For an antidote to premature sighs of relief that we’ve weathered the worst of Trump and the larger populist wave hitting the Western world, you couldn’t do much better than catching up on Andrew O’Hehir’s recent political columns over at Salon.com. This week’s piece points up the way in which the Marine Le Pen versus Emmanuel Macron run-off may well only prolong, not resolve, whatever reckoning French politics is heading towards, and how mainstream commentators repeatedly seize on evidence that any apparent ruptures in Western politics are going to be healed, lickety-split.
Among other things, O’Hehir argues that establishment politicians and media have a tendency to believe the political-economic system is fundamentally sound and self-correcting, and work to promote this idea in a hundred ways large and small; an underlying assumption is that it is also fair, insofar as the current arrangements should continue without major changes. The underlying point he makes, not so explicitly, is that ordinary citizens must inevitably struggle against a myopic world of purported expertise that in some ways is inherently incapable of admitting the significance of very real changes and conflicts in our world. For O’Hehir, these issues of perception are front and center today as the world enters what he considers to be an age of revolution around political and economic systems, with an outcome still very much to be determined.
As we pass the 100-day point of the Trump presidency, I’ve got two contradictory feelings that correlate intriguingly with O’Hehir’s observations. On the one hand, I’m gratified that resistance to Trump has been so strong, and that our constitutional system has slowed down initiatives like the Muslim ban: hey man, our system works! No dictatorships or religious tests in this country, buddy! On the other hand, as Trump embraces a more straightforward plutocratic, self-dealing agenda, sets course toward voter suppression and a hands-off approach to police violence, proposes tax “reform” that will drive income inequality to new, unfathomable extremes, and dismantles a bare-bones federal effort to fight global warming, there are signs that the political system and media coverage are beginning to relax into familiar territory; it is as if the message is, “Yes, Trump is crazy, but the system has constrained him; and now we are back in the charted world, of tax plans, health care, and the like.”
But even if accepting for the moment that the particular danger represented by the personal derangements of Trump has passed (which I don’t), the world of “regular” politics and economics is where the real emergency ultimately lies: our failures as a polity and a society are what gave rise to this wrecking ball of a presidency in the first place. Trump, after all, was elected on a promise to break or reform a system that many people, particularly the working class, correctly see as no longer working for them. So if Donald Trump now pursues policies that will worsen those problems, one possible outcome is that he’s laying the groundwork for worse Trumps to come.
The most dangerous tendency of the Democrats right now is to believe that all they have to do is let Trump and the Republicans keep shooting themselves in the foot, and to sit back without a full agenda of opposition. By keeping themselves above the fray, their larger message is that the overall economic and political arrangements are acceptable, and all they have to do is swoop in at some point and tinker at the edges. In a way, Donald Trump is a godsend for cautious Democratic politicians; they can oppose Trump without having to deal with the real problems that helped him come to power.
While many Democrats continue to believe that Trump and the Republicans’ self-destructive tendencies will sweep them back to power, the good news is that the bigger story is the ongoing battle in the Democratic Party over the issues that I’ve been talking about: whether the party will be driven by grassroots concerns, or continue to be an entity of the status quo. And on this note, I want to flag this article by Andrew Cockburn, entitled “Texas Is the Future,” that reports on some news that most people are probably not aware of: that while much of progressive America cried and/or drank itself to sleep last November 8th, Democratic voters in Houston and other parts of Texas were cheering victories in various local races.
For those of us who believe that the answer to our political and economic problems is always more democracy — democracy defined as civic engagement, education, economic opportunity, and fighting for values like dignity, fairness, and fair wages — what progressives have been accomplishing in Texas comes like a welcome glass of cold sarsaparilla on a hot summer day. In the face of Democratic electoral annihilation since the 1990’s, progressive organizers in Texas, including members of the Texas Organizing Project, have gone back to the basics. They’ve identified crucial issues that harm or hold back working class voters and voters of color, and have mobilized voters around solutions to those issues. They combined research into voting patterns with focus groups on basic political questions, such as why potential Democratic voters don't show up to the polls (the most-common answer: nothing seemed to change when they do, so why bother?)
These activists saw the need to deliver concrete results, and for community engagement to be ongoing, not just at election time. And by acting directly on issues that affect the poor, like the punitive fines that can turn minor driving offenses into major financial burdens, not to mention jail time, they’re also pushing back on trends that have been turning us into a nation of have’s and have-not’s. In short, what they did was dogged, common-sense, and essential; they re-expanded the definition of democratic politics from elections to actually making changes and expanding the idea of democratic participation. In the context of a Democratic Party that has too often passively relied on the notion of changing demographics to push it into the political majority, these state organizers’ efforts come across as mind-blowing.
To give you a sense of what they've been up to, there’s this:
“Ever since the era of [former governor] Ann Richards, Democrats had been focusing their efforts (without success) on winning back white swing voters outside the big cities. But [TOP organizer Crystal] Zermeno realized that there was no reason ‘to beat our heads against the wall for that group of people anymore, not when we’ve got a million-voter gap and as many as four million non-voting people of color in the big cities, who are likely Democrats.’ By relentlessly appealing to that shadow electorate, and gradually turning them into habitual voters, TOP could whittle down and eliminate the Republican advantage in elections for statewide offices such as governor and lieutenant governor, not to mention the state’s thirty-eight votes in the presidential Electoral College. In other words, since the existing Texas electorate was never going to generate a satisfactory result, TOP was going to have to grow a new one.”
Here’s another way of thinking about what the TOP organizers did: they stopped playing by the old rules, expanded the electorate, and ended up changing the game. To give you a sense of how revolutionary this organizing work has been: in November, the Democrats dominated the election in Harris County, in which Houston is located, including electing a sheriff and district attorney. And here's an amazing statistic: Hillary Clinton got in excess of 160,000 more votes than Donald Trump in the county, even though Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there by only a few thousand votes in the last election.
There's been a lot of excitement about the Democrats competing in the handful of special elections that have been happening; but clearly immense changes have been occurring below the radar of national elections that need to be replicated and expanded if progressives are going to push the country in a better direction.
