The Netroots in Retrospect and the Resistance to Trump
Almost anyone who has heard of Machiavelli associates him with the sly deceit supposedly recommended in The Prince. It is a grievously erroneous way to think of Machiavelli, whose far more important book was The Discourses on Livy, a multi-volume work some ten times the length of The Prince. At the time of the American Revolution, and the framing of the Constitution, American leaders were thoroughly familiar with Machiavelli's Discourses. In fact, when the classical ideas that inspired these leaders became a popular subject of USA academic historians in the late 1960s and 1970s, one of the three books most cited was entitled, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, by J. G. A. Pocock.
About the only blogger I have ever come across who has mentioned Machiavelli's Discourses is Ian Welsh. And he has done it a number of times, and even included The Discourses on Livy on a list of recommended books for all militant progressives to read. So it is not at all surprising that Welsh has some of the most concise and insightful commentary on the tubez. Welsh's analysis of the Trump campaign / regime has been especially notable for eschewing the "hair-on-fire" outrage of the liberal establishment, using instead a very cold and unemotional examination of Trump and Bannon that I think is closer to reality than anyone else I've read.
Yesterday's posting by Welsh is an example: The Method to Trump and Bannon’s “Madness”. I have permission from Mr. Welsh to repost any of his material, but after a few days have passed since the original posting. So I will only give you a conclusion, before giving you a full post from a couple days ago. "General opposition is good, but the current strategy is neither focused nor brutal enough to bear results soon unless Trump blows himself up."
Lessons for “The Resistance” from the Bush Resistance
by Ian Welsh
January 30, 2017
Trump’s ban of travelers from seven Muslim countries spawned a large backlash, showing that “the resistance” is still a thing. I suspect it will continue to be a thing, because Trump is going to do much which enrages people who already believe he is a fascist.
It is little commented on now, but when Bush was ramping up for his invasion of Iraq, millions of people came out against it, world-wide. Most US allies of any significance–apart from Britain–refused to participate. The war went ahead anyway, and in its shadow there was resistance. I was part of that, the Netroots.
The Netroots opposed Bush directly when possible, and it also sought to make the Democratic Party better because we had noticed that enough Democrats (and in many cases almost all) Democrats had signed off on the worst parts of Bush’s regime. Gore, had he been in power, might not have been quite so bad, but the Democrats weren’t really opposing Bush strongly, and some of them were absolutely terrible–straight-up collaborators. Joe Lieberman, for example. (Who was also Obama’s mentor in the Senate.)
It should be clear that the Netroots was pretty organized: We communicated behind the scenes, and often coordinated. We were in constant contact with Democratic Party staffers, and had access to many Democratic Congress members. They saw that we had reach, and, being politicians, they wanted to use that reach. Even people who despised us, like Clinton, came to Netroots.
In 2006, Republicans lost control of the House. The Netroots had helped with that, and we had hopes and expectations.
They were quickly dashed: The House caucus had taken our help, sure, but they had no intention of seriously opposing Bush’s wars or his vast over-reach on civil liberties and executive power.
Then, in 2008, Obama won. He took some of our help, but he didn’t buy it. Unlike the Democrats in 2006, many of whom had pretended to agree with us and had been willing to work with us, Obama did not work with the Netroots. During the entire campaign, the only time he reached out to us was during a period of a few weeks when he was losing to McCain in the polls, and even that was pro-forma.
Obama built his own grassroots organization, and he didn’t go through the blog gatekeepers (there were exceptions, one A-list blog of the time was the favored dumping ground for Obama oppo research). Instead, Obama’s supporters, and very likely operatives, flooded the comments and diaries. Obama got the support of Netroots supporters without having to give anything to the Netroots organizers.
By “give anything,” I mean “policy concessions.” And while there was plenty of petty careerism in the Netroots, that was never the issue. Since 2008, many people who were part of the Netroots at that time have been taken on and given jobs by various organizations associated with the Democrats. The trivial amount of money required to buy out the “alpha activists” wasn’t the question–control was.
Obama was very clear about his contempt for the Netroots. He thought that we didn’t understand how politics worked and how good things happen. He was explicit, you can read it in Obama’s original post at DKos.
So Obama got in power, he bailed out the banks, he fucked over ordinary home-owners, he increased deportations and ramped up drone assassinations. He was far harsher on whistleblowers than Bush had been and he re-signed all the bad bills when the time came, like the Patriot Act and the AUMF, which had given Bush massive executive power and carte-blanche to spy, and assassinate, and go to war.
