Maybe it is because I grew up as the son of an advertising executive, next door to a senior partner at a major Manhattan law firm, with classmates whose parents worked at places like Cantor Fitzgerald or the Institute for Advanced Study, but I’ve never been really comfortable with the language of the Occupy Movement. I understand the usefulness of discussing the 1% vs. the 99%. I certainly understand the impulse to bash Wall Street. In any case, we need to have some kind of language for discussing rising income inequality and its causes. I just choose to use my own terminology.
I also noticed and was somewhat annoyed that the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Georgia, Michelle Nunn, came out of the box talking about the need to address the country’s debt. It annoyed me on the merits, not so much on the politics.
I have long argued that progressives can win in the South without adopting the DLC/Blue Dog model, so long as they can figure out how to finance their campaigns. On balance, I think someone who talks about Wall Street the way Elizabeth Warren talks about Wall Street will do better with your average Georgian voter than one who talks constantly about lowering our debt.
But let’s also be realistic. Go down to Georgia hill country and a spend a little time. “The massive Primal Scream coming from the children of the DixieCrats” that currently has the government shut down has to be taken into account.
Michelle Nunn can win this race, but she is going to have to significantly cut into the Republicans’ advantage with the white vote. Maybe she can count on some x-chromosome solidarity, but she can’t sound like she’s going to Washington to be a big help to the president.
The most obvious route to victory for Michelle Nunn is for her to brand herself as a newer, hipper, more estrogen-endowed version of her father, and to take advantage of the radicalism of her opponent. It’s not too distinct from the path Kay Hagan took to win a seat in North Carolina, and Sen. Hagan looks like she is in decent shape to win a second term.
Now, playing it safe may not be good enough, but going populist is probably the harder challenge. For starters, I’d hesitate to recommend a strategy that isn’t genuine. The daughter of a senator isn’t necessarily a natural anti-establishment candidate. Secondly, we need to think of what type of white voters she can attract, and how she can attract them?
Going heavily into the Occupy dictionary could help her win votes among the crowd that really hates the president, but how many votes are really there for the taking? Since we know that her opponent is probably going to be extremely unhinged, her best bet isn’t to try to out-radicalize them from the left. Her best bet is to seem sane and reasonable when compared to her opponent. This is where she can win over moderate white professionals and northern transplants.
My advice here cuts a little against my usual advice, but that is because of some factors that are unique to this race. The Nunn name is a well-regarded and established brand in Georgia, and you probably don’t want to mess with it too much. The likelihood of a crazy opponent is so high, that I think the sane/reasonable approach is on solid footing. These features are absent or largely-absent in the senate races in South Carolina and Tennessee, where I think the only hope of success is to go populist in a big way. You aren’t going to beat Lamar Alexander by being more reasonable.
But, in Georgia, in 2014, I don’t think running a Blue Dog campaign is a bad bet, even though it is annoying as hell.
Yup. It’s one thing to complain about a Democratic candidate for statewide office in New Jersey being too centrist, but Georgia?
Running as the daughter of her father would involve something much more nuanced than the Blue Dog “me too” position.
What is needed in politics is politicians who stop marketing and advertising and pushing hot buttons long enough to establish a base of facts with voters. Long enough to ground voters in reality. It is how Michelle Nunn talks about the debt, which has been hyped in red states into an anxiety as big as terrorism. And there is not good information about that in the article.
I would be surprised if any Democratic candidate knows what they are doing. It is very hard to figure out how to break out of the conservative enthrallment that has gripped the country and is reinforced daily by national and local media. The conservative certainties, like the danger of the debt, are not policies for Democrats in red states, they are part of the environment in which they must run.
Fort Oglethorpe is not in the “hill country”. It is in the northwest Georgia mountains. Paul Broun’s district is in the hill country (actually the red hill country; the “hill country” is a Texas phenomenon). There are cultural differences although both turn out to result in conservative attitudes. Historically, the mountains were the area that expelled the Cherokees through Jacksonian politics and in the Civil War was the first in Georgia to experience Sherman’s campaign. Broun’s district was first slaveholding, and then textile country. and provided the base for Lester Maddox’s campaigns.
What you are saying about Occupy is that you grew up with the servants of the 1% and you really don’t get democratic populism. In a sense, that’s irrelevant to an analysis of Michelle Nunn’s campaign and the democratic populist movement in the US right now does not see electoral politics as a means of influence as long as money dominates the system and the political culture. Electoral strategies are less important until there is a way to rein in that influence. And so far in terms of strategy, democratic populists keep coming up against a brick wall. The one movemental way to change political culture was shut down by massive paramilitary force organized by Democratic municipal administrations primarily (Bloomberg is the huge exception), coordinated by the administration of a Democratic President, and only during the mop-up picked up by Republican municipal administrations.
That makes all of the 2014 campaigns kind of side shows and one again more of a firewall against additional craziness than a return to actually moving forward.
The way that the shutdown is handled and the results of the endgame could dramatically change that political situation and open up the range of political discussion again.
