In 2009 President Obama inherited the worst economic conditions this country had seen since at least 1981, if not 1929. Investors had lost faith in financial markets. Uncertainty in goods and services markets locked up the labor market. And newly indebted home owners lost the means to consume. There was no bottom in sight. Gallup recorded an economic confidence (ECI) score of -65 when Obama took office. And that number never got back to black until this month when it magically shot up 31 points after Trump's election.
Obviously we can speculate that Republicans are only now accepting Obama's economy as good because a Republican is about to take office. But then shouldn't we expect Democrats to shift the opposite way? In that "both siderist" scenario, the ECI should look fairly flat. As any liberal blogger can tell you, both siderists don't deal in reality.
So what is the reality here? It's quite simple actually. Liberals view economic conditions the way they are supposed to look at them. If the economy is doing well they have a favorable view (even when a Republican is sitting on the Iron Throne). If the economy is doing poorly, they have an unfavorable view (even when a Democrat is in charge). But it's pretty clear that Conservatives don't operate the same way. With the economy collapsing in 2008, Conservatives were saying things like "the fundamentals of the economy are strong." They pointed to Bush's housing-led growth from 2003 to 2007 as "52 months of ... uninterrupted job creation, longest in the history of the country."
Which brings me to my main question, who is to blame for this divide? As it turns out, in the 1990s, Republicans actually thought the Clinton economy was great... at least until 1998. In 1998 even as we were experiencing the best economic growth in the post-war period, a new channel was starting to become available on TV sets nationwide. In 1996, 17 million households had access to Fox News. Over the next four years that number was up 440%. And with that greater reach came the first steps toward the idiocracy.
I think it's great that it's happening; people are hungry for techniques to fight back, and Indivisible is basically a codification of a lot of the best practices that activists have been using for years, kind of a drier Rules for Radicalsfor our time.
I'm not going to chisel at the substance of the document, because it's generally solid and useful, but I want to take a sledgehammer to one of the basic premises. Quoting the mighty Driftglass:
You see, back in 2009, millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done foe the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat on 1,000 suns. In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.
But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.
But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.
No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax. In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth, In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were. Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?
I don't want to patronize the team of writers who put this document together too much (they're in their 20s and early 30s, from what I understand), but I happened to be watching CNBC on that fateful day in 2009 when the "Tea Party" equivalent of the Franz Ferdinand shot was fired:
We knew way back then that this was nothing more than astroturf. From the Atlantic, on April 13, 2009:
Here is the organizational landscape of the April 15 tea party movement, in a nutshell: three national-level conservative groups, all with slightly different agendas, are guiding it. All are quick to tell you that the movement is a bottom-up affair and that its grassroots cred is real.
They are: FreedomWorks, the conservative action group led by Dick Armey; dontGO, a tech savvy free-market action group that sprung out of last August's oil-drilling debate in the House of Representatives; and Americans for Prosperity, an issue advocacy/activist group based on free market principles. Conservative bloggers, talk show hosts, and other media figures have attached themselves to the movement in peripheral capacities. Armey will appear at a major rally in Atlanta, FreedomWorks said.
In 2002, CSE launched the website USTeaParty.com, with a video game that encouraged users to toss crates of tea off a ship in Boston Harbor while then-Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle stood on the dock, wearing a British redcoat and taunting: “Just pay me and shut up.”
Armey joined CSE as co-chairman the next year, providing political star power that the organization lacked. He made $430,000 a year, on top of the $750,000 salary he earned as a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.
But shortly after his arrival at CSE, a boardroom dispute split CSE in two. The Kochs broke off and founded Americans for Prosperity while Kibbe partnered with Armey to form FreedomWorks in 2004. Kibbe wanted to make sure FreedomWorks couldn’t disband the way CSE had, Armey says, so he structured the nonprofit with an unusual three-person board of trustees that had the final say in all organizational matters. Kibbe and Armey took two of the three seats.
Together they organized activists to support small-government initiatives throughout the country. But without the Kochs’ financial backing, FreedomWorks struggled to make payroll. Kibbe and Armey organized anti-tax protests each April 15 at post offices around the country—rarely drawing more than two dozen people.
They penned an op-ed submission in 2007 advocating the Boston Tea Party approach to citizen revolt. “[Samuel] Adams was the first American to recognize that ‘it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather, an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds,’ ” they wrote, according to Kate Zernike’s book Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America.
Editors yawned; the op-ed was never published. No matter what they tried, Kibbe and Armey couldn’t seem to ignite their modern-day Tea Party movement.
The spring of 1993 was a lousy time to be associated with the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. Bill Clinton had just stormed into the White House. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. Even undersecretaries of powerful cabinet departments from the Bush administration discovered that they were unloved, unwanted, and unemployed in the nation’s capital.
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So I did what many others did in that spring of 1993 in the nation’s capital: I began consulting. My first client was a think tank that I’d never heard of—a small outfit with big dreams and a curious checkbook.
At the time, no one knew much about Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). When I’d asked about funding for CSE, it had taken a while to get a clear answer. But, eventually, it became obvious when Rich Fink showed up at critical strategy sessions and spoke with unblinking certainty about what Charles Koch was interested in and wanted done without question. Though few have heard of Rich Fink, he’s been in the inner circle of the Koch brothers’ movement-building efforts for decades, influencing the creation and actions of Koch-funded front groups.
