Robert Reich published Seven Hard Truths for Democrats: Future Bleak without Radical Reforms
This is the version rebllogged on Naked Capitalism with Yves Smith’s introduction.
Reich: 7 Hard Truths for Democrats: Future Bleak without Radical Reform
Here is a summary of Reich’s points with my annotations.
1. The Party is on life support. This is what I mean by “The donkey is dead.” The brand is toxic and the institutional infrastructure has been nuked in many states and localities.
2. We are now in a populist era. Actually, we are in an astroturfed organized hate that has stirred up the grassroots and that the established Democrats do not understand (possibly do not care) how to ratchet back into authentic grassroots governance.
3. The economy is not working for most Americans. Most Americans means those without the market or institutional power to set their own wages and salaries.
4. The Party’s moneyed establishment–big donors, major lobbyists, retired members of Congress who have become bundlers and lobbyists–are part of the problem. These folks are in the situation in which they can set their wages and salaries and want to keep their good thing going. They have sabotaged effective outreach and created the scandals that have been used to bring down Democratic politicians in state after state.
5. It’s not enough for Democrats to be “against Trump,” and defend the status quo. State and local elections get nationalized when one or the other party does not contest state and local issues of importance. McCrory’s failure to adequately deal with a coal ash spill cause by his previous and future employer is what brought him down as much as his sudden change from moderate to GOP-lockstep radical. That was not sufficient to change the General Assembly, nor was opposition to Hate Bill 2.
6. The life of the Party–its enthusiasm, passion, youth, principles, and ideals–was elicited by Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Bernie and his followers within the Democratic Party are still where the vitality is. But the establishment is still taking pot shots at the so-called Bernie voters (twitterers) who are still hung up on the Clintons and wanting to ensure that the donkey is really dead. (It is.)
7. The Party must change from being a giant fundraising machine to a movement. The right-wing populist movement already has the big money behind it. The rest of the money is hanging out at Davos and scared enough to talk about inequality and how to manage the carnage. Whatever movement that revitalizes the movement must function with a minimal of rich folks’ money, be as frugal as possible, and not create a subverting professional class. Doing this is not a trivial challenge but without it Democrats go the way of the Federalists and Whigs and spend some amount of time in the belly of GOP power before it can break out again.
Reich says on item 7:
It needs to unite the poor, working class, and middle class, black and white–who haven’t had a raise in 30 years, and who feel angry, powerless, and disenfranchised.
That means wrenching the corporate seal of state and local Democratic parties out of the hands of those who have been selling it to the highest bidder and winning back the people at the same time. Do you see the fight that this is in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, and other places that have retained some of the mechanisms of the machine politics that caused the rise of a progressive populist movement out of the moralistic side of the Republican Party a century ago? The same urban machines that FDR had to bring into alignment with his programs in order to roll out the New Deal. Chicago’s Anton Cermak took a bullet for that alignment. But he had to overcome a Republican machine with a Democratic machine.
This raises the question about populist approaches. When does the demos select at tyrant? And when does a movement degenerate into a machine?
