Author: MassCommons

It’s the demographics, stupid.

“Stupid” in this case doesn’t so much apply to Queens Congressman Joe Crowley, currently the #4 ranking Democrat in the US House of Representatives, and—with his upset primary loss last night to 28 year old first-time candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—soon to be an ex-Congressman, as it does to the political wiseguys and pundits who saw the 56-year-old Crowley as the next Democratic Speaker, and therefore as politically invulnerable in one of the most heavily Democratic districts in the country.

Crowley’s Queens-Bronx district includes Archie Bunker’s old neighborhood, but the old neighborhood ain’t what it used to be. Today NY’s 14th Congressional district is roughly 50% Latino and 25% “other minorities”. Crowley wasn’t/isn’t a bad representative for his district; it’s just that times have changed.

And, like so much of the Trump era, there are echoes of the Nixon/Watergate era in Crowley’s defeat. In the spring of 1972, legendary Brooklyn Democratic party boss Meade Esposito grumbled to Jimmy Breslin about longtime Rep. Emanuel Celler:

“This is how Manny runs a campaign. He gives me a plaque and I’m supposed to make sure everything is all right in his district. He never comes around….”*

“He has no trouble, has he?”

“Well, there’s some broad says she’s going to run against him the primary or something. You know these freaking broads. Who knows what she wants? It don’t matter. How the hell can you run against the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee? Manny’s a national landmark.” (p. 92)

The “broad” was Liz Holtzman, then a 30 year-old lawyer and party activist. In his Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won, Breslin recounts what happened next, and its political significance:

“Only 23 per cent of the people in the district voted in the June primary. Elizabeth Holtzman received 15,596 votes; Emanuel Celler had 14,986. By the margin of 610, she was in Congress. The fabled Celler was retired, and in a Washington apartment on the morning of June 21, a virtually unknown Congressman, Peter Rodino of Newark, New Jersey, found he was the next Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

The primary election between Holtzman and Celler could be considered one of the most meaningful elections the nation has had. If Celler had won, he would have dominated the impeachment process with the Judiciary Committee, as he dominated everything about the Committee for his thirty years as Chairman. Brilliant but egotistical, he would have been quite abrasive in such a delicate process. Particularly to needed Republican votes.” (p. 93)

Two years later, in 1974, the “Watergate babies”—over 50 new, young Democratic representatives and senators—followed in Holtzman’s wake and transformed how Congress works.

Ocasio-Cortez’ victory is another signal of a new demographic change inexorably rumbling through the nation and its politics. The baby boomers are retiring from public life and dying off; the millennials are taking their places. It’s a disruptive, chaotic process—as is all demographic change—and it’s going to open up new possibilities for political change that the older and retiring generations can’t imagine.

Like Joe Crowley losing a primary election to a rookie half his age.

*Another echo: Crowley refused to debate Ocasio-Cortez, making a similar mistake to Celler who “never came around”.

Not only has no US president been more vulnerable—economically, socially, psychologically—to his own constituents than Donald Trump will be, there’s not even a close second.

We’ve already talked about this in some detail, using Trump Tower as an example. In this post I just want to use the rest of Trump’s business empire to sketch some of the breadth of his vulnerability.

Again, because it can’t be said too often, I’m talking only about Trump’s vulnerability to disciplined, nonviolent campaigns led by his constituents and aimed at influencing his actions as president, and/or persuading his political allies to remove their support from him.  (Others better equipped than I will have to analyze the more troubling possibilities: e.g., terrorists attacking one or more of the Trump Organization’s highly visible properties in the US or around the world,  foreign-controlled banks calling in (or threatening to call in) Trump’s business loans unless President Trump follows a particular course of action.)

And it’s hard to imagine a businessman-turned-Republican-president whose business interests are more accessible to his political opponents.  Virtually all of Trump’s domestic properties and business interests are located in parts of the country where he’s already enormously unpopular. Just look:

   
• Golf courses

   

• Vineyards

   

• Hotels

   

• Restaurants

   

• Skating rinks

   

• Other real estate

Even Trump’s entertainment industry businesses—his modeling agency, his beauty pageants, his television shows—are located deep in the heart of “blue” America.

To the extent Trump’s businesses rely for their profitability on 1) his good name, and 2) large numbers of satisfied customers who buy his goods and services, those businesses are vulnerable to all manner of nonviolent tactics and strategies aimed at inflicting pain—economic, social and/or psychic—on Mr., soon to be Pres., Trump.

