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How To Save The Democratic Party So It Can Save The World

How To Save The Democratic Party So It Can Save The World

What follow are the scariest words I’ve read since I first saw President Donald Trump.

“Unless the Democratic Party becomes stronger and more effective, a radicalized Republican-conservative juggernaut is likely to take over for decades,” Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, wrote in Vox.

Skocpol is co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, one of the definitive books on the movement that to many Trump opponents exemplifies the widespread reach and sustained opposition necessary for the left to match — if it is to contain and then reverse the new president’s agenda. She’s rightly seen as a guiding light for insights into effective mobilization from the bottom-up, which she regards as the most significant aspect of the Tea Party story.

Of course, top-down support from Koch-brothers backed groups and Fox News should not be understated, but Skocpol’s research shows that whatever its leaders and funders did, the Tea Party movement sparked a genuine explosion of activism among the party’s base.

“These grassroots activists, pretty much on their own, ended up organizing 900 regularly meeting local Tea Parties spread all over the United States,” she told Democracy Journal‘s Michael Tomasky. “And a lot of the impact they had filtered up from local Republican Party committees, from pressure on elected representatives and candidates, and the effect they had on galvanizing people to vote and participate in Republican primaries.”

And most of these groups were brand new to politics, not rebranded versions of existing groups as many — including your pal @LOLGOP — assumed.

So how can Democrats match the right’s exponential expansion of its activist base?

She believes that while outside efforts like the Indivisible Groups are “right on,” they won’t be enough.

“But here’s the problem in just imitating—even if you get it straight that it wasn’t the Koch brothers and it wasn’t all a bunch of marches, which were the least of it in some ways—it’s hard for the left now, for the center-left now, to imitate what the Tea Party grassroots people did,” she told Tomasky. “Because they were spread out across the country.”

With Skocpol’s help, it’s easy to identify the left’s biggest immediate problems: (1) its geographical density in a Constitutional republic designed to empower well-distributed minorities; and (2) the understandable urge to burn it all down. (Effective messaging, including the lack of a clear contrast to the GOP’s “GOVERNMENT BAD” rallying cry, is the third biggest problem, but this requires a much more concerted long-term effort to match conservatives’ decades-long framing advantage.)

“Anti-institutional tendencies in today’s culture make the idea of dismantling the existing order attractive to many people,” she wrote in her post, “A guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party, from the ground up.” “But social science research has long shown that majorities need strong organizations to prevail against wealthy conservative interests in democracies.”

Skocpol argues that the Democratic National Committee is our best — and possibly only — hope to combat the “strong possibility of a long-term authoritarian right turn in US politics.”

This is a terrifying thought for several reasons.

You have to start wetting yourself when you consider the reality that America has likely been in a “feedback loop of growing inequality and Republican rule” for decades, with conservatives using their victories and the billions of dollars in gains they’ve secured from those victories to firmly establish their political dominance by shrinking the tax base, hammering organized labor, and making voting more difficult while buying elections, especially local elections, only gets easier.

Almost equally underwear-spoiling is the prospect of having to depend on the DNC, which has seen its reputation shredded both due to its pro-Hillary Clinton leanings and concerted attacks on the institution from foreign interests.

The contest to lead the Democratic Party’s central organ now seems to be verging on repeating the trauma of the 2016 presidential primary between frontrunners Rep. Keith Ellison, the choice of most Bernie Sanders supporters, and former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, the choice of most Obama-and-Clinton-leaning factions of the party.

Especially when compared to the ruthless, increasingly autocratic opposition Democrats face, the differences between Ellison and Perez are subtle, stylistic, and somewhat hard to find. Yet these differences are still easy to magnify.

Skocpol believes Democrats need to “embrace a year-round, face-to-face organizational style.”

Both Ellison and Perez are capable of pulling off such an organizational and functional transformation. Both candidates represent groups targeted by Trump’s overreach. And both can appeal to the sort of genuine populism that the president effectively faked during his campaign.

