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Editor:

With democracy on Novembers ballot, progressives must act to ensure that we preserve the system of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

We have already won the war of ideas. Especially with the onslaught of COVID-19, Americans increasingly favor universal health coverage. A majority of all Americans believe that climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

Our only chance to meaningfully address the many critical issues facing our country public and personal health, the environment, resuscitation of our economy, wealth inequality, student debt, immigration, mass incarceration, public education and more is through our vote in the November election.

Another Supreme Court justice in the mold of the two most recent appointees would be fatal to our civil liberties and civil rights.

The self-anointed pro-life conservatives have been exposed as not even remotely valuing life. They have allowed COVID-19 to become a catastrophe and caused countless unnecessary deaths by first denying the pandemic and then delaying and bumbling its response.

They told us the elderly should become human sacrifices on the altar of the stock market so business as usual can quickly resume. They suggested we pack the churches on Easter despite a life-threatening contagion ravaging our country.

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They withheld life-saving equipment and supplies to punish blue states or had governors who failed to show sufficient appreciation. What could be less life affirming?

Our votes will write the next chapter of American history. Lets write a chapter that cherishes our democracy and works to make it better.

Sincerely,

William C. Bumgarner

Bernalillo

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Letter to the Editor: Progressives must vote well in Nov. - Albuquerque Journal

Bernie Sanders campaigns in Ann Arbor, Mich., March 8, 2020. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)The Populists Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising, by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (Strong Arm Press, 244 pp., $19.99)

Timing is everything for election-cycle treatises, which tend to have a shorter shelf life than do other political books. Praise a candidates legacy too late or envisage a political partys emerging strength too early and you submit your thesis to the unpredictability of the voters. Such is the case with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjetis manifesto, The Populists Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising, which was released in February. The nascent revolution at its heart the supposed leftright populist realignment that animates the duos project risks being crushed in the crib.

Ball, a former MSNBC host, and Enjeti, a former Daily Caller correspondent, have attracted praise from a heterodox crowd that ranges from Glenn Greenwald to Steve Bannon. The two are cohosts of Rising, a fire-breathing display of populist punditry, from both the left (Ball) and the right (Enjeti), that is produced by The Hill and streams daily on YouTube. While the show borrows the aesthetic of the mainstream media, it is self-consciously iconoclastic. In an era of insurgent politics and rampant skepticism of media, its the BernieTrump show that owns the elites. Despite starting less than a year ago, Risings audience has ballooned to 400,000 subscribers on YouTube, with over 3.4 million hours watched in the last month enough fans to allow The Populists Guide to debut on Amazons best-seller list.

The book is composed largely of the pairs on-air monologues, offering the screen-averse reader a sample of Risings greatest hits with some original commentary mixed in. The authors goal is to challenge conventional wisdom and shift both parties to work in the interest of the working class instead of their current financial masters. But ultimately this ambition undoes their analysis as the 2020 race proves, their vision clouds their judgment.

The progressive Ball and the conservative Enjeti differ in their beliefs and their preferred policies, but they are united by an economic framework and by a conviction that America is beset by working-class anxiety. As they put it, they share a central diagnosis of the rot in this country, of how we got to this place, and a deep skepticism of power. Exhortations against the establishment are a staple: Speak up. Make people uncomfortable. Dont let the experts convince you that better isnt possible. As good populists do, Ball and Enjeti focus on exposing problems. In the books first three sections titled Core Rot, Media, and Identity they go after neoliberalism, media bias, and identity politics.

While Ball shares with other Democrats a visceral dislike of President Trump, she trains her fire on members of her own partys establishment. Just imagine if a fraction of the time devoted to Russiagate and Ukrainegate had instead been spent on increasing Social Security, or a $15 minimum wage, or Medicare-for-All, she writes in a chapter criticizing the failed impeachment. She also hammers the pundit world of her past life, documenting how the mainstream media bared their ideological and biased preferences in coverage of the 2020 field. An entire chapter is dedicated to her former employer MSNBC, which for various reasons she says is no friend of the left.

Enjeti offers criticisms of the Right, echoing the 2016 Trump campaigns rejection of the Republican Partys past affinity for liberal immigration and free trade. Republicans should become more comfortable with using the power of the government to help direct market forces toward the goal of conserving our American way of life, American workers, and American families, he writes.

