This is a seed post – to spark posts, post-nomination, that will keep us going.  That means it’s weakly reasoned, poorly documented, and more sloppily written than usual.

[UPDATE:  The two artifacts below turned out to be sub-optimal ways of looking at the next couple generations of political activism.  This article in The Guardian, despite its incorporation of tattoos, cover some interesting trajectories from well before and looking to after 2016.  It has a Sanders focus, but that’s where the debate is.]

It’s about a topic that pops up and surprises us a lot:  how 20-somethings are veiwing politics and what 2018 – 2024 might look like.  I spent last night in a FinTech accelerator hanging out with many young people, playing Magic, so I’m the expert for now. That said, Mister Jones has done a lot to highlight the unleashed anger within this generation, as well as the deeply personal connection to issues that seem frankly less personal than abortion, or gender equality.  I’ll try to bring it down to a popular culture level.

Exhibit #1 no why they’re pissed and are deeper than the media coverage of them:

• “Stop telling me” – they’re tired of being told how to view history, how to think, how enthusiastic they need to be, or how they should have been voting all along
• “hasn’t won the nomination yet” – a little trickier, but a lost of this is connected to the pre-California announcement by the AP that it was over, and HRC’s statement that it’s time for Sanders to shutter the operation.  Glenn Greenwald put it in better context, but I think it’s more than the naive hope that “he might win”
• “She’s NOT the first woman” – I have trouble taking this one too seriously.  HOWEVER! Given how quickly, and inescapably, a lack of enthusiasm for HRC translates into sexism, I could see a desire to turn the tables on the Woman Card being played against them.
• “why should I celebrate” – I think there are two things at play here:  1) HRC has come to represent the ultimate game player; 2) HRC’s connection to 2008 (which directly diminished the future prospects of many millenials) through WJC’s deregulation, her closeness to the financial sector, and some blaming the victim in the sub-prime mortgage crisis; and 3) possibly, a higher-minded notion of the women they want to celebrate.
• “corrupt kleptocracy” – doesn’t need annotation, post-Occupy
• “Stop being sheep.  Fight” – not sure what’s next, Occupy, Obama, Sanders were all worthy places to put energy and educate themselves and now their outlet is HRC or Trump.

This meme comes from Lee Camp, the host of Redacted Tonight, and an aspiring youTube heir to the Daily Show tradition.  I personally find him charming, often funny, but burdened by his anger.  But this is an age where rage must be served up with humor.  And as the outrage gets stronger, Jon Stewart’s menchsy approach might not cut it.  Witness the John Oliver cadence: spend two minutes getting really, authentically angry about a surprisingly sober analysis, and then riff on a reach-around joke for a minute to defuse the tension, repeat throughout the piece.

But the point with the video is an assertion of independence – “our dismissing their dissent on that basis [youth0 is one of their issues” and this technically accurate but arguably wrong argument serves that purpose.

In response to Mister Jones’s question about what’s next for this blog, I’ll share what’s next for me now that my preferred candidate is figuring out what’s next for him (much less interesting than the future of the blog, to be sure, but I can see why he cares).

My headspace includes the following thoughts:

1. Since 1988, with the exception of 2008 and 2012, all of my presidential votes have been against the Repbulican party.  I’ve accepted other people’s math that I can’t vote for what I want, that I must defeat the enemy.  I’m doing it again, but I want more.
2. Sanders 2016 has proven:  1) you can succeed in national campaigns with many small donations from human beings; 2) people will come out in shocking numbers for political ideas and politicians that conventional wisdom declares DOA; 3) you can fill venue after venue after venue with shocking numbers – even if you haven’t flown in on a private jet funded by a reality TV show.
3. Key issues, like the $15 minimum wage, can become national requirements for a democratic candidate with enough local, grassroots pressure.
4. Local power and popular pressure can move national candidates (and maybe keep them there).
5. FDR’s challenge to Sidney Hillman – “that’s a great idea, now go out and make me do it” – has renewed importance.
6. Mass media and advertising in presidential elections no longer holds the sway it did during the heydays.
7. Partly because of the declining efficacy of advertising, money in general seems to be holding less sway over voting and voters, even as it increases its power over elected officials.
8. “The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.” (I’ll use the Arendt version rather than Lenin. Both are inferior to John Hodgman’s keen observations about the subject, but I haven’t read enough of his work.)  We need to make sure there’s someone with resources (people rather than money) to pick up the anger in the street.

