Whither the Democrats?

[Elvis]

One exposé of a small visible portion of the "deep state" is the aforementioned Terry Reed book, Compromised. A parapolitical/deep state "must read" memoir, still relevant. Sometimes it really is just one big party.

Fair haired.jpg

[American Dream]

No, I would just say that the CPUSA (actually a spin-off called the Committees of Correspondence) was surprisingly reformist and not as radical as one might expect. That is one strategy- I'm not privileging it above or below others- more just noting that in this case it was a disaster. I'm not "blaming" Jerry Brown for aligning with them when they did seem to have the potential to organize things effectively for him. I'm just saying that in this case, there were big problems. Mostly with the Pacifica takeover rather than the Brown candidacy but he did miscalculate to align himself with them.

Was this faction appropriately pragmatic? I would argue no, as they went down in flames. So much for working inside the System.

The CPUSA wasn't appropriately progmatic, therefore working in the system is futile? Both statements may be true but the logic fails me.

I wonder how they could they have been more appropriately pragmatic.

It's a pity Brown lost because the other side lied, and people didn't know better. It's a multifaceted problem for sure.

[American Dream]

From a history of the "New Communist Movement” (NCM):

Lessons from One Left to the Next: Revolution in the Air Reissued

Paul Saba July 19, 2018



Elbaum devotes considerable attention to the involvement of the last remnants of the NCM in a major political development of the 1980s – Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and his two presidential election races of 1984 and 1988. The Rainbow Coalition’s progressive agenda, ability to galvanize people of color, and genuine electoral clout generated a favorable terrain for revolutionary activism and ideology. Elbaum shows how organizations like LRS, LOM the Proletarian Unity League, and other smaller collectives quickly recognized the radical potential inherent in this movement and committed their cadre to the effort. As Elbaum says, these groups ultimately didn’t “win leadership of the broad masses,” but they did, for a brief time, play an important role in a genuine mass radical formation, nationally and locally.15

The NCM groups’ commitment to an anti-racist, multi-sectoral agenda, discipline, organizing skills, and expertise in agitation and propaganda were valuable contributions to the Rainbow Coalition. And the Coalition’s willingness to accept and even welcome their involvement offered them an entré into mass mobilizations not seen since the early 1970s. The hope was that the Rainbow Coalition would ultimately disengage itself from the Democratic Party and evolve into a powerful independent political force in its own right, one which could be moved in an increasingly more radical direction by participating communists.

However, NCM groups underestimated two critical factors that ultimately would doom the Rainbow Coalition experiment. First, despite all its non-electoral organizing and mobilizing components – from social-justice oriented trade union efforts which crossed industrial and rural divides, evolving links with the peace, anti-imperialist, and environmental movements on issues of military intervention, nuclear weapons, and energy sources, as well as a continued emphasis on “multinational” alliances between oppressed groups – the Rainbow Coalition was primarily an electoral vehicle, tied to the election cycle, delegate selection processes, vote-getting and Democratic Party politics.16 In the end, the former components were subordinate to and dependent upon the latter and failed to take on a life of their own. Second, in spite of all efforts to make it a bottom-up, democratic movement, the Rainbow Coalition was dominated and controlled by Jesse Jackson and his key acolytes. When, in the aftermath of the 1988 election, Jackson cut a deal with the Democratic Party establishment and decided to wind the whole thing up, the Rainbow left was powerless to stop him.

Perhaps this outcome was inevitable and nothing revolutionaries could have done would have changed it. But the failure of NCM groups to adequately theorize the Rainbow Coalition phenomenon, to grasp its limitations and strategically prepare to address them, reduced their effectiveness and didn’t prepare them for an outcome that left them rudderless.17 In the current period, with left-wing electoral campaigns proliferating and drawing in increasing number of activists, there is a warning here for contemporary militants.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/07/19 ... -reissued/

[liminalOyster]

Breaking News: "“Once again, the time has come to mend, but not end, capitalism for a new era,”

Centrist Dems begin arguing against far-left agenda as 2020 play
BY ALEX ROARTY

July 20, 2018 03:11 PM

COLUMBUS, OHIO

Leading moderate Democrats forcefully argued this week that the party can embrace a robust agenda of change while still praising capitalism and downplaying income inequality.

