If his research can be believed, psychologist John Gottman can tell you with about 90% accuracy whether you’re going to stay with your partner or split up. It’s really not that complicated, actually, and his findings match what we’d intuitively expect. Couples that treat each other with contempt don’t have good long-term relationships. Happy couples listen to each other, particularly about those things that one of them feels is important. If you focus on the negatives in your wife, she’s not going to want to stick around, but people who look for the positives make good lifelong mates.
However you want to define white progressives, black progressives, Latino progressives, Democrats or liberals, what happened at Netroots Nation during the appearances there of presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders (and particularly what has happened since) is a classic example of shitty relationship management.
If the progressive movement is a marriage of disparate groups on the left, we better start doing better quickly or we’re headed for a messy divorce.
It isn’t hard to see how this analogy works. The husband comes home from work quite self-aborbed with a speech prepared to tell his wife about his day and his big plans for the future. The wife, also living too much in her own head, cuts him off and tells him that she doesn’t want to hear about all that and it’s vitally important that he talk about what’s bothering her.
The husband feels diminished. He’s unhappy. He not only is frustrated that he can’t say what he was planning to say, but now he’s also on the defensive. Rather than pausing to consider his wife’s sense of urgency, he resists changing the subject. He gets huffy. He tries to go ahead with the conversation he had been planning for all along.
The wife doesn’t appreciate that her husband isn’t listening and takes this for dismissiveness and disrespect. She raises her voice. He raises his voice. Soon they’re throwing hurtful words at each other. The husband storms off, and the wife calls her friends to vent about what a jerk her husband is.
People who act like this don’t stay married, at least not anymore. And they’ll probably fail in their next relationship, too, because they have bad relationship habits. People need to be heard. They need their interests and concerns to be valued by their partner. They deserve someone who will see their glass as half-full rather than someone who will probe for their weaknesses in the hope of winning some petty interpersonal war.
I belabor this analogy because it’s the only way I can think of to get both sides of this debate to stop and reflect on how their own behavior came up short here.
What happened in the ballroom in Arizona is one thing, and we can debate who was more disrespectful or dismissive or who started it or who was justified. What has come after the incident in the ballroom is much worse. What began as groups with legitimate concerns and agendas having a bad misunderstanding has morphed into a mass exercise in showing contempt for each other.
If you want to keep it up with the “they started it!”, “their side is so much worse!” bullshit, then you can stop reading right now. Because this is simple.
People wanted to be heard or they wanted to hear something, and that didn’t happen. And they’re mad. And they want to act like they are the only ones who didn’t get their needs met. And they want to lecture the other side about how “they don’t get it.”
We know how this ends. It doesn’t end with a happy second honeymoon.
So, stop it.
Stop participating in it like you’re going to win something, because everyone involved is guaranteed to lose.
You can lecture people all day long about how the only way to lose the election in 2016 is to alienate enough white people that the Republicans don’t need anyone else. You can create a hashtag to diminish and humiliate Bernie Sanders and his supporters. You can question each other’s savvy and intelligence and tactics and strategy with harsh contemptuous language.
But, you’re wrong. And you lose.
If you want to be right so badly, you’ll ignore what I’m saying. If you can’t get past your own desire to be heard and respected to see that everyone else wants those same things, too, then you’re as bad as the people you’re trashing.
What happened, happened. People don’t like to be interrupted and shouted down. They don’t like to have their agenda hijacked by someone with a different agenda. But sometimes, when you’re not getting heard, and your needs aren’t getting met, you have to interrupt and insist on your agenda. That’s fine, and for #blackslivesmatter, it could be that a sleepy progressive convention in the middle of the summer was a good time to interject and demand recognition. We’ll all recover. We’ll survive. Perhaps we’ll all be better off for it.
But how about some recognition that you hijacked the agenda and interrupted and shouted people down and denied people the ability to have their needs and desires met? They didn’t respond the way you wanted? Well, you own that, because people never respond well in those circumstances. And now you want to heap contempt on their heads on top of it?
No, this is all wrong.
