Don't Be So Sure The Democratic Party Has Moved Left The Way The Corporate Media Says It Has

The Morning Consult poll released by Politico this morning shows an electorate moving sharply left... at least on taxing the super-wealthy. The two party establishments may not like the progressive tax reform ideas Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and AOC are bringing up, but the voters do-- overwhelmingly. The Morning Consult poll shows 76% of registered voters believe the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. A recent Fox News survey showed that 70% of Americans favor AOC's proposal that taxes need to go up on those earning over $10 million-- including 54% of Republicans. Warren's wealth tax proposal is opposed by just 20% of voters, while 61% want to see it enacted. "It’s not surprising to me at all," said Senator Warren. "Washington has been working so long for the billionaire class that people around here cannot imagine crossing them. It never even becomes a topic of conversation. The ultra-millionaires have gotten so much from this country that it’s not unreasonable to ask them to give back a little bit."

The numbers suggest the political ground upon which the 2020 pres-idential cam-paign will be fought is shifting in dramatic ways, reflecting the rise in inequality in the United States and growing concerns in the electorate about the fairness of the American system.

“There is a deep wellspring in terms of perception of unfairness in the economy that’s been tapped into here that either didn’t exist five years ago or existed and had not had a chance to be expressed,” said Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management who has studied the latest tax proposals. “This is quite a moment in American economic history where all of a sudden in a matter of months this thing has kind of exploded like this.”

Voters seem to be moving left a lot faster than the status quo-oriented Democratic Party establishment is. Nevertheless, writing for The Intercept early Sunday morning, Shaun King exclaimed cautious optimism about the 2020 Democratic Party. Obviously, no one needs King to tell us that 2016 was a disaster that "caused real harm to legions of everyday Americans." One of the reasons he's optimistic is because he sees the party embracing progressive ideas.

A few years ago, if you supported “Medicare for All,” you were probably either a hippie, a Bernie supporter, or both. Today, polls show that 70 percent of Americans like it, and mainstream Democrats are finally embracing it publicly. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began talking about how essential it is that the United States embrace a “Green New Deal,” on Day 1 her idea only had support from a few of her closest allies in government. In just a few weeks’ time, you’d now struggle to find a Democrat who doesn’t support it. Speaking of Ocasio-Cortez, she’s got the entire country talking about finally making the ultra-rich pay their fair share of taxes. And a few years ago, I struggled to find a single mainstream Democrat talking about ending cash bail or decriminalizing weed-- now those are basic talking points for presidential candidates.

I’m glad about all of this, but here’s why I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s easy as hell to talk about your bold policy choices when your party doesn’t have the power to enact them. I just want to make sure the Democrats don’t lose their nerve when it matters most.

Not 70% of the Democrats in Congress-- not even half

I'm less optimistic than Shaun. He thinks that because the presidential candidates have been hiring minority staffers there's a better chance that they won't-- let's call it-- sell out or wimp out. Good luck with that, buddy. That Julián Castro hired an amazing black woman, a highly skilled organizer named Maya Rupert, as his campaign manager, is a good thing on many levels. That it's a reason to be optimistic, even cautiously, about the Democratic Party... I wish I could find the new MSNBC promo for Chris Hayes' show. Or even just remember it exactly. It's about how his show will cut through all the bullshit and noice to get to what's really important in the election: who candidates are going to fight for and how believable and capable they are.

A couple of days ago, Les Leopold, writing for CommonDreams.org warned readers to Beware the Moderate Democrat. Like me, Leopold resents how the corporate media has given the word "moderate" over to those on the right of the Democratic Party. "Such a soothing political word," he wrote. "It conjures up a reasonable, considerate person who seeks the middle ground between ideological extremists: Works well with others, crosses the aisle to make good policy, knows how to win incremental change rather than issuing jarring proclamations that jump too far ahead of the electorate. A moderate is pragmatic, gets things done and doesn't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Oh, in these troubled times, aren't such moderates-- beloved as they are by right-wingers like Bret Stephens-- desperately needed?"

Get ready to hear more and more of that from mainstream media pundits as the Democratic Party moves more towards the kind of progressive populism put forward by the Sanders/AOC wing of the party. We'll be asked by centrist journalists to take a careful look at more reasonable moderates like Gillibrand, McAuliffe, Bloomberg, Biden, Booker, Landrieu and many more (e.g. Is There Room in 2020 for a Centrist Democrat? and The Loneliness of a Moderate Democrat).

But what is the substance of all this centrism and moderation?

First and foremost, these moderates are united by their unwillingness to take on Wall Street. And because of that unwillingness, they are unable to confront the defining problem of our era-- runaway inequality.  They cannot face up to the fact that the wages of the average worker have been stagnant for an entire generation. Meanwhile the pay gap between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker has risen from 40 to 1 in 1980 to an obscene 800 to 1 today.

The centrists run away from this problem in large part because they are in a desperate race to win the very first primary-- the fundraising primary. And it is no secret that victory goes to the candidate who garners the most financial support from Wall Street/corporate Democrats.

Rather than discussing runaway inequality and ways to ameliorate it through Medicare for All, free higher education, and higher taxes on the super-rich, these moderates instead will stress enhancing "opportunity," and "removing barriers" to race/gender advancement.  Rather than confronting billionaire oligarchs they want to "partner with business" and, in some vague way tame their excesses while also building a robust and fair economy with "opportunity for all." No conflict needed. No diatribes against the billionaire class. Hear the melodious tones of moderation.

From this coziness with Wall Street flows the trope about being "socially liberal" and "fiscally conservative."  The moderate centrists, and their Wall Street donors, support LBTQ rights, the advancement of women in business, immigration and criminal justice reform, gun control, and abortion rights.  At the same time, they believe the entire progressive runaway inequality platform is an affront to economic reason: High taxes on the rich will discourage initiative and innovation; single-payer health care and free higher education will bankrupt the country; breaking up the big banks will cripple investment and jobs.

Of course, the moderates must ignore the reams of data from all over the world that show that these progressive reforms would reduce inequality and enhance the well-being of nearly everyone, though it is true that reducing inequality would harm-- at least to some extent-- the precious privileges of the very few. The super-rich would have to pay more. They would no longer be able to financially strip mine the rest of us through wasteful stock buy-backs.  Their billions would be reduced a bit. But most alarming would be their deflated egos: No longer could they bask in the false narrative that what is so very good for them is good for all of us.

But do "moderates" represent anyone other than their Wall Street donors? Is there a mass base for the kind of moderation they are putting forward?

Let's take a look at the eye-popping data from the 2016 presidential election, put together by the Voter Survey Group, which polled 8,000 Americans (a very large sample which is eight to fifteen times larger than most of the surveys we usually see in the news.) A study of these voters showed that they could be divided into four major groups.  (See Lee Drutman, Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond. Note: the title names used below are mine not his.).

• The first group, Left Populists, are those who are both social and economic progressives. They support immigration, women and minority equality, LBGTQ rights and immigration. They also worry about rising inequality and support proposals that would attack it.
• The second group, Nativist Populists, also worry about rising inequality and support proposals that attack it. But they are more comfortable with traditional gender roles, have qualms about abortion, see immigration as a problem and are not particularly supportive about LBGTQ rights.
• The third group are the Arch Conservatives who are not interested in reversing economic inequality or social inequality.
• And finally we have the Socially Liberal/Fiscal Conservatives. This is the home base for the "moderate" politicians who are wooing Wall Street and see themselves as the sensible alternatives to the extremist populists.

So more or less, that's who we are.  If the electorate were equally divided among these four groups, the "moderates" might have an argument. The facts tell a different story:

• Left Populists account for 44.6 percent of the electorate according to this study.
• 28.9 percent are Nativist Populists. This means that nearly three-quarters of all voters fear runaway inequality and want to reduce it. But these economic populists are divided on identity issues.
• Arch Conservatives account for another 22.7 percent.
• And that leaves a miniscule 3.8 percent for the Socially Liberal/Fiscal conservatives.

How pathetic is that? It goes to show how out of touch these billionaires and their accolades are from political reality. They have no base. Nada. There's no one there... except very rich Wall Street/Corporate funders and centrist pundits who feel compelled to find a judicious balance between left and right.

Danger Ahead

The data shows why Trump's nativist, race-baiting, immigrant-bashing base-building makes some electoral sense. If he can hold both the Nativist Populists and the Arch Conservatives he can win again. And he can do that most easily against a candidate with virtually no natural base-- the "moderate"-- the Socially Liberal/Fiscally Conservative Democrat.

Given enough financial support, a "moderate" might be able to buy her or his way through the Democratic primaries, especially if many candidates split the progressive populist vote. One could imagine one of the "moderates" becoming a media darling of the center, which might further enhance his or her status.

But should one of them squeak through to become the nominee, we might have a Democratic debacle. The nativist economic populists on the right might flock back to Trump along with the arch conservatives who will never leave him. Trump may look incredibly weak now, but a Wall Street-backed Democratic "moderate" with a natural base of 3.8 percent could give the worst president in American history a real chance.

Jim Hightower, the great Texan populist, turned a phrase that comes to mind every time a Wall Street "moderate" is touted.

"There's nothing in the middle of the road," he famously quipped, "but yellow stripes and dead Armadillos."

And even Jim Hightower fully embraced Beto, even as Beto, an unabashed New Dem, was one of the minority of Democrats in the House, when he was a unaccomplished backbencher there, refusing to support Medicare-For-All. Don't even ask about the Green New Deal. I can barely wait to hear him discussing AOC's proposal for a 60-70% marginal tax rate on annual earnings of over $10 million.

Middle Of The Road For President?

Who should be next in the popular series, "The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President?" Part III, at the end of November, was all about multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg. A mutual friend tells me he wasn't pleased with what I wrote about him. I'm sure he's gotten over it. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that he's still mullin' whether or not to run. I hope he asks people who don't stand to make small fortunes if he does run. The Post report indicated that he thinks he has some kind of clue about what Democrats want. "I think," he claimed, "most Democrats want a middle-of-the-road strategy. They want to make progress, but they’re not willing to go and to push something that has no chance of ever getting done and wasting all their energy on that." What a pitiful clown!

Like Biden, Bloomberg is a tired old centrist with no vision and nothing to offer the country. And, like Trumpanzee, he thinks it would be just awesome to be president.

There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos

Bloomberg, of course, was referring to Bernie's platform-- i.e., things people want, like free state universities, Medicare-For-All, $15 minimum wage, etc. You know some of the other things that have been pushed by visionary progressive Democrats, each and every one of them something Bloomberg would have deemed to have "no chance of ever getting done" and wasting all that energy on? Let's skip the American Revolution, since there can be no doubt which side Squire Bloomberg would have been on. Also might as well skip the Bill of Rights. However, there was a time when free public education was looked at as an insane unattainable dream, a unicorn, not to mention land grant universities, yet each of them came into being after great battles between progressives and conservatives. And, of course, ditto for the whole concept of a minimum wage, which people like Bloomberg didn't just not want to waste money on, but had workers who demanded a minimum wage murdered. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were all deemed "impossible, out of the question" by people like Bloomberg and each was a struggle to achieve against all odds.

A few other "impossible" things progressives achieved by fighting people like Michael Bloomberg: food safety, the breakup of monopolies, the 8 hour workday, rural electrification, the emancipation of the salves, civil rights for minorities and then voting rights for minorities. None of those things grew on trees-- and none were achieved by a rich shit-head who thought they were too utopian to waste any energy on. How about consumer protection? Cleanup of water and air? Consumer protections? Workplace safety? The weekend? Do you think any of those things came easy? Thank God we had people unlike Michael Bloomberg fighting to make them realities. Michael Bloomberg would be an absolute catastrophe as a Democratic Party nominee. Why doesn't he run as a Republican again?

Is The Democratic Party A Party Of Working People Or A Party Of Its Own Elites And Careerists?

Thomas Edsell's OpEd in the NYTimes yesterday, Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good?, came just as Blue America posted the above video by Mike Lux on our main 2018 congressional contribution page. Edsall began by pointing out that "During his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, lived up to the grand Democratic tradition of favoring the underdog at the expense of the rich. He proposed hammering the affluent by raising taxes in the amount of $15.3 trillion over ten years. New revenues would finance about half the cost of a $33.3 trillion boost in social spending. The Sanders tax-and-spending plan throws into sharp relief the problem that the changing demographic makeup of the Democratic coalition creates for party leaders. Trouble brews when a deeply held commitment to the underdog comes into conflict with the self-interested pocketbook and lifestyle concerns of the upper middle class." Edsall, though, isn't celebrating.

In rhetoric reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Sanders declared:

We must send a message to the billionaire class: “you can’t have it all.” You can’t get huge tax breaks while children in this country go hungry.

But Sanders spoke to the Democratic Party of 2016, not the Democratic Party of the Great Depression.

In days past, a proposal to slam the rich to reward the working and middle classes meant hitting Republicans to benefit Democrats.

Even as recently as 1976, according to data from American National Election Studies, the most affluent voters, the top 5 percent, were solidly in the Republican camp, 77-23. Those in the bottom third of the income distribution were solidly Democratic, 64-36.

In other words, 41 years ago, the year Jimmy Carter won the presidency, the Sanders proposal would have made political sense. But what about now?

In the 2016 election, the economic elite was essentially half Democratic, according to exit polls: Those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution voted 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump. Half the voters Sanders would hit hardest are members of the party from which he sought the nomination.

The problem for the Democratic Party is that “them” has become “us.”

In the past, Democrats could support progressive, redistributive policies knowing that the costs would fall largely on Republicans. That is no longer the case. Now supporting these policies requires the party to depend on the altruistic idealism of millions of supporters who, despite being relatively well off, often feel financially pressed themselves.

This problem applies not only to tax policy, but even more to social policies concerning education and housing.

Richard V. Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, highlights the contradictions of modern Democratic liberalism in his new book, Dream Hoarders: How the Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust.

Reeves argues that those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution have become an increasingly isolated class; if the country is to restore the American tradition of upward mobility, this elite will have to pay for it.

“The upper middle class has been having it pretty good. It is about time those of us in the favored fifth recognized our privileged position,” Reeves writes. As members of this class protect their status and economic gains for themselves and their children, Reeves contends, they have capitalized on a host of less visible forces — exclusionary zoning, the clustering of elites, legacy college admissions, disproportionate political influence — to build a protective wall, keeping those in the lower quintiles of the income distribution from breaking in.

As Reeves points out,

it is a stubborn mathematical fact that, at any given time, the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population. Relative intergenerational mobility is a zero sum game. For someone to move up the ladder, someone else must move down.

Or, as he put it in a 2013 essay in The Times,

Even the most liberal parents are unlikely to be comfortable with the idea that their own children should fall down the scale in the name of making room for a smarter kid from a poorer home.

His proposals calling on the upper middle class to abandon unfair “opportunity hoarding” raise a basic political question. Can the Democratic Party, as it is currently constructed, maintain its commitment to a redistributive agenda? Put another way, can a political party impose costs on its own constituents, especially those voters who make up the most influential faction of the party: the affluent and well educated?

The preliminary evidence from actual events is that demanding sacrifice poses major risks. Asking people to think of themselves as compassionate and to pay higher taxes is one thing-- many Democrats have made that leap-- but ask them to live in a mixed income neighborhood or ask them to have their kid give up her spot at Princeton, and you get a different response.

Reeves himself points to the Democratic uproar when President Obama proposed a relatively modest change in a tax-based mechanism to help pay college costs. The change in what are called 529 College Savings Plans was designed to make the program more advantageous to people with moderate incomes and less so for those with high incomes. An estimated 70 percent of the tax benefits of 529 plans currently go to families with incomes above $200,000.

The moment Obama suggested the reform, prominent Democrats from both the House and Senate were inundated with angry complaints from affluent constituents. They pressured Obama to drop the proposal. In less than a week, he did.

“The idea was sensible, simple, and progressive,” Reeves writes. “The episode was a brutal reminder that sensible policy is not always easy politics.” Reeves noted that two of the leading Democratic opponents of the 529 reform, Nancy Pelosi and Chris Van Hollen, who was elected Maryland’s junior senator in November but was a congressman when Obama proposed it, represented districts where “almost half their constituents are in households with six-figure incomes.”

Perhaps the most problematic issue for affluent Democrats are proposals calling for expanded construction of affordable housing in middle-to-upper-middle class neighborhoods.

When local officials and the courts pressed for construction of relatively small numbers of moderate income housing units in such upscale liberal bastions as San Francisco (Clinton 84.5 percent, Trump 9.2 percent) and neighboring Marin County, Calif. (Clinton 77.3 percent, Trump 15.5 percent), the groundswell of opposition was loud and clear.

...In an effort to further explore this question, I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, two questions:

As the share of Democrats who are well-educated and upper middle class grows, how can the party continue to advocate redistributive policies? Can a party survive that calls on its own members to pay the costs of policies designed to help those on the bottom rungs?

Hacker replied:

The evidence is clear that even relatively affluent Democrats are more supportive of redistribution than a typical Republican-- at least in opinion surveys. This general support, however, doesn’t always translate into support for pro-opportunity policies at the local level.

Affordable housing, Hacker wrote, “is far and away the best example.” Opposition to zoning allowing denser and more affordable housing “comes not just from well-off residents but also from landlords who get monopoly rents.” The inherent zero-sum thinking underlying not-in-my-backyard approaches

prevents positive-sum solutions that could reduce the economic conflict between poorer members of the Democratic coalition and the more affluent segments.

Hacker concluded his email on an upbeat note, contending that “demography is not destiny” and that Democratic leaders

could work more aggressively to identify and create positive-sum solutions-- pro-growth policies that both lift up the least advantaged and attenuate class-based cleavages within its own coalition.

Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, less optimistically put his finger on the core problem for Democrats:

The Democratic Party is evolving in multiple ways that separate it from the living conditions of large numbers of working-class Americans.

The result, Lupia wrote, is that

many Democrats now know less, and appear to care less, about the day-to-day struggles of many working class Americans. Hillary Clinton is an example of a Democrat who struggled to be seen by many such Americans as having a sincere and credible grasp of their concerns.

Hacker and Lupia, while differing in outlook, together raise a basic concern about the contemporary Democratic Party: the casual, if not negligent, willingness of the party elite to adopt policies and positions, however worthy, without regard to the costs such policies impose on others.

The characteristics of the Democratic elite are best reflected in studies of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. For years, CBS surveyed these delegates but stopped doing so in 2008. Still, even without data from 2012 and 2016, the CBS surveys show a consistent pattern. Delegates are drawn overwhelmingly from the liberal upper middle class. In 2008, 70 percent of the delegates reported earning $75,000 or more per year, compared to 27 percent of Democratic voters at that time.

The Democratic delegates were well to the left of Democratic voters, a trend that continues. Seven out of ten delegates said that abortion should be generally available and 20 percent said abortion should be available under “stricter limits”; 43 percent of Democratic voters supported generally available abortion and 39 percent said under “stricter limits.”

More than 8 out of 10 Democratic delegates in 2008 agreed that “government should do more to solve national problems,” while 54 percent of Democratic voters shared that view, according to American National Election Studies. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic coalition clearly reflected the same priorities.

As the Democratic elite and the Democratic electorate as a whole become increasingly well educated and affluent, the party faces a crucial question. Can it maintain its crucial role as the representative of the least powerful, the marginalized, the most oppressed, many of whom belong to disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups-- those on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder?

This will be no easy task. In 2016, for the first time in the party’s history, a majority of voters (54.2 percent) who cast Democratic ballots for president had college degrees. Clinton won all 15 of the states with the highest percentage of college graduates [Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Conneticut, New Jersey, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Minnesota, Washington, Illinois, Rhode Island, California and Oregon].

The steady loss of Democratic support in the white working class, culminating in Trump’s Electoral College victory on the backs of these white voters, must inevitably send a loud and clear signal to the Democratic elite: The more the party abandons the moral imperative to represent the interests of the less well off of all races and ethnicities, the more it risks a repetition of the electoral disaster of 2016 in 2018, 2020 and beyond.

Paul Clements is the Kalamazoo progressive who ran against reactionary Republican Fred Upton in 2014 and 2016. We're hoping he runs again in 2018 and he told me he's considering doing so but hasn't made up his mind yet. He's speaking to folks on the ground and figuring out if another run is the best way to defeat Upton. After watching Mile's video up top, he told me that "As Americans see and live the results of Trump's government of billionaires and generals allied with Ryan's free market fundamentalists, Democrats need to give a vision of government for the people. Medicare for all, breaking up big banks, and clean energy, not to mention getting rid of for profit prisons, raising the minimum wage, and re-investing in public education."

Jenny Marshall, who's running for the North Carolina seat held by right-wing knee jerk crackpot Virginia Foxx, is exactly the kind of progressive Democrat who feels in her bones exactly what Lux is talking about. "We want someone who will stand up for our values, our way of life and our families," she told me after watching the clip-- although it's exactly the kind of stiff she's been talking about ever since I met her. "We want a champion that will fight for us. Democrats need to be willing to go to the mat for people and stop caving in when the GOP refuses to compromise. We can no longer negotiate away our schools, our health, our livelihoods and our future. We cannot continue to follow the Republicans as they lead us further to the right. We must stand up for what we believe in. I am standing up for the people of the 5th district. It is time we had a real leader in Washington who won't back down from a challenge."

Last year Tom Wakely ran for the Austin-San Antonio corridor seat occupied by crackpot science denier Lamar Smith. He's running again this year. He found Mike's video spot on and without knowing about Edsall's OpEd, addressed some of the questions he raised in it:

As candidates, we need to be bold. We need to tell people that having Medicare For All is a good thing. We need to tell them having the EPA around is a good thing. Unfortunately, too many in the Democratic Party still think that being a centrist is the only way to win elections. Here in Texas, we are fond of saying the only thing that is in the middle of the road is a dead armadillo and it stinks to high heavens.

When I ran against 30-yr. Republican incumbent Lamar Smith in 2016, I ran on a progressive agenda and while I lost that race, we managed to do something no one else has been able to do in over 30 years-- we managed to drop Smith's percentage vote total to 56.9%, the lowest of his career. Our campaign accomplished this not by running a centrist political campaign but by running a progressive community organizing campaign. And Lamar Smith took note of this. For the first time in nearly two decades, Smith actually started campaigning. He also dumped over $1.7 million into his campaign, spending over $8.00 a vote. We only raised $70,000, which came to a little less than .55 cents per vote. Imagine what our campaign could have done with a  little more money.

As I take a look at the Democrat Party today, I don't see the party of FDR, of Kennedy, of LBJ. I see a party wed to Wall Street, to the Big Banks. A party more interested in helping line the pockets of consultants with cash than with helping line the pockets of ordinary, working class citizens of this country. We need to make voting a hell of lot easier and that is why I support a national program to vote by mail. A lot needs to be done in the Democrat Party if it is ever to be able to proudly raise it's head once again and say, "I stand for the working people of this country." It's a marathon and not a sprint.

I am 64 years old and I don't think I have that many years left in me to take on the Democratic Party Establishment and Wall Street and win. But there are so many young, enthusiastic activists out there I have hope that one day we will see a return to the party of FDR and LBJ. But until that day comes all I can do, all I will do, is continue to tell everyone that will listen, that I am a Progressive. I  will shout from the rooftops that I stand with the working people of this country against Wall Street and the Big Banks, against those who would destroy the EPA and against those who believe that making a profit off of sick and dying people is okay.

New Chrissie Hynde Memoir Takes Some Swipes at Good Ol' USA

-by Denise Sullivan

I think of Chrissie Hynde's stunning "My City Was Gone" just about everyday as I stalk the streets of San Francisco, searching for meaning and life in a place I used to and sometimes still do call home. The song's themes of urban destruction and environmental decline in the name of so-called progress are threaded throughout Hynde's new memoir, Reckless, My Life as A Pretender, among other unexpected twists to her rock star's back pages, but then Hynde was never one to do the expected. The fact she let Rush Limbaugh get away with using the opening notes of "My City Was Gone," for his radio show for years still boggles the mind: Rationalizing her parents were fans, with folks like that, is it any wonder she had to leave Akron?

Born and raised in and around Rubber City and what became the Rust Belt, Chris Hynde was a warrior for the underground and a champion of the underdog from the gate. With Zap Comix as her Bible and artist S. Clay Wilson as her teacher, she loved the swagger and style of rock'n'roll dandies like the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page; Mitch Ryder's and Iggy Pop's stage antics were the kind of thing that sent her but she also loved Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. Personally, she was drawn to amphetamine popping, hell for-leather motorcycle types-- carnies and heavy bikers-- and their allure inevitably led her into water too deep for even a biker chick to navigate. She got it semi-together during a stint at Kent State ("I loved being in Kent. There were people walking the streets like in a real town. This was human pageantry on display where it should be"), but noticed an unsettling disconnect within the peace and love generation: "I was baffled that the entire hippie nation hadn't become vegetarian en masse. It made no sense as eating meat went against the whole dialogue. Were the hippies just as hypocritical as the rest of them?" With Young's "The Loner" as her theme song, she was not long for university life, even before she witnessed the famous massacre at Kent that injured nine and took four lives, including Jeff Miller, her friend Cindy Hino's boyfriend.

----

Throughout Reckless, Hynde recounts further feelings of otherness that led her to leave the Midwest and plant roots anywhere but there. Just one problem: So lost and so high was she, Hynde couldn't read the signals clearly enough to know the way out. Pacing the city's streets before making her way across the country, west, north, and eventually overseas, she took a last look around: "Something was happening to me. Even the gigantic oak tress that had ushered in whole families and see them right through to their endings seemed to be waving me past-- past the Akron houses with their Akron stories. The winds off Lake Erie that swept over northeastern Ohio like searchlights announcing the grand opening of a new discount store seemed to be announcing my leaving. That way. You go that way. It's time."