Yet despite these affinities it’s easy to imagine the Bernie-wing taking a second straight rebuke as proof that it is not welcome in the party. This would be a disaster for the United States and the world.

There is simply no other organization on the left that can match the “well-entrenched networks” of the right including “the cross-state federated networks of the NRA, the Christian right, and the centerpiece Koch organization, Americans for Prosperity.”

With 2017 and 2018 elections rapidly approaching and likely to establish the momentum for 2020, Democrats need to quickly move on to effectively combatting the GOP and its concerted efforts to prevent non-conservatives from voting by “checking and adding voter registrations.”

And the DNC has to be the beating heart of this effort, regardless of who wins the chairmanship. Or any hope of defeating Trump may be DOA.

5 Reasons It’s So Hard Not To Help Donald Trump

5 Reasons It’s So Hard Not To Help Donald Trump

You probably hate using the words “President Trump” as much as I do.

Even if you do not invest the office of the presidency with mystical properties, you still recognize its extraordinary power to do good, or to strand thousands of people who are in the process of becoming permanent residents of the United States in countries and airports around the world.

“I am the President of the United States, clothed with immense power!” Tony Kushner has Abraham Lincoln say in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.

This comes at a moment in the slog to pass the 13th Amendment when Lincoln’s aspirations seem to face their greatest peril and the president’s bombast seems to be an attempt to convince himself of his own agency, even more than his audience — the shady “lobbyists” he has employed to secure the necessary votes.

And in that effort to end the great evil of slavery, Lincoln’s performance prevailed.

Everything about Donald Trump is about appearances and his fragile ego. Unlike Lincoln, his agenda shows no promise of elevating above anything but a childish need for self-validation and a tyrannical need for the accumulation of power.

Once when he was being deposed in a lawsuit in which he sued a journalist for questioning his “wealth,” Trump explained that his net worth “goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”

America, despite our best efforts, is now in the Donald Trump’s “feelings” business, especially because he hasn’t divested from his own businesses.

Everything our chief executive does is chained to the massive insecurities of a man who can’t even admit that the “very small” million dollar loan from his father, which was still a massive gift in the mid 1970s, was actually closer to “$14 million dollars.”

Given his cartoonish faults, his relentless scapegoating and his petty vindictiveness, it’s easy to not take him seriously. And now we have to take him for at least four years and face the realization that he actually is engaging in a strategy that may offend you but was convincing to the 75,000 Americans in three key states he needed to secure his minority presidency. And in 2018, Democrats face a Senate map with 10 swing states, nine of which Trump won.

And we also have to face that we may still be helping him as we did in 2016 by not flooding Democratic blue wall states from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania with volunteers and resources, not taking the prospect that he could win dead seriously.

Here are five ways we may still be helping Donald Trump.

1. It’s hard to admit that nobody knows how to beat Donald Trump yet.
Some want to blame liberal sensitivity to language and “identity politics” for Trump’s win, as if he isn’t a walking open wound who appealed to “coded racism” in a way that no candidate has since George Wallace. But there are some ways smugness hurt the left in 2016. We believed the models that said Clinton had an 80 to 90 percent chance of winning. We discounted the effort of the Kochs to build a shadow GOP that may have helped the party keep the Senate and carry Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. We ignored Trump’s engagement of Cambridge Analytica, the firm that used Facebook “psychometrics” to help win the Brexit vote for the “Leave” campaign. We also underestimated the impact of slowing GDP growth. Despite this all, absent FBI Director James Comey’s unprecedented intervention into the election, which has been rewarded with Trump’s nod to continue serving, Clinton likely would have won. Instead of focusing on the systemic and technical advantages the GOP has secured, the debate in the left often strays into repeating the trauma of the 2016 primary, which, despite representing substantive disagreements about the future of the party, often reinvigorate hurts that are mostly irrelevant given Hillary Clinton’s involuntarily retirement.
2. Our brains do not get his appeal and thus amplify it.
Here is something that you understand but I constantly have to remind myself: The things that make me despise Trump are what make his supporters, a minority of Americans, love him. This brings us back to George Lakoff, the brain scientist who told us how to turn Trump into a “loser.” A strong Washington Post piece summarizes the power of Trump’s language:

Many liberals, by contrast, base their notion of optimal family structure on the idea of a nurturing parent rather than a strict father. Trump’s language therefore strikes them as overly authoritarian.

