What Does It Mean To Be Progressive?

After suffering mightily from conservative disdain, for us and for any political principles except sticking it to us, Progressives now sense vindication. On the points that Progressives have advocated over the past few decades, events, meaning reality, have shown us to be right. Everyone but Republicans and fossil fuel companies has gone beyond talking about global warming to planning their responses. The majority of Americans like Obamacare, and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 56% favor Medicare for All. Racism and sexism are recognized more than ever as deeply embedded flaws in our society, which require systemic change to eliminate. Policing must be made safer for Black lives and for other lives, because of racism and sexism, as well as a culture of impunity from the people police should serve.

It took a cartoon version of conservative ideas to wake up the 20% to 30% of Americans in the middle to the speciousness of Republican political ideology. Progressive causes are becoming American causes.

I worry now that the greatest danger to the political success of progressivism is self-destruction. As soon as Biden pulled ahead in the primaries, David Siders and Holly Otterbein wrote for Politico about a “Never Biden” movement among Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Disappointed revolutionaries are seeking to break off a chunk of progressive support and ensure the victory of Trump and forces of the right. Their motives are as fuzzy as their thinking.

Here’s what I mean. Ted Rall says “Progressives Should Boycott the Democratic Party”. David Swanson tells us “Why You Should Never Vote for Joe Biden”. Victoria Freire says “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our vote”.

Joe Biden is far from the ideal candidate for Progressives. Biden has personified the corporate wing of the Democratic Party for decades. He has a long history of moderate, even conservative positions as a centrist Democrat, which these articles detail as one of their major arguments. On the burning issues of the day, it is easy to find Biden statements and votes which anger Progressives: opposition to Medicare for All, endorsement of President Obama’s anti-immigrant policies, silencing of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings, support for military aggression in the Middle East.

Next to these legitimate criticisms, however, anti-Biden voices sink to less honest arguments against him. The least honest is the claim that he is mentally unfit. Rall says, “He is clearly suffering from dementia” and is “senile”, citing as evidence only a poll that shows that many Republicans think he is not fully there. Jeremy Scahill says, “Biden’s cognitive health and mental acuity is, to say the least, questionable”. The senility argument is a Trump talking point, and is just as dishonest when employed by leftists.

As someone who has talked in front of audiences all my life, I can confidently say that Biden shows no signs of dementia. His critics ignore how difficult it is to talk publicly, especially in front of cameras, even for those who have done it a thousand times. I constantly hear college graduates, even college professors, fumble for words, interrupt their sentences, insert “like” and “you know” everywhere, and make those flubs for which Biden is criticized, often using videos from another century.

Somewhat less dishonest, but just as misleading, is the dredging up of every past Biden statement that puts him squarely in the moderate Democratic camp as proof about his policy ideas today. Biden’s centrism has moved leftwards during his career, just as the Democratic electorate has shifted. He is no Bernie Sanders and has not endorsed Medicare for All. But he openly advocates a version of the Green New Deal, a much more radical environmental policy than that of any presidential candidate before this year. He has argued against defunding the police, a purely negative idea which ought not be a progressive litmus test until it has been much more thoroughly discussed. But his current approach to the twin scourges of sexism and racism is far from his previous stands and squarely in the middle of progressive politics.

Anti-Biden leftists ignore the policies that Biden and the Democratic Party are promoting now. Waleed Shahid, of the leftist Justice Democrats, said that Biden’s proposals represent “the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party”.

I believe that Progressives, especially now in the face of Republican anti-democratic politics, should always emphasize the necessity of listening to the voters. But a central part of the anti-Biden clamor is the delegitimization of the will of Democratic voters.

Krystal Ball, former MSNBC host, already in March told millions of viewers of “The Young Turks”, “if they always can say, 'Look, you've got to vote for us no matter what, you've got no other choice,' then they're always going to treat us like this.” Victoria Freire argues this way: “Start by asking why the DNC would choose such a weak candidate for Democrats to consolidate behind. The answer? Corporatist democratic leaders would rather have a fascist in the White House over a democratic socialist.”

A different form of condescension comes from David Swanson, who asserts that those who would pick Biden over Trump are “lesser-evil voters” who become evil-doers themselves: “People, with very few exceptions it seems, cannot do lesser-evil voting on a single day without having it take over their identity and influence their behavior.” He cites his own made-up facts: “the nearly universal practice of those who advocate less-evil voting of becoming cheerleaders for evil for periods of four years”.

A conspiratorial view of American politics is not limited to the right. Many disgruntled Bernie supporters in 2016 attributed his loss to the secret machinations of some Democratic elite. Democratic voters were duped then and are being duped now by people nearly as bad, or maybe worse, than the far right.

