Why We Can't Have a Tea Party

I don't anticipate writing that much today; I need a bit of a break and I know I'm going to spend a decent amount of time on the post-mortem roundup tomorrow. I just wanted to share an article from Thursday's USA Today by Jason Sattier about one of the topics I've written a decent amount about, the need for some big money behind an organized liberal movement. In this case, he explains why it probably won't happen.

So why aren’t liberal donors trying to spark a Tea Party of the left?

They know as well as anyone that the “spontaneous” uprising of 2009 was fed or led by an extremely well-financed web of conservative networks. How else do you get a movement enraged by teacher’s salaries and government regulation during an apocalyptic financial crisis caused by bankers exploiting a lack of government regulation?

Conservative donors have spent tens of millions of dollars and decades building a movement that revolves around resentment of liberals and the government. The gains of tax breaks, deregulation and privatization are massive — so massive that the donor class is willing to suffer some demands from an activated grassroots, as long as those demands don’t get in the way of tax breaks, deregulation and privatization.

Big Democratic donors also tend to have their pet causes, such as guns and climate change. And in some cases, such as climate and immigration, a Demos study shows, these funders actually push the party to the left. But the story is different when it comes to "pocketbook" issues such as the budget and taxes.

Democrats in general were nearly six times as likely to support raising taxes to reduce the deficit as Democratic donors who gave $5,000 or more, the Demos research found. Organized labor, meanwhile, the backbone of the left, has been systemically hollowed by the right while Democrats failed again and again to strengthen unions when they had the chance.

Yes, the left needs a movement that rivals the Tea Party movement’s passion, reach and influence. But rather than happening with the encouragement and funding of the party’s rich donors, it might have to happen in spite of them.

He's probably right, and it bums me out. I do think that we can win the Presidency back in 2020, and maybe even get a slim margin in the House and Senate by 2021. But we're never getting a majority of state legislatures back, at least not while I'm still *fairly* young, unless we can get a mass national movement like the Tea Party. I've been trying to make the point over and over, to no avail -- because, really, who the hell am I? -- that I think the Indivisible crowd is making a mistake to frame the Tea Party as a grassroots movement:

As much great energy as we have at the bottom in the progressive movement, we need real, well-funded leadership at the top, as well. It's largely because of the lack of that that despite the fact that we're on the right side of history that we're still relitigating the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1960s, the 1930s, hell, even the 1890s! It's why when they had Brooks Brothers Riots while we have somber press conferences. They've been building a movement for decades with tremendous resources behind them, win or lose, while we appear to dissolve and start anew after each loss because we have nothing to fall back upon

I should amend that to say "relitigating the 1870s... or even 1850s." And given that there's a lot of talk comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson, maybe we're looking further back. A Trail of Tears for Latinos isn't really out of the question.

But I digress. One of the reasons I was so excited about a Hillary Clinton presidency was the potential for a liberal-leaning Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United and start to take at least a chunk of the money out of politics. We're pretty clearly going the other way for at least the next decade or two. So we're going to need money. We can't pretend we don't, and we can't pretend that it wasn't big money that built the other side.

I continue to admire the goals of Indivisible, but it's really, really tough to get to the right conclusion when you're starting with the wrong premises. And until people like them acknowledge that they need to fight fire with fire, we're going to keep trying to douse gunfire with water because we learned the wrong lessons from history (and metaphors).

People Are Getting It

On November 13th, I reopened this blog to the public with this post. Half of the current basis for it is that we need to mitigate the damage potentially brought by the Republicans over the next four years, issue-by-issue. We can get to our bigger vision later. Peter Dreher for HuffPo yesterday:

In the not-too-distant future, we can try to translate our progressive policy agenda into actual policies — adopting campaign finance reform, immigration reform, stronger environmental regulations, stricter rules on Wall Street, and greater investment in jobs and anti-poverty programs; turning Election Day into a national holiday, reforming our labor laws, protecting women’s right to choose, expanding LGBT rights, making our tax system more progressive, reforming our racist criminal justice system, investing more public dollars in job-creating infrastructure and clean energy projects; adopting paid family leave, and expanding health insurance to all and limiting the influence of the drug and insurance industry.

But, at the moment, our stance must be one of resistance and opposition.

The Trump presidency and Trumpism is a new phenomenon in our country’s history. Never before has such an authoritarian personality been president. We’ve had demagogues in the House and Senate, but never in the Oval Office. The best primer to understand what we’re facing is Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, a counter-factual history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh.

It is not enough simply to proceed with caution. We must view Trump as a real threat to our institutions, to our democracy, and to our future. 

The same day, I posted this:

As Democrats, most of us don't want stark income inequality and wealth inequality. But it exists, and that starkness leads to outsized influence by a small group at the top. One thing I've come to realize (not an original thought; someone else wrote it a few days back) is that "neoliberalism" is less about conservative-lite policies, and more about an approach to politics that is at the same time cynical and optimistic.  

Politicians like the Clintons have realized that it's easier to join 'em than beat 'em, and not all of them are bad. The second Obama term opened my eyes to that. He remained pretty close to Wall Street but did things for this country that I thought would never happen, and it took some cynicism on his part to get there (does anyone think he, or Hillary, for that matter, was really against gay marriage?). 

The Republicans have a few donors that dig deep to keep them afloat all of the time. They have the Heritage Foundation, AEI, Mercatus, and endless other "think tanks" and astroturfing groups. We had an amazing presence in Brooklyn that I'm currently helping to disassemble. I'm using it as inspiration to get pumped to put together the next one. But why should it come apart? Why shouldn't we keep all of those people around fighting for us, and building on what we have rather than doing it all over again in mid-2019. Those amazing heads and hands should be working non-stop to keep Trump and Pals from repealing too much of the last 120 years or so. I just found out today that the DNC doesn't even have a permanent presence in NYC (and, I assume, the other large metro areas, not even to mention "flyover country." How can that be? 

The answer, most likely, is money. It rolls in in the 15 months or so before an election, but it's not there to keep momentum the other (does math on fingers) 33 months of a cycle (not to mention the three elections that go on in between, as well as special elections. There are a ton of lessons for us to learn and apply along the way, and it's tough to do that when we have to build them onto a totally new structure.

We may have to concede a bit to the superwealthy as long as they help support *most* of what we want for the country and the world. There are some lines we shouldn't be willing to cross, but there are also some that we will have to cross. 

If we have to compromise with someone, I'd rather it be with people who are motivated by self-interest than by people who revel in destroying the interests of people they don't like, which is the essence of American "populist" conservatism.

And hot off the presses, David Brock is doing exactly that:

Hillary Clinton’s attack dog David Brock is launching his own Koch-brothers-like donor network to finance attacks on President-elect Donald Trump and to rebuild the political left after Trump’s stunning victory over Clinton last week. 

Brock on Thursday night emailed more than 200 of the biggest donors on the left — including finance titans George Soros, Tom Steyer and Donald Sussman — inviting them to a retreat in Palm Beach over inauguration weekend to assess what Democrats did wrong in 2016, figure out how to correct it and raise cash for those initiatives.

Obviously, I had nothing to do with it. Almost no one is reading this. But it's nice to see people offering "reality-based" solutions.

More of this.

God, 2006 Me would hate 2016 Me. Then again, 2006 Me would have never believed 2016 Me when 2016 Me said, "Uh, dude, we elected Donald Trump President..." 2006 Me would've done a spit-take with Dogfish Head 120 Minute flying across the room.