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The 2016 election is more than three months past, and we live each day with its apocalyptic consequences. We need to fight President Donald Trump and what he stands for on multiple fronts. We need to fight the Muslim ban, the global gag order, the border wall with Mexico, rollbacks of consumer protections and health care, and a host of ethical issues. We must link all these fights to a political narrative aimed at restoring progressive power in this falls elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and taking back statehouses and Congress in 2018.

But as we do that, were still debating what hit us last November. Reliable data is beginning to come in, and as always, there is a cottage industry of consultants eager to interpret it and chart the way forward (often without reference to how wrongheaded much of their advice and predictions proved to be in the last cycle). As the leader of a group of progressive donors, I have sat in at least a dozen election post-mortem discussions and read a stack of reports and PowerPoint decks. Ive learned a lot.

I dont pretend to have all the answers, and am distrustful of those who think they do, since humility is demanded of us after a stunning upset almost no one predicted. If your diagnosis is completely in sync with whatever you devoutly believed the day before the election, or translates into a single magic bullet or in the case of looking backward, a single culprit you should think again.

The way I look at it, at the presidential level the 2016 election was like the classic Agatha Christie murder mystery (I wont say which one and spoil the novel for those who havent read it) in which there are a dozen suspects in this case, James Comey, misogyny, over-reliance on data and ads and underinvestment in the field, lack of an economic message, a flawed candidate, voter suppression laws, Russian interference, fake news and a host of other factors. In the end, each of them turns out to have taken a turn stabbing, poisoning, shooting, bludgeoning and strangling the victim.

When you win the popular vote convincingly but lose an election by about 60,000 votes in three close states, this is almost certainly true. (My own favorite culprit is that you can draw a clear forensic line from the 2010 election of right-wing Republican governors in Wisconsin and Michigan and their successful efforts to weaken the power of labor in their states to the razor-thin margins that shifted those states into the Trump column in 2016.)

There is one emerging conclusion that could very well become the dominant narrative about the 2016 election, and critical for elections to come, that I believe deserves much more analysis and context before it becomes set into stone, because the consequences are very high. It is that mobilization by which is meant turning out voters in the progressive base, such as communities of color, women and millennials has fallen short. We must shift to persuasion to start winning again; that is, talking with voters who dont agree with us, and who may have voted for Trump or third-party candidates.

Its not that I think persuasion is unnecessary or mobilization is sufficient I dont. But if we are not clear by what we mean by each, and if we dont avoid creating a false dichotomy between the two, the progressive base will fracture and well move backwards, not forward.

Heres what I mean. A mobilization strategy, which Hillary Clintons campaign largely seems to have followed, building on the two general election successes of Barack Obama, emphasizes the New American Majority of blacks, Latinos and Asians, along with young voters and a large cohort of unmarried women who, when they vote, tend to vote for progressive candidates. It requires investments in voter registration, because many in those communities are not yet on the voting rolls. If the registration gap could be narrowed or eliminated, the thinking goes, you can lock in a progressive majority for some time. It requires investments in turnout, knocking on doors, motivating voters, and getting them to the polls. But given the result last November, we now wonder, of course, whether the Obama strategy requires Barack Obama, or someone like him, who can inspire and galvanize.

Too often, a mobilization strategy presumes the allegiance and even enthusiasm of a voting group. But no one likes to be taken for granted. When candidates and parties speak to the issues most important to communities police violence, or immigration reform, or childcare, or student debt passion and turnout rise. The same appears true with some of the disaffected voters Trump turned out, who saw a candidate voicing their grievances with the elites of both political parties.

Further, to argue that mobilization is insufficient to win presumes that it has been fully backed with the necessary resources, but thats just not the case. Some key electoral field efforts in the past cycle moved more money to communities of color than in the past, but as someone who tried to raise money for black and Latino civic engagement, I know that money for those efforts came, as it almost always does, too little and too late, and in any case, is rarely sustained between elections, perpetuating a boom and bust cycle that saps the fight to build permanent political power.

