Street Fighter Mas.

Joe Dunman in February, when briefly it seemed like there might be a viable future.

Dunman nails it: Bernie Sanders' agenda is "pretty much just 'catch us up to where Western Europe has already been for 40 years.'"

Fast forward to now, and Joe Dunman on well-mannered left-wing protest movements (again at Twitter: @JoeDunman).

---

I'm a broken record on this but any serious reading about coups, uprisings, riots, and assassinations through global history will make you really appreciate how polite and patient American left-wing protest movements really are.

Modern right-wing protest movements, on the other hand, are bloody as hell. Spree killings, assassinations, bombings, beatings, you name it. The anti-abortion movement alone is an endless string of violent behavior. An incomplete list of victims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence

That doesn't mean there's been NO left-wing violence, of course. There's been some. But compare the damage a crowd of thousands can do to what amount of damage they've actually done and it's really striking how passive they are.

The thousands of people now showing up nightly in Portland could very easily and very quickly take and destroy that federal building. Instead they play endless games of chemical weapons tag with a couple dozen goons in riot gear.

It is estimated that 500k people showed up to the Women's March in DC in early 2017. Do you know what 500k people can't do? Nothing. They can do anything they want, if they work together in even the loosest possible way. Instead, signs and slogans, and everybody went home.

Mayors Wheeler and Frey and Fischer still walk freely around their cities with the barest security if any at all. They don't fear retaliation from demonstrators, and rightly so, because demonstrators have shown no interest in extra-institutional forms of justice.

Historically speaking, this is really something. Hell, lynchings were (and perhaps still are) a regular occurrence in America. Violent mob justice is part of our culture. And yet, protesters' demands are limited to institutional calls for action. Arrest the cops! Defund them!

Of course the counter-rhetoric paints protesters as lawless and destructive in cartoonish ways. But if the protesters were as violent as they've been portrayed, there probably wouldn't be any cops left to arrest. No departments to defund. No mayors left to resign.

---

(for the next few days, I'll be titling my posts after songs. That should confuse them even more)

"Bernie Sanders has spent his life working to find a party to advance his cause, rather than finding a cause that can advance his party."

I support Bernie Sanders as a presidential candidate because his positions jibe with my own. There are other Democratic presidential candidates who have positions similar to the ones Sanders professes; for my money, he was there first, but if one of them becomes the nominee and not Sanders, there's a fairly good chance I'll be supportive. Until then, I stick with the purest expression of my own set of values. I can't see this having much of anything to do with a candidate's gender, race, orientation. It's about platform, policies and core values.

The Long Shot, by Matthew Karp (The Nation)

How Bernie became Bernie

If you want to appreciate the return of the left as a significant force in American politics, treat yourself to a quiet evening with the 2012 Democratic Party platform. This vast accumulation of words, over 26,000 in all, contains no fewer than 42 invocations of “the middle class,” 28 calls for “innovation,” and 18 promises of “tax credits.” Its first policy section places “Middle Class Tax Cuts” atop the list of Barack Obama’s achievements as president. And amid this great desert of focus-grouped language, boundless and bare, there rises not a single demand for a major universal public program.

How much has changed in the last few years. At the grass roots, the evidence for some kind of left-wing resurgence is too overwhelming for all but the most jaundiced or mechanical skeptic to deny: the wave of victorious labor strikes from West Virginia to Los Angeles, the advent of new activist movements like Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March, the rise of left political organizations (the Democratic Socialists of America grew from 6,500 members in 2014 to about 60,000 today), and the election of avowedly radical candidates to city governments, state legislatures, and Congress itself. Amid this hive of activity, national opinion has pitched sharply to the left ...

Leftward trends.