At the core of The Populists Guide to 2020 are critiques of most of the Democratic field. High on the naughty list are the failed centrists. Ball dismisses Pete Buttigieg as the Boomer candidate for the college-educated MSNBC watching type. And Enjeti blasts Kamala Harris: Her entire political ethos was founded on being a woman of color who touted neoliberal economics. Fundamentally for their case, the authors then deliver a broadside against Joe Biden, in behalf of Bernie Sanders.

Ball and Enjeti declare Biden to be a representative of the centrist establishment, a figure upholding a bipartisan commitment to wars, soft corruption, and steady grinding of the working class in the name of efficiency. Enjeti rips Bidens neoliberal record in an essay on the former vice presidents legacy in the Obama administration, pointing to his promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement and his weak record on China as the proof in the pudding. Ball calls the former vice president inarticulate and unimpressive and blames him for creating the very rot which led to Trump in the United States and other right-wing populist movements around the world.

Throughout the book, Ball makes the case for Sanders not only as her preferred candidate but as the candidate best positioned for electoral success: Bernie is the representative of a left-wing class-based movement that could answer Trumps right-wing populism with something new, a Democratic Party that actually delivers for the entire multi-racial working class. This characterization is jarring when set against the Vermont progressives collapse, for the second straight Democratic primary, against an allegedly weak, establishment front-runner. Before he dropped out of the race, Sanderss support among black voters was down significantly, and he had hemorrhaged votes from non-college whites, suggesting his working-class base had shrunk since 2016. And his hoped-for record youth turnout didnt materialize. The failures raise serious questions about the prospects for progressive populism, among them: What animates the Left? A revolution of class consciousness, or a collection of socially liberal cultural crusades?

As Samuel Huntington famously wrote, the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. For all the books warnings about the dangers of identity politics, perhaps the most telling passage of The Populists Guide to 2020 is Enjetis damning description of the dynamic that will bring about the eventual downfall of the American Left: No matter how much you want to tout progressive economics, the intersectionally woke members of your coalition will always impose their PC litmus tests upon you, he warns the economically minded members of the Left. They will not allow a single concession . . . to the cultural right and will demand representation in any future administration they are likely to hold.

Sanderss political demise illuminates this conflict. While Ball tries to paint the movement of the Vermont independent as a genuine revolution, distilling a fusion of democratic socialism and intersectionality into slogans fit for TV, Sanderss failures illustrate the error of touting the consistency of his vision and message in the war to end all class wars. In reality, the campaigns 2020 pitch to young voters amounted to adopting some new woke and hip markers. He went from being a hardliner on illegal immigration in 2015 a working-class position Trump espoused to great effect to calling the presidents position dehumanizing. He touted endorsements this election cycle from uber-wealthy models and pop stars while railing against wealth inequality. His rock-concert-like rallies gave off more of a college-kid-who-read-Marx-once vibe than one of New Dealera organizing. And as he spoke of waging a peoples revolution against the status quo, Sanders personally apologized to Biden after a surrogate wrote an op-ed about Bidens corruption problem. For all his posturing, Sanders has been more of a hippie godfather than a protagonist in the great progressive struggle.

His fall demonstrates how the institutional strength of the Democratic Party, built on Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas mainstream popularity, has been able to mollify the angry winds of progressive populism with incremental cultural shifts of the Overton window. As Matt Stoller recently quipped, the progressive movement is basically just an aesthetic critique.

While The Populists Guide to 2020 offers a populist paradigm for the future of American politics potentially moldable in a post-coronavirus world its fatal conceit is the assumption that both Left and Right must answer the putative rise in working-class political energy. A different sort of shift seems more likely. Michael Lind argued in an April 2016 New York Times op-ed that in one form or another, Trumpism and Clintonism will define conservatism and progressivism in America. As Republicans continue to align with working-class voters by moving somewhat to the left on middle-class entitlements and somewhat to the right on immigration and trade, Lind predicted that Democrats would react to balance the bipartisan system by moving toward finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism to represent more upper-class constituents. Indeed, on his podcast for the Hudson Institute, The Realignment, Enjeti offers a frequently perceptive exploration of these issues.

If the Tea Partys 2010 surge of populist anger within the GOP was a portent of Trumps shock victory in 2016, the resurgence of moderate Democrats and the partys blue suburban wave in the 2018 midterms may herald an upscale future for the party that once dominated union halls. Ball and Enjeti envision working-class populism as a panacea for Americas political deadlock, but the realignment may already be underway on terms Ball would find unfavorable. The Democratic Partys swift rejection of Bernie Sanders suggests committed populists may have a future on only one side of the aisle.

