. I’ve written before about the strange career of the word “progressive.” As recently as my college days, the word was meant to delineate a politics which was to the left of mainstream liberalism. Progressive politics was characterized by a more rigorous attention to systems of inequality, and a preference for reforms which took these structural fissures seriously. Unlike liberals, progressives took seriously the structuring forces of race, class, gender and sexuality. That distinction has been blurred now that we are all “progressives”, as liberals have taken refuge in a term that hasn’t been destroyed yet.
I understand that all political vocabulary is fuzzy. The way we use the word “liberal” in the United States is not exactly the agreed-to definition in political theory, but American Liberals are liberals nonetheless. Those of us who are not, or, more accurately are not just liberals are caught in a rhetorical and ideological trap. You will hear people say that it doesn't matter what we call ourselves, "liberal", "progressive", even "moderate", we are all on the same side. That may be true in the electoral arena, but it doesn't mean that we all are coming from the same place, which is also important.
In that regard, I wish that the “L” word would make a comeback, not only because I’m tired of the dominance of mean conservatism and blithe centrism, but also because I miss being able to understand and explain why our side doesn’t always agree with one another. I have arguments, both theoretical and practical, with fellow “progressive” Democrats, and it is clear that our disagreement stems from the fact that, regardless of what they call themselves, they are liberals. That’s fine, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if we could just be honest about it.
This is most disturbing when it comes to trying to figure out if an action, policy, organization or individual is “progressive.” Locally, I have seen folks who are very defensive of their “progressive” credentials back candidates who were clearly to the right of so-called “centrist” candidates. The only differences were that they took a louder stand on a single, often symbolic, issue and they attended meetings of “progressive” groups. In the absence of a more sophisticated discourse about ideas, labels and single issues emerge as the most important litmus test for organizations, candidates and public figures. In the white left, the issue of the moment is the War. As long as you are sufficiently and loudly anti-War, you are a “progressive”, regardless of your overall world-view. We have to be willing to understand that issues provoke coalitions, not unanimity. Lots of people coming from lots of perspectives are against the War. It doesn’t make you a progressive.
So, I want liberals to start coming clean. I’ll have your back. I may not be a liberal myself, but many of my close friends are. Me and the rest of my pro-liberal friends will be here for you when the barking dogs come after you. After all, when they went after us, you were there…

Well, we’ll be there anyway.

looking ahead 2: hillary, barack and john

2007-01-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

So, the other major theme which will no doubt preoccupy all of us over the next year or so is the emerging contest for President. In my mind, there are really only three interesting candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Now, before you click "comments" in order to throw out some other person's name, take a second to consider the list that I just threw out. One is a woman. One is African-American. The third just began his Presidential campaign by calling for a withdrawal from Iraq, universial health care and the importance of unions. Regardless of who else crowds the field, these three candidates will present a set of dilemmas for the Democratic left. How important is it to break the monopoly on power by white men in American politics? What does Obama's acceptance by many white voters really mean? Why hasn't Clinton tried to appeal to disaffected white working class voters? Will Obama?

It is tempting to oversimplify this dynamic, but it is rare to see such a blatant example of the difficulties of parsing race, class and gender. My guess is that, given the high stakes of the war and the powerful pulls of identity, this could be the most bitter primary fight since 1968. The debates started hard and heavy for me and my family over the Christmas holiday. My mother informed me that she'd stop talking to me if I voted for anyone other than Hillary...but then she softened as Edwards made an inspiring, if imperfect entry into the fray. My mother-in-common-law argued that Obama's rapid rise to stardom may have been a deliberate strategy by conservatives to divide the party. I think that white, liberal women will forgive a lot from Hillary, and I can't completely blame them. My father is going to support anyone who seems vaguely viable and who will take a strong stand on the country's murderous foriegn policy. As a black man, I am trying to figure out what I make of the fact that many of Obama's fans see him as an example of "post race" politics. At the same time, I think, goddamn. President. Barack. Obama. And then, there is Edwards. He's unambiguously anti-war, even if that position took a major mea culpa. He's talking about the economy in a way that few have in recent years. He's charismatic, unassuming and straight-forward. His is a voice which should continue to exist in the Party.

There's no conclusion here. I'm just trying to sketch out the terms of a debate which will no doubt rage here at hoverbike as it does among my diverse family. The decisive factor for me, however, will be to watch how these three campaign, what kind of organizations they build, and what the long term impact of thier efforts will be. That's how I settled on Dean, and I feel vindicated. Watch this space.

looking ahead 1: the legislative fight to watch

2007-01-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

As the new congress takes shape, there is no doubt that there will be many disappointments and frustrations. Perhaps taking a page from the Bush Administration, Pelosi has been busy lowering expectations, even on the issue that contributed most clearly to her achieving the speakership: the disastrous war in Iraq.
There is one thing that Pelosi has promised to move through the House, even if it will take quite a bit of muscle to pass in the Senate. The Employee Free Choice Act, a measure which would roll back some of the worst provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, the 1947 bill which has done so much to curtail workers’ ability to form unions. According to the AFL-CIO, the EFCA would require “employers to recognize a union after a majority of workers sign cards authorizing union representation.” The bill also strengthens the currently squishy legal consequences for illegal union-busting activities by employers.
The process of using cards rather than elections to establish collective bargaining has been good for workers and the labor movement. A majority of growth by the most aggressive organizing unions has been won by using political and public pressure on employees to promise to abide by the results of card drives. In some parts of the public sector, this is the law of the land. EFCA would make that process mandatory, and extend it into the private sector.
I don’t believe in magic bullets in politics, but there is no doubt that passing labor law reform would have a tremendously widespread effect on American politics. There are millions of workers (by some estimates almost sixty) who want to be in a union, but aren’t in large part because of the authoritarian power that employers wield over the process of establishing collective bargaining. A labor movement so invigorated, in addition to helping to democratize the increasingly oligarchal American economy, would be a crucial influx of power for the broad progressive movement. I don’t need to explain how helpful it would be to a Democratic Party still struggling to speak meaningfully to a majority of working-class voters.
For Santa Barbara locals, you need only look at the drama over at the SB News Press to see how brutal current conditions are for workers seeking union representation. Even when workers vote in overwhelming numbers for a union, the bosses are still able to tie the process up in expensive red tape for years. They are able to threaten, even fire active employees without the threat of meaningful sanctions. Busting a union is cheap in America. Ignoring a union organizing drive is just too damn easy.
So, for the next year, or as long as it takes, hoverbike will be following the progress of the Employee Free Choice Act. Expect hysteria from the anti-union industry, even some hand-wringing from labor’s fair weather friends in the Democratic Party, and, perhaps, excuses from Dem leadership about their inability to turn the rhetoric of every Democratic Presidential Candidate since 1947 into a reality.

Current status (Senate Version) SS. 842: Awaiting re-introduction
Current status (House Version) H.R. 1696: Awaiting re-introduction

holiday reading/listening

2006-12-20T19:44:00.000-08:00

Given that my thesis advisor occasionally reads hoverbike, I will start out by saying emphatically that the only things I will be reading over the holidays will be scholarly books and articles about grassroots Democratic Party activism. That shouldn’t stop the rest of you, however, from indulging in some somewhat political entertainment while you celebrate the turning of the year, the birth of your savior, the survival of your people or the pride of your African roots. Below are is a list of books and records I strongly recommend. Let me know if you enjoy any of the items below, as I will be busy untangling the mess of political identity formation and movement intentionality.

1. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
As we all try to figure out Barack, the will-he-won’t-he man of the hour, I am reminded of the moment in Primary Colors where the protagonist struggles to figure out whether the Bill Clinton stand-in is the “real thing” or is willing to give up the store. On the one hand, Obama seems to be trying to find a political space in between two parties which are closer ideologically than they have perhaps ever been. On the other hand, he takes the left to task in some crucial ways: the reactive nature of our foreign policy thinking, the laziness of our cultural prejudices, the acceptance that there is, indeed, such a thing as “red” and “blue” America. In his second book, Obama continues to entice, but also puzzle. My reaction is always to bristle when I hear anyone attack the easy target of “partisanship”, but Obama’s attack is not exactly the same as, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. For the most part, Obama seems to be calling on progressives to think about the possibility of a broad majority, one that will only be achieved by speaking to people where they are actually at, and not where we would wish them to be. I like that. A lot. Read the book, let me know what you think.

2. A Distrubance of Fate by Mitchell J. Freedman
This book was recommended to me by a commenter on hoverbike. Set in an imaginary America in which Robert Kennedy not only survived his assassination but went on to win the Presidency. In this alternate reality, the coalition between liberalism, civil rights and the new left is held together and expanded, though not without trial and difficulty. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a new edition put out in the wake of Emilio Estevez’ film Bobby. It’s fun to read imaginary conversations between Richard Daley and Kennedy, and to be caught up in the suspense of all sides trying to avoid a bloodbath in Chicago. The book is dedicated to Michael Harrington, who figures into the book as well. It’s a fitting dedication, as the narrative of the book is essentially the realignment he spent the second half of his life advocating and critiquing.

3. In Defence of Politics by (Sir) Bernard Crick
This is an important little book. It is, perhaps, the single most influential book for me politically, and I’m sure I’m going to do it a disservice in this small blurb. Crick delivers a blistering defense of the realm of the political, taking on all those who would seek to “transcend” the difficult business of achieving social ends through ideology, democracy, nationalism, technology or tradition. This may sound esoteric, and his writing style may be a bit terse for some. However, think about the tendencies on both the right and the left which get in the way of effective and humane political action. Many of them are attacks on “politics”. We should let the market handle the distribution of wealth and power. We should let the Bible dictate our social policy. We can engineer and invent our way out of environmental problems. We should use elections to “get our ideas out there”, regardless of who wins. We should replace parties with independent, “common sense” elected officials or endless Athenian meetings. For anyone who is interested in rooting progressive political goals in a philosophy of political action, this is a must read.

4. Jennifer Government by Max Berry
Anti-corporate Sci-Fi at its best. In a milieu polluted by much self-righteous libertarianism, Max Berry has created a fun, geek-worthy novel in which government is the good guy. Pick it up and read it in one or two sittings. Cast the film in your head: should Angelina Jolie or Salma Hayek play the eponymous government agent, ruthlessly investigating the murders of schoolchildren as part of a plot to boost sales of Nike shoes. Berry has an interesting website, and while I don’t agree with all of his politics, he’s a fun guy who’s had enough of the branded dystopia of late capitalism.

5. The Aggrolites: The Aggrolites
Wow. This is one of those bands that makes me simultaneously wish I was still making music and ashamed that I ever tried to make music. I was lucky enough to see them a few weeks ago playing with the Skatalites. With all their punk swagger and rock poses, you would think that they were the latest garage indie thang…but no. The Los Angeles five-piece puts out amazing, tight, aggressive skinhead reggae with a heavy ribbon of funk and soul. While not a “political band” per se, they drop some consciousness and clearly understand the roots of their sound: an approach I appreciate more and more. If you only buy one post-Jamaican record this year, this has got to be it.

6. The Slackers: Peculiar
If you buy two, pick up the new Slackers album. The most consistently talented Jamaican-influenced American band has scored again. The last time I saw this band was on September 14th, 2001, just a couple of days after the attacks of 9-11. I was living in Oslo, Norway, and feeling especially homesick and terrified. I had just moved to Europe from New York, where many of the band members were drinking buddies of mine. Seeing old friends, hearing the comforting sounds of great ska, soul, jazz and reggae, and the hopeful onstage banter was like a healing salve. “Now why the hell would anybody want to go flying planes into people? That’s some fucked up shit.” I remember those words. Couldn’t have been said better.
At any rate, the new album takes quite a political turn. Several songs hit the Bush Administration from a Bronx-Reggae working-class perspective. Anthemic, simple, danceable, articulate.

7. Fischerspooner: Odyssey
Fischer-Spooner is one of the best of the new crop of synthesizer fetishist bands that all the kids are into nowadays. In fact, I found out about them through my 17 year old cousin, which is a sure sign that I am o.l.d. In any case, the music is complex and catchy, and the song “we need a war” is written with the simplistic punk irony that made bands like the Dead Kennedys so vital to survival in the 1980’s. Here’s a taste:

If they mess with us
If we think they might mess with us
If we say they might mess with us
If we think we need a war, we need war

Heh.

...and a third escapes justice

2006-12-10T16:06:00.000-08:00

Apparently only Margaret Thatcher is mourning.

jeane kirkpatrick 1926-2006

2006-12-08T18:13:00.000-08:00

Former Reagan advisor and United States Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick died yesterday. She was 80 years old. The obituaries I have found on the internet focus on her major contributions to (neo)conservative foriegn policy thought, including the so-called "Kirkpatrick doctrine" outlining the difference between "authoritarianism" and "totalitarianism". This delightful bit of intellectual gymnastics was used by the Reagan administration to justify support for murderous right wing "traditional" regimes, as well as the illegal destruction of democratically elected governments.

What is less reported is that Kirkpatrick started her political life as a socialist. Her break with the left was steady but gradual, and by no means unique. The link between staunchly anti-communist strains of socialism and the "muscular" neoconservatism which surrounded the Reagan administration is quite fascinating. Given my own strident anti-communism, I find the lives of people like Kirkpatrick to be cautionary tales.

I wish death on no one. I do, however, wish that Kirkpatrick and her coterie were given the justice that they deserved for helping engineer one of the most outrageously criminal foriegn policy adventures in recent American history. Let's not forget: these are the folks who sold arms to Islamist Iran in order to fund terrorists fighting to undermine a democratically elected government in Nicaragua.

While I'm dismayed by the political direction he has taken, Daniel Ortega's re-election last month does provide a sweet irony here. I do hope that Ms. Kirkpatrick heard the news before she passed on.

This has been a bad month for right wing heroes. Milton Friedman has also shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving a body of work which will continue to fuel cynical attacks on the most precarious members of society. William Greider has written a rightfully unsympathetic obituary in the Nation.

2006-12-08T14:51:00.000-08:00

I missed this commercial during the election

unserious waste of time

2006-12-08T14:34:00.000-08:00

Lest people think that I live by political invective alone, below are some links to wonderful things I have found on the internets.

1. White folks have the record for longest winning streak.

2. A religious tract for one of America's oldest faiths.

3. You, too, can be a heroic leader of the toiling masses.

4. The politics of your favorite superhero.

5. LNSGP

6. Why I don't trust anthropologists

7. I'm rooting for the Japanese lizard

are the progressive democrats possible?

