How A Socialist Mainstay Found A Democrat Worth Supporting

 

Grand Choral Synogogue, Petersburg, where I communed with my grandfather's teenage spirit

A few years ago I visited Russia for the first time. My grandfather, fleeing a series of pograms in his district, left there when he was a young teen and came to the U.S. When I was in St Petersburg I visited the Grand Choral Synagogue, the biggest in Russia-- built in 1893. My grandfather, who wasn't a religious person, was there about 10 years after it was completed, the first non-wooden building he had ever been in and the last building he was in before leaving for the New World. Politically, he was my mentor. He came to America a committed socialist and, though he became a successful entrepreneur, he stayed true to his beliefs for his whole life. He used to tell me that there was "only one thing worse than the Democratic Party-- the Republican Party."

But... he abandoned the Socialist Party itself in 1936 and supported President Roosevelt, the first-- and last-- Democratic president he felt any enthusiasm for. The Jewish Daily Forward was already an old and established newspaper when my grandfather was starting to get involved with American politics. Today it is just known as The Forward and it has changed significantly. Like my grandfather, it used to be part of the Socialist movement... until FDR came along. Yesterday, reporter Talya Zax explained how that happened way back nearly a century ago.

"Nothing in this campaign happened to change my mind about there being no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties," Norman Thomas, the 1928 Socialist Party presidential nominee, wrote in a Forward column that appeared on Election Day that year, Nov. 6. "The question of who will win this election isn’t much more significant than the question of who will win the next big football game or the world series. Giving your vote to one of those two parties, that are so similar to one another, is what’s called tossing your vote away."

It was a statement completely in keeping with the politics of The Forward, which had, since its founding in 1897, consistently called for readers to vote the Socialist line.

But only eight years later, as Thomas sought the presidency for the third time, The Forward had shifted its stance on at least one of America’s two mainstream political parties. In a shocking move, our founding editor, Ab Cahan, endorsed the incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt-- a candidate whom he had described in 1932 as embodying the capitalist system against which The Forward was determinedly arrayed.

How could The Forward, which had built its reputation on its staunch Socialist politics, have gotten in bed with the Democrats?

The story begins with Eugene V. Debs, perhaps the most famous Socialist politician of the 20th century.

Debs first campaigned for the presidency in 1900, when President William McKinley, a Republican [and Karl Rove's favorite president], ran for reelection against Williams Jennings Bryan, the Democrat he had beaten four years before. It was the first national election since The Forward’s founding, and Debs’ campaign was rich fodder for the young Socialist paper.

On Nov. 5, 1900, after circulars were distributed in Indiana falsely claiming that Debs was leaving the race, The Forward rushed to his defense. "Since the campaign began, the capitalist newspapers and politicians throughout the country have tried to swindle the citizenry," a column about the incident noted. But the Forward had a telegram from Debs himself standing firm against the falsehoods. "McKinley and Bryan will resign in favor of me, rather than I for them," he wrote. "I stand in these fights until the bitter end." (The Forward's postscript to the telegram: "Politicians know Debs as a bone stuck in their throat… Tomorrow is the day their skin crawls.")

Debs' dedication to his cause reached an apex in 1920, when he ran for president from a prison in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was serving a 10-year sentence on charges of sedition. The Forward was as loyal as ever, reveling in his comparatively successful-- but still losing-- campaign.

"Debs’ vote… will explode like a bomb in the barracks of the capitalist classes," crowed a column on election results. "The 3 million citizens who have given their votes for the socialist candidate who sits behind iron bars because he fought courageously for his ideas and for the right of his ideas to be freely expressed-- that powerful voice will echo in the ears of the capitalist reaction that so arrogantly raged across the country over these last years and once and for all, rouse from slumber their sweet dream of having finally succeeded in choking and snuffing out the spirit of freedom and rebellion against their despotic rule."

But by the time Thomas ran his first race, two years after Debs' death in 1926, the political environment had slowly begun to change. The Soviet Union, which The Forward initially believed might show the world the benefits of living under socialism-- the paper was an early American publisher of Leon Trotsky-- was veering increasingly into authoritarianism. The conflict between the upper classes and the organized-labor movement, the latter of which was a core passion of The Forward's, was reaching a new apex after the 1927 execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. And while the economy was temporarily holding strong, seeds had been planted for the 1929 collapse that would instigate the Great Depression.

By the mid-1930s, a clear rift had opened between The Forward and the Socialist Party under Thomas. The Forward celebrated Roosevelt's New Deal for its substantial investments in organized labor; Thomas lambasted it as shoring up a capitalist system that had, in the economic collapse, once and for all proved its fundamental insufficiency. The Forward had been raising alarms about the threat of Hitler for years, and pushing for aid to Europe's Jews; Thomas was a committed anti-interventionist. And as The Forward's editors saw far-right forces on the rise in the United States, they increasingly saw a mandate to prioritize the defense of liberty over ideological purity.

It must have pained Cahan to step away from the party affiliations he had spent decades urging American Jews to cultivate, but as his 1936 endorsement of Roosevelt made clear, there was no helping it.

"In these elections, as we have come to see, there’s a lot at stake. We all stand to lose, or win, a lot in these elections," he wrote.

"And so we must not neglect our duty. Each of us must today give their vote for Roosevelt and Lehman as candidates of the American Labor Party. No vote should be lost today. Each of us with the right to vote, must use their right and their duty and must vote today. The time has come when, with our vote, we can influence and decide which side will be victorious-- the reactionary one or the progressive one, and in that decisive moment no one must permit their vote to be used simply as a means of protesting against the current capitalist system."

It was a strident call, especially from a man who had, for decades, argued the opposite approach. But no matter what his emotions on the occasion were, Cahan was clearly certain that if his readers followed him in making such a sharp political turn, they'd be working for the public good. "Our conscience," he wrote, "will then be clear."

 

A National Crossroads: The Needs of the Many or Wants of the Few?

In the fictional Star Trek universe, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

by Thomas Neuburger

The U.S. is at a national crossroads of world-historical proportions. Thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic we're headed for a collision, a heavy-engine oil train pileup, between two competing imperatives — does the nation serve the pathological wants of the few who control it or the immediate and existential needs of the many who live in it?

Long put off, this question can no longer be avoided. The few — the bankers and profiteers; investors and CEOs of all kinds and stripes; their well-paid enablers in the media and professional classes — think the corona virus emergency will pass and "business" (our modern, rapacious way of doing it) will eventually return to normal.