CSE was, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, with interests in manufacturing, trade, and investments.
But what I didn’t know when I began consulting for Citizens for a Sound Economy was what any of the connections between CSE and the Koch brothers were really all about. What was the endgame? Today, we know.
Charles and David Koch—who, if their individual fortunes were combined in one place, would quite possibly represent the wealthiest person on earth—have almost certainly spent or raised more than a billion dollars to successfully bend one of the two national parties in America to their will. The long rise of the Tea Party movement was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington. And it has nearly succeeded, as America saw in the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011, prompted by the Republican Party’s demand that the president negotiate over deficit reduction in exchange for an increase in the maximum amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to borrow. There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that.
Some on the left are dismayed at Fox News for its unabashed support of the "tea party" protest movement, wherein citizens protest the government's use of taxpayer money in its response to the economic crisis--primarily in the TARP bailout, and also the $787 economic stimulus package.
Frustration culminated this week with Glenn Beck, who promoted the tea parties on his show Monday, encouraging viewers to "celebrate with Fox News" and join the protests April 15. Some of Fox's more popular personalities--Greta Van Susteren, Neil Cavuto, Sean Hannity, and Beck himself--will broadcast live from tea parties in DC, Sacramento, San Antonio, and Atlanta on tax day.
What's our real equivalent to Fox News? It really doesn't exist (no, MSNBC doesn't count).
Anyway, this is not to say that there was no grassroots conservative activity during the time of the "Tea Party." There was some. But unlike Occupy Wall Street, and most of what pissed off and scared liberals doing right now, it was building on a foundation and frame that already had existed for years and just needed walls and some paint. Kibbe and Armey, among others, were making salaries well into the six figures to provide leadership, and the Fox talking heads were making millions. I don't think any member of OWS ever took a salary.
Conservatives are great at taking the long view -- Rick Perlstein's series on the rise of the modern conservative movement is required reading.
(An aside: we need a word that combines "pissed off" and "scared" to pithily describe what we're all feeling right now.)
So what's my point? It's really to address this disclaimer that was only in the original Indivisible Google document and colored the way I read the rest: "P.S. We’re doing this in our free time without coordination or support from our employers. We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything."
Um, WHY NOT?
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 don't expect the writers of this document to fix all of our problems alone, but they need to know their enemy. Why? Because their revolution was televised:
I just got back from an event held by one of our local city councilmen featuring a number of activists from local not-for-profit organizations talking about what they're doing in gearing up for the changing of the guard in Washington. It was great to hear about their work, but between the fact that it feels like draining the ocean (swamp?) with a teaspoon and the fact that it's incredible that we have to even be having these conversations (bystander training for hate crimes and ICE raids?) is a bit deflating. Yet we have to keep getting ourselves off the mat and fighting:
NEW RESISTANCE: After the Electoral College vote comes the ways to resist, including NEVER calling Trump "president" pic.twitter.com/ZtC8olNAXk
Keith Olbermann makes his suggestions for how to resist the coming Trump regime, now that it's been codified by the Electoral College.
One of his ideas is to never refer to Trump by his title. Just "Trump." I think I'll go with it.
He also talks about continuing to remind others every day of the Trump camp's, at best, treasonous-adjacent behavior.
I still remain puzzled by the Democratic leadership's complete reluctance to face this issue head-on, before we swear this walking horror show into office. I don't think I'm saying anything here that I haven't said before, but if would seem to me that inviting a hostile foreign country to interfere in an election would invite more than an investigation, which, if concluded anytime after January 19th and without Trump and his cronies behind bars, will accomplish nothing. These are people that do not care about the law, at all:
Newt Gingrich said Monday that President-elect Donald Trump could simply pardon members of his administration who may break anti-nepotism laws, adding that Trump's business ties require "a whole new approach" to addressing potential conflicts of interest in the presidency.
“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” Gingrich told WAMU’s Diane Rehm on Monday morning. “It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.' Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”
He really said that. Really. More from the same story:
After returning from a commercial break, Rehm asked Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007, for his reaction to Gingrich's comments.
“There is no billionaire exception in the Constitution of the United States,” Painter said, adding later: “The pardon power can not be used by the president to pardon himself, or to cause other members of his administration to engage in illegal conduct or unconstitutional conduct and then simply use the pardon power in that way. If the pardon power allows that, the pardon power allows the president to become a dictator."
This is real. These are people who are happy to have a dictator with a leader who is happy to be one. We always tut-tut the Germans of the 1920s-40s for having done nothing to stop the rise of Hitler. But what I've come to wonder is how they'd actually do that and at what point they'd decide to. Because right now *feels* like the closest we've gotten to that, and it seems like we're just going to let it happen. I keep vacillating on whether we're going to see any action from our leaders, and right now I'm tipped toward "No." So how are we better than the Germans who didn't stop Hitler? By the time they knew he was really "Hitler," he had control of the military. Well, we're a month away from an aspiring dictator gaining control of the military. I don't think I'm being alarmist when I say that if we do nothing now, that's it.
Not my best post, but it's where my head is at the moment. If you want better from me, revisit this post.
