Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Initially, my reaction to this article from Wednesday, September 18, 2019 in the New York Times, www.nytimes.com/...entitled “How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez learned to play by Washington Rules,” was one of sadness. After all, as my title suggests, becoming an good insider was about the last feature I was looking for in a Congressperson to represent the bottom 60% of the nation amidst what Washington had become, that the left and Tea Party both hate. That’s the Beltway culture which Kevin Phillips, Bill Greider, Matt Taibbi, Molly Ivins (the late MI) and Naomi Klein all despise(d), the Congress of millionaires, lobbyists, special interests and the revolving door. Of Neoliberalism and Austerity for public purposes & awash in private $$$...A scene which, I am also sad to report, I saw firsthand in statehouse cultures, in detail in Trenton, NJ, and later in Annapolis, MD.
Yes, she comes from a unique NY District, part of the Bronx and part of Queens, the 14th Congressional District of New York. And yet it has always looked to me, visually at least, to be a district full of struggling citizens and small businesses, everyone hustling just to barely keep their heads above the swift economic currents, ones that have swept so many others away. It may be urban and new ethnic, but it has more in common with the economic struggles of rural red state Trump country, of Baltimore’s troubles merging with Allegany County in Western Maryland — drugs and despair, many empty storefronts right on Main Street, kids heading for the exits ASAP…than the Republican Right or Democratic Centrists want “the ends of the spectrum” to “woke” and realize.
That being said, it’s not what initially called my attention to AOC, who was not on my political radar screen until the national publicity about her great Democratic primary upset in June of 2018. What grabbed me first was her obvious charisma, a fusion of passion and ideas in a fluid and seamless public persona, a gift as rare as a bright new comet amidst the staid old political constellations. And her intellectual pedigree was a factor, that she had Justice Democrats roots, out of the first Sanders campaign, and even more personal for me, was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, at about the same age as I was in the 1970’s when it was the home for Michael Harrington, Irving Howe and Deborah Meier, called the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. I was, for a brief time in that decade, an unpaid “weekend” organizer for “DSOC” in New Jersey along with Vern Mogenson and John O’Keefe, and we were “tutored” by an old leftie from the UAW, whom I will here call “Ira,” grown cautious and skeptical even then as the AFL-CIO of today, who regaled us with stories of the nightlife and social occasions for the left in Newark, NJ, a veritable subculture of the left, in the 1930’s, when it was one of the East’s great manufacturing centers, “back in the day” for Ira.
That was a bit before Cory Booker’s time, before the industries left or collapsed, leaving the pollution behind, before Newark’s version of Frank Rizzo took over, the riots of the 1960’s, and before Newark-Camden-Paterson formed an underclass inverted “brand” the opposite of Short Hills-Bernardsville-Princeton. But please, repeat after me, Kossacks: there is no such thing as “class” in America, just different stops on Hawthorne’s Celestial Railway all heading in one direction…
That was what I saw at first. Then came the tactics and the platform, the sit-ins outside the Speaker’s office, siding with the Sunrise kids to place the Green New Deal before a startled Democratic Establishment and at first astonished nation. This was audacity itself. For ten years I had been writing about and calling for a “Green New Deal,” and for the last five it’s been stamped on my business card: “For a Green New Deal,” handed out right in the heart of Trump company in purple state Maryland. In a vast course correction to former Speaker Tip O’Neil’s “all politics is local,” he of the compromises with the opposite side of the spectrum, with the Reaganauts, all headed in one direction — to the Right — here was a brash not even sworn in young woman who was formulating a national program for the Democrats. The Democrats of corporate fiscal austerity and social causes now starkly challenged with an egalitarian economic ethos and political “parity” for Nature. (Yes, I’m tweaking the Farm Bureau’s foundational agricultural parity here.) This was unheard of, a comprehensive outline (to come out in print on February 7, 2019 in fourteen pages, the Green New Deal Resolution) which united economic causes left untouched since the unravelling of the Old New Deal coalition, and especially since the Great Recesssion of 2008-2009, joining overlooked frontline communities of race and gender short- changed by the tough realities of the 1930’s, and now joined to the great upper middle class reform stream of the environmental movement, even as some of the most established names there recoiled in shock, having been outflanked. By who? AOC? By what — the Sunshine movement?
Not since Napoleon’s electrifying campaign in Italy (you remember that, fellow world citizen’s don’t you?) or Stonewall Jackson’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley — or Patton’s race to save the besieged paratroopers at Bastogne — has such tactical brilliance been thrown forth — in civilian clothes on the battlefields of politics.
I’m getting up a head of steam here readers, but I don’t want this to be a long posting, I’ve written my say on the First New Deal and the Green New Deal in August (Compass in the Storm), so let me finish the story here as succinctly as I can, given my limitations as a poor old white man who keeps looking for my privileges so as to check them at the door. Whatever they have given me over the years, some of them must still have been lost in the mail.
Upon re-reading that NY Times story, several times, and looking at AOC’s concluding line, I think, and surely hope that it was more about the Times’ reporter putting her finger to wind as to the papers inclination of fear: away from Bernie and the left wind blowing across the old redoubts of the party. A party which has been so long in a crouch, so long in looking over their shoulder that David Roberts, the former Grist and now Vox reporter says they are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome: captive for more than 30 years of Market Fundamentalism, kept in a Neoliberal straight-jacket for the mind — and for big ideas which require a government more on the side of the people than the corporations.
And sure enough, others, Cynthia Nixon from New York, the gutsy actress turned Cuomo challenger, caught the drift of this “hit” piece, and Truthdig did this follow-up, which puts it in perspective: www.truthdig.com/...and even The Hill was drawn into the “Taming” dialogue...thehill.com/…
For my part, I want the old AOC back, the one that fought for and lost the battle, before she was even sworn in, for that Standing Select Committee for the New Deal, with subpoena power - that Speaker Pelosi was so dismissive of — a tragic mistake for the party, the needs of the country, and perhaps the fate of Nature and the bottom 60%. I say that because we really do need the best minds in the country to work on a plan, in public, with input from all quarters and corners of the country, the sifting all the various streams from the great environmental rivers that have been flowing since the first Earth Day in 1970, and I can attest personally to how diverse they are.
It took more than a hundred pages for the Climate Mobilization to set them down in their Victory Plan, here, www.theclimatemobilization.org/...a sample of what the thinking-out- loud presentations should have been in front of that committee and which also is contained in the methodology, if not all the choices put forth by editor Paul Hawkens in the book Drawdown ( 240 pages). The tragedy of this committee denial, strangled in the crib by Pelosi, is that it didn’t bind anyone in the party or the Congress to accept the Plan or policy recommendations at the end of the year long process — they would still have to be passed by the relevant legislative jurisdictions of the existing rules of Congress. More than anything else, this signaled the brittleness, the shallowness, the aimlessness of the Democrat’s Ancien Regime, their fear of having to rise to meet the challenge of developing a national vision and program. Indeed, it is the Green New Deal Resolution that still represents the most comprehensive and sweeping reform proposals ever put before the American People and “their” Congress — and the irony between the quotation can’t be jagged enough, bleed enough over these pages.
I haven’t escaped unscathed from this struggle for the soul of the Democratic party. Right inside our Western Maryland Green New Deal coalition, we have been jostled by the same ups and down that the GND has suffered in the broader country, over the same time frame, with it being attacked by the left, right and center. So when I defended AOC from this NY Time’s restraining harness in an Email, a retired steelworker jumped on me for my pure “bullshit.”
That hit more than a bit of a nerve with me, because in many of her speeches, in AOC’s tone of urgency and calls to action, backed up by the most comprehensive reform package in the nation’s history, I have witnessed the closest approximation to what I have been lambasting the AFL-CIO leadership for, for many Labor Day’s now, going back more than a decade. Where is the Labor Day speech that will go down in history with Lincoln’s at Gettysburg, King’s at the Tidal Pool, Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in 20012...(yeah, read that one online...)
At the very nadir of labor’s standing in the country, not only politically but culturally, in the paychecks, decimated pensions and shriveled share of the nation’s income and wealth, and the despairing, departing white working class falling for Trump the imposter, I have shouted that any national union leadership that can’t give a fiery speech over these conditions is captured lock stock and barrel by the Nancy Pelosi’s, Steny Hoyers, Larry Summers and EJ Dionne’s happy faces of this party and they have served their corporate leaning times long enough and ought to step off the stage. Get out of the way. AOC, a woman under 30, has delivered the speeches and tactics that all the old AFL-CIO “tough guys” can no longer dare to speak.
And here’s the burning irony for someone from the steelworkers to toss my way: AOC is using the same tactics — sitdown, sitdown, sit-in, occupy — that the CIO first used to organize the mass production industries — that the AFL turned their noses up at — in the 1930’s. But she had to first let them loose against the leaders of the Democratic Party before employing them against the corporate powers which are harder to reach. And today, what is the AFL-CIO leadership doing? Attacking the Green New Deal, attacking universal healthcare and fueling their long-standing feuds with greens, defending, in other words, their old stakes and constituencies rather than speaking for all the unorganized in the service sectors, and the broader needs of their society — for the more universal good which this society so desperately needs. Not even the tens of thousands “Deaths of Despair” from their natural constituencies can get them to change their course.
My steelworker friend/adversary also exclaimed “What has AOC done at the practical level for her constituents? Nothing.”
Now we’ve been hearing this from the center of the party for a long time, the need to compromise with the hard Right to get even the smallest common denominator piece of legislation passed. It’s become a pipe dream, and all through the compromised years of Tip O’Neil, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama (collectively they got four presidential votes out of me — and I voted for Jesse Jackson in the ‘88 primary in NJ and his Rainbow early “intersectionality”) we have moved, the price of little splinters of compromise, steadily to the Right in terms of political possibility, until the physical facts on the ground in the paychecks and the incarcerations and the demonizations grew to such outrageous proportions that Bernie Sanders and his offshoots said “enough,” this is a crazy, losing strategy.
To my steelworker, just what do you think Rep. AOC can get passed through this Congress to help her district? My answer is zero, which gives her all the more licence to raise the new vision built upon the oldest and most successful one the Democratic Party ever had — the New Deal, and FDR’s challenge to go further by enacting his Second Bill of Rights from 1944, which Brent McKee of the Living New Deal having just reminded us in Western Maryland that we have not passed, achieved, a single one those Rights denominated in that Great, forgotten speech. Senator Sanders said it was the foundation of his democratic socialism, and Senator Markey, co-author of the Green New Deal Resolution, said it informed the whole document without being explicity mentioned.
I have the same question the young in the streets have posed in the great marches of their Climate Strike on Friday: if not now, under these conditions, when? I pose it to the Democratic Party and the fossils of thought at the AFL-CIO: if you can’t rise to the occasion, get out of the way.
And I can see the need, just around the corner, the need for massive sitdowns, and sit-ins and massive arrests, to get “there,” to get to the vision in the Green New Deal. Ideally we want to do it at the polls, in a massive wave of hope and mobilization. But it may take more. Our very own history tells us that.
And I thank AOC and the Sunrisers for reminding us of what the young men of the CIO once did in the 1930’s but apparently are not capable of doing today in their “Golden Years.” I have some explanations for the why of that...but I’m saving it for another time.
Best to you all, and it’s time to rise to the occasion...with Ocasio-Cortez.
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, Md