Persuasion seems like common sense its what elections are all about, isnt it? But it, too, is contested ground. Many in the communities of the New American Majority and on the left of the Democratic Party fear, from the experience of the post-Reagan/Bill Clinton era, that its a synonym for triangulation for moving to the center, and muting or abandoning key progressive positions. After years of chronic underinvestment in low-income women and men of color, the progressive discovery of white working class men in the Rust Belt feels galling to many, particularly when a majority of college-educated white men and women, who are hardly marginalized, contributed heavily to Trumps Electoral College victory. For black voters whose communities are still feeling the ravages of a drug epidemic that was treated (by Democrats no less than Republicans) by prison-building, the sudden empathy with largely white communities disrupted by opioid abuse seems, well, it seems like racism.

Moreover, while progressives have invested much in mobilization strategies for those who are with us, so far we know too little about what works to persuade those who are not. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into 30-second ads that pollute the discourse and line the pockets of consultants and television stations are not the answer. We have to step up investment in smart and targeted digital strategies, where we seem to have been bested by the Trump campaign last fall, and return to good old fashioned, year-in, year-out, face-to-face organizing in communities. Because listening, and the relationships built from it, matter. Powerfully.

A true New American Majority must have room for those left out of the economy no matter their race or geography. The pain of an unemployed coal miner, steelworker or other casualties of globalization is no less real than that of a struggling fast food worker or caregiver. It makes no excuses for the racism and misogyny fueling a too-large bloc of Trumps voters or even for those who swallowed their disgust at racism and misogyny to vote for him anyway to say that a shared interest in good jobs, a strong social safety net and functioning roads and bridges can forge an electoral coalition that will be powerful. Its an arithmetic issue, to be sure, but more fundamentally, its a moral issue. A progressive vision has to be one that most can see themselves in.

Its not that we dont know how to do this, or how to talk about this. Organizing groups like Working America, PICO and Peoples Action know how to have deep and ongoing conversations with white working class voters and most importantly, how to listen as do labor leaders like Mary Kay Henry of SEIU and such thought leaders and activists as Van Jones and Demos President Heather McGhee.

Such winning progressive candidates in purple states around the country as Senators Al Franken in Minnesota, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, not to mention the new Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, have shown that strong adherence to core progressive values on human rights and justice issues can and must be coupled with an inclusive economic vision.

Donald Trump peeled off voters in key states who felt betrayed by the elites of both parties. Those voters will be up for grabs when they realize as we must drive home to them that they were conned. The extremist and corrupt government that Trump is installing, from his family on down, will line its own pockets and dole out more hardship for working people. As that becomes clear, millions could turn away from politics completely or be ready to listen to a candidate or party really standing up for them.

No less than skeptical Rust Belt white men, voters of color and women and young people must be listened to and delivered to before they can be mobilized, and campaigns have to start treating them as agents, not targets. The persuasion of Rust Belt voters in economic distress must keep faith with progressive human rights values yet lead with credible remedies for economic pain, delivered by authentic messengers.

In the end, we must both persuade and mobilize. We have fallen short in both. Starting now, we have to do better. If we dont, well be embroiled in a potentially toxic debate that could do as much harm to progressives as any right-wing Republican.

Read the original post:
Shattering the false dichotomy: Progressives must mobilize and persuade and get better at each - Salon

Among progressives, the immediate response to Donald Trumps election was conflicted. Some rejected him completely, and others most notably Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren expressed an attitude of selective cooperation: Opposition to Trumps racism, bigotry and xenophobia, but a willingness to work with him on economic proposals purportedly designed to aid the working class.

The mood of progressives has since shifted sharply away from cooperation in light of how Trump has conducted himself. But things could shift again as attention finally starts being paid to Trumps budget proposals, with other economic concerns likely to follow. What approach should progressives take toward Trumps economic policies and why?

Thats the question taken up by University of Massachusetts economist Gerald Epstein in a new article in Challenge magazine, Trumponomics: Should We Just Say No? He argues that economists need to significantly reorient themselves to deal with Trump, as his intentions are markedly different in intent from the neoliberalism of the past several decades. Both Trumps kleptocratic tendencies and his proto-fascist orientation raise problems that defy the standard methods used to critique neoliberal economics.