Obama institutionalized Bush. Oh, he drew back on some things, but he advanced others, and he left the basic power structure in place and the legal structure. Then he went to war with Libya, which while it killed less people than the Iraq war, was the exact same type of war crime as Bush had committed: aggressive war on a non-threatening country. This is what the Nazis were hung for in Nuremburg.
Note that the Democrat-controlled House and Senate of 2009/2010 was no better than Obama, they did not push him to be better.
The Netroots hadn’t quite given up yet. They had one last hurrah in 2010 when they tried to primary Blanche Lincoln. Obama came out strongly in support of her and she won. The Netroots, what was left of it, collapsed (no results, crashing traffic and a cash crunch from other sources).
Six years, later Trump won the election. The apparatus put in place by Bush to allow him to commit his crimes and over-reach was not just still there, it had been extended significantly in terms of whistleblower prosecution, drone assassination, spying on journalists, immigrant incarceration, and surveillance state powers and capabilities.
Trump inherited a more powerfully oppressive system than Obama did, even if Obama had not always used it as oppressively as Bush (though in some cases he had been worse).
There are a couple lessons to learn from this.
The first is that while partisan Democrats may be one’s allies when opposing a Republic president, their opposition is opportunistic and not principled. The second they are in charge, they will support or wave aside the same actions they condemned coming from a Republican. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with partisan Democrats, it means understand when they’ll stop fighting AND that once they don’t need you, they will regard you as a threat and seek to to eliminate you.
The second is more important: The control of a party matters more than the results of any individual election.
This is where half the readers will disagree, indeed, they will disagree violently and emotionally.
But there’s a reason that the US is where it is: After each over-reach, after each extension of executive powers, to the creation of police state and the waging of war, the Democrats didn’t roll back the worst excesses when they got into power, NOR did they push the lever further to the left. In fact, Clinton had many policies worse than Reagan/Bush (welfare, crime) and Obama had many policies worse than Bush Jr., as has been discussed.
In order to stop the next Trump, not just this one, you must have control of a party to the point that they are forced to roll back the terrible laws and policies of the last 40 years–and not just roll them back, but start pushing the lever even further towards equality, away from oligarchy, and towards civil liberties and widespread prosperity.
If you do not do that, your victory over Trump is temporary. You win against him, but you do not win against what caused him, and what he represents.
The right-wing understands that. The Netroots said “More and better Democrats,” and while it had some successes, it didn’t have enough, because it failed repeatedly at primarying bad actors.
The Tea Party succeeded: They were able to remove enough Republicans they objected so that the ones who remained were scared to cross them. While doing so, they were willing to lose seats, because they understood that Republicans who would not vote for them when the chips were down might as well be Democrats. (This is where the screams about the Supreme Court would be inserted. There is truth to this, but you are now losing it anyway.)
If the Resistance wants to really succeed, to really make the US a better place, it must learn the lesson of those who fought and failed before. If you succeed at getting rid of Trump without changing the trajectory of US economy, foreign policy, and disrespect for civil rights, you have done little more than kick the can down the road.
Changing what Democrats WANT to do, who they want to be, and what sort of country they are actually willing to vote for and work to build, is what matters. Objectively, Obama and Bill Clinton contributed massively to the ills which lead to Trump. That needs to stop. There needs to be a Democratic President who rolls back what has been done, and then moves strongly to the left. Who dismantles the legal, regulatory, and institutional framework for tyranny, and who actually reduces inequality and increases prosperity for all Americans in a clear way they can feel.
Failure to achieve that, and, in tandem, to achieve a Congress which would work with such a president and oppose the inevitable future Republican presidents, will equal failure for the Resistance, no matter how many small successes they have, or even if they are able to remove Trump through impeachment or loss in 2020.
Slowing the rate of the downward spiral the US is on is good. Stopping it from getting worse is better. Reversing it and making it better is best and is necessary for long-term success and long-term security against leaders like Trump.
Comments
Good article
now check out my essay for why we are f*cked in relation to your points.
More confirmation
that the dem party is, essentially, dead. It's on life support, no doubt, but the machines should just be unplugged so it can finish dying. It doesn't look like there is anyone with a strand of courage answering the door.
