2020 Election: It's About Much More Than Defeating Trump

I broke my vow to refrain from engaging in Facebook political arguments with “moderate Dems” (what moderate Republicans used to be) when one of them, for about the 10^th time, referred to Bernie Sanders as a “Bolshevik.” If people weren’t so stunningly gullible it would be an hysterically funny one-off. My brief response was: “So, was FDR a Bolshevik?”

That opened the floodgates. The so-called moderate Dem, who apparently sits in front of his computer all day long posting nasty comments on Facebook (and in letters to the editor in various online newspapers) and calls people who disagree with him assholes, dupes, or Bolsheviks, told me that FDR wasn’t a Bolshevik because his economy was nothing like today’s booming economy where everyone is enjoying the benefits that Bolsheviks like Bernie want to take away from us. The next day the stock market tanked in its biggest loss since the Great Recession of 2007 because of the corona virus (the 99 percent are already in the toilet).

It wasn’t this guy’s knee-jerk response that drew me further into the den of iniquity, however. In a previous private message to the moderate Dem whose Facebook page hosts much of his vitriol, I had respectfully asked why she didn’t call him out for spewing such nonsense. She sees herself as the voice of reason, an engaged Democrat who is avidly anti-Trump and a big proponent of engaged political discourse. Her response, which acknowledged he is “annoying,” is a climate change denier, and a beneficiary of the booming oil and gas industry, was “I don’t think shielding Bernie fans from the portrait people have of him is helpful.” So much for engaged political discourse.

The rants continued for a while until she accused me of hypocrisy in advocating for socialism while being a community organizer who advocates for local control of resources and government, citing my support for the integrity of acequias. She again missed an opportunity to really explore what Bernie’s agenda, or Elizabeth Warren’s for that matter, actually involves, much of which she and I, as community organizers, endorse: a government that makes sure policies are in place to protect and allow people to flourish in a more equitable society than the unregulated, late stage capitalism one in which we live. The social democracy that Bernie endorses means just what it says: that a society based on a leveled playing field is what democracy looks like.

I responded: “Yeah, Bernie’s coming for our acequias.” That was it for me, and I signed off for good. But if I hadn’t (we all like to have the last word, don’t we, and while I can’t really have the last word I do have Unf*#!ing Believable), I would also have pointed out another disconnect in this kind of group think. While they all rail against their elected Democratic legislators who have supported the settlement of a decades old water rights adjudication, the Aamodt, to which they are objecting parties, they fail to acknowledge those same legislators’ ties to the DNC, which directed the Clinton and now the Biden takeover of the primary (Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Bloomberg). They love Biden but they hate Ben Ray Lujan, who directed the DNCC money flow for many years.

I broke my vow again, the day before Super Tuesday, but this time I had an excuse: I thought I was responding to an old friend from Antioch—ANTIOCH!—who had momentarily lost her mind and was saying she’d vote for Biden. I responded: “Are you crazy? Joe Biden!!??” Her response was: “I don’t see evidence of Bernie playing well with others. He did nothing to support Hillary after he lost the nomination in 2016. He’s too polarizing. We need someone who can heal the body politic. I don’t see Bernie helping the down ballot. I’m following the lead of African Americans who carry so much water for the Democratic Party and get little back for their efforts.” It made me almost nostalgic for the days when the SDSers and YSAers at Antioch were yelling at each other over who knew best how to start the revolution.

But I didn’t have time to point out her lie (Bernie did nothing to support Hilary) or get any further dragged in, as another Antioch friend then replied: “Now isn’t the time for healing with Republicans and oligarchs kicking our teeth in. That was Obama’s saddest miscalculation in his first two years when he had both the House and the Senate (by a large margin.) They strung him out until the billionaire funded Tea Party bullied its way into Congress. Bernie is building a movement (not a campaign) of mission driven activists that is growing daily. When was the last presidential candidate who campaigned on organizing the working class— not in our lifetime. That’s the movement that’s going to raise up candidates at the local level, not Biden’s gaggle of establishment endorsements. African Americans are part of the movement. Bernie’s agenda will lift all boats; well, at least 99% of them. Vote your aspirations, not your fears.”

