Our Revolution: "It Is Not Our Job to Fit Into the Democratic Establishment."

As though economics don't exist, these two Clintonites call for the Democratic Party to court the center.

The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.

To which Robert Reich plausibly rebutted:

Almost everything in the oped is dead wrong. For the last 40 years, Republicans have been moving to the right and Democrats have been moving to the so-called “center,” with the result that the center keeps shifting rightward and the Democrats have lost their way.

Nor can Democrats expect to win simply by being against Trump.

Democrats have to take a bold stand to make America work for the many -- reversing the unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the hands of a few.

I wonder which of these costumes Chairman Adam will be inhabiting this week, and how often he'll be switching between one and the other? That's a lot of non-existent phone booths for someone who isn't even Superman.

Nina Turner: It Is Not Our Job to Fit Into the Democratic Establishment, by Collier Meyerson (The Nation)

The new president of Our Revolution on race, class, electoral strategy, and whether we’ll feel the Bern in 2020.

Nina Turner is a “proud homegirl” of Cleveland, Ohio, where she was a state senator from 2008 to 2014 and a candidate for secretary of state in 2014. Long viewed as a rising star inside the Democratic Party, Turner began 2015 affiliated with the Ready for Hillary Super PAC, only to throw her support behind Bernie Sanders later in the year. During the primary, Turner became one of the most prominent black voices to stump for Sanders, and she has remained an active Sanders ally, joining the board of Our Revolution. On Thursday, the organization announced that Turner would take over as president, replacing Jeff Weaver, who was Sanders’s campaign manager in 2016. The Nation spoke with Turner about her goals for the group. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I'll leave this q/a right here.

CM: How will Our Revolution relate to the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC, that kind of establishment that so many activists and politicians, including you, have frequently criticized?

NT: I don’t think it is our job nor our obligation to fit in. It’s their job to fit in with us. But the overwhelming majority of registered voters in this country, I think it’s 53 percent or maybe 54 percent, identify as independent. Now, we know independents lean one way or the other but they identify as independent so that means that both political parties need to do some soul searching. I’m certainly willing to sit across the table with almost anybody if we gonna work towards the collective good, but it is not Our Revolution’s job to fit in with them.

The legacy of James Baldwin.

The article isn't about the video, but I'd advise watching the video.

The fire this time – the legacy of James Baldwin, by Lanre Bakare (The Guardian)

His work fell foul of civil-rights-era binary racial and sexual politics but, as a new film shows, now Baldwin’s ideas are used to explain everything from Trump to Black Lives Matter

 ... For Baldwin scholar, professor of English at Yale and author Caryl Phillips, the return of Baldwin to mainstream thinking isn’t surprising at all. For him the big issues concerning American life now – the rise of crude, racially charged politics, killings of unarmed black men by the police, an apathetic public – repeat a history from which Baldwin’s critiques still offer some solace. “People are looking for someone who can articulate these issues,” says Phillips. “I think the person who has probably articulated what it means to be an American and what it means to be black, with more eloquence than anybody else in the last century, is Baldwin.”