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'The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising' Book Review - National Review

The Democratic presidential primary is over. Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee heading into the election. And this week, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed their former competitor.

On the left, the question is: What went wrong? How did Sanders lose to Biden? Why didnt Warren catch fire? But too few of these postmortems have had sufficient data to build out their theories. And too many of them explain away strategic and tactical failures as media or establishment conspiracies.

Sean McElwee has a different perspective. McElwee is the co-founder and executive director of Data for Progress, an organization that utilizes cutting-edge polling and data-analysis techniques to support progressive causes. His aim is to fashion an agenda that is both progressive and popular. But he also sits atop mountains of data that let him test hypotheses with a lot more rigor than most armchair pundits.

As a result, McElwee has a fascinating, heterodox view of the 2020 primary, the Sanders and Warren campaigns, and what it will take for progressives to build power. We discuss the critical mistakes both major progressive candidates made, which progressive ideas are most popular with the American people, how the lefts theory of class politics interferes with its most obvious path to electoral victory, why maximalist policy agendas fail even when they look like theyre succeeding, what good (and bad) Overton Window politics look like, how progressives can shape Bidens presidency, and much, much more.

You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As a teaser to our discussion, here are some of McElwees findings:

Theres a lot more where that came from. You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Support Voxs explanatory journalism

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Read more from the original source:
Why Bernie Sanders lost the presidential nomination and how progressives can still win - Vox.com

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Few things are clear about next years defense spending authorization billwhen Congress will be able to debate it, when it will be approved, when President Donald Trump might sign it. The only certainty, at a time when the coronavirus crisis has upended almost every known quantity in Washington, is that progressive Democrats are going to hate this legislation.

Every spring, Congress puts together a mammothbill that is supposed to authorize the Defense Departments spending for the next fiscal year, but usually contains dozens of unrelated amendments that help shape the federal governments national security policy. For decades, lawmakers passed the bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Actor NDAAwith strong bipartisan majorities and avoided prolonged debates over controversial policy matters.

That changed last year when the progressive flank of the House Democratic caucus pushed to include amendments limiting Trumps ability to spend Pentagon funds on his border wall, preventing him from starting a war with Iran without congressional approval, and ending American support for Saudi Arabias war in Yemen, among other things. None of those provisions made it into the compromise bill, which emerged after negotiations with the Republican-controlled Senate. In the end, progressives were left feeling discouraged.

This years debate originally presented an appealing opportunity for progressives in the House to extract concessions from Senate Republicans. Nearly every major Democratic presidential candidate has spent months calling for a rethinking of American national security strategy, which has been dominated by endless wars in the Middle East. Even Joe Bidenthe presumptive nominee, who is distrusted by many on the leftacknowledged to Military Timesthat the Pentagon can maintain a strong defense and protect our safety and security for less.Meanwhile, the Center for International Policys Sustainable Defense Task Forcecomposed of former government budget analysts, retired military leaders, and other expertsdetermined that the United States could save at least $1.25 trillion over the next decade by trimming the size of the military by 10 percent, eliminating waste and redundant positions, and halting the Trump administrations massive investment in nuclear weapons.

And now, the death toll and economic devastation caused by the coronavirus has reinforced the fact that there are urgent national priorities and security threats not named Russia, Iran, or ISIS that might require some of the resources normally reserved for the military. With the pandemic wreaking havoc on the US Navy, there would, perhaps, be no better time than this year to craft a compelling message against maintaining the Pentagons status quo.

But structural obstaclesincluding a lengthy,coronavirus-caused delay that is expected to push the passage of the bill into the next fiscal yearwill probably make any significant changes near impossible. There will probably be a prejudice within the leadership and the Congress to dispense with the NDAA as expeditiously as possible, Bill Hartung, director of the Center for International Policys Arms and Security Program, told me. Hartung is one of many advocates for a slimmer defense budget who views the pandemicas an appropriate moment to reset the eternal debate over how to spend the Pentagons money. But, because of the truncated schedule lawmakers now face, he doesnt expect reformers will have as many opportunities as last year to attempt to amend the NDAA.