When I do post articles on Facebook that I think are insightful, it’s to do exactly what my Antioch friend said, to encourage voters to base their decisions on who best exemplifies their values, not who is the most likely to defeat Trump, a futile exercise, IMHO. But today, independent journalist Arun Gupta posted an opinion piece by The Guardian’s Nathan Robinson that was really disturbing but probably prescient: “Stop saying Biden is the ‘most electable.’ Trump will run rings round him.” It’s basically 2016 redux: “Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians.” And the baggage Biden brings to the table as that establishment politician is daunting: “He has been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the ‘capital of corporate America’. He is infamous for his connections to the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war. Even Matthew Yglesias of Vox calls Biden the “Hillary Clinton of 2020” for his corporate ties and war support.” Another columnist, Shaun King, posted a heavily researched piece that exposed Biden's lies about his participation in the civil rights movement.

Then there’s Ukraine. They will go after him unmercifully for Hunter Biden’s obscene $50,000 a month Burisma salary even if it’s only nepotism, not criminality.

Joe Biden offers no progressive or radical values like Sanders or Warren offer. He only proffers “virtuousness and decency. But if Biden doesn’t actually look virtuous and decent—because he isn’t—the argument that he has made for himself collapses completely.”

So we’ll keeping plugging away for Bernie. A friend of mine wrote me the other day (another Antiochian), “I wish he would just settle for being Moses, someone who almost single-handedly changed the terms of the debate, but never saw the promised land.” I know he’s an old white man but there will be young women or people of color or atheists (Bernie’s a Jewish atheist!) who will come after Moses gets to the promised land.

It may Involve mud slinging, but we're still trying to make the world a better place.

I followed a Facebook thread the other day that was initiated by someone who said she wouldn’t be voting for Bernie Sanders after all because of his “bros’ ” nasty “memes.” Then someone else told me he wouldn’t be voting for Elizabeth Warren after all because several of her staff members claimed Bernie had told her in a private meeting that “a woman can’t get elected president.” He, of course, denied that he’d ever said this.

A reluctant Facebook responder—saying she didn’t like engaging in these kinds of discussions on that platform—stated that politics has always been nasty and mud slinging in an election was to be expected, particularly when campaigns seemingly last forever. But that was no reason to abandon the candidate whose policies and values are the ones you endorse. Once the mud starts getting slung it really diminishes the character of those doing the slinging more than the candidates, but unfortunately, it also impugns the organization or cause to whom the characters belong.

Those of us on the left are very familiar with this scenario in our organizations and movements that seek to make the world a better place (not to say that the right and alt-right don’t know how to mud sling, it’s just that there’s no pretense that it’s to make the world a better place—just their own pocketbooks). Because the United States is such a massive country, with such a massive and diverse set of ideological interests, it’s always been extremely difficult to bring together those interests, who even though they share an understanding of the kind of world we want, don’t necessarily share a methodology about how to get there.

 I’ve been involved in community organizing all my adult life. I’ve witnessed what happens when groups let their sense of solidarity be eroded by special interests, misunderstandings, and battles among egos. The divide in the environmental community between those who identified as “deep ecologists” and those as “social ecologists” (who helped define the environmental justice movement), was bitter and self-defeating as they argued over how our degraded forests should be managed while they continued to decline and burn and our communities suffered.

There is an example of one of these failures right now in another coalition of groups with whom I’ve worked. I’m not going to be specific; naming names would only contribute to the conflict that I’m trying to help mitigate by writing this essay. This particular conflict has been extant for some time, but has recently been exacerbated by government policies that are immanently threatening to impact all of our lives.

Just as in the Warren/Sanders case, activists of integrity and commitment comprise this movement. And just as in the Warren/Sanders case, there are disagreements  about methodology. But when one of the activist groups continues to try to impugn the integrity and commitment of the other members of this community, it discredits the movement as a whole. It transfers validation to those interests trying to enact the policies the community is trying to dismantle.

Although the group claims it is respectful in its public statements, this is far from the truth. In letters to newspaper editors, in e-mails, and in press releases that address the issues that the entire community is dealing with, it often disparages the work of the other groups and makes misleading, and even false, accusations that constantly confuse the public over the basis of their criticism.

Warren and Sanders seem to have taken a step back from confrontation after witnessing how the media played up their so-called dispute (CNN’s moderation of the debate was disgraceful—they, more than “bros” or “memes” are the problem) and the public sighed in exasperation. The conflict I’ve been describing is being played out in a smaller, more insular world here in New Mexico but the ramifications of its dysfunction loom large. What will it take for this community to come together? I would hope that those who believe they are always right and everyone else is wrong will eventually recognize that this leads to the distortion of facts, blanket accusations, paranoia, and outright lies to support a destructive position.