CLINTON, SANDERS, TRUMP AND THE USA
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY M WARNER
OCTOBER 5, 2016


http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/3/13133874/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-leaked

What Hillary Clinton’s leaked audio teaches us about Hillary Clinton
A theory of why Hillary Clinton struggles with young voters.
Updated by Ezra Klein @ezraklein Oct 3, 2016, 9:10a

Photograph – Hillary Clinton Selfie

What’s most interesting about the leaked audio of Hillary Clinton assessing the Bernie Sanders movement from February isn’t what she says about Bernie Sanders or his supporters. It’s what she says about herself.

Clinton does not — contrary to Politico’s initial, and quickly deleted, headline — mock Sanders’s supporters or Sanders himself. And before a room of wealthy donors, she doesn’t attack Sanders from the right — she doesn’t argue that she’s the only candidate who will save capitalism, or that a Denmark-style welfare state will crush America’s entrepreneurial grit.

Instead, she offers a theory for why she struggles so much to inspire young voters.

“It is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is,” she says in the audio. “I don’t want to overpromise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.”

This, more than anything else, is her critique of Sanders, and her explanation of his success. “There’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free health care, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”

It’s easy to miss what’s new in that comment. Until the last clause, this tracks with Clinton’s public criticism of Sanders almost exactly. She frequently argued that his policies lacked crucial details, that the numbers didn’t add up, that the big dreams were unmoored from clear plans. It’s only in these comments that Clinton admits she understands the real source of the appeal.

People feel “that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough,” and even if they’re not sure where a Sanders or a Trump will take the country, they know their vision is to go further, faster, than Clinton is promising, and that matches their sense of what the moment requires.

Her effort to put herself in the shoes of younger millennials winds toward a similar conclusion. “If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing,” she says. “So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism.”

There’s an observation that the Atlantic’s Molly Ball made about Donald Trump that nailed a key part of his appeal: “All the other candidates say ‘Americans are angry, and I understand.’ Trump says, ‘I’M angry.’”

This describes the Clinton-Sanders dynamic, as well. Bernie Sanders says “I want a political revolution!” Hillary Clinton says, in effect, “I understand why young people might want a political revolution.” Clinton is stuck on the outside of youthful idealism looking in.

The audacity of political realism

I have written before about the audacity of Hillary Clinton’s political realism, but you see it again on display in these remarks. Her persistent theme is the danger of overpromising and the difficult work of persuading voters — particularly young ones — to stick around for the slow, grinding work of change. Her rallying cry is that modest victories can add up, over time, to something much grander.

“Young people seem to be listening to promises on both sides, and I'm worried that you can't get from here to there without going incrementally," she says.

This is Hillary Clinton's political philosophy in a nutshell. It is the hard-won lesson of a politician who had a front-row seat to both Bill Clinton's impeachment and Barack Obama's release of his longform birth certificate. It's the conclusion of someone who has tried to win change amid Democratic and Republican Congresses, who has worked out of the White House and out of the Capitol, who has watched disagreement and polarization prove intractable, who has seen grand plans die amid gridlock.

In his influential 2008 essay on Democratic theories of change, Mark Schmitt wrote that "Clinton's theory in a sense takes the status quo for granted more than the others, but it's appropriate in certain situations. … Superior knowledge and diligence can be a tool of power."

Clinton's approach is well-suited to a world in which Republicans will almost certainly continue to control the House, and so a Democratic president will have to grind out victories of compromise in Congress and of bureaucratic mastery through executive action.

But it is not an inspiring vision — it does not promise grand advances, transformative change, or a kinder, gentler political sphere. Clinton’s belief in the limits of her persuasive and political power might be admirable, but it doesn't fill arenas or win over idealistic young voters.

There is an ongoing effort to understand Clinton’s problems with millennial voters, and there have been no end of theories proffered. But this, I think, is one of the big gaps. The candidates who win over young voters — Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Howard Dean — do not unduly concern themselves with the limits of practical politics. They dream of a better system, and they invite young voters to share that dream.