And for the folks on the other side who traveled to Arizona to hear what Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders had to say and to maybe have the chance to engage them in a civil dialogue, maybe you should take that frustration you’re feeling and try to understand what it’s like to live in a country with mass incarceration and unaccountable murderous police. I think that’s a lot more frustrating for the communities most affected than not getting to hear a speech.
The problem isn’t how people reacted in the moment, which was natural, but how they are behaving now.
Stop showing each other contempt. Listen to each other. Act like you love each other and want to work together.
Please.
Did anyone see what Chuck Toddler talked about Sunday morning? Did he, hopefully, concentrate on Trump’s bashing of Versailles’s favorite Republican(McCain)?
Don’t know. Should I care or am I better off remaining ignorant?
Here’s a successful outcome that Democrats can brag about:
Models of group dynamics may be more appropriately descriptive of what was unleashed at NN than predictors of divorce.
However, it’s well known among marriage therapists that couples without a shared pursuit (professional or personal) that don’t engage in fights are headed for divorce.
First of all, I love the reference to Gottman. As a divorce attorney and mediator who helps people to divorce with love, I think his research is great. I mix a lot of Imago work into my work, which is a more heart-centric approach than Gottman. But Gottman is one of the big players in the movement to deconstruct relationship dynamics and help people do marriage in a far more conscious way. He’s also one of the most rigorously analytical and scientific.
As for its application to Netroots, we can all always look at our place in (what we bring to) any conflict. That is the healthiest and most mature approach. Look at it this way: A spiritual master wouldn’t do conflict. He or she might feel sorry for someone, but the essential ground of being is one of compassion. If I get frustrated or angry, I’m implicated in that. After all, I’m the one who responded by collapsing and being reactive.
The 1960s were high on commitment to social justice and a willingness to work hard but what was missing was any sense of personal responsibility. Way too much finger pointing. You can still here it in the music of the time. “Where have all the flowers gone? . . . When will THEY ever learn?” How about “When will we ever learn?”
Democrats are great at forming circular firing squads. Fortunately this happened early in the process. Neither O’Malley or Sanders handled himself well. I don’t know if Hillary would have done better, but I do know that both Obama and Bill Clinton would have responded far more effectively. Both are really skilled at talking to people. Both love interacting with ordinary citizens. Both are the kinds of politicians who appear rarely. Sanders was cranky and O’Malley tone deaf. Those guys showed that they do not play in the same league with either of the last two Democratic presidents.
The activists were immature. Still, the best tactic for the candidates would have been to simply listen. In my work as a mediator and collaborative divorce attorney I help people listen. I get them seeing through each other’s eyes. I believe the three most powerful words in the English language when stringed together are “Tell me more.” Try saying that to your wife when she’s yelling at you and watch her fall out of her chair. It’s disarming.
As Boo said, everyone wants to feel heard. So let them. Talking into a space where no one’s listening is worse than stupid; it’s ridiculous.
○ A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza [2014]
Interview with Patrisse Cullors lays out the rationale (Video)
Chris Reeves @dKos
○ What the #blacklivesmatter Protest at NN15 Shows Us
Excellent coverage in The Guardian …
○ #BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement
The Netroots Nation event was a teaching moment. What will be interesting to see is if it’s also a learning moment.
The Republicans are relieved that the spotlight is off Trump for a minute so they can try to get the rest of the clowns together in the car, and they’re giggling and pointing at the Dems because the so-called Progressives showed themselves to be less progressive than they ought to be. They’re oblivious to the whole message because they’re always oblivious when it comes to racism.
And Black Lives Matter had to stage an intervention because they have not been heard in other venues. All the hashtags and t-shirts won’t make them be heard, and they had to make their voices louder. Unfortunately, people who are taken by surprise aren’t the best listeners.
So, a teaching moment. Let’s see if anyone learned anything.
Gottman also wears incredible ties, I should note.
Well, I think I was right.
Neither side is going to change. Prepare for President Walker with an (R) Senate, House and Supreme Court.
That just brings the revolution closer.
The worse, the better.
I see that this was a put up job by Hilary.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1404029/-Hillary-Clinton-Black-lives-matter-Everyone-in-thi
s-country-should-stand-firmly-behind-that?showAll=yes
But I would add a word of caution – I doubt this will matter a hill of beans next November.
I see no evidence that African Americans don’t like the Democratic Candidates in polling – including Hillary.
Post 2000 there is a good deal of paranoia that somehow the left of center will split. This is mostly, I think, overdone.
Like I said earlier, the manner of message delivery became the focus of things. That’s too bad. Perhaps BLM needs to take actions like this to be heard but it’s going to be hard to turn the ship of mutually hurled contempt around now. I think they need to read this post.
Oh boy, the tastes great/less filling has started even earlier this cycle.
Reasoning by analogy is dangerous. Reasoning with the analogy of marriage is especially fraught with traps. Psychologizing what is fundamentally a political issue of building a coalition can lead one off the tracks. Especially when the issue at hand has already been eloquently described in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s work on coalitions.
People who don’t like messy politics and like well-scripted events are advocating that the #blacklivesmatters adopt an inevitable inside game. That, at this point, is advocating that #blacklivesmatter allow itself to be co-opted by whatever candidate in the Democratic (or other) party, cease being in the street every time another cop murders another unarmbed person of color for fear of hurting the candidate’s chances. (Hispanics and Native Americans are now surfacing as targets, especially in the West and Southwwest.) People who don’t like messy politics don’t like the outside game and especially don’t like it when it is used to draw attention to issues within their preferred political institutions that have not moved on issues they should have.
What is at issue in Netroots Nation is its relevance. By allowing politicians to dictate terms of their access to participate at Netroots Nation, it has become co-opted by the Democrratic Party and no longer has a strong progressive influence on the party. What is at issue in figuring out the interrelationship between outside progressive movements and inside progressive strategies and tactics is whether progressives will continue to be co-opted or whether they can be transformative and build a much larger coalition.
The politics of a growing coalition is uncomfortable. The politics is political, not psychological. The issue at hand was not whether O’Malley and Sanders on the one hand and #blacklivesmatter were going to respect one another. It was whether the inside was going to listen and politically engage with the outside. As a political communications mechanism, canned stump speeches that suck the time out of the session shut that capability down. #blacklivesmatter took direct action in order to try to transform the communications the the room. The political conversations about how the outside gets inside that we are having are part of that. Direct action paradoxically has an implicit assumption of respect of the targets of direct action. The protesters asssume that the target is capable of transformative change. Or that outside forces can encourage the target to become capable of change. That is the core of non-violent direct action. And it is why sending protesters against Steven King of Iowa or Donaald Trump.
If you don’t like your agenda hijacked, if your agenda is being hijacked, you are in something other than a coalition. Need I repeat that the big tent parties in the US are essential coalitions. And during the New Deal, black Americans sat on their major issues to ensure the success of FDR’s economic program. And during World War II, black Americans sat on their major issues in order to keep conservative politicians behind a war effort against their natural allies, fascism. And during the 1950s, black Americans sat on their political issues so as not to strengthen the Dixiecrats. And when in the 1960s, black Americans stopped sitting on those issues and used confrontational non-violent direct action, there was indeed a period of transformative change in America.
What white politicians are doing 50 years after that Civil Rights movement is asking black Americans to sit on those life-and-death issues again–the right-wing subversion of law enforcement, the lynching under color of law, the complicity of the criminal justice system, and the cowardice of the federal justice system. Those are still life-and-death issues to black Americans, and they are happening at rates that the KKK in the 1920s could only dream of. If #blacklivesmatter is impatient and not willing to be co-opted, it is because of the very grim statistics in their neighborhoods, and not just the poorest ones. It is political.
To the extent that the campaign staffs of the two candidates put out stories that try to defend their candidates by smearing #blacklivesmatter, they shoot themselves in the foot politically by diminishing the coalition. It is not up to #blacklivesmatter to figure out how to penetrate the political bubble that all political office-holders in America have created for themselves by going hat in hand and bowing and scraping to political authority. It is a matter of reasserting to politicians, even the best of them, that they work for all of us to the extent that the laws they pass affect all of us. The bristling at interruptions to their canned speeches shows that there are no politicians in America who get how they have cut off political communications with Americans in order to better manage the marketing to Americans. Nor to they get how that contempt and manipulation of the people drives the anger, the disruptive Town Halls, the sullenness of voters and the lack of voter turnout.