By this theory, when Trump seems to flit from topic to topic, he’s not being incoherent, but rather is building a case that he will be the strict father who asserts his authority in all spheres, whether it’s protecting the nation by building the wall on the Mexican border, or by expanding the nuclear arsenal. “Trump is always selling and always making deals,” Lakoff said. “When he tweets ‘send in the Feds,’ he’s saying, ‘I want you to buy what I’m selling, which is me — I’m taking care of this, I’m in control,” Lakoff said.

3. It’s almost impossible not to take the bait.
Lakoff also has developed a taxonomy of Trump’s tweets that explains how the president uses rhetoric to his advantage:

It’s almost impossible to not use Trump’s frames and engage him on his distractions. And often there are so many distractions and so many awful things he’s doing, it’s impossible to suss out what he’s trying to identify or exactly which story he’s trying to distract from.
4. The liberal opposition to Trump is forming faster than the Tea Party.
Here’s a happy problem Democrats have. The opposition to this new president is unprecedented in American history. The Women’s March alone was probably larger than all Tea Party protests ever combined. And the thousands of Americans who showed up at airports to oppose the president’s immigration policy — which seems singularly obsessed with “the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest” — show how widespread and agile the resistance to Trump’s policies is. This massive movement raises questions for a party that hasn’t seen anything like this since the peak of the Iraq War, including: How can this energy best be channeled into effective limitations on Trump’s power and then victories at the polls? And can that be done without the left turning on itself? There are already signs that the base is “marching right past” its elected officials.
5. Trump’s contradictions help him disguise how he is enacting failed Republican policies.
It turns out one of the biggest mistakes of the 2016 election may have been not saddling Trump with the GOP’s extraordinarily unpopular policies — like defunding Planned Parenthood — in an effort to cast him beyond the pale of normal politics. This failed and now we’re getting Mike Pence’s policies with Donald Trump’s temperament. Over and over, we need to remind Americans that Trump is scapegoating the most vulnerable and dividing America in order to repeat George W. Bush’s fiscal policies, which will likely amount to the largest transfer of wealth to the richest in human history.

IMAGE: President Donald Trump, flanked by senior advisor Jared Kushner (standing, L-R), Vice President Mike Pence and staff secretary Rob Porter, welcomes reporters into the Oval Office as he signs first executive orders at the White House, January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Brain Scientist Explains How To Turn Trump Into A ‘Loser’

A Brain Scientist Explains How To Turn Trump Into A ‘Loser’

“A majority of voters saw Trump as a racist,” FiveThirtyEight‘s Harry Enten tweeted. “They also found him to be one of most moderate prez nominees in a generation. Circle that square.”

For George Lakoff, a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley, this paradox is evidence of something he has been arguing for decades: political “moderates” exist but “There is no consistent political ‘middle.'”

Ah, the middle! The mystical gloryhole that Beltway insiders with elaborate plans to “fix the debt” imagine most voters want to crawl into for the nirvana of tax and “entitlement” reform. It’s a kinky fantasy on par with a Republican Congress that cares about deficits when a Republican is in the White House.

“A moderate conservative has mostly conservative views, but some progressive views,” Lakoff wrote in his post-mortem of the 2016 election “A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do.”

Trump’s “progressive” views included promising to preserve Social Security and Medicare while raging against outsourcing, despite his own company’s record of prodigious outsourcing.

So what what were Trump’s “mostly conservative views,” you and many #NeverTrumpers may be wondering?