Clinton doesn’t. She is resigned to the system we have, and she invites young voters to share that resignation. They want a political revolution, and she sympathizes, but then she says: “I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals.”

At a time when what we can achieve now is far from what voters wish was achievable, this is a realistic vision of American politics — it’s a vision that might even get some good things done — but it is not an inspiring one. And Clinton, as you can hear in these remarks, knows it.

Democrats are in deep trouble even if Clinton wins



THE FOLLOWING FROM SALON IS THE EXPLANATION OF WHAT HILLARY IS MISSING IN THIS WHOLE SITUATION. SHE BELIEVES THAT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, WITHOUT CHANGING A DARNED THING, CAN SURVIVE; AND THAT THEY DON'T OWE THE COUNTRY THEIR COURAGEOUS BEST AT A TIME OF OBVIOUS CRISIS, RATHER THAN THEIR "RESIGNATION." MAYBE HILLARY REALLY IS TOO OLD TO BE PRESIDENT.



http://www.salon.com/2016/09/30/hate-unleashed-for-decades-the-gop-kept-right-wing-bigots-under-control-trump-has-snapped-the-tether/


FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2016 08:08 AM EDT
Hate, unleashed: How Donald Trump unleashed the right-wing bigots that the GOP once kept under control
Republicans have cashed in on ugly bigotry for years, while keeping the worst offenders under wraps. No longer.
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Photograph -- Donald Trump supporters at a campaign rally at the Silver Spurs Arena in Kissimmee, Florida, August 11, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer)
VIDEO -- Obama Challenges Trump's Commitment to Working People


There has been a lot of talk over this presidential campaign about the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton compared with the excitement and energy among Donald Trump’s followers. It is a bit overblown; there are plenty of highly enthusiastic Clinton fans who are very excited to see the first woman president.

But it is nonetheless true that Trump has inspired a group of remarkably passionate and committed followers. And while many of these people have legitimate economic gripes that are finding expression in Trump’s “angry outsider” populism, what electrifies many of them is something else entirely.

They chant, “Build that wall!” and “Lock her up!” They cheer wildly when Trump says he will ban Muslims and send refugees back where they came from. They catcall the media and shove and hit protesters while Trump cheers them on from the stage. They enthusiastically endorse his promise to torture terrorist suspects and “take out their families” and cheerfully back his calls to let the police take the gloves off to restore law and order. They wear overtly misogynist T-shirts that say “Trump That Bitch” and “Hillary Sucks, But Not Like Monica.” (A new slogan has recently been added to the collection: “I wish Hillary had married O.J.”)

Outside Trump rallies, where Confederate flags are commonly displayed and sold, videos show that people are worked up, energized, febrile. Reporters overhear snippets of conversation like “You can’t trust Latinos. Some maybe, but not most,” “Immigrants aren’t people, honey” and “You know them crazy black girls, how they are.” Something feral and undomesticated has been set free.

This week the Los Angeles Times reported on the surge of political activity among extremists, particularly white supremacists and the alt-right, noting that online hate groups are now dominated by pro-Trump conversation:

Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily Stormer website and an emerging leader of a new generation of millennial extremists, said he had “zero interest” in the 2012 general election and viewed presidential politics as “pointless.” That is, until he heard Trump.

“Trump had me at ‘build a wall,’” Anglin said. “Virtually every alt-right Nazi I know is volunteering for the Trump campaign.”

In the same edition, the Times reported that hate crimes had risen sharply in the Los Angeles area over the past year. It wasn’t the worst year for hate-inspired violence in recent times (2001 and 2002 hold that record), and when you look at the numbers year over year, you can see that this current is always lurking underneath the surface. What’s unusual about the present moment is that we have a political leader who is unapologetically drawing it to the surface and giving it light to grow and flower.

This is not to say that the right hasn’t been exploiting bigotry and hate for decades to advance its cause. But in the modern era there has been an awareness among political leaders and thinkers that it would be very dangerous to let it run freely.