We have a political problem here that requires serious conversation and not staged events. We do not have a relationship problem that requires marriage counseling.
But politicians must also lay out and do it quickly how they intend to stop the killing of unarmed black men and women under to color of law.
An Netroots Nation needs to do some serious soul-searching on how to bring the outside and the inside together so as to allow outside agendas to get inside. That was after all it’s purpose a decade ago when the Democratic Party was studiously ignoring the Progressive movement. (Has that changed?) It is not progressive’s own faults because of stylistic issues; the access really is closed to them because they cannot come up with enough money to command authentic collegiality from politicians.
Bernie Sanders asked if he should leave. Has he forgotten what it was like to be an outsider back in the days when he was protesting?
In so many ways in the US the house is on fire. But politics is business as usual. That contradiction surfaced where it would be most likely to surface–in an event that sought to bring insiders and outsiders together.
The good news is that this happened 15 months out from the general election and 6 months out from the Iowa caucuses. There is sufficient time to build that bristly coalition of 2016–but only if we start understanding it in political discourse terms instead of psychologizing it to place blame.
Politically, all candidates have made themselves out of touch with the voters through the ways they have structured their office and campaign communications systems as one-way systems (except for “constituent services”). Politically there is a huge outside movement occurring across this country that is not being covered by the media and hence out of sight of the politicians who do not search out what is happening. Politically, the law enforcement agencies are biased to suppress large appearances of that outside movement. Politically, law enforcement agency are unaccountable to executives, legislatures, councils, and judges because none of these supposed checks and balances have the courage to touch the issue. Politicians are fiddling while a fire is raging, except that Republican politicians are pouring gasoline on it thinking that they have a monopoly on the military, law enforcement, and all the gun nuts.
The way to deal with this is not in what a politician says; we’ve heard enough pretty speeches that went nowhere for the remaining life of the Republic. It is in how the politician engages the public in the political process of democracy. The current model of engagement–mass marketing — has failed miserably by allowing massive corruption. The previous means of interaction — through local and state party structures — failed through massive corruption in the party from the establishment of Tammany Hall. And so far the experiments in direct democracy have proved scalable only up to the size of the Athenian state. And have been suppressed from the outside everywhere they have appeared. Last of all, the current hierarchy of political activity does not extend down to units the size of the Athenian state. And more local units–small town councils, homeowners associations, and so on — have continuing difficulty in this workaholic economy getting sufficient representatives to have a quorum. We have a political process issue that OFA for three months after the inauguration appeared to be solving, but by bypassing the issue of creating extended local structures in trying to influence legislation in Congress finally failed.
How exactly does political discourse expand so as to make marketing money irrelevant and even self-defeating? That more than marriage counselling is the core of the conflict on Saturday.
The contradiction that progressives face is the need of insiders to give transformation legitimacy and the high price the insiders pay for collaboration with a coalition because of “pressures on their time” (which are indeed real). Reducing it to personal problems of style or relationships diverts attention from the very serious political task that progressives face.
If your coalition is comfortable, says Bernice Johnson Reagon, it is not nearly big enough. Are progressives yet ready for some rambunctious youth?
“The issue at hand was not whether O’Malley and Sanders on the one hand and #blacklivesmatter were going to respect one another. It was whether the inside was going to listen and politically engage with the outside.”
But O’Malley and Sanders (and certainly their supporters) also are, or feel themselves to be, relatively ‘on the outside.’ So what you have is a conflict, possibly tinged with contempt, between two ‘outsider’ groups.
