@on the cusp

According to Cenk, Justice Democrats is a play on "just us Democrats". The mistake they made is using the word, Democrat. It has been defined, and it isn't pretty.

If we are to defeat the oligarchy, it will take crossing the aisle. The bigger and broader the coalition, the harder it will be to create infighting and tear it down. That is why 99% worked and BLM didn't.

On the other hand, it matters. As soon as a person tells me they are a conservative, alarms go off in my head. I steer clear from religion, taxes, gay rights, immigration, Social Security, health insurance, and try to discuss the business at issue.
I cannot rationally discuss Medicare for all with a person who lives by Breitbart, who almost died from a massive heart attack, and hates the whole idea of government programs that are currently providing his child with a college education by government grants.

@Tak

Terminology needs to be continually re-invented, if the concepts being described are to have any longevity whatsoever. This has been a huge problem for the American Left, ever since the 60's. Corporate media have the ability to grab hold of any word, and turn it completely upside-down.

Words need to have meanings that successfully communicate, especially when you are attempting to communicate complex ideas. If they become so bastardized that meaning is effectively smeared all over the map, it's time to look for another word.

This happened twice before in my lifetime, first when in the 1960s the term liberal similarly lost meaning. While it wore well enough in the previous decade, the glaring conflict of calling oneself liberal while at the same time waging imperialist slaughter in Viet Nam and telling the civil rights movement that we're asking for "too much too soon" quickly led to a complete cognitive breakdown. So, after 1962's Port Huron Statement, most of us adopted the term The New Left (which also served to underline our substantial disagreements with the "old left"), and which worked quite well until the main national organizations came apart at the seams at the end of the decade.

After a few years of position papers and informal discussions, most of us (though not including what became a new form of the old left, with a very similar fucked-up-ness as the old old left) settled on the term progressive, which looked back to both the turn-of-the-century progressive movement as well as Henry Wallace's Progressive Party of the late 1940s. In other words, broad enough to encompass all of us working on a huge range of projects, some electoral and basically reformist, as well as some grassroots and community empowerment projects that occasionally were quite radical (I tended towards the latter, of course...).

However, for about the last 10 years it's become increasingly obvious that the word is now commonly used to describe people and stuff that really have no business using it, at least in the way it was first intended. This is that obliteration of meaning I mentioned. While imperialist wars, global manipulation and the racist system we all live inside rumble right along, one feature of life in America has risen to the fore, dominating and shaping everything else: the increasingly naked plutocracy and its accompanying ideology of neoliberalism. A failure to recognize this (hello, Democratic Party loyalists!) is an abject failure to deal with our current reality.

So this is why I've thrown in the towel on "progressive," and am now back to just referring to "the left," whatever that may mean, until something better emerges.

@k9disc "Drain the Swamp" absolutely activated values in people. Do you know how many right-wing people cited that to me, whether online or IRL?

The problem with it for Trump wasn't in the message, it was in the fact that he wasn't prepared to follow through on the message.

and you're likely to get an eyeroll.

Same thing with "Reform".

We do not have corruption in politics. This is the business of government. It is legal, and it is how the system works.

Talking about "Reform" or "Corruption" is an anachronism. It isn't corruption if it's legal. And reform is a hackneyed political concept that is un-believable on it's face. You might as well say "transparency".

Also, corruption is a human failing, not a systemic one. Talking about corruption is a great way to get the whipping boy whipped or the scapegoat ran out of town on a rail.

Drumpf didn't promise reform. He didn't go in to root out corruption, that would have lead to guffaws across the electorate. He went directly after pay to play; after systemic political problems with his "Drain the Swamp" metaphor.

There are no values or frames to hang an argument on with corruption and reform frames.

We've got to stop corporate sponsored public policy and the private sector predation it enables. The whole American political system is set up as a public policy department for Big Corporate & the Oligarchs. They sponsor the representatives and as the corporate or philanthropic sponsors, they get to call the tune. It is as simple as that.

We are not fighting corruption, we are fighting the business of government. It ain't going to be fixed with political reform, it's going to get fixed by throwing some people in jail, eliminating the profit motives, and making citizens as important as profit.

@k9disc There's also no reason you can't have an umbrella word AND specifics. The best speeches, for instance, have both.

I see no value in trading out the concept of corruption for the concept of business as usual.

Corruption? What is it? Pay to play? Legalized Bribery? Aristocracy? Big vs Little? Rich vs Poor?

I'd say,"Yes," to all of them. Corruption is an umbrella, and as such it is not specific or discrete enough to allow for proper targeting. You can't have precision nor accuracy if the target is poorly defined.