Buckley had a lot to answer for with his own racist beliefs but his actions in that moment were necessary to stop those dark impulses from getting further out of control.

He’s not the only one. As historian Rick Perlstein pointed out in what I consider to be the most insightful piece about the Trump phenomenon (written a year ago!) most modern conservative leaders have understood that their right-wing fringe was dangerous:

Previous Republican leaders were sufficiently frightened by the daemonic anger that energized their constituencies that they avoided surrendering to it completely, even for political advantage. Think of Barry Goldwater, who was so frightened of the racists supporting him that he told Lyndon Johnson he’d drop out of the race if they started making race riots a campaign issue. And Ronald Reagan refusing to back a 1978 ballot initiative to fire gay schoolteachers in California, at a time vigilantes were hunting down gays in the street. Think of George W. Bush guiding Congress toward a comprehensive immigration bill (akin to that proposed by President Obama) until the onslaught of vitriol that talk-radio hosts directed at Republican members of Congress forced him to quit. Think of George W. Bush’s repeated references to Islam as a “religion of peace.”

Take John McCain in 2008, when confronted with a supporter claiming that Barack Obama was “an Arab.” He corrected her and said, “I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.” (Donald Trump, by contrast, spent years demanding Obama’s birth certificate and repeated at this week’s debate that he’s proud to have done it.)

These were all people who knew that the bigots of the far right were part of their coalition but also understood that it had to be restrained. They winked and dog whistled, but when the crazies threatened to get out of hand they pulled them back. This time the crazies have broken the chain and nobody in the Republican political leadership has been brave enough to do anything but run with the pack or get out of the way.

This week’s story in The New York Times Magazine about the conservative media battle over Trump shows just how futile the #NeverTrump movement, led by Buckley’s successors at the National Review, has been. The rest of the right-wing media outlets are reconciling themselves to the fact that they are actually slaves to the mob rather than leaders:

This February, [Rush] Limbaugh, who has applauded Trump without endorsing him outright, posed to [Erick] Erickson the question of whether a commentator should try to act as “the guardian of what it means to be a conservative.” In effect, the legend of talk radio was laying down an unwritten commandment of the trade, which applies as well to cable TV: Do not attempt to lead your following.

That’s what Trump is doing, too, saying out loud what unhinged right-wingers have long been thinking and giving them permission to do publicly what they’ve wanted to do all along: rapturously, ecstatically and openly wallow in hate. They’re having the time of their lives.

Heather Digby Parton
Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.



REMEMBERING THE RISE OF NAZISM IN EUROPE BEFORE WWII:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/kristallnacht.html
Kristallnacht:
Background & Overview
(November 9-10, 1938)

Almost immediately upon assuming the Chancellorship of Germany, Hitler began promulgating legal actions against Germany's Jews. In 1933, he proclaimed a one-day boycott against Jewish shops, a law was passed against kosher butchering and Jewish children began experiencing restrictions in public schools. By 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship. By 1936, Jews were prohibited from participation in parliamentary elections and signs reading "Jews Not Welcome" appeared in many German cities. (Incidentally, these signs were taken down in the late summer in preparation for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin).

In the first half of 1938, numerous laws were passed restricting Jewish economic activity and occupational opportunities. In July, 1938, a law was passed (effective January 1, 1939) requiring all Jews to carry identification cards. On October 28, 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship, many of whom had been living in Germany for decades, were arrested and relocated across the Polish border. The Polish government refused to admit them so they were interned in "relocation camps" on the Polish frontier.


Germans pass broken window of Jewish-owned shop
(USHMM Photo)

Among the deportees was Zindel Grynszpan, who had been born in western Poland and had moved to Hanover, where he established a small store, in 1911. On the night of October 27, Zindel Grynszpan and his family were forced out of their home by German police. His store and the family's possessions were confiscated and they were forced to move over the Polish border.

Zindel Grynszpan's seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, was living with an uncle in Paris. When he received news of his family's expulsion, he went to the German embassy in Paris on November 7, intending to assassinate the German Ambassador to France. Upon discovering that the Ambassador was not in the embassy, he settled for a lesser official, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Rath, was critically wounded and died two days later, on November 9.

The assassination provided Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Chief of Propaganda, with the excuse he needed to launch a pogrom against German Jews. Grynszpan's attack was interpreted by Goebbels as a conspiratorial attack by "International Jewry" against the Reich and, symbolically, against the Fuehrer himself. This pogrom has come to be called Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass."

On the nights of November 9 and 10, rampaging mobs throughout Germany and the newly acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. At least 96 Jews were killed and hundreds more injured, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned (and possibly as many as 2,000), almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, cemeteries and schools were vandalized, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps [added by Mitchell Bard from his book The Complete Idiot's Guide to World War II. NY: MacMillan, 1998, pp. 59-60].

The official German position on these events, which were clearly orchestrated by Goebbels, was that they were spontaneous outbursts. The Fuehrer, Goebbels reported to Party officials in Munich, "has decided that such demonstrations are not to be prepared or organized by the party, but so far as they originate spontaneously, they are not to be discouraged either." (Conot, Robert E. Justice At Nuremberg. NY: Harper & Row, 1983:165)


The burning of the synagogue in Ober Ramstadt (USHMM Photo).

Three days later, on November 12, Hermann Goering called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy. An interpretive transcript of this meeting is provided by Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper and Row, 1983:164-172):

'Gentlemen! Today's meeting is of a decisive nature,' Goering announced. 'I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.'

'Since the problem is mainly an economic one, it is from the economic angle it shall have to be tackled. Because, gentlemen, I have had enough of these demonstrations! They don't harm the Jew but me, who is the final authority for coordinating the German economy. `If today a Jewish shop is destroyed, if goods are thrown into the street, the insurance companies will pay for the damages; and, furthermore, consumer goods belonging to the people are destroyed. If in the future, demonstrations which are necessary occur, then, I pray, that they be directed so as not to hurt us.

'Because it's insane to clean out and burn a Jewish warehouse, then have a German insurance company make good the loss. And the goods which I need desperately, whole bales of clothing and whatnot, are being burned. And I miss them everywhere. I may as well burn the raw materials before they arrive.

'I should not want to leave any doubt, gentlemen, as to the aim of today's meeting. We have not come together merely to talk again, but to make decisions, and I implore competent agencies to take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy, and to submit them to me.'

It was decided at the meeting that, since Jews were to blame for these events, they be held legally and financially responsible for the damages incurred by the pogrom. Accordingly, a "fine of 1 billion marks was levied for the slaying of Vom Rath, and 6 million marks paid by insurance companies for broken windows was to be given to the state coffers. (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).

Kristallnacht turns out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of what is now called the Holocaust.

By now it is clear to Hitler and his top advisors that forced immigration of Jews out of the Reich is not a feasible option.

Hitler is already considering the invasion of Poland.
Numerous concentration camps and forced labor camps are already in operation.
The Nuremberg Laws are in place.
The doctrine of lebensraum has emerged as a guiding principle of Hitler's ideology. And,
The passivity of the German people in the face of the events of Kristallnacht made it clear that the Nazis would encounter little opposition—even from the German churches.

Following the meeting, a wide-ranging set of antisemitic laws were passed which had the clear intent, in Goering's words, of "Aryanizing" the German economy. Over the next two or three months, the following measures were put into effect (cf., Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945. NY: Cambridge, 1991:92-96):

Jews were required to turn over all precious metals to the government.
Pensions for Jews dismissed from civil service jobs were arbitrarily reduced.
Jewish-owned bonds, stocks, jewelry and art works can be alienated only to the German state.
Jews were physically segregated within German towns.
A ban on the Jewish ownership of carrier pigeons.
The suspension of Jewish driver's licenses.
The confiscation of Jewish-owned radios.
A curfew to keep Jews of the streets between 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. in the summer and 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. in the winter.
Laws protecting tenants were made non-applicable to Jewish tenants.
[Perhaps to help insure the Jews could not fight back in the future, the Minister of the Interior issued regulations against Jews' possession of weapons on November 11. This prohibited Jews from "acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority."]

One final note on the November 12 meeting is of critical importance. In the meeting, Goering announced, "I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another." The path to the “Final Solution” has now been chosen. And, all the bureaucratic mechanisms for its implementation were now in place.

It should be noted that there is some controversy among Holocaust scholars as to the origin, intent and appropriateness of the term Kristallnacht. The term, after all, was coined by Walter Funk at the November 12 Nazi meeting following the pogrom of November 8-10. The crucial question is whether the term was a Nazi euphemism for an all-out pogrom against German Jews and whether the Nazis used the term in a derisive manner. There is considerable evidence that both of the above questions have an affirmative answer.

Holocaust, and Kristallnacht survivor, Ernest Heppner made the following observation in a recent (June, 1995) exchange of ideas on the Internet Holocaust Discussion List:

...as an eyewitness I was very emotionally involved in this event and its consequences. Like everyone else here in the United States, for some 50 years I called those horrible days and nights Kristallnacht. I changed my mind reluctantly when, during my research, I discovered Goering's intent to use this designation to ridicule this event.

The following sources should be of interest to the subscribers of this list.

"Die Juden in Deutschland 1933-1945," herausgegeben von Wolfgang Benz, Verlag C.H. Beck, Munich 1989, part VI, pages 499-544, Der November- pogrom 1938. The second sentence of this chapter begins: "Der Novem- berpogrom, als "Reichkristallnacht" im Umgangstonverniedlicht..." (The November pogrom was "prettified" in the vernacular as crystal night.")

Chapter 6, titled "Die 'Kristallnacht' als Anfang vom Ende";, (crystal night as the beginning of the end) starts: "Man kann den November- pogrom als ein Ritual oeffentlicher Demueting deuten..." (The November pogrom can be explained as a ritual for public humiliation...) The photograph accompanying this chapter it titled: "Vielleicht gab das zersplitterte Glass Anlass zu dem "Spottnamen Reichskristallnacht." (Perhaps the broken glass was used to ridicule the pogrom).

Also see Arnold Paucker's "The Jews in Germany," Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1986, page 220: "Der Novemberpogrom, euphemistisch 'Kristallnacht' genannt, war der Anfang vom Ende..." (The November pogrom, euphemistically named "Crystal Night" was the beginning of the end.)

There are additional sources, but I hope the above will serve to illustrate the fact that, except for the United States, The November Pogrom appears to be the established term.

Walter Pehle makes the following observation:

It is clear that the term Crystal Night serves to foster a vicious minimalizing of its memory, a discounting of grave reality: such cynical appellations function to reinterpret manslaughter and murder, arson, robbery, plunder, and massive property damage, transforming these into a glistening event marked by sparkle and gleam. Of course, such terms reveal one thing in stark clarity - the lack of any sense of involvement or feeling of sympathy on the part of those who had stuck their heads in the sand before that violent night.

With good reason, knowledgeable commentators urge people to renounce the continued use of "Kristallnacht" and "Reichskristall- nacht" to refer to these events, even if the expressions have become slick and established usage in our language. (Pehle, W. H., 'Editor's Preface' in Pehle, W. H. (ed.) November 1938, From Reichskristall nacht to Genocide, Berg Publishers Inc., NY, 1991, pp. vii-viii (English edition)

So, it appears, the term "Kristallnacht" or "Crystal Night" was invented by Nazis to mock Jews on that black November night in 1938. It is, therefore, another example of Nazi perversion. There are numerous other examples of this same tendency in the language of the Nazi perpetrators: Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment") for gassing victims, Euthanasie for a policy of mass murder of retarded or physically handicapped patients, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes you Free) over the entrance to Auschwitz. When the Nazis launched their plan to annihilate the remaining Jews in Poland in the fall of 1943, they called it "Erntefest," or Harvest Festival. While this may have been a code word, as Froma Zeitlin has observed, it had the same grim and terrible irony that is reflected in Kristallnacht as in so many other instances of the perverted uses of language in the Third Reich. Perhaps most cynical of all is the use of the term, "Endloesung der Judenfrage" (Final Solution of the Jewish Question), for what is now known as the Holocaust. Goebbels frequently used such terminology to amuse his audiences (usually other Nazi officials) and to further demoralize his victims.

On the other side of this controversy are those who argue that the term should be retained. In the first place, it is the term which has been used now for fifty years and connotes significant meaning to those who study the Holocaust. As Froma Zeitlin (in a message posted to HOLOCAUS Internet Discussion Group in June, 1995) observes:

But I would like to point out that whether or not the name came into existence as a Nazi euphemism or not, the event itself and what it has come to signify has transformed an 'innocent' name into one of unforgettable and dramatic meaning. The term is permanently out of circulation for any other use whatsoever. Can you imagine us now using 'Kristallnacht' to refer to some street riot or another, no matter how extensively the streets were littered with broken glass? Certainly not. Moreover, what disturbed the German populace was less the sight of synagogues burning (fires take place all the time, after all -- it depends on the scale) than of the savage and wasteful vandalism that confronted bystanders everywhere, disrupting the clean and orderly streets (to say nothing of consumer convenience). What was indeed memorable was the sheer quantity of broken glass. A third point was the economic outcome of this massive breakage. Germany didn't produce enough plate glass to repair the damages (synagogues did not have to be replaced -- quite the contrary). The result was twofold: the need to import glass from Belgium (for sorely needed cash) and the outrage of indemnifying the Jewish community to pay for the damages. So the broken glass came to assume yet another outrageous dimension in the wake of the event.

Paul Lawrence Rose, Penn State University, agrees with the retention of the term "Kristallnacht" instead of "pogrom" or some other term and makes the following observation:

Of course, K-nacht was a pogrom of sorts, but it was a German event and more specifically still, a Nazi event. Replacing it with pogrom certainly sets it in the larger context of anti-Semitic massacres in European history, but it loses the German and Nazi contexts.

And, as Zeitlin observes, the origins of terms do not equal the historical meanings that they accumulate. To have criticized Goering's use of language in 1938 would have been appropriate; however, 1996 the term kristallnacht carries the significance and power it has acquired over the past fifty years.

Sources: The Holocaust\Shoah Page



EXCERPTS -- “Something feral and undomesticated has been set free. …. These were all people who knew that the bigots of the far right were part of their coalition but also understood that it had to be restrained. They winked and dog whistled, but when the crazies threatened to get out of hand they pulled them back. This time the crazies have broken the chain and nobody in the Republican political leadership has been brave enough to do anything but run with the pack or get out of the way.”


So how will we prevent this emerging NeoNazi trend from taking over our country? Before reading my philosophical comments here, go first to the description of Krystalnacht and beyond, as it occurred in Germany; and note how LITTLE TIME the transformation took from a nation of mainly good citizens to one of hatred and fear. One comment in the story is that the Nazi leader was surprised at how PASSIVE the German good people were as a vile and dangerous group took over the government. This description sounds very similar to what I see today, and I am unable to avoid feeling fear for America the Beautiful, and revulsion for what these newly prominent politicos have brought out into the open air. We’re going to have to wait until this election is over and someone takes power. Until that happens, I won’t look at what to do next. It would be easy for those who remember history to panic, and I don’t want to do that; but WITHOUT PANIC, we true believers in a fair-minded society are going to want to start taking action, I think, and soon. We need to get Bernie’s “OurRevolution” up on its feet and organized at the local level.

We need to form and join groups to mobilize the effort to drag our politicians out of the mud that they have become stuck in up to their knees by using letters, emails, phone calls, marches to get their attention, planning groups to envision write some proposed laws that we can use to gain much more control over the Police Departments and mandate how they do their job. Shooting a man six times in the back because he ran is not Law and Order. It’s an assassination, and I believe it is consciously political in nature. Setting up a White Supremacy oriented government is a goal that some have expressed in news articles, especially recently, and such “street justice” by police looks like a step in that direction.

Sanders stated a goal of local activism to elect Progressive candidates to every office that comes open. That may sound silly and useless, but it’s what the Tea Party has done and, unfortunately for Progressives, it has worked against us in federal and state legislatures. They now have Tea Party followers in countless jobs across the country, who form a network for group action. That’s what BLM has succeeded in doing on racial issues, whose actions are probably initiated via Facebook, very effectively.

A few years ago a fun, if spooky kind of activity called a “flash mob” was adopted by young people, using the Internet for communication and organization, which consisted of the sudden appearance of dozens of young people in an ordinary location like a shopping mall, often dressed outlandishly, with no obvious purpose for their being there. They would dance around and do other actions which amounted to a kind of theatrical production. Old people like I am now often felt disturbed, annoyed and threatened, but I can’t remember any arrests occurring from the flash mobs. Perhaps it isn’t actually illegal unless it leads to property damage or interrupts business activities. I always thought it was funny, but it certainly would be shocking to someone not in the mood for a sudden and bizarre party popping up with seeming spontaneity.

Adopting flash mob type activity to bring OurRevolution to the attention of average people would probably make really conservative people angry, rather than winning friends and influencing people, but the Internet could be used to strategically place OurRevolution members to take advantage of other events that are going on.

The old fashioned thing to do would be to set up a card table for display of OurRevolution literature and the signing of petitions, etc. In NW DC there is a great neighborhood, or at any rate it used to be great, called Dupont Circle. It was a mecca for young twenty and thirty-year-olds who want something to do. People were throwing Frisbees, playing drums, and generally interacting in a relaxed way, meanwhile talking over political issues of the day. Many a serious movement was hatched there.

We of OurRevolution could explore a variety of things, from boycotts, “teach-ins” about the danger of such a wide income gap, holding open discussions about more open and participatory political activities and community organizing to enlist citizens in depressed neighborhoods to help plan and join in efforts to improve blighted housing, assist the housebound or elderly in becoming registered to vote, set up their own Neighborhood Watch activities to identify and prevent threats to citizens from illegal activities such as selling drugs or predatory behavior like stalking. I know the hateful Mr. Zimmerman was doing Neighborhood Watch when he bulldogged an unfortunate young Black man and ended up actually shooting him. The Neighborhood Watch organization made it clear when this story became public that Zimmerman was NOT following the protocol correctly at all. A well-managed and disciplined manner is the way to patrol the streets; the Watch sees and reports suspicious behavior, but they do not threaten anyone as Zimmerman did. They can provide information to the police of which old abandoned properties have begun to draw drug users and homeless people.

These things may not strike you as great ideas, but I would like to see a political group become integrated into society in an active way and draw in helpful and interested volunteers. To me, purely and simply economically based work to “transform society,” is not only a clear-cut case of “half measures,” but it fails to “improve” anyone. I would like to see a designated community center where children and adults could be tutored by educated volunteers, resumes could be prepared on a community owned computer, one could be matched with others to pick up trash from the streets and yards with a group of volunteers, etc. The Police theory of “broken windows” would be less convincing as an argument about how very inferior poor Black people are, if there were fewer “broken windows.”

Finally, to really “raise all boats” in our society we need to meet with people individually as humans rather than as statistical concepts. I do believe that one of the problems in our society today is the essential isolation within a crowd type of situation that our cities tend to produce, especially in low rent areas. That’s not only a lonely way to live, but it pulls people who are trying to climb upward in their life down to the bottom again. When poverty becomes pervasive, it’s hard to turn it around. I don’t think simply making more money will completely and single-handedly heal the sense of personal degradation that we tend to find in hard core poverty settings. That doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with Sanders that a $15.00/hour minimum wage is essential to solving these problems. In our idealized new Democratic Socialist country, we need to do multiple community outreach projects of that type and interact one-to-one. The police on their days off could put in volunteer hours, too, making them visible to the hostile and suspicious poor inner city dwellers as something other than a truly deadly enemy. We might even find that we have made new friends in the process.