2006-12-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

Some weeks ago, I spoke on a panel organized by the local chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). The event was meant as a post-election pep rally and the beginning of discussion of “what’s next”. John Dean of Watergate fame was the keynote speaker, and panelists included local elected officials, campaign staffers and grassroots activists. It was a good event. My thanks to the PDA for putting it on and getting the ball rolling on an important discussion.
My panel, focusing on citizen participation included a guy named Brad Parker, a lead activist with Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles. He is an articulate, if sometimes demagogic advocate for moving the party to the left. However, his comments on this occasion were somewhat disturbing, and pointed to some deep problems with the PDA’s approach to Party politics.
In his opening remarks, Parker explained, quite forcefully, why pundits and politicos are wrong when they insist on characterizing the Democratic victory last month as a triumph of the “center”. He went on, however, to excoriate Blacks and Latinos for “listening to their churches and opposing civil rights for women and gays and lesbians.” Holding the line on choice and gay marriage is commendable, but singling out blacks and latinos, two groups which once again handed the Democratic Party the overwhelming bulk of their support is somewhat strange. Framing the complexities of religious commitment and progressive values as a choice between one’s church and progressive politics is counterproductive to the extreme.
The event was attended by (I counted) three people of color, including myself. While there are many reasons for this fact, the kind of rhetoric employed by Parker is certainly no help. If white progressives insist on a cultural or theological litmus test for participation in their crusade, it is bound to fail. It’s also just inaccurate. While abortion and gay marriage are not popular among latinos, blacks, native Americans and other minorities, those are not the issues on which these communities base their voting decisions. The Republicans have tried desperately to force a realignment along “social” issues, but it has failed. On November 7th, it failed completely. I’m pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and about as progressive as you can get on a whole range of “social” questions, but Parker’s bizarre attack made me feel pretty damned unwelcome in the Democratic Party.
I was busy trying to figure out how to respond, when a question from the audience elicited another bizarre and divisive tirade from Parker. Someone asked why proposition 89, the somewhat sloppily constructed campaign finance proposal went down to defeat so dramatically in the election. I responded that the opposition was highly effective in painting it as a tax on businesses to go to a “slush fund for politicians”, and that the coalition necessary to pass radical campaign reform was simply not put together.
Parker blamed, and I quote, the “union bosses”, citing opposition by the California Teacher’s Association. The union bosses, according the Parker’s worldview, didn’t want to give up their corrupt power over the political process. While I had held my tongue after his vaguely racist outburst earlier, I did respond to this bit of ridiculousness. We can disagree with the decisions that unions make, but to use the rhetoric of the right, or to reify the myth that labor is a corrupting force in the political process is poisonous and counterproductive. It actually got worse from there, as Parker insisted that the problem with the “old” unions is that they don’t recognize that politics should be about free individuals with equal votes. A worse understanding of the circumstances labor finds itself in I have yet to hear.
I don’t quite get what folks like Parker think a progressive majority would look like. Apparently, it doesn’t involve actually existing black folks, latinos or labor, only imaginary, perfect and pristinely “progressive” versions of these vital constituencies. This is a typical and tragic failure by many white, middle-class progressives. They have a revelatory truth around which people should rally.
The PDA is currently working on a statewide push to elect progressive delegates to the next California Democratic Party convention. It’s a wonderful initiative, and I am excited that any organization is taking party work seriously enough to launch such an effort. However, if their plan is to build a progressive party by attacking labor and people of color, you can count me out.

the democratic party is possible

2006-11-28T16:54:00.000-08:00

Don’t believe the hype. The Democrats did not win by moving to the center. Some socially conservative candidates won, particularly in states where strong majorities are anti-choice and against civil rights for gay and lesbian families. However, there were at least as many progressives elected, including eight new members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, now the House’s largest non-party group. Nancy Pelosi is a member. Many of them will inherit powerful committee chairships.
That’s not to say that the victory demonstrated any kind of fundamental realignment. In fact, “all” that happened was that Republican gains within the Democratic base were eroded. Key constituencies within the old Democratic majority coalition came back to the fold. This can be seen geographically, as the electoral map begins to look more and more like a map of Civil War America, only with the parties switched. We made almost no gains in the South, while Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and New Hampshire snapped back into the Union. The Republicans, for their part, held the South and are in danger of becoming a regional party. Blacks stuck with the Democrats to the tune of 90%, despite high-profile campaigns by black Republicans in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Latinos shifted to the Democrats by a margin of nearly 30%. Support rose among women, working people, the poor and people at both ends of the educational spectrum. In short, this election showed that a majoritarian Democratic party is possible. The key will be keeping this coalition together, and expanding it, even when the Republicans aren’t falling on their own bibles/swords.
One important factor in this election was the slight but noticeable move toward economic populism by our Party. Gains in Ohio demonstrate the importance of this move. Witness Sherrod Brown, the state’s new Senator. On November 6th, Ohio was Republican, from the State Assembly to the Governor’s mansion to the contested Senate seat. The pro-choice, pro-gay and fervently pro-worker Brown led a clean sweep of the state, as all levels of government went to Democrats. The hook was Brown’s strong stands on economic issues: a re-evaluation of “free trade”, a rise in the minimum wage, a crackdown on corporate malfeasance. He did so without trading away the Party’s commitment to so-called “social issues”.
If social conservatism is the glue that holds the Republican majority together, economic justice can serve the same role for Democrats. Even the much ballyhooed “moderates” who won senate seats in Montana and Virginia ran ads against free trade and attacked their opponents for scuttling a minimum wage increase. Jim Webb, the Reagan Republican turned Democrat who won in Virginia campaigned hard on jobs and income inequality. Ballot initiatives raising state minimums passed everywhere they appeared on the ballot- a move widely seen as beneficial to Democratic turnout. In a nice symbolic turn of events, the Kansas state house turned totally Democratic. We even picked up a Congressional seat there. The idea that what is the matter with Kansas is that Democrats haven’t given working class folks a reason to vote for them seems like a pretty unassailable hypothesis.
Not to the right wing of the Democratic Party. They have joined the mainstream media and Republican sour-grapes pundits in arguing that super Tuesday was the result of the party’s move to the vaunted “center.” Rahm Emmanuel, the clarion voice of the New Democrats, has been buoyed by his successful gambit to recruit Gulf War veterans to run as Democrats. That was clever politics, but it only worked because both Republicans and Democrats gave people a reason to vote our way.
Organizationally, Emmanuel has called for DNC chair Howard Dean’s head. As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emmanuel has been highly critical of Dean’s strategy of (re)-building party organizations in every State. The DCCC is beholden primarily to members of Congress and the party’s fundraising base, and is locked into the logic of the short-game. Their preference for one election at a time, slash and burn strategies has led to twelve years of Party defeats and a general erosion of progressive values and discourse. The deep victories by Democrats in state government (we now control more state legislatures and governorships than the bad guys for the first time since 94) demonstrates that long-term base building reaps benefits. The Dean path will help solidify the base, the way that Republicans have done for 30 years. We shouldn’t go back to the days of Clintonian shallow victories. The Democratic Left should continue to rally around Dean.

No doubt, Congressional Democratic leaders could very well overplay their hand. I’m glad that symbolic, oppositional red-meat like impeachment has been jettisoned from the table. We have to achieve a modest program of actual reform to lay the groundwork for winning back more of the Democratic coalition. We will have to tread carefully, even on issues surrounding Iraq, regardless of the clear mandate for withdrawal.
If it is hard to call it a decisive victory, we can safely conclude that it was a decisive defeat. The Karl Rove strategy of combining jingoistic paranoia with cultural reaction went down in flames. What, precisely, it will be replaced with remains to be seen. Nevertheless, whether by accident or by design, the Democratic Party has won a major election, one that will have huge positive effects for working families and for the cause of international peace and security.
The minimum wage will be raised. Anti-labor fine print will be removed from bills. Real health care reform will get a hearing, and even “single-payer” will see the light of day. Judicial nominations will be blocked. Investigations will be mounted, and from the dais rather than the basement. For this we should be happy.

Next week: Progressives and the Party

party like it's 1967

2006-11-15T20:19:00.000-08:00

As if things weren't feeling Vietnamy enough, this from The Guardian:

President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations.

I am very much afraid that this logic will be echoed from some of the new Democratic members of congress, particular in the Senate. Phased withdrawal must remain the mantra from our side of the aisle. The repetitious promise of “One last big push” is how the political class locked the country into escalation in the war in Vietnam.
If progressives can achieve one thing over the next two years, it will be to put enough pressure on Democrats to hold the line against escalation. This will take willingness to be vocal and critical. It will also take the ability to mobilize on the ground with enough success that there is a majority of votes behind staying the course…to get out of Iraq. We have to do both. One without the other will fail.

now that's party discipline

2006-11-15T12:24:00.000-08:00

I'm still working on an analysis of last tuesday. Suffice it to say, I am elated but cautious.

Other news is pressing however, and provides food for thought on our own predicament. South Africa's parliament, thanks to a party-line vote by the ruling African National Congress, has legalized gay marriage. The move was prompted by a high court decision stating that the constitution, perhaps the world's most progressive, demanded equal rights for gay couples.

The majority of South Africans, black, white and "colored" oppose gay marriage. In fact, it is likely that had the ANC allowed its members to vote independently, the vote would have gone quite differently. Most of the opposition parties voted against the new law, including the Pan African Congress and the Inkhata Freedom Party, two of the ANC's rivals among black South Africans.

Traditionalists in the ANC and elsewhere in South African civil society are furious, claiming, as one would expect, that the move would usher in a moral downfall for the continent. Others claimed that the move toward gay rights follows from "foriegn" or "eurocentric" political doctrine.

In fact, the ANC's action was further testament to the notion that, however shaky or imperfect, South African political leadership is deeply committed to the principles of equality. The ANC has strong enough support among its base that it can make risky moves in devense of those principles.

Here's Vytjie Mentor, the ANC leader in Parliament, as quoted in the NYT:

There is “no such thing as a free vote or a vote of conscience,” he said. “How do you give someone permission to discriminate in the name of the A.N.C.? How do you allow for someone to vote against the constitution and the policies of the A.N.C., which is antidiscrimination?”

We have seen this dynamic in South Africa before, with the ANC pushing a line of truth and reconcilliation over revenge after coming to power, as well as their insistance on including women's rights in the new constitution. That document, along with the ANC's own statement of principels includes a radical commitment to social, gender and economic equality, as well as environmental sustainability and protection.

So, can a party win and govern when part of its base is not on board with an ambitious progressive agenda? The ANC demonstrates that it can.

In the US election last week, Democrats pulled significant support from constuencies which are fairly socially conservative. Blacks, latinos and white, male union members all turned further toward the Democratic coalition. Latinos swung a full 30% toward Democrats in comparison to the last election, and blacks remained at their current level: 90% support for Dems. Blacks held firm even as Republicans courted black clergy, offered up socially conservative black candidates, engaged in vote supression and bombarded black neighborhoods with radio ads calling Democrats "the party of slavery". None of it worked, and that's good.

While running socially conservative candidates may have helped in courting white evangelicals and some white males, conservative pundits are grossly overemphasizing this factor. Less reported is the fact that economic populism, minimum wage campaigns and a more critical pose toward trade all helped us win back the parts of our base that Republicans have been chipping away at for decades.

The Democrats are not the ANC. We don't have a parliamentary system or a political culture that even allows the sort of party discipline on display in South Africa. However, what we can learn is that standing up for minorities' rights doesn't have to cost you a majority if you really give people a reason to vote for you.

NY Senate Race focuses on the issues.

2006-10-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

According to FOX news, Hillary and her hopeless Republican opponent are sparring over the most important issue of the day.

ha. ha.

2006-10-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

In the past weeks, two ministers in the new "center-right" government in Sweden have had to resign: one for tax evasion, and another for failing to pay TV license fees and hiring a nanny off the books. Before you jaded American readers scoff too heartily, consider that the TV license evader was Minister of Culture, a post that had her overseeing the state Television stations funded mainly through these subscription fees. Add to this that her summer home was owned by a corporation based in the British Channel Islands (a popular tax shelter for European elites), and you have a recipe for exactly the sort of venality we've come to expect from the Swedish Right.

It's true, though, that Swedes don't mess around when it comes to corruption. A few years ago, a popular Social Democratic minister resigned for having an extravagant crawfish dinner at his home on the taxpayer dime. Crazy swedes. I bet they don't even care who is doing what to whom in the Prime Minister's residence. All they care about is their elected officials obeying the same laws they do. Commies.

Two down, a whole bunch more to go...

Read more here.

what do you expect?

2006-10-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

Wow. Readers of hoverbike know that I generally don't blog about major news stories: I always figure there is enough noise out there about anything going on in the mainstream media. However, I just couldn't resist the unfolding drama around Mark Foley's fall from grace.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that congressional pages are preyed upon by older staff and members of congress. In fact, two Congressmen got in trouble for just that in 1983. One was a Republican who hooked up with an underage female page, the other a Democrat who had a relationship with a 17 year old male. The Republican was defeated in the next election, while the Democrat was reelected repeatedly. They were both officially censured by the House.

What Foley did was disgusting and should be illegal. Apparently though, the age of concent in the District of Columbia (run by Congress, remember) is 16, and so it is possible that his lecherous emails and messages are perfectly legal.

What is most disturbing, however, has been the reaction on the right to the hypocracy of one of their rising stars. The party which prides itself on being the moral gatekeepers of the nation have found a pedophile among their ranks, something which in an alternate universe might prompt some discussion about the silliness of holding elected officials up as moral paragons. Instead, Foley gave the Republican leadership a gift: he came out of the closet.

By admitting what everyone in Washington already knew, that he is a gay man, Foley allowed conservatives to go around saying "what do you expect? He's gay." Right wing playmaker Paul Weyrich today on NPR stated clearly what everyone else is saying between the lines: "it's well known that gays are obsessed with sex." When pressed by the interviewer to justify such a wildly homophobic statement he explained that this is a well-established fact, backed up by psychologists and scholars and others "who have to deal with them (gay people)".

It's a brilliant way to play to a base that makes little distinction between consensual gay relationships and child molestation. A recent caller in to a CSPAN talk show asked why people were making such a big deal about it, since Democratic congressman Barney Frank has been an "avowed homosexual" for years. Jesus.

And if the ploy doesn't work, Foley has also claimed to have been molested by a Catholic priest, allowing the fundementalist base to dismiss him as an isolated incident on two counts. Gay. Catholic. Oh, and an Alcoholic. All the bases are covered.

There are loads of gay catholic alcoholics out there, even some who were molested by priests. I'm sure many of them are Republicans. However, very, very, very few of them are pedophiles. Just Mark Foley.

(re)class struggle

2006-10-04T14:52:00.000-07:00

The National Labor Relations Board just ruled that nurses who are responsible for assigning tasks to other nurses are officially management, and therefore inelibable for union membership or protections.

The decision will have disastrous reprocussions accross the service and professional sectors, encouraging employers to re-classify workers out of bargaining units. This may well effect teachers, scientists, engineers and technicians among others.

The vote on the NLRB was along party lines, with Republicans voting for the change and Democrats voting against it. Say what you will about union involvement in politics: this decisions would have gone the other way had Al Gore or John Kerry been put in the White House.

The ruling wasn't as bad as it could have been, and nurses unions accross the country are mobilizing around it. However, the precident is clear- not satisfied with the roughly 10% union density in the American Workforce, labor's enemies want to use decisions like this one to further curtail the ability of workers to bargain collectively.

For more info, check out the AFL-CIO's blog.

the green party picks its battles

2006-10-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

This just arrived in my email from Jen Ancona over at governorphil.com and powerpac.

From Capital Morning Report

*Todd Chretien*, Green Party candidate for US Senate, accuses the
*Angelides* for Governor campaign of "censoring anti-war students by
cutting them out of a video now on the campaign website because they
believed the Democrat isn't really opposed to the war." According to
*Chretien*, when students arrived at a Sept. 26 rally at SF State to
hold up signs questioning *Angelides'* commitment to ending the war,
"they appeared in the news coverage and the original video the campaign
shot. In order to censor out the anti-war students, the *Angelides*
campaign used footage from an identical speech he gave in Burbank and
then spliced the two together to create the video now seen on his
website." Says *Chretien*, "I think it's shameful that *Phil Angelides*
wanted to use the students of SF State, ... as a back drop for his
campaign. And yet, when those students who, unlike *Angelides*, have
been organizing against the war since the beginning, arrived to express
their opinion, he censored them ... " Contact: Chretien 415 412 4540.

*Chretien* also says *Angelides'* campaign "illegally searched
students"
at a Sacramento City College rally last week, "having campaign staffers
go through students' backpacks before they could enter the free
on-campus, outdoor rally."

--- I say, call the bastard (Chrenien) and ask him why he thinks its more important to hold anti-war rallies at Angelides campaign events than it is to beat Schwarzenegger. While you're at it, ask him how it is that Angelides is insuficiently anti-war given that he is the only Democratic gubenatorial candidate in recent memory to pledge pulling National Guard troops out of Iraq.

why we fight

2006-10-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is because I hear watered down versions of it so often here in California, my favorite quote from this week’s cover story in The Nation goes as follows:

“Whites do not like crowded societies, and Americans would not have to live in crowds if our government kept out Third-World invaders.”

The quote is by Marian Kester Coombs, wife and ideological comrade to Francis Coombs, managing editor over at the Washington Times. The Nation story details a leadership fight brewing over at the Times. The paper is being fought over by hard-line conservatives loyal to Preston Moon, son of Times owner Sun Myung Moon and a band of neo-confederate racists. Coombs is the leader of the latter group, which mixes openly with white supremacists, holocaust deniers and even international far right leaders, including folks from the British National Party. It’s a straight out horror story in which the “good guys” are connected to a bizarre Korean religious cult and the “bad guys” argue that slavery was good for Black people. It’s well worth a read.

But underlying the story is the fact that the white supremacist wing of the Republican Party have zeroed in on immigration as the “most important issue facing America.” Immigration has been the issue that Coombs and his compatriots have pushing hardest in the editorials and news section of their paper, a key political organ for Conservatism as a movement.

With a major national platform like the Washington Times (Ronald Reagan’s “favorite newspaper”), these bridge-builders are helping to mainstream a slightly slicker version of Henry Wallace style populist racism. Together with the prolific Pat Buchanan and the softer bigotry of CNN’s Lou Dobbs, they have turned vigilante Minutemen into celebrities, helped embolden House Republicans to pass draconian immigration laws one step at a time, and made it safe for the Governor of California to make racist comments. Making immigration the issue is smart, especially as real concerns about economic insecurity, overpopulation and pressures on natural resources are combined with suburban NIMBYism and subtly racist feelings of cultural superiority among Anglos. Buchanan and Dobbs are able to make white supremacy seem like common sense.

This is bad for the country. The divisive politics of the neo-Confederates and race-baiters is dangerous to our society. It’s also a crucial part of the Right’s long-term strategy of dominance. Building a strong racial-nationalist discourse is direct and compelling appeal to the last parts of the white working class base that is crucial to any hope of building a progressive majority in America. It is the coffin-nail in the Democratic Coalition that we should be expanding, not having to defend.