Progressive advocates who are in touch with the committee staff crafting the House version of the bill have also tempered their expectations. It is very, very likely were going to see an NDAA that reflects business as usual, a source affiliated with a group that works on military issues told me, adding that this years legislation is just not designed to encompass the vision progressives had for last years bill.

The primary architect of the the House bill will be Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who chairs the Armed Services Committee. Last year was his first time shepherding the NDAA process, and he was evidently no fan of how the debate unfolded. Liberal lawmakers stacked the bill with contentious policy provisions, resulting in a rare party-line vote in committee, zero Republican support from the rest of the House, and a compromise negotiation with the Senate that left progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) blasting the legislations astonishing moral cowardice. An exasperated Smith told Politicoat the time that he would be a lot more critical in the future of lawmakers trying to insert amendments that were not within our jurisdiction.

Whilethe delay in moving forward with the NDAAcould open the door to pandemic-related provisions that shore up the Pentagons response to the virus, its not likely the bill will be as expansive as in previous years. I think there is a renewed resolve, certainly by both Adam and me, to confine our bill to our issues, and not allow it to be a vehicle for lots of other wish lists that are not able to make it through other committees, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the committees top Republican, told Defense News earlier this month. Having gone through last year, everybody has a better understanding of what is and is not doable with a Democratic House and a Republican Senate and a Republican president.

Thats not to say Democrats wont offer amendments that challenge Trumps war-making authority. Smith told reporters last week that he expects to revisit the provisions from last years bill aimed at limiting American support to Saudi Arabia.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Smith said the chairman understands and shares the concerns of House liberals, as well as those of other House members. But this time around, progressive lawmakers say they arent going to support a bill without assurances that their priorities will be included in the final product. The progressives are not going to pass a House NDAA to give them license to strip all the progressive priorities from the bill, as it was last time. The leadership is going to have to make a choice, Khanna, an Armed Services Committee member, told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. Theyll either pass a progressive NDAA or pass a bill with Republican votes.

Continued here:
Progressives Are Going to Hate This Year's Defense Spending Bill - Mother Jones

Upset Wisconsin Supreme Court winner Jill Karofsky. Photo: John Hart/AP

There may have never been in living memory a more blatant voter suppression scheme outside the former Confederacy than the one Wisconsin Republicans and their federal and state judicial allies attempted this month. With the connivance of the legislature and the Wisconsin Supreme Court they controlled, the Badger State GOP insisted on holding an in-person election at the height of the coronavirus pandemic that was sure to disenfranchise many Democratic-leaning minority voters in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a federal judge from extending time for voters forced to vote by mail to receive and return their absentee ballots.

The big prize for Republicans in this maneuvering was a ten-year term on the state Supreme Court that would have ensured its judicial agents a majority on that powerful tribune until well into the next decade, making a Republican gerrymander of the legislature and the congressional delegation much more likely, along with a voter purge. The intended beneficiary was incumbent judge Daniel Kelly. But in a big upset delayed by slow-arriving absentee ballots (SCOTUS would not allow an extension of the April 7 voting deadline but left in place a ban on the announcement of results until April 13), Kellys progressive rival Jill Karofsky won the nonpartisan election, as David Nir reported:

Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jill Karofsky has unseated Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly in a key race that will narrow the courts conservative majority in this crucial swing state. The victory also sets progressives up to take control of the court when its next member is up for election.

Karofsky piled up big majorities in Milwaukee and Dane Counties but also held Kelly to smaller margins in the suburban and rural areas that were the mainstay of Kellys political patron Scott Walker and the Republicans controlling the legislature. It was an astonishing win for Wisconsin Democrats and may even reflect a popular backlash against Republican tactics, which risked many lives by demanding that voters who didnt receive mail ballots in time vote in person even though thousands of poll workers considered polling places so unsafe they didnt show up.

In what had become an afterthought, Joe Biden easily dispatched Bernie Sanders who formally endorsed him today in the Democratic presidential primary by a better than two-to-one margin. But turnout partially driven by the all-but-abandoned primary may have helped Karofsky. Now we will see if Wisconsin Republicans find some way to challenge the Supreme Court results despite their determination to go ahead with a mid-pandemic election. And Wisconsin Democrats have reason to feel more optimistic about the odds of recapturing their state for Biden in November.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Progressive Upsets Conservative Judge After Suppressed Vote in Wisconsin - New York Magazine