So, I’m focusing on 2018 in two ways:  1) The Personal Democracy Forum, a conference about technology, organizing, and campaigns; 2) the pipeline and things like Brand New Congress, both of which are identifying, and cultivating, progressive candidates at the local, state, and Congressional level.  All of these initiatives are trying to work alongside, with, and occasionally the existing two parties, but are focused on helping develop progressive candidacies outside of the existing party systems.

I think this is relevant to the Inn – I put in the bullets up top to justify it as an observational post.  And I think the pipeline issue has been hinted at by CVFD in multiple posts.

 

 

 

 

 

I thought we should have a post on the blog that celebrates what happened last night. We all have our misgivings about Hillary and how committed she’ll be to the issues we believe in. And, as I noted somewhere else in this blog, she often manages to be as ineluctable as Nixon and as charismatic as Walter Mondale.

And, we all are so used to working with women in all types of senior executive roles, that it’s easy to just say, sure, why not a woman nominated for president. But, A WOMAN JUST BECAME A MAJOR PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

And, last night, she really stepped into it and reminded people why this is an emotional and historic moment. Between the San Diego speech and this one, I am becoming optimistic that she can be a more inspiring figure than we thought.

Most Presidential candidates, when they’ve reached the moment of defeat or futility, can simply step down and get back to their lives.  They can resume being Senators, enjoy being rich again, start getting rich, get out of debt and then into the private sector, or go onto TV and wait for phone calls about appointments.

But what does a Bernie Sanders do?  He’s a combination of Jed Bartlett (“I’ll give some speeches and then we’ll all go home”) and Stackhouse from The West Wing:  he never expected the kind of success he attained, and built a movement that was bigger (and angrier) than anyone could have predicted.  He’s built a coalition that is demographically and philosophically different from but maddeningly close to the Democrat mainstream (or many people’s memories of it) and the campaign has unleashed (or scaled) a form of political energy not seen in decades.

An exit now is more than stepping out of the race for the good of the party – it’s stepping out of the race while maintaining momentum.  It’s being an alternative voice to a deeply conflicted party while supporting its deeply flawed candidate.  It’s being a Senator while figuring out how to stoke and transfer the momentum of a movement that not everyone likes.  It’s straddling the anger and idealism, the realpolitik and the vision.

Not at all easy.  I hope he is as deft about this as he has been at his best moments.

Reagan and Nixon.  Speaking, as we were the other day, of distorting history, Michael Reagan, son of Ronald, a weird guy and no master of the written word, tweeted this, regarding Trump:

This most likely would be the 1st time if my father was alive that he would not support the nominee of the GOP

Along with the goofy use of “if my father was alive” (which way would he vote if he weren’t alive?) the remark is funny because until 1952 Ronald Reagan not only voted Democrat but also lent his prestige as a (fading) movie star to liberal Democratic candidates in California.  In ’50, he worked especially hard for Helen Gahagan Douglas’s U.S. Senate campaign. Her winning opponent Richard Nixon dubbed her “the Pink Lady” to suggest she was a Communist fellow-traveler, and in ’52, when Reagan decided to cross party lines and vote for Ike, his main misgiving was the evident sleaziness and vapidity of Ike’s running mate Nixon.

That’s it. This item has no real point. Except Michael Reagan is a weird guy.

Superdelegates.  A guy I follow on Twitter notes the irony of seeing an insurgent candidacy, beginning by criticizing the existence of superdelegacy as a component of unfair rigging, now floating the idea of turning superdelegates against the expressed will of a clear majority of voters based on polling purporting to show greater “electability” in the insurgent — electability, that quality so recently associated with voting out of fear, not hope. The irony doesn’t bother me. It’s politics, the ploy seems more narrative than real, and it shows brazenness and gumption, some sense of the game as a game. Intellectual honesty isn’t a quality I look for in these weird contests the parties have established for choosing nominees.

But the guy on Twitter also suggests that in addressing this irony, at least we might now begin to address the question of how to make the Dem nominating process more democratic. To which, in the mood I’m in today, I can only respond by noting that doing the same thing over and over (“reform”) and getting the same result (“rigging”) is the definition of insanity.

There’s another point of view on this, also not mine, expressed by the penetrating liberal journo Jamelle Bouie. He says that 2016 has shown that the mix of majoritarian and anti-majoritarian elements in the Dem contests are working fine.

Anyone saying things are more or less “fine” will get a raised eyebrow from me — just consider this post from from Laska, or this one — but Bouie nevertheless makes the interesting technical point, again involving an irony, that the less democratic form of contest, caucus, is actually more likely to benefit insurgency. So reforming things by moving, say, to a one-day, all-primary, blanket-majority system, though hyperdemocratic, will always simply crown the most mainstream nominee, according to him.

