Reich: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

"I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system – I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause."
-- Robert Reich

I'm confused. Reich's analysis appears to be broadly correct, but nonetheless, I still feel the pressing need to take a shower. I asked Jeff Gillenwater for his thoughts.

Yes. A few quibbles - marking the erroneous white working class bit again - but generally correct. An overwhelming majority of “professionals” are complicit, hoarding opportunities and not standing up while outwardly claiming to be very liberal just as long as the financial and social order favors them. As a country, we’re not in overall possession of the self-awareness, intelligence, and fortitude to own up to that. While actual discrimination remains a serious problem, much of the virtue signaling lately serves the same role as “but I have a black friend” did previously. It’s more cover than impetus for genuine self-reflection within realistic social and economic frameworks.

Reich says: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

And, as I write, these same Democrats are frantically undermining radical democratic reform in a desperate attempt to install a fully complicit nitwit like Joe Biden as the party's candidate.

The Democratic Party's engorged elites never learn; on second thought, that's a redundancy.

Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump, by Robert Reich (The Guardian)

... In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism”.

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement ...

Where are the Democrats? "It’s urgent Democrats stop squabbling and recognize seven basic truths," says Robert Reich.

(See also: Where are the Democrats? "The Democratic Base Is Marching Right Past Its Leaders")

If you're a Floyd County resident and consider yourself in alignment with the Democratic Party, then please click through and read Reich's seven truths.

Next, consider carefully the recent history of the Floyd County Democratic Party. As currently constituted, do you think the FCDP understands these truths and is capable of doing what's needed (as Reich asks)?

If the answer is yes, the blog is yours. Make the case, explain what the FCDP will be doing, and tell us why these appearances of utter futility are deceptive.

If you feel constrained by lack of skill in writing, don't worry. I'll help you. If you're bashful about speaking openly because the party's leadership tends toward the secretive and hermetic -- well, isn't that a huge part of the problem?

In fact, I'm begging local Democrats -- any or all of them -- to explain this:

ON THE AVENUES: Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey are Trumping the Donald when it comes to breathtaking moral turpitude. Have they no shame?

There are good people in the FCDP; unfortunately, they've been silent for too long, submerged beneath the vapid corporate surface sheen which continues to amass little more than losses. The FCDP as we know it today functions primarily as Jeff Gahan's fundraising arm -- and with all the funds raised going to Gahan, and none to the party.

If Gahan possessed Barack Obama's intellect and charisma, this might make sense, though carefully mark my words: Gahan may have won two mayoral terms, transforming him into a genius superstar in the eyes of local Democrats, but he's on course to become a tremendous liability.

Local Democrats have been almost swept clean in the county, and there are no natural successors to Gahan in the city, apart from functionaries like Pat McLaughlin and Bob Caesar, for whom wishing simply won't make it so. Now Gahan is striking deals with the likes of Coffey, not because these concessions assist his moribund political party in any coherent way, but in defense of the mayor's own campaign-finance-lockbox-driven indefensible ambitions.

As you know, I don't care a jot about the Democratic Party, although we could use an entity to function as the principled local opposition to state and national madness. If it cannot do even this, then Reich is correct. Let it be swept away, and the sooner the better.

The life of the party — 7 truths for Democrats, by Robert Reich (San Francisco Chronicle)

The ongoing contest between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders wings of the Democratic Party continues to divide Democrats. It’s urgent Democrats stop squabbling and recognize seven basic truths ...

7 The party must change from being a giant fundraising machine to a movement. It needs to unite the poor, working class and middle class, black and white — who haven’t had a raise in 30 years and who feel angry, powerless and disenfranchised.

... If the Democratic Party doesn’t understand these seven truths and fails to do what’s needed, a third party will emerge to fill the void.

Third parties usually fail because they tend to draw votes away from the dominant party closest to them, ideologically. But if the Democratic Party creates a large enough void, a third party won’t draw away votes. It will pull people into politics.

And drawing more people into politics is the only hope going forward.

Robert Reich has an "8-Point Plan for a New Democratic Party," and I fully expect Floyd County's Democrats to whittle it down to less than zero.

Has a single local ranking Democrat had anything intelligible to say since the debacle on November 8?

Donald Trump ran roughshod, but roughly 40% of the county opted for Hillary Clinton, and it stands to reason that these people might be interested to know what's next.

(crickets chirp)
(pins drop)
(somewhere, a dog forlornly barks)
(the flutter of this passing moth's wings is deafening)

I resent being proven wrong again; after all, I thought local Democrats couldn't display any fewer leadership skills.

But when the going gets tough ... water park!

Robert Reich's 8-Point Plan for a New Democratic Party, by Tessa Stuart (Rolling Stone)

Former labor secretary says the party must be rebuilt from the ground up, and has some ideas on how it should be done ... "the entire organization has to be reinvented," Robert Reich says of the DNC.

During the 2016 primary, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was an outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders. When he threw his weight behind Hillary Clinton's bid in the general election, he did so while also calling for the formation of a new progressive party to take up Sanders' cause after the election. In the wake of Democrats' humiliating defeat in November – not just for the presidency, but in a number of Congressional races – the UC Berkeley professor and co-founder of Inequality Media says the Democratic Party must be rebuilt from the ground up, and he has some ideas about how it ought to be done ...

... This requires a completely different kind of politics in response, and the Democratic Party needs to think at a much, much larger and more ambitious level than a lot of the Democrats I've been talking to over the last week have been. Here's Reich's blueprint for the future of the party."

To learn the details, click through. Here is the title list:

1. Overhaul the DNC
2. Embrace populism
3. Mobilize, energize and educate the base
4. Expose Trump as a fraud
5. Focus on 2018 now
6. Look to the state and local level
7. Protect groups threatened by Trump
8. Failing all else, look outside the party

Look outside the party? That's interesting.

"All I can tell you at this point in time is that millions of people are afraid of what's to come. They want to know what to do. They want to be engaged and involved. They want to be part of a peaceful resistance army, with regard to what they expect to happen over the next months or years. And that expectation it is, it seems to me, justified and realistic. The Democrats would be wise to take advantage of this upsurge in public concern, and this desire to be directly involved."

The problem for our local Democrats is when you've been this bad for this long, even Santa Claus isn't returning your calls.

But look, they're already hard at work mobilizing, energizing and educating the base!

Robert Reich and Thomas Frank connect the dots between Hillary Clinton, Adam Dickey and Jeff Gahan.

Q. What do Jeff Gahan's toadies say when the Bud Light stops flowing?
A: Wow, this regime really sucks.

First, author Thomas Frank previews the Clinton campaign.

Why must the Trump alternative be self-satisfied, complacent Democrats?, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

 ... In reality, Donald Trump is a bigot of such pungent vileness that the victory of the Democratic candidate this fall is virtually assured. Absent some terrorist attack ... or some FBI action on the Clinton email scandal ... or some outrageous act of reasonableness by Trump himself, the blowhard is going to lose.

This, in turn, frees the Democratic leadership to do whatever they want, to cast themselves in any role they choose. They do not need to move to “the center” this time. They do not need to come up with some ingenious way to get Wall Street off the hook. They do not need to beat up on working people’s organizations.

That they seem to want to do all these things anyway tells us everything we need to know about who they really are: a party of the high-achieving professional class that is always looking for a way to dismiss the economic concerns of ordinary people.

Hmm. Adam Dickey's local Democrats in a nutshell.

Concurrently, Robert Reich posted the following at his Facebook account. I've highlighted the passage that most clearly explains Jeff Gahan's local governing preferences, and his prioritization to date. Union jobs at Pillsbury were lost, with nothing to replace them -- but Gahan's suburban Eastridge voters wanted parks.

---

How did Democrats lose the white working class to Republicans, and now to Donald Trump?

One answer is for years Republicans have skillfully played the race card (“welfare queens, “Willie Horton” the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry spewing forth from Donald Trump is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters.

But this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and controlled Congress for four of those years. In that time they've scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class.

In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class.

Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift?

In part, because they bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.

Will they? Could they? What do you think?

Reich: "We the People, and the New American Civil War."

This is a topic so obvious that quite a few of us have tried to ignore it. On the election's eve, don't expect encouraging reading.

We the People, and the New American Civil War, by Robert Reich (Huffington Post)

The vitriol is worse is worse than I ever recall. Worse than the Palin-induced smarmy 2008. Worse than the swift-boat lies of 2004. Worse, even, than the anything-goes craziness of 2000 and its ensuing bitterness.

It's almost a civil war. I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won't even consider going out with Republicans, and vice versa. My email and twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn't share with my granddaughter ...

I've been reading American Civil War history since I was a babe in the burbs, and there is an accumulated weight of recollection as to the intensity of feeling that took little to ignite into vitriol worse than what is being described by Reich. It was a nasty time, it took a century to even begin recovering from it, and now we seem intent on repeating aspects of it. I attribute this to sheer, unalloyed ignorance of history. Maybe it would be better to omit history, and simply refer to our abundance of just plain ignorance. Back to Reich:

 ... But I think the degree of venom we're experiencing has deeper roots.

The nation is becoming browner and blacker. Most children born in California are now minorities. In a few years America as a whole will be a majority of minorities. Meanwhile, women have been gaining economic power. Their median wage hasn't yet caught up with men, but it's getting close. And with more women getting college degrees than men, their pay will surely exceed male pay in a few years. At the same time, men without college degrees continue to lose economic ground. Adjusted for inflation, their median wage is lower than it was three decades ago.

In other words, white working-class men have been on the losing end of a huge demographic and economic shift. That's made them a tinder-box of frustration and anger -- eagerly ignited by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other pedlars of petulance, including an increasing number of Republicans who have gained political power by fanning the flames.