But for now you still have a bunch of defensive Democratic candidates in red states who have not yet figured out how to differentiate themselves from the crazies and go on the offensive. (Pointing out that someone is crazy is a he said-she said and doesn’t effective differentiate oneself from the crazies.)
David Atkins just posted this over at Digby’s place:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/what-took-democrats-so-long-by.html
It’s not exactly on the subject .. but it does touch the greater point about D.C. Democrats being out of touch .. and finally getting a clue .. but people gotta remember something .. I don’t know about the Senate .. now that Patty Murray is running the DSCC .. but for the DCCC .. Steve Israel recruits blank slates .. as Boo ought to know all too well(see PA-08) .. and why should people come out to vote for those kinds of Democrats? Are people going to get excited to come out and vote for a Democrat like Nunn? I doubt it. How is she promising to make life better for her constituents?
Michael Bennet is running the DSCC.
I get Democratic populism. But I also have first-hand experience with NJ, NYC politics. That’s my political archetype. I learned that first and then had to learn that my experience wasn’t really applicable to other parts of the country.
You know, a Democrat in Northern New Jersey is representing an army of white professionals who are upper middle class, to outright rich. The Occupy language is so alienating to those folks that it seems like political malpractice to engage in it. You’re basically calling them evil, or, at best, the servants of evil.
That’s not my experience. That’s not how I view the people I grew up with. That’s not how I approach them politically.
When you start demonizing people like that, pretty soon someone gets the idea that flying a plane into their workplace is a morally justifiable way to protest them. Same thing for the IRS down in Texas or the Federal Building in OK City.
So, on a personal level, it’s hard for me to embrace the Occupy movement’s rhetoric, even if I agree with them about the importance of income inequality and the need for a fairer and safer financial industry.
You won’t see me talking about the 1%. Instead, I will be a lot more specific in who I rail against.
Unfortunately, Occupy was an actual grassroots thing, rather than a carefully-crafted non-violent protest.
I say this because I live in Atlanta, and know many people who are liberal, but also professional, and who heard the 1% catchphrase and said that success shouldn’t be demonized.
I had to explain to them that Occupy isn’t about demonizing people who make more money than you. It’s about bringing attention to the fact that the people at the very top of the US economic system control the entire economic system and make it work for them to the detriment of everyone else.
They immediately understood, and said the message was mixed and hard to parse. Well, kind of, yeah, sure.
Yeah. Occupy was more about that Permanent 1% that doesn’t change faces.
Just generations.
The analysis of the 1%-99% wasn’t about demonizing. It is an objective fact that the privileges of the 1% come increasingly from the manipulation of the conditions of life imposed on the 99%. And that the 1% arrive at those privileges either through the old-fashioned way: they inherit them. Or they follow the path of upward mobility, which more often than not involves socialization into “toughness”, making “tough decisions”, and expanding your own salary by shafting the salary of others.
As for the servants of the 1% in privileged communities, they become trapped by their own privilege.
My background is this. I grew up in middle class privilege mainly because FDR created a government employment agency that my dad started out as a junior clerk in. And through his manipulative skills and a one-year business course, his future went from that of a tenant farmer of cotton to eventually manage the office in with the largest volume of placements in the the state of South Carolina–in a time of prosperity. Because of this I was able to get a degree from a prestigious department of international relations and go get a masters degree at a Big Ten university. And come out because of scholarships, fellowships, assistantships, and my parents’ help with zero student loans. And be unemployed on graduation and unemployable in my field because of degree inflation that occurred during the time I was in college.
I know the assumptions of privilege of the 1% and the way that they vet connections and even acquaintances for class acceptability.
But I grew up in a small town and my friends were the kids of cops and postal service employees, the produce manager at a chain store, Corps of Engineers civil engineers working on a pork-barrel dam brought by Olin Johnston and Richard Russell, local doctors. I said I was privileged. But I also went to school with the kids of weavers and doffers and other workers at the six textile mills in town and some of them were acquaintances in Scouts and band and other activities. My parents acted as if they had crossed the class divide that existed even in small Southern cities, but it was an illusion; they were tolerated and respected because they were competent, kind, and generous people but the divide was still there.
In the 1970s, I worked on internships on community projects in the West Side of Chicago, a rapidly changing community south of Decatur, Georgia, a working class neighborhood in Green Bay, a small community on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. At the turn of the 1980s, I was working at war on poverty agency in the mountains of North Carolina that was run by Republicans dramatically different from the current crop there. Ronald Reagan ended that career. After two years of unemployment and a community college degree, I entered the IT world and built a 24-year career there. In that position, I saw how managers at high levels in corporations make decisions, what they actually know about their books and IT systems, and the elaborate dances that go on in corporations when they are going to admit $100 million losses.
And in the IT recession at the age of 55, I was unemployed for a total of 3 1/2 years. Could not even get a job flipping burgers. “Overeducated”.
I know how the system works from the outside, the inside, and personal experience.