Reform? Again, what are we reforming? Pay to play? etc...

The words and arguments we need have to be based on values. Corruption and reform have no values.

That's why Bernie's schtick was so powerful. It was all based on values. It's not fair for Big Corporate & the Oligarchs to run the place and to get all the gains and support of a nation while leaving the people out in the cold.

The value is basic fairness. Never uttered, either... Can you imagine the hearty guffaws and belly laughs if Bernie said,"American Politics is not Fair!" Duh!

There is a sweet spot for messaging, and it's all about getting the listener to conjure up the values for him or herself.

When you are messaging you are trafficking in values that the listener/voter assumes are due them. If you tell them too directly, you are talking down to them. If you set the scope of your argument too wide, you wind up with platitudes that are meaningless.

We want to say things that activate values in the listener. Selling corruption and reform activate no values and have no target.

It's a great way to get rid of a few bad apples, but does nothing to remove the rot from the barrel.

@Cassiodorus I think that's an unnecessarily harsh view of the progressive movement. Any movement against pay--to-play is good for me, as long as the leadership is sincere. The part of the right wing that objects to corruption has every right to join the fight, and I've got no problem with them doing it. But they over-relied on a famous politician.

Today, much like 120-some years ago, the United States finds itself in need of a strong progressive movement.

The original "progressive movement," as Gabriel Kolko pointed out, was a conservative movement, designed to quiet the class struggle of the late 19th century. That's not what they needed then, and it's not what we need now.

What would be useful today would be what its proponents call ecosocialism. The task of the century is to get people to sign on to (note that I don't use the word "buy") that.

1) One of the most important items on the progressive agenda today is getting big money out of politics, especially corporate money. It's a very worthy goal.

It's also a stupid sell.

I'm at a loss to understand why all our politicians should be commodities owned by rich people. Of course, that's what they are -- I wouldn't expect anything less of the utopia of money in its declining phase -- I'm just at a loss to understand why it should be that way. People ought to dream of some other utopia than the utopia of money, mostly because the dream of individual riches is for the most part used to get them to produce the society of a few rich and a struggling many. They can be observed doing this every day like donkeys on the treadmills with the carrots dangling in front of their noses.

What was equally amazing is that it never occurred the Democrats to jump on that bandwagon and vow to battle the corruption, even after the issue was sitting there in the open.

Democrats had to phrase it as "keeping money out of politics" because they were and are hip-deep in that money. Vowing to "battle the corruption" meant, and means, vowing to battle themselves, and as Clinton spent most of last year going from coast to coast collecting donations from the Hamptons and from Beverly Hills, everyone knew that. The Democrats are BOURGEOIS, and everyone outside of the coasts knows this now.

So what do progressives do? They embrace Democratic Socialism.
While I am totally onboard with that, this is once again, a stupid sell.

Sanders used the term "socialism" to sell something far less -- a deviant conservatism that promised the public a few basic programs while keeping the basic social roles of American late capitalism intact. His use of the term "socialism" was one of the best things about his campaign, which otherwise fell short of what his followers clearly wanted to produce. If you want to make something like the Sanders campaign or the Justice Democrats effective, the key is not to change their name to "Reform Democrats," because it sounds like forsaking the "political revolution," another hopeful term Sanders used to oversell his campaign. Rather, try to engineer some sort of accord between the Sanders-campaign-from-above and the Sanders-campaign-from-below, two entities which were clearly at odds with each other last year.

Fortunately there is a word we can learn from the Progressive Movement that they used effectively. It also happens to conveniently tie in with the 'corruption' theme.
That word is: monopoly.

I have no idea why "monopoly" would be a word of any importance today. What dominates late capitalism are oligopolies -- everyone knows that if you don't like Verizon you can get your wifi from Time Warner Cable, if you don't like flying United you can always fly American or Delta, if you don't like Coke you can drink Pepsi and so on. These corporations aren't hated monopolies; they're service providers. The revolt against corporations will instead begin with a collective understanding of why their class interests are opposed to those of the working people of America.

@Cassiodorus There's so much good in this comment.

I'm at a loss to understand why all our politicians should be commodities owned by rich people. Of course, that's what they are -- I wouldn't expect anything less of the utopia of money in its declining phase -- I'm just at a loss to understand why it should be that way.

And that's the beginning of any movement toward reform or revolution. Which is why the establishment narratives focus so intensely on inevitability, on the notion of "the world as we find it." It's why there's such an effort to fiddle with people's perceptions so that they will never measure the distance between their lived experience and what could be. Politics today runs on the reversal of Bobby Kennedy's statement that 'There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?'