O’Malley and Sanders, by virtue of being relatively on the outside, are far easier to target than politicians who are more insiders: Clinton and Obama. Targeting Clinton (as the prohibitive frontrunner and a Clinton) and Obama (as the actual president, right now, with all the powers that Sanders and O’Malley will almost certainly never have) with entirely justified demands that they quickly lay out how they intend to stop the killing of unarmed black men and women under to color of law is a much clearer case of the ‘outside’ demanding that the ‘inside’ engage.
If your coalition is comfortable, says Bernice Johnson Reagon, it is not nearly big enough.
That may be true. But if it’s contemptuous, as Boo says, it won’t remain a coalition for long. So we need discomfort without contempt. That’s a tall order, for humans.
A member of Congress and his staff and a former governor and his campaign staff are in no way on the outside of anything. Being in the minority is not being on the outside. They understand how the inside of politics works. They have worked strategies to make it work. And they have skills at doing that if only there is sufficient pressure from the public. The outside is in the role of creating that pressure from the publicc; deny the outside access to the inside cuts off those publics from participation in the system of governance completely. Disenfranchise even after faithful voting has been a huge problem that minority communities have faced ever since they got the right to vote. Sanders and O’Malley and their supporters are taking for granted that these voters have no where else to go. That Hobbesian choice leads to depression, apathy, and low voter turnout–exactly what we have had in the past two midterm elections.
Demanding a serious discussion of a life-and-death issue instead of campaign speech is not contemptuous; it is calling for a politician to get real.
I’m tired of having politician fee-fees being defended as if they are some fragile flowers. They work for us. Or at least that’s what the democratic republican principles of government say.
Dimissing #blacklivesmatter as contemptuous ignores the fact that they respected the politicians enough to think that their direct action would get a positive response if only because of the seriousness of the issue.
I tried to be clear that I was making a big distinction between what happened in the room and what has evolved from that.
Do you know what ‘relatively’ means?
Sanders and O’Malley are both outsiders relative to Obama and Clinton, and many of their supporters justifiable identify as outsiders in the broader sense, as well, given their political goals.
As I’ve said, I think it’s a good thing that BLM raised these issues in this way; but that doesn’t mean that I’m unable to think critically. I do not have your insight into the minds of Sanders or O’Malley, or the confidence that their supports are a monolithic whole who take certain voters for granted, but even if you’re right, this is still a case of relative outsiders confronting relative outsiders which explains, I think, the … heated feelings. Engaging like this with Clinton or–far, far more meaningfully–with Obama, would be a much clearer case of ‘punching up.’
And, contra Boo, of course it’s contemptuous. Forcing people to listen to my issue, even when my issue is of massive importance, is contemptuous when done without permission. Just like the activist who interrupted Obama to raise the issue of rape of transexuals: ‘you’re a guest in my home.’ Yes, Obama works for us, and no, he’s not a fragile flower, but that doesn’t mean that that activist wasn’t acting contemptuously.
In my opinion, both that activist and BLM were justifiably contemptuous, but being right isn’t the opposite of being contemptuous. In fact, they very often go hand in glove. There are climate activists who would happily interrupt a BLM conference, in an attempt to spark action against global mass extinction.
An outsider/insider without strong connections to real outside-the-structure outsiders is in no way transformative. This is not a moral category, it’s a structural description of access to the lever of power. Any elected official in principle has formal access to the levers of power regardless of his status with the in-group that controls the process. Outsiders have zero access to those levers of power except through those inside who do. What outsiders do have is the ability to mobilize the public to create an environment of pressure on those on the inside. Insiders who push away those public pressures align themselves with other public pressures or with inside agendas. “Progressive” candidate do this at peril to their legitimacy as “progressives’. #blacklivesmatter is a huge movement across many places in the black community. They are speaking to the number one hot-button issue of the moment in black communities. If that does not command a candidate’s attention, we as “progressives” are in big trouble.
Because the next wedge issue the religious right and neoconservatives (including Wes Clark, by the way) are trotting out are internment camps for Muslims. When Franklin Graham and Wes Clark have the same idea, watch out for being railroaded by the media. Politicians who lack the courage to acknowledge #blacklivesmatter are likely going to duck for cover when the rightwing trots out a fear campaign to force through internment of Muslims.