That’s why the Democrats, and the broader left should take immigration seriously- and fight back against the emerging “consensus” that immigrant workers are to blame for our social and economic ills. We need a brave narrative, like the one taken by the labor movement and many community leaders in last Spring’s wave of demonstrations. In our narrative, immigrant workers are a part of our community, and their precarious situation is the reason that wages and working conditions are depressed, which results in poverty in their communities. Any solution centers around a path to legalization and the construction of institutions to support immigrant families in pressing for their rights. No doubt policy compromises will be made, but this is the narrative we must continue to promote. It’s the only one that can really counter the story of a white America overrun by “Third World invaders.”

news press workers victorious!

2006-09-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

Some good news for a change! By an overwhelming majority, Santa Barbara News Press newsroom workers voted for representation by the Teamsters' Graphic Communication Conference.

This is a great victory for workers who have been threatened and harrassed by their independently owned newspaper, and is the latest event in a saga which has been covered by everyone from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to the British Guardian. A few articles are linked below:

San Francisco Gate

Santa Barbara Independent

A Journalism Blog

Los Angeles Times

The added importance locally is that the News Press is a consistantly anti-union voice in the community, railing against the living wage and singling out political contributions by public employee unions while ignoring corporate donations to candidates they like. The newspaper, of course, has editorialized against their own employees' drive for recognition, spreading what can only be described as propaganda against unions in general and the Teamsters specifically.

The union has done a good job of reaching out to the community, enlisting the help of environmental, social justice and labor organizations in encouraging supporters to cancel subscriptions. We've all been rooting for the reporters, and everyone who cares about quality journalism and workplace rights have reason to celebrate.

is the democratic party posssible pt 3: labor to the rescue

2006-09-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

Can Labor Save the Party’s A**?

It is a good day. The announcement that key unions will be resurrecting the Alliance for a Better California in a full campaign to unseat Gov. Schwarzenegger is indeed welcome news. It comes at a time in which understandable disappointment is brewing over the Democratic Party’s seeming inability to mount a viable campaign for it’s Gubernatorial candidate. Once again, it seems that the burden for electing a Democrat to high office will fall on the working families of California’s labor movement. While the Party may well do a similar independent expenditure in the campaign, it is likely to be paltry compared to Alliance’s.
We should all be saying “thanks.”

The fact is that Phil Angelides is a good candidate. What he lacks in relative star power, he more than makes up for in substance and commitment to Democratic values and sensible, winnable policy change. I don’t want to throw salt on anyone’s wounds by criticizing his campaign, though there is much to complain about. The point, however, is that the campaigns of individual candidates shouldn’t matter nearly as much as they do. There should be a grassroots apparatus which surrounds and supports such campaigns. That’s hard to do given campaign finance law, and may become even harder should the otherwise noble Proposition 89 pass.

However, the problem is not just the vagaries of post-McCain-Feingold campaigning. There is an unfortunate lack of will among some leaders of the Party, particularly elected officials who put their own careers ahead of the goals of the Party and the needs of their constituents. A more partisan and dynamic Democratic Party could help to translate last year’s decisive victory against Arnold into a triumphant campaign to replace him. Alas.

Enter labor. Labor is often the subject of accusations, from both our enemies and some of our erstwhile friends, that unions are anachronistic “special interests”. However, the decision by the Alliance to jump into the campaign demonstrates that unions, like other social movement elements of the Democratic coalition, respond to the real needs and interests of their base. That’s what makes them a vital part of our democracy. The analysis presented by Political Scientist Bruce Cain in yesterday’s Chronicle is right on the money:

"If you go after Arnold and he wins, you're giving him more reason to go after you when the election is over," said Bruce Cain, political scientist at UC Berkeley. "But if you don't go after Arnold now, you still have the risk that he will do another 180-degree turn on you after the election. "My guess is that labor probably doesn't think they have a choice -- they've got to go all out for Phil and not trust Arnold."

Labor knows what so many Democrats can’t seem to grasp: Arnold is not a friend. He may have played nice these past few months, but the real Arnold will be back.

It’s not just the Alliance that will be working to stave off that return. County Central Labor Councils and locals of unions not active in the Alliance have already started contacting their members and mobilizing their troops to walk precincts and make phone calls. We won’t be able to rely on many of the Party’s mucky-mucks, and there is no doubt that Arnold will outspend Phil. What we do have, however, are thousands of union members who will join those grassroots Democrats who, despite it all, believe that Arnold is worth beating and can be beaten.

Eat that, Susan Kennedy.

will the swedish model hold?

2006-09-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

The answer to my own wonky question is "yes". Sunday's electoral victory by the right-wing "Alliance" of four parties was a defeat for the valliant but tired Social Democratic Party. It was not a defeat for Social Democracy. Still, it's not a good thing. While the new majority is somewhat slim (7 seats), it will likely survive a full term. They'll do some damage, on integration questions, on macro-economics, labor rights and probably foreign policy.

However, their victory required a major concession: the acceptance of the basic governing tenants of Social Democracy. In fact, the conservative Moderate Party, the dominant player in the Alliance, campaigned, Blair style, as "the New Moderates". Their move to the center brought in middle and working class votes that would not have been theres had they stuck to their traditional neoliberal talking points.

Nonetheless, even though the mandate is small at the national level, it was a mandate. In fact, at the local level, (local and national elections were held simultaneously) the Moderates took control of scores of city and regional governments, including Stockholm and Gothenburg. While the Social Democrats did perform better than was expected several months ago, the Moderates' surge in popularity was decisive.

There were interesting trends among the smaller parties, as well. Neither the Social Democrats nor the Moderates will ever recieve enough votes to govern absolutely. The Social Democrats rely on the "toleration" of the sometimes quixotic Greens and the Left Party. Neither minor party is allowed into the Government, so it is not technically a Coalition. While the Greens perennially make noise of breaking with the Social Democrats, they always end up listening to their base and voting in a minority Social Democratic government. The Left Party can also be a pain in the ass. Shortly after the last election, their popular and quite strategic was forced to resign due to a personal tax scandal. Her replacement, from the paleoleft faction of the party, decided to announce last year that he was, in fact, a "Communist." Then he recanted, becoming the only thing worse than a Communist in Swedish politics: a disloyal, dishonest Communist. Their vote was down considerably this time around.

In Sweden, Right Wing governments are always true coalitions, led most times by the Moderates, but with government ministers from the other so-called "bourgeois" parties: the liberal People's Party, the agrarian Center Party and the Christian Democrats. The People's Party has also participated in governments of the left, and include a healthy faction of left-leaning "social liberals" (these folks are probably the closest to our Democratic Party in Sweden). In the last elections, the liberals did very well by moving to the right on immigration and integration questions. It was a craven move, but it paid off. For the first time, it seemed that the People's Party would be the new leading party of the right. This year, they got caught spying on the Social Democrats. They lost a lot of ground.

It was the Moderate Party who were back in the forefront, and their leader, Fredrik Reinfeldt, is the new Prime Minister. Right wing governments don't usually last long in Sweden. Generally they try too hard, and over-extend their mandate. The fact that they are always coalitions makes them even more unstable: the Christian and agrarian vote won't let them go after the Welfare State too aggressively and the liberals demand radical moves on social issues. Not an easy recipe for a coherent strategy for governance.

But this new "Alliance" seems a bit more disciplined and truly eager to govern. They have resonated the same themes on the campaign trail, they've stuck to the script, and they seem to have hammered out key turf issues well in advance. Most importantly, they've campaigned as centrists, as modernizers, as having accepted the basic Swedish lay of the land. They are, in that sense, akin to our own Governor here in California. We know that he has proven much more difficult to beat, even though his agenda is usupported by the majority of Californians. He's a "moderate" Republican. Nonetheless, he continues to sneak right wing policies quietly past the goalie. Beware these "moderates", old or new.

The Social Democrats and the rest of the Swedish left needs to do some serious thinking whilst sitting in opposition. It's possible that this bunch can't be counted on to simply lose the next election for us. The next one will have to be won.

Here are the results, via our friends at The Daily:

Percentage vote on the left, Riksdag seats on the right, change in brackets.

Left Party 5.8% (-2.5%) 22 (-8)
Social Democrats 35.2% (-4.8%) 130 (-14)
Greens 5.2% (+0.6%) 19 (+2)

Total Left bloc 46.2% (-6.7%) 171 (-20)

Centre Party 7.9% (+1.7%) 29 (+7)
Liberal Party 7.5% (-5.9%) 28 (-20)
Christian Democrats 6.6% (-2.5%) 24 (-9)
Moderate Party 26.1% (+10.9%) 97 (+42)

Total Bourgeois bloc 48.1% (+4.2%) 178 (+20)

Others 5.7% (+2.6%) 0 (-)

europolitics round up

2006-09-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

Sweden.

Well, there's just a few days to go until Swedish parliamentary elections. The two party blocs are still polling neck in neck, with the left (made up of the Social Democrats, the Left Party and the Greens) slightly ahead. The good guys' fortunes were recently improved when it was revealed that the Liberal Party (on the Right in Sweden) had been hacking into the Social Democrats' private network to get info on campaign tactics and schedules. It's good to see that all parts of the American campaign toolbag is being exported, including Richard Nixon's contributions.

Critics are calling the scandal "Leijonborggate" after charismatic Liberal Party leader Lars Leijonborg. Confusingly, the word also means "Lejonborg Street", but I guess the "-gate" suffix is now universal. What is most striking is that somehow Swedes are angry about such shenanigans, while American voters are bored by evidence that an entire election has been blatantly stolen. Twice. Oh well.

Great Britain (And Northern Ireland)

Accross the North Sea in Britain, pressure is mounting for Tony Blair to step down. As previously reported, the heir apparent is still Gordon Brown. Blair has now said that he will step down within a year, though that's not good enough for some on the Labour back bench or among some of the membership. Read more about it, and other goings on in the UK over at The Daily.

In other British news, former US President Martin Sheen has entered the Freshman class at Glasgow University. He'll be studying Literature, Philosophy and Oceanography.

Federal Republic of Germany
In a move hinted at by Ben in a comment on my last post, German automaker Volkswagen is pressing workers to accept longer hours without pay increases. I always like to read sentances like this one:

"Although Volkswagen's cars are proving popular and sales are very strong, its profit margins are being squeezed by high production costs, particularly in its west German heartlands."

So, here in the US, we are being asked to accept drastic pay cuts (as much as 70%) because of lagging sales, while in Germany, amid high sales, we are being asked to work harder and longer. Gotta love market logic.

labor day essay: buy american!

2006-09-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

It’s labor day, the traditional start of the fall election cycle. While most of Santa Barbara’s progressive political community looks at today’s holiday as the two-months-to-go mark for the November midterm election, I’m thinking about the state of the nation’s unions. Despite many positive developments and an increasing commitment to new organizing, it would be foolhardy to argue that workers are in anything but a tough situation in 21st century America. The bulk of new and innovative organizing will doubtless be centered in the growing service sector. However, there are still millions of industrial and manufacturing jobs out there to be organized.
Those jobs are under constant threat from the forces we generally refer to as globalization. Millions of jobs have been scrapped throughout the country, not only in the so-called Rust Belt of the Midwest, but also here in California, throughout the South and Northeast, the cradle of American industry. This is a crisis not only for workers and their families who are thrown to the market wolves, but also for the nation as a whole. On this labor day, we should reflect on how important it is to make things in America.
There are many people and organizations in a community like Santa Barbara who are part of the growing movement toward organic, sustainable and locally-grown food. That’s a good thing. From the perspective of public health as well as ecological sanity, buying locally, when possible, is an important principle. Getting people to make a connection between their favorite produce and our dependence on fossil fuels is an important lesson. We shouldn’t stop at food, however. We are driving cars made from metal forged in China, minerals mined in Africa and assembled in pieces from Korea, Mexico and Japan. The same is true of our ipods, cell phones, computers and other hallmarks of the “new” “clean” economy. In fact, they are very, very dirty products.
Basing our economy on debt-fueled consumption, real estate, and a low-wage service sector invites a massive crash. It won’t be felt equally throughout American society, but where it is felt, it will be disastrous. In many respects, the consistent and horrific decline of our urban centers is a harbinger of a deiundustrialized America. Communities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago and Newark have been destroyed by the loss of manufacturing jobs. When this happens in the context of racialized patterns of opportunity, the results are easy to see.
The art of balancing trade policies which aid the development of poor countries while supporting a domestic industrial base is a difficult one- but it will never be achieved so long as our policy makers, and consumers, fail to see the importance of a domestic manufacturing base. Consumer preferences alone aren’t going to solve the problem, but they can go a long way. Consider again the case of organic produce.
Wal-Mart, a company that got its start stocking made-in-the-USA products and now leads the retail industry in plunder and devastation, has announced plans to step up its marketing of organic food. While this is a mixed blessing for organic food advocates, it demonstrates that rising demand has effected the behavior of a major U.S. corporation. It would be great if, in addition to shopping for local squash, progressive shoppers would also buy cars, electronics and washing-machines made in the United States.
Of course, organic buying also shows the limitations of consumer-based social action. Organic farms are not generally better than their pesticide-using counterparts when it comes to labor standards. In fact, many workers trade exposure to pesticides for increasingly intensive labor. There are attempts underway to find ways of labeling food as worker-friendly. Of course, as with anything from toasters to tomatoes, there is no better label than the union label.

Happy labor day!

new phil angelides blog

2006-08-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

Some friends of mine have started a Phil Angelides blog, independent of the campaign, with news, analysis and counter spin.

I'll be contributing occasionally. Check it out. Here's my first post:

From Connecticut to California

Liberals and progressives have been rightfully juiced-up by events in Connecticut this week. Tuesday night was a good one for everyone who cares about the future of the Democratic Party, or, more generally, about our country’s dwindling reserves of goodwill world-wide. With the nomination of Ned Lamont, Connecticut Democrats are saying that they want a real alternative to Republican foreign policy. That’s a good thing.

The race for Governor here in California is another such moment. In some respects, in fact, it is even more crucial and decisive a struggle for progressives than the nutmeg state’s Primary. After more than 20 years of ideological retreat, concession and incoherence, we have a candidate for leadership of the nation’s most powerful and populous state who offers a serious break with conservatism. It is one thing to campaign against an unpopular war in New England. It is quite another thing to campaign for progressive tax policy and massive public investment in the state that pioneered the Middle Class tax revolt. That takes a special kind of courage.

Nominating Lamont sent a strong message to Washington that we want Democrats to unify around opposition to the war. Our fight doesn’t stop there, however. We also want Democrats to be able to win elections and govern based on principles we could recognize as progressive. Republicans don’t only dominate discourse about foreign policy. They set the tone and the parameters of debate on the economy, labor issues, and a broad swath of social policy as well. For the medium, and the long-run, it is this sweeping hegemony that we need to uncrack. Foreign policy is important, especially given the carnage caused by our failed mission in Iraq. However, we have steadily lost ground in the war of ideas and rhetoric surrounding our most basic values as Democrats: equity, fairness and social justice.

That’s why Phil Angelides’ campaign is so damned important. His platform, which combines progressive taxation, the leveraging of state pension assets to encourage green production, and a renewed and honest commitment to education is the most progressive this State has seen for decades. It is, finally, a rejection of voodoo economics and the radical under-funding of public goods.

It’s also clever politically. The campaign targets the core justification of the Republican Party’s existence in California. They are in the clear minority on social issues, and Californians do not trust them to provide quality education, health care or to protect the environment. Low taxes are all they’ve got. If there is one thing that Karl Rove has demonstrated, it is the efficacy of aggressive campaigns which hit the opposition right where they think they are strong. Rove’s approach is sleazy and ad hominem (Swift Boat Vets), but it’s deadly. In an infinitely more principled way, and relying on sound economic policy, Angelides is also taking the fight to the Republicans.

The wealthy and giant corporations have been getting a free ride for too long. It is this free ride, not teachers or administrators or public employees which has bankrupted California. Instead of taking this issue head-on, Republicans continue to borrow from our grandchildren in order to educate our children. It just doesn’t make sense. A victory based on these arguments will be a fundamental defeat for the conservative movement. We can’t honestly say that about too many Democratic victories nowadays.
Unfortunately, just like in Connecticut, some California Democrats refuse to get with the program. Several big-donor Hollywood moguls have pledged their support for Arnold, including Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and “Power Rangers” importer Haim Saban. More destructively, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s campaign co-chair just announced in The Chronicle and The Times that she’s voting for Schwarzenegger because she’s “sick and tired of paying taxes.” Fellow Governor Phil contributor Conan Neutron has put these folks “on notice." Rightfully so.