In other words, everything the empowered liberal base has spent a year and a half mobilizing against.

Democrats gathered here in Ohio’s capital city on Thursday and Friday in what was an opening salvo of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, part of a conference organized by the center-left think tank Third Way.

The longtime Washington-based group was unveiling the findings of a year-long assessment launched after the 2016 election, hoping to convince potential presidential contenders that they don’t have to adopt the hard-left agenda and style of a Bernie Sanders progressive.

Included in its report were a dozen big-picture policy recommendations — such as adopting a robust apprenticeship program and expanded unemployment insurance to help workers find new jobs — and encouragement to bypass talk of income inequality for an emphasis on creating opportunity.

Third Way officials even attempted to remove the “moderate” moniker from the event, encouraging those in attendance to call themselves “opportunity Democrats.” (The event itself was labeled “Opportunity 2020.”)

“Once again, the time has come to mend, but not end, capitalism for a new era,” said Jonathan Cowan, Third Way’s president, in a sweeping speech outlining his group’s study.

The group’s recommendations will be met with skepticism — if not outright derision — by many Democrats and liberals, who argue the party has been ill-served by a more modest, incrementalist approach. (Third Way officials counter that although their platform is different than a Sanders-style agenda, ideas like a proposed employer-funded pension system would be radical changes in their own right.)

And indeed, even many of those on hand in Columbus — a few hundred congressmen, Democratic officials, and local politicians — needed convincing that the rest of their party was interested in this approach.

“There is no question there is a lot of volume and emotion and energy around the more activist wing of our party,” said Jim Himes, a Democratic congressman from Connecticut and chairman of the New Democrats, a coalition of business-oriented party members on Capitol Hill.

The party’s more moderate voices, he told reporters, were at risk of being “drowned out” if they didn’t start speaking out more.

Kansas congressional candidate, James Thompson says Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be in Wichita to help him campaign. The Thompson campaign rally will take place at 1 p.m. July 20 at the Orpheum Theatre, 200 N. Broadway, Wichita.

Few Democrats would disagree with Himes’s assessment: Just last month, the victory of avowed democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked longtime Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in New York shocked the party and ushered in a wave of predictions that future Democratic candidates would mimic Ocasio-Cortez’s platform and style. On a policy front, once-fringe issues — such as the adoption of single-payer health care and a federal jobs guarantee for every citizen — have moved into the party’s mainstream.

Poll data from 2016 would suggest Third Way’s approach has some merit: A Gallup poll from October 2016 found that voters thought Trump was actually less less conservative than prior GOP nominees. Clinton, meanwhile, was seen as as liberal as former President Barack Obama.

Of course, liberals argue that energizing the party’s base is of paramount importance, especially in the age of Donald Trump.

The more centrist approach advocated at the conference, those in attendance acknowledged, will face skepticism for many reasons. A party left devastated after the last presidential election is dead-set on looking for big, bold ideas, and Third Way officials say it’s hard to compete on that front with liberals advocating a total overhaul of the health care system.

Any effort to rebrand the party reminds Democrats of the approach advocated by former President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, when he pulled the party in a more moderate direction on social and economic issues. Third Way rejects the idea that it’s trying to do the same thing now, arguing that they are instead advocating for an entirely new approach.

“Let’s be clear,” Cowan said. “80s supply-sidism, 90s centrism and 60s socialism will not cut it for the era we’re in. We need something new and different.”

Many of those in attendance were careful not to directly criticize Ocasio-Cortez, saying they welcomed the new energy she was bringing into the party. But they also made clear that they thought her style of politics would be a difficult sell outside of her New York City congressional district, where the party must try to win over more conservative voters.

Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way, said a poll conducted by the group found voters — including many Democrats — responded more positively to a message that emphasized creating economic opportunity over income inequality. The opportunity message, she said, “trounced the other Democratic approaches on the table with the voters we need to win in a general election.”

Other Democrats in attendance were harsher in their assessments of the party’s liberal wing.

“A small but vocal subgroup that is unhinged from evidence will be wrong in the long run, regardless of how loud they are,” said Iowa state Sen. Jeff Danielson, in an interview.

Danielson hails from a conservative-leaning district in northeast Iowa and says he’s managed to win re-election there by adopting an approach similar to the one advocated by Third Way. Many of his constituents would see Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda and think it amounted to nothing more than a “grievance list,” he said.