Although Epstein was largely writing to other progressive economists, his arguments warrant a wider audience for several reasons. First, we need to understand the kinds of arguments that Epstein is urging progressive economists to make. We cannot simply take things on faith, the way that conservatives routinely do. Second, we need a broad public understanding of these arguments. If there had been such a broad understanding in advance, then arguably the differences between Trump and the Sanders-Warren camp would never have become so blurred as to get Trump elected in the first place. Which is why I interviewed Epstein, to help develop that understanding for the battles ahead. (Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

In your paper, you argue that Trumponomics is something new to America, and that the response it calls for from economists needs to reflect that. In particular, you argue that Trumpism is a protofascist social formation. What does that mean in terms of economic goals, and how theyre married to political goals?

By proto-fascist, what I mean is that in in the social formation, or group, there are a lot of different tendencies, from neoliberal Republicans to nativist xenophobic fascists, probably best represented in his government by Steve Bannon. So proto-fascist means its on the road to a kind of fascist movement. Its hard to know exactly how its going to play out, depending on the relative power [of] these various groups that are vying for power.

But the idea about proto-fascism is that those in power use racist, nativist, xenophobic ideologies to try and divide and conquer a political system, for their own goals. That can be for personal enrichment. In the case of Trump its self-aggrandizement, in the case of others who are associated with him, its probably enrichment and the implementation of a destructive ideology. So they use economic policies to mobilize power [and] achieve their own political power, and then they parse out the spoils to various groups in their coalition.

You write that your analysis of the social formation leads you to advise a political economy precautionary principle. What do you mean by that?

Thats a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the basic idea is Im trying to argue against economists and particularly progressive economists, leftist economists, heterodox economists, whatever you want to call them from doing business as usual. I think the Trump phenomenon is unusual if not unique in the United States, though weve seen these phenomena elsewhere in the world at different times. As I said to Joseph Stiglitz when I saw him recently, You know we economists and you probably better than most of us know how to analyze neoliberalism, and weve been looking at neoliberalism now for 20, 30 years. We know how to analyze that. But we dont have much experience analyzing fascism, and I think that requires a different approach.

In neoliberalism and other economic policies, were used to looking at it piecemeal. Each policy we analyze: Is it good? Is it bad? Whats the impact? On income distribution? On efficiency? On economic growth? Were not used to looking at these policies not only as an economic package that is how they support or relate to each otherbut also how they support the accumulation of political power.

And since one of the key goals of a proto-fascist or fascist formation is to accumulate and sustain political power for destructive ends, I think we as economists have to look at how these policies will affect the accumulation of power. So a progressive political economy precautionary principle takes the idea that you look at the risk associated like a new drug, at the Food and Drug Administration and if theres a reasonable chance that this new policy is going to further the destructive goals of fascism, then you should raise red flags about it, even if on its own terms it might seem to be helpful to some constituencies within the economy that you support. So thats the idea.

Its also different in that its like a pass/fail grade, isnt it? You dont halfway raise a red flag.

Yes. You raise a red flag, but you dont raise the red flag and just badmouth it. You give your reasons. You analyze it. Why are we raising the red flag? What Im most concerned about is policies that seem like they are the same as progressives have been proposing for years, if not decades: Managed trade, renegotiating trade agreements, infrastructure investment. Trump has talked about those, and recently weve seen some labor unions jump on those bandwagons.

But the question is: Are these really the same kinds of policies that progressives have promoted? Who would they help? Who would they hurt? How will this help Trump accumulate more power? We analyze that, and if it seems as though this is going in a bad direction, we raise that red flag. And yes, its kind of a pass/fail.

An important part of your paper is looking at Trumponomics in terms of various economic frameworks of understanding. You lay out six of those. Can you run through them and say a few words about each?

Economists are trying to figure out, What is Trumponomics? What family does this belong to? Some have said, well, its kind of Keynesian economics, because it relies on tax cuts, government spending, a demand-side approach to getting the economy going. Others have pointed out that maybe its Keynesian, but its a reactionary type of Keynesian, building on the concept John Kenneth Galbraith promoted years ago. That is, it does depend on fiscal expansion to get the economy going, but its impact is likely to be very unequal, its going to help the rich more than the poor or the middle class, maybe its going to involve more military spending, etc. So thats reactionary Keynesianism.

Its similar to the third one, a military Keynesianism, which people started analyzing when they were looking, for example, at the Vietnam War and the economic expansion in the 60 and early 70s. Its an expansionary fiscal policy built around extending the military and the military-industrial complex. Yes, maybe this will create jobs and get the economy going, but you end up producing a lot of destructive stuff that could be used for destructive purposes through imperialist adventures.

The fourth one I call Reaganomics redux. Jeff Maddrick, who is one of the editors of Challenge magazine says, well no, this really isnt demand-side at all. This is being justified as a supply-side policy, [as in] Reaganomics, the idea that if you cut taxes on the rich, their incentives for investing and innovating go up, so you can have such a burst of economic growth in output that while the tax rate is going to decline total tax revenues go up, and this will reduce the budget deficit. Supply-side Reaganomics has been shown not to work. Under Reagan, there was a massive increase in budget deficits when they cut taxes for wealthy people, and there wasnt a big burst of investment. There was a big increase in speculation and moving capital abroad.

The fifth is relatively new for Americans, but not for other countries around the world what I call crony capitalism or kleptocracy. I think economists and others were slow to realize this, but the big danger in Trumps regime is just that they steal stuff, billions of dollars worth of stuff, through their control of the government. This can go way beyond trying to sell Ivankas jewelry. Were talking about massive looting of billions of dollars through various programs, including, for example, the infrastructure program. I think this has to be a key part of our analysis of Trumponomics.

Yes, there will be elements of all the previous four, but this new element which we are not that used to analyzing has to be central. I have economics colleagues who think that, well, the real problem is neoliberalism, its capitalism, this is kind of a sidelight. But I think when you think about Trumponomics, kleptocracy is a central component.

The final one, number six, is the one I worry most about, though: Right-wing populism. I gave it a kind of cheeky term, Schacht therapy. Im drawing on the example of Hjalmar Schacht, who was Hitlers economic minister and head of the Bundesbank during significant parts of Hitlers reign. Schacht was responsible for developing and implementing a massive public works program, he helped to build the autobahns the infrastructure, in other words.

That got the economy going in the short run, and it was very popular. Schacht was also responsible for figuring out how to raise funds to rebuild the military, to rearm Hitlers Germany. This generated a lot of jobs too, and was very popular. In addition he develops a very elaborate kind of managed trade system, not free-trade at all, but [more like] make Germany great again.

These policies, on their face, did seem to work in the short term. They did increase jobs and get Germany going again, and help generate a lot of support for Hitler. But we know where the story ends, and its in a very destructive place. So Im worried that unless we open our eyes we can have another kind of Schacht therapy in the United States. If we dont look carefully at these trade and infrastructure and other kinds of policies that Trump is proposing, and look at what kind of role they really will play in our politics and our economy.

In the paper, you suggest a fivefold approach to analyzing Trumps economic proposals, assessing the impact on climate change, human rights and democracy, and on the distribution of power in two forms. First between citizens and corporations, and second between groups that have historically protected the interests of workers and those who typically undermine them.

Let me talk first about climate change. When I think about the problems that we face, and how economists have analyzed them, we have always treated climate change as a secondary issue, if at all. But in terms of Trumps climate denial and in light of all the fossil-fuel advocates placed into important roles in his government, I would say we are in a climate emergency.

So Im suggesting that as part of our analysis of Trumponomics, we have to put his impact on climate change front and center. So even if an infrastructure program does create some jobs in the short run, if its not oriented towards dealing with reliance on fossil fuels and worsens our climate problems, then thats a red flag. Thats not a net macroeconomic policy we should be pursuing now, and as my colleagues Bob Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier pointed out, there are great ways to generate good paying jobs by investing in green energy, rather than fossil fuels. So I say to my colleagues, please put climate change up there when youre trying to analyze the policy.

On human rights, I think its an important signal for understanding the path of fascism. I wrote this article in anticipation, though no knowledge, that Trump would start implementing his war on immigrants and Muslims and foreign citizens. I was raising that as a red flag to say, look, this is a sign that the fascist forces are gaining some ascendancy in his coalition, and when we think about analyzing economics and economic policies, we have to think about whether these policies going to generate support for those gross violations of human rights. That should be a red flag.

The same thing for democracy. Lots of people are worried about autocracy, and how Trumps goal is to aggrandize himself and achieve more power. As he rails against the press, judges, the CIA and others, any possible opposition to his power, thats a red flag. This right-wing populist fascist, if you will aspect of this movement is gaining ascendancy. Any economic policy that generates support for that kind of movement raises a red flag. So these are all things that we need to worry about with this kind of Schacht therapy, this proto-fascist movement.

You present an overview of some expected Trump policies and divide them into three categories: Ugly, uglier and ugliest. Could you explain how that division can clarify our thinking?

Well, again, I was being a little tongue-in-cheek. As I define it, the ugly ones are the ones that, first of all, we can analyze pretty easily using the toolkit that were used to in terms of being inefficient, in terms of generating more inequality of income and wealth, and even in the sense of generating crony-capitalist outcomes where you bestow a lot of benefits to a few corporate leaders, and not many benefits to anybody else. And ones that might lead to financial instabilities.

The one that Im most familiar with is getting rid of Dodd-Frank, and deregulating finance. We know that this is likely to generate, at least in the short run, a lot of profits to the Goldman Sachs friends of Trump by letting them do whatever they want to do with borrowed money. Weve seen this picture before, and we know that its not going to end well. We know that it could lead to more financial instability and maybe even another economic crisis, and then the government will be placed in the same kind of bind it was before. Do we bail out the too-big-to-fail banks, or do we let them drag down the entire economy? So nothing will have been learned, and more destruction is likely.

So we know how to use our tools to analyze these ugly policies. Take the tax cuts. We analyzed the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, so we know that theyre going to not lead to a burst of supply-side magic. We know that theyre going to lead to some economic growth, because thats what tax cuts do, but we also know that theyre going to be very un-equalizing, so these are ugly policies.

Uglier policies are ones that start have kind of a shade of respectability, or some interest to progressive forces and the middle class, but we know that they are very destructive. Some of these for example are privatizing Social Security or block-granting Medicare. These weve analyzed before, and we know that these will be very destructive of long-standing social policies that the right wing, the Paul Ryans of the world and the Koch brothers, have wanted to get rid of for decades.

The ugliest are the ones that Ive been talking about mostly so far, the ones that seem to be really progressive. For a long time, progressive economists have talked about, you know managing trade, renegotiating trade agreements and making infrastructure investments. These you can partly analyze just by looking at them.

Lets look at infrastructure. What Trump is proposing is not really a massive public works program. To the extent its clear what he is proposing, hes proposing a privatization plan: Huge tax subsidies for wealthy investors and hedge funds and private equity funds and bankers, to privatize public bridges, roads and things like that. [He wants to] start charging tolls to pay for them, and again its a huge subsidy, its a crony kind of policy, and are most likely they are going to use labor thats not unionized. Theyll probably use these kinds of policies as leverage to get other kinds of reactionary policies they want.

Thats a very specific example, in a case where Trumps plan has already been put out there. Whats the broader lessons we can draw from that example?

The broader lesson is that we have to look under the rhetoric. These people are masters at using the words we think we understand, like infrastructure program. First of all, look under the rhetoric to see what it really is, and give it its proper name, and use that proper name. So in this case itsa privatization plan. No. 2, analyze it for its crony-capitalism aspects, my fifth category of Trumponomics. Then analyze it for its environmental implications, and finally look at how its going to be used to mobilize power for Trump and his allies, his corporate allies, his base, and so forth. And then analyze what impact it will have on the middle class and working class in the long run, if he is successful.

I think if you do that, the political economy analysis, the climate analysis, the crony-capitalism analysis and then just the standard income distribution efficiency analysis, you will find that very few of these policies are going to come out smelling good.

Its very important not to get caught up in the appearances of what Trumponomics is proposing. One needs to look underneath the words to the real policies, and be very skeptical and analytical. Skeptical at first to understand what is being proposed. Analytical in the sense of whos going to benefit, not just in terms of income and wealth but in terms of whos going to gain power and whos going to lose power. Dont be afraid to stand up and say, no, this is a package that if you look at its power effects is going to lead us down a very destructive path, and were not going to go there.

Theres a positive side to all this that we havent talked about yet. There are a lot of positive alternatives being developed at the state and local level by progressives, but also in coalition with just pragmatic people. I would say that progressive economists and progressive politicians should link up with whats happening on the state and local level, and get more involved in analyzing and helping to promote those kinds of initiatives.