Good politics should chart a course, not merely triangulate a path of least resistance. It is this notion that is on the ballot in November. If we are serious about building a Democratic Party that stands on principle and wins real and not merely fleeting victories, we’ve got to do all we can to elect Phil.

yesterday's news

2006-08-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

In the Constitution State

Congratulations to everyone in Connecticut who worked to give Joe Lieberman the defeat he deserved. We have indeed taken one step closer to a coherent political party as Democratic voters did what Senate whips could not: demand that we behave as an opposition party.
However, any conclusion that is larger than that, I have to approach with skepticism. I'm not so sure that this was a victory for "progressives" as much as it was a victory for anti-war politics with an electorate that is increasingly hostile to the Bush Administration's so-called "foriegn policy". Ned Lamont is at best a mainstream Democrat, not a barnstorming progressive as some have made him out to be. Lieberman's attack dogs, while clearly overemphasizing some of Lamont's votes as a local elected official, were not totally off-base.
I don't mean to rain on anyones parade (OK, yes, I do), but we need to be careful about substituting a candidate's position on one issue, even an important one like the war in Iraq for a comprehensive shift in politics. We'll see what kind of Senator Lamont becomes, but both the hopeful left and the spiteful right need to be careful before concluding that the Democratic Party finally aligning itself with the views of a majority of Americans signals as decisive shift to the left.
But speaking of Party Unity, rumors are flying that Connecticut Republicans will endorse Lieberman's bid as an independent. I'm not sure what to make of this. I am not an expert on Connecticut's electoral laws, though I know that they do have some sort of fusion which allows cross-endorsements. At any rate, it will be a fine and fitting end to the guy's political career if he went out running as a Republican.

In the Peach State
What are we to make of Cynthia McKinney's defeat in her own primary run-off for the Georgia 4th? Most of the analysis I have read has focussed on her physical confrontation with a security guard and voters' "wearyness" surrounding her often controversial personality and opinions.
McKinney has been a solid and outspoken critic of the Administration, from its handling of Katrina to its adventures in Iraq. At the same time, she's also done some strange things, including cozying up with African dictators. McKinney became the darling of the 911 conspiracy crowd when she intimated that the White House knew about the infamous attacks before they happened- no doubt those folks are spinning theories about the plot to silence her. Then there's the comments made by her father, a ranking State Legislator after her defeat in the 2002 Primary. According to dad, Cynthia was another victim of the "J.E.W.S."
Any thoughts out there in cyberspace?

couldn't resist...

2006-08-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

:: Which West Wing character are you? ::

I wanted to be CJ, but I ended up Toby... I think everyone ends up Toby.

Thanks to The Daily.

is the democratic party possible? Part 2: Party Unity

2006-08-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of partisanship. I know that this is an unpopular position, both among the growing plurality of “independent” voters, as well as those on the left who wish to remain outside the “confines” of the Democratic Party. However, a disciplined political party, with a loyal voter base, active civil society organizations in and around it, and a clear national or statewide agenda can accomplish considerable social change. Unfortunately, it seems that only the Republican party got this memo.

And so I was surprised today to read a great defense of partisan strategy written by none other than Paul Krugman, a guy who normally leads the squishy brigade. I am used to him offering above-the-fray niceties, and was quite shocked to read him lay down some bomb tracks:

“The point is, those who cling to the belief that politics can be conducted in terms of people rather than parties –a group that also includes would-be centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman and many members of the punditocracy- are kidding themselves.”

Krugman hammers NARAL and the Sierra Club for endorsing liberal Republican Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island. Chaffee has a decent voting record on both choice and environmental issues. However, as Krugman points out, if the Democrats do not take back the Senate, people who dismiss climate change as “a hoax” will continue to oversee the nation’s environmental policy. Conservative NGO’s, on the other hand, are down the line partisan, even rolling with policies they don’t deem perfect in order to make sure that their larger interest, a Republican government, remains fulfilled. This is a profound point. Partisanship matters.

However, this relationship is a two way street. If we are going to expect labor folks, environmentalists and civil rights activists (and their organizations) to stick with the Party, the Party needs to stick with them. And themselves.

Democratic politicians have a tendency to show their “independence” to voters by stepping on the faces of their base supporters. Consider Clinton’s welfare “reform” initiatives and his support for NAFTA. A whirlwind of discussion in the liberal magazines (The Prospect and Nation, specifically) has centered on the need for the Party to generate a set of “big ideas”, organizing principles within which a majority of Americans can find themselves. This is certainly a necessity. However, in arguing for this, writers like Todd Gitlin, Michael Tomasky, and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga have suggested that politicians need to distance themselves from the groups which make up their base. That’s nonsense, and it’s precisely why so many organizations at the grassroots level want to assert their own independence. When you add in the American cult of individuality, the weakness of our party system, and an electoral arrangement built around individual candidates (especially in California), there are a lot of incentives for issue and constituency-based social movement organizations to be quite guarded and even schizophrenic when it comes to dealing with Democrats. Any “big idea” that comes out of the Democratic Party has to be a sum of its parts, appealing across the varied communities and interests under its tent. You aren’t going to get that by following Tomasky’s advice.

A third problem is that so often elected Democrats put short term gains ahead of long-term strategy. Compromise is the life’s blood of politics, but Democrats seem to suffer from hemophilia.

Take a look at the California Gubernatorial race.Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa both could use a dose of party loyalty. Nunez, while serving the largely ceremonial role as campaign Chairman for Phil Angelides, has in recent months become a regular podium-buddy to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Together, they have crafted a “bi-partisan” package of infrastructure bonds and sent them to voters, thus reinforcing Arnold’s strategy of delivering public goods while passing the cost on to kids who can’t vote against him. That’s not good for Phil. In an even more craven mode, Assembly and Senate leaders are discussing a swap: Arnold gets to take redistricting away from them (one of his failed proposals in the Special Election last year) and in return they get relief from term limits. Now is not the time to be playing footsy with a rich, telegenic populist Republican. Now is the time to be sending a single message about why the Democrats should take back the governor’s office.

Villaraigosa, of whom I’m generally a fan, has done his friend Fabian one better, publicly feuding with Angelides over the Mayor’s attempt to take direct control of the LA school system. He has even enlisted the support of the Governor in pressing his case. So far, Villaraigosa has failed to endorse Angelides.

At best, this is about the short-term goals of shoring up their own voter base. At worse, however, this could be about intentionally working to sink Angelides in order to clear the way for a Villaraigosa run for Governor in 2010. I'm not so sure, but San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has floated that theory in his recent call to Democrats to muster for Phil.

In the end. Party unity must be earned. It emerges from a healthy balance between compromise, strategy, principles and trust. If you don’t believe me, ask Joe Lieberman.

to the euston station.... the left and universal human rights

2006-07-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

The left has often found it difficult to resist the notion that our enemy’s enemies are our friends. From the defense in some parts of the left of every move the Soviet Union made, to the 60’s fetishization of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, to the softer mistake of lifting Hugo Chavez to sainthood, we often seem to believe that any force which opposes the United States must be a good thing. Thankfully, most of us have not made this mistake in the current “war on terror”. This isn't true for everyone, of course. For example, the always overrated Naomi Klein let her enthousiasm for brown people with guns get the better of her when she wrote a much-attacked celebration of the Mahdi Army in Iraq. She found a way to triangulate around the simple fact that a victory for the Iraqi "resistance" would lead to the repeal of most of the Iraqi people's hard-won gains for women, workers and intellectual freedom.
Similarly, just as some Zionists employ a double standard about Israeli vs. Palestinian violence, there are those in the American left who simply reverse this double standard. Suicide bombings are regrettable, but the “real” problem is Israeli military action. Zionism is racism, but the rampant and disgusting anti-Semitism among Muslims and Arabs is understandable. In my view, they are both “the real problem”.
It is understandable that we would want to support resistance movements opposing occupations and atrocities committed with our tax dollars, but not all resistance movements are born equal. I am no pacifist, and believe that all people have the right to self-defense, even military. However, just as we would be critical of Israel’s choices in defense of its nationhood, so, too should we keep our wits about us when analyzing the motivations, behavior, ideology and strategies of movements opposing U.S. or Israeli policy in the Middle East.
That’s why I lost all respect for George Galloway after his recent speech at a march in London opposing Israeli terror-bombings of Gaza and Lebanon. You may remember Galloway, the articulate British MP who spoke to Congress last year, defending himself from allegations of aiding terrorism, and told them to stick it. He became a brief celebrity among liberals and progressives here, as we had not heard an elected Democrat speak forcefully about anything in so long. Galloway’s always been a bit nutty, but he jumped the goddamn shark when he exclaimed at the March that ''I am here to glorify the resistance, Hezbollah. I am here to glorify their leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah''. That was simply indefensible, especially given that the city of London is still recovering from a series of home-grown terror attacks which killed scores of working-class people.
As this sort of nonsense has gained ground in parts of the UK left, a group of intellectuals, activists and bloggers have issued a statement of principles known as the Euston Manifesto. Essentially an appeal for a renewed commitment to fundamental human rights, the document criticizes both anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, as well as the strange sympathy some on the left have toward Islamist movements. The Manifesto has been criticized for being waffly on the Iraq war, (in truth it is mostly silent on the issue, as authors are split on the question), and has been characterized as a right-wing document. Read it, and decide for yourself. Personally, I see the statement, which has been signed by a number of prominent American social democratic thinkers, as an important corrective to some of the more dangerously simplistic and authoritarian tendencies on the left. It may sound strange, but we do need to lay out a clear statement of principles regarding universal human rights. The real world is complex, and, contrary to George Bush’s bedtime stories, it is not divided clearly into good guys and bad guys. People living under repressive regimes must make difficult choices: however, it is important not to degenerate into an absolute moral relativism of the left- supporting anything that is against U.S. power, for example, or which wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism or anti-globalization, whatever those words actually mean.
We know that the right plays this game all the time. Any regime that is “anti-terrorist” or “anti-communist” can be apologized for: which is how both Pinochet and Saudi Arabia became our best friends. Let’s not make the same mistake.

See a clip of Galloway's speech here.

More of Naomi Klein's Judgements, "Bring Najaf to New York". I don't know about you, but I don't want to bring Najaf to New York.

after blair

2006-07-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

If the prevarications of the Clinton era have left center-to-progressive politics in noticeable disarray, the same can be said for the legacy of Clinton's cousin across the pond, Tony Blair. Blair's attempts to dismantle the Labour Party's ties to it's traditional bases in the trade unions and the new left may have created a considerable, but unstable electoral majority- just as Clinton's triangulation afforded the Democrats our only two-term president in my lifetime. As any hoverbike reader knows, I have serious doubts that the centrist strategy is good for our side in the long run. Life after Clinton has been hard for the Democrats, and the broad left, as we struggle to figure out what a progressive message, let alone progressive governance, looks like in the twenty-first century.
Blair's inevitable departure as Party Leader (and Prime Minister) is setting the stage for a political battle that, mirroring the 2004 Presidential Primary, will be a referendum on the meaning and consequences of the New Labour project. The heir apparent, Chancellor Gordon Brown, represents the segment of the party which is more traditional (and progressive) than the hard-core of New Labor, but which has gone along with Blair's rightward drift for the sake of victory and party unity. Most analysts believe that a Labor Party under Brown will continue the generally centrist approach of the current government, while strengthening slightly the commitment to the welfare state, trade union rights and a social justice-based trade policy. Even this difference, however, has been in question of late as Brown seems to be signaling his own shift to the right. Other voices (and potential Leader candidates) have emerged, however, positioning themselves as heralds of a more decisive shift to the left.
The darlings of the far-left blogosphere (think of them as somewhat akin to Dennis Kucinich) are John McDonnell and Michael Meacher. McDonnell has attracted attention and some key commitments from some of the grassroots. Meacher has nabbed some headlines for adding his voice to the 911 conspiracy chorus. Neither candidate is likely to win, given the powerful role that the party’s parliamentary group plays in selecting a leader. In the case of Meacher, that’s probably a blessing.
Other floating names include two cabinet members, John Denham of the Home office and Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary. As is the case here, the Iraq war looms heavily over the leadership question. The Party’s grassroots are strongly anti-war, and Blair’s continuing support for the Bush Administration’s policies has angered the base as well as a large percentage of Labour members of parliament. There have been high-profile cabinet resignations, as well as an upsurge in support for anti-war parties both to the left and the right of Labour. There is certainly an argument to be made, as it is here, that to be the leading party of the center-left, Labour must have a coherent, and progressive position on the war, while remaining credible and pragmatic on the overall question of national defense. That’s not an easy line to walk, but Blair’s lap-dog routine only works so long as the Conservatives don’t provide a viable alternative.
In Bush, the Republicans found just such an alternative. The new Conservative leader, David Cameron, is looking more and more like a serious challenger. In the next British election, Brown may well end up joining Al Gore as the failed continuation of the “Third Way” model. Only a strong and compelling reason to vote Labour will stop that from happening, and an internal challenge from the left of the party may be what it takes to force Brown to campaign on the Party’s strengths, instead of the Conservatives’ weaknesses. Let us just pray that he doesn’t put in a call to Kerry’s advisors.

To follow the Labout Party’s leadership saga, check out the daily, a fantastic new blog from which I blatantly stole much of the above analysis and information.

is the democratic party possible? Part 1

2006-07-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, Rick Jacobs, the pundit and activist behind the Courage Campaign, wrote an editorial for the Los Angeles Times in which he criticized the state Democratic Party for making endorsements in its own primary. In part, his missive seemed to stem from his support for wealthy centrist Steve Westly, who was thankfully beaten by the more progressive and labor-friendly Phil Angeledes for the gubernatorial nomination.
His essay, however, raises important and interesting questions for those of us who are attempting to create a political home inside the Democratic Party. Jacobs argues forcefully that the “party structure” is run by “insiders”, a group in which he seems to include not only elected officials, but unions, donors and large social movement organizations. Jacobs writes:

The last thing elected officials want is a party structure that could have a life of its own, European style, in which policy is actually decided by the party and in which ideas matter more than old connections. The state party's central committee, which meets annually, consists largely of well-intentioned, mostly older individuals who work year-round on political activities. Some go to monthly meetings where a parliamentarian drones on about Robert's Rules of Order and the proper way to make a motion. Most care deeply about the state but have at best a cursory connection to (California’s) 7 million Democrats. And they have no connection to the "decline to state" voters, who also may vote in primaries -- albeit only for initiatives and nonpartisan offices. In short, it is neither a disciplined structure nor a porous, welcoming organizing vehicle for activists outside of the club, or for the millions who vote.

It is refreshing to see a player of Jacobs’ stature recognize a key truth about Californian (and American) politics: the game is rigged to constrain the party grassroots. In fact, California is particularly bad. It’s electoral system, characterized by local non-partisan elections and an insane initiative process make it very difficult to develop the kind of “European style”, idea-based political culture that Jacobs mentions. Elected officials have, over the past twenty years, worked hard to further marginalize grassroots party structures, or to turn them into rubber stamps for their own decisions and endorsements. Add to this the nightmare of McCain-Feingold, which has further weakened political parties by making it harder for them to run coordinated campaigns at both the local and federal levels.

However, this is precicely why Jacobs’ thinking is so, well, whack. We all want to get rid of the smoky room, and empower grassroots activists to be more than shock troops for party elites. That’s not going to happen without the participation and buy-in of social movement actors (labor, feminists, Latinos, blacks, etc). These groups are often derided by Jacobs, Kos, and other Atari Democrats, who see the line of struggle in American politics as between the “netroots” and the “elites”. Would that it were.

Ironically, Jacobs’ main complaint, that the party endorses candidates in its own primary election, is exactly the sort of thing we need to facilitate the “Europeanization” of American party politics. For a more independent, grassroots-based party to exist, it must have some kind of independent power to intervene in politics as a coherent organization. Endorsing candidates in the primary which are “more” rather than “less” worthy of the Democratic Party mantle is a small but crucial power that the party can bring to bear. Otherwise, primary battles are nothing more than expensive beauty contests. The endorsement process facilitated a handful of promising (if ill-strategized) floor fights at this year’s state party convention. If there was no endorsement process, the Progressive Democrats wouldn’t have bothered to show up as part of their attempt to unseat pro-war Democratic congresswoman Jane Harmon.

Jacobs is also mistaken about the ability of “decline to state” voters, (people with no party identification) to vote in Democratic primaries. They can. That’s not a good thing. Campaigns like Westly’s, which sought to appeal to non-Democrats in order to win the Democratic nomination doesn’t build the strength of the party or lead to political contests where “ideas matter”. It pushes all politics to the so-called “center”, and begins the downward spiral of triangulation, poll-fetishization and compromise before the choices are even put to voters in the general election. We are very lucky that last year’s attempt to essentially do away with the primaries and just have two rounds of voting went down in flames.

All of this, of course, is part of an open question. It is quite possible that the structure of American political life is determinant enough that the electoral arena will always be personality-driven and expensive. Certainly, this is the direction that European politics is heading, though at a slower clip. I, for one, am still willing to fight for a democratic Democratic Party, and I know I am not alone. Jacobs and the Courage Campaign have an important role to play, along with the social movements, intellectuals, precinct captains, peace activists and neighborhood leaders. It would be nice if folks like Jacobs would put their money and time where their mouths are. Instead of dumping millions into a network of bloggers and point-and-click “activists”, the Courage Campaign should be identifying, training and supporting activists to –take over- the apparatus that Jacobs argues is geriatric and out of touch.

So, let us move forward, but be careful not to destroy the party even as we are building it.

on the liberal blogosphere

2006-07-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling to give birth to an essay about the "netroots" for weeks, and just found something quite close to what I wanted to write over at Clemens' blog. Check it out, cyberpoliticos!

the onion likes to pick on my union

2006-06-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

And, there's this.

On the plus side, it's nice that the UAW's recent decision to put more resources into organizing has filtered down to The Onion. This is good news. Scott Bailey, president of my local, 2865 was quoted in an AP story which was picked up by the New York Times and the Detroit Free Press among other papers, using academic student workers as an example of how resources and determination are needed to build union strength in an anti-union era.

a message from "big labor"

2006-06-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

Let’s get a few things straight. Labor is not a special interest. Unions are not anachronisms. The modern economy has not made worker’s organizations obsolete. One would think that these would be uncontestable principles among progressives in the United States. Unfortunately, waning union strength, years of effective conservative propaganda, and the predominance of middle-class professionals in Democratic circles have conspired to make us somewhat forgetful of these basic truths.

Organized labor is a cornerstone of modern democracy.

Imagine a government in which unelected officials had complete power to make decisions about the environment, about our economy, even about our civil liberties. Few in the United States would tolerate such a situation, but that’s the natural state of affairs in our workplaces. Employers decide how much we get paid, what our working conditions will be, how many hours we will work, and what we get to do on the job. Given that most adults spent the vast majority of their lives at work, this is a profound democratic deficit in our society. Just as people should have a say in government, so, too should they have a say in their workplace.
We don’t have to look too far to see what employers do without this check on their power. Sweatshops in Central America, Africa, Eastern Europe and South East Asia operate with impunity, paying abysmal wages and subjecting their workers to deadly environmental conditions. People who speak up are fired, beaten, even killed. Lest one would think that this is a question of culture or “backwardness”, remember that these are often American companies, headed by American executives and accountable to American shareholders. While some employers are better than others, they all feel the pressure of the race to the bottom. It is the logic of our economic system. If one company cuts costs through exploitation, they all have to, or they die. Unions are the necessary counterweight to this downward pressure, not just in terms of wages, but in health and safety, benefits and rights on the job.
If we want to take the “high road” in our economic life, we need to start at the most basic level: empowering working women and men.

Organized labor produces progressives.

In the last Presidential election, only one demographic group of white men voted for John Kerry: union members. If we have learned one thing about our country in the last few years, it is that great swaths of the nation are culturally quite conservative, and the corporate-Evangelical coalition which runs the Republican Party has been adept at tapping into that conservatism even while majorities strongly favor Democratic policy positions on the economy, education and the environment.
We can do a lot to improve our messaging, but the most powerful frames come from people’s everyday experience, not campaign spin rooms. Union members have an every day experience which shows them that banding together gives them power, that corporations are not our best friends, and that solidarity is more effective than scapegoating for putting bread on the table. Through internal education and voter mobilization, unions are able to direct this message into the political arena. That mobilization is often the key margin of victory for progressive candidates and ballot measures. Ask Arnold Schwarzenegger.
At the recent national convention of my union, the United Auto Workers, I met Glenn, a local leader from Saint Louis. As you all know, these are tough times for the auto manufacturing industry, and tough times are always passed first on to working families. As Glenn and I were talking, the subject of Gay Marriage came up. I found my own “Blue State” prejudices start to well up as Glenn, who grew up in rural Missouri and spoke with a slight country twang, explained how the issue was being used to distract people from what was really going on. Besides, he explained, his family has an aunt who lived her whole life with a female companion, and nobody cared. Glenn argues with his sister who insists that the world will be made a worse place if same sex marriage is allowed.
Glenn didn’t join the United Auto Workers because he’s a liberal. He’s a liberal because he joined the United Auto Workers. It is hard to name another popular institution in American social life which produces both material benefits and a progressive worldview. That potential is squandered when the Democratic Party is afraid to stand by working families in their economic policies. For too long, the Party has taken labor support for granted, championing cuts in the social safety net, failing to raise the minimum wage, backing lopsided trade deals and refusing to invest in real job creation. After all this, people are surprised when working class voters abandon the Democratic Party. When neither side can be trusted to deal with bread and butter issues, the choice is easy: chose the party which seems to share a cultural framework. The problem is not that the Democratic Party is too liberal on social issues. The problem is that it is too conservative economically.

Unions are needed now more than ever.

There is one term to describe the new economy being foisted on America. No, it isn’t dotcom, its Walmart. Now the largest private employer and wholesale consumer in the United States, Walmart is serious about building a union-free future. Liberals who are skeptical of labor should take a hard look at what’s happening in the retail and service sectors of our economy. That’s where lean production and flexible workforces lead us. We need unions to lift people out of the poverty that Walmart both preys on and reproduces. And we need them to make sure that restructuring and redeployment in the auto industry doesn’t happen at the expense of more than a hundred thousand workers and their families.
By some estimates, there are more than 65 million workers in the United States who would join a union tomorrow if they could. Ruthlessly pro-employer labor laws and management’s increasingly sophisticated union-busting playbook make it difficult, but not impossible, to help them achieve their dream. That organizing is happening, and the Democratic Party must be very clear about which side it is on.

Labor should have more, not less, power in the political process.

Corporations outspend unions 24 to 1 on political donations, and yet they are often discussed as if they are identical threats to the democratic system. Not only do employers have more power in the economy and in the workplace, they have more power in the political process: more money to give, more leverage over elected officials, more access to media. We should always be careful, in developing strategies for taking big money out of politics, that we don’t inadvertently reinforce this imbalance of power.
Where labor is strong, however, is on the ground and institutionally within the Democratic Party. While some people lament the fact that labor, along with environmental, feminist, people of color and LGBT groups, wield “insider” power within the party, this is aspect of the coalition politics upon which so much positive social change has been built. What all of these organizations have in common is that the people they represent are deprived of power in our society. Their strength is in coming together and using a collective voice- in mobilization, advocacy, and monetary contributions. They should have a strong voice in our party because our party is supposed to be about giving them a stronger voice in society.
And let’s not kid ourselves: there is a moral distance between corporations, which are driven by profit, and democratic organizations which represent millions of people at the bottom of the economic ladder. All things are not equal when they chose to intervene in politics. One does so for the benefit of the many, the other for the benefit of the few. It’s that simple. While unions can be sectoral in their thinking, there is tremendous pressure on them to think broadly and strategically, which is why unions have been at the forefront of so many important struggles- for universal health care, well-funded education, civil rights, even environmental protection. My own union, the United Auto Workers has a better position on fuel consumption than the national Democratic Party does.

Unions are at the core of any conceivable coalition to move America in a progressive direction. There is much work to be done to rebuild the labor movement and move it forward into the next century. However, this task is of crucial importance if we want to take the initiative away from the right. It is not an accident that as unions have waned, so has the “traditional” Democratic Party. We can wring our hands and talk about using the internet to "take back America", or we can understand that that fight happens in workplaces and neighborhoods across the United States. It is in organizing drives, Living Wage struggles, house meetings and city council elections from Seattle to Miami. Everywhere, labor is a part of those battles. Unions are far more than a national ATM machine for tepid, “liberal” candidates. Labor is the heart and soul of our progressive future.

Certainly, new challenges face us as the economy moves at lightning speed. Still, at the most basic of levels, nothing has changed at all. Employers still have more power than employees. Perhaps they have more than they ever have. All over the country, people are realizing that the only way to change that balance of power is to join together. For the union makes us strong.

feminist comic blogs

2006-06-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

In part because I haven't the time nor the money to read many comics, I've taken to reading blogs about comics. I've found some pretty funny and irreverent sites, many with good review sections which will help me make some purchases sometime down the line.

But the most interesting online community I've found in this forray has been the rapidly growing network of feminist comic bloggers. Two sites in particular are great reading: When Fangirls Attack and Girl Wonder. Both of them are afire with dissection of new, and startlingly mysoginist Xmen film, as well as the new lipstick lesbian version of Batwoman. The debates mirror those which arose in response to shows like The "L" Word and Sex in the City: With such a dearth of women characters, do you take what you can get or (and?) continue pushing for better representations? The analysis is smart, straight-forward and thoughtful. Even non-geeks should check it out.

One somewhat famous website/essay, which has elicited a fair amount of discussion among comic writers is entitled "Women in Refrigerators". It details the common use of women as grisly fodder- murder and meyhem victims with little agency or power themselves. It's excellent, and, if you followed that link you know that it has already generated its own Wikipedia entry. Here's the post itself.

If you don't think that such a movement is needed, check out some of the comments which greeted one of the columns on "Girl Wonder". Even searching for a good image for this story was a good illustration of the central problem: if it wasn't an impossibly built superheroine, it was an anime girl being violated by a space monster. True, the men in comics are hardly realistically rendered, but they are meant to be strong at least. Most female superheroes are essentially Penthouse models with capes. One feminist blogger photoshopped some images of what comics would look like if the men were similarly objectified. It's pretty hillarious and would likely produce more than a little bit of self-doubt among fanboys.

election day

2006-06-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

So, all the election analysis I wanted to do is going to have to wait for a post-mortem.

But, if you are a Californian and you are reading this, be sure to vote for Phil Angelides for Governor Tuesday June 6th!

-Daraka

Dirty words: “electoral politics”

2006-05-30T19:43:00.000-07:00

Where, exactly, is the line between social movements and electoral politics? Aside from being a heady topic of academic inquiry, this is an important, practical question for activists eager to be both effective and progressive in deciding where to put their time, hopes and energies. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who seem to approach anything on a ballot with suspicion and no small bit of righteous indignation. Social movement activism is de rigueur, while working for a candidate is seen as either a diversion or a sell-out. Protest bad politicians, certainly, but, argue many, don’t lift a figure to replace them with better ones. They won’t be perfect, so chuck the whole operation and stay above the fray.
If my tone here seems annoyed, it may have something to do with the fact that I spend many hours of my time working in the electoral arena, and often find good candidates and good causes woefully understaffed. But this Hadrian’s Wall between electoral and “movement” politics is also offensive to me on an intellectual level. Social movements have myriad goals, and there are certainly many for which electoral activity simply makes no sense. Cultural movements, artistic movements, religious movements may well have a focus which makes the state as a target illogical. However, for those movements which seek to rearrange material power, putting candidates into office and working to keep them accountable is bread and butter. Imagine a Civil Rights movement which decided that the vote was not important.
Good progressive electoral politics flows from social movement activism. Good social movement activism doesn’t stop at the halls of governance or ignore the ballot box. It’s that simple, folks.
Have movements overemphasized electoral politics at the expense of organizing? Absolutely. Have movement organizations fallen down on the job of building power and support and leadership at the grassroots level? Yes. Oligarchy? Corruption? Co-Optation? Yes, yes, yes. But there are plenty of movements which stayed out of politics in order to stay “pure”, and they have also died myriad deaths. Obsolescence being one of them.
The historical touchstone for many of the anti-electoral-politics crowd is the Zapatista revolution. This “non-Enlightenment” movement, which supposedly eschews engagement with the state and “formal” politics has inspired a generation of postmodern rhetoric-driven junior theorists. I don’t want to dwell on a critique of Zapatismo here, but I do believe that their effect on the North American left has been somewhat stupefying. Ironically, while the theory of Zapatismo claims to be a rejection of universalist ideas about politics, people up here are trying their damndest to pretend that they are Mayan peasants. The children of Marcos think themselves into pretty boxes, while the New Deal is dismantled and the hard-won rights of women dangerously corroded. What is the point of theory which demobilizes?
As with most things, this dynamic is a two-way street. There are plenty of people, deeply embedded in the logic of governance and campaigning who give scant thought to the broader patterns of political mobilization, activism and social change. However, these folks do not go unchallenged- the California Leglislature, for example, is full of candidates and staffers who were forged politically in social movements- feminists, gay and lesbian activists, labor folks, chicano/a student leaders. These people are worth knocking on doors for.
My academic work, such as it is, focuses on the frontier between movement activism and political party activism. Not just in the common instrumentalist model of movement organizations –taking over- parties or party structures, but also in exploring the possibility that many party activists see themselves as movement actors. This is easy to see in the labor parties of Europe, in which the line between union, party, local club and issue-based activism is so obviously blurry. Even here in the land of the weak party, however, you will meet people with a confrontational stance toward established power, a broad, hopeful critique of the world as it is, and a self-conception as an agent of social change. Some of them call themselves Democrats.

dialog

2006-05-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

My invitation to friends to write joint essays recieved the following comment from an anonymous reader:

"things remain white and or male because males of all shades like to elevate the importance of one another----and decree one another the experts in all things or find women who will agree with their decrees----liberal, conservative, 'social democratic' or whatever label you want to apply---that's what ya'all do---I've watched it happen in the "progressive" arena for many years; seems to be a resurgence of it in the Santa Barbara area; young men---some white, some straight, but most of all men---decreeing themselves the great hope----and its really tiresome....many of us are just waiting for this tide to pass......so please, get over yourselves, ok?"

This comment had a rather large effect on my thinking lately, and I wanted to respond substantively. Forgive me if I am not completely coherent- there’s a lot to think about here.
First, I think the point that s(he) is making is important and true. Anyone who has worked in progressive activism has seen the ways in which men dominate discussion, strategy and leadership- often in subtle and "legitimate" ways. I've seen it, I've done it, I've been called on it, I've ignored it, and I've tried to challenge it. We see it in academia, punditry, journalism, and the “blogosphere”, despite the latter’s constant self-congratulationism to the contrary. And, of course, as the author notes, we see it in local politics here in Santa Barbara.
I have some idea of the issues and individuals alluded to, and, unhappily, would say that I am part of the problem. Some of us who are working to change local politics haven’t been doing a good job of making sure that women and their perspectives are front and center, though I know that people think about it more than the author implies. I don’t think that anyone really believes that they are the “great hope”, though I understand why others might say this about a number of local activist boys.
It is difficult to know, however, where the argument outlined above ends and where the often knee-jerk reaction to “young turks” begins. There are people who would make the above statement from an honest sense of exclusion and injustice. There is also a part of local feminist politics which is sometimes inattentive to questions of race and economic justice, and looks with suspicion toward new politics and new leaders. I have no doubt that the author of the above comment belongs in the first group.
Furthermore, while gender and sexual privilege are obviously in play here, people’s behavior is also informed by a desire to overcome barriers of age, class and oligarchy. Getting involved in electoral or “formal” political institutions often leads to some degree of grandstanding, networking or deal-making: three sets of behavior which can perpetuate the marginalization of women, and which are often generally anti-democratic.
I’m not sure, however, that some degree of entrepreneurship isn’t inevitable. It is part of the political terrain. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t be a whole lot better about how we define, develop and practice leadership in the movement. We have to simultaneously engage in politics while fighting to transform politics fundamentally. I don’t know exactly how to do that, and I want to hear from lots of people. I do think that I have something to contribute to the discussion, as does the anonymous commenter.
So, let’s talk.

WTF?

2006-04-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

Fox Host to Be Named White House Spokesman - Yahoo! News: "He will replace Scott McClellan, who is stepping down in a White House personnel shuffle intended to re-energize Bush's presidency, bring in new faces and lift the president's record-low approval ratings. McClellan had served as Bush's chief spokesman — the most prominent public figure in the White House after Bush — for nearly three years."