There’s an entire virtual arsenal filled with hundreds of nonviolent “weapons” that could be brought to bear on Trump’s businesses and the people those businesses rely upon.  (198 of those “weapons” are listed here at the website of the invaluable Albert Einstein Institution.)

In fact, Trump and his businesses are so vulnerable and so exposed to so many people, one of the major challenges for his opponents will be summoning up the collective discipline to 1) act strategically, and 2) maintain nonviolence in the face of a) overwhelming violence, b) subversive infiltration, or c) both.

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

We’ve already started talking about how the Trump administration is going to provide a target-rich environment for all sorts of folks.  (Among the most troubling possibilities: What if terrorists decide its in their self-interest to attack one or more of the Trump Organization’s highly visible properties in the US or around the world? What if foreign-controlled banks decide to call in (or threaten to call in) Trump’s business loans unless President Trump follows a particular course of action?)

Today I want to talk about how Trump’s business interests could be targeted by nonviolent campaigners in ways that could weaken his political power over the next four (or eight) years.  Let’s start with his most iconic property: Trump Tower.

Donald Trump cares about Trump Tower…a lot. (Don’t believe me? Watch this 4 minute video he put out in 2014 on the building’s 30th anniversary.) The gold-plated skyscraper is Trump’s primary residence, as well as headquarters for the Trump Organization. It’s also in the heart of midtown Manhattan, where Trump received less than 10% of the votes cast for president. During the presidential campaign Trump Tower was already the target of nonviolent immigration activists from Cosecha blocking its doorways, and projecting video on its walls to spread their message. Since the election, it’s been the target of marches, demonstrations, and more arrests.

But if that’s all that New York-based advocacy groups, social movements, labor unions, and community organizations do at Trump Tower over the next 4-8 years, they’re missing a huge opportunity.<!–more–>

First, read Josh Marshall on Trump’s style of “dominance politics” and his fear of humiliation. Read anything (heck, for that matter, read everything) Timothy O’Brien has written about Trump. (Wayne Barrett too. You want to know what you’re up against.)

Now start thinking about the many ways in which this highly vindictive and very powerful (about to become exponentially more powerful) man is vulnerable to attack through this one building that means so much to him.

Watch the video again. There are five(!) Trump-branded retail outlets: a store, an ice cream shop, a bar, a grill and a café. What if the bar were filled on a Friday night with customers who ordered nothing but glasses of seltzer water? Which they drank very slowly as they were enjoying an evening out with their friends and co-workers? What if they tipped the servers and bartenders very generously? And what if this happened night after night, targeted on what would otherwise be the bar’s most profitable nights? What if something similar happened with each of the other Trump-branded businesses?

Then there’s Ivanka Trump’s Fine Jewelry Boutique. What would happen if it was filled with customers who were very polite, but had lots (and lots) of questions? And what would happen if those customers were terribly indecisive?  (Understandably so, given the amazing variety of items for sale at the boutique.)  Maybe they wouldn’t be able to decide what to buy, and would have to come back with a trusted friend or relative (and ask all the same questions again)?  Who knows? It might take several trips…and then the customers might decide to buy their jewelry somewhere else…but only after carefully, and in great detail, explaining to the manager why.

Gucci’s flagship NYC store is in Trump Tower. As is Tiffany’s. (According to Fortune, Tiffany’s seems to be in a somewhat vulnerable position: sales at its flagship store were down in the 3rd quarter, and that one store apparently accounts for 8% of its business.) There’s a Starbucks there, and a Niketown. What if they and other retailers one by one closed their stores because the cost—the actual, economic cost—of doing business at Trump Tower was no longer worth it?

Trump Tower also has 26 floors of commercial office space. Qatar Airways is a tenant, as are Braver, Stern & Co., and Concord International Investments Group. Apparently there are several vacant floors already (although the Secret Service may end up leasing two of them at a cost to taxpayers of $3 million/year).  Which (if any) of those tenants might be vulnerable to economic, political or social pressure that an organized nonviolent campaign aimed at persuading them to leave Trump Tower?

Finally, Trump Tower isn’t just home to the Trump family. It has dozens of floors of apartments and condominiums. Real estate ownership is a matter of public record, so it would be relatively easy to find out who owns most of those units.  And there is a wide variety of tactics that could be used to bring pressure on President-to-be Trump via the residential part of Trump Tower.