Never underestimate the rightwing of the ability to up the crazy. Especially as it seems they are perfectly comfortable with a Nazi flag showing up on the Statehouse grounds at a KKK rally in Columbia SC.
And they have the radio and preacher resources networked to move the issue.
I don’t think outsider/insider is quite the dichotomy you propose. I suspect it’s more of a range, and that the president does not occupy the same point on it as O’Malley or Sanders, or Sandernistas at NN.
Other’n that, I agree, though I’m not sure how your comment responds to mine.
Again, I’m pleased that BLM spoke out at NN. That’s how activism works. I was pleased when the trans activist spoke out at Obama’s talk, too. I’m a fan of disruption. (Of other people.) My point is the rather obvious one that there are many justifiable reasons to interrupt an event to draw attention to my cause. BLM is, to my mind, one of the most urgent. Some might believe that climate change is another. Nuclear nonproliferation is another. Income inequality is another. Domestic violence is another.
I am not in a position to say which events should be interrupted by which activists. If a climate change activist interrupts a BLM conference or a domestic violence activist interrupts an income inequality seminar, that’s how the process works. Yay, process! But I think Boo’s right in that perceived contempt is corrosive, and I think that is another way that we ‘progressives’ might find ourselves in serious trouble.
I think that activists are perfectly capable of identifying who just might change as a result of direct action and who won’t. And they themselves take the risks of the consequences of their own action. When it succeeds, it succeeds like Bree Newsome. When it fails it fails.
Politicians are less vulnerable to immediate accountability for their errors.
It does seem like this is more than a food fight with some sad in the aftermath. This may not be fixable at all, whether we treat it as a family quarrel or ignorance of the other. I hope not. But it is clear to me both sides have something to say. I have long thought the economics of this country is seriously leading to these very troubles. And that turns on money in politics. But, you are right. Sanders and friends cannot simply tell everyone to sit down and shut up, if there is to be any way forward. We sort of need each other.
It is not fixable with politics as usual. Period.
We had one of those moments back in 1968. That saw the end of the FDR coalition.
That was in fact a perpetuation of politics as usual. Richard J. Daley got his way. A pro-Vietnam War candidate was the nominee.
If you really want to push the marriage/divorce analogy, the issue facing the progressive partners is whether they can learn to fight fair.
The candidates have hidden in a room and shut the door. For years, out of touch. And object when their one-way conversation is interrupted.
The protesters are pounding on the door and chanting the latest life-important issue. The cops are killing the kids.
And the candidates go abstract (“all lives matter”) when it it their kids who are being killed. Or they ask “Should I leave?”
There’s the situation that gets brought to counselling.
Oh, yes, the candidate is going for a new job that might make things better for the family, but they need unquestioned support and no interruptions for the duration of that job search process.
Ask any feminist. Families are not necessarily the best analogies for politics–for politicians.
Well done, THD! I was reading the thread and ready to post a similar observation. You did it better.
It wasn’t natural. it was planned. Planned disrespect to a man that had never shown them disrespect. Disrespect based on skin color. it’s 1950 in reverse. I didn’t like it then and i like it even worse now.
BLM should have directed their anger at the White House and AG. What have the black president and either black AG done about Ferguson? Or the black women from Chicago thrown to the ground, incarcerated for three days and probably murdered for failure to turn on a turn signal?
There use to ba phrase “poverty pimps”. now whe have violence pimps.
Direct actions are planned as protests. The assumption behind a protest is that the object of protest has the possibility of change. That is not disrespect; that is a form of respect that if forcefully shown a error they will correct it.
#blacklivesmatter is directing its protests in different places and different ways, including to the President and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. And directly in Waller County TX as well.
Your description of these people as “pimps” is despicable. That’s the sort of Chicago ethnic bigotry I’ve come to know and love. It might possibly outlast Southern bigotry. Time will tell.
The people protesting in Phoenix were only a part of the overall #blacklivesmatter movement, which is pretty large and widespread because the extrajudicial killing of black people (and the mentally ill) is also wideapread.