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
What a great post. Thank you so much for the Ian Welsh
There is so much of import within his essay, but essentially it boils down to, even when you win, you lose when it comes to putting Democrats in power. They gain the seats of power and then they do literally nothing to advance the causes of the people who put them there with votes. They do plenty for the people who put them there with money.
He also touched on what has become a key point for me - you have to be willing to play the long game and be willing to sustain losses, but nevertheless to forge ahead. If you can't get the seats, work on getting the minds and the hearts a la Barber in North Carolina. I also think you can't allow yourself to be sucked into the vortex of diminished expectations, incrementalism and triangulation. Consider that both Obama and Hillary told us explicitly that we can't have single payer even when a majority of the American public either already has it (Veterans, Medicare and Medicaid) or is supportive of it.
What will it take for people to give up on the party of such massive and consistent betrayal of the people it putatively represents? Building a new party is extremely difficult, but it can be done, even with the roadblocks established by the status quo.
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
I hope this essay is promoted to the front page. nt
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
ditto /nt
https://www.euronews.com/
The Democrats have done us MORE damage than the GOP
They have to go completely before we can begin to improve anything.
Great essay, but I am not hearing what the commenters heard.
I heard Democratic Party - not Green Party, a new third party. Regardless, the party is but a tool to taking power. As much as Trump hurts me more, I had to do what I could to make Hillary lose ala the Tea Party philosophy aka "with Democrats like these, who needs Republicans".
This will also be posted on our FB page. If you are on FB, please take a go to c99's FB page and invite your friends to like and follow us. When the share button cooperates with me, I post c99 front-paged articles to c99's FB page. Come look. https://www.facebook.com/pg/caucus99percent/posts/?ref=page_internal
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
In this regard,
perhaps then our efforts should be in taking over the Republican Party, since after thirty-seven years of explicitly neoliberal rule the best that has been coerced out of the Democratic Party is its tentative voice-agreement with a few progressive positions now and then. At least when we fail to take over the Republican Party we'll know we've failed, whereas with the Democratic Party the failure is an established fact (see e.g. gjohnsit's diary) that remains hidden from the vast majority of self-described progressives.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
What are your thoughts on
The Justice Democrats? Nascent, but seem to grasp many of the concepts in the quoted essay.
I support it and am looking
I support it and am looking for a role to play. I know at least one founder of Brand New Congress has moved on to JusticeDemocrats. I worry that there will be far too many groups trying the same thing. I read a couple weeks ago some former Hillary staffers have also created a group with same goal of getting people elected to Congress. wtf? More status quo Democrats in Congress? No, thank you. But I suspect the new Hillary staffer group is at least partially intended to drain away some of the funding and support from other groups like JusticeDemocrats and Brand New Congress.
I have not seen any interesting initiatives from MoveOn.
We need a course program to teach candidates and their supporters some political economy and some political basics. How do you find out what filing requirements are? How do you find staff members? How do you vet them? How do you raise money? What parliamentary procedures can be used in Congress to stymie and hinder the reactionaries that now control the place?
I would be interested in helping with teaching political economy. Almost no one knows about the American School, which is the alternative to Marxism, and to the British school of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus. Almost no one knows what a republic is supposed to be, and what policies of political economy should distinguish a republic from other forms of government such monarchy, or oligarchy, or plutocracy. Think about this questions: how did the USA shift from a political economy in which republicanism was teh central element, to one in which capitalism is the central element?
I intend to rewrite and expand this a bit before posting it here: A Short Crash Course in American Political Economy
- Tony Wikrent
Nation Builder Books(nbbooks)
Mebane, NC 27302
2nbbooks@gmail.com
Oh, that's you.
We don't agree on stuff.
As for Ian Welsh, he makes a nice liberal now and then. But "let's take over the Democratic Party" has already been trademarked as a Democratic Party status quo strategy. Keith Ellison is a primary example of how this came to be.
Btw, if you're looking for some ideas on how to rewrite the short crash course, here are some thoughts.
Obama IS the power of Wall Street. He appointed his cabinet on the whim of a Citigroup executive.
This is a straw man argument -- there are plenty of people who believe that the US Constitution was designed to protect the rich, but not
to protect the rich.
No, that end was implicit in the system from the get-go. See e.g. Gerald Horne's book.
This sentence appears as sloganeering. One could argue, au contraire, that economic inequality is basic to a republic because real independence is not possible under capitalism, and because the point of a "republic" is to elicit the public's assent or acquiescence through "democratic process" while at the same time maintaining continuities of elite rule.