One would be to drive down the reputation of Trump Tower by making it a building that current residents would want to leave (even if they had to take an economic loss to do so), and prospective residents would decide to live in some other luxurious midtown Manhattan high-rise. Another would be to identify residents who might themselves organize and join (publicly or privately) a campaign to pressure Trump.

And then there are all the workers at Trump Tower: janitors, maids, clerks, plumbers, electricians. How might they, for example, participate in a campaign to persuade a President Trump to fire a Labor Secretary Puzder and replace him with a pro-worker appointee?

Once you start thinking, the possibilities are virtually endless.  (That’s even more true if you’re thinking together with a group of like-minded-and-interested people.) Then, once you have all your great, exciting, outrageous ideas out on the table, remember this: your opponent is, by all available evidence including his own words and actions, an extraordinarily vain, vindictive and vicious man who is about to take hold of the most powerful political office in the world…with all that that implies.

If you go after his favorite thing in the world—which is what Trump Tower appears to be—he will come after you and the people you care about. Which is why any such nonviolent campaign would need to be preceded by extensive research, training and preparation, and would need to have a carefully thought-out strategy. Even with that, you’d have to expect losses.

But all available evidence suggests there will be losses—including some major and devastating losses—during the Trump Era anyway.  Better to minimize those losses and have them mean something, right?

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

“I think it provides a lot of opportunities.“

That’s what the rabbi (who has a long, courageous & distinguished career as a civil rights advocate) said yesterday when I asked what he thought about the US election results.

And certainly, the Trump administration—as well as the Republican-controlled Congress—is shaping up as a target-rich environment for all sorts of people: those who care about civil rights, equal rights, climate change, health care, economic inequality, governmental ethics, criminal justice reform, etc.

It’s also shaping up as perhaps the most vindictive and dangerous-to-those-who-would-dare-oppose-it administration in US history. The president-elect proudly and repeatedly proclaims, “Anybody that hits me, we’re gonna hit them ten times harder“.

Finally, the Trump administration—and this can’t be repeated too often—takes office as a minority government (Trump currently trails Clinton by 2.5 million votes) committed to broadly unpopular policies.

So let’s look at immigration.  It’s the issue that Trump used last year to kick off his presidential campaign; and in the only interview he’s given since winning the election, he reiterated his plan to deport 2-3 million undocumented immigrants as quickly as possible, and millions more after that. What “opportunities” exist there?

For over a decade now, roughly 2/3 of the American people have supported a path to citizenship for most or all of the 11 million estimated undocumented immigrants living in the United States. In 2013, the US Senate, by a 68-32 margin, passed a bill that would do just that.  But as has been true with every attempt at comprehensive immigration reform over the past decade, a well-organized and vocal minority blocked the bill.

The conversation we should be having—because it’s what 2/3 of the country wants—is how to create a path to citizenship for most or all undocumented immigrants.  Since President-elect Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress don’t want to have that conversation, the first challenge immigrants and their allies face is: how to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation until such time as the powers that be in the federal government are ready to talk about a path to citizenship?

And that, as the rabbi said, is a question that does provide a lot of opportunities—not just for immigrant leaders and organizers, but also for a broad array of local and state officials and agencies, employers and business interests, labor unions, religious and civic institutions, who favor a path to citizenship and oppose mass deportation.

ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) is the federal agency within the Department of Homeland Security that is the “head of the spear” when it comes to deporting undocumented immigrants. To do its job, and this is in many ways the critical point, ICE depends upon the active or passive support of literally thousands of other institutions and millions of citizens.

An organized campaign of militant nonviolent resistance and noncooperation could make it effectively impossible for ICE to do the job of deporting undocumented immigrants. We know this because it’s been done before.

It happened during Prohibition. (New York Governor Al Smith served alcohol at the executive mansion and repealed the state’s Prohibition enforcement law.) It happened during the 1850s as the Fugitive Slave Act became increasingly unenforceable across most of the northern United States. It happened in Massachusetts, and much of New England, in the 1760s and early 1770s as the British government (which is to say, the government) increasingly lost control of its colonies.  By the end of 1774, months before the shooting at Lexington and Concord started what became the war for independence, the colonial government in Boston pretty much couldn’t get anyone to accept an official appointment to carry out the basic functions of government in most of the other towns in the colony of Massachusetts.  (See, for example, Alfred F. Young’s excellent The Shoemaker & The Tea Party.)

