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Democrats Need Something Better Than A Tea Party

Democrats Need Something Better Than A Tea Party

Reprinted with permission from USA Today.

You can understand why some on the left are drooling for their own Tea Party movement.

Only eight years after Republicans suffered a nearly cataclysmic defeat, they are roaring back into “unified” power. It all started with a movement that seemed to appear out of nowhere to challenge GOP orthodoxy, only to be handily co-opted and weaponized to win both houses of Congress and control of more state legislatures than at any time since Republicans actually were the Party of Lincoln.

Now, thanks to the grabby hands of Donald Trump — who marched the GOP establishment through all the stages of mourning as he led a sort of one-man Tea Party movement of his own — Republicans will soon add to their trophy case the White House and possibly Supreme Court control for another generation, coasting on the winds of the best economy any new president has inherited since 1988.

Trump’s campaign is almost impossible to imagine without the equally unlikely candidacy of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement she once inspired by being a know-nothing, Obama/lamestream-media-bashing straight word-salad shooter.

Like Palin, Trump was supposed to be a Frankenstein’s monster lacquered with bronze toner who turns against its creator, punishing the party’s donor class for indulging the worst instincts of a Republican base driven into a frenzy by the “conservative entertainment complex,” as David Frum calls it.

Instead, conservative donors are now preparing to live out fantasies they’ve had since they were their mistresses’ ages.

Forget slicing taxes for the rich, their kids, their corporations and their kids’ corporations, along with uninsuring millions. Too easy. Soon they’ll be ready to gut Medicaid and possibly Medicare while deregulating and privatizing everything from the Department of Veterans Affairs to roads to schools. And Trump, like Mitt Romney before him, has adopted wholesale much of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand-on-Red-Bull agenda.

Why wouldn’t the Democratic Party want all this — a chance to live out its wildest dreams, freed from the constraints of consequences, facts, promises, transparency, tax returns, news conferences or any experience in public service?

The past six out of seven presidential elections proved that there are more Democrats than Republicans, Liberals just happen to enjoy living around each other too much to maximize their electoral clout. As for what Democrats stand for, even as Arizona went for Trump by 3.5 percentage points in 2016, it passed a ballot referendum by nearly 18 points to raise the minimum wage.

Democrats obviously just need a presidential nominee named “Raise T. Minimumwage.”

America is a majority left-wing country that has been gerrymandered into a distorted reality, right? With sprawling protests already planned for Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20, it should be easy to spark a national uprising against the biggest popular-vote loser elected president in modern American history.

So why aren’t liberal donors trying to spark a Tea Party of the left?

They know as well as anyone that the “spontaneous” uprising of 2009 was fed or led by an extremely well-financed web of conservative networks. How else do you get a movement enraged by teacher’s salaries and government regulation during an apocalyptic financial crisis caused by bankers exploiting a lack of government regulation?

Conservative donors have spent tens of millions of dollars and decades building a movement that revolves around resentment of liberals and the government. The gains of tax breaks, deregulation and privatization are massive — so massive that the donor class is willing to suffer some demands from an activated grassroots, as long as those demands don’t get in the way of tax breaks, deregulation and privatization.

Big Democratic donors also tend to have their pet causes, such as guns and climate change. And in some cases, such as climate and immigration, a Demos study shows, these funders actually push the party to the left. But the story is different when it comes to “pocketbook” issues such as the budget and taxes.

Democrats in general were nearly six times as likely to support raising taxes to reduce the deficit as Democratic donors who gave $5,000 or more, the Demos research found. Organized labor, meanwhile, the backbone of the left, has been systemically hollowed by the right while Democrats failed again and again to strengthen unions when they had the chance.

Yes, the left needs a movement that rivals the Tea Party movement’s passion, reach and influence. But rather than happening with the encouragement and funding of the party’s rich donors, it might have to happen in spite of them.

There are some models for this, including the genuinely spontaneous Black Lives Matter movement, the Fight for $15 effort birthed by the Service Employees International Union, and the Bernie Sanders campaign for president, which was able to marshal small donors and large crowds even with much of the Democratic Party’s establishment working against it.

The left needs something better than a Tea Party movement because the party base needs to drag its donors’ economic agenda toward the people and not the other way around. And in American politics, dragging is expensive.

True equality of opportunity that enshrines health care as a right and puts workers on equal footing with their bosses might not have the same obvious economic constituency as eliminating the inheritance tax. But there are more of us than there are of them. And that has to be worth something.

The Left Is Building A Movement Of Movements To Pressure Hillary

The Left Is Building A Movement Of Movements To Pressure Hillary

By Emily Greenhouse, Bloomberg News (TNS)

For Democrats, there is not even a nominee, yet. She’s coming, but there’s still no guarantee of a primary fight. In the absence of a genuine challenger to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — in the absence, most particularly, of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, for which hungry liberals pine — a sort of movement of leftist movements has emerged to bring pressure on the presumptive nominee.

This week, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee announced that a petition it launched calling for the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee to campaign on a populist platform has been signed by 5,000 current and former elected leaders, as well as Democratic Party officials, union leaders, and progressive activists. These include 25 members of Congress, such as Sen. Harry Reid, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Alan Grayson, Donna Edwards, and Barbara Lee, plus former Sen. Tom Harkin. The petition — which was posted below a page header that reads ReadyforBoldness.com, and rides above a shooting star — begins, “We want the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee to campaign on big, bold, economic-populist ideas that tangibly improve the lives of millions of Americans.”

Last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called for similarly big, bold, economic-populist ideas, from a podium at Gracie Mansion. On Thursday, de Blasio announced that he, with a coalition of progressives he had convened, would in May put forward a template for how best to conquer inequality, and then ask presidential candidates to respond. (He said it would parallel the GOP’s 1994 Contract for America.) De Blasio and his allies in the project, progressive activists and lawmakers including Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Gov. Dannel Malloy of Connecticut, offered no specific policy suggestions, but spoke of their “vision.” The mayor talked of changing the national conversation, of “making sure income inequality is at the forefront of the national discussion.” A reporter asked if Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had been involved in the gathering. De Blasio replied that her team had not been a part, but that he expected every candidate, including Clinton — were she to decide to run, he was careful to say — to speak to the matter.

No one present asked about Warren, and she wasn’t in the room with the mayor and the activists. De Blasio told the Washington Post that a scheduling conflict kept her from attending. But Warren’s spirit, and her robust commitment to middle-class families and working people, was felt. The focus on income inequality — even Republicans including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and even Mitt Romney have taken up the cause, or at least phrase — is thanks, most of all, to her.

On Wednesday, Warren gave her stamp of approval to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee effort. In a statement to the Associated Press, she said, “Anyone who runs for president should talk about big economic ideas that will help rebuild the middle class in this country and improve the lives of working-class families. I applaud those who are working hard to make big ideas central to the conversation in 2016.”

The PCCC petition’s already mirrored her beliefs: the policy suggestions given were “establishing a national goal of debt-free college at all public colleges and universities, expanding Social Security benefits instead of cutting them, creating millions of clean-energy jobs, reducing big-money influence in politics, breaking up the ‘too big to fail’ Wall Street banks that crashed our economy, and ensuring that working families share in the economic growth they help create.”

We’ve entered announcement season for Republicans, which gives the GOP at least a news-cycle advantage: their speeches at universities, their press availabilities and political confessions, are dominating the airwaves. There’s little going on on the Democratic side, as liberals wait for Hillary Clinton to take the stage. Although Warren has repeatedly said, and continues to say, that she won’t run in the 2016 presidential race, she manages to fill the vacuum that is the present Democratic camp.

The same day she gave her imprint to the Bold Progressives petition, she criticized the government on Conan O’Brien’s talk show for spending money to keep tax loopholes around for billionaires, rather than helping reduce the interest rate on student loans. With vigor, she said, “The United States government should not be making profit off the backs of kids who are trying to get an education.” In late March, Warren introduced an amendment to the Senate budget resolution that would expand Social Security benefits. Every Democrat in attendance but two voted for it — quite a change in approach from January 2013, when Warren entered the Senate. Then, Democrats and Republicans alike were considering cutting Social Security. Pema Levy wrote in Mother Jones this Monday that Warren has “turned Social Security expansion — once a progressive pipe dream — into a tough-to-ignore 2016 issue.”

Earlier in the month, Warren, who, through a representative, declined to comment for this article, led an effort against President Barack Obama’s attempt to negotiate free trade deals with the European Union and Pacific Rim countries, an “investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.” Warren said. “The name sound a little wonky,” — she tends to speak to the people — “but this is a powerful provision that would fundamentally tilt the playing field further in favor of multinational corporations. Worse yet, it would undermine U.S. sovereignty.” Warren’s challenge was not just to Obama’s administration, but to Clinton: as secretary of state, Clinton had supported the negotiations.

(c)2015 Bloomberg News, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Democrat Elizabeth Warren, center, waves to the crowd with her husband Bruce Mann, left, during an election night rally at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel in Boston after Warren defeated incumbent GOP Sen. Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)