The #RepublicanParty, a coalition between Big Business farmers and turkeys who'll vote for Christmas (Red Scare cowards, apocalyptic white nationalists, religious fanatics, etc) has fallen to its bizarre, violent radical wing, who obsessed pver policies that are irrelevant to the majority of Americans.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This isn't just bad for policy, it's bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up #pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger:
Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.
Nowhere is this better explained than in #NaomiKlein's superb long-form article on #RFKJr's presidential bid in The Guardian:
Don't get me wrong, RFK Jr is a Very Bad Politician, for all the reasons that Klein lays out. He's an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracist, and his support for ending American military aggression, defending human rights, and addressing the climate emergency is laughably thin.
But as Klein points out, RFK Jr is not peddling pizzaburgers. He is tapping into a legitimate rage:
> a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world – inflamed on every level – that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.
RFK Jr is campaigning against "the corrupt merger between state and corporate power," against drug monopolies setting our national health agenda, and polluters capturing environmental regulators.
As Klein says, despite RFK Jr's willing to say the unsayable, and tap into the yearning among the majority of American voters for something different, he's not running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth.”
Rather, "public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers."
We've been here before. Remember Trump campaigning against a "rigged system" and promising to "make America great again?" Remember Clinton's rejoinder that "America was already great?"
It's hard to imagine a worse response to legitimate outrage - over corporate capture, declining wages and living conditions; and spiraling health, education and shelter costs.
Sure, it was obvious that Trump was a beneficiary of the rigged system, and that he would rig it further, but at least he admitted it was rigged, not "already great."
The Democratic Party is not in thrall to labor unions, or racial equality activists, or people who care about gender justice or the climate emergency. Unlike the GOP, the Dem establishment has figured out how to keep a grip on power within their own party - at the expense of exercising power in America, even when they hold office.
But unlike culture war nonsense, shared prosperity, fairness, care, and sound environmental policies are very popular in America. Some people have been poisoned against politics altogether and sunk into nihilism, while others have been duped into thinking that America can't afford to look after its people.
In this regard, winning the American electorate is a macrocosm for the way labor activists win union majorities in the workplaces they organize.
In her memoir A Collective Bargain, #JaneMcAlevey describes how union organizers contend with everything that progressive politicians must overcome. A union drive takes place in the teeth of unfair laws, on a tilted playing field that allows bosses to gerrymander some workers' votes and suppress others' altogether.
These bosses have far more resources than the workers, and they spend millions on disinformation campaigns, forcing workers to attend long propaganda sessions on pain of dismissal.
This is how the most important labor victories of our day were won: the 2019 LA teachers' strike won everything. Not just higher wages, but consellors in schools, mandatory greenspace for every school in LA, an end to ICE shakedowns of immigrant parents at the school-gate, and immigration law help for students and their families.
What's more, the teachers used their unity, their connection to the community, and their numbers to get out the vote in the next election, winning the marginal seats that delivered 2020's Democratic Congressional majority.
As I wrote in my review of MacAlevey's book:
> For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. First, we fix the corrupt union, firing its sellout leaders and replacing them with fighters.
> Then, we organize supermajorities, person-to-person, in a methodical, organized fashion. Then we win votes, using those supermajorities to overpower the dirty tricks that rig the elections against us. Then we stay activated, because winning the vote is just the start of the fight.
> It’s a far cry from the Democratic Party consultant’s “data-driven” microtargeting strategy based on eking out tiny, fragile majorities with Facebook ads.
> That’s a strategy that fails in the face of even a small and disorganized voter-suppression campaign — it it’s doomed in today’s all-out assault on fair elections.
> What’s more, the consultants’ microtargeting strategy treats people as if the only thing they have to contribute is casting a ballot every couple years. A sleeping electorate will never win the fights that matter — the fight to save our planet, and to abolish billionaires.