Thus for them, the current crisis represents once-in-a-generation opportunity for theft on the grandest of scales, the plundering of public goods and control in the time of greatest emergency. They think this theft, like the many similar others that went before it, will occur with no consequence for them and only long-term consequences for others — thefts like the 2000 election, which cost them nothing while adding to their power and credibility, but left a great many others broken or dead; or the theft of family fortunes and futures during the 2008 global meltdown, losses that even today only they have recovered from.

The Pain of the Many

In this they are wrong. True, when the pain of the many is slow to arrive, their response is slow as well. The theft of the 2000 election was without immediate consequences for the mass of those wronged by it. Men and women went off to war only later, killed without mercy and died without reason only after years had passed, and returned damaged or dead to the families they had left only in trickles, not floods.

The mass surveillance instituted by the Bush-Cheney regime, which too was a theft, affected people only slowly — at first because most were just dimly aware of it, and later because so few were materially harmed by it. People even now do not object to the constant governmental intrusion into their private lives, likely because so few feel its sting.

In the same way, the massive loss of wealth by the working class after 2008 — wealth they have still not regained — happened slowly, and in a nation filled with "back to normal" TV propaganda (you don't see the struggling depicted on spry network dramas and comedies) their constant pain has by now been normalized and accepted as just the way things are "for some people." (Those "some people," it must be noted, put Donald Trump in the White House.)

In contrast, the Great Depression struck suddenly, massively and nationally. In an instant the nation's people were cast into poverty and fear, with consequences they could see and feel in front of them almost the very next day — starvation, joblessness, homelessness, helplessness — a nation surprised in an instant by the collapse of their lives. That suddenness put Roosevelt in the White House, and thank God for that.

Sudden Crises and Sudden Responses

When calamities this large happen quickly — in a span of months, not decades — people respond as did the people of France. In 1789 a severe financial crisis forced the king to call the Estates-General, giving the people for the first time in a century a voice in the national outcome. That opened the gates, and barely two months later the Bastille was taken. The old regime had collapsed in a matter of weeks, never to return.

When societies do break apart, they often break quickly. Thus it will be here. In two months' time our grocery shelves have gone from stuffed to bare.

In one weeks' time, the barely-passed week of March 7-14, initial unemployment claims jumped by 33%, from 210,000 to over 280,000.

While jumps this large are not unusual, the Labor Department made it clear this one was corona virus crisis-related, a crisis that's in its infancy. "The increase in initial claims are clearly attributable to impacts from the COVID-19 virus," according to the BLS report. Layoffs are expected to increase for the duration of the pandemic, with predictions of unemployment above 20% not uncommon.

The Many or the Few?

Just as when the U.S. entered World War II, lives will be changing dramatically and fast. Clearly, government will have to step in massively and soon — and therein lies the problem. On whose side will government throw its weight? On the side of the pathological few or the side of the suffering many?

The answer to that question will determine the future of the nation. Will we more resemble the country of FDR and his widely loved government for the people, or that of Louis XVI and his overthrown government of the people. A crossroads indeed. Will the national needs of the many be honored and met? Or will the pathological few light a flame that burns us all?

Early indications aren't promising, but still, it's early days. Either way, we're not going back to what we used to call normal — the next new normal may be written in the next few months.
 

Does Trump Have The Coronavirus? Pence Too?

Fake Magic by Nancy Ohanian

You may only know Michael Gerson as a Washington Post columnist who leans right. But he's much worse than that. A member of the neolib warmonger Council on Foreign Relations and a top George W. Bush speechwriter from 2001 'til 2006 he can proudly take a great deal of credit for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq.

As you can probably imagine, he has a very different vision of the presidency than I do. I can think of no better short term solution to our current Trump-created disaster than Trump and Pence both getting coming down with severe cases of COVID-19 and dying quickly, first Trump and then, an hour later, Pence. An elite #NeverTrumper, his vision was in his column yesterday. "Every time Vice President Pence appears for a coronavirus briefing," he wrote, "it is a reminder what the votes of just 20 Republican senators for impeachment might have accomplished for the republic."

Pence is no Franklin D. Roosevelt, but neither is he an obviously outmatched leader like his boss. The vice president is a sycophant but not an incompetent. He possesses the type of qualities one might find in an effective governor facing a hurricane. President Trump possesses the qualities one might expect in a shady businessman trying to shift responsibility for bad debt and mismanagement-- which was the main leadership qualification on his pre-presidential résumé.

Never has the phrase "President Pence" had a better ring to it. Never have Republican votes against impeachment seemed more shortsighted and damaging to the country.

I’ll not deny that a presidential election is always something of a crap shoot. Before his own election as president, even FDR was no FDR. Walter Lippmann thought that the New York governor’s record showed “that he just doesn’t have a very good mind, that he never really comes to grips with a problem which has any large dimensions, and that above all the controlling element in almost every case is political advantage.”

Lippmann badly underestimated FDR. But we now have plenty of evidence to judge our current president. Trump just doesn’t have a very good mind-- or at least one capable of absorbing and repeating essential facts. He can’t come to grips with a problem that has large dimensions-- as displayed by his habitual lateness and indecision. And his controlling element is political-- particularly in his contemptible attempt to shift political blame.

The point here is not simply to condemn Trump, which has limited usefulness in the midst of a national crisis. At this point it is perhaps better to ignore him, which is precisely what governors and mayors across the country are doing to good effect. But Americans do need to recall this moment the next time they enter a voting booth.

In nominating and electing Trump, Republicans were making the claim that presidential character matters for nothing. That only his policy views and judicial appointments really count in the end.

Two months ago, every Republican senator except Sen. Mitt Romney publicly reaffirmed this argument. By voting against impeachment for Trump’s abuse of power, they were also denying that presidential temperament and judgment should be given serious weight in our public life. They were saying, in effect, that a trivial leader was sufficient for a trivial time. Who cares about integrity, wisdom and public spirit when the stock market is rising and the economy is booming?

They should have cared. We all should have cared.

It was impossible to elect Trump without mentally shrinking the presidency to fit him. A president, we were told, didn’t really need to have governing experience. He didn’t need to care about the truth. He didn’t need to be civil or unifying. He didn’t need to be a diplomat. He didn’t need to be a pastor.

But suddenly, governing skill is the antidote to panic. Trust in the truthfulness of public officials is essential to public health. Unified action is central to the safety of the vulnerable. Global cooperation is necessary for any national strategy to work. And leadership will increasingly require the ability to express empathy and to comfort those dealing with inexplicable loss.

It has recently been common in our politics to assert that the establishment has failed, that our institutions and systems are corrupt, and that we need political disrupters to shake things up or burn things down. This is now revealed as the political philosophy of spoiled children.