If Joe Lieberman is a Liberal...(My 800 Words)

2006-04-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

For a good portion of my life, political labels were uncomplicated things. I used them interchangeably, contradictorily, sometimes meaninglessly. I collected political labels. They were chosen as much for the intensity the reactions they evoked as for the quality of those reactions.
That approach made a certain sense when one is stuck in an adolescent punk-radical bubble. Leaving that bubble, however, makes things a bit more complicated. Labels communicate real ideas to real people, and if your intent is to influence those real people, you have to think carefully about what you call yourself or your ideas. At the same time, labels allow us to be clear about our ideas, to find others who agree with us, and to make claims about the large-scale implications of policy ideas. Contrary to popular rhetoric, there is no such thing as pure, non-ideological politics. Things really are “conservative”, “liberal” and “socialist”, even if there is also consensus, overlap and room for debate. Labels, and political vocabulary in general are simultaneously crucially important and blindingly dynamic.
Consider the word “progressive.” Just a few years ago, this word was unambiguous in its political meaning. A progressive was someone who thought of herself as to the left of liberalism, but distanced herself, for ideological or pragmatic reasons, from the socialist tradition. Progressives could be populist or academic/theoretical in orientation, but they were generally actively engaged in day-to-day politics while trying to expand some political space to the left of even the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
But that liberal wing is no longer dominant in American politics, or even in the Democratic Party. In fact, anyone in 2006 who calls themselves a Liberal is a kind of Weberian hero. Using the “L” word involves considerable political risk, and, frankly, doesn’t describe many of the positions taken by a great number of prominent Democrats. And so the lines between “progressive” and “liberal” have blurred, and the two words have become somewhat interchangeable. At your average meeting of Democracy for America or in the discussions on MoveOn.org or DailyKos, these words are used to describe the same general political positions, even when some of the analysis is decidedly not “Liberal” in any political theory sort of sense.
Stranger still, I have heard people defend the use of the word “progressive” by saying that it is less offensive or “extreme” sounding than the despised “L” word. That was an assertion which would have been impossible in 1995, before the Clinton Revolution both mitigated and completed the Reagan Revolution. For some, “progressive” is in a sense to the right of “liberal.” That’s strange.
All of this is to say that political vocabulary changes over time in relation to shifts in political power. What is more confusing, however, is that this relationship works in the opposite direction, as well- shifts in vocabulary have an influence on political power itself. The fact that politicians can call themselves “conservatives”, and with that statement convey a coherent world view is incredibly powerful. The media may still stage vapid debates between “liberals” and “conservatives” on TV, but when a real debate happens, say between two Presidential candidates, only one guy can clearly articulate what he is, what he stands for, what he believes in. The other guy is left defending arcane policy preferences or has to spend time explaining what he isn’t.
The results of losing our vocabulary are far-reaching. The vilification of liberalism has brought with it the vilification of government, feminism, multiculturalism and multilateralism. Sets of effective policy options have been simply wiped off the table. This process has had dire consequences for the world, and constricted the possibilities of positive social change for generations.
Nonetheless, the evasion of vilified political vocabulary is understandable in a country in which a majority of the electorate defines themselves as “moderate.” In the long run, the Left is exoticized and alienated from mainstream political discourse, but it is extremely difficult, in the course of a Presidential campaign, or even a run for school board, to try and redefine labels as you are trying to get to 51%. It’s not just for office seekers, however, that this is a problem. You will find labor, community, feminist, anti-racist and social justice activists all evading the vocabulary demonized by the Right.
And that’s my dilemma. I want to describe the world in which I want to live, and I don’t want to have to do that in excruciating detail every time I open my mouth. However, I also don’t have the time to explain what I mean by “social democrat” to people raised in an environment in which these words are either meaningless or vaguely sinister. For now, unsatisfactorily, I describe myself as a person of the Left, as a “progressive” rather than “centrist” Democrat, and as a feminist. I know allies when I see them, no matter which set of words they use to describe themselves. That’s the best I can do with the hand dealt to me. Let me know when it’s time to draw again.

And here are the other posts from this call to action, so far:
Matt May
Goeff Kurtz

Lucas Shapiro

Experiment: 800 Words From Social Democratic Bloggers

2006-04-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

So, here's an experiment. There are a few blogs linked to hoverbike, by readership and or by the author's shared political experiences somewhere in the sphere of social democracy. It would be great if our interaction went deeper than just posts or responses. I propose that, every once in a while, we all write essays on the same topic, and post them on our blogs with links to one another. I know this is common out there in the blogosphere, but not in our little democratic left corner...

What do you say? 800 words. Take no longer than a week or so. Post it. Link the others.

Here are the people I would like to hear from:
Geoff Kurtz
Matt May (and his other Gunslingers)
Peter Gustafsson
Fredrik Jansson
Lucas Shapiro
Maria Svart
Erik Love (our token liberal)

Am I missing folks? Is the social democratic blogosphere really this white and male? Are you holding your sides laughing at such a naive question?

And here is the question:
In our post-post-modern era, in which we are told by pundits and social scientists that ideology is dead, what is the importance of political labels? How do you label yourself? Is there a unique discussion around labels in your own national or regional political culture?

Get writing.

the uses of patriotism

2006-04-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

There has been a rhetorical change in the second wave of marches across America in response to the “immigration reform” measures being debated in Washington. News reports are finding Mexican flags and Chicano Power imagery being replaced by the Stars and Stripes and appeals to the immigrant nature of the United States. The change was too dramatic not to have been organized- fliers for rallies here in Santa Barbara county advised people to bring American flags. It was a good move, even if the various stripes of anti-immigration voices are calling it cynical.
It is a sad, and frankly racist double standard that the right employs in vilifying expressions of Mexican or Chicano pride. It is part of the great forgetfulness of this country that people set aside the fact that Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish and other nationalisms all coexist with American patriotism- and that they have all been seen as threatening or subversive by nativist forces in the past. America is strong enough an organizing concept that it can mingle with, even embody, diverse national-cultural expression.
In order to make this case, however, you have to wave the flag. Otherwise, it will continue to belong to those who believe, deep down, that to be American, is to be white, Christian, homophobic and anti-Government. In fact, they are the minority in America. Let’s make sure that everybody knows that.

the exportation of Chavismo

2006-04-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

The nail-biter election in Peru presents three unpleasant but difficult options: a neoliberal woman, a corrupt social democrat and a clone of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Exportation of the Chavez model is dangerous, but not for the reasons that the U.S. State Department think it is.
I have no problem with Chavez radical plan to use Venezuelan oil to fund social programs and the dislodging of the country’s oligopoly. Whether they will be replaced by a new one remains to be seen. No, the problem lies in unique situation in which Venezuela finds itself. While nearly all developing countries have natural resources that could be more equitably (and ecologically) exploited, there is no natural resource quite like crude oil. As we know, this is both a blessing and a curse in nations in which the public sphere is repressed and democratic institutions nearly nonexistent. It’s good to be a Norwegian after that country tapped into the bounty of North Sea oil. It’s not so good to be a democratic activist in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Nonetheless, if the Bolivarian Revolution invests in institution-building as much as it does in posturing, a lot of good may come of it. But countries which are not blessed/cursed with plentiful oil reserves will have to find a different path. For Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and the rest of Latin America, the trick is to become a producer and an exporter without abandoning environmental protection, human and labor rights or being buried in debt and dependence. This is a tough line to walk- even tougher without truckloads of hard currency from oil revenues.
And this is the crux of my skepticism about Chavismo: it’s not exportable. If you don’t have the oil money, you can’t play the games that Chavez is playing. You can’t muscle the United States by yourself, you can’t thumb your nose at the risk of massive capital flight and you don’t have a reservoir of public wealth to redistribute. Bolivia’s Evo Morales will try, using coca instead of oil, and will find that he’s following (forgive me) a pipe-dream.
There’s a First World example, as well, which will no doubt unleash the wrath of my friends in Norway and Sweden. The traditional Nordic Social Democratic left has been skeptical to hostile toward European integration. It is seen, with validity, as a threat to the welfare state and to the principles of social solidarity which the labor movements of Scandinavia have worked hard to establish as hegemonic. However, of the nations of the Scandinavian peninsula, only Norway remains outside of the European Union. At the same time, only Finland has embraced it whole-heartedly. It is not an accident that, thanks to oil wealth, Norway is the richest and most fiscally independent from the rest of the region, while Finland is the poorest and most vulnerable to market pressures. I support those who argue that Norway should stay out of the EU, but I also know that this is not so easy an option for other countries. I’m also not convinced that the Union is the doomsday machine that is feared by many of my friends in Sweden.
And so, it would make no sense to me to hold up Norway’s refusal of the European Union as that country’s major contribution to the world. Instead, I look to Norway (and to Venezuela) as examples of what countries can do with their natural resources. They stand as counter examples to Kuwait, the U.S., and to Great Britain which squandered it’s North Sea oil wealth in Thatcherite privatization madness. Everybody can’t be Norway, and every Latin American leader can’t (and shouldn’t) be Hugo Chavez.

In other words, we make history, but not in the conditions of our own making…

from the front lines of “la reconquista”

2006-04-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

The anxieties which surround Latino immigration have been on brilliant display over the past few weeks. As many as two million immigrant workers and their families and allies have taken to the streets to protest a version of “immigration reform” currently up for debate in Washington. Under some proposed measures, illegal entry into the United States would be felony, and aiding immigrants by providing food, water or medical supplies to those crossing the desert frontier between the United States and Mexico would be a criminal act. More ominously, local police and law enforcement officials would be made responsible for enforcing immigration laws, making policing of immigrant communities even more difficult. Who will report crimes of domestic violence theft or even murder if officers are required to report and deport anyone they come in contact with?
The debate in Washington is somewhat surreal, constrained as it is by the realities of the contemporary American economy and the increasing electoral clout of working-class Latinos. Overwhelming majorities of Anglo and black Americans favor harsh regulation of the borders and a crackdown on undocumented workers and their employers. The Republican back bench, as well as many local conservative activists and opinion-makers are biting at the bit to capitalize on the insecurity and xenophobia conjured up by discussion of immigration. Populist Democrats and some in the labor movement see restricting immigration as a way to boost wages and employment. They are likely to be frustrated. American capital needs immigrant labor just as much as it needs cheap oil- and so demands to move the Berlin Wall to the Texas border is not very realistic.
On the state and local level, however, it is likely that more of the “punish the poor” strategies which take rights, benefits or small comforts away from undocumented workers will continue to proliferate. Just as conservatives seem to think that denying condoms to young people keeps them chaste, people seem to think that denying drivers’ licenses, health care or education to undocumented workers and their families will stop people from crossing our border in search of jobs.
This leaves a “strange bedfellows” coalition of immigrant-rights advocates, unions who represent heavily Latino and Asian-immigrant industries, and corporate-oriented conservatives to hammer out a compromise. I expect that the upshot will be a bill which allows employers to hire “guest workers” at very low wages, but that also offers some windy and treacherous path to permanent status or citizenship. In order to get such a bill past conservatives, however, some of the more draconian measures of border enforcement and criminalization will also be part of the mix.
One of the things that keeps us as a country from being able to discuss immigration in a rational, let alone compassionate way is the perennial wave of nativism which greets any wave of immigration. The same theories are trotted out each time: the new group of immigrants refuse to assimilate, their religion is anathema, they won’t learn our language or our culture, they are disloyal, subversive. In the United States, this pattern is made all the more ridiculous by our own policultural history- and so each new claim must be distinguished from the xenophobia of the past generation. And so Samuel Huntington and Pat Buchanan must explain why these new immigrants are qualitatively worse than the Polish, Irish, German, Jewish, Norwegian or Chinese families who were accused of destroying America a century ago.
Layered onto this anxiousness is the rumor/talking point among both Anglo and black public opinion that there is a deliberate, calculated plan on the part of the Mexican government and infiltrators in the United States to “re-conquer” the American Southwest. As “Proof” of these fantasies, immigration opponents point to expressions of Mexican and Chicano nationalism at Marches and rallies and on streets and businesses in Lationo neighborhoods. Michelle Malkin, a syndicated columnist and major exponent of the “reconquista” myth has waxed hysterical in recent columns and on her website about the “brown power” and “this land was stolen” banners held at last week’s marches. She goes so far as to complain that “brown is beautiful” is a racist slogan, and that any white person with such a banner would be attacked.
I don’t know what feelings of harassment would lead a person to march under the banner of “white is beautiful” given that Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the U.S. Senate all seem to agree with such sentiments. Furthermore, if waving Mexican flags is such a dangerous sin, why was President Bush praised for doing just such a thing at a parade in Texas in today’s L.A. Times? The incident was used to illustrate the fact that the President is “at ease” with Mexican-Americans. However, when it’s waved in the context of one million immigrants marching in the streets of Los Angeles and demanding more rights, immigration opponents go ape. Sometimes I wonder if these people hide in their houses in fear during Saint Patricks Day parades, when another immigrant group plots the destruction of America. "Why should I kiss you just because you are Irish, you racist!"
The point here is that Malkin and others are working hard to prove to us that we are in a unique historical moment. Just as their predecessors, and their compatriots in Europe, they are conjuring up an image of dangerous, subversive immigrant population. They are joined by those who argue that population growth itself mandates stopping migration across the border (though these people usually seem less concerned about the density of Mexico City or Guatemala City). Then there is the pseudo-feminist argument that Latino immigrants, unlike regular Americans, are sexist and have lots of babies under the enslavement of the Catholic Church. All of this is nonsense. America is strong enough to handle cultural diversity. And, while radical nationalist slogans stoke irrational fear of a “reconquista”, Anglos in the West do need to wake up and realize that the cultural landscape of our entire region has always been heavily Latino. Talking about the “Latinoization” of America is like talking about the “Americanization” of Canada- it’s really hard to figure out what is invasion and what is co-evolution. Spanish has always been spoken here. Or do people think that “Los Angeles” is a Dutch name?
It's an American tradition: get here, then complain about whoever comes next. Just ask Michelle Malkin, who, like 99% of America, is descended from either an immigrant or a slave.
Taken altogether, this immigration anxiety could become one of the defining issues of the next decade. If so, we can expect to see the breakdown of some important political alliances. Like Civil Rights, it will present the Democrats with a tough choice to make, between new and old loyalties, between votes in the suburbs and the cities. Republicans, too, will have to chose between corporate money and the xenophobia of their base. That’s why a lot of the political elite on both sides of the aisle want the whole thing to just go away.
It won't, of course. Immigration (and fear of immigration) are as American as a taco salad.

I was on the al franken show

2006-03-29T11:53:00.000-08:00

I was a guest on the Al Franken show this morning, talking about the Living Wage, and, sadly, my less-than-addonis-like physique.

Check out a clip from the show here.

Enjoy!

What the next left won’t look like: some notes.

2006-03-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

This is a tough time for the American left. We have seen a series of crushing electoral defeats and gains made by an increasingly bold far right. Recent weeks have seen alarming attacks on women’s rights (in Michigan and South Dakota, most notably), continued disarray in the opposition, and, despite the catastrophes in Iraq and on K Street, there is no real sign that the country can be turned around any time soon. Add to this the overwhelming feeling that huge swaths of American public opinion favor the repeal of the 20th Century, and it is easy to sink into defeatism, cynicism and frustration.
Nonetheless, opinion polls continue to point to solid majorities behind progressive reforms, in health care and education, and opinion tracking on gay rights and other social issues are, in general, trending our way. More people vote Democratic than Republican for the House and Senate, and the Republican edge in Presidential elections is miniscule, even if our electoral system makes it decisive. These are things to build on, to utilize as building blocks for a new progressive movement that is broad, multi-faceted, strategic and visionary. How, exactly, do we do this? To paraphrase Michael Harrington, if I knew this I would be President of the United States. I don’t know, and chances are any answers will emerge from trial and error as well as scholarly and popular debate- even blogging.
Below, however, is my attempt to outline a few of the tendencies which exist on the left which are decidedly not helpful: Minimalism, Denial, Sectarianism and Conspiracy Theory. Some of them are, in fact, contradictory impulses which need to be balanced with one another. Others are simply dead-ends. Whatever the Next Left looks like, however, I hope that it is able to keep these mistakes in abeyance.

Minimalism

“The least we can do is the best we can do” is a sort of defeatist orientation that one finds throughout the center-left. It is prevalent in the Democratic Party and among local politicians, in the labor movement as well as some environmental activists. For the minimalist, the status quo of public opinion and discourse is immutable, and the purpose of politics is to work within that accepted “consensus”. If America is conservative, then Democrats must be conservative. If the market ultimately dictates the prospects for environmental protection, environmentalists should embrace the market. It is good to recognize the social and ideological realities that we face, but movement conservatism, like movement liberalism before it, proved that political action can help to shape social reality. Strong, well-targeted advocacy can move discourse quite a long way- from the Great Society to Morning in America, from justice to just us. Overarching economic and social trends are important, no doubt, but history is also made by purposeful political action. The right did not miss key opportunities presented to them. The left does just that when it concedes on foundational principles and allows conservatives to sculpt mainstream politics in its own image. Every time Hillary Clinton tries to out-hawk the hawks, we grant one more year to the Republican era.

Denial

But framing isn’t everything. Another key mistake that is made, especially by the new progressive activists emboldened by the Howard Dean campaign and weaned on the iMac Gramscianism of George Lakoff, is to think that the only problem facing the left is one of communication. There is no doubt that progressives have serious problems in communicating their ideas- and Lakoff is indispensable in that he has refocused our discussion on how specific policy debates exist in a powerful ideological context. However, his insights are often reduced to a game of grassroots spin-doctoring. Activists ask “how can we fit our policy preferences into frames already set-up by the right?” That gives way to “how can we better sell our product?” And that gives way to “what are the best words to use to describe this policy?”
It is our frames which are in crisis. Worldwide, the left lacks a compelling master narrative, now that government is a universal evil and grand social change is off the table. We are in the minority, not as much as the corporate media or Karl Rove say we are, but our ideas are not as salient as they once were. We have to ask ourselves why. We need to spend time and energy thinking about what we think. The fact that we seem to be completely agnostic about what we call ourselves nowadays is an example of this problem. Are we liberals? Are we progressives? Do those words describe anything? Are our internal disagreements just tactical, or are they ideological? What kind of world do we really want to see? The Dean left could stand to follow some of the discussion in the “radical” or “anti-globalization” left, where some of these questions are being discussed. (the World Social Forum crowd could use a dose of Deanism, as well…)
Denial is also prevalent in the populist-green left as well. Listening to folks like Jim Hightower or arch-denier Ralph Nader, one would think that all the Democrats have to do to win power and glory is to move radically to the left. According to this view, there is a populist progressive silent majority out there to be grabbed. In fact, such a majority must be created.