American political campaigns are certainly tarnished by deliberate deception, and Trump’s campaign thus far brings the worst form of public lying to the presidential campaign. Voter manipulation is a feature of American politics. But the assertion that a corporate Democratic cabal, a wealthy corporate war-mongering racist and sexist elite, has successfully manipulated Democratic voters to vote for “their” safe candidate is insulting to us voters. That much is obvious.

Less obvious are its racial assumptions. The “Black vote”, the convenient political label for how millions of Black Americans make their political choices, was a central media talking point during the primaries. The collective choices of those voters gave moderate Joe the victory over more progressive Bernie. Were they all duped? Did they throw away their votes out of ignorance or malice?

The political conspiracy theories of the right assume that Democratic voters actively support evil. The conspiracy theories of the “Never Biden” element of the left assume that we are just dumb.

I was frustrated by Bernie’s defeat in 2016 and 2020, and wished that certain Democratic politicians and media personalities had not nudged those elections toward the center. But there is no evidence that the nudging created Hillary’s victory over Bernie by 12% or Joe’s victory this year by 22%.

To assume that Black voters, or Democratic voters in general, have made poor choices, that they don’t understand what they should want and how to get there in today’s political climate, is not progressive. That kind of thinking has led left movements towards dictatorship. Letting Trump win by convincing Americans on the left to vote against Biden will be good for nobody, especially for anyone who supports positions further to the left.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 28, 2020

Republicans Versus Schools

Trump hates the pandemic. Not because 130,000 Americans have died and that many more may die. He is not doing a thing to prevent more deaths. He is the only victim who matters. The coronavirus has ruined His economy, which ruins the prospects for His winning, winning, and more winning in November.

Trump has flailed at the virus, putting on display for everyone the disorganization, the inability to plan or lead, the absence of empathy for nearly everyone, and the overpowering weight of his ego. Watching his incompetence dealing with this crisis has become a national spectacle. We are liable to be blinded by that display and miss how Republicans are exploiting mass death to pursue their attack on American education.

Schools and schooling have played a central role in conservative ideology my whole life. The social eruptions around who gets to go to what school marked the 1960s and continues to this day. That was part of the fateful shift of racial conservatives across the country away from the Democratic Party, lured by the Republican “Southern strategy”. Later conservatives launched an ideological war against the American curriculum in science and history. In my lifetime, “professor” has turned from an object of respect for knowledge and intelligence to an object of ridicule on the right. Now, under cover of outrage at the Republican blundering during the pandemic, they are attacking two long-time educational enemies with unprecedented assertions of executive power.

Public schools are barely tolerated by Republicans. The long-delayed push to equalize education for black and white sent conservatives into resistance to any changes to the status quo, and then fleeing into private schools when they lost. Those schools and many more since then became a refuge from the discoveries of science and the transformation of our understanding of race and gender, where a certain version of Christianity is lifted into dogma. But most American children go to public school, and Republicans have fought to control national curricula by inserting creationism and rejecting revisions to great white men’s history.

They have won some battles and immensely slowed down change, but they are losing the cultural war.

Few principles have been raised as high in the conservative war for education as local control. “Local” did not always really mean local. “States rights” was the stated principle behind the Southern resistance to integration, because the push for educational equality was supported by the federal government. For people who mythologized the Confederacy, states’ rights was a natural slogan and opposition to racial equality a natural goal.

Now that they have control of the presidency under a man who knows no rights other than his own, today’s Republicans brush aside all principles, even their own, in their rush to achieve partisan goals. The principle was not so important after all, just the ideological goal.

Trump made the extraordinary demand that public schools across America open up for in-class teaching: “In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

This is not extraordinary for the lie behind the comparison of European countries who have the virus under control to the out-of-control spread in the US, or for the use of CAPS, or for the attack on his enemies. The President is asserting that he can control Congressionally-mandated funding for more than 130,000 local public schools. The federal government contributes about 8% of school funding, which mostly goes to schools with large numbers of low-income students and to special education. Any attempt by Trump to withhold federal funding would probably fail, but he might be able to block funds from the March CARES Act to deal with the COVID crisis. His threat might be empty, but it reveals ever more clearly both the conservative agenda to control public education and the disdain for the welfare of the most vulnerable children.

Most of Trump’s sudden assertions of executive power come from his deep need for potency rather than legal rules. Here, too, his ability to actually cut off money from public schools is questionable. But with the support of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the silence of other Republican officials, Trump’s tweeted assertion of executive power has become official Republican policy.