The Louisiana Purchase was by any stroke of the imagination a steal, and a steal vital to the economic interests of slaveholders such as Jefferson, given the need of the slave system to expand its territories. Napoleon was desperate for cash to pay an army assigned to reimpose slavery upon Haiti, and could not commit to the defense of Louisiana.
You may at some point wish to quote some sort of actual "Marxist analysis," otherwise you run into the perception that you write merely for an audience who can dismiss Marx without having read his words.
You have it backwards. It isn't that Elon Musk is useful to society; rather, it's that society is useful to Elon Musk, providing him with what Jason W. Moore calls "cheap nature" which he can appropriate to his profit needs as a good capitalist. Society, on the other hand, could do far more than what Elon Musk currently does if it wasn't under the spell of a system that benefits Elon Musk's social class.
And those who work for Musk get no credit?
All of which were co-opted into the Democratic Party and thus deprived of their ability to effect meaningful social change. This is something you can say here but not at Daily Kos.
Nobody really ignores labor, at least not during periods of labor strikes. Laborers build capitalist civilization without taking credit for it.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Brilliant Essay! Thanks! n/t
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
Thanks, I enjoyed the Welsh essay...
I've lost all faith in parties...and perhaps government... a government ruled by those who don't believe in the rule of law.
But I still believe in movements...and it's gonna take a helluva movement to deal with our current mess.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Power in America is currently shared by,
or divided between two vast, diametrically opposed, and endlessly quarreling behemoths known as The Republicans and The Democrats. Neither of these Organizations has served the nation's fundamental interests particularly well in recent years. Together they form a self-perpetuating Duoploly that tends to divide Americans into two mutually hostile "camps", forcing voters to "choose sides" - essentially to define themselves and to limit their political activities according to which side they have chosen.
This Duopoly encourages and promotes a kind of dualistic, almost Manichaean thinking that does not correspond accurately to the complex realities of contemporary life. It is an outmoded system of categorization that distorts the popular will by forcing voters to endorse much that they would prefer to oppose, and to oppose much that they would prefer to support.
Rather than trying to "reform" one half of this ancient Duopoly (a Herculean task) would it not be preferable to begin dismantling the Duopoly itself? It almost seems to be disintegrating of its own accord. Possibly the American public as a whole has become so thoroughly disenchanted with both political parties, that such a transformation may indeed be possible now. I think this could be a very desirable outcome of the chaotic and divisive conditions that currently prevail within both the Democratic and Republican party establishments.
native
Yes, we disagree. I have had
to Cassiodorus @ Thu, 02/02/2017
Yes, we disagree. I have had no use for Marxism, communism, and their adherents since I found in the 1980s that they had no interest in fighting against the drug money and organized crime that was taking over the financial system and destroying the industrial sector through LBOs. They were useless ideologues interested only in rehashing the differences between Trotsky and Lenin and trying to find a way to venerate Mao without openly approving of the Cultural Revolution.
I read quite a bit of Marx in the 1980s. Turned me off completely from Hegelianism. I even read Lenin's What Is to be Done? Actually reading Benjamin Franklin is what I found much more engaging. I am mystified and troubled by the left's continued insistence on ignoring the actual history of USA economic development, which I think is best told by the stories of the engineers and scientists who did it.
But I wonder what you think of the entire corpus of work of Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood. Do you disagree that there were "ideological origins of the American Revolution?"
- Tony Wikrent
Nation Builder Books(nbbooks)
Mebane, NC 27302
2nbbooks@gmail.com
I see.
We need capitalists and capitalist government, all the way down to the bosses and the landlords, to rule over us because omigod Russians. Historical materialism and political economy are irrelevant because omigod Russians, too. And maybe if we can pretty it up with some nice words about how it was better before the drug money corrupted it, it'll be fine. Or at least that's how I read what you said.
Generally I find discussions of the American Revolution to be tedious. Are we still pretending the continent was empty when the Europeans came here? And how about those African-Americans? They had no rights until Reconstruction while being an essential component of what, maybe half the American economy? -- and that went away for the most part with the Compromise of 1877. When we're finished with that we can talk about the status of women before the cultural revolution of the 1960s. We're both white males, right?
