So I looked up on Wikipedia, the whole of human knowledge, what Asian Pacific Heritage is, just so I know who to include, and Wikipedia said India is included in that. Also, Australia, which seems wrong. Now, I’ve been looking for an excuse to run a graphic of Vijay Prashad, but I didn’t expect it would be during Asian Pacific Heritage Month.
So next week either I will make one of Paul Hogan or a Koala bear.
If you don’t know Vijay Prashad, you really should. He is an international public intellectual, who is really engaging when he speaks. He’s also written a number of books, including Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, and Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Stocks, Jails, Welfare. During the election, I intended to use a quote from him and for some reason, I forgot. So I will share it now:
When Americans say Benghazi, what they mean is Hillary Clinton’s attempt to become president.
If Hillary comes back, I might still use this quote.
Also, Vijay Prashad lives one town over from me. Someday I hope to meet him. I keep missing him speak when he does something local. Someday.
Solidarity is the core to any movement and there hasn’t been solidarity between the Democrats in years. As I mentioned before, I am reading Nixonland by Rick Pearlsten and I am reading about the split in the Democratic party in 1968. Here is the problem: Historically the Democratic party is not the natural home of Labor and civil rights. There can be an debate about Economic justice.
When the Republican party was founded, it was the antithesis of what it is today, it was an abolitionist party who was for worker rights. That’s why it was the natural home for people like “Fightin’ Bob” LaFollett. Roosevelt was the first Democrat who really supported labor and Truman was the first to really work on civil rights. It wasn’t until the late 60s when the Democratic party was seen as the party of civil rights.
That is when racists like Nixon and Reagan started using dog whistles to attract racists to their party, running the last of the progressive Republicans out of the party.
This is also where we see how in the 60s, the Roosevelt coalition fell apart.
This was due to the anti-war movement and racism.
Solidarity was lost in the 60s and the Democrats moved to the right because they ran campaigns with issues. (I can’t wait to read “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan” to learn about the 1984 election to understand the rise of the New Democrats better.) Instead we got Bill Clinton whose greatest accomplishments as president was everything Republicans couldn’t pass, NAFTA, Welfare Reform, and the expansion of the Prison industrial complex with his Crime bill.
There was the faux solidarity of the Obama ascendancy. It wasn’t so much “Solidarity” as much as it is different groups voting the same way.
Obama wanted to be the great unifier and when you peer beneath the surface, you can see he wasn’t.
Now we do have some people who actually talk solidarity, like Medea Benjamin, but we don’t see a politician to do so. Bernie Sanders essentially told the #BlackLivesMatter movement to wait, he’ll get to them, creating a riff between him and people of color. This, with the reinforcement of white supremacy, outright racism (The attack of Marissa Janae Johnson after she interrupted Bernie in Seattle), and misogyny (Killer Mike’s rewriting of what happened in Seattle) has disrupted the solidarity needed to win.
Bernie Sanders’ lack of leadership to end the racism and to create genuine solidarity is why he lost the primary. Because Clinton was so bad at campaigning she lost to Trump; we need to find our solidarity. We also need someone who is genuinely progressive and who can actually build coalitions. We need somebody who understands that the reasons for the uprising in Egypt are the same as the uprising in Wisconsin, and who can bring that solidarity needed to win.
I’m certain that, intellectually, Bernie Sanders understood this, but his actions speak otherwise, and Clinton doesn’t understand the word “Solidarity.” This is why we need new leadership. This is why, unless Elizabeth Warren runs for President in 2020, and unless the Democrats figure this simple idea of Solidarity, we are likely to lose the next two elections. To paraphrase Thomas Geoghegan, the idea of solidarity is scandalous.
Maybe now we should actually do something to change that.
I see a 5-legged chair of the Democratic party if the party ever wants to win. 1) Labor, if it wants to survive MUST show solidarity with the Fight for $15, 2) Civil Rights, which the Dreamers and #BlackLivesMatter have done a good job showing Solidarity with each other, 3) Economic Justice movement, which needs to learn that just because the venn diagram of social and economic justice movements have a lot of overlap, that means that they have to support and center people of color if they want to build that coalition. Right now, because of the white supremacy in our society, the civil rights movement doesn’t trust the economic justice movement, 4) Anti-war movement, which I am not overly familiar with other leaders of the movement beyond Medea Benjamin, who does a great job of showing solidarity, 5) The environmental movement which I have no critique of with solidarity because I haven’t delved into it as much. I will say, the venn diagram of these movements, the environmental movement overlaps with the other 4 nicely. Solar, wind, Geothermal, and battery production are all jobs of the future, communities of color tend to be the dumping grounds of pollution, with the expansion of the economy of non-exportable jobs, there can be better economic justice, and since oil is almost a conflict mineral (Minerals are solids and inorganic, coal is organic and oil is a liquid) and we fight wars for oil, we should switch to renewable sources for that alone. Plus, climate change is the reason why the conflict in Syria started.
These five legs are not natural coalitions, however, with better leadership they can be. That is the coalition the Democratic party must build upon in order to win. Sadly, neither Bernie Sanders or Tom Perez has figured this out in their solidarity tour.
We need to fix this. We need to actually put these people in a room in a town hall style event to start finding that solidarity. Then the cream will rise to the top and we can start seeing who the next democratic leaders will be. Because what we are doing right now isn’t working and it hasn’t worked for a long time. We need change in this country, and the place to start is with Solidarity. Until then, we can’t move forward.
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