Geoff Kurtz has a somewhat relevant review of some recent books in this vein here.

Sectarianism

Speaking of Nader, there is a tendency on the left, especially in times of trouble, to retreat into a prophetic and slef-righteous sectarian pose. This impulse drives people to view particular organizations or causes as embodying a singular truth around which political solutions will be shaped. Other movements and populations which do not share a particular strategic orientation can be sacrificed, as they have not yet seen the light. A case and point here is the “hard” wing of the Green Party. Vote-splitting is not a concern for these folks, since the growth and success of the Party becomes an end in itself, no matter the consequences on the ground for our communities and the environment. Sending a clear message will ultimately do more than keeping reactionaries out of office. Sectarian politics is proudly and defiantly minoritarian, and is often skeptical of coalition politics and the attempt to build and maintain majorities. They’d sooner take their toys and go home.
It may be true that it is sometimes better to lose an election than to compromise certain values, but such a tactic should not be entertained lightly. I don’t believe that it is ever a good idea at the State or National level. Instead, we should view elections as only one part of our work- balancing the viability of a given electoral campaign or candidate with a long-term vision for moving the country (and the world) in a progressive direction. Outside of electoral organizing, we should focus on the big picture, on shifting debate and bringing new issues to the fold. This can be done, in part, by political parties, but every election should not be seen as a referendum on our most long-term and big-picture ideals. Elections (as well as union contract fights) are finite things, struggles for power, even if they do have long-term consequences. We should be running candidates who are solidly progressive and who don’t accept conservative frameworks of ideas, but we should also be running candidates to win. Sometimes both are not possible.
Another caveat here is that we do need strong organizations which act in their own self-interest. It is fine to jealously build our institutions, but this should never be done at the expense of a broader left majority.
In my student activist days, I often encountered organizations (often Communist or Anarchist groups) which simply could not “play well with others”, and who viewed all coalition work as primarily an opportunity to build their own group. On a national-electoral level, this describes much of the Green Party’s strategy, while at the local activist level Greens can be found to be working constructively, even indispensably, to create progressive change. Personally, I think this is a core contradiction that the Greens won’t be able to work out without fracturing.
The base problem with sectarianism is that democratic politics has to be about convincing a majority of people that a given electoral program or set of ideas are better for their everyday lives. Especially given our retarded electoral system which rewards minority parties with zero representation, this necessitates compromise. We can have an impact on what people think about their lives and how they relate their experiences to the world, but intervening in that process are key political “moments” in which we need to line up more people than the other team.

Check out "Sectarian Jeopardy".

Conspiracy Theory

It seems that every day I meet someone who believes that September 11th was orchestrated by George Bush or the Israeli government, or both. Sometimes this thinking is based on the findings of physicists or chemists who raise questions about the technical details of the towers falling, sometimes it is raw desire to believe that George Bush is not only corrupt, but genocidal.
Conspiracy theory is tempting because it offers simple answers to complicated questions. Why are the American people allowing their government to run rampant? Because they have been tricked! Why did a network of elite Islamo-fascists murder thousands of innocent Americans, and why was this act supported by many in the Muslim world? They didn’t do it! What can we do about it? Nothing! They run everything!
The world is, of course, more complicated than that. Evil isn’t manufactured in planning meetings, it is dispersed throughout structures of power and privilege in a system in which most of us are implicated.
Of course, one person’s conspiracy theory is someone else’s muckraking journalistic hunch. The bombing of Cambodia, the Iran-Contra affair, and of course Watergate were all conspiracy theories. There should be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that there are those in the U.S. government who are capable, willing and adept at lying to the American people about great crime. However, to believe that September 11th was the Neocon version of the burning of the Reichstag is about more than muckraking- it implies a unanimity of purpose and discipline of action across thousands of political actors, both political parties and at nearly every level of governance. It would require near complete cooperation from the media. This seems to fly in the face of dear old Occam. It also worries me that so many of the Sept. 11th theories boil down, in some fashion, to the organized involvement of “zionists” in the plot. Any time jews are targeted as the culprits of an international or national conspiracy, I reach for my revolver.

Instead of all this, we need a politics of engagement, a politics which is unafraid of meeting people where they are at, which understands that the left is not a majority position, and seeks to be one. I could try to enumerate the principles and strategies of this future left, and one of the reasons I started this blog was to try my hand at just that. However, I find myself unable to articulate it any better than two of my favorite dead white guys. I often turn to Antonio Gramsci, who gave us the immortal line “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. And then there is my old standby Max Weber. I read and re-read the closing lines from Politics as a Vocation, perhaps the most beautifully rendered words about political struggle ever written. I’ll end with that:

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth--that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics.

fugazi and the politics of communication

2006-03-22T15:06:00.000-08:00

I recently (finally!) watched “Instrument”, Jem Cohen’s documentary/video about seminal D.C. punk band Fugazi. While there wasn’t very much in terms of information about the band, the concert footage and bits of interviews were well worth the viewing. I had almost forgotten how simply wonderful this band is- since they haven’t been in very heavy rotation for me in a few years.
What was striking about the film, however, was how much of the band’s strategy- never to charge more than a few dollars for a show, eschewing merchandise, etc, is less about a utopian revisioning of the music industry, as they are a quite conservative attempt by artists to retain control over their relationship with listeners. What emerges is not a critique of music as a commodity per se, but the more specific desire to protect against any mitigating factor (image-making, marketing decisions) which would disrupt the ability of the band to communicate what –they- want to communicate with an audience.
This is important because it strikes at the heart of an ongoing and contentious debate among cultural/art scholars about the nature of the artist/subject/audience relationship. Can anyone ever control how people process and interpret a work of art? Probably not, but it is possible to identify some of the complicating factors in that relationship and seek to isolate or remove them. I’m not sure that a rock band can ever truly decommodify their music once it is sold in a market, and the effect of keeping prices low may not be as effective as the indie-only folks may think. However, refusing to use common marketing strategies, being careful about granting interviews and rejecting the music video-commercial complex are certainly interesting strategies. Do they work?
One thing that certainly comes out in the film, by way of interviews with concert goers, is that a given fugazi audience is full of people who do not “get it”. Regardless of the band’s attempts to frame themselves, playing loud, aggressive music, even resolutely feminist loud and aggressive music, still provides a soundtrack for adolescent masculinity.
I think about this because there are lessons here beyond cultural production- for politics and politicians. Fugazi’s “business” is to make music, and they want as little as possible to get in the way of that endeavor. If a political advocate’s business is to communicate politics, how does eschewing the typical mechanisms of reproduction help to keep the ideas pristine or unadulterated? Do you refuse to appear on television? Do you refuse to grant interviews with news outlets that you know will bring personalities, salacious details and gossip to the fore and bury real issues and concerns?
In the end, you will never be able to control how your message is interpreted, how it is translated into discussions around the water cooler or at the coffee shop counter. In a sense, good progressive politics tries to wrestle with these difficulties, while bad politics does not. There is an important difference, however, between music and politics. Fugazi is happy to sell fewer records and hope that their connection with a smaller group of fans is more real and lasting than that of their mass market counterparts. Such pretensions may be dangerous, however, if your business is realigning power and resources, and the stakes are the future of everything, everywhere. Political actors should be wary of being avante-garde.

partisani

2006-03-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

Taken from my friend Fredrik’s blog, here is a graphic which maps the political allegiances of Italian football support groups. Fan organizations are common in European sports- and range from student drinking societies to labor movement affiliated social clubs to ultra-violent “hooligan”-style gangs. To read the map, “Sinistra” means “left”, and “Destra” means “right.” You’ll notice that some clubs have two or more support groups of opposing ideological alignment. No doubt this makes for tougher conflict in the stands and beyond, but also says something about the partisan stratification which has marked Italian society since the first world war. While in the U.S. we have just begun to regard ourselves as a nation divided between Red and Blue, Italy has been Red, Blue and Black for generations.
I paused on this graphic because my academic work has of late focused on the meaning, depth and function of partisanship in the United States. Even here, where partisan identity is thought to be weak and transitive, and where many voters jealously covet their “independence”, partisan identity is deep and actually quite slow to change. A great new book by political scientists Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist and Eric Schickler called Partisan Hearts and Minds makes the strong case for reevaluating the conventional wisdom. Americans, they argue, are profoundly partisan creatures, and party identity links closely with class, cultural, racial and regional fields of group consciousness. In fact, Italy is used as a comparative case in their exhaustive evaluation of previous studies and reevaluation of available data. This is a must read for political sociologists, and for political activists who are reticent about wading into party politics. In fact, it is in the act of partisan identification that a whole host of core ideological and identity questions are nested. While American political parties certainly don’t look like European ones in their behavior in the halls of government, on the ground they are not so very different.

the people's republic of santa barbara

2006-03-09T17:01:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, the Santa Barbara City Council finally passed a long awaited Living Wage ordinance. The law, which goes into effect next month, will require that city contractors pay workers between 14 and 11 dollars per hour, depending on the level of health care or other benefits they provide. European readers will find such a law somewhat perplexing, perhaps, but with an economy in which less than 10% of workers belong to a union and millions of people are without health insurance, Living Wage laws are an important, and increasingly popular local-level anti-poverty reform. The vote went 5 to 1. A five-year long campaign at last came to fruition.
What was interesting about the hearing, however, was the tenor of the opposition, voiced by the leader of the local Chamber of Commerce, as well as two wildly unsuccessful conservative City Council candidates. As Steve Cushman, the head of the Chamber, approached the microphone, mayor Marty Blum teased that he would move to China should the council vote to approve the Living Wage. Cushman, who was indeed slated to leave for a Chamber-sponsored visit to China the next day, quipped that “China thinks we are becoming socialist.” Another speaker warned that the Living Wage would be the first step toward becoming the “People’s Republic of Santa Barbara”, lamenting that our community was fast joining other anti-business bugaboos as Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Santa Monica on the wrong side of history. The crowd laughed. Some cheered.
And with that, Santa Barbara’s right wing did more than viciously mix metaphors- they revealed their true colors. In their eyes, requiring that public dollars do not subsidize poverty wages is an “anti-business” move. It is a path in the direction of socialism. While the thought of a People’s Republic in California is a nightmare, that actual People’s Republic emerges as a dream. If only we behaved more like China, with its militarily pacified workforce, endless millions of impoverished “surplus” labor and non-existent environmental, safety and health regulations. There are no barriers to reaping all the profit you want over there in China. History is full of ironies.
As for me, I’m firmly against Chinese economic policy. Neither Mao Tse Tung nor Steve Cushman are my leader.

provoking liberal dog lovers

2006-02-16T15:54:00.000-08:00

Here are some political cartoons I found while poking around for the post below. They all come from the same great website.

self fulfilling prophet: notes on islam and social democracy, part one

2006-02-16T15:14:00.000-08:00

Conservatives and Christian Jihadis are having a field day framing the so-called “Cartoon Riots”. Sleepy Denmark, once just another crazy socialist country over the water, has become ground zero in the fight to defend western values. At a recent national gathering of Conservative activists, a prominent anti-immigration Republican Congressman began his speech with “God Bless Denmark.”
According to these folks, the attacks on Denmark are yet another example of inexorable divide between the Muslim world and the West- either a struggle between enlightenment and a new dark ages or a battle between Islam and Christian civilization, depending on which kind of reactionary is up at bat. As usual, this conservative triumphalism misses some crucial facts.
First, let’s state some basic principles. There is no justification for mob violence or the violation of national sovereignty in the form of burning down embassies. Nobody should lose their lives over insults, real or imagined. And of course, the right of free speech must be defended. All that being said, really to really understand what’s going on, we have to get beyond the easy assumptions which underlie the self-congratulation and understandable indignation promulgated by the chatterati and the Western media.
Firstly, the violence is not over theology. Nearly every article I have read about the issue has asserted that the reaction stems from a general prohibition in Islamic law on depicting the prophet. Such a framing glosses over the fact that the cartoons themselves are not neutral depictions of Mohammed. In fact, the cartoons picture the holiest of figures in the world’s fastest growing as a terrorist, an abuser of women and as a moron. I do not wish to excuse the brutality of the reaction, but we must reject the idea that a basic Muslim doctrine, one which seems exotic or quaint to most Westerners, is the source of the explosive violence. Such a mistake helps to depoliticize the conflicts surrounding the Middle East, including terrorist attacks on Western nations and the ongoing difficulties faced by Europe in dealing with a growing Muslim minority. According to the myth, Muslims don’t like pictures of their prophet, and they will burn down Embassies and kill innocent people if that is violated, even thousands of miles away. The reality is far more complicated.
As fellow UCSB graduate student Reza Aslan points out, depictions of the prophets, including Mohammed, are surprisingly common throughout the Muslim world. Though officially forbidden by most interpretations of Muslim doctrine, there is tolerance for such depictions across the diverse communities of Muslims. In addition, the same proscription on images applies to depictions of Abraham and Jesus, also held in high regard in Muslim cosmology. People have not taken to burning things down because of the numerous Shiite and Sufi depictions of the prophet, nor have they rioted over the millions of images of Jesus, looking suspiciously lilly-white, hanging in Christian homes worldwide. The point here is that the prophet was maliciously depicted in publications hostile to Islam and Muslims.
This leads to a second point. For once, Jaques Chirac was right: publication of the cartoons was deliberate, racist provocation. While I am somewhat sympathetic to publications which have republished the images as a statement of raw civil libertarian solidarity, most of the first instances of publication were by right-wing, xenophobic or Christian-conservative magazines and newspapers. They were visual arguments that Islam is an inherently terroristic religion, a notion which is widespread throughout public and elite political opinion on the right.
The furor over the publications began in the context of increasingly tense relations between Denmark’s Muslim community and xenophobic forces in Danish society and politics. Parties across the political spectrum in Denmark have fallen over themselves to vilify and scapegoat the immigrant community, and central to this move has been the argument that Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy and rational, modern social order. This is a debate which rages throughout Europe, and is especially hot right now in the Nordic countries. I will briefly discuss the implications of all this for social democracy below. The upshot is that it is clear that the motivation for publishing the cartoons was to fulfill its own prophecy. The cartoons themselves advance the reductionist argument of Islam’s anti-democratic nature, and the inevitable reaction provides further evidence. The strategy of self-fulfilling prophecy was all-too effective. It is doubtful that anyone expected the level of anger or violence which resulted from the publication. This is a dangerous game.
As a side note, we can see a similar dynamic in the Netherlands, where a massive shift in public attitudes and government policy on immigration and integration have been spurred in part by provocative artistic and “literary” criticisms of the core values of Islam. Dutch society has been rocked by murders and threats in retaliation, and opportunistic politicians, including Somali women’s advocate Ayan Hirsi.
Lastly, let us admit that the politics behind the violence is not uniquely Muslim. The Syrian mob which destroyed the Danish and Norwegian embassies is different only in tactics from the besuited mobs attempting to theocracize public schools, jurisprudence and public policy in the United States. Likewise, while American liberals may romanticize Europe as fantastically tolerant and sophisticated, a significant portion of European society believes strongly that cultural (and racial) commonalities are the defining characteristics of their success as a democratic society. This is the same argument used by American mobs (and the government), to justified violence against Catholics, Jews, blacks, Chinese, Japanese and Native Americans. It is the same argument used by Samuel Huntington to argue for war with Islam and the militarization of our border with Mexico.
So, what does this all mean for Denmark, Norway and their neighbors? I have argued for years that the greatest challenge to Social Democracy now and in coming years is the pace of non-European immigration. The class solidarity which underlies the welfare-state consensus is strained tremendously by including people who are culturally are racially different. Just look at the difficulty in forging class consciousness in the United States. It is one thing to ask people to pay taxes to help their neighbor who looks, eats, worships, and celebrates just like them. It is quite another thing to ask for the same kind of solidarity for a group perceived as alien, dangerous and culturally subversive. It also provides structural challenges. The robust Nordic welfare model was predicated on easy access to a managed labor market. It is difficult, however, to sustain provision of subsidized housing, unemployment benefits, vocational training and health care to a population barred from full participation in the workforce because of deindustrialization, discrimination and, in some cases, lack of education. For the first time in the history of the most generous welfare state on Earth, a real underclass characterized by chronic underemployment has emerged. A recent article by Christopher Caldwell about the Swedish welfare state and Muslim immigrants in the New York Times Magazine is particularly useful reading.
Thus, Danish politics has moved far to the right, with the Social Democratic Party adopting much of the conservative’s agenda and rhetoric on staving off immigration, limiting access to welfare and requiring “assimilation” on the part of Muslim immigrants. In the last Swedish national election, the Liberals surprised everyone by adopting anti-immigrant rhetoric shortly before election day. They picked up a sizable number of parliamentary seats, and then quickly abandoned the xenophobia in a strange display of election-year cynicism. In Norway, despite a solid mandate for the Center-Labour-Socialist government, the major anti-immigrant party continues to wield power.
All of these problems rest on top of a general dilemma for European nation states in a global economy. The economic imperative of workforce immigration and the principle of equitable refugee policy mean that there will be a growing number of Europeans who are Muslim and non-white. When the basic notion of citizenship and nationality is based on common cultural and religious history, how can this new population ever truly feel at home? Can a second or third-generation Algerian really feel French? Can a Pakistani be Swedish? Not so long as the definition of these national identities, explicitly or implicitly, means national and ethnic origin. True integration requires transformation on the part of immigrant communities, no doubt, but it also requires a reformulation of what it means to belong. This will take some time.
In this regard, American progressives have a slight edge over our friends in Europe. While racially-based notions of American identity are persistent and foundational, we are fortunate in that one version of the “official” definition of “Americanness” is ideological rather than cultural. In theory, anyone can be an American. Success on this front means beating back our own xenophobes and Christian identity advocates, as they proudly proclaim Denmark to be their favorite country in Europe.

too bad it's conservative...