Jason W. Moore discusses in his book and in his articles (he's another white male, so you're safe) about how the capitalist system came into being as a particular social philosophy. As Moore describes it, capitalism instituted a particular division between "society" and "nature" that mirrored the mind-body division one finds in readings of Descartes' Meditations. The society/ nature division was adapted in early capitalism to the motives of Europe's conquest of the world, such that propertied European white males were considered the exclusive population of "society," and everyone and everything else was in the category of "nature," such that the native peoples of "New Spain" were referred to as "naturales." We are still, as Moore points out, living through this early capitalist philosophical choice, given that it's essential to the operation of the capitalist system in all places and times.
Btw, I looked at your "real economics" page. Michael Hudson apparently constructs "Marxism" as a straw man. Here's the graph in the middle:
https://real-economics.blogspot.com/2015/11/michael-hudson-on-american-s...
Its idea of "Marxist population and wage theory" is that of "a supply-and-demand theory of wages determined by the 'reserve army of the unemployed.' The state will employ surplus labor under socialism." As mischaracterizations go, this is a pretty ridiculous one.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Important Discussion
Thanks to Tony and Cass. More like this are needed here!
Tony, what do you make of the American "republican" (?) view that high-end labor will squeeze out low-end labor, via productivity? Seems to be how the proles learn to step on each others' faces (doing the bidding of owners). . .
Cass, I didn't read Welsch exactly as you do, I believe. To me, Welsch is uncovering the "ethos" of business/men/women. That ethos pervades the society from top to bottom, including pols(and you and me and Trump, for example) of course. It's the pursuit money, not people and not law, etc. and being checked by no historical/cultural underpinning. It shows up in the affability of the American businessperson, a particularly conscious-free self-blessing, that, at least in the early 20th century, was noticeable by Europeans who caught sight of Americans.
Eyeround: By writing "high
Eyeround: By writing "high-end labor will squeeze out low-end labor, via productivity" Are you referring to the Doctrine of High Wages, which has been written out of mainstream economics textbooks and histories? I regard the Doctrine of High Wages as one of the lost jewels of American political economy.
Cassiodorus is a fine example of why I rejected Marxism decades ago. Scream that dirty money is taking over the financial system, and these ideologues only stood in place and replied that it is the nature of capitalism to be so corrupt. They had no interest in actually identifying let alone fighting the actual agents of that corruption (such as HSBC and Barclays and JP Morgan - perhaps because Marxists in the USA were funded in 1950s-1970s by a scion of Morgan bank.) Scream that the rich are funding movement conservatism to roll back the New Deal, and these ideologues only stood in place and reply that it is the nature of capitalism. The actual agents such as von Hayek and von Mises and their Mont Pelerin Society were given a free pass. The ideologues offer no solutions, no alternatives, no fight against the actual agents of reaction. I protested in front of the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980s. They did not. Some day in the not too distant future, I suppose that those of us who have refused to subscribe to the cable oligopoly will be punished by being psychically chained in front of our televisions, while our bank accounts are automatically dunned for the cost of our "entertainment." And the Marxists will still be standing in place, congratulating themselves on having foreseen that it all was a natural devolution of capitalism.
- Tony Wikrent
Nation Builder Books(nbbooks)
Mebane, NC 27302
2nbbooks@gmail.com
Mischaracterization is a force that keeps them going.
Dear Secondary Audience,
If I refer to Tony Wikrent in third person in this post, it is because I do not believe that he is part of my audience anymore. At any rate, perhaps Tony Wikrent believes that capitalism has been "corrupt" at times in its history; I don't, and I certainly don't believe that there was any past Golden Age that capitalism is a "corruption" of. Capitalism is what it is: a trend in political economy defining the past 500 years of history. But maybe Tony Wikrent believes that there was, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a pristine, pure capitalism that was corrupted by evil actors who appeared out of nowhere. You'd have to ask him.
We outside-the-box thinkers do our elite sociology, so this is obviously wrong.
Apparently it has escaped Tony Wikrent's attention that, under Obama, and to a certain extent under the Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan, movement "liberalism" (aka neoliberalism) was the main force rolling back the new deal.
Is Tony Wikrent asserting here that the Mont Pelerin faithful forced everyone at gunpoint to adopt their ideology? The nice people of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations and their associated think tanks and foundations (and equivalents abroad) had no choice?
This is also obviously false, and I can only assume that since Tony Wikrent "rejected Marxism decades ago," he doesn't know a socialist he hasn't pushed away. Socialists around the world work hard to promote mass movements, cooperatives, and other worker-based organizations.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama