Argh shriek late!
This is (part of) the promised followup to the diary posted by Berner Kossack InteGritty here a few days ago, where he and I both declared a disagreement over and done with and – and! – said we’d work together on a joint effort. I am of course a Clintonista of some ferocity. “And never the twain shall meet”, right?
Wrong.
We asked each other a series of questions to find out what the other thinks, where we disagree and where we can work together. The idea is to publish the results. That’s what you’re looking at. His is here, go read it.
Spoiler: turns out yelling at each other all day is, like, not the way to do that. Whodathunkit?
Lastly – can we find snark?!?
It was a fantastic experience. What a great guy, I was wrong about him, I’m sure we’ll do more. Screw subtle, that’s kind of a hint, folks.
Anyway, on to the show.
InteGritty’s questions here are in bold, my answers in regular type. Enjoy. Please read his version here. And then, for the love of FSM stop trampling all over each other. Life’s too short, we have work to do, if we two hotheads can come together, anyone can.
Valar Morghulis.
– MB
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★ MBNYC, you’re a Hillary Bro. I’m a Bernie Bro. I say, dude, we should like, fight to better the world. You say nah, brah, things are just peachy as they are. Why should we get on board with your side now? What’s to gain, and for whom?
Heh. Well, to begin with, I don’t share in the view that things are just peachy; if it were so, I probably wouldn’t be engaged in politics. They bore me to tears. That doesn’t affect the obvious truism that politics is a lever for change in our society, that change is the one constant of American life, and that if people like you and I don’t engage in forming that change, others will.
The question of what’s to gain is a good way to frame it; we’ve spent too much time saying the other side is bad, hooray us. We need a positive and achievable agenda, and behold, Hillary has one. Quite well thought out, give it a fresh look.
As to getting on board, I’d argue doing so is a step inherent to taking part in a primary. As they say, elections have consequences. People can grab their ball and go home, of course, but if the outcome were reversed, five will get you ten that those same people now threatening to do so would demand fealty to the party’s choice at the top of their lungs. As well they should; in for a penny, in for a pound.
★ As a brainwashed cult member under the complete thought control of a frothing Stalinist fanatic, I am utterly incapable of critical rationality. Beyond continuing to thus caricaturize and insult those of us working all our lives for social justice – or just ignoring us altogether -- how do you plan to address those on the left moving forward?
Speak up, Leninist filth, I can barely hear you what with the Coronation Mass and all.
Let’s start with the obvious: the caricatures are a problem both here on this site and in the larger world beyond it. They distort the real substance of what our opponents are saying and inflate the value of our own views. Feels great, sure, but insulating an argument from counter-argument is not usually indicative of a strong position. Too much of that and you wind up with those things to your immediate right.
The systemic issue I think is this: people distill candidate preferences into tribal identities – a huge problem when the resulting tribalism forms aspects of their definition of self.
That’s when you get to the point at which a dispassionate discussion of policy becomes problematic, in that disagreement on substance becomes...
“I hate your guy and by the way hate your fucking guts too. You probably smell odd and have awful hair amirite? No wonder you’re always wrong!”
Colorful language aside, this reflex is the easiest cop-out imaginable. It’s a lot simpler to argue strawmen...
“No, even orc lepers like myself are not actually in favor of grinding up the poor into nutritious, affordable snacks for the top 0.01%”
...than to address substantive differences. Duh right?
One thing I won’t let stand unremarked though: you and your friends are not exclusively “the left”, “on the left” or anything of that flavor. We all are “the left”. I certainly consider myself a part of it.
The left is not a club with a secret handshake or something that just miraculously took to the flesh in the person of Bernie Sanders. It is not defined by Bernie Sanders; he’s one actor in a story great men and women have been bleeding in for hundreds of years.
Some use the label to divide rather than unite. As far as I’m concerned, these people display not high-minded ideological insight so much as an absolutely exquisite intellectual cowardice.
★ How fragile is Hillary’s coalition of 1%-ers, aspiring 1%-ers, and 99%-ers willing to let 1%-ers run the show and reap all the rewards?