... What explains this swift ideological transformation? Over the longer term, no doubt, it owes its origins to the political and economic upheaval that has gripped much of the industrialized world in the last decade. Forty years of globalizing markets, deregulating states, declining unions, flattening wages, expanding debt, and skyrocketing inequality—administered by governments of the right and center-left alike—established the conditions for general political revolt, the reverberations of which could be seen from Wisconsin to Greece. Yet this broader crisis, by itself, hardly ensured a renaissance of social democracy in the United States. Across the Atlantic, the anti-establishment upheaval has boosted right-wing nationalists more often than movements of the left; its most immediate impact on American politics, after all, was the election of Donald Trump. And so one must look for more acute reasons for social democracy’s revival, and no better one can be found than Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president. So many of the ideas, tactics, and even key players of the current moment—including Ocasio-Cortez, a former Sanders-campaign volunteer—emerged in the context of that remarkable primary run. As new books by Sanders and his 2016 campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, help demonstrate, the Vermont socialist’s long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination did not just succeed in “pushing Clinton to the left”; it helped transform the shape and content of progressive politics in the United States.

Outside the duopoly.

Such deep roots in third-party struggle make Sanders a black swan not only among today’s Democratic elite but across American political history. To find an influential national figure with such an extensive background outside the two-party system, you have to return to Debs and the Socialists in the early 20th century or, perhaps, Salmon Chase and the antislavery radicals who helped found the Republican Party before the Civil War. Like the political abolitionists of that era, Sanders has spent his life working to find a party to advance his cause, rather than finding a cause that can advance his party. Nor has that cause wavered very much in half a century. Interviewed by United Press International at the start of his first Liberty Union Party campaign in 1972, he produced a paragraph that could be pasted into a tweet today: “If we wanted to, we could have decent housing and free medical care and jobs for everyone…. It won’t happen because the wealth and money lies in the hands of a few people who are not concerned with the welfare of others.”

BIG SNIP

It would be wrong to say that the Democratic Party, in its current institutional form, is anything like the party of Bernie Sanders. Business-friendly moderates still make up its largest congressional caucus, billionaire donors (and billionaire politicians) remain close to its leadership, and even many Washington progressives appear willing to dump Medicare for All for some plausible-sounding substitute. Nevertheless, the larger pattern is clear. On issue after issue, from wealth taxes to climate change to corporate PAC money, the national debate has moved away from the cautious incrementalism of the Clinton campaign and toward the bold social-democratic agenda laid out by Sanders in 2016.

Foreign policy.

Much about a possible Sanders foreign policy remains uncertain, including its approach to trade relations with China, its attitude toward Israel and Palestine, and its outlook on the 800-some military bases that the United States maintains around the world. Denouncing the “military-industrial complex” is one thing; dismantling it, quite another. Nevertheless, a view of international politics that rejects the premise of US global hegemony, as Sanders does, is already worlds apart from anything dreamed up within official Democratic circles, where enthusiasm for a new Cold War against Russian and Chinese “neo-authoritarianism” is brewing.

Big money.

Sanders, by contrast, understands that the rise of the 1 percent is a bipartisan phenomenon. “Our economy, our political life, and the media,” he writes, “are largely controlled by a handful of billionaires and large corporations…. I believe that the Democratic Party bears an enormous amount of responsibility for this sad state of affairs.” And unlike the party’s leadership, he recognizes that the power of the ownership class extends far beyond the nebulous special interests that every politician denounces. While no other national Democrat, Warren included, even uses the phrase “corporate media,” Sanders rightly makes it a recurring theme in his critique of billionaire rule.

Civil rights.

Contrary to much disingenuous criticism, this does not mean that Sanders refuses to recognize historically specific inequalities of gender and race. On questions of discrimination, pay equity, mass incarceration, and civil rights, his rhetoric and record have been far in advance of the Democratic Party’s mainstream for quite some time. (Many surveys have shown that Sanders’s strongest national support comes from women and people of color; the vast majority of black voters, regardless of their 2016 primary choice, continue to view him favorably.) The difference is not what Sanders does not say but what he does say: that every American, including those who voted for Trump, is entitled to the universal protections of social democracy.

FDR ... and Lincoln.

From Weaver to Ocasio-Cortez, nearly every progressive figure today is urging the Democrats to reclaim the bold mantle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet Sanders rounds out the introduction to Where We Go From Here with a quotation from another president who led an even bolder movement and whose election spurred an even greater transformation. The hoariest words in American history—Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg vow to defend “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”—are also, Sanders reminds us, some of the most radical. To overthrow an entrenched oligarchy and claim a “new birth of freedom” based on democratic equality for all: That would be a political revolution worth fighting for.

Michael Moore interview: "The director’s latest film, Fahrenheit 11/9, is a broadside against both the president and the Democratic establishment that failed to defeat him."

Moore's documentary film didn't last long locally.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9: "The film is as much about how the left and the media have failed us as it is about the dangers of Trump."

My guess is it will have greater success abroad, where people tend to understand realities that we can't, or won't, face here in Merica.

Interview: Michael Moore: 'We have the power to crush Trump', by Owen Jones (The Guardian)

The director’s latest film, Fahrenheit 11/9, is a broadside against both the president and the Democratic establishment that failed to defeat him. He explains why a leftwing comeback is on the cards

 ... For young leftists, myself included, Moore’s work was something of a political life-raft back in an era when the traditional left was all but sunk. Fahrenheit 9/11 – his indictment of George W Bush’s so-called war on terror – courageously advanced otherwise marginalised ideas: it suggested that a proposed gas pipeline through Afghanistan may have played a role in the war, and noted links between the Bush administration and the Saudi regime. Moore has called for Bush administration officials to be put on trial. All this strays from the respectable centrist critique of the invasion, that it was simply the wrong war at the wrong time, or a “dumb war”, as Obama put it, rather than a crime.

His documentaries are designed not simply to inform, but to mobilise people. “Yeah, I was hoping to stop the Iraq war, hoping to end gun violence, to ensure every American has health insurance,” he explains. But he is keen to emphasise that his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9 (9 November 2016 being the day Donald Trump was declared US president-elect), is different. “It’s not some single issue, it’s not just about Donald Trump,” he says. “There’s nothing I can tell you about him that you don’t already know. You’d be wasting time and money to watch that.”

(snip)

For me, one of the strongest elements in the film was his J’accuse against the Democratic party establishment. He seethes with profane rage when he talks about their failures. He makes a parallel with his documentary – he’s down a rabbit hole again: if it’s a great film, if the critics like it, then he’s done his bit as a director, he hands his raw materials to Vertigo, the UK company in charge of distributing the film, it’s on them to make it a success.

It’s an allegory for the Democrats, he suggests. The polling shows that on the key issues, such as progressive taxation, or abortion rights, or healthcare, or gun control, most Americans side with the progressive side of the argument. In the past six out of seven presidential elections, he notes, the Democrats won the popular vote. “So the Democratic party are handed a population which agrees with their entire platform,” he says; they even have more voters. “Yet they’re still unable to put themselves and us in power.” If his film distributor kept doing that, it would go out of business. But here is what happens, his film posits, if the Democrats become too much like the Republicans, too in hock to a corporate agenda ...

"Meanwhile capitalism does what it does — mostly unabated — and inequality once again becomes the scourge of our times."

The book is Radicals in America: The US Left Since the Second World War, by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps. I have not read the book, although maybe there'll be time to do so soon, but the point of mentioning it, and excerpting the final section of Hartman's assessment, is to draw a line in the anchor crosswalks.

Hartman's essay is comprehensible to me. In short, I know what he's talking about, and referring to. If you're running for local office as a Democrat, and ask me for my vote, I'll be asking you to display a working knowledge of the history recounted by Hartman. It's as simple as that.

If you can't, then off my porch you'll be going.

It's not about expressing lockstep agreement; it's about being familiar with the material. If you're identifying as a Democrat, then I need to know where you stand in the context of what's being discussed in books like this.

As a Democratic candidate for office, if you can't comment sensibly about matters like this, you're wasting my time.

Got it?

Beyond the Whack-a-Mole Left, by Andrew Hartman (Jacobin)

Though often condemned to the fringes of American political life, the radical left has changed the course of US history.

 ... Brick and Phelps are not entirely without hope. They point to “green shoots,” including the millennial embrace of socialism, which since their book was published has gained political force through the Sanders campaign.

But grizzled historians that they are, Brick and Phelps remain skeptical that a movement capable of a mainstream left-wing revival is visible:

If new layers of youth had come to see capitalism as unstable, destructive, and inequitable, how to connect that observation to imaginative political practice, how to challenge the established order and offer plausible visions of a better future that popular movements can bring into being — in other words, how to move from margin to mainstream — remained opaque.

In spite of their pessimism, Radicals in America highlights some left-wing successes — with the qualification that “radicalism becomes invisible, paradoxically, in its victories.” One such invisible victory — the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which protects the rights of a previously excluded group of Americans — occurred due to radical organizing and protest.

But one of the reasons left-wing successes like the ADA feel so fleeting is because their effects seem far removed from the labor question that informed a more cohesive American left before 1945.

When it comes to the question of labor — or, more accurately, when it comes to class struggle — the Right is winning. The Left’s invisible victories need to be understood alongside this perplexing fact. As Brick and Phelps write in their shrewd conclusion:

Following the high point of the cascading radicalizations that ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, American political history shows two seemingly antithetical trends: one conservative, toward growing inequality, weakened unions, and an emphasis on private, market relations as a way of life; the other liberalizing, toward greater participation by women and people of color in most aspects of social, economic, and political leadership and a dramatic easing of sexual proscription to make gay and lesbian identities more legitimate.

There is an enormous difference between “liberalizing social relations,” which radicals can chalk up as a victory, and “democratizing and equalizing social relations,” which the Left has failed miserably at achieving. As Brick and Phelps rhetorically ask:

What does it mean that anyone of color can sit in the front of the bus, for example, or that it contains a wheelchair lift, if buses, heavily used by the working poor and elderly, now come with much less frequency and at greater cost to riders because of privatizations and cuts to public transit budgets?

Radicals in America offers a powerful history of how the Left has both succeeded and failed to bring its views into the center of American political life. The fight for gay marriage is a prime example of how once-radical ideas can become widely accepted.

But to make victories like these more substantive and widely shared, we need a broad socialist movement in the United States. Our task is to bring that marginalized idea into the mainstream.

A Jacobin doubleheader: "The Case for Single-Payer" and "Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus."

Thinking, drinking and surveying the landscape, there is serious doubt in my mind that I can ever again identify with an American political party, especially the two biggest political monopolies.

I’m also no longer interested in fealty to symbols. I genuinely respect YOUR superstitions and addictions, so long as they don’t intrude on my space. I won’t whistle or splutter karaoke. By the same token, my butt and knee are mine, not yours. Open your eyes and see the world around you. Follow the money.

But I digress. Insofar as the various branches of Let's Pretend We're Democrats can get aboard with ideas like the two that follow, all the better. I might yet vote for them on occasion.

Otherwise, the tag "independent" largely summarizes my lot in life. So be it, although running for a council seat as a Sanders-style indie "genuine" Democrat still might be great fun, only if I can suppress the gag reflex at the thought of  the party's local management.

The Case for Single-Payer, by Timothy Faust (Jacobin)

Winning Medicare for All would allow us to take a giant step toward health justice.

Last month, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders introduced his Medicare for All Act — a bill that, if passed, would establish a federal, universal, single-payer health care system in the US. The legislation stands against a cruel summer of “repeal and replace” blood lust, most recently championed by senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, and years of mewling, milquetoast non-ideas from mainstream Democrats.

Toward Health Justice

The United States may be a country where Saudi princes can fly to get a heart transplant, but it remains a place where poor men die fourteen years earlier than rich men. In a land of resplendence, the powerful condemn the marginalized to chronic illness, because it’s not profitable to provide nutritious food or adequate shelter.

Fragmented and commodified, the present model treats health care as something that only happens when people are insured, not a holistic process spanning an entire life. Single-payer could begin to change this. Once the federal actor bears the costs of providing care and not providing care, it could finally be a tool for realizing health justice.

If people are getting sick and dying because they don’t have a place to live, or if the places they live are unsafe, then housing is health care, and you build housing to bring health care costs down. If people don’t have access to healthy food to eat, then food is health care, and you provide them with affordable or free food options to bring health care costs down. If people live in fear of their personal safety — if they are assaulted or beaten at home, at work, by the police, or by their domestic partners — then safety is a form of health care, and you provide safe havens for them to bring health care costs down.

In other words, a single-payer program is not the goal. Single-payer on its own cannot be the goal. Single-payer does not solve the biggest sin of commodified health care: that taking care of sick people isn’t profitable, and any profit-driven insurance system thus disregards the most vulnerable.

Sick people, people with disabilities, poor people, pregnant people, trans people, people of color — all of them are valuable to insurance markets only inasmuch as profit can be extracted from them; afterward, they are drained, discarded, abandoned to charity care, or, absent that, to the carceral state. Corporations have proven themselves unable and unwilling to look these problems in the eye, and people suffer while Democrats use public money to bribe corporations into trying to ameliorate the health care crisis.

Single-payer alone does not solve these problems. But it gives us a fighting chance to square up against them ...

Then there's this wonderful opening sentence.

Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders showed his commitment to a sharp break from the foreign policy platforms of both the Democratic and Republican establishments.

It connects to a long overdue foreign policy rethink ... but the robber barons aren't going to like it.

Breaking from the Consensus

Perhaps most significantly, Sanders used his speech to rebuke not just the neoconservative worldview, but some of the core precepts of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, like the concept of American exceptionalism and the projection of “toughness” through a willingness to use force.

“Blustery threats of force, while they might make a few columnists happy, can often signal weakness as much as strength, diminishing US deterrence, credibility, and security in the process,” he said in a thinly veiled dig at Trump, currently in the midst of an unnecessary contest of brinkmanship with the North Korean dictator.

Going further, Sanders declare the death of the concept of a US “benevolent global hegemony” — a notion embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike and often used to justify meddling in foreign countries. Events like the Iraq War, he said, “have utterly discredited that vision.”

In a rather remarkable section of his speech, Sanders went further than just about any mainstream US policymaker in rattling off a list of the US government’s past misdeeds — some of which, he noted, the US public would probably be aghast to learn about for the first time. To justify his point that intervention and force are the wrong approach, he cited events like the Iraq and Vietnam wars as well as the 1973 military coup in Chile. He particularly stressed the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government, engineered by both the US and British governments, which, as he noted, ultimately resulted in the country’s 1979 revolution and the anti-American hostility the US contends with today.

“What would Iran look like today if their democratic government had not been overthrown?” he asked the audience. “What consequences are we still living with today?”

Long read: "Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals."

Bud Selig is to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. That's actually more repulsive as Donald Trump being elected president.

As a corrective, this long but necessary survey, ranging from the early days to the present.

Out of Left Field, by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias (Jacobin)

Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals.

... Despite their courageous and pioneering efforts, neither (Marvin) Miller nor (Curt) Flood have been elected to the Hall of Fame. While Miller was alive, the baseball establishment blocked him from the Cooperstown shrine five times. The owners and executives who control the Hall of Fame kept changing the voting rules to keep him out.

Yet baseball experts overwhelmingly agree with Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber, who claimed that Miller is one of the three most important figures in baseball history, alongside Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.

Flood’s fifteen years of Hall of Fame eligibility ended in 1996 when he garnered just 15.1 percent of baseball writers’ votes. He died the following year at fifty-nine, which made him eligible to enter the Hall of Fame posthumously if the Veterans Committee voted him in. There’s been no effort to resuscitate his candidacy.

Books and chairmen: "After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America."

For a companion piece to The Nation's book reviews ...

Democratic divisions on display at DNC debate, by Eric Bradner (CNN)

For all the marches and protests the left has generated since Election Day, the debate over who will lead the Democratic Party in the early stages of Donald Trump's presidency is underscoring the divisions still lingering within its ranks.

As was evident at the recent Adventure at the Voiture, state Democrats seem to be backing Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, as are some younger local Democrats with a pulse. Naturally, a win by Buttigieg would enhance the career prospects of local chair Dickey, and the object of potential Democratic Party retrofitting should be to remove problems, not promote them.

What the hell; I'm just a Democratic Socialist in the isolation ward. Carry on with the reviews.

Socialism’s Return, by Patrick Iber (The Nation)

After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.

For the American left, 2016 proved to be a year with a cruel twist ending. In the first few months, a self-
described democratic socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders mounted a surprisingly successful primary challenge to the Democratic Party’s presumed and eventual presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. By the end of 2016, however, not only had Sanders lost the primary race, but Clinton had been defeated in the general election by a billionaire who dressed his xenophobic and plutocratic ambitions in the garb of class resentment.

But the apparent strength of the left wasn’t entirely an illusion. Even as late as November, the Sanders campaign had racked up a set of important victories. The Cold War had helped to entrench the idea of socialism as antithetical to the American political tradition, and Sanders had gone a long way toward smashing that ideological consensus. By identifying himself explicitly as a democratic socialist from the outset of his campaign, he helped give renewed meaning and salience to it as a political identity firmly rooted in the American tradition.

The books being reviewed are:

Outsider in the White House
By Bernie Sanders, with Huck Gutman

Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
By Bernie Sanders

The ABCs of Socialism
By Bhaskar Sunkara, ed.

The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for a New Century
By Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara, eds.

Keith Olbermann and The Resistance: "More people are paying attention to my message at the moment than they would be if I were some other host on MSNBC or CNN."

Let us read, and watch, and draw our own conclusions: Watch 'The Resistance" with Keith Olbermann.

Have liberals found their combative new leader in … Keith Olbermann? by Ben Terris (Washington Post)

... Olbermann may have claimed “The Resistance” as his show’s title, but it’s also fashionable shorthand for the emerging, amorphous community — career Democrats, masked anarchists, Hollywood liberals, conservative Never Trumpers — working to topple, or at least rein in, President Trump. Not working together, mind you: The movement has only the barest organization and no true leaders. But plenty of people are looking to fill that void and, in some cases, pave their own path back to relevance.

Insofar as there is a "left" in New Albany, it simply cannot trust the local Democratic Party to "lead" it.

The problem with relying on the Floyd County Democratic Party's largely fictional "leadership" cadre to assist in the rebirth of the Left is that they are capable neither of waging nor winning a "battle" for the party's soul.

Our Gahans and Dickeys are influence peddlers, displaying far less soul than conditioned responses for self-preservation, and they're currently leaning over backwards to appease Dan Coffey, a snarling Trumpian and the polar opposite of what's really needed. They're engaged in this demeaning somersault because the local party presently has no stated purpose apart from enhancing Jeff Gahan's cult of personality.

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

If all this disgusts you, you'll be delighted to know that alternative models exist. Let the principled refurbishment begin ... and if the local protectors of rapidly failing orthodoxy are unable to adapt, seeing them swept away would be a highly soulful development, wouldn't it?

First, about the Left itself ...

The American left will be reborn under President Trump, by Owen Jones (The Guardian)

Clintonian-centrism was defeated in November, but attempts to repeal Obamacare show the Republicans are weak and divided. Now is the time for the left to craft a populist alternative

Donald Trump is now the most powerful man on Earth. You would expect the American left to be despondent; it’s not. The left is stronger than it has been for decades. They are up against a president who lost the popular vote, who assumes office with the lowest approval rating on record, and whose party is riven by divisions. In November, Clintonian-centrism – whose compelling selling point was the ability to win – was defeated, plunging the American republic into its gravest crisis since the war ...

 ... A battle for the soul of the Democratic party now beckons. There are siren voices who claim that the Democrats were too radical, too vociferous in their support of women and minorities. But a powerful new movement is determined to transform the Democrats into a party that unapologetically challenges vested interests.

 ... then, some strategies for those still embracing the Party.

The First Step to Electing More Democrats? Getting Them to Run, by Tim Murphy (Mother Jones)

How one group is trying to channel the Trump resistance into political gains.

... Run for Something's mission is not to stop Trump in 2020, at least not directly. Its focus is on local races, where Democrats have been creamed over the last eight years, losing some 935 state legislative seats during the Obama era. In 2017, it is focusing its efforts on Virginia and North Carolina, two places where Democratic gains at the state level (the party controls the governor's mansion in both states) are undercut by conservative legislatures. In Virginia, a blue state in the last three presidential elections, Democrats have failed even to show up in some races: 44 of the state's 67 Republican delegates ran unopposed in 2015, including three Republicans in districts carried by Hillary Clinton. Democrats have a long way to go to recoup what they lost, but they've also left a lot of low-hanging fruit on the vine.

"How do liberals halt the march of the right? Stand our ground and toughen up."

The author writes primarily from the British perspective, but the gist of it remains intact, and echoes Michael Moore's points about available tools and a willingness to act.

Opposed to what's coming down? Great, but you may find it necessary to stop whining and actually do something.

I've shortened the ten points to a bullet list. Be sure to click through and read the gritty details -- and please stop bitching about 2016. We need to be ready for 2017, campers.

How do liberals halt the march of the right? Stand our ground and toughen up, by Matthew d'Ancona (The Guardian)

To all you despondent liberals, Labour centrists, Tory modernisers, remainers, social justice warriors, social justice worriers, and everyone out there fretful about Brexit, depressed by Donald Trump, and scared of the alt-right, here is my festive message: get off the ground, you wusses. Put down your gingerbread lattes, and put up your dukes ...

 ... here are my 10 tips for liberals of all kinds hoping to stop the march of the right in 2017:

1. Defend your ground, aggressively
2. Colonise your opponents’ language
3. Lead, don’t follow
4. Heed grievances – but don’t appease
5. Stand up for immigration
6. Stand up for integration
7. Fight the next battle, not the last
8. Don’t make a fetish of “unity”
9. Challenge the public
10. Be patient

Local Democrats AWOL as The Nation asks: "What Is the Left Without Identity Politics?"

We interrupt the Floyd County Democratic Party's latest "Bowling for Dollars" soiree to offer these four examples of "collective soul-searching into what went so devastatingly wrong" on November 8. I'm told that just as soon as The Right Honorable Chairman finds a local "Democrat" who didn't vote for Donald Trump, the soul-searching will commence. 

At least the party can't lose again in 2017.

That's because there are no elections being held next year. 

---

What Is the Left Without Identity Politics? Four writers consider the question dividing the Democratic Party (The Nation)

... We asked four contributors to weigh in on this debate. Is the left too focused on “identity politics”—and what the hell does that term even mean? Their responses follow.

WALTER BENN MICHAELS
A Universe of Exploitation

The defensible heart of identity politics is its commitment to opposing forms of discrimination like racism, sexism, and homophobia. I share that commitment. But opposing discrimination today has no more to do with a left politics than do equally powerful ethical commitments against, say, violence or dishonesty. Why? Because the core of a left politics is its critique of and resistance to capitalism—its commitment to decommodifying education, health care, and housing, and creating a more economically equal society. Neither hostility to discrimination nor the accompanying enthusiasm for diversity makes the slightest contribution to accomplishing any of those goals. Just the opposite, in fact. They function instead to provide inequality with a meritocratic justification: If everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, there’s no injustice when some people fail.

CHARLES W. MILLS
Whose Identity Politics?

The causes of Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory will be debated for years: FBI director James Comey’s October 28 letter about Clinton’s e-mails, her “basket of deplorables” comment, the Democratic campaign’s neglect of the Rust Belt states, and so on. But the pernicious and enduring role of identity politics was crucial.

I refer, of course, to the white racial identity politics that has shaped the United States from its birth.

LINDA HIRSHMAN
Expanding the Circle

The call for the left to abandon its appeals to not-white-men violates the very premises of the American project. The Declaration of Independence describes a world in which “all men are created equal,” where “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Even the slaveholders’ Constitution prefaced its enterprise with the purpose of “secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” At the hearings for her confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated it precisely. The American project started with white men’s freedom and equality, and has been, for more than two centuries, all about expanding the circle to include more and more people in that blessed plot. It has almost always been the left that forces such expansions.

One argument for disregarding identity politics seems to be that it would free the left to focus solely on reducing economic inequality. But in the United States, where so many issues are entangled with race, such a turn to the material would still have a powerful racial element. (That explains at least in part why confronting inequality has been so much harder to do here than in the mostly white states of Western Europe.) The future of identity politics, and thus the moral and political mission of the left, is predicated on its capacity to organize people who are not white men.

CARLA MURPHY
Beyond the Distraction

These past weeks the dominant post-election debate among liberals and progressives has centered on “identity politics.” The term is a Rorschach test. Everyone sees something different depending on their cynicism towards diversity or experience with Others. More telling than its highly subjective content, however, is its origins. “Identity politics” is an internal argument by and for the white academic-media-donor-managerial class, about how they incorporate people of color into their institutions. I’ve heard this cultural squabble every year since I was a black kid at prep school and Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein published The Bell Curve. It imagines people of color as problems for white people to solve. I am profoundly uninterested in legitimizing such a discussion.

New Albany looks to Greece.

Photo credit: Guardian

Sort of a Salvador Allende moment for the EU, wouldn't you say?

Don't miss this comment, also in The Guardian: Greece shows what can happen when the young revolt against corrupt elites (Paul Mason).

The rise of Syriza can’t just be explained by the crisis in the eurozone: a youthful generation of professionals has had enough of tax-evading oligarchs ... From outside, Greece looks like a giant negative: but what lies beneath the rise of the radical left is the emergence of positive new values – among a layer of young people much wider than Syriza’s natural support base. These are the classic values of the networked generation: self-reliance, creativity, the willingness to treat life as a social experiment, a global outlook.

Negotiating the terms of engagement. Imagine that.

Syriza’s historic win puts Greece on collision course with Europe, by Ian Traynor and Helena Smith (Guardian)

• Voters reject EU austerity for radical alternative of far-left party
• Upstarts fall two seats short of an overall majority
• ‘Greece has turned a page,’ says 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras

European politics has been plunged into a volatile new era following a historic victory in Greece’s general election by far-left radicals committed to ending years of austerity.

More than five years into the euro crisis that started in Greece in October 2009 and raised questions about the single currency’s survival, Greek voters roundly rejected the savage spending cuts and tax rises imposed by Europe which reduced the country to penury ...

... The clock is already ticking. When the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, French president François Hollande, British prime minister David Cameron et al assemble for an EU summit in Brussels in just over a fortnight, they will be joined at Europe’s top table by (Alexis) Tsipras, probably the only man there not wearing a tie. The symbolism will be enormous. Europe’s anti-mainstream mavericks and populists are no longer just hammering on the doors.