The question of 1% and 99% isn’t so much who you are but who are you actually serving. There were some well-heeled Wall Streeters who took the trouble to go to teach-in sessions at Zucotti Park, for example, and explain to the people there how Wall Street worked and the tricks and shenanigans and outright fraud that they were seeing. The counter-example is of course the blue-shirted cops who were bound by the orders of the upwardly mobile and privileged white-shirted officers. Even as the city governments were threatening their pensions and trying to delegitimize public employee unions.
And it’s democratic populism that we need to start understanding, not Democratic populism. But to tap into that requires long patient grassroots political discussion about realities. There is no venue for that in the US. Most attempts to create physical and local venues for that are shut down because there are no real public common spaces anymore.
I’m a northern transplant smack dab in the middle of Atlanta.
I’m a registered Republican since it allows me to have a say in the Republican primaries (Ron Paul 012!) and I’m also an ultra radical who identifies with liberals as people on the correct side of US politics, even if y’all are still way to the right of me, politically (I’m an unserious Anarcho-Syndicalist who sees much further than next decade, but that’s a topic for another post).
I’ll of course vote for the Democrat. That said, outside of Atlanta (and Athens)it is basically Alabama. I think that for Federal office here in Georgia, it’s all about whose coattails you can ride if you’re a Democrat.
If the government stays shut down long enough to influence the non-dumbfucks to either Vote D or stay home, she may have a chance in 2014. Otherwise, a female Democrat running in Georgia on an off-year is going to have an uphill battle once the Republicans have a set candidate.
My 2¢ after living here in the confederacy for the past couple of years. But who knows, maybe if the crazy is strong enough, Nunn can walk away with a win and we’ll have one less fascist piece of shit in the Senate.
It’s hard to express how something like this is experienced by your average white professional Manhattan commuter:
But it isn’t experienced as an attack on just the true 1%.
It’s experienced as an attack on them.
And that’s the enduring image of the whole Occupy Movement.
It was experienced as a much broader attack than was probably intended. It certainly wasn’t popular in the NYC suburbs, even though most of the people who were offended are in the 99%.
Enduring image promoted by who?
Seems like a pretty single-issue and ephemeral sign.
And much more sensible than the photo of the guy shitting on an NYPD car that the defenders of Wall Street were circulating during Occupy Wall Street.
It does at least allow the 1% the agency to decide whether to follow the instructions on the sign.
And boy-oh, reading about the multiple levels of fraud that brought down the economy, doing it the 1929 old-fashioned way is too good for some of those arrogant bastards.
As a non-sociopath and a historian, I view that sign as more of a sardonic expression of frustration than some type of command that Wall St. criminals were supposed to follow.
I.E. the exclamation point at the end of the Jump! You Fuckers! is akin to a smiley face.
Of course I don’t want any of them to jump. It would create a huge mess and likely cause all sorts of psychological problems for witnesses.
😉
Rhetoric is rhetoric.
The main difference is that the people on Wall St. literally and figuratively looking down on the Occupy protesters have a lot of money, a lot of power, and a lot of clout.
Occupy was thrown out of parks around the country through a co-op of Federal and State agencies.
I understand how the poor, poor ultra rich financiers saw those types of signs and rhetoric and thought they were being attacked for being successful.
That violent rhetoric didn’t help Occupy at all.
That said, the media’s coverage of Occupy didn’t help Occupy at all, so the blame for the disorganization and mixed messages can be spread around. And for regular people to identify themselves with the criminals on Wall St. is either a function of naivete or Stockholm Syndrome – probably the latter considering how NYC is dependent on Wall St. criminal activity for its economic well being.
The rap on Occupy was that they were disorganized, when the intent of Occupy was to talk through politics as individuals without the intermediary of organization. And to work together only through consensus instead of organizational authority. Not realizing that over time habits create de facto organizational authority and continuity creates de facto “leaders” who can be targeted.
Of course, those who get their information only through the commercial media have no clue of the real intentions, strengths, and weaknesses of the Occupy movement.
But it is an increasingly inescapable fact that it touched somebodies fear hot-button.
You want a revolution, you need a vanguard.
Lenin would look at Occupy and laugh. And he overthrew two governments..
Not sure that these folks would want Lenin’s revolution. That’s one of the political problems that is much discussed because Lenin didn’t finally serve the 99% either. Just created a new 1%, sometimes from the same folks that were in the previous 1%.
The politics really isn’t about overthowing governments. Overthrowing governments is easy. Edward Luttwak wrote a classic book about it.
The political question is how do ordinary people have effective political power. And the insight is that organizations in and of themselves, not to mention the US legal system, forces the creation of remote leaderships who begin to wield power independent of their original purposes.
And so now you are beginning to see the commercialization of the Occupy brand and the collapse of consensus under that label.
But the issues have not gone away. And electoral politics looks even more incapable of dealing with those issues now. However, things will look different in six months. And the real test for electoral politics’s relevance is a year away.
You do know that Wall Street is still about as popular as Congress now, right?
Wonder why people hate your North Jersey friends? Try this:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/how-the-foreclosure-crisis-made-the-rich-even-richer.html
Here’s another thing to consider about the shutdown and Southern strategy.
Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews: The White Man’s Last Tantrum