They're trying to destroy the people's ability to say "why not?" That's what the Clintons' project has been for 30 years. They've gone a long way toward achieving their goal, but somehow the brass ring keeps eluding them. Maybe with Bernie Sanders helping them, they'll finally grab it. (Which is sad, because IMO, Sanders was trying to strike a blow AGAINST inevitability; he saw that the idea of any political alternative to the Trump/Clinton world was about to go under for the foreseeable future. And indeed, without his campaign, where would we be?)

People ought to dream of some other utopia than the utopia of money, mostly because the dream of individual riches is for the most part used to get them to produce the society of a few rich and a struggling many. They can be observed doing this every day like donkeys on the treadmills with the carrots dangling in front of their noses.

Of course they ought to. That's why the current fight is over perception. Right now, Americans think that, in order to survive, they must stay on that treadmill. Stay on it, or get dragged into its gears and be destroyed. Why do you think I recently bought a house? Because I think I may not be able to do so for much longer. I don't want to get dragged into the gears and crushed, so I take what steps I can to stay on the machine rather than in it. Everybody tries to do this with what they have; most of us can't make it because the machine keeps draining away the very wealth and assets which are the only way to stay on top of it.

"I ought to say," explained Pooh as they walked down to the shore of the island, "that it isn't just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it's a Boat, and sometimes it's more of an Accident. It all depends."

"Depends on what?"

"On whether I'm on the top of it or underneath it."

Sadly, in the case of money, it's worse than an Accident. Money is a weapon, not a well-officiated baseball game, and Americans have been awakening to that fact since '08.

Democrats had to phrase it as "keeping money out of politics" because they were and are hip-deep in that money. Vowing to "battle the corruption" meant, and means, vowing to battle themselves, and as Clinton spent most of last year going from coast to coast collecting donations from the Hamptons and from Beverly Hills, everyone knew that.

Exactly. It's not about how the Dems fumbled some messaging technique that they would have done right had they possessed a more sophisticated understanding of political language. It's the same reason they can't mobilize against the wars in the Middle East. They're up to their eyeballs in blood.

Sanders used the term "socialism" to sell something far less -- a deviant conservatism that promised the public a few basic programs while keeping the basic social roles of American late capitalism intact.

I don't have a problem with anyone wanting to go back to the days of the New Deal and the rule of law--except the fact that that entire structure was based on rich people keeping their word, which they've now proven they can't do. In fact, despite the fact that FDR was saving their dumb asses, most of them resented the hell out of it at the time and had to be dragged into the deal (with a few exceptions--that era's version of "smart money.")

If Sanders were really dedicated to achieving his goals, he'd understand that it's OK to have a more mainstream reformist AND a radical revolutionary both advocating against the same corrupt system at the same time. That has actually worked fairly well in the past when it comes to steering the country away from horrors and toward something better. I don't mind (much) that he decided to be the mainstream reformist; I do have a problem that he is so timid that he's not willing to address the corruption when it marches into his reform movement, into the polling place with his supporters and bitch-slaps them to the ground.

His use of the term "socialism" was one of the best things about his campaign, which otherwise fell short of what his followers clearly wanted to produce. If you want to make something like the Sanders campaign or the Justice Democrats effective, the key is not to change their name to "Reform Democrats," because it sounds like forsaking the "political revolution," another hopeful term Sanders used to oversell his campaign. Rather, try to engineer some sort of accord between the Sanders-campaign-from-above and the Sanders-campaign-from-below, two entities which were clearly at odds with each other last year.

This is one of the best parts of your comment. The people were obviously well ahead of Sanders on this one. One speech, repeated with variations, nearly threw Hillary Clinton and all her power out of the race, forcing her to resort to voter purges and actual fraud, which goes well beyond the media collaboration people feel comfortable talking about, in order to eke out a "win;" she also had to pad her numbers with superdelegates to make her "win" look credible. This from some old guy who calls himself a socialist who was known by 3% of the population when he started? The American people were seriously ready. And they leapfrogged ahead of him FAST. While he was making that speech over and over again, people all over the country created their own, essentially independent, Sanders campaign from the bottom up. Over and over again, you hear stories of how people were dissatisfied with even the mechanics of what the top-down campaign was doing, and simply went out and did it themselves.

One of the greatest things about the Sanders campaign, and what made me believe, briefly, that we could have a real movement in this country, a viable movement born out of that campaign, was that independent, bottom-up, creativity--as if somebody had taken the spirit of Occupy and briefly applied it to the field of electoral politics. But the problem with campaigns is that they are laser-focused on the individual leader. That focus, which I thought would be a problem with bringing the new movement to birth, was actually a fatal vulnerability. Shifting the focus to Nina Turner or Tulsi Gabbard will only result in the same vulnerability bringing down any efforts for change.