That’s a mischaracterization of her coalition; she basically reassembled the Obama coalition and will very likely extend it further. That coalition is hardly fragile; obviously, it beat the Sanders effort, just as it beat the GOP twice. The real question is how best to join the Clinton and Sanders coalitions into one unstoppable juggernaut with the ability to truly transform how and by whom this country is governed. The test of that won’t be 2016, it’ll be 2018 and 2020.
I would even take that observation a step further: the names we attach to these transitory electoral groupings matter less – if they matter at all – than does transforming them into a single cohesive force that doesn’t require reassembly every two or four years. In the age of the permanent campaign this strikes me as a glaringly self-evident necessity.
If the 1% meanwhile expect to reap the rewards of our effort, I’d suggest they read Hillary’s platform again – or Russ Feingold’s, or Elizabeth Warren’s – and maybe bear in mind that in a democracy, the majority governs.
★ As you know, we agreed to ask 3 snark questions each. But mine still kept shifting into serious ground. Let’s just blame such dull snark on my side coming up short in the primary contests. Sigh. Speaking of the primaries, what positives in Bernie’s campaign most surprised and impressed you?
Yeah whatever tiresome. Kidding, heh. No, seriously, put down the baseball bat.
What really impressed me most fundamentally about his campaign were two responses to it; one, the enormous enthusiasm among young people – never saw that one coming, nor by the way do I believe the tired claptrap about the cause of it being “free stuff” – and two, the virality it achieved online and off. Absolutely stunning; there was a time when I thought he would pull it off by sheer force alone.
In the end it wasn’t enough, but there are lessons there for those willing to learn them. At the very least, the astounding, self-directed engagement of young voters with the campaign is going to be studied for a long time to come. None of this is singular – Barack Obama did it better – but credit where credit is due.
★ As we all know by now, the core of Bernie’s campaign was the fight to reduce income inequality. If the next President refuses to champion that issue, how can we best work to alleviate it in future?
I don’t know that there’s a simple formulaic answer to that. The underlying question goes to two separate issues: one, can any President act decisively to affect economic outcomes, two, what tools do we as the Netroots have to influence the Executive Branch?
I’m personally somewhat wary of gifting any occupant of the Oval Office with more powers than he or she will already have; that’s not the job and shouldn’t be. That said, the main tool to act on income inequality would likely be the Federal budget and tax code, both areas I have not the faintest shimmer of a clue about.
I’d be very interested in seeing a Federal infrastructure bank and related measures to dramatically ramp up public investment in areas as diverse as clean energy, the power grid, universal high-speed internet access on a par with the best on the planet and college affordability. All of which are discussed at some length in Hillary’s platform.
For the Netroots, I would suggest two additional levers: one, a push for strong appointments to head the various relevant offices in and out of the cabinet – Treasury comes to mind, the SEC, the Federal Reserve – and two, a conscious broadening of our focus to include Congress and the states in any agenda, this ideally with a Progressive ALEC.
An enormously beefed-up Center for American Progress or Roosevelt Institute could play that role, or even more sexy, a crowd-sourced legislative drafting workshop. Nothing like that exists in the world today. Anywhere.
★ A common theme among “moderate” Democrats is the notion that social class is somehow passé, a fossil rendered irrelevant by other categories of discrimination like gender, race, and sexual identity. How should social class factor into Democratic policy formation today?
This again strikes me as a false construct; one, there aren’t all that many moderate Democrats left, two, it seems unlikely that those remaining would concern themselves primarily with issues of gender or race, three, social (or more accurately economic) class is integral to any intersectional analysis, say of race with poverty and gender. The exacerbated economic stratification of the country or a critique thereof isn’t something I’d be comfortable describing as “passé” either. Not as long as single child In America goes to bed hungry or wakes up to a day without hope.
I think this question comes down to a peril of campaign season: because candidate X didn’t manage to link issue A with issue B, they are seen by their adherents as not linked. I would argue that of course economic class matters, but that it is in many ways a corollary of race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, disability status, geography and so on.