Read more:
Total resistance or selective engagement? Economist Gerald ... - Salon

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Post-modern progressives, contrary to popular belief, are not irreligious. They worship at the altar of government power, lifting the chalice of diversity and eating the bread of tolerance.

Under their arms they carry certain portions of the U.S. Constitution, plus copies of court rulings that are considered sacred and settled but only if they advance progressive notions of progress. All others are open to revision.

For example, progressives have pledged to overturn the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United ruling that recognizes the individual right to collective political speech in unions and nonprofits.

But the same progressives tell us that the Obergefell same-sex marriage ruling in 2015 is settled law and thus in stone. The same goes for the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 that legalized abortion in all 50 states regardless of what happens in state legislatures or at the ballot box.

The progressive divines claim to value individual liberty above all, selectively citing the First Amendment. They ignore altogether the Second Amendment, which they regard as the crazy uncle in the constitutional attic.

Paying lip service, progressives sometimes accord religious liberty a degree of constitutional protection nearly equal to pornography and obscenity, the free exercise of which constitutes an important part of their rites. For anyone paying attention, their cultural agenda has been obvious. Decades ago, C.S. Lewis remarked that the goal of the left is to make pornography public and religion private. Except, of course, for the progressive brand. And they are almost there.

Concerning religion itself, progressives draw sharp exceptions. They give a pass to more recent faiths in America such as Islam, for example, while putting public expressions of Christianity and sometimes Judaism, whose tenets constitute Americas foundational values, under a magnifying glass.

In recent years, progressives have used the courts to establish newer classes of protected behaviors that effectively trump the explicit constitutional protection of religion. What is not written takes precedence over what is. Youve heard of fake news? Welcome to fake justice.

A prime example is the Washington state Supreme Courts unanimous ruling last week against a Christian florist, Barronelle Stutzman, who declined to service a same-sex wedding, citing conscience reasons. Like the New Mexico photographers, the former Colorado bakers, and the former Iowa wedding venue owners before her, the 72-year-old grandmother was told to comply or face ruinous legal costs.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represented the plaintiff, a longtime homosexual customer named Robert Ingersoll, argued that he had a right to force Mrs. Stutzman to service his ceremony.

The back story is important. Mrs. Stutzman has never refused to sell flowers to Mr. Ingersoll or any other customers. In fact, she counted Mr. Ingersoll and others among her friends and employed some openly homosexual people. She said she still would sell him flowers tomorrow. But helping to facilitate a ceremony celebrating what her faith calls sin was a bridge too far. She suggested three other florists who could do the job, to no avail. The Washington high court ruled that Mr. Ingersolls claim of discrimination based on sexual orientation cancels Mrs. Stutzmans claim to religious liberty. If allowed to stand, this is an extremely dangerous precedent that paints a target on every Christian-owned business. Which is the whole idea.

Chai Feldblum, an Obama appointee to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, famously declared that civil rights are a zero sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses. During a public forum, she was more specific: Gays win, Christians lose.

Indeed. When sexual orientation laws began in the 1970s, most Americans regarded them as little more than extensions of current civil rights laws to include more groups. What could it hurt? They had no idea that the phrase would effectively supplant religious liberty whenever the two collide.

The Supreme Courts Obergefell ruling was followed by a slew of heavy-handed policies imposed by the Obama administration that favor all things sexual over religious liberty. These include the Corporal Klingerization of the military, penalties against military chaplains for defending biblical morality, and an order by the Justice and Education departments to Americas public schools to allow boys and men who think they are female into girls locker rooms and restrooms. This past week, the Trump administration rescinded the order, setting off progressive howling from Maine to Seattle.

As Mrs. Stutzmans plight reveals, we are not witnessing a civil rights expansion but a severe contraction of religious liberty and an entirely different worldview a new religion imposed on an unsuspecting populace.

The only cure for this existential threat is to assert strongly the unalienable rights granted to us by nature and natures God. We need to work and pray so that real justice replaces the fake variety.

Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union.

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Fake justice and the rise of a new religion - Washington Times

ATLANTA A progressive group charged Saturday that the Democratic National Committees reliance on paper ballots in the race for DNC chair raises questions of transparency, tainting the process.