Trapped in a world that she hadn't made, with only an intuitive knowing that told her the heartland was no place for a girl like her, she followed a few chance meetings with rock stars (including David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Ron Wood) and a hunch she should set off for England in 1973 with another friend named Cindy (quite possibly of "Cindy's Lament" fame). There was no point to staying: The bikers wanted to kill her, and everything else was falling apart. "Just outside the city limits, the whole country was bending over to take it up the backside. The green meadows of Montrose were being churned up and rolled away, concrete expanding over the hills of Ohio like molten lava."

While Hynde might not be the first songwriter who comes to mind when we think of ideas and topical concerns, her writings on the failure of the American Dream, its disconnecting interstates, urban renewal programs, and our often animal-based diet, are the threads that bind her musings on the rock'n'roll life with real life, as seen through the eyes of an ex-patriate. She's exhilarated by England's vast train, tube and bus system, impressed by the National Health Service and believes in squatter's rights. There used to be good reasons people made rock 'n' roll to survive. But rather than drawing these distinctions and declaring any party allegiances, Hynde stays true to punk's extremes and attitudes of non-conforming and delivers her sketches, her version, of what the music's meant to her. She captures to great effect the wait she endured-- like dog years in a young person's life-- as she worked her way into the English music scene and into the country itself to stay. Hynde was well behind her gang, watching as her close friends in the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Damned all formed bands around her while she shuffled along, unable to secure compatible people to play with and unable to write or perform a decent song. Her addictions to substances-- any and all-- were the culprit and a drug addict's path is not one she recommends or endorses; the regret of time wasted on people and places for whom drugs were central are writ large throughout the pages of Reckless, yet she doesn't preach or proselytize in the name of clean living.

Similarly matter of fact are the passages about her willing liaisons with men while she was under the influence: She was ultimately left black and blue and fearing for her life. Upon publication of Reckless in September and during the publicity period that followed, Hynde took responsibility for being half dressed, messed up, and abused over repeated occasions which riled sexual assault victims rights groups and (mostly) younger feminists who voiced their displeasure with her position. Hynde's defenses of her remarks did little to help her profile as intractable, and she would not be moved: Not a joiner of movements (well, except maybe animal rights) or a spokeswoman, her righteous autonomy is one of the most appealing things about her persona.

The book's subtitle, My Life as a Pretender, works on at least three levels and is best saved for the reader to discover, though fans of the band who've come seeking more about the working relationship between Hynde, Pete Farndon, James Honeyman-Scott and Martin Chambers may be disappointed: Hynde doesn't even meet them until the book's final 60 pages. Not too much about the songs themselves, though stories of the creation of "The Wait" and her friend Meg Keene's "Hymn to Her" emerge; she describes the thrill at hearing Grace Jones sing "Private Life."

It's tempting to compare Hynde's book to this year's offerings by the punk era's Viv Albertine and Kim Gordon, both women in their 60s, but the three memoirs are distinctly different in style and approach; despite her recalcitrance and tough exterior, Hynde is the most likable on the page. Her measure of humility and ability to own every bit of bad behavior along the way without excusing it, denying it, or apologizing for it ensures her status as an icon. As painful and graphic as some of the situations described are, her style-- a combination of hipster casual mixed with American and English street slang-- succeeds at covering even the most unseemly and unthinkable situations without being too coarse. It is of course all a bit of hat trick, appearing to stay cool while living under the pressure of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, yet it's clear Hynde has paid the cost to rock; that she's lived to tell of her experience at all, and not tell all, is her mystery achievement.



Denise Sullivan is a regular contributor on arts, culture, and gentrification.

Tonight's Song: Willie Nelson And The Pretenders

Break Up The Concrete is the new album-- the first since Artemis released the mostly unheralded Loose Screw six years ago-- from The Pretenders. I love it. So many great references to Dylan! And, like most Pretenders' albums I love it because of Chrissie's songwriting. And yet, tonight we're listening to one of the two songs on the album, the other being "Rosalee," not written by Chrissie. Actually this isn't even officially on the regular album. It's a bonus track offered by WalMart for CDs sold in their store. (What a really bad idea from some marketing guy for a conscious artist.) But, fittingly, it's a song, "Both Sides Of Goodbye," by Hank Williams, Jr. Fortunately Chrissie chose Willie Nelson to sing it with her.