So, how does ICE operate? Where is its nearest office? What is its operating structure?  (Currently, for example, Sarah Saldaña is the director, Thomas Homan is Executive Associate Director for Enforcement & Removal Operations.)

Who’s the field office director for the ICE office that covers  your community? How many agents work in that office? Who are they? Who else works there? What are their jobs?

Where are the ICE detention centers in your area? Where are the courts that hear deportation cases? Who are the judges? Who else works there?

Who else does ICE interact with, and rely upon, in order to do the part of their job that involves deporting people?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions (and/or questions like them), then finding out is part of the task ahead. Remember, there are people in your community who already do know he answers to these and other questions: undocumented immigrants themselves and their family members, ICE agents and lawyers, immigration lawyers, judges and court officials, journalists, local law enforcement officials, religious and community leaders. Many of them are willing, even eager, to share their knowledge.

Once you can trace the path of deportation for one individual—from arrest, to detention facility, to court hearing, to airplane (or bus, or train) across the border—you’ll start to have an idea of how the system works, and where its weaknesses are or might be.

The challenge then is organizing nonviolently to remove the supports from the deportation system until it can no longer function effectively.

Gene Sharp is one of the foremost scholars of social change in the world today. Over 40 years ago he catalogued 198 methods of nonviolent action, classifying them into three broad categories: 1) nonviolent protest and persuasion, 2) noncooperation, and 3) nonviolent intervention.

Any organizer or leader who can’t read that list and come up with at least 20 ideas for action—whether it’s on organizing for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, or on another issue you care about—should probably start looking for another line of work.

The rabbi’s right; there are a lot of opportunities. It’s just a matter of choosing one and following it through.

Crossposted (on 12/1/16) at masscommons.wordpress.com.

With Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead having blown past 2 million–and more ballots yet to count–it’s increasingly clear that the anti-democratic structures (most notably the electoral college) in the US political system have delivered us a government in which the minority party (in this case, the Republicans) has near total control of the levers of power.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened*. We’ve already talked about the 1920s, and the 1850s. Now let’s go back to where it started, with the election of 1800.

The presidential electoral system the US has today doesn’t come from the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It comes from the aftermath of the “Revolution of 1800“, when Jefferson—with the aid of the 3/5 Clause—defeated Adams, the party system (not envisioned by the men convening in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787) emerged, and was effectively institutionalized by the adoption of the 12th amendment.

As Yale constitutional law professor Akhil Reed Amar notes:

“It is the 12th Amendment’s Electoral College system, not the Philadelphia Framers’, that remains in place today.    —snip—

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.”

This is the world as it is: US presidential elections have, from the beginning, had a systemic bias against people of color, and that structural bias continues today.

As European-Americans continue to shrink as a percentage of the US electorate, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for candidates like Donald Trump to win presidential elections…if everyone votes.  (Which is another reason to expect voter suppression efforts to intensify during—and with the support of—the Trump administration.)

For those who are fearful at the prospect of a President Trump—and outraged that he’ll take office despite having lost the popular vote by a convincing margin—one of the challenges is understanding the context of our times. This isn’t unprecedented; we have more power (including a popular majority) than we think we do; and there are lessons to be learned from our predecessors who also faced the challenge of organizing for justice in the face of anti-democratic and oppressive institutions.

*Note: For purposes of this discussion we’re setting aside cases of massive, categorical disenfranchisement of entire populations–e.g., women prior to 1920, slaves (and freedmen and women) before 1870, African-Americans across the South for the three generations between the end of Reconstruction and passage of the Voting Rights Act.

That’s despite the fact that there’s also much to learn from the political, social and economic organizing tactics and strategies successfully used by those non-voters to have powerful impacts upon the political system…including tactics and strategies that led to the destruction of those exclusionary regimes.

Crossposted (on 11/30/16) at masscommons.wordpress.com.

With Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead having blown past 2 million—and more ballots yet to count—it’s increasingly clear that the anti-democratic structures (most notably the electoral college) in the US political system have delivered us a government in which the minority party (in this case, the Republicans) has near total control of the levers of power.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened*. We’ve already talked about the 1920s. Now let’s look at the 1850s.

Abolitionists and their free soil allies called it the “Slave Power”. What they meant was the disproportionate political power wielded by Southern slaveowners in their own states, and (especially) in the federal government.