The DNC had planned on using both an electronic system, as well as paper ballots, but switched gears minutes before the vote when interim Chair Donna Brazille announced they would rely on the ballots in part because of concerns over spotty internet service.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Committee, pointed to reports that said some DNC members are concerned over blowback they could receive from the Bernie Sanders-aligned forces that are supporting Rep. Keith Ellison if their support for former Labor Secretary Tom Perez became public.

Paper ballots instead of visible and accountable voting is something that Debbie Wasserman Shultz would be proud of, Mr. Green said on Twitter, alluding to the former chair, who resigned after hacked emails showed DNC members were biased against Mr. Sanders in the 2016 primary race.

The group also highlighted a DNC rule that said secret ballots are not permitted and the results should be shared with the candidate or their campaign in the case that the contest goes beyond the first ballot.

Continued here:
Progressives raise transparency concerns over paper ballots in DNC chairman vote - Washington Times

Turning out voters in the progressive base, such as communities of color, women and millennials, as well as talking to voters who don't agree with us, is critical to winning again.

Knocking on doors to get out the vote, Tefere Gebre, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, chats with voter Michael Brown, 68, about the right-to-work amendment, on October 8, 2016 in Woodbridge, VA (Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The 2016 election is more than three months past, and we live each day with its apocalyptic consequences. We need to fight Donald Trump and what he stands for on multiple fronts. We need to fight the Muslim ban, the global gag order, the border wall with Mexico, rollbacks of consumer protections and health care, and a host of ethical issues. We must link all these fights to a political narrative aimed at restoring progressive power in this falls elections in Virginia and New Jersey and taking back statehouses and Congress in 2018.

BY Sarah van Gelder | February 23, 2017

But as we do that, were still debating what hit us last November. Reliable data is beginning to come in, and as always, there is a cottage industry of consultants eager to interpret it and chart the way forward (often without reference to how wrongheaded much of their advice and predictions proved to be in the last cycle). As the leader of a group of progressive donors, I have sat in at least a dozen election post-mortem discussions and read a stack of reports and PowerPoint decks. Ive learned a lot.

I dont pretend to have all the answers, and am distrustful of those who think they do, since humility is demanded of us after a stunning upset almost no one predicted. If your diagnosis is completely in sync with whatever you devoutly believed the day before the election, or translates into a single magic bullet or in the case of looking backward, a single culprit you should think again.

The way I look at it, at the presidential level the 2016 election was like the classic Agatha Christie murder mystery (I wont say which one and spoil the novel for those who havent read it) in which there are a dozen suspects in this case, James Comey, misogyny, overreliance on data and ads and underinvestment in the field, lack of an economic message, a flawed candidate, voter suppression laws, Russian interference, fake news and a host of other factors. In the end, each of them turns out to have taken a turn stabbing, poisoning, shooting, bludgeoning and strangling the victim.

When you win the popular vote convincingly but lose an election by about 60,000 votes in three close states, this is almost certainly true. (My own favorite culprit is that you can draw a clear forensic line from the 2010 election of right-wing Republican governors in Wisconsin and Michigan and their successful efforts to weaken the power of labor in their states to the razor-thin margins that shifted those states into the Trump column in 2016.)

There is one emerging conclusion that could very well become the dominant narrative about the 2016 election, and critical for elections to come, that I believe deserves much more analysis and context before it becomes set into stone, because the consequences are very high. It is that mobilization by which is meant turning out voters in the progressive base, such as communities of color, women and millennials has fallen short. We must shift to persuasion to start winning again; that is, talking with voters who dont agree with us, and who may have voted for Trump or third-party candidates.

Its not that I think persuasion is unnecessary or mobilization is sufficient I dont. But if we are not clear by what we mean by each, and if we dont avoid creating a false dichotomy between the two, the progressive base will fracture and well move backwards, not forward.

Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into 30-second ads that pollute the discourse and line the pockets of consultants and television stations are not the answer.

Heres what I mean. A mobilization strategy, which Hillary Clintons campaign largely seems to have followed, building on the two general election successes of Barack Obama, emphasizes the New American Majority of blacks, Latinos and Asians, along with young voters and a large cohort of unmarried women who, when they vote, tend to vote for progressive candidates. It requires investments in voter registration, because many in those communities are not yet on the voting rolls. If the registration gap could be narrowed or eliminated, the thinking goes, you can lock in a progressive majority for some time. It requires investments in turnout, knocking on doors, motivating voters, and getting them to the polls. But given the result last November, we now wonder, of course, whether the Obama strategy requires Barack Obama, or someone like him, who can inspire and galvanize.