So much for enemy number 1. Enemy number 2 is higher education, also a system of public schools under state jurisdiction and private schools, many with worldwide renown. What could be a better idea than to combine an attack on all these schools with an assault on immigrants? Trump said he would refuse visas to international students and deport those in the US if their institutions did not teach them in classrooms. His effort to control thousands of colleges and universities from the White House also proved to be a flop. The administration had to drop this plan after Harvard University and MIT, supported by dozens of other universities, more than 70 higher education associations, and 20 state attorneys general sued to block the new policy and it was subjected to massive criticism.

That victory over anti-intellectual malice will not reverse the disastrous decline in international student enrollment caused by other Republican policies. The numbers are uncertain, but it is likely that enrollment of new international students in American higher education this fall will be one-third or less of the number from previous years.

Knowledge is power. But knowledge can be disempowering to the mythology of Republican ideology. These failed attempts to take over American education from kindergarten to graduate school will not be the last efforts by Republicans to prevent popular knowledge from disproving their alternative facts and baseless theories. They want to destroy what is best about America.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 21, 2020

What Will Happen on November 4?

It looks like Biden will beat Trump badly and the Republicans will suffer disastrous losses across the country in November. Although the polls have just been inching toward the Democrats, suddenly articles about what Trump might do if he loses are multiplying, here, here, and here.

Trump might declare the elections fake, go on FOX News to say he had really won, call out the National Guard, barricade himself in the Oval Office, order the Secret Service to shoot Biden on sight.

But what he will do is the wrong question. What matters is what his supporters will do when they lose.

Three groups of supporters are crucial to observe. The media will focus at first on Republican politicians. Will Senate losers in Montana, Arizona, Colorado, and other states jump on the fake news bandwagon? Would Mitch McConnell go quietly if Amy McGrath beats him in a very close race? Maybe Susan Collins will accept defeat in Maine, but what about QAnon promoter Jo Rae Perkins in Oregon? How about Lauren Boebert, QAnon enthusiast and House candidate in Colorado, and the other 7 Republican congressional candidates on the ballot who have expressed support for QAnon?

The whole Republican Senate delegation has already cast doubt on the results by allowing their leader to proclaim unchallenged that the election will be fraudulent. On June 22, Trump said the 2020 election “will be the most RIGGED Election in our nations history”. In 2018, the National Republican Senatorial Committee followed up a Trump tweet about “electoral corruption” in the Arizona Senate race by charging that the election they lost there was rigged. Stripped of power, perhaps for years, it’s not hard to imagine Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham, among others, casting doubt on the results.

Thus far the bravest Republicans in Washington, aside from Mitt Romney, are Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who called Trump’s pardon of Roger Stone a “mistake”, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who said she won’t campaign against Joe Biden. The majority of Senate Republicans cowers in silence.

Will Trump’s toadies now running our intelligence services and justice system speak up and what will they say? Across the country, Republican state legislators who lose their gerrymandered majorities could join the chorus.

A second set of Trump supporters use their control of media to send waves of influence into every corner of America. Will FOX News report the official results or attack them? How about the other people to whom Republicans listen, even more partisan and less connected to reality, like Limbaugh, Breitbart, InfoWars, Drudge? Will powerful evangelical pastors Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress proclaim that their God-given leader was cheated?

The third group is the most important and hardest to gauge – the MAGA-hat-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving white supremacists and conspiracy partisans who make up his legendary “base”. Will they see the end times coming as their messiah is defeated? Will the dozens of armed militia groups adopt 2^nd Amendment remedies to the impending takeover of America by radical socialist pedophiles? What will Ammon Bundy, the boogaloo boys, the Oath Keepers, and the more than 500 other anti-government groups loosely allied in the so-called “patriot movement” identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center do? Will the NRA call out its members to fight the commies?

Trump could scream himself hoarse with no effect unless his supporters sing along. As full election results trickle in the days after November 3 and as the implications sink in with the approach of Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021, a coalition of supporters in Washington, state governments, media, and on the ground might throw our country into an existential, not merely Constitutional crisis.

It’s certain that Trump will do nothing brave himself, will commit himself to no action that he can’t back out of. But the radicals who drive their cars into Black Lives Matter protesters, who bring their assault rifles to the pizza palace, and who believe anything “Q” says are much more volatile, unhinged, and violent.

Whatever answers such questions might elicit now will change over the next few months, as Trump stokes more fear among his supporters, pushes them further away from the American center, and forces his Republican allies to come along.

Watch Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Matt Gaetz (Florida) and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California), Gov. Ron DeSantis (Florida), and Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff. Watch wily Mitch McConnell, who shares with Trump a powerful belief in the importance of his own survival.

And watch out for America.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 14, 2020