A great wave of immigrants, primarily from Ireland and Germany,  was reshaping the demographic makeup of the United States as an ever-increasing majority of free citizens took root in the Northern states where slavery had virtually been eliminated.  (Not quite though: New Jersey, for example, had resident slaves who were only freed by passage of the 13th amendment in 1865.)

That popular majority did not find expression in the federal government, largely because of the 3/5 Clause and its related effects (including the Electoral College).  As a result, even when Northerners opposed to the spread of slavery negotiated compromises with Southerners in Congress (as with the Compromise of 1850), subsequent actions by the “Slave Power” (e.g., the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the 1857 Dred Scott decision) undid major portions of those deals.

The irresistible force of the Slave Power eventually crashed against the immovable object of the abolitionist movement and their allies.  Throughout the 1830s, 40s and 50s, abolitionists and free soilers organized, agitated, wrote, protested, honed their arguments, and steadily built their political power within their own cities, towns and states.

On the evidence of words expended in South Carolina’s “Declaration Of The Immediate Causes Which Induce & Justify The Secession Of South Carolina From The Federal Union“, nothing upset the “slaveocracy” more than organized Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850:

But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.  

The Fugitive Slave Act eliminated the right to a trial for suspected escaped slaves, and imposed heavy fines on local officials who refused to cooperate. Nonetheless, in response to the broad-based, organized opposition to the law:

   
• Wisconsin’s Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional (and a mob of 5,000 rescued escaped slave Joshua Green from the Milwaukee jail where he was being held by federal marshals);

   

• Vermont passed a “Habeas Corpus” law requiring local law-enforcement and judicial officials to assist captured fugitive slaves, effectively nullifying the federal law within its borders;

   

• Several states passed “personal liberty” laws guaranteeing the right to a jury trial and forbidding state officials from recognizing claims to fugitives; the Massachusetts law “vacated the office of any state official who authorized the rendition of a fugitive, barred any such person from holding state office, and disbarred attorneys who represented slaveholders“.

The 1854 arrest and rendition of Anthony Burns from Boston back to his Virginia owner proved so costly (in men, money, and in shifting public opinion) for the federal government that it basically gave up attempting to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in Massachusetts.

Actions like these by Northern legislatures, governors, and courts rested on a broad foundation of organized opposition (mostly, though not exclusively nonviolent) to the expanded use of federal power to infringe upon the civil rights of escaped slaves, free Negroes wrongly accused of being escaped slaves, and their allies.

By organizing, abolitionists and their allies increasingly forced their fellow citizens to choose a side: for or against slavery.  As the wealthy industrialist Amos Adams Lawrence said at the time, “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists”.

*Note: For purposes of this discussion we’re setting aside cases of massive, categorical disenfranchisement of entire populations—e.g., women prior to 1920, slaves (and freedmen and women) before 1870, African-Americans across the South for the three generations between the end of Reconstruction and passage of the Voting Rights Act.

That’s despite the fact that there’s also much to learn from the political, social and economic organizing tactics and strategies successfully used by those non-voters to have powerful impacts upon the political system…including tactics and strategies that led to the destruction of those exclusionary regimes.

Crossposted (on 11/29/16) at masscommons.wordpress.com.

With Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead having blown past 2 million—and more ballots yet to count—it’s increasingly clear that the anti-democratic structures (most notably the electoral college) in the US political system have delivered us a government in which the minority party (in this case, the Republicans) has near total control of the levers of power.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened*.

In the 1920 elections, Republicans swept control of the White House and both houses of Congress from the Democrats. At the same time the US census revealed that a majority of Americans now lived in cities, and those city dwellers were disproportionately Catholic and Jewish immigrants.

Faced with the prospect of losing their majority—and at the insistence of what was perhaps the nation’s most powerful single-issue group ever, the Anti-Saloon League—congressional Republicans simply refused to redistrict Congress…until 1929.  (After all, the Constitution only says that there must be a census every 10 years, and that congressional representation must be reapportioned using that census.  It doesn’t say when the reapportionment has to take place.)

With the ensuing lawsuits, it wasn’t until the 1932 elections that the reapportionment took effect.  That’s one reason Franklin Roosevelt’s election marks such a turning point in American politics.  It’s not only the backlash against the failed policies that led to the Great Depression; it’s also the first election in 20 years that reflects the massive demographic changes caused by the final wave of southern and eastern European immigrants (before passage of the explicitly racist and nativist Johnson-Reed Act in 1924).

Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise & Fall Of Prohibition is a rollicking read, and contains a terrific section on the Anti-Saloon League’s rise to power, and its key role in effectively nullifying the 1920 census. The kind of voter suppression and violation of longstanding democratic norms that Republicans are using today to wield power disproportionate to their actual public support is nothing new in American politics.

Those dismayed at the election of Donald Trump, the returns of Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell, and the prospect of a decades-long conservative majority on the Supreme Court can first take heart at the presidential popular vote returns in 1920 v. 2016.  Warren G. Harding won a landslide victory, defeating his Democratic rival, Ohio Gov. James M. Cox by more than 25 percentage points.  (One of history’s few lessons: things may be bad today, but chances are they were worse sometime in the past.)

More significant are the lessons to be learned from Harding’s (and Coolidge’s and Hoover’s) opposition: virtually everything we know today as Roosevelt’s “New Deal” of the 1930s—old-age and disability insurance, labor rights, minimum wages and maximum hours, civil service reform—was built on the foundation of what social reformers, labor activists, suffragists, progressives, and Democratic officials in states like New York, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts accomplished in the 1910s and 20s.

Unions like Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers founded their own banks, built thousands of units of low-cost cooperative housing, and pioneered their own brand of unemployment insurance.  (See Steven Fraser’s Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman & The Rise Of American Labor, and in particular the chapter titled “Socialism In One Union”, if you’re looking for inspiration on how to organize against the odds.)

Worker and civil rights organizers like Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Bob Moses and Diane Nash spent a lot of time and energy in the 1960s figuring out how to organize so as to bring the power of the federal government to bear on local issues and campaigns.  Organizers in the Trump Era may well face the opposite challenge—how to bring the power of local and state governments, as well as business leaders and organizations, to bear in ways that 1) protect their communities against the powers of the federal government, and 2) plant and nurture the seeds of what a 21st century New Deal might look like.

*Note: For purposes of this discussion we’re setting aside cases of massive, categorical disenfranchisement of entire populations—e.g., women prior to 1920, slaves (and freedmen and women) before 1870, African-Americans across the South for the three generations between the end of Reconstruction and passage of the Voting Rights Act.

That’s despite the fact that there’s also much to learn from the political, social and economic organizing tactics and strategies successfully used by those non-voters to have powerful impacts upon the political system…including tactics and strategies that led to the destruction of those exclusionary regimes.

Crossposted (on 11/28/16) at masscommons.wordpress.com.

It’s been just over a week since Donald Trump became president-elect, a week to begin absorbing the reality that on Jan. 20 the Republican party will have unchecked control of all three branches of the US federal government.

Here are some writings that I’ve found helpful as ways to get oriented to our new political reality.

I’ve been following journalist/organizer/gadfly Al Giordano since the fall of 2007 when he wrote in the late, lamented Boston Phoenix the first (to me) plausible analysis/argument for how then-Sen. Barack Obama could, and would, win the Democratic presidential nomination over then-seemingly-invulnerable-frontrunner, Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Giordano’s pre-election analysis, “What Happens Now With A President-Elect Trump?”, of what would happen if Trump won the election is both sobering and instructive. Here’s a taste:

“Life as we knew it and expected it to unfold will never be the same. American fascism will have arrived and the worst, most violent elements in society will feel emboldened to harm everyone they consider as “the other” with impunity. The burning of the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi this week by Trump supporters is merely the opening salvo. The internal conflict within the FBI in public view right now will afflict every police agency, federal, state and local, as openly authoritarian elements attempt to seize control. Hate crimes will rise against women, people of color and the LGBT communities precisely as law enforcement turns a blind eye to much of it. Look for entire new demographic groups to be targeted, too: Those 20 million who newly have health care, many of whom had preexisting conditions, people living with disabilities and others will be added to the list of national scapegoats. The attempt to repeal Obamacare will be a literal death sentence for many of us.

Those of us who have lived in countries under authoritarian rule have spent recent months having our own conversation about what is happening in the USA. We do it in whispers because most of you will not believe us no matter how loudly we shout about what a Trump election would bring down the `pike. We shake our heads and feel a great wave of pity for most Americans who have no idea what tyranny really looks or feels like. Tyranny – contrary to popular myth – is asymmetric. It hits from all sides, crevices, nooks and crannies, from the dark places, the shadows. The figurehead’s power above merely provides it cover. It has the same paramilitary logic of what was endured in Latin America’s dirty wars and the dictatorships across the sea that gave rise to the Arab Spring. When Donald J. Trump praises strongmen leaders across the globe he is giving his “tell” of how he would govern – with a clenched fist.”