Kansas congressional candidate, James Thompson says Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be in Wichita to help him campaign. The Thompson campaign rally will take place at 1 p.m. July 20 at the Orpheum Theatre, 200 N. Broadway, Wichita.

But he’s not sure other members of his party will listen to his advice.

“We don’t know what we want,” he said. “We haven’t found our sea legs as a party.”

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/article215241865.html

[Belligerent Savant]

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Indeed -- it's already making its rounds well into the mainstream.

See below example.

The heading of the print version of this article: "Democrats Brace As Storm Brews Far To Their Left"

"Far to their left" . All relative, isn't it (though in this instance, an intentional means to frame opinion/views)?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/p ... terms.html

DETROIT — For Rachel Conner, the 2018 election season has been a moment of revelation.

A 27-year-old social worker, Ms. Conner voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries, spurning the more liberal Bernie Sanders, whom many of her peers backed. But Ms. Conner changed course in this year’s campaign for governor, after concluding that Democrats could only win with more daring messages on issues like public health and immigration.

And so on a recent Wednesday, she enlisted two other young women to volunteer for Abdul El-Sayed, a 33-year-old advocate of single-payer health care running an uphill race in Michigan to become the country’s first Muslim governor.

“They need to wake up and pay attention to what people actually want,” Ms. Conner said of Democratic leaders. “There are so many progressive policies that have widespread support that mainstream Democrats are not picking up on, or putting that stuff down and saying, ‘That wouldn’t really work.’”

Voters like Ms. Conner may not represent a controlling faction in the Democratic Party, at least not yet. But they are increasingly rattling primary elections around the country, and they promise to grow as a disruptive force in national elections as younger voters reject the traditional boundary lines of Democratic politics.

Energized to take on President Trump, these voters are also seeking to remake their own party as a ferocious — and ferociously liberal — opposition force. And many appear as focused on forcing progressive policies into the midterm debate as they are on defeating Republicans.

The impact of these activists in the 2018 election has been limited but revealing: Only about a sixth of Democratic congressional nominees so far have a formal affiliation with one of several important insurgent groups. Fifty-three of the 305 candidates have been endorsed by the Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the Progressive Change Campaign and Our Revolution, organizations that have helped propel challenges to Democratic incumbents.

But the voters who make up the ascending coalition on the left have had an outsize effect on the national political conversation, driving the Democrats’ internal policy debates and putting pressure on party leaders unseen in previous campaigns.

Mark Brewer, a former longtime chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said “progressive energy” was rippling across the state. But Mr. Brewer, who backs Gretchen Whitmer, a former State Senate leader and the Democratic front-runner for governor, said Michigan Democrats were an ideologically diverse bunch and the party could not expect to win simply by running far to the left.

“There are a lot of moderate and even conservative Democrats in Michigan,” Mr. Brewer cautioned. “It’s always been a challenge for Democrats to hold that coalition together in the general election.”

Progressive activists have already upended one major election in Michigan, derailing a former federal prosecutor, Pat Miles, who was running for attorney general with the support of organized labor, by endorsing another lawyer, Dana Nessel, who litigated against Michigan’s gay marriage ban, at a party convention.

In more solidly Democratic parts of the country, younger progressives have battered entrenched political leaders, ousting veteran state legislators in Pennsylvania and Maryland and rejecting, in upstate New York, a congressional candidate recruited by the national party.

In Maryland, Democrats passed over several respected local officials to select Ben Jealous, a former N.A.A.C.P. president and an ally of Mr. Sanders who backs single-payer health care, as their nominee for governor. And in a climactic upset in New York last month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Democratic socialist, felled Representative Joseph Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House.

With about two months left in primary season, a handful of races remain where restive liberals could flout the Democratic establishment, demolishing archaic party machinery or pressuring Democrats in moderate areas to tack left. Beyond Mr. El-Sayed, there are also insurgents contesting primaries for governor in Florida and New York, for Senate in Delaware and for a smattering of House seats in states including Kansas, Massachusetts and Missouri.

The pressure from a new generation of confrontational progressives has put Democrats at the precipice of a sweeping transition, away from not only the centrist ethos of the Bill Clinton years but also, perhaps, from the consensus-oriented liberalism of Barack Obama. Less than a decade ago, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, derided the “professional left” for making what he suggested were preposterous demands — like pressing for “Canadian health care.”

More at link.

[dada]

They really have a thing about polls, don't they? Clinging to their polls. Even though the polls have been consistently failing them. When they don't want to debate, they wave polls in people's faces. There's something very Freudian about this.

(Third Way officials counter that although their platform is different than a Sanders-style agenda, ideas like a proposed employer-funded pension system would be radical changes in their own right.)

Yo, bro, the Democrats are hip to the scene. Sunglasses and saxophones? Way uncool. Let's get wild. Radical, man.

This reminds me of a scene in Monarch of the Glen. Duncan is the manager of the construction site for the new biodome. He tries giving the workers a pep-talk, "Let's get to work, so we can get out of here early!"

The voice of the workers says, "Duncan, we get paid by the hour."

Duncan thinks, has an idea. He says, "Does the word bonus mean anything to you?

The workers are interested. Duncan calls the big boss-lady in Kilwilly Castle. He gets off the phone and says, "Sorry fellas, upper management can't give out bonuses at this time. But they want to remind you that the new biodome will be a bonus for all of us!"

The workers smile and shake their heads, walk away.

edited to add: I notice how everything to the left of the Democrats is called 'liberal' in these articles. I found it confusing at first. "Ferociously liberal." Subtle reframing.

[Grizzly]

https://lbo-news.com/2018/07/20/the-russia-obsession/

The Russia obsession

Some ambitious and generous person at The Raucous Rooster transcribed my radio commentary from yesterday. Thank you!

Good God, the Russia obsession!

It seems that Democrats are now incapable of talking about anything but Russian interference in our sacred elections.

The Trump administration is eviscerating environmental regulations, appointing horrific judges, prosecuting a grotesque war on refugees and immigrants, and we’re hearing about little other than Putin’s alleged hold over Trump, often expressed in grossly homophobic terms.

In doing so, they’re accepting uncritically the version of events proffered by cops, prosecutors and the CIA, organizations made up of professional liars who’ve been enemies of democracy and free expression at home and abroad for decades.

We’re seeing Dem pundits even accusing Bernie Sanders and other insurgents within their party of being Russian agents, witting or unwitting. Their indictments of Trump for treason make them sound like demented right-wingers at the height of the Cold War.

This obsession does relieve mainstream Democrats of concocting an attractive agenda that might win an election or two, but to do that they’d have to tack left, and Goldman Sachs wouldn’t like that.

This Russia obsession’s a win win for the establishment though – subdue Trump and the domestic left insurgency all at once.

I understand why those within a half a standard deviation of the center would embrace it, but why anyone further left would play along with it is beyond me.

Please stop.

Of course they wont...

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

[American Dream]

BOOTS RILEY: POWER IS NOT IN ELECTED OFFICE



PM: Is this a system you’d ever take part in by running for office?

Nope. Here’s the thing: I know where the seat of power really is. And it’s not in the elected office.

PM: Where is it?

It’s in the ruling class, the folks that have the money. For lack of a more understandable thing, the 1%, you know. Those are the puppeteers. The folks in office are the puppets. If we can make a movement that can get to the puppeteers, then the puppets will do whatever we want.

Think about it like this: Affirmative action came in under [President] Nixon, and it’s not because he just had one contradiction where he had some progressive idea and was like, “Hey, let’s do this.” No, it’s because the ruling class was afraid of this movement that was building.

Let’s take it back to even the New Deal. It’s the biggest liberal reform we’ve had in the 20th century — that and the civil rights bill. But that didn’t come because of a big campaign to get FDR in office. That came because all throughout the South, and places like Alabama, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, there were mining strikes, shutting down mines.

In the Midwest at the same time, in the ’20s and ’30s, there were people occupying factories. On the West Coast, at that time, there were the longshoremen who were shutting down the ports to create there, for the first time, a union.

In that milieu, with revolutions going on all around the world, the ruling class was afraid of an actual movement, perhaps a revolutionary movement happening, and because of that, we’ve got the New Deal, specifically because that’s what the left focused on — movements that were able to withhold labor.

So if we’re looking for extreme changes like that, and we want elected officials to make big changes like that, we’ve got to stop focusing only on elections because then we’re going to get caught in this cycle.

