On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 07:05 PM, Gary MacLennan wrote:

 

The real question is whether Trump will call for an armed mobilization of his followers. The English media personality and former Leftist @paulmasonnews has asked this very question.

 

On the construction of 'the middle class' in place of the US working class [and problematic Marxist conceptions of the fate of the former], see David Roediger, The Sinking Middle Class: a political history.
     michael

Which I reviewed:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/25/myths-of-the-white-working-class/

On the construction of 'the middle class' in place of the US working class [and problematic Marxist conceptions of the fate of the former], see David Roediger, The Sinking Middle Class: a political history.
     michael

Barack Obama — his policies and his posture — just won a third term.

Joe Biden will be president because of his close association with Barack Obama, because he espoused many of the same centrist policies and positioning and because of public nostalgia for the normalcy and decency the Obama years provided.

Biden is a restoration president-elect, elected to right the ship and save the system. He is not so much a change agent as a reversion agent. He is elected to Make America Able to Sleep Again.

He doesn’t see his mission as shaking things up, but calming things down.

But, just as was the case with Obama, many of the people who made Biden’s win possible are far to the left of him. As Biden told a Miami television station last month: “I’m the guy that ran against socialists, OK. I’m the guy that’s the moderate. Remember, you guys were all talking, you’d interview me and say, ‘Well, you’re a moderate, how can you win the nomination?’ It’s who I am.” But progressives are not likely to be as silent now as they were during the Obama years.

Obama faced intense, often unfair, resistance from the right on every front, so many who wanted to push him in a more progressive direction held their criticism or limited it for fear of adding to the damage being done to him by his conservative opposition.

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

But many progressives emerged from that unhappy or downright angry. They are not likely to repeat what many consider a mistake.

As my colleague Thomas Edsall astutely observed last year, the Democratic Party is actually three different parties: the most progressive on the left, the “somewhat liberal” in the middle and the majority nonwhite moderates on the right.

The most progressive, who are also the most vocal, have yet to have a true champion in the White House. Although Biden and the Democrats need their energy and can sometimes tack in their direction, these people know that the right uses them as the boogeymen of whom voters in the center and on the right should be afraid.

And many centrist Democrats accuse the most progressive of doing damage to the rest of the party with their rhetoric and policy ambitions.

As The Intercept reported last week, House Democrats held a conference call in the wake of the election in which “centrist after centrist lambasted the party’s left for costing it seats in the lower chamber and threatening its ability to win the Senate.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

Senator Bernie Sanders last month told the Squad — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — that the first order of business for progressives was to defeat Donald Trump by electing Biden. But, he said, the second order of business was to push Biden into becoming “the most progressive president since F.D.R.”

Ocasio-Cortez chimed in to thank Sanders for “normalizing bringing the ruckus on the Democratic Party.” As she explained: “That was not seen as OK for a very long time. It was seen as extremely taboo for a very long time. And it would result in so many people being ostracized, and targeted.”

These progressives aren’t simply going to slink away and be quiet, to sacrifice principles for decorum, nor should they.

We are coming to the end of four years in which Republicans have rampaged, endangering our democracy and attempting to use the courts to lock in their power for a generation. Democrats are meeting that with more happy talk of unity and normalcy. The Republicans know that we are at war; Democrats think it’s a crochet class.

Democrats must think bigger and more strategically. They lean far too heavily on changing demographics, as if population patterns make long-term planning about the gaining and retaining of power unnecessary. That could eventually be problematic. Although nonwhites still vote about two to one for the Democrats, Trump this year got a larger share of the nonwhite vote than any Republican since 1960.

When they were frightened by the socialist claim against Biden, frustrated by what they thought wasn’t enough of a Black agenda, had fallen victim to misinformation, or had simply decided that, somehow, the Republican Party was more attractive to them, they voted for Trump.

Nothing is static in politics. You can take nothing for granted.

Donald Trump got more votes than any Republican in history. He will remain a powerful force among conservatives. The Republican Party is still his. There has been some speculation that he could start his own network that rivals Fox News or exists to the right of it, if that’s even possible.

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

He loves television and this would give him the perfect perch to launch a four-year-long assault on the Biden administration and to influence Republicans in Congress. He could in fact run again in 2024.

Republicans are playing hardball; Democrats are playing softball.