Too often, a mobilization strategy presumes the allegiance and even enthusiasm of a voting group. But no one likes to be taken for granted. When candidates and parties speak to the issues most important to communities police violence, or immigration reform, or childcare, or student debt passion and turnout rise. The same appears true with some of the disaffected voters Trump turned out, who saw a candidate voicing their grievances with the elites of both political parties.

Further, to argue that mobilization is insufficient to win presumes that it has been fully backed with the necessary resources, but thats just not the case. Some key electoral field efforts in the past cycle moved more money to communities of color than in the past, but as someone who tried to raise money for black and Latino civic engagement, I know that money for those efforts came, as it almost always does, too little and too late, and in any case, is rarely sustained between elections, perpetuating a boom and bust cycle that saps the fight to build permanent political power.

Persuasion seems like common sense its what elections are all about, isnt it? But it, too, is contested ground. Many in the communities of the New American Majority and on the left of the Democratic Party fear, from the experience of the post-Reagan/Bill Clinton era, that its a synonym for triangulation for moving to the center, and muting or abandoning key progressive positions. After years of chronic underinvestment in low-income women and men of color, the progressive discovery of white working class men in the Rust Belt feels galling to many, particularly when a majority of college-educated white men and women, who are hardly marginalized, contributed heavily to Trumps Electoral College victory. For black voters whose communities are still feeling the ravages of a drug epidemic that was treated (by Democrats no less than Republicans) by prison-building, the sudden empathy with largely white communities disrupted by opioid abuse seems, well, it seems like racism.

Listening, and the relationships built from it, matter.

Moreover, while progressives have invested much in mobilization strategies for those who are with us, so far we know too little about what works to persuade those who are not. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into 30-second ads that pollute the discourse and line the pockets of consultants and television stations are not the answer. We have to step up investment in smart and targeted digital strategies, where we seem to have been bested by the Trump campaign last fall, and return to good old fashioned, year-in, year-out, face-to-face organizing in communities. Because listening, and the relationships built from it, matter. Powerfully.

A true New American Majority must have room for those left out of the economy no matter their race or geography. The pain of an unemployed coal miner, steelworker or other casualties of globalization is no less real than that of a struggling fast food worker or caregiver. It makes no excuses for the racism and misogyny fueling a too-large bloc of Trumps voters or even for those who swallowed their disgust at racism and misogyny to vote for him anyway to say that a shared interest in good jobs, a strong social safety net and functioning roads and bridges can forge an electoral coalition that will be powerful. Its an arithmetic issue, to be sure, but more fundamentally, its a moral issue. A progressive vision has to be one that most can see themselves in.

Its not that we dont know how to do this, or how to talk about this. Organizing groups like Working America, PICO and Peoples Action know how to have deep and ongoing conversations with white working class voters and most importantly, how to listen as do labor leaders like Mary Kay Henry of SEIU and such thought leaders and activists as Van Jones and Demos President Heather McGhee.

Such winning progressive candidates in purple states around the country as Senators Al Franken in Minnesota, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, not to mention the new Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, have shown that strong adherence to core progressive values on human rights and justice issues can and must be coupled with an inclusive economic vision.

Donald Trump peeled off voters in key states who felt betrayed by the elites of both parties. Those voters will be up for grabs when they realize as we must drive home to them that they were conned. The extremist and corrupt government that Trump is installing, from his family on down, will line its own pockets and dole out more hardship for working people. As that becomes clear, millions could turn away from politics completely or be ready to listen to a candidate or party really standing up for them.

No less than skeptical Rust Belt white men, voters of color and women and young people must be listened to and delivered to before they can be mobilized, and campaigns have to start treating them as agents, not targets. The persuasion of Rust Belt voters in economic distress must keep faith with progressive human rights values yet lead with credible remedies for economic pain, delivered by authentic messengers.

In the end, we must both persuade and mobilize. We have fallen short in both. Starting now, we have to do better. If we dont, well be embroiled in a potentially toxic debate that could do as much harm to progressives as any right-wing Republican.

Originally posted here:
Progressives Must Mobilize and Persuade And Get Better at Each - BillMoyers.com