Right now, the next time a Democrat gets in office, all they have to do is be two inches to the left of [President] Trump.

The evil genius of Trump is that he’s already got the Democratic Party and people who want him out to move to the right in order to get him out. You got people cheering on the CIA and the FBI, this false nationalism where people are cheering, “Let’s only use politicians that only take U.S. billionaires’ money.”

There are people that are doing this that know better. But the opportunism of electoral politics makes people lie to each other.

More: http://blackrosefed.org/boots-riley-pow ... ed-office/

[American Dream]

“Progressive” Democrats: Learning from the past

BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON JULY 24, 2018

Trump moving towards one-man rule
Fast forward to July, 2018. Trump is in office. He’s totally taken over the preferred party of the US capitalist class and, through that, the Republican-controlled congress. With his nomination of Kavanaugh, he’s on course to take over the US Supreme Court, assuming that nomination is approved as is almost certain. However, he’s also in a tight spot, with the Mueller investigation closing in and the mainstream of the US capitalist class increasingly agitated. they’re even beginning to reveal his role as a money launderer for the Russian mafia – something that has been public information for over a year but largely hushed over up until now.

Can he afford to lose control of congress through losing the Republican majority? It seems the answer is “no”. He, himself, seems to be getting ready to use any means, “fair” or foul to prevent that.


Trump speaking in Montana this July. We need to take his words seriously.

Consider what he said at his July 5 speech in Montana. “A vote for the Democrats in November is a vote to let MS-13 run wild in our communities…. Democrats want anarchy, they really do, and they don’t know who they’re playing with, folks.” If we have learned anything about Trump, it’s to take his words seriously. Here he is, already justifying a possible rerun of Florida 2000, but on a national scale.

It’s far from certain that that will happen, but we can’t discount the possibility.

If it does, what will be the results? It seems most likely that there will be mass protests across the United States. In this case, it seems unlikely that even the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party will be able to squelch it this time. Nor will the union leadership be able to. In fact, they might actually join in, but they will do so in order to prevent such protests from being really effective. Consider one question:

Shut down the jobs
Will such protests try to shut down the major work places? Will there be a campaign to encourage workers to walk off their jobs? There certainly should be. If so, the union leadership, representing both “their” employers and the Democratic Party, will oppose anything of the sort. There will be an all-out campaign to keep any protests politically safe, legal and non-disruptive. Where will the “progressive” Democrats such as Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez stand?


Ocasio-Cortez having friendly chat with self-described center-right Margaret Hoover

The recent PBS interview with Ocasio-Cortez is an indication. It’s not just that she walked back her criticisms of the racist State of Israel. Maybe more important was her entire attitude towards the interviewer, Margaret Hoover, who described herself as “center-right”. Throughout the interview, Ocasio-Cortez tried to find common ground with this center-rightist. At one point she completely agreed that she’d be “learning” from her fellow Democrats, and maybe some Republicans, when (if) she gets to Washington. Key was her comment that she does not intend to be “antagonistic” to the representatives of big business. In the context of her cozying up to Hoover and her expressed desire to “learn” from these representatives in Washington, this can only mean that she will try to get along with the representatives of the enemy, rather than confront them.

The photo of Sanders yucking it up with Pelosi and John McCain is a visible reminder of the same thing from him.


Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi and John McCain enjoying each others’ company at the Trump inauguration

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/07/24 ... -the-past/

[Elvis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imcjXdlTKuk

Washington Post Live
Sen. Bernie Sanders weighs in on his potential 2020 presidential plans
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) discusses whether he has plans to run for president again in 2020 and whether he would run as a Democrat or as an Independent.
June 6, 2018

[American Dream]

California Uber Alles - THE DEAD KENNEDYS


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5znmmaFW-E

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president...

Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!

California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face

Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!

Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece

Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower.

DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
When you mess with President Brown

[Grizzly]

This isn't a 'shit show', Shows end; it's a shit parade. Never ending, 'shit parade'.

[Elvis]

Shall I just delete this thread?

[liminalOyster]

Shall I just delete this thread?

Put me down for Yes.

[dada]

I vote no. Move it to current events. This stuff is important, currently. The Democrats are doubling down on cutting off their base. That's the point of this thread, to me.