With all due respect, we need to stop deluding ourselves, rhetorically, statistically, and otherwise, if the Green Party is ever to amount to anything. "Tell no lies, claim no easy victories."

Howie Hawkins talks about "Greens" as if he speaks of a singular, unified, ideologically-homogeneous polity-cum-political party, That's a falsehood. The Green Party US is a federation of under 50 state-level parties lacking any sort of ideological, strategic, or even basic discursive coordination. I live in RI, a state that is 50 miles by 40 miles, and I have zero clue about what the Massachusetts and Connecticut parties are up to. Never heard from them once during the campaign, never have seen an update from their leadership provided by an inter-party bulletin, absolutely no idea what they are doing. If the Greens want to actually get elected to federal office in a fashion that would shift things, they need to not just elect one or two candidates, they need to run AN ENTIRE SLATE NATIONWIDE WITH A UNIFIED AGENDA AND PROGRAM! I see no interstate infrastructure in place to facilitate that sort of campaign. The Progressive caucus of the Democrats has 95 seats in the House, 1 in the Senate, and they are brushed aside as an utterly annoying pest by Schumer and Pelosi. If a single Green were to be elected to the House without other Greens, they would rapidly be compelled to either behave like Bernie Sanders, outright switch affiliation to the Democrats, or flounder after a single term due to inability to pass legislation that "brings home the bacon."

In spring/summer 2020, multiple state Green Parties and candidates actively sought to thwart the Hawkins-Walker ticket. The RI party, a bastion of the Cobb 2004 faction, issued a hyperbolic press release about how they would not be responsible for siphoning votes from Biden and urged all Greens to "vote blue no matter who" (the laughable fact that the state is dependably Democratic seemed to slip their minds). Alaska's even more dysfunctional party tried to nominate Jesse Ventura and Cynthia McKinney, both of whom have rather dubious political orientations at this juncture. Dario Hunter, who failed to gain the nomination, ran an independent presidential bid after the Green convention, claiming that the nomination was corrupt and illegitimate (or some such nonsense).

Those two matters should obviate the objective reality and material circumstances the Greens have to face: Until it builds itself into a cohesive nationally-unified party that adheres to a basic platform and has a modicum of inter-state coordination for federal office candidates, their candidates will remain little more than gimmicks and their discombobulated state parties will continue to make believe they are a single unified national party.

Say what you will about securing ballot lines, restrictive access laws, and all the rest, here's the objective reality: Both the Debs-era Socialists and the Depression-era Communists spent multiple election cycles solely focused on organizing in their communities before running for office. Debs had been organizing and leading labor unions for decades, including stints in jail for his role in railroad strikes that gained him nationwide recognition, BEFORE he ran for president. The Communists likewise had built both the CIO and community activism hubs in preparation for their presidential runs. They knew that their presidential candidates could serve as hubs for people to rally around as part of a larger base building strategy. There was no substantial, cohesive, multi-state, coordinated Green base equivalent to the Socialist or Communist base prior to 2019-20.

That is not Marxist, socialist, or even sanity, it is a delusion of grandeur in service of a refusal to make substantive institutional changes to a political party whose foundation was always predicated upon a marriage of convenience between dissident liberals and various New Left tendencies/polities.

"Real liberals are concerned from the start with social inequality as such and not as some bullshit godgiven individual rights issue.  Very few Americans post-Reagan can even grasp how this is possible.  That, not  'engaging' with fake liberals, is the problem the Left faces."

The people I have in mind are fellow workers, real flesh and blood humans that I see on the job, not the abstractions you are describing. Unless you are claiming psychic powers you have NO idea who these people are. Your generalizations may apply to some generic mass but they do not apply to the people I know.

NY Times Sunday Book Review, Nov. 9, 2020
The Man Who Made Us Feel for the Animals
By Victoria Johnson

A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES
Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement
By Ernest Freeberg
336 pp. Basic Books. $30.

In March 2019, drivers near Yankee Stadium were startled to find themselves sharing the expressway with a reddish-brown calf. Police officers trussed and tranquilized the terrified animal in front of rolling cameras, and the scene went viral on social media. The calf had escaped from a nearby slaughterhouse. Its bid for freedom reminded city dwellers that tens of thousands of animals die in New York each year.

It was once utterly impossible to ignore this fact. In 19th-century New York, cattle were driven through the streets to the stockyard on 40th Street, stray dogs were drowned by the hundreds in wire cages in the East River and trolley horses fell dead in their tracks. P. T. Barnum’s menagerie on Broadway burned to the ground three times, killing hyenas, big cats and hundreds of other animals. The trapped creatures screamed in a “horrible chorus” of “mortal agony,” The Times reported.

One man did more than any other to change the way New Yorkers — and Americans overall — treated their animals. In his vivid and often wrenching new book, “A Traitor to His Species,” the historian Ernest Freeberg tells the story of Henry Bergh, a wealthy New Yorker who braved ridicule, assault and death threats for over two decades as he sounded the alarm about animal suffering. Among Bergh’s many achievements, the most consequential was the founding in 1866 of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

“A Traitor to His Species” is not a conventional biography, intriguing as its central figure is. The book is above all a compassionate, highly readable account of the 19th-century plight of animals, especially urban animals — and of those who tried to come to their rescue.

Bergh began his crusade late in life. In his 50s, he was posted as a diplomat by the Lincoln administration to Russia, where he was horrified by the cruelty he saw carriage drivers inflicting on their horses. One day he chided a violent driver, who ceased his abuse. Heartened by this episode, Bergh began to cast about for a way to draw attention to the suffering of animals in an age when many people thought that they couldn’t feel emotion or even pain. Back in New York, Bergh assembled a group of fellow elites and secured a charter from the State of New York to create the A.S.P.C.A. Remarkably, Bergh and his A.S.P.C.A. agents were empowered to make arrests when they witnessed animal cruelty.

Bergh flexed his new muscles immediately, marching onto a docked schooner and arresting the captain. His hold was stacked with starving and thirsty green turtles. They were immobilized on their backs, their flippers bleeding from the ropes threaded through them. Turtle flesh was highly prized on dinner tables, in taverns and at “turtle clubs” devoted to this delicacy.

The ensuing court case drew national attention, just as Bergh had hoped. “Notoriety is wanted,” he insisted — and he got it. He was ridiculed for trying to protect lowly turtles, but he had made his point. Every creature, Bergh believed, deserved humane treatment. In the end, the schooner captain was declared innocent. Yet Bergh had made himself and his cause instantly famous. Americans who had never thought about the question before were suddenly debating whether animals had rights.

Bergh’s crusading compassion aligned him with the great reform movements of his age. All around him, men and women were creating institutions meant to improve child welfare, education, hospitals, prisons and the plight of the formerly enslaved. Bergh found allies as well as inspiration in these efforts. If people had learned to stop thinking of human beings as property, couldn’t they be taught to stop thinking of animals as property, too? Bergh pointedly called animals “our speechless slaves.” No less a figure than Frederick Douglass put the same argument to an audience in 1873. Farmers should be kind to their horses, he said, because even though they can’t speak, they have senses and can feel affection: “A horse is in many respects like a man.”

But how to change minds and behavior? Animal advocates disagreed on the best strategy. Some of Bergh’s milder allies sought to encourage respect for animals not through the strong arm of the law but through sentimental education. Adults organized essay contests for schoolchildren on the subject of “Kindness to Animals.” A prominent Bostonian named George Angell arranged for the American publication of Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty,” introducing readers to the novel idea that a horse could both suffer and rejoice. Louisa May Alcott contributed to the genre as well, writing a short story in which an abused horse told her own sad tale — mentioning Bergh along the way.

Bergh’s own approach was fiercer; he had less faith in human nature. He thought the fear of arrest was a stronger deterrent than moral suasion. He strode like an avenging angel through the streets of Manhattan, on the hunt for suffering animals and harsh masters. Freeberg’s writing is at its liveliest when he is following Bergh on these daily rounds. One mesmerizing scene has Bergh climbing with a policeman to the roof of a bloody dogfighting den run by a Five Points gang leader. The policeman lowers himself through the skylight, catching the perpetrators in the act.

Bergh’s passion for animals thickened his own hide. Whenever he encountered a mistreated trolley horse, he swooped onto the tracks in front of the horsecar, halting traffic for blocks as he rescued the animal. He pioneered an ambulance in which to transport sick horses — an innovation soon adapted, Freeberg writes, for the transport of sick New Yorkers. Bergh made enemies of the horsecar drivers and their powerful bosses. He hectored one of the latter, the formidable Cornelius Vanderbilt, about his bloody profits, made from “the cruel sufferings of a dumb, speechless servant.”

Bergh attacked another famous American, P. T. Barnum, for abusing wild animals to entertain humans. Barnum relished the fight with Bergh; it brought him more publicity and bigger audiences. (It was only in 2017 that the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed down, after a long campaign by animal rights activists.)

No possible site of animal cruelty escaped Bergh’s attention — the Erie Canal with its straining, bleeding mules; vivisection laboratories where dogs were pinned down and sliced open in front of medical students; city slaughterhouses where cattle were clubbed to death after enduring horrific privation on railroad cars left to bake in the sun while the animals gasped for air and water. When “iced meat” emerged as a partial alternative to the transport of live animals, Bergh embraced the innovation — both because of the relief it would bring livestock and because it removed the morally corrupting sight of abused animals from the view of all but those who worked in the industry. Today, when a desperate creature manages to break loose and run through New York City, it reminds us of the hidden cost of our tastes.

As Freeberg shows, Bergh rankled many Americans with his insistence that individual liberties must sometimes bow to the common good. But even some of Bergh’s targets came to respect him deeply for his convictions. When Bergh was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in 1888, P. T. Barnum was in attendance.

Victoria Johnson is a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College and the author of “American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic.”

On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 04:17 PM, Richard Modiano wrote:

"There are no liberal Democrats any more"

I was not talking about Democrats. I was referring to people who are appalled at Trump's attack on reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, his border concentration camps, caging children, etc. but who fail to draw the connection between these injustices and capitalist property relations. These are the kind of people who vote for the "lesser of two evils" but are NOT Democratic Party stalwarts.

The people you are describing are Democrats. That is, they walk and quack like "centrists," ie  ducks who are interested only in "God-given" bourgeois rights in the abstract, find Libertarianism daring and enticing, and who are 100% ready to support "compromise" when it comes to "socialist" nonsense like universal healthcare, free college, and all the other Bernie Sanders mildly social-democratic stuff.  Most of them experience sexual arousal when they hear the word "entrepreneur."  This is a social disease.

You will never make real liberals out of these smug bourgeois asswipes.  Furthermore, the nice-guy act in most cases is paper-thin--what they are for is gentrification and a tidy little investment portfolio and not being challenged in any serious way intellectually, politically, or otherwise.  They are "liberal" to the insignificant extent that they are because it gives them the right to be offended by violations of bourgeois decorum, which they detect everywhere because in reality most of them are mad as hell and as paranoid as Trump. In that, they go well beyond the limits of the "love me" liberal of the Sixties, who they will tell you was naive and immature and ill-versed in the stern necessities of the marketplace, which they now unreservedly embrace.  They are in love with virtue-signaling and smugness and the ineffable contours of their own expensively toned buttocks. They have friends at the Chase Manhattan.

It's perfectly possible to have a BLM sign on your tiny urban tree lawn and still be a Karen.  You can no more trust these fakers than you can a Trump republican--in most cases they are far more treacherous because, like Mack the Knife, they keep the messer hidden where nobody can see it until it's used to lethal effect/

They will support the Biden-Harris-Emanuel war on "socialism" right down to the property line. 

Of course you can have a nice chat with such people at cocktail parties.  So what?  

Real liberals are concerned from the start with social inequality as such and not as some bullshit godgiven individual rights issue.  Very few Americans post-Reagan can even grasp how this is possible.  That, not " engaging" with fake liberals, is the problem the Left faces.  

"Why can't we all just get along" is a fair question.  But there are good reasons why we can't.  All that post-Popular Front Kumbaya bullshit is dead and has become dangerous.

A major factor beyond accusations that all Trump voters are racists, goes back to the legacy of Roger Ailes and the manipulation of culture to tribalize politics beyond issues. This, via FOX and talk radio has cultivated and fed what, as a mental health worker, we would have called a  "thought disorder" en mass. In the old cold war era, they called it "brainwashing." I've written several articles on this for a local rag when I had a monthly column (pre-COVID). Today's America and the cultivated divide is the legacy of Roger Ailes and to a degree, George H.W. Bush who honed an embedded media worthy of distrust

Roger and Us

remembering-that-blue-marble-moment.

Students of color at Haverford and administrators are at a standstill as a boycott of classes continues for a second week. The students are demanding firm commitments to structurally shift the institution and better support for students of color.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/09/students-color-haverford-college-continue-strike-racial-equity