Understanding that requires seeing politics the way George Lakoff does.

In the 1990s he began asking himself a series of questions that have perplexed liberals for years. Like: “What does being against abortion have to do with being for owning guns?” or “How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty?”

It all came down to metaphors. America, in our brains, is a family.

“The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different idealizations of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).”

Trump can’t quote William F. Buckley and likely prefers Barry Manilow to Barry Goldwater, but he may be the most brazen “Strict Father” candidate ever. His fixation on “winning” and dominating his opponents reinforces the hierarchical nature of conservative thought. His vile preening may have repulsed your “Nurturant Parent” brain but it offered his voters “self-respect, authority, and the possibility of power.”

Last summer, when many experts were still wondering how a non-doctrinaire conservative like Trump could win the nomination of a GOP that had gone so far to the right that it has to urinate at 90 degree angle, Lakoff laid out how Trump’s bullying bombast appealed to Evangelicals, Pragmatic Conservatives and Laissez-faire Free Marketeers. He saw Trump exploiting elements of the conservative worldview — including the “country as person metaphor” and simplistic “direct causation” — that the right has spent hundreds of millions of dollars nurturing.

In addition to his mastery of the broad strokes of the right-wing politics of dominance, Trump’s decades of experience selling crap taught him how to use your brain against you, including repetition, framing like “Crooked” Hillary, and “truthful hyperbole.”

Lakoff also explained how Trump could win over people who had voted for Barrack Obama, despite being a birther who represented the exact opposite of Obama’s nuanced, systemic thinking.

“Many union members are strict fathers at home or in their private life,” he wrote. “They believe in ‘traditional family values’ — a conservative code word — and they may identify with winners.”

This brain scientist’s insights into American politics first came into vogue during the George W. Bush era, when he pointed out that approaching voters as logical issue-weighing machines gave Republicans — who employ the same marketing techniques that sell cars and timeshares — a huge advantage.

And he thinks Democrats made that mistake again in 2016, though Lakoff — like pollsters and much of America — didn’t see Trump’s narrow Electoral College win coming.

“They failed to understand unconscious thought and moral worldviews” he wrote. “While hailing science in the case of climate change, they ignored science when it came to their own minds.”

Instead of building upon the progressive frame, Democrats unconsciously aided Trump.

“They kept running ads showing Trump forcefully expressing views that liberals found outrageous,” he wrote. “Trump supporters liked him for forcefully saying things that liberals found outrageous. They were ads paid for by the Clinton campaign that raised Trump’s profile with his potential supporters!”

So how to defeat a master of self-promotion like Trump?

Start by pointing out that Trump is the biggest popular vote loser ever to win the Electoral College.

“Don’t let anyone forget it,” Lakoff suggests. “Keep referring to Trump as the minority president, Mr. Minority and the overall Loser. Constant repetition, with discussion in the media and over social media, questions the legitimacy of the minority president to ignore the values of the majority.”

Trump’s unique status as the most unpopular man ever to enter the White House can chip away at his core “Strict Father” appeal, which explains why pointing it out irritates him so much.

“There are certain things that strict fathers cannot be: A Loser, Corrupt, and especially not a Betrayer of Trust,” Lakoff writes.

Trump’s conflicts of interests and their potential for corruption are also unprecedented in American history and any retreat from his promise to preserve Medicare must be framed as a catastrophic betrayal.

But Lakoff warns Democrats against “showcasing Trump, keeping him in the limelight” and urges them to instead to focus on reinforcing the values of the “American Majority” movement.

“The idea that must be brought across is empathy for those in your in-group, your town.”

Empathy is conservative Kryptonite.

But in order to use it effectively, progressives need to understand that the things that repulsed them most about Trump are what he used to bring out the conservatism in swing voters’ brains.

IMAGE: President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump to discuss transition plans in the White House Oval Office in Washington, U.S., November 10, 2016.  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque