The Weekly Screed (#833)

Six words (FCUCPW)
by David Benjamin

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity… we can crush the Democrats.”
                                                                     — Steve Bannon

MADISON, Wis. — As creepy as it feels to agree with Steve Bannon, I suspect Steve was right when he said that the liberal focus on racial strife is God’s gift to Donald Trump.

Certainly, at this moment, the struggle for racial justice is in crisis — so much so that even the usually timid ranks of professional sports are becoming politically outspoken and awkwardly symbolic.

In this atmosphere, it’s every reasoning patriot’s duty to rage against racial profiling by cops, the unpunished murder of black people in police custody, and the “new Jim Crow” of mass incarceration. But social justice for minorities cannot, unfortunately, serve as the main political fulcrum to pry our government from the grip of the right-wing cynics — Trump, Bannon, Sessions, Ryan, McConnell, et al — who are currently calling the shots.

For Donald Trump, bigotry is the whistle that keeps the dogs slobbering. He knows that, no matter how viciously he attacks African-Americans, he won’t lose any black votes — because he never got any black votes, and never will. Even better, he knows he can count on the racist machinery erected by the Republican Party — gerrymanders, voter ID gimmicks, poll taxes, propaganda and Putin — to shrink and discourage the black vote.

Above all, he knows that more white people will vote because they’re white than black people will vote because they’re black. Bannon and Trump understand that America’s angry horde of white identitarians will rally to their Bigot-in-Chief come hell or high choler. They know further — as Hillary Clinton noted in a dialog with Chris Hayes — that 90-plus percent of Republicans will salute and support a ten-foot pile of horse manure as long as it’s spray-painted with a big red “R” and topped with Old Glory. They’ll stay true to their school even if their blind devotion brings the election of a short-fingered vulgarian who calls his daughter a “piece of ass” and manifests the emotional stability of a five-year-old sociopath with Tourette Syndrome.

Democrats have never achieved this sort of pep-squad spirit.

At the moment, four Democratic factions are wandering, simultaneously, in four directions. One bunch believes that the key to winning elections in 2018 and 2020 is to just keep ripping Donald Trump.

Another faction clings to the identity politics that has trapped Democrats in a honeycomb of balkanized echo chambers since George McGovern spit the bit in ’72.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bestowed upon Republicans the gift of simplicity. The GOP became, first by default and then by design, Caucasian, Christian, conservative. You didn’t necessarily have to be all those things to join. But once you’d pledged in, you were expected to act white, trudge off to church and spout right-wing talking points.

Donald Trump infiltrated the GOP by doing those very three things.

Democrats have never tried to simplify. They’re black, white brown, Native-American, Asian, feminist, LGBTQ, liberal, moderate, progressive, leftist, Marxist, Jewish, Unitarian, Universalist, Buddhist, Muslim, atheist, pro-choice, anti-gun, ADA, DLC, ACLU, SPLC, NOW, NAACP, SCLC, AFL-CIO, SEIU, vegetarian, locavore, consumerist, tree-hugging, Prius-driving, touchy-feely, yada yada yada. Every subgroup has an agenda, every agenda is a sacred cause and each must be enacted right now, today, in full — before all the others — “by any means necessary.”

Another Democratic split — the tunnel-vision cult-of-personality faction — separates Bernie Sanders zealots from Elizabeth Warren’s acolytes. Neither bunch can see eye-to-eye (or even have a cup of coffee) with Hillary die-hards, who are the mortal enemy of the Hillary-hater faction who will — ’til the day she dies — reserve the right to give the Party the finger and piss away their vote on the latest version of Ralph Nader.

Finally, the Democrats also include a club of Clintonian triangulators addicted to Big Money, so eager to compromise with anyone, including Donald Trump, that they’re regularly mistaken for Republicans.

These disparate dwellers within a divided Democratic house exhibit two distinct qualities. One is their inability to speak about almost any issue with a single voice, rendering them habitually incoherent. There isn’t a rank-and-file Democrat in America who can effectively explain the Party’s principles.

Second, not one Democratic subgroup has yet to articulate a basic program for moving the nation upward from the moral cesspool that Donald Trump will leave behind.

In this respect, Republicans have it easy. For them, politics is not about accomplishing anything. It’s about beating the Democrats.

For Democrats to turn the tables and lick the GOP, it’s simple. They already have voters. They have an actual majority. But they have to do something they almost never do: stick together. They need a message as simple as Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” And they need to infuse the message with positive policy ideas that invoke and illuminate the future.

Democrats have no shortage of such ideas, but they need to pick a lane. It’s time for them to pare and clarify the ideas they’ve been spraying around, trampling, muddling and muddying for the last 20 years. Three of their best — “Free College, Universal Coverage and Public Works” (FCUCPW) — can point America’s direction home.

As soon as you hear these simple six words — Free College, Universal Coverage and Public Works — you understand. You know that most Americans will rally, intuitively, to all three goals. You know that these objectives are aspirational and will not come about, in full, right away. But you know that they’re common sense and that — with a little sacrifice and a lot of cooperation — we can afford them all. You know that, within these six words, there are positive vibes for economic growth and genuine tax reform, for jobs, for the public welfare, for saving our environment, for better education and greater equality. You know, above all, that higher education for everyone, that health care as a human right, that the rebuilding of America’s roads and grids, rails and bridges, schools and wind farms, national parks and day-care centers, from sea to shining sea, is worth fighting for.

FCUCPW!

Neither Republicans nor Democrats can guarantee their selfish political dominion for long if it’s based on a Trumpoid formula of disparagement and division. We were weary of this sort of shit even before Trump shoved our faces in it.

The political lesson we’ve learned from Trump’s ascension is as old as our republic, but often forgotten: Simplicity works. (See FDR, see JFK).

The accompanying lesson, also old and still forgotten — until someone in the Democratic coalition remembers — is that substance works even better.