Whatever it was it was not reverse racism. It in no way disadvantaged either of the politician’s candidacy because of race. Just watch. If the politicians get the message (and both seem to, at least rhetorically, this incident which was minor anyway in the scheme of the news) will rapidly disappear.
#blacklivesmattter’s anger is at all those who are not acting with urgency at the fact that several black people per day die from extrajudicial law enforcement violence, a situation for which the statistic should be zero. And the number of police among the perpetrators who have right-wing, KKK, and Nazi affiliations or are neo-Confederates outside the South.
This was the hidden gem you’ve been holding out on? Sounds to me like another Bernie fan who had a rough weekend.
The Democratic Party is suffering a psychological crackup over the loss of Barack Obama. Preemptive grief is warring with preemptive glee, and it’s all very transparent and I think the contempt is unavoidable.
I’m sorry that black people (and especially black women) find themselves unrepresented in the party hierarchy or in the primary. I’m sorry that they feel like their progress is being thwarted and they’re being made to move backwards. At the same time, people need to concede that future presidents are going to have future agendas that go beyond the deeds of this current administration and that President Obama does not represent the end of history and the curer of all ills. Societies picking up and carrying on under new leadership is actually the goal, not an indictment or another intended humiliation.
Somebody will replace him. They will not be black this time. They will be president and do president stuff. And then one day they’ll be replaced by another president who will do president stuff and so on and so on in perpetuity.
You do understand that the issue is black people being murdered under the color of law, don’t you? That’s kind of an urgent issue to get to terms with if you have fathers, sons, brothers, mothers, daughters, sisters who might just randomly be the next victim, don’t you think?
That’s a huge part of the context that gets missed over the concern for decorum.
Beat me to it. Think any politician’s prepared talking points are more important than people being murdered by those supposedly sworn to enforce the law? If so, you’re doing progressive politics wrong.
I like Bernie a lot but he’s got to do better than this.
To the exclusion of everything else?
Why don’t they complain to Obama and/or Loretta Lynch? THEY have the power to do something. THEY can turn the FBI on cases, bring indictments and do arrests. The candidates can’t. This IS an important issue but it’s not the only one and if you poll the general electorate I think you’ll find that it’s not the most important one. I suspect it’s not even #1 in the black community.
The different sides of the Democratic party are each others enemies, we are not on the same side.
If you want to make progress in a social area, you have to abandon traditional democratic economics and fuck the middle class. Then you can get backing from rich urbanites so you can win.
If you want to make progress in economic areas you have to piss off those rich urbanites and ally with social conservatives to get it.
That’s the issue, pick one. If you value social liberalism than economic liberals are the group you need to kneecap and savage to get ahead. And if you value say social security then social liberals are the group you need to mug and move on.
There is no fix for this. Only one side can get what they want and it will only be purchased with a pound of flesh from the other side.
As for Sanders and O’Malley, they are white men, why the fuck are they running to lead the Democratic party? This isn’t what it once was, white and male is a negative, they should get the fuck off the stage.
Lulz. Welcome to the future.
Troll alert.
I’d take either Roosevelt at this point.
Eleanor would be a good choice of the moment.
Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t say a word when she attended a 1939 HUAC hearing. And Nobody Had To Ask Her to attend in support of those being attacked.
Eight years later:
Imagine a former First Lady in 2003 calling music industry producers “chicken-hearted” as they remained silent when the Dixie Chicks were attacked.
Natalie Maines 10 March 2015
Hillary Clinton has weighed in through a carefully crafted marketing message on Facebook and Twitter that begins with #blacklivesmatter and goes into mush before trotting out police cameras as an action.
This is what passes for “political discourse” on the Democratic side these days.
And some circles will laud her for it. Of course no one knows if she was even actually typing those words. Typing your initials at the end of a tweet doesn’t mean squat. It just means you dictated something specific for someone to send.
Given what happened in Seattle today and what might happen at Sanders rallies in Portland tomorrow and Los Angeles Monday, any chance you could do another post on this subject? Your insight on this particular post, I’ve shared with a lot of people. It’s really challenging now….how to deal with what the BLM people are doing as they target Sanders.
Thanks,
Patrick