The only authentic resistance to the policies of a Trump presidency will make nonviolence its watchword, and unapologetically so. To participate, you’re going to have to get training in nonviolent civil resistance. I’m not speaking of the “express trainings” by dudebro groups like “Democracy Spring” with fawning celebrity dilettantes like Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, but, rather, sessions that last a minimum of eight hours or, ideally, an entire weekend or more and are led and organized by women of experience at it and especially women of color….

The resistance will not be led by the Green or Libertarian Parties, “Occupy” activists or any similar fringe: Their brands of “leadership” are what got us into this mess in the first place.

The revolution will be authentically multi-racial, a true partnership, women-led and nonviolent or there will be no chance of success at all….

Me? I’m ready to play an auxiliary role in a women and women of color-led resistance to a Trump’s America. They’re the only reason we have a candidate with a chance of defeating him on Tuesday. They’ve saved America once already this year. It’s time for us boys to start taking orders instead of barking them while wagging our finger at the gals. And it’s the only possible guarantee against Trumpism infecting the movement against his policies. Real men – like President Obama – will know just how to play that supportive role. He’ll be doing it from an organizing academy out of the coming Obama Museum in Chicago – and win or lose this election I expect to see y’all there, too.

Trump’s numbers were different, because his analysts, like Trump himself, were forecasting a fundamentally different electorate than other pollsters and almost all of the media: older, whiter, more rural, more populist. And much angrier at what they perceive to be an overclass of entitled elites. In the next three weeks, Trump channeled this anger on the stump….

So America stands at the precipice of a Second Redemption. Unlike the first, it was not achieved by violence, and has not ended in the total disenfranchisement of people of color. Its immediate consequences may not be as total, or as dire. Yet it has a democratic legitimacy that extends far beyond the American South. The erasure of the legacy of the first black president of the United States will be executed by a man who rose to power on the basis of his embrace of the slander that Obama was not born in America.

But the problem was Trump ran up huge margins in nonmetro rural, small town and some outer-suburban areas. Factory workers, even former ones are few and far between there. Previous work shows that Trump voters are NOT disportionately affected by trade disruptions, factory closings, etc. What is more likely is that these nonmetro areas had organized networks – NRA, Christian Right, some RNC and Koch network/AFP presence – that amplified the right media attacks on HRC nonstop and persuaded many non-college women and some college women in those areas to go for Trump because of the Supreme Court.You say Trump had no organization. True enough for his own campaign. HRC had the typical well-funded presidential-moment machine, an excellent one. We on the center left seem to treat these presidential machines as organization, and they are, but they are not as effective as longstanding natural organized networks. To get some of those working for him, Trump made deals to get the NRA , Christian right and GOP federated operations on his side. They have real, extensive reach into nonmetro areas. But off the coasts, Democrats no longer have such reach beyond what a presidential campaign does on its own. Public sector and private sector unions have been decimated. And most of the rest of the Democratic-aligned infrastructure is metro based and focused. That infrastructure is also fragmented into hundreds of little issue and identity organizations run by professionals.

   
• “the potential for a revival of anti-trust enforcement to revitalize the economies of small town America”;

   

• “The freedom Trump and the Republicans have to make radical sweeping and (often) unpopular changes to our country is way out of proportion to what the voters said”;

   

• “people need to look themselves in the mirror and stop trying to blame everyone else”;

   

• “Progressives need programs, strategies and organizing in (white, rural, northern) communities. And they need it now”.

Finally (for now), there’s blogger and former Congressional staffer Emily Ellsworth’s tweetstorm on how members of Congress listen to their constituents. Read it.  (Not-so-long story short:  “If you want to make a difference, call your representatives and show up at their town halls.” But read the whole thing.)

That’s all I’ve got for now. As always, I welcome your reactions in the comments section, as well as any suggestions you have for help with making sense of this new era we’re entering. If the Twitter machine works better for you, hit me up @MassCommons.

Crossposted (on 11/18/16) at masscommons.wordpress.com.