Reagan again. It’s recently become clear to me that at its 1968 convention, the GOP essentially anointed Reagan the future of the party. It took some twists and turns and some whack-a-mole, but GOP liberalism basically died there, when Reagan was not quite two years into his first term as governor — and that was the only elective office he’d ever held. He’d been an actor and a corporate and right-wing spokesman before that, and that’s it. Whoever before Reagan got anointed the future president with nearly zero experience in gaining and executing office? In making that revolutionary change, Reagan set up something that Trump may now be taking to a logical conclusion: Reagan brought the party together behind an image supported by nothing, but because he had effective people around him, and because he was a kind of political animal, he made the party dominant. Trump is ripping the party apart the same way, and because he has no effective people around him, and not one political bone in his body, he may be bringing it down, at least temporarily. So while the rise of Reagan and the rise of Trump are in historical opposition, the idea of who a presidential candidate can be changed for good with Reagan, as early as ’68, and Trump may now be serving as Ronnie’s funhouse-mirror reflection.

Whither In at the End of the World? As we emerge, finally, from the primary season, things simplify, horribly, in that in our system there must always be only two candidates in the end, with the occasional third-party spoiler  — and this year one of the two will be Donald Trump, the other the first female to get anything like this far. This exchange began for me in bewilderment and interest in Sanders, horror at Cruz and Trump, amazement at the non-starter Jeb, potential GOP collapse, the class-and-race ironies of left-Dem insurgency, etc. It will be interesting to see what if anything we have to say now.

For my part, once more or less assured that Clinton will be the nominee, my cold eye for her many flaws will start to twitch. That’s what always happens to me. Not like it matters . . .

I was half-way through a post on how last week revealed the Trump campaign to be barely functional and possibly on the verge of collapse six weeks before the Republican convention.  But, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Here’s Trump’s tweet honoring the anniversary of the D-Day Invasion:

Here’s a link to Redstate.com where Caleb Howe points out how ludicrously obvious it is that this photo is not of D-Day. Notice the guy standing with his hands on his hips and his back to the Germans.  As Howe, asks:  “And who, exactly, would have taken this photo? The Germans? Look at the perspective.”

http://www.redstate.com/absentee/2016/06/06/even-donald-trumps-d-day-tweet-fallen-heroes-wrong/

Howe publishes the full photo with a clear caption from Getty Images that states this was a photo of a training exercise for D-Day. I mean, it’s in the caption of the photo!! Is anyone on his staff even trying?

Btw, before the election, I would visit Redstate a couple times a month just to see what the other side was thinking. Or just to get really angry. But, have to give them credit. Most of the contributors to the site have been against Trump from the start, at first because they don’t think he represents conservative values. But, since Trump has secured the nomination, they’ve denounced his candidacy as dangerous to the country. And a few of them, like Caleb Howe, have appeared on cable news and declared that they are voting for Hillary.  Even though that means that they get Supreme Court justices and a lot of other stuff they don’t like for the next four years.

Having a hard time pulling myself away from productivity conversations on the webs.  A recent report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisors indicated that if the last 40 years had shown productivity gains similar to those made in the previous 40 years, the average US household would be $30,000 richer.  While the measure is being hotly debated, US citizens seem to have made up their minds:

the last time a majority of Americans rated their own financial condition as “good or excellent” was 2005. Gallup finds that the last time most Americans were satisfied with the way things were going in the country was 2004. The last time Americans were confident that their children’s lives would be better than their own was 2001.

We’ve been hearing some of this since the 90s.  The first reported Generation X  – born in 1965 or after  – was notable because it wasn’t likely to experience the material comforts of its parents.  Subsequent Gen Xes – the start year moved until we got to Y and Z – have had the same fate.  Still, there’s something grim about millions of people going to the polling booths, knowing that a majority of them know they’re screwed, and that only one person is saying it.

Nothing becomes a Saturday morning like watching someone be really good at politics. This week, Hillary showed that she could deliver a masterpiece of a speech. And, that maybe she’s getting the hang of being stand-up comic funny while also cutting the knife deep and quick across her rival’s hamstring.

Not that this is a new thing. Here’s a one-minute clip of FDR in December, 1938 at the University of North Carolina, mocking his critics. You could cut and paste this performance into 2016 (o.k., I just did), and it’s funny and feels contemporary.

1938 was a terrible year for Roosevelt and the New Deal. He’d overplayed his hand on a number of fronts: court packing, challenging anti-New Deal Democrats in congressional primaries, and mostly failing in those challenges. In the November mid-terms a month ago, the Democrats lost six senate seats and 71 House seats.

And here he is in North Carolina, still master of the game.

Love the smile that he can’t suppress when he says, “Actually, I’m an exceedingly mild mannered person.”

And the trademark throwing back of the head at the end: “I’m a devotee of scrambled eggs!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQRwcI0-Nm4

I thought to post this because it’s a great clip from one of the greatest political performers.  But, then I read the entire speech. It’s here and pretty remarkable.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15578

He’s at once aligning himself with the forces of modernity, but at the same time goes back to the beginning of the country and the Democratic Party. Fascinating in part because for all of us, the Democratic Party started with the New Deal. Here’s the leader of the New Deal, going back into history to justify his program.

“The very birth of the Democratic Party, at a time when President Washington publicly expressed the hope that the Nation could be run without Parties, was due to the simple fact that the Government itself was dominated by the great commercial and shipping interests of the seaboard, and failed to give recognition to the needs and the desires of the masses of the inhabitants of the original Thirteen States who did not subscribe to their theory that birth, wealth or political position could give to the possessors of these qualifications the sole right to govern. Hence the Democratic Party.”

I’d look to Mr. Jones to keep FDR honest on his reading of history. I suspect that he wasn’t above bending it to his own purposes.  He does, for example, totally gloss over the Civil War because he needed all those white supremacist committee chairs to support his legislation.

 

Hillary delivered what was billed as a major foreign policy address yesterday in San Diego. If you missed it, find the time to watch the full thing.

As far as foreign policy speeches go, this wasn’t JFK calling for a nuclear test ban treaty or Reagan telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall. But that’s not what the moment called for. To paraphrase other reviewers of the speech, it was a blistering evisceration of Donald Trump, a complete unmanning of the Republican nominee and jackass.

The speech was masterfully written, eschewing any cringe-worthy gotcha phrases, and Hillary delivered it skillfully. She looked presidential. She also looked like she was enjoying herself. And she seems finally to have mastered the Obama approach of being presidential, somewhat aloof, and yet devastatingly funny and biting in her comments.

She pushed all the chips into the middle of the table, calling Trump unqualified to be president, questioning the state of his mental health, generally ridiculing him, mocking all the stupid things he’s said about foreign policy. And she did all of this without getting down into the gutter with him. This was a former first lady, former senator, former secretary of state just brushing this clown off.

I certainly hope this speech presages the Democrats’ strategy for the rest of the summer. To simultaneously remind people that she’s a serious candidate for president and to just call Trump out as the national joke that he really is and to render him a laughing stock.

And, He’s Still Lonely . . .

Meanwhile, Trump’s all by himself.  I haven’t seen a single prominent Republican step up to defend Trump. Certainly, no national security surrogates to respond to Hillary on foreign policy. Trump tweeted some half-hearted nonsense. And his “comments” at a rally in California last night were so uninteresting that MSNBC didn’t even bother to air more than :30 seconds of them. He apparently spent the day still complaining about the “Mexican” judge in the Trump University case.

“Charlie, They Took My Thumb!”

Paul Ryan used the occasion of Hillary’s speech to sneak out his non-endorsement endorsement of Trump. He said that he would vote for Trump. He didn’t really ask anyone else to do the same.  And he published his “support” in an op-ed piece in his local paper in Wisconsin. I’m surprised he didn’t slip it into the classifieds section.

He did appear on television explaining his decision. I can’t find a video on Youtube. I’m sure that Ryan’s staff insisted on watching the reporters delete the files from their hard drives. He looks sad and mumbles some things about “policies” that Trump would advance without bothering to mention what those “policies” are.  If you turned the sound down on the video and just watch his body language, you could easily imagine him saying things like, “we think we caught the cancer in time” and “Uncle Bill lived a long and full life. . . “

The Pope of Greenwich Village is a really bad eighties mobster movie starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts (I realize this sentence is a tautology). Roberts’ character is unavoidably named “Paulie”. There’s a scene where Paulie’s Uncle Pete is dispatched by a mob boss to amputate Paulie’s thumb in retribution for some offense. Before doing the deed, Uncle Pete tells Paulie to “go numb . . . . Nothing ever hurts as much as you think it will.” Paul Ryan had that look on his face yesterday.