We no longer have the luxury of apocalyptic petulance or the language of faux revolution. We need trusted experts to carry hard truths. We need our systems and institutions to bear enormous weight. We need public officials to encourage an orderly urgency, to repair what is broken and to calm irrational fears.

Perhaps all these lessons will be quickly forgotten once the emergency is lifted. But it would be better if this period were known as the “Great Sobering,” when our country relearned the high stakes of politics, the indispensability of public character and the importance of a functioning president.

Meanwhile, since Gerson brought up FDR, let me ask you to imagine that the Democrats in Congress from 1932 on were as spineless and cowardly as the Democrats in Congress today. The Democrats whop passed the New Deal were nothing at all like the Democrats Wall Street Journal reporters Siobhan Hughes, Natalie Andrews and Kate Davidson wrote about yesterday, "The Democratic-led House scaled back a paid-leave program that the chamber had tried to enact days earlier, following pressure from businesses worried about financial burdens from the sweeping bill in response to the coronavirus crisis. In revised legislation that Democratic leaders billed as a technical correction, but represented a significant rewrite, the House modified a program aimed at providing paid leave to people affected by the coronavirus." Imagine Mitt Romney-- and even Trump-- getting to the left of Pelosi and her team of cowardly losers!

If John Oliver is going to continue doing his show during the pandemic, he absolutely needs a canned laugh track. Or maybe I'll just get used to this; he seems to have-- more or less:

All Left Hands On Deck!

According to the corporate media, Bernie is moving up and is now ready to win. That is a warning in their establishment universe and, as Norman Solomon noted in his own warning, Here It Comes: Get Ready for a Stop-Bernie Onslaught Like You've Never Seen. He predicts "a vast array of full-bore attacks" and "a massive escalation of anti-Sanders misinformation and invective… [T]he overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage-- synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party-- will range from condescending to savage."

With so much at stake-- including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party-- no holds will be barred. For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it’ll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.

While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that a Sanders presidency is a real possibility. The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets that distort options and encourage passivity.

Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it is done.”

From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.

Ron Brownstein warned in his essay for The Atlantic Friday that the country is on the verge of a deep and dangerous divide-- and that it goes beyond just Trump. “Whichever side ultimately prevails in November,” he wrote, “red and blue America are diverging along both demographic and geographic lines as sharply as at any other point in modern American history. The biggest lesson of the coming year may be that for all the divisiveness that President Donald Trump has stoked, the political divide may still continue to grow wider.” It isn’t something that would ever cross Brownstein’s mind, but the one person who would minimize this is the Independent senator from Vermont-- just as FDR did for nearly 2 decades. (Sure there were some professional conservatives who were always screeching about “Socialism!!!!” But what that yielded politically was, for example, a 1936 reelection that yielded:

• A 27,747,636 (60.8%) win over Alf Landon’s 16,679,543 votes (36.5%)
• An electoral college landslide of 523 to 8, FDR winning every state but Maine and Vermont.
• A U.S. Senate with just 17 Republicans left
• A House of Representatives with 334 Democrats (+ 8 from the Progressive Party and 5 from the Farmer-Labor Party) and 88 Republicans
• A gubernatorial landscape with 38 Democrats (+ one from the Farmer-Labor Party, one from the Progressive Party and one from the Non-Partisan League) and just 7 Republicans

The more the Republicans screamed “Socialism!!!!,” the more they united the country-- against them-- and the more elections they lost. OK-- back to Brownstein, who wrote that “The 2020 election looms as a ‘Battle of the Bulge’ between a Republican coalition that represents what America has been and a Democratic coalition that embodies what it is becoming. By all indications, turnout in next year’s election is poised to be the highest in decades, in part because so many Americans consider the stakes to be so high. Across the red and blue divide, it is now common to hear voters say they fear that the America they believe in will disappear if the other side prevails in 2020. That anxiety and antagonism has been building for years, but it has dramatically intensified since 2016. Trump is the first president since at least the Civil War to so directly kindle the nation’s political conflicts. He has governed almost entirely as the president of red America, excoriating his political opponents while wielding the power of the federal government to punish blue America. He has been unique among presidents in offering virtually no concessions to viewpoints outside of his coalition.” Thank God he was impeached. Now the voters should watch closely how Republican senators protect him and then move to remove each of them from office in a state where Democrats + independents can override red majorities-- this coming year in Arizona, North Carolina, Colorado, Maine, Iowa, Alaska, Georgia, Montana… even Texas and Kansas.

“The main dividing line between the parties, wrote Brownstein after the 2012 election, “had become attitudes toward the cultural, demographic, and even economic trends transforming the nation. Democrats now mobilize a ‘coalition of transformation’ centered on the young, nonwhite, and college-educated white voters comfortable with these changes-- most of whom are clustered in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Republicans, in turn, rely on a ‘coalition of restoration’ centered on groups of voters who feel most uneasy about, and even threatened by, these changes: disproportionately older, non-college-educated, and evangelical whites who live outside of metropolitan centers.” This separation continued growing in 2016 along this lines.

On the whole, polls suggest that the 2020 election will closely track 2016, with small changes among key groups potentially tipping the result. Democrats hope that revulsion at Trump’s behavior will help them make gains with traditionally Republican-leaning blue-collar white women and college-educated white men, and further boost their margins with college-educated white women, who have left the GOP in droves. Republicans believe that the strong economy and Trump’s swaggering style will lead them to make small gains with Hispanic and African American men, suppress any defections from the working-class white women who backed him in 2016, and prompt greater turnout among the party’s base.

Trump’s persistently low approval rating-- he is the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to crack 50 percent at any point in his tenure-- means he faces an uphill climb to win the popular vote. But he could still squeeze out another Electoral College victory without it. Like in 2016, the election will likely hinge on just a few states that could be decided by very small margins: Pennsylvania and Michigan, which both polls and the 2018 election results suggest lean slightly toward the Democrats; Florida and North Carolina, which lean toward Trump; and Wisconsin and Arizona, which sit precariously at the absolute tipping point between both parties.

It’s this combination of factors that makes American politics so uniquely volatile at this moment. The country is deeply divided between two equally matched coalitions: Neither side has been able to establish a durable advantage over the other for the past half century. Since 1968, one party has simultaneously controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate for only 14 years. The past four times a president went into a midterm election with unified control of government, most recently Trump in 2018, voters revoked it. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can truly be confident about the outcome of the presidential race in 2020, and while each party might be favored to hold the congressional chamber it now controls, neither advantage is impregnable.

The long-term demographic trends in the electorate-- more racial diversity, more college graduates, more urbanization, more voters who aren’t Christian-- benefit Democrats, but those advantages are offset by signs that those very changes are leading more white voters wary about them to back Trump. Republicans think they can squeeze out larger margins from shrinking groups; as a long-term strategy, that’s a dicey proposition. But it could prevail in the near term, especially since both the Electoral College and the Senate benefit small states that remain mostly white and Christian. Amid such closely balanced contending forces, both parties live in constant fear that even the tiniest of blunders will lead to victory for the other.

That the parties are growing in their differences only compounds that fear. Election outcomes now produce whiplash-inducing reversals in policy outcomes, since the two sides represent coalitions with such divergent priorities and preferences. Polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute captured that separation: In an October survey, 92 percent of voters who approved of Trump said Republicans are working “to protect the American way of life against outside threats,” while 75 percent of voters who disapproved of him said the GOP has been taken over by racists. Conversely, three-fourths of Trump approvers said Democrats have been taken over by socialists, while three-fourths of those who disapproved of him said the Democratic Party is endeavoring to make capitalism work better for average Americans.

Separate polling from Pew has found that Democrats and Republicans hold views of the other that are growing more negative, with GOP partisans especially likely to view Democrats as immoral and unpatriotic. While most Democrats in the Pew poll indicated that they would prefer their party to seek common ground with the other, most Republicans did not-- attitudes that explain both the appeal to Democratic voters of former Vice President Joe Biden’s promise to seek bipartisan cooperation if elected and the widespread skepticism among leaders in both parties that he’s likely to obtain it.

These underlying trends will endure whichever side wins control of the White House and Congress next year. The relentless geographic and demographic sorting of the parties means that the two coalitions more and more inhabit separate realities: Nationally, Clinton beat Trump in the 2016 popular vote by a little more than two percentage points, but 60 percent of Americans lived in counties that were decided by 20 points or more, according to calculations by Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort. (That was up from just one-fourth of Americans living in such landslide counties in 1976 and half as recently as 2012.) It’s possible, maybe even likely, that this divide will widen in 2020, with diverse major metropolitan areas rejecting Trump by even larger margins than in 2016, while predominantly white, rural areas rally behind him more firmly.

The outcome of the 2020 election will have enormous consequences on many fronts, but beyond all the immediate implications, it’s likely to stand as a milestone in the country’s long-term separation. The racial, religious, class, generational, and geographic trench between the parties may look even more impassable after November than it does today. Each party is understandably focused on ensuring that its side of the political divide turns out in slightly greater numbers than the other side, but the growth of the divide itself may be the dominant dynamic shaping American politics in the years ahead.

Bernie Has Another Plank For The Most Phenomenal Platform Anyone Has Ever Run On-- High Speed Internet For All

In the 1920s, conservatives were suspicious of-- and hysterical about-- rural electrification proposals... you know, "Socialism!!!" So President Franklin Roosevelt had to get the ball rolling with an executive order (May 11, 1935). At the time, just 3% of farms and ranches were electrified. A year later, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act which was bitterly opposed by the same kind of corporate Republicans who oppose all progress that aims to make the lives of working class Americans better today. The legislation was bipartisan and bicameral-- drafted by Senator George Norris (R-NE) and Congressman Sam Rayburn (D-TX). But, for working on behalf of his rural constituents, Norris was viciously attacked by reactionary Republicans. Pro-Nazi fascist Republican Henry Ford, for example called Norris a "socialist" for supporting public electric power through the 1933 Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the Rural Electrification Administration, and successfully led a movement to force Norris out the Republican Party. In 1936, Norris ran-- and won-- as an independent New Dealer.

Little known fact: In 1962, raving right-wing lunatic Ronald Reagan was fired from his job as the long time host of the hugely popular TV series, General Electric Theater because he kept giving speeches attacking the TVA as one of the problems of "big government." At that time the TVA was one of the biggest customers in the world of General Electric's turbines. In any case, much of the work that the Rural Electrification Administration did in homes 7 and 8 decades ago, is still in existence today, although much of it has been augmented to support a greater number and variety of appliances in rural homes. There were many reasons Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency in 1964 but one was his call for the U.S. government to sell the TVA. In fact. the two states whose economies were most impacted by the TVA, Tennessee and Kentucky-- blood red today-- voted against Goldwater by huge margins. LBJ won Tennessee 55.50% to 44.49% and Kentucky went blue 64.01% to 35.65%.

Today, as Bernie explained, "high-speed internet is central to the basic functions of families, students, and businesses. Small businesses often cannot exist without it. Access to health care often depends on it. Yet across the country, huge swaths of the population lack access to an internet connection or cannot afford the options available. Millions lack any internet provider in their area and tens of millions are trapped with only one option. High prices keep internet out of reach for working families in both rural and urban areas." Here's his point and why those is a campaign issue-- for him, though not for any of the other candidates:

High-speed internet service must be treated as the new electricity-- a public utility that everyone deserves as a basic human right. And getting online at home, at school, or at work shouldn’t involve long waits, frustrating phone calls, and complex contracts and fees meant to trap and trick consumers. It should just work.

The internet as we know it was developed by taxpayer-funded research, using taxpayer-funded grants in taxpayer-funded labs. Our tax dollars built the internet and access to it should be a public good for all, not another price gouging profit machine for Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.

Internet, telecom, and cable monopolies exploit their dominant market power to gouge consumers and lobby government at all levels to keep out competition. And they don’t provide service to anyone who can’t afford it, or install it in areas where it won’t make them as much money as their shareholders demand.

Their greed must end. Verizon made more than $45 billion in profits over the last two years, and last year their CEO took home more than $22 million in compensation. Comcast made more than $34 billion over the last two years and paid their CEO more than $35 million in 2018. AT&T took $3 billion from Trump’s tax cut and cut 23,000 jobs while their CEO pocketed $29 million last year. With no incentive to innovate or invest, these conglomerates charge sky-high internet prices to reap profits from consumers, and they collect government subsidies to provide service to rural households while still leaving millions of Americans unconnected.

It’s time to take this critical 21st century utility out of the hands of monopolies and conglomerates and bring it to the people while creating good-paying, union jobs at the same time. This is not a radical idea. Cities across the country deliver municipality-owned, high-speed internet to their residents, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Lafayette, Louisiana.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised to deliver electricity to every home in America in 1935, a time when 90 percent of rural households lacked it. Ten years later, his promise was largely fulfilled, transforming the standard of living for millions of Americans. Farmers could finally refrigerate milk. We already know how to provide affordable, high-speed internet, but conglomerates continue to monopolize the industry and provide the country with inadequate coverage and service. Bernie fought against this monopolization in 1996, when legislation passed into law that gave free reign to monopolize markets and gouge consumers. Enough is enough. When Bernie is president, every American household will have affordable, high-speed internet by the end of his first term. This investment will provide every community the internet they need for their homes, educational systems, small businesses, health clinics, and more.

The geographic disparities of internet access are stark: in rural communities, more than 31 percent of Americans still lack access to what the Trump FCC defines as broadband. In urban areas, low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately lack access to broadband and millions more can’t afford to subscribe to broadband services. The United States ranks just tenth of 22 in a comparison with European countries in broadband deployment.

The situation is even worse for under-resourced groups, communities of color, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. White, educated households are more likely to have broadband internet than households in communities of color. More than 80 percent of white households have home internet, compared to only 70 percent of Latino households and 68 percent of Black households. The FCC has reported that less than half of rural tribal areas have access to high-speed internet. Roughly one in four people with disabilities say they do not use the internet, and people with disabilities are 20 percent less likely to have broadband. We must end these disparities by connecting every household in America to high-speed internet, regardless of their income or zip code.

Municipalities across the country running their own internet services have proved they can deliver high-quality service at a fraction of the price of established monopolies. Cities can run their own networks just like a water or electric utility or build out an open access network to allow multiple providers to compete on price and service, rather than one or two conglomerates gouging customers and setting their own prices. Bernie believes it’s time to stop relying on profit-focused corporations to get to universal broadband. Bernie will provide the necessary funding for states, cities, and co-ops to build out their own broadband networks, and ensure all households are connected by the end of his first term.

This is what Bernie is promising to do when he replaces Trump in 2021:

• Deliver access to high-speed broadband internet to everyone in the United States by building out the necessary resilient, modern infrastructure.
• Provide $150 billion through the Green New Deal in infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities and/or states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.

• Condition grants on strong labor, wage and sourcing standards to ensure that federal funding goes toward creating good-paying union jobs and ensure all funded projects cannot subcontract work to evade labor law through the Workplace Democracy Plan.
• Condition grants on universal service, provisioning minimum speeds, privacy standards and affordability
• Reform the Universal Service Fund and establish dedicated funding from general revenue to the existing programs, ending regressive contributions from providers are passed onto consumers.
• Establish a dedicated, accelerated last-mile fund through the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service to provide capital funding to connect all remote rural households and businesses and upgrade outdated technology and infrastructure, prioritizing funding for existing co-ops and small rural utilities.
• Set aside $7.5 billion of this funding to expand high-speed broadband in Indian Country and fully resource the FCC’s Office of Native Affairs and Policy.

• Preempt the 19 state laws, largely written and lobbied for by internet service provider monopolies, that limit or bar municipal and publicly-owned broadband.
• Ensure all public housing provides free broadband services to residents.
• Ensure people with disabilities have full access to the internet.

• Aggressively enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure the accessibility of the Internet, cloud-based applications, and internet-connected devices.
• Ensure full Section 508 compliance, including making sure government agencies can receive ASL video calls from deaf people.
• Ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
• Develop regulations to expand the availability and quality of closed captioning and audio description on internet platforms.
• Reinforce and expand the national and state equipment distribution programs for people with disabilities.
• Reinforce and expand the availability and quality of accessible modern telecom services to ensure everyone who needs these services receives them.

• Expand the E-Rate and Rural Health Support programs to ensure all schools, libraries, hospitals and other essential community facilities are connected equitably and affordably and provide dedicated funding to ensure these facilities on Tribal Lands are connected.

Nor is this all Bernie is determined to do along these lines. Costs too high. "The problem goes beyond a lack of basic access to internet services," he wrote. "Access to high-speed internet means nothing if you cannot afford your bill. Microsoft found an estimated 163 million people in this country might not currently use the internet at minimum broadband speeds. That’s because the internet in this country costs too damn much. American consumers who are connected are forced to pay more for less. The United States ranks 10th of 28 countries in average broadband speeds and 18th out of 23 countries in fixed broadband prices, charging double the prices of. Only 54 percent of households with incomes below $20,000 have home internet, compared to nearly 90 percent of households with incomes above $100,000. Affordability and digital literacy are major barriers to internet usage for low-income households and seniors. The internet was invented in America. We should be the world leader in providing fast, affordable service. We must also invest in digital adoption and literacy, ensuring when affordable service is provided, all can fully utilize the benefits. Large internet service providers have enjoyed government funding, protection from competition, and light regulation while gouging customers with some of the highest prices for service in the world. Bernie will regulate these providers like a utility. The FCC will review prices and regulate rates where necessary, ensuring areas without competition aren’t able to run up prices. We will also require providers to offer a basic plan for a regulated rate to all customers, ensuring everyone will be able to affordably connect to the internet."

Bernie has been very clear that he intends to break up and regulate internet and cable monopolies. He wrote that "Telecom and cable monopolies exploit their dominant market power to gouge consumers and lobby government at all levels to keep out competition. Just four companies control nearly two-thirds of the entire market. Prices are as much as 25 percent higher than they would be in a competitive broadband market. Large ISP monopolies report inaccurate or overstated coverage information, obscure their prices, and often don’t deliver promised speeds." And by the way, that ActBlue thermometer on the right is a way you can contribute to Bernie's campaign and make sure all these proposals and promises come to fruition. I can guarantee you Status Quo Joe or Trump will never deal with any of them.

Bernie foresaw what deregulation and consolidation of cable giants would do to consumers. He was one of just a handful of Congressmembers to vote against the 1996 Telecommunications Act, arguing against the bill on the House floor:

“Mr. Chairman, this telecommunications bill cripples consumer protections and should be soundly rejected. It is being touted as pro-consumer when, in reality, it will cause inflated rates and will limit consumer choice. It is touted as pro-competition when it actually promotes mergers and the concentration of power.”

This legislation set the groundwork for the light touch regulation and monopolization of the broadband market that we see today. We will break these monopolies up and closely regulate them to ensure they are providing consumers with acceptable service, and eliminate hidden fees, surprise bills, and other consumer-gouging practices.

What's he going to do about it? First off, "Use existing antitrust authority to break up internet service provider and cable monopolies and bar service providers from also providing content and unwind anticompetitive vertical conglomerates." He also intends to Classify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II and reinstate net neutrality regulations while working with Congress to codify net neutrality protections into law to prevent a future FCC from repealing them once again. He promises to appoint members of the FCC who will use Title II authority to promote competition, choice, and affordability for broadband service and he will require price transparency, advertised speed accuracy, and granular service data for large, private broadband providers, while eliminating hidden fees, including surprise billing, and require internet and cable providers to clearly state the cost of service, ban unexpected rate increases, and end service termination fees.

He also intends to build resilient communications networks as part of his infrastructure plan for the country. "Our outdated and dangerous national infrastructure is not ready to withstand impacts like floods, hurricanes, or wildfires," he wrote. "When extreme weather events hit, communities can be left without the life-saving communications tools and information they need... Internet access and communications infrastructure are critical to the decade of the Green New Deal, a ten-year, nationwide mobilization centered around justice and equity during which climate change will be factored into virtually every area of policy. With our $150 billion investment in resilient, affordable, publicly owned broadband infrastructure, we willI ensure that communities stay connected during natural disasters. This communications infrastructure will ensure first responders and communities are ready to deal with the worst climate emergencies."

Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba is running for a seat to represent a large and largely rural Oregon congressional district in the heads of very reactionary Blue Dog Kurt Schrader who can be counted on to not support Bernie's initiatives. Gamba told us that he has "long believed that high speed internet should be a public utility similar to other necessities like water and sewer. It has been on my to-do list as a mayor, but since that list is long and intense, we’ve had to prioritize issues like climate change, safe routes to school and affordable housing. In our region, an even smaller city than Milwaukie, Sandy Oregon, did choose to roll out gigabit service to their residents who didn’t have any high-speed access. It turns out that they’ve been able to provide better service than what the rest of us experience from Comcast, at half the price. The main reason we haven’t done it is the upfront expense for building out the system. The U.S. government could easily create a zero-interest loan process that helped cities and counties with that initial investment and be paid back within a decade or so. I totally agree with Senator Sanders that we need to break the death grip that the telecom giants have on this critical piece of infrastructure and make sure that every family has fast internet access so that parents can start a business or apply for a job and kids have the opportunity to succeed on their homework which, more and more depends on internet access. As a member of congress I would work to make sure that the rural and low income areas of America were prioritized in this rollout."

Jon Hoadley is a Kalamazoo area state legislator running for Congress against reactionary Trumpist Fred Upton. "Districts like mine in southwest Michigan," he told us this morning, "need high speed rural broadband access now. When we have some of our neighbors who can't get online quickly and easily, and even some neighbors who can't reliable cell phone service, we are limiting people's freedom and opportunities. Big telecom companies aren't going to be jumping in to help any time soon. If we want thriving rural communities, we need to invest in rural communities with bold ideas that face these challenges head on."

This morning, two California progressive candidates, for whom-- and for whose districts' residents-- rural broadband is an important issue, sent us statements of their own visions. Audrey Denney is running in the far northeast largely rural corner of the state. "Lack of broadband internet and cell service in large areas of the North State," she told us, "inhibit access to public safety resources, education, services, and economic opportunities. Investment in improving our communications networks will revitalize our rural economy by helping local businesses prosper and encouraging economic investment in the north state. Improving access to phone and internet will also help all people access the resources, knowledge, and skills they need to improve their livelihoods and quality of life."

Kim Williams, a former diplomat under Obama, wrote that when she meets with constituents "we frequently talk about how this district can look dramatically different in a few years or how it could look exactly the same. This resonates with many people because so many things have remained stagnant. And while there are many parts of California that are thriving, the Central Valley is not. We desperately need policies that can rebuild communities from the ground up and acknowledge every basic need wealthier Americans take for granted. And we need the might of the federal government to do this. Most of our local electeds have remained laser focused on pleasing a handful of wealthy campaign donors when we've needed a government that can lift up everyone. Universal access to high speed internet would do just that. It would ensure everyone could access the doctor when they needed it and not weeks later. It would ensure our workforce (one third of which do not have a high school degree) could skill up for the changing job market, and it would open up remote jobs to thousands of people across the Valley. In short, access to the internet would be life changing for hundreds of thousands of people in my district."


 

Bernie Sanders, Organized Labor & the Use of Force

Striking mill workers facing off with National Guardsmen in Greenville, S.C., in 1934. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

by Thomas Neuburger

     Power concedes nothing without a demand. 
     —Frederick Douglass

One of the things I worry about in the coming election is not just whether a progressive will be elected, but whether enough of a progressive will be elected. I've written about that previously — see "Thoughts on Warren and Sanders: How Much Change Is Needed in 2021?" — but there's a lot more to say on the subject.

One example of Sanders' more aggressive-progressive approach to both policy and process was recently captured in, interestingly, the New York Times, and by, also interestingly, former Hillary Clinton supporter Jamelle Bouie. (For an example of Bouie's 2016 Clintonism, see "Bernie Sanders' Scorched Earth Run Against Hillary Clinton Is a Mistake").

And yet Bouie is onto something — that the fight against a radically entrenched, radically anti-worker establishment must be engaged with force, not negotiation or the use of insider leverage alone.

That argument makes itself. To quote the great Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." And more often than not, that demand must be backed by enough force to make the demand impossible to ignore. It must be accompanied by an "offer that can't be refused."

From Bouie's article on Sanders' needed radicalism, here's his retelling of the turbulent, violently repressed yet successful labor strikes of the 1930s. Consider the force these labor actions represent, and consider if anything less would have worked. Also consider how far labor leaders are today from anything like these approaches.

First, Bouie discusses Sanders' radical labor proposals (emphasis mine):

The Necessary Radicalism of Bernie Sanders

His plan to enhance workplace democracy puts the strike back where it belongs: at the center of political power.

... [T]he most important parts of Sanders’s plan have to do with striking and other powerful levers. He would give federal employees the right to strike and ban the permanent replacement of any striking workers. He would also end the prohibition on secondary boycotts, which keeps workers from pressuring “neutral” employers — like suppliers and other service providers — in the course of an action against their “primary” employer. This prohibition closes an important avenue for collaboration among workers. Lifting the restriction would open new paths for collective action.

This push to enhance workers’ freedom to strike is more consequential than it might look at first glance. Conflict was the engine of labor reform in the 1930s. And mass strikes and picketing, in particular, pushed the federal government to act.

In the post-war era, labor has been successively hobbled by these restriction, each encoded into law. Then Bowie tells the story of the mass strikes of the mid-1930s that forced passage of the Roosevelt-era pro-labor laws in the first place.

It's an amazing, inspiring, impossible-to-believe-in-today's-environment tale:

In 1934, the historian Irving Bernstein writes in “The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941,” “there were 1856 work stoppages involving 1,470,000 workers, by far the highest count in both categories in many years.” In that year, nearly five years into the Great Depression, “labor’s mood was despair compounded with hope.”

The despair was self-explanatory. The hope came from the growing conviction that workers had to act of their own accord — to, Bernstein wrote, “take matters into their own hands and demonstrate their collective power to recalcitrant employers through the strike.” And strike they did.

In Toledo, Ohio, for example, workers demanding union recognition organized a strike against Electric Auto-Lite, an automobile parts manufacturer, and its related firms. When Auto-Lite and its partners hired strikebreakers and kept their factories open, the union worked with the American Workers Party, a small, radical political party that organized jobless workers to keep them from breaking strikes.

Together, unionists and labor radicals led mass pickets against Auto-Lite. Thousands of workers, employed and unemployed, surrounded the plant. Fighting broke out when a strikebreaker attacked a striker. The police and company guards attacked, and a battle ensued. The National Guard arrived and the fighting continued. In their attempt to break the siege and evacuate the strikebreakers, troops killed two strikers and injured more than a dozen others. After a week of violence, Auto-Lite agreed to close the factory. The next month, after additional mass protests and the threat of a general strike, the company backed down, recognizing the union and agreeing to rehire the strikers.

Mass pickets appeared elsewhere in the country. Late that summer, the United Textile Workers of America called a national strike, demanding union recognition and a shorter workweek. Hundreds of thousands of workers formed pickets at mills as far north as Maine and as far south as Alabama. “This strike now in progress,” Joseph Shaplen reported in The New York Times, “is obviously a mass movement.”

The strike was most active in North and South Carolina, where strikers closed hundreds of plants. “Moving with the speed and force of a mechanized army,” Shaplen wrote in a Sept. 4, 1934, report, “thousands of pickets in trucks and automobiles scurried the countryside in the Carolinas, visiting mill towns and villages and compelling the closing of the plants.” He continued: “The growing mass character of the picketing operations is rapidly assuming the appearance of military efficiency and precision and is something entirely new in the history of American labor struggles.”

Of course, the reaction to the Auto-Lite strike from those in power was violence:

Mill owners and management responded with private militiamen and armed strikebreakers, all backed by state and local authorities. A police officer killed a picketer in Augusta, Ga. In one South Carolina mill town, sheriff’s deputies fired on picketers, killing seven. In Rhode Island, armed state troopers — equipped with machine guns — drove a crowd of 600 strikers from a mill that refused to close. And during a confrontation in Burlington, N.C., soldiers bayoneted several picketers.

Bayonets, machine guns, the arsenal of the State in defense of ... I have to say it ... capital and its owners. This is what labor, working people, always face when they resist the wishes of wealth.

Finally, the Roosevelt administration capitulated to the strikers: "The strike ended when the Board of Inquiry for the Cotton Textile Industry, established by President Franklin Roosevelt at the start of the strike, issued its report, which recommended a federal study of work conditions and pay." The unions' leaders declared a victory and ended the strike — to the great and bitter disappointment of the striking workers, I might add, since even under Roosevelt workers didn't trust government to ultimately side with them when the final report was issued.

There were many other strikes in 1934; it was a turbulent year:

The year saw many other monumental strikes. After the San Francisco police killed four workers in a confrontation with striking longshoremen and their allies, local unions announced a general strike. More than 150,000 workers left their jobs, paralyzing the city. And in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in solidarity with a Teamsters strike in the city.

It was this widespread labor struggle — as well as an overwhelming victory for New Deal Democrats in the 1934 midterms — that created new space for political action in 1935. Senator Robert Wagner of New York introduced a labor bill that would give workers “the right to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” Facing re-election and eager to shore up support from labor, Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act that summer.

That's how the National Labor Relations Act got passed — not because labor asked, or negotiated, or leveraged deals with insiders, cleverly and carefully trading one thing for another. The law was passed because FDR had two choices — do what Hoover had done and call out the army (thus risking his support in the 1936 election), or give in to labor's demands because those demands were backed by a force — constant and national strikes — that no one could ignore.

Sanders' radical plan, which is curiously and academically called his "theory of change," is plainly and simply the massive use of force — the wielding of his multi-million-person mailing list to mobilize anti-establishment resistance and demand that his policies be passed.

These days, given how entrenched insiders are in their force-defended world, I don't trust anything but outside force to dethrone them. Let us negotiate with them after we've given them no other choice, not before. For example, consider what a nationwide general strike would do today to the balance of power in the U.S.

Any course of action — any "theory of change" — that doesn't depend primarily on force is doomed, I fear, to fail. And if it does fail, I also fear for the fragile, pre-revolutionary nation it attempted to save.
  

Wall Street Banksters Like A Lot Of Candidates Besides Just Status Quo Joe-- But They Hate And Fear Just One: Bernie

When Wall Street came after Franklin Roosevelt-- snd did they ever!-- he laughed in their faces and the American people gave him 4 terms. In fact, when he was reelected in 2036, when the banksters and Republicans were screaming "Socialism!" FDR beat Republican Alf Landon 27,747,636 (60.8%) to 16,679,543 (36.5%). FDR took every state but Maine and Vermont and won the electoral college 523 to 8. The Republicans were left with just 88 members in the House and 17 in the Senate. As for turnout... first let me run the turnout by you in the last 10 elections.

• 1980- Reagan v Carter- 52.6%
• 1984- Reagan v Mondale- 53.3%
• 1988- Bush v Dukakis- 50.2%
• 1992- Clinton v Bush- 55.2%
• 1996- Clinton v Dole- 49.0%
• 2000- Bush v Gore- 51.2%
• 2004- Bush v Kerry- 56.7%
• 2008- Obama v McCain- 58.2%
• 2012- Obama v Romney- 54.9%
• 2016- Trumpanzee v Hillary- 55.7%

So FDR is 1936? His massive win was powered by an absolutely eye-popping 61.0% turnout. And that grew even further to a 62.5% turnout in 1940. People really do come out when Democrats give them a reason to-- and not just a choice between a lesser and greater evil. Listen to how Franklin Roosevelt handled the screams of "Socialism!" from the banksters and the Republican Party in 1936:





During a 2015 primary debate, the moderator asked Bernie if corporate America will love a President Sanders. Bernie's response: "No, I think they won't... The CEOs if large multinationals may like Hillary; they ain't going to like me. And Wall Street is going to like me even less! And the reasons for that, is we've got to deal with the elephant in the room, which is the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street... We have got to break the large financial institutions up. I don't think I'm going to get a whole lot of campaign contributions from Wall Street... I don't want campaign contributions from corporate America... The greed of the billionaire class, the greed of Wall Street is destroying this economy and is destroying the lives of millions of Americans. We need an economy that works for the middle class and not just a handful of billionaires and I will fight and lead to make that happen."

And today Bernie still welcomes their contempt. Wall Street executives and corporate PACs are pouring contributions into the campaign coffers of Status Quo Joe, Kamala Harris and McKinsey Pete.

Biden made explicit at a fund-raiser last Monday in Washington that he does not plan to demonize the financial industry like some rivals have, saying that “Wall Street and significant bankers” can “be positive influences in the country.” (As a senator for Delaware, Mr. Biden was regarded as an ally of financial institutions in the state, such as the credit card industry.)

Donors described various doubts about even their favored candidates: Mr. Biden’s age, say, or Mr. Buttigieg’s inexperience, or whether Ms. Harris’s political skills will play on the biggest stage.

“If you could roll all three of them into a single candidate,” Ms. Smoot said, “you’d have the perfect candidate.”

One of the most surprising developments of the 2020 race is how quickly Mr. Buttigieg, a virtual unknown only a few months ago, has vaulted into competition with Mr. Biden and other leading candidates for top party donors in New York and elsewhere.

One common message from the banksters though is that they're back anyone but Bernie. Creepy multimillionaire MSNBC anchor Donnie Deutsch-- a Wall Street fruit fly-- has said he'll vote for any Democrat over Trump except... "a socialist."

I'm going to quote very briefly from an excellent New York Magazine Wednesday piece by Eric Levitz, America’s Political System Is Rigged Against the Left (and Always Has Been). "[T]he left has been predominantly urban since (at least) the dawn of industrialization. Early in the 20th century, socialist and labor parties arose to represent the burgeoning proletariat. This was an enviable social base in numerical terms. But since such workers were densely packed into company towns, or the manufacturing districts of major cities, left-wing parties inevitably punched below their weight in winner-take-all legislative elections. Labor parties would 'waste' votes by running up the score in a few districts, while their rivals secured narrow plurality victories in many districts. Between 1890 and 1907, Germany’s Social Democrats won the most votes of any party in every single election but never won the most seats; some years, their main conservative rival claimed twice as many votes in parliament, despite winning a million fewer ballots.

Democrats have drawn disproportionate support from urban voters since the New Deal. But the party’s overreliance on underrepresented urbanites has grown more severe and problematic in recent decades. Before the civil-rights movement’s triumphs, the Democrats’ grip on the segregationist South blotted out the electoral disadvantages that came with being the party of northern cities. And even after Republicans began painting the South red, “blue dog” Democrats succeeded in distancing themselves from their party’s urban Establishment, crafting regional identities that enabled them to compete in low-density areas. But over the past three decades, as American politics grew ever-more nationalized-- and social issues (which divide city and country more sharply than fiscal ones) grew in salience-- conservative voters stopped splitting their tickets and the right secured an overwhelming structural advantage in U.S. politics.

This development is an underappreciated cause of the mounting tensions in Nancy Pelosi’s caucus. The concentration of left-wing voters in urban districts bifurcates the Democrats’ House majority between lawmakers with overwhelmingly progressive, urban constituencies, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and those who represent Republican-leaning areas, like Oklahoma’s Kendra Horn. The progressives believe-- quite rightly-- that much of their agenda commands majority support. But moderates can reply, with equal accuracy, that their party can’t retain power by pleasing a mere majority of the voting public...

[S]ince social identity tends to influence voter behavior more profoundly than policy details, the Democratic Party’s association with left-wing city dwellers can undermine its candidates in low-density areas, where many voters feel alienated from urban liberals (and/or nonwhite communities). This is why GOP ad-makers worked so incessantly to tie Democratic candidates to “San Francisco liberal” Nancy Pelosi ahead of the 2018 midterms, and why Fox News has proved so eager to make Ocasio-Cortez the face of Team Blue in the election’s aftermath, and why many (though not all) swing-district Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the AOCs of the world. It is also, likely, one reason why Pelosi is currently going out of her way to marginalize her caucus’s most progressive freshmen (the nefarious influence of Reagan’s ghost may be another).

...There is a less-improbable path to modest structural reform: If Democrats can leverage Trump’s unpopularity (and/or a declining economy) into a 2020 landslide large enough to deliver them a slim Senate majority, then they could theoretically abolish the filibuster and grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and various other U.S. territories on a party-line vote. This would do little to correct the underrepresentation of urban voters in the upper chamber but it would mitigate that of nonwhite Americans. Then again, this would require a level of political courage and party discipline that Chuck Schumer’s caucus shows no signs of possessing.

More plausibly, Democrats in deep-blue states could mitigate their party’s disadvantage in the House by gerrymandering more aggressively. If the party disavowed the notion that districts should be compact or contiguous, then Empire State Democrats could chop New York City into pieces and put at least one hefty chunk of urban voters into each and every one of their state’s congressional districts. Then again, this would cost Democratic incumbents a modicum of job security and could inspire popular backlash.

If urban America’s structural disadvantages can’t be mitigated, perhaps urban-rural polarization can be. Democrats could try to increase the salience of bread-and-butter issues to residents of low-density areas by formulating an agenda that addresses rural America’s very real economic problems. Or the party could tolerate (even) more triangulation from aspiring “blue dogs” in light-red territory (although such a strategy would risk alienating the party’s core supporters and further inflaming intra-Democratic tensions).

Or perhaps, demography will solve Democrats’ problem for them. In recent years, the Republican Party has grown more reliant on its rural, socially reactionary base-- while America’s suburbs have grown more racially diverse and ideologically progressive. Liberal cities’ passion for exclusionary zoning seems to be expediting the latter process by forcing would-be urban leftists to settle for suburban sprawl. Which is awful for the environment and the economy, but good for the left’s political representation (go NIMBYs, go?). Meanwhile, the sprawling geography of America’s fast-growing Sun Belt cities is also dispersing cosmopolitans more widely across space, thereby reducing their underrepresentation. For these reasons, among others, it’s possible that the Democrats’ success in traditionally Republican suburbs last fall was not a one-off reaction to Donald Trump but the beginning of a realignment. And if America’s suburbs do turn durably blue, then the tables could turn: Support for Republicans could become so heavily concentrated in rural areas that winner-take-all districting starts hurting the right more than the left. Demography isn’t destiny. But if demographic change (or some kind of political revolution) does not radically reshape America’s electoral terrain, perpetual disempowerment may be the left’s fate.

And this is what they want for president instead. Please, let's not be fooled again!