376 days ago the Politics department here at MassCommons World Headquarters grudgingly posted its first—and last—piece about the 2016 US presidential election campaign. (And they remain oddly proud of their non-participation in the past year’s political punditry and prognostication.) Let’s see how it held up, shall we?

On Election Day 2016, Clinton will win a narrow but solid victory and become the first female president in US history.

Well…that’s not looking very good, is it?  You could argue that Clinton won a “narrow but solid victory” in the popular vote—she’ll likely end up with a 2 million vote lead—but presidential elections in the US are decided by the anti-democratic electoral college, and Trump has a “solid victory“there…which, in the end, is all that matters.

Republicans will still control the House of Representatives.  Democrats may (or may not) narrowly retake the Senate.

That’s a bit more accurate. Republicans control the House; Democrats didn’t retake the Senate.

Any of a thousand unexpected and improbable events could reshape the campaign.

Getting warmer.

This is going to be the election campaign equivalent of World War I trench warfare–not because it will be so ugly, but because it won’t move more than a few yards back or forth.

Probably the most accurate statement in the entire post.

Not only did Clinton end up with over 2 million more votes than Trump, Democratic Senate candidates garnered over 6 million more votes than their Republican counterparts. In 2012, Democratic House candidates won a majority of total votes cast but Republicans won a majority of seats; the same may happen this year, once all the ballots are counted.

So Republicans will find themselves with (effectively) unchecked power in all three branches of the federal government (once Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee is confirmed).  And they’ll do so despite strong signs that a small but growing majority of the electorate opposes them.

It won’t be the first time in US history something like that has happened.  The dominance of slave states before the Civil War is the most notable example. The tight grip on national politics held by the Prohibition movement in the 1920s is another.

What it means and where we go from here is the subject of another post (or many).

Crossposted (on 11/13/16) at masscommons.wordpress.com

I don’t know why “everybody still treat(s) Donald Trump with kid gloves“, as the headline to this Kevin Drum post asserts.  And, to the (minimal) extent I’ve paid attention to the Republican presidential race, I agree with Drum’s assessment that “no one has ever really tried” to attack Trump.

With one exception.

There’s one national political figure who’s not only taken on Donald Trump but also taken him down, and that’s President Barack Obama.

He did it at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and in doing so offered a model for any of Trump’s current or future opponents.  (He also so thoroughly embarrassed and enraged Trump that this little episode may well have been a crucial factor in Trump’s decision to run for president this year…but that’s a topic for another day.)

Before looking at how President Obama did it, it’s worth noting what he didn’t do: he didn’t follow the course of action Drum recommends for Trump’s fellow Republicans:

I’m thinking of full-bore, kick ’em in the nuts, Willie Horton style ads. Ones where you get to frame the attack in as vicious and unfair a way as you want. Ads that will really hurt him.

To his credit (Drum is an impressively modest and self-reflective commentator) he quickly adds, “Would it work? Beats me.“

Five years ago, President Obama took a different approach.  Instead of attacking Trump, he ridiculed him.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8TwRmX6zs4&w=420&h=315]

Trump—who had spent months traveling the country mocking Obama and questioning his citizenship—had to endure the president releasing an “official birth video” (the state of Hawaii had released Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate earlier that week), mockingly referring to Trump as “The Donald“, and suggesting Trump could now get back to “focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And, where are Biggie and Tupac?“.

Obama then piled on by getting the crowd to laugh at Trump’s “credentials and experience“.  He recounted Trump’s decision on an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice to fire Gary Busey rather than Lil’ Jon or Meatloaf, adding, “These are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.“

The crowd then burst out into uproarious, sustained applause…and that’s without them all knowing that President Obama, before leaving the White House that evening, had just authorized the secret raid into Pakistan to capture and kill Osama bin Laden.

Saul Alinsky’s fifth rule in Rules For Radicals* is: “Ridicule is man’s (sic) most potent weapon.”  Alinsky adds, “It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.  Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”  And it’s an especially effective tactic when used against a pompous, self-absorbed and self-inflating opponent.

My free advice (take it for what it’s worth) to Republican presidential candidates: Don’t kick Donald Trump in the nuts.  Laugh at how small they are.

*Why yes, Barack Obama was a community organizer as a young man.  Yes, he would have read Rules For Radicals. Yes, he learned from Alinsky-trained organizers.  Presumably this still infuriates Glenn Beck (even though he and Obama now agree Trump should not be president).