Also, I didn't realize that the Left would so obediently trek off to shake its fist at Donald Trump, letting itself get sucked right back into the establishment's narrative. Right vs left, Dem vs Repub, we must get these monsters out of office, vote Dem next time, etc. Exactly like it was when we opposed Bush. I believed in it then.

"Words, Bernardo, words. I used to believe in words."

Rather, try to engineer some sort of accord between the Sanders-campaign-from-above and the Sanders-campaign-from-below, two entities which were clearly at odds with each other last year.

That is obviously impossible, since the aims of the campaign-from-below necessitate changing the entire power structure, a fight Sanders is absolutely unwilling to take on. That's where you and I differ a bit. Those "deviant conservative" attempts of his to resuscitate some parts of the New Deal and the rule of law, small and feeble though they are, are absolutely intolerable to the Princess-and-the-Pea oligarchy we've got here. They can't stand it. They can't stand anything that deviates even slightly from their current course. They can't stand anybody even thinking that there could be an alternative. Thus, the entire power structure--because it is so extreme---would have to be changed in order for any of these aims to be accomplished.

Sanders isn't willing to fight that fight. Therefore, Sanders can't lead any effort to achieve the goals he supposedly had. He's left with the feeble hope that if he says the same things for the millionth time to a power structure set on destruction that it will be willing to deal with him.

“I strike no bargains. I take. What have you to offer that I cannot take from you when I like?”

As far as the word "monopoly" goes, the real word in this case would be "cartel," but Americans (most of us) don't know that word. We lump the idea of one company controlling a whole industry in with the idea of all the companies in an industry collaborating to fuck us over. It comes to the same thing for the person at the bottom.

You write great comments, Cass. Always a pleasure.

Today, much like 120-some years ago, the United States finds itself in need of a strong progressive movement.

The original "progressive movement," as Gabriel Kolko pointed out, was a conservative movement, designed to quiet the class struggle of the late 19th century. That's not what they needed then, and it's not what we need now.

What would be useful today would be what its proponents call ecosocialism. The task of the century is to get people to sign on to (note that I don't use the word "buy") that.

1) One of the most important items on the progressive agenda today is getting big money out of politics, especially corporate money. It's a very worthy goal.

It's also a stupid sell.

I'm at a loss to understand why all our politicians should be commodities owned by rich people. Of course, that's what they are -- I wouldn't expect anything less of the utopia of money in its declining phase -- I'm just at a loss to understand why it should be that way. People ought to dream of some other utopia than the utopia of money, mostly because the dream of individual riches is for the most part used to get them to produce the society of a few rich and a struggling many. They can be observed doing this every day like donkeys on the treadmills with the carrots dangling in front of their noses.

What was equally amazing is that it never occurred the Democrats to jump on that bandwagon and vow to battle the corruption, even after the issue was sitting there in the open.

Democrats had to phrase it as "keeping money out of politics" because they were and are hip-deep in that money. Vowing to "battle the corruption" meant, and means, vowing to battle themselves, and as Clinton spent most of last year going from coast to coast collecting donations from the Hamptons and from Beverly Hills, everyone knew that. The Democrats are BOURGEOIS, and everyone outside of the coasts knows this now.

So what do progressives do? They embrace Democratic Socialism.
While I am totally onboard with that, this is once again, a stupid sell.

Sanders used the term "socialism" to sell something far less -- a deviant conservatism that promised the public a few basic programs while keeping the basic social roles of American late capitalism intact. His use of the term "socialism" was one of the best things about his campaign, which otherwise fell short of what his followers clearly wanted to produce. If you want to make something like the Sanders campaign or the Justice Democrats effective, the key is not to change their name to "Reform Democrats," because it sounds like forsaking the "political revolution," another hopeful term Sanders used to oversell his campaign. Rather, try to engineer some sort of accord between the Sanders-campaign-from-above and the Sanders-campaign-from-below, two entities which were clearly at odds with each other last year.

Fortunately there is a word we can learn from the Progressive Movement that they used effectively. It also happens to conveniently tie in with the 'corruption' theme.
That word is: monopoly.

I have no idea why "monopoly" would be a word of any importance today. What dominates late capitalism are oligopolies -- everyone knows that if you don't like Verizon you can get your wifi from Time Warner Cable, if you don't like flying United you can always fly American or Delta, if you don't like Coke you can drink Pepsi and so on. These corporations aren't hated monopolies; they're service providers. The revolt against corporations will instead begin with a collective understanding of why their class interests are opposed to those of the working people of America.