2006-01-24T13:03:00.000-08:00

...because the title is absolutely wonderful. A rightous and rightfully sniggering voice for Santa Barbara conservatism has emerged with the new blog "hippie-free Santa Barbara". I have my own uncomfortable relationship with SB hippies and certain parts of the environmental community here in Santa Barbara. However, I'd rather deal with them than Republicans, even with the occasional short-term thinking and not-so-occasional below the surface racism. At any rate, it will be nice to check up on what the handful of actual Republicans in this town think, in addition to the pseudo-Republicans who wield so much power in our fair city.

Also, the author seems to be afraid of political repression at the hands of said hippie establishment. Like blogabarbara's honchos, he's hiding behind a psuedonymn. Poor Republicans. So beaten down.

actually, they are gone because you killed them all

2006-01-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

This is the strangest thing I have seen in a long, long time. The business section of today’s Los Angeles times included a unsigned, cryptic 2/3 page announcement/ advertisement that I just can’t get my head around. The ad, as well as the short faux-news broadcast clip that appears on the associated website, assert that California bears, including the symbols on our flag, are leaving the state because of “high taxes, and high business costs.” Yes, that’s right, some PR hack for the business forces who failed in this years special election has started an ad campaign stating that bears (as well as our famous cheese-producing happy cows) are leaving the state because of the lack of progress on worker’s comp reform. Check it out. I didn’t make this up.

the ralph nader of mexico

2006-01-19T17:14:00.000-08:00

Chile’s historic election, in which the center-left coalition led by Salvador Allende’s Socialist Party retained power is another step forward in a progressive sweep throughout Latin America. While the Che Guevara set tend to focus on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, a former military coup leader turned “socialist”, and the populist but exciting Evo Morales in Bolivia, my interest is pulled toward the left governments in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Michelle Bachelet’s victory, becoming Chile’s first female President, is a tremendously exciting prospect for the region. Together, the reemergence of social democracy in the Southern Cone and the “Bolivarian revolution” are a resounding rejection of the neoliberal project in our hemisphere. However, the frustrating constraints of the global economy, as well as the strength of a fickle and skittish middle class mean that the way forward will be tricky.
Next up is Mexico, where a general election is set for July 2nd. The three way race between the oligarchical and populist PRI, the conservative-reformist PAN and the social democratic and labor-backed PRD will be closely watched. Just as Brazil’s Lula has been assailed from his left flank, PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has become a target of the Zapatista movement, which has launched a nation-wide tour meant to influence national debate. I’m all for this brilliant example of political theater, and the Zapatistas have long shown an ability to highlight the perspectives and needs of populations long marginalized by Mexico’s corrupt political elites. However, some of Subcommandante Marcos’ rhetoric leaves me worried. It is one thing to force a discussion of the broader implications of neoliberalism, and to mobilize a base that is interested in radically shifting the terrain of the global economy. However, as is the case in Brazil, Argentina and indeed in the United States, losing sight of the real differences between mainstream political actors is a deadly mistake.
The EZLN and its allied organizations have, for the most part, chosen not to formally participate in the election, though Marcos has taken to calling himself “Delegate Zero.” Instead, they argue that the tour and related mass events will raise the profile of indigenous concerns and force the heavy questions of Mexico’s place in the global economic order. However, when Lopez Obrador is excoriated as a traitor and it is argued that only non-electoral civil society organizations are “truly” left, the somewhat puritanical and overly-theorized nature of Zapatista politics comes to the surface. Obrador’s election will make a serious difference to millions of working-class and poor Mexicans. It will make a difference in Mexico’s and Latin America’s relationship to the United States. It won’t bring about a global autonomist-feminist agrarian revolution, but that shouldn’t be the litmus test for a candidate in 2006.
It’s easy, of course, for me to sit in Santa Barbara, USA, and critique the Zapatista’s political strategy. I’m not an indigenous farmer in Chiapas. (To be fair, nor is Marcos.) However, many grassroots mass organizations have not taken the same abolitionist stance toward politics as the EZLN is taking today- which is exactly why progressive candidates continue to sweep the polls throughout Latin America. If people listen to Marcos, the results could be disastrous. What’s exciting about what is happening throughout the hemisphere is that both the parliamentary center-left and a more inchoate and radical populist movement are increasingly successful at mobilizing popular support. Let’s hope the Bolivarian revolution doesn’t end at San Cristobal de las Casas.

politics anonymous

2006-01-17T16:52:00.000-08:00

“This is the same, tired, old story, centering around a tax-and-spend approach to relief of poverty. If most of the north County poor population would learn English and stop getting pregnant before age 20, then they might deserve some more tax money from south County.” –Anonymous, posted on “Blogabarbara”

“It is so clear that Das (Williams) cares about Das and nothing else.”
-Anonymous, posted on “Blogabarbara”

Many months back, a group of political junkies and insiders here in Santa Barbara threw up a blog and started posting snarky, sometimes funny and sometimes insightful missives about local politics. Titled “blogabarbara”, the site quickly gained a huge readership and a vibrant coterie of commenters. Hiding behind clever, street-name pseudonyms, the blogmasters railed against our often less than stellar local press, and some of the less principled members of the local political establishment. The politics of the blog is centrish Santa Barbara Democrat, hostile to rampant growth, but also hostile to any real progress on economic justice.
It’s great that such a thing exists. Despite my political differences with the hosts, and the fact that they’ve taken a few swipes at yours truly, I think that we need just such a forum. I don’t, however, think that it should be anonymous.
Don’t get me wrong. Anonymity is a fun thing. It allows you to call names and spew vitriol with no accountability. You can hide any interests you have in the topic, and never seem self-serving. It’s like the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut. You get to put on a mask and screw whoever you want to without any consequences. However, in a town as small as ours, when a good portion of the political elites is thrilled to read an ongoing commentary about themselves, a forum which encourages anonymous mudslinging is irresponsible.
It’s also frustrating for people who put themselves in the public eye in order to move a political agenda forward. There are always armchair pundits out there who spread gossip and talk trash, I’ve been known to talk a little myself down at my local. However, putting that low level of discourse up on the web is no good for anyone, and allowing people to post anonymously does just that.
Why provide a forum for someone to hurl invective like the examples above and not even sign it? More importantly, how can someone respond to personal attacks, like the one leveled against County Supervisor candidate Das Williams, when the attacker is unidentified. Poor Das keeps valiantly and politely wading into the online crapstorms, only to be followed up by anonymous post after anonymous post attacking his character. Why do people deserve a forum to attack people anonymously? Of course, they have the –right- to, but is it a good thing for the polity? We don’t have to do everything that the internet makes possible.
Any Santa Barbarans or Blogabarbarans care to weigh in?

on suicide

2006-01-17T16:25:00.000-08:00

UCSB recently hosted a debate between Eric Alterman and Tucker Carlson. The topic of the debate was to be media bias, though there was a lot more agreeing than disagreeing. However, one interesting moment came as the two journalists discussed the crisis of ideas facing American liberalism. Interestingly, they both agreed on a general narrative- that movement conservatism has flourished while liberalism has withered. Alterman, who is working on a book about the prospects of American liberalism sought to encapsulate it’s position by arguing that “American liberals essentially want to live in Europe”. He cited Finnish health care and education programs, and while his choice of Finland as an example of a universal welfare state was somewhat odd, his overall point was well taken. Social Democracy, for all its flaws, is still a compelling counter model to Reagan-Thatcher-Bush style Social Darwinism. It is, perhaps the “maximal program” that the American left should orient itself around, even defending the gains of the New Deal serve as our day to day priority.
At this point, Carlson, who was cordial, even conciliatory in the main, busted out the old conservative saw that there was somehow a link between equitable social provision and the desire to take one’s own life. “If things are so great in Finland, someone forgot to tell the Finns,” he said, stating that “Finland has the second highest rate of suicide in the world, after Cuba.” Nice. In one sentence, he lumped democratic Finland and authoritarian Cuba together while insinuating that state intervention leads to suicide. Interesting, if true. Unfortunately for Carlson, it is not.
Setting aside the dubious notion that suicide rates are linked directly to free education, let’s look at available data. As of 2003, the most recent global survey, Finland’s rate, while disturbingly high, was lower than that of Japan, Sri Lanka and almost the entire former Eastern Bloc, including neighbors Russia and Estonia. Some of this data is old, as countries are often slow to report indicators like this one. However, a 2004 report stated that suicide rates in Finland are declining, while South Korea, Mexico and Japan continue to see annual increases. South Korea, in fact, has the fastest growing rate in the OECD. China leads in female suicide, while Southern India tops youth suicide statistics. The United States has mid-level suicide rates, while, surprisingly, sunny and laid-back Australia is in the top tier. While Cuba’s is not the highest, Tucker was on to something, as the island nation boasts the highest rate in Latin America. Theirs is still lower, however, than Japan’s.
Serious medical personnel point to job losses, loneliness, high rates of alcohol abuse and other depressive factors as conditions leading to spikes in suicides. No doubt major economic downturns are important causes here, as well. This would certainly explain the high rates in Warsaw Pact countries as well as Cuba and Japan. There doesn’t, however, seem to be any correlation between suicide and generosity of welfare states. Within Europe, rates go down as you get warmer and sunnier...Greece is lowest, Finland highest. Hmm...
Domestically, the coasts have lower rates than the west- New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming and Colorado are all at the top of the list. Would Carlson argue that voting Republican is related to suicidal tendencies?
In researching this post, I found that Tucker is not alone in his attempt to politicize suicide. The Chinese government points to high Japanese rates, anti-choice activists claim that abortion leads to suicide, and, of course, Miami Cubans rejoiced when they heard that suicide rates in Cuba have been skyrocketing.
I questioned Carlson after the debate, and he was remarkably friendly and willing to research his claim a bit more. We talked a bit about Finnish winters and the Nordic penchant for drinking home-made liquor. Alterman also took issue with his suicide theory, and challenged him to back it up on AlterCation, Alterman’s blog. Carlson promised to look up the stats on the UN’s website. I emailed them to him as well.

happy holidays, dammit.

2005-12-23T16:14:00.000-08:00

I was recently giving a talk at a conference in Sweden- the topic was 'prospects for progressives in the United States', a subject of great interest here at hoverbike. A key theme of the talk, as well as the discussion which followed, was the rise of fundamentalist political activism, and the debate over the role of "values" in American politics.

One audience member, a young warehouse worker and union activist said that he saw on Fox news (yes, it airs in Sweden) that liberals in America were trying to get rid of Christmas. I explained that this was a myth used by the far right to further denigrate the left. He seemed to understand.

What was scary about that exchange is that the effectiveness of the right is such that a Swedish trade unionist wearing a Chavez medallion and a Che t-shirt somehow bought the line that the American Left hates Christmas.

Chalk the "war on Christmas" boondoggle as one of the great achievements of right-wing rhetorical and ideological hegemony in contemporary America. Somehow, the commercialization of Christmas, which is driven by corporations and consumerism, is the fault of the left. It is our preference for secular public institutions and science-based science teaching which has led to the bonanza of consumption every Christmas season. Never mind that the majority of those folks out there bashing skulls to buy this year's Cabbage Patch doll are self-professed Christians.

Worse than that, attempts by state, cultural and commercial institutions to aknowlege that the Winter months include non-Christian holidays have been recast as an attack on Christianity. As a Christian, I like to hear people wish me happy Christmas. But it doesn't shake my faith in Jesus Christ to hear a holiday greeting which takes into account the millions of Americans who don't worship as I do. Is it too much to ask for Fundamentalists to share America?

Yesterday, a Southern California mall reversed a decision to take down a giant Menorah. They had originally felt that the Chanukah symbol was "overtly religious", while their 25 foot Christmas tree, angels and bells were not. A threatened boycott by local Jewish organizations changed their minds. Remember, Jewish symbols are religious. Christian symbols are regular.

Anyway, happy holidays.

quitting smoking...

2005-12-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

..hard to write...want to die...

2008: gender, the white house and the democrats

2005-12-01T17:45:00.000-08:00

It is far too early to be speculating on the next struggle for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and yet the pull is strong. Hillary Clinton’s public call for increased American troop presence in Iraq is another sign of the obvious: that she is working to position herself as the standard bearer for the battered “New Democrat” tendency in the party. Meanwhile, right wing pundits kvetch about the presumably awful new Gina Davis show “Commander in Chief”, in which a centrist, independent woman finds herself in the oval office by virtue of a presidential death. In their minds, it is a direct attempt by Hollywood communists to “soften” the country up for the idea of a female president.

I’m not a big one for predictions in political writing. It is a bad habit borrowed from the worst, most hackish sports journalism. Nonetheless, I offer this prediction: the next Democratic primary will be bitterly divisive. We will see a battle between a hawkish, fiscally conservative woman, in Clinton, and an economically populist Southerner, most likely the increasingly compelling John Edwards. Thus, the most viable female Democratic candidate in history will stake her victory on the further destruction of the party’s principles, as well as its long-term prospects. Such a conflict may well cleave the party along already glaring class, race and gender fault lines.

Clinton’s gambit is understandable. Women and people of color on the left are always pressured to move to the center in order to reassure white and male voters that they aren’t, after all, revolutionaries. Barack Obama has undergone similar pressures, though he seems to be handling it reasonably well. On the other side of the aisle, it has become conventional wisdom that one can rocket to the top of the heap in the Republican party by providing a little ethnic, racial or gender cover. I think that a measurable percentage of black and latino republicans are actually employed by the Bush administration. Some in the Republican Party are discussing running Condoleeza Rice for the big job. On the one hand, it would be a great day for America when our choices for President would be two women, one of them African American. On the other, it speaks to the long-term constriction of our political spectrum that both would be arguably right of Richard Nixon.

Adding some irony is the fact that Clinton has publicly called for a weakening of the Democratic stand on abortion, arguing that the party should actively seek out anti-choice candidates. Edwards, on the other hand, has made no such noises, and is betting that a decisive move to the left on economic issues is the way to gain back Democratic support in the South and the interior. These two candidates, defying their presumptive gender roles, may end up personifying two opposing strategic responses to the Red State/Blue State impasse. Again, this may have everything to do with Clinton’s “need” to reassure male voters that if elected, she would not, in fact, be a feminist. Regardless, Clinton’s willingness to move to the right shows that the hard-core DLCers inside the beltway have still learned nothing from the past 10 years of pummeling from a strident, overconfident and ultraconservative Republican Party.

Again, it’s early. There is still time for both candidates to continue to reinvent themselves. Things may degenerate so badly in Iraq that both of their positions (Clinton’s support, Edwards’ mushiness) will be a liability. The field itself is likely to expand as well. What is certain, however, is that the question of the party’s soul will be at stake in the next contest. If the Democratic Party cannot move beyond short-term thinking and begin the long hard work of moving the center of political gravity to the left, it will continue to be a minority party for many years. In the meantime, we may continue to lose crucial civil rights, key ideological debates even entire communities and ecosystems. It will be tempting to postpone that fateful decision in order to (finally!) elect a woman to the highest office in the world. There are arguments for such a move, but it is one we should not make lightly.

while I'm gone, think about this picture

2005-11-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

in sweden

2005-11-16T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'll be in Sweden for a week, until November 23rd.