It would follow that to truly address the issue underlying social class in your question, downward mobility, we need to craft policy that recognizes these contributory factors. Notably, discrimination comes in degrees; it’s not merely a question of using a slur, it’s also a matter of ascribing negative characteristics based on group status.
This becomes perhaps more self-explanatory when considering superficially unrelated matters such as police brutality against Americans of color. The cause underlying this particular horror is unlikely to be an inadequate paycheck, rather the legacy of systemic racism manifesting in a cascade of discriminatory acts culminating in lethal violence.
To truly make those communities whole, they, we need more than freedom from arbitrary state violence. They also need effective, systematic public and private investment of moral, political and real capital.
★ What does the fight against white hetero-normative male privilege consist of beyond breaking glass ceilings to seat a handful of female, non-white and/or LGBT folks in positions of power?
I’m not sure (or all that good at queer and feminist theory), considering that the academic concept of heteronormativity is itself expressly a critical reaction to and against power.
Heteronormativity is a term used by social theorists in order to discuss the way in which gender and sexuality are separated into hierarchically organised categories. It has become one of the most important ways of thinking about sexuality within the academic study of sexuality. Theorists have argued that a discourse or technique of heteronormativity has been set up, and subsequently dominates, social institutions such as the family, the state and education.
Heteronormative discursive practices or techniques are multiple and organise categories of identity into hierarchical binaries. This means that man has been set up as the opposite (and superior) of woman, and heterosexual as the opposite (and superior) of homosexual. It is through heteronormative discursive practices that lesbian and gay lives are marginalised socially and politically and, as a result, can be invisible within social spaces such as schools.
I think the answer to your question lies in the way that you asked it: with the creation of an implicit binary between [A] and [B] in the distribution of power.
I don’t think the precise ratio within that binary is worth fighting for, as long as we understand that a historic precedent equating power with being male and white informs our present perceptions, but does not need to and will not mold our common future.
What is worth a fight is this: erasing the underlying binary construct – white males here, everyone else there – to a point where it doesn’t matter what someone is, only what someone can do, a state of full and equal human worth for all.
That’s what equality is and what I personally work to achieve. Speaking as a queer American, we ain’t there yet, but we will be. Speaking as a white man with an advanced degree, I don’t see a gain by anyone else as implying a loss for myself; the process is one of addition, not subtraction.
Of course, it would be helpful if you people could dress worth a damn :-)
★ A fairly prominent Daily Kos pro-Hillary commentator once told me that global warming “didn’t matter” and we should just burn all the fossil fuels and “adapt”. How common is that view among Democrats and how can it be shifted?
I’ve never seen that argument being made here and would be flabbergasted if confronted with it. That’s pure right-wing petro-talk at best indicative of a lack of information. It’s also diametrically at odds with Clinton’s actually quite strong platform on climate change.
That said, climate is not an area of my expertise, so I’d have to defer to someone else to really go into the weeds on the subject. Personally, I think our underlying values of care and responsibility to one another preclude absolutely the view held by the poster in question. I do not share it.
★ How can Bernie Sanders and his supporters work to defeat Trump while still pressing the case for the ideas that animate us?
I’d say by working with the rest of us and being better ambassadors for your ideas. I’ll be blunt: quite a few of you suck on both fronts. That’s by no means a partisan issue, mind you; we have cranky assholes on our side as well, myself often enough among them.
Being in the happy position of winning the race however doesn’t absolve me or mine of our responsibility for the common project, of showing some humility and grace, as little as not winning provides yours with a blanket license to be enormous dicks. That’s not how democracy works or what Progressivism is about. All of us need to get our heads in the game, because right now we’re looking at fascism in America. We cannot fail this test. Full stop.
So I would suggest, and this again goes out to both sides: nobody can be right all the time, nobody can win every argument, and nobody has to. We Clintonistas deeply resented the Bernie triumphalism during his rise, it does nothing at all for anyone to repay it in kind.
The Bernie folks meanwhile should bear in mind that some of you behave atrociously when you know there’s a friendly audience to back you up. That’s human, I suppose, but consider if you will that the wheel always turns and that hurt persists longer than the momentary satisfaction of inflicting it.
★ What road could we take to avoid a divided-government status quo stasis the next 4-8 years?
Win, obviously. Heh. But also this: win for a purpose and with a strategy. To do otherwise or less is a disservice to who we are and less than the country demands.
That said, I’d assume we may still have a divided government for a while. A House majority would be quite the lift in 2016. Unless the Republican Party implosion we’re seeing at this writing creates a wave election, instantly making this year our best chance to take back Congress before either the next Decennial census or a SCOTUS ruling against GOP gerrymandering.
I’m personally however somewhat pessimistic that we’ll make use of the opening the GOP has so graciously provided. We as Democrats may think of their failing in terms of our opportunity, with a little gloating thrown in for variety and good clean fun, but nobody really talks about the responsibilities the Republican implosion places on us as Democrats. We can’t take a nap while the GOP takes its vacation from reality – the country will suffer if we do.
So your question is probably more important and timely than you might imagine.
★ Can the “Bernie movement”, if it exists, survive under a Clintons II administration? What role could the “movement” play – worst case scenario, best case scenario?
I honestly don’t know. What I would say is that in my experience of the Dean and Obama post-campaigns of 2004 and 2008 respectively, it’s difficult – from a management perspective – to keep people motivated and active long term without the incentive and finite time horizon an election supplies. The energy dissipates once folks go back to having lives. There’s an inflection point after an election, I’d guess a few months out, when people have had enough. Simply put: it’s exhausting. And if folks do what I did to compensate for an overall drop-off, work for years without pay to keep the cause alive, they might come to regret the sacrifice as much as I did and do.
I also don’t know, nobody does, what a President Clinton would do with the Bernie movement from the White House. Historically, presidents aren’t too fond of external actors beyond their control. I would assume it will come down to a very cold calculus of power on the part of the Clinton White House, but what the variables in that equation will be is anyone’s guess.
That said, I’d suggest that the most important thing for invested Bernie folks right now isn’t gaming out the probability of long-term survival; that will handle itself. It’s in articulating a reason for being, finding something you do better than anyone else and providing the support base with concrete incentives to stay engaged after Philadelphia. In Nerdspeak, the ladder of engagement writ enormously large.
Can it be done? Abso-fucking-lutely. It could be a MoveOn.org on steroids, create a lasting legacy for Senator Sanders and potentially become something of value and meaning to all of us.
★ By what strategy might the American left recapture the Democratic Party? Would that circumstance bring catastrophe or nirvana?
The American left will not have the kind of power over Democrats – to the extent that’s not somewhat redundant – implied in “recapture” until we have power of our own to match or overcome the intrinsic resistance we would provoke.
Put differently, until we become both independent and indispensable.
I don’t mean this as a call to create a third party; there already is one, the WFP. They’re almost always allied with Democrats and expressis verbis push them to the left.
Not always successfully – Andrew Cuomo railroaded them into dropping their own nominee, Zephyr Teachout, in the 2013 NY-GOV primary – but they usually mean well. Zephyr by the way is fantastic and currently running for Congress, throw her some clams. One of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met.
More broadly though, we need to focus on creating infrastructure. I talk above about a leftie ALEC – why doesn’t that exist yet? Where are all the think tanks, the blogs, newspapers, media in general, support infrastructure for activists, training – NOI went under last year IIRC – all of that?
That’s why I always beg people to go to Netroots Nation; there’s nothing like it. It’s a big warm bath of proggie love, and astonishingly effective at movement-building. That’s how you build power and make the Democrats come to you, not the other way around. I’ve seen it happen.
Power concedes nothing without demand, sure. It might take your phone call, it might not. When we’re the ones writing the checks, power calls us. Infinitely more pleasing.
It begins there. Like I said at the beginning of this tedious monstrosity, “if people like you and I don’t engage in forming change, others will.”
Are